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Feb. 18, 2020 - Skeptoid
17:58
Skeptoid #715: The Knowles Family UFO Incident

This family's car is said to have been lifted off the road by a UFO and dropped. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
UFO Lifts Car Off Road 00:01:37
Who says UFOs aren't real?
When this Australian family was driving along a long straight stretch of road late one night, a UFO actually landed on the roof of their car, picked it up, and dropped it, causing damage that was verified by the police.
Anyway, that's how the story is told throughout the UFO literature.
But if we apply just a little bit of skepticism, we can go through the facts as they were determined at the time and put together a picture of what probably happened that doesn't require any aliens at all.
The Knowles Family UFO incident is coming up next on Skeptoid.
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The Knowles Family Nullabor UFO.
It was reported as if it was the story of the century, which given its details, it could very well have been.
Pursued By Glowing Lights 00:08:38
According to the story, an Australian family on a road trip was pursued by a glowing UFO, and in full view of witnesses in other cars, the UFO landed on top of them, picked up their car in the air, and dropped it several meters, blowing out a tire.
It was January 1988, and the Knowles family of Perth was traveling cross-country when the terrifying event happened.
Today we're going to dig as deep as we can into the events of that night and see if we can determine whether this truly was an extraordinary case of intervention by aliens from another world, or if there might be some other explanation.
Just some 13 hours into their trip toward Melbourne, a journey of some 3,500 kilometers, the Knowles family of four was driving along the coastal Air Highway across the Nullabor Plain in Western Australia, known for its barren and dry desert geography.
Faye Knowles and her three young adult sons, plus two dogs, were all packed into a small Ford Telstar sedan.
The time was anywhere between 2.45 and 5.30 in the morning.
Accounts vary.
Sean, 21, was at the wheel with his mom sitting right behind him.
There's a lot of variation in the accounts of what happened next, but it's some combination of seeing bright lights on the road ahead and also following them from behind, a mighty swerve to avoid one such light that nearly caused them to hit oncoming traffic, and possibly turning back to have a second look for the light.
Regardless, at the pivotal moment, Sean reports driving east at 200 kph, 125 miles an hour, to escape a pursuing light, which they described as having a yellow center and shaped like an egg cup.
At this point, they reported a strange smell, a strange gray smoke or mist filling the car, and their voices seemed to slow down and sound low-pitched.
There was a thump on the roof, and Faye reached outside to feel for it, finding something spongy or rubbery.
Suddenly, the car was lifted and dropped, blowing the right rear tire and forcing Sean to make an emergency stop.
The family ran into the bush and hid behind a tree for 15 minutes, believing that the object was looking for them.
Finally, they returned to their car, changed the tire, and continued their trip without further incident, reporting what happened at the Mundrabilla Roadhouse, the very next stop on the road.
Luckily, the story received prompt and aggressive media attention, and I say luckily because that gave us plenty of good reporting of the incident while it was still fresh in the family's minds.
A mere 36 hours after it happened, the whole family was interviewed on the evening news.
We were treated to a first-hand account of all these details, giving us something to compare against the way the story is told today.
That's important because what we see time and time again with stories like this is that they grow over time, often substantially, with each retelling.
Often to the point that the version of a famous story you hear today bears little resemblance to what really happened.
So let's take some of the most important details from this story and compare them with what the family actually said at the time.
The tale began, so we're told, with the family seeing a brightly lit UFO flying around.
But contrary to the reports, the family was clear that they only ever saw the light on the ground.
Here are Faye Knowles and her son Sean telling a television reporter what they saw.
And it was flying miles back and I drove miles up the road again and it was in front of us again.
How high off the ground was it?
It was on the ground.
I mean it was on the ground.
It was on the ground, facing us when we were driving along.
And then so it was moving along with you?
Yeah, it was following us.
In fact, they never reported a flying light at all, only lights at the horizon, straight ahead and straight behind along the Ayr Highway, said to be the longest stretch of absolutely straight road in all of Australia.
In fact, their description was indistinguishable from that of the Min Min light, discussed in episode 133, Australia's most famous ghost light.
In that episode, we detailed the research that conclusively proved the Min Min light was a superior mirage, showing distant car headlights below the horizon to be hovering eerily just above the horizon, an effect which changes with temperature gradients, explaining how sometimes they might have seen lights ahead and other times lights from behind.
No lights described by the Knowles family were inconsistent with this common optical illusion.
But the most extraordinary part of this story is that the UFO landed on the car and then lifted it high enough that dropping it blew a tire.
Let's see what the family actually said about whether their car was ever lifted at all.
When it landed on the car, what happened?
It was screaming and yelling.
And as soon as it landed on the car, that's when my tire blew out.
If a car has a blowout at 200 kilometers an hour, there is a danger, isn't it, that it will overturn?
How come you didn't?
There was a weight on the roof.
And explain that.
Was the car on the road at all times or was it lifted off as has been reported?
We don't really know, but we think it has been lifted off the road.
So not only were they highly non-committal about whether the lifting ever took place or not, Sean, who was driving, was quite clear that the tire blew the moment the UFO landed on them and not as the result of being subsequently lifted and dropped.
That would be a hard detail to get wrong if so extraordinary event had in fact taken place.
Elsewhere in the same interview, Sean reiterated this.
And at what stage did the object land on your roof?
How fast were you going at the time?
I was doing about 200.
I got a blowout and once the car stopped, I blinked out and I don't know what happened after that.
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Most likely the blowout was simply from the excessive speed.
Tires have various speed ratings, and typically only sports cars come equipped with tires rated to go much faster than 200 kph.
The Knowles 1984 Ford Telstar was about as far from being a sports car as you can get and came equipped with S-rated tires, intended for speeds up to 180 kph.
Now, exceeding the speed rating doesn't mean that your tires will instantly explode, but if Sean did indeed get the Telstar up to 200 kph for several minutes, then a tire failure was indeed a very likely outcome.
Hear the family's description of the moments before the tire failure.
Mirage Or Extraterrestrial Visit 00:05:25
Were there any sounds or smells?
Yes, there was.
And when it was on the roof, I went in my window and all the smoke started coming.
It was like a grayish black mist.
Although the story says there were witnesses to the car being lifted, in fact, there were never any witnesses presented or any corroborating accounts.
One truck driver who heard their story at the Mundravilla Roadhouse later said he had also seen a light hovering above the car headlights in his rearview mirror.
Again, consistent with a superior mirage.
Judging by the times, it's been estimated that he could have been some 10 to 15 kilometers ahead of the Knowles family.
So it's possible this lone corroborating sighting was actually of the Knowles family themselves.
There are other details we could go into on this story.
A claim of strange dust on the car, which turned out to be nothing, inconsistent reports of dents on the roof, which may or may not have been from a luggage rack or from bags tied to the roof and which can't be seen in the news photographs, and a few others.
But the last we'll mention is the family's claim that their voices all slowed down and became low-pitched.
Well, it is not unusual for one's voice to be a bit hoarse in the morning.
The family had been driving through the desert for 13 hours straight, and the incident happened in the wee hours before sunrise.
There's not really a medical name for it, but it's called morning voice, and the most common cause is your vocal cords drying out overnight.
And this can happen as a result of mouth-breathing, drinking too much the night before, or simply spending the night in a dry climate like the extremely arid Nullabor Plain.
It is fully to be expected that the Knowles would have woken up in the car with morning voice that day.
No extraterrestrial intervention required.
So what did happen to them on that strange night?
Psychologist and author Robert Bartholomew studies a phenomenon he calls small group panics.
Compare his description of this phenomenon to the situation in which the Knowles family found themselves.
Normal, healthy people who, as a result of a series of unusual events, grow paranoid and literally scare themselves after growing convinced that their lives are in imminent danger.
During episodes, members become distressed and emotionally unstable, often as a result of prolonged fear, fatigue, and lack of sleep.
These factors enhance suggestibility and inhibit their powers of critical thinking.
Within this atmosphere of fear, members begin to redefine everyday objects and events in a new light.
It is within this context that a car backfiring may be perceived as a gunshot, or rustling in the bushes is mistaken for a monster or hostile gang member.
Most cases begin in an isolated environment under the cover of darkness.
In each case, a false consensus emerges that the group is under attack, after which a variety of ambiguous stimuli are redefined within popular cultural labels such as space aliens, yowies, or drug dealers.
Were you tired?
I was a bit tired, yeah, but not tired enough to say a thing like that.
How scared were you, Patrick?
Scared as I've ever been.
Well, what was your feelings?
What were you feeling at the time when this was all down the door?
That's what I felt when we just managed to figure out what we're doing.
Have you had any unusual feelings since it happened?
A bit sick or wasn't.
I won't turn the lights off at night.
I'm too scared to go to sleep.
Any other feelings?
What about you, Wayne?
How do you feel about it all?
Pretty scary.
Writing in Psychology Today, Bartholomew summarized several of the approximately 30 such cases he has collected, including not only this case, but also that of the Kelly Hopkinsville Space Goblins case discussed in Skeptoid number 331.
Bartholomew summarized the Knowles family case thus.
Given the lack of corroborating physical evidence and the frightened state of the occupants, it appears that family members, fatigued from a long trip under the cover of darkness while traveling on an unfamiliar road, mistook an anomalous light for an extraterrestrial spacecraft that they believed was pursuing them.
It is also notable that based on interviews with the family, they were all in an extremely emotional state, shouting and crying.
Mrs. Knowles even said she thought they were going to die.
Whether the lights they saw were Min-Men-style superior mirages or something else, we can't know.
But we do know that it panicked them up to 200 kph, fast enough to blow a tire that could have easily accounted for everything else they perceived.
There appears to be insufficient reason to introduce supernatural elements like aliens, as there simply aren't any pieces of evidence in need of an explanation.
Call me skeptical, but the official skeptoid conclusion is that the only interesting things that happened that night in 1988 were probably a neat mirage effect and an intriguing sociological phenomenon.
Skepticism Is Best Medicine 00:02:14
Both of those things are real and well-evidenced.
And between them, they sufficiently explain all the details of the Knowles family Nullabor UFO.
They also explain all the details of Skeptoid Premium members, Dean Bertram, Yvonne Dubrovin from Moscow, Deborah Wade and the four Wadlings, and Sean Callow.
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