Australia.Goulburn · a Navy pilot sees two lights beside his aircraft

On the night of August 31, 1954, Lieutenant J. A. O'Farrell of the Royal Australian Navy's 723 Squadron was flying a night navigation exercise from Nowra naval air station, in New South Wales, in a Hawker Sea Fury piston-engined fighter. The route was Nowra – Young – Temora – Yass – Nowra at 13,000 feet (about 4,000 meters). At 18:58 he gave his position to Canberra civil radio, and on passing southwest of Goulburn he switched to the squadron's exercise frequency and called Nowra.

According to the report he signed on September 2, at about 19:10 he saw a very bright light closing fast from "one o'clock", ahead and slightly to the right. It crossed ahead of his aircraft and carried on to a position on his left side, where it appeared to orbit. At the same time he saw a second, similar light at "nine o'clock", on his left, which passed a mile ahead and turned into the position where he had first seen the other.

O'Farrell asked Nowra whether they had him on radar, hoping they would confirm other aircraft in the area. The answer was that they had three echoes (three blips on the screen), and they offered him a 180° turn to identify him if he needed a homing. At that point the two lights re-formed at nine o'clock and disappeared on a northeasterly heading. In the last paragraph of his report the pilot specifies what he saw: no other lights, and only a vague shape, with the white light on top, in the center. He adds that their apparent crossing speed was the fastest he had ever seen, while he himself was flying at 220 knots (about 400 km/h).

Nowra's radar petty officer, K. E. Jessop, left his own statement: the aircraft called at 19:07 (three minutes before the approximate time the pilot gives for the sighting) and, on checking a remote display of the ground-controlled interception radar (the ground radar that guides fighters to their targets), they found two echoes at about 280° and 32 miles; about fifteen seconds later a third appeared in the same area. One seemed to head toward the base and the others to the northeast. Since the pilot declined the identification turn, they stopped tracking them.

Nowra sent the report to the Director of Naval Intelligence in Melbourne, who passed it to Air Force Intelligence, the body that collated such reports. The Navy asked the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) whether it had aircraft near Goulburn; the answer was no, but a Convair of Trans Australia Airlines (TAA), a domestic airline, was in the area at 14,000 feet (about 4,300 meters) on a northerly course.

Naval Intelligence's assessment, of October 1, concluded that O'Farrell was an entirely credible witness, that he saw "a mass associated with the lights" but was unable to distinguish any form, that the night was clear, starlit and moonless, that the pilot, visibly shaken, remained adamant that he had seen the objects, and that "there was no question of collusion between the two witnesses." The document does not name them; the reports it accompanied were the pilot's and Petty Officer Jessop's. The committee set up to study such reports thanked him for "such a well authenticated sighting". The RAAF added a practical instruction: aircrew should report any unusual sighting by radio at the time, so it could be identified without delay.

The case became public in December, when the Navy Minister, Josiah Francis, visited Nowra with journalists. His statement merged two different things: he said the pilot had observed "two lights on his radar with vague shapes underneath". The Sea Fury carried no radar; the echoes were from the ground radar and the vague shape was a visual impression. The press amplified the error ("saucers on our radar", objects flashing past "at supersonic speed"). According to one of those clippings, naval authorities admitted they could not find any "human source" for the Nowra echoes.

At the same time, senior Air Force officers in Canberra warned that many "saucers" were likely to be reported in the following weeks, that these would be guided aircraft and projectiles, and refused to confirm or deny that experiments with such projectiles had been made on the coast.

The pilot's report describes two lights and a barely glimpsed shape; three months later the minister turned it into "lights on his radar with shapes underneath", and the press into supersonic saucers. Almost everything spectacular about the case is born in that second version. Underneath remain a professional pilot judged credible by his own intelligence service, an independent radar statement with time, bearing and range, and a complete official file that can be read today.

The three echoes at 280° and 32 miles from Nowra fall in the Goulburn area, where the Sea Fury was; according to the press at the time, one of them was the fighter itself, and the TAA Convair was flying in the same region at 14,000 feet. Nobody could track the echoes because the pilot did not make the identification turn, so it cannot be claimed that the other two correspond to the lights. The most natural conventional hypothesis (the airliner and its lights, seen at night with no references) runs up against the description of two lights that cross, orbit and re-form, and against the insistence of an experienced airman. Meteors fit poorly with the duration and the turns.

Australia then had a rocket and missile test range at Woomera, in South Australia, and official interest in "unidentified objects" lay with the RAAF, which collected and examined such reports without publishing them. That senior Air Force officers announced publicly, when the case came out, that the "saucers" of the following weeks would be guided aircraft and projectiles shows the hypothesis the authorities themselves were working with. None of those readings (a conventional misidentification, an own or allied test) was checked at the time, and the file does not allow them to be checked today.