Australia.Tully saucer nests · a grower sees an object rise from a lagoon

On January 19, 1966, around 9:00 am, George Pedley, a 28-year-old banana grower, was driving his tractor half a mile from Albert Pennisi's farm house on Rockingham Road (Euramo), near Tully (tropical North Queensland, Australia), when his attention was caught by a loud hissing noise clearly heard over the tractor, "similar to air escaping from tyre". According to the RAAF form he completed with the police, he saw a definite object, with no light visible, about 25 yards ahead at a height of about 30 feet, rising vertically; it was light gray, dull and non-reflecting, shaped like "two saucers face to face", about 25 feet long and 8 to 9 feet deep, with no structural detail observed. It rose vertically to about 60 feet, appeared to be rotating the whole time, and departed south-west climbing at about 45 degrees, "extremely fast", "much faster than an aeroplane", until it receded into the distance in mid-air. It left no trail. The observation lasted about 15 seconds.

Approaching the site where the object had been, Pedley found a "clearly defined" near-circular depression, about 32 feet long by 25 wide, the swamp grass flattened to the surface of about 4 feet of water and lying in clockwise curves (the word is typed over on the form), the "nest". He reported it to Tully police at 7:30 pm that day and again at 7 am the next morning. Sergeant A. V. Moylan, who went with him to the site, noticed no smell of combustion and no scorching of grass or trees; the flattened grass was quite green in the morning and had turned brown by the afternoon. According to the Courier-Mail of January 24, a second and third nest were reported within days, found around the lagoon by cane farmer Tom Warren and school teacher Hank Penning; later accounts raise the count.

The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) opened a file. Sergeant Moylan telephoned RAAF Base Townsville on the morning of January 20; the RAAF sent him the form for Pedley, asked him for a grass sample, which he took on January 21, and confirmed that no service or civil aircraft were operating in the area at the time of the sighting. Moylan first formed the opinion that the depression had been made by a small helicopter and that the morning sun on the rotor misled Pedley, though he himself objected that there were about 200 yards of cleared land to the east where such an aircraft could have landed more safely; a Tully electrician, Wallace Evans, assured him he had seen similar markings in a swamp at Kurrimine Beach made by a whirlwind sucking water into a waterspout. On February 17 RAAF Operational Command closed its part: "This headquarters believes that the depressions of the swamp grass were caused by small isolated waterspouts."

Pennisi, who climbed into the five-foot-deep lagoon, said that roots and mud which normally lie on the bottom were floating on top, "They must have been sucked up by something." The University of Queensland Botany Department (Dr R. F. Langdon) concluded that the reeds, in a low-lying section flooded by the recent rains, had died from submersion, with no parasitic infestation nor "any evidence of burning", while warning that its findings could not be conclusive without details of winds, currents and topography; the Physics radioactivity tests were negative.

Pedley never accepted the whirlwind reading: he stated that he knew the area's wet and dust whirlwinds well and that "I know what I saw". Australian ufologist Bill Chalker, a chemist by training, investigated the case for decades and maintains a documentary archive with samples and interviews.

An air force investigated, in writing, a physical trace left in vegetation, a decade before crop circles became a subject of debate. The RAAF asked the police for a grass sample, and the University of Queensland examined the vegetation in its Botany and Physics departments: the reeds had died from submersion, with no burning, and there was no radioactivity.

The official explanation covers the nests, not the object. The waterspouts the RAAF proposed, like the whirlwind the electrician Wallace Evans described, refer to the depressions; they say nothing about the definite object, with no light, that Pedley saw rise vertically and depart climbing faster than an airplane. By confirming that no service or civil aircraft were in the area, the RAAF also ruled out the helicopter the Tully sergeant first suspected, and no instrument recorded anything that would decide between a rare natural phenomenon and what Pedley said he saw.