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March 22, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:10
Edition 623 - Ross Coulthart Update
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Another lovely spring day as I speak these words.
Hope everything is all right in your world.
Thank you for the emails that you keep sending.
Please keep them coming because you are my connection with the outside world.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam, and you can follow the link and send me an email from there.
And if you please have time, please check out my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
You won't be disappointed.
And thank you to all of the new people who have stumbled on that Facebook page, checked in with it, left me a comment for something that I posted there.
But any news about this podcast, or indeed the radio show, will be there.
A number of people have been emailing me recently asking me for information about the future of the radio show.
I'm not able to tell you that at this moment because I don't know.
Clearly, as you will know if you're listening in the UK, things are changing and it's not a question that is within my pay grade.
But what I can tell you, the one thing that is within my control, is that this podcast and the digital version where everything started, right from this place where I'm sitting right now, will continue for as long as I'm able to do it.
As you know, we have a massive, and I don't want to talk about things that are negative here because there's enough negativity about as it is.
But there's a huge economic crunch here, and it's massively impacting me.
You know, I was getting by for years, as you will know, and suddenly all of us, wherever we are, are hit by enormous price hikes in things.
And I'm looking at the bills and demands as they come in, and maybe like you too.
I'm thinking, how the hell am I going to manage this year?
So, you know, all of those things are issues.
But for as long as I can continue to be online like this, then I will.
And I've managed to do it now for 16 years.
This month is the 16th anniversary of the podcast.
It seems like only yesterday since I was sitting here saying the first words and wondering, how do you do this?
And now I've got it to the stage where I understand it much more.
You know, I'm not an IT man.
I leave the website and all of that stuff to Adam because he's very good at that.
I don't know anything about that.
I know about sound and how to record sound and those sorts of things.
I know about microphones and that technology.
You know, the organic stuff.
But the IT stuff is all a blank to me.
But what I'm saying here is that the things that I can control will be there for as long as I can physically make sure they are there.
That's the website, theunexplained.tv, the podcast, the unexplained with Howard Hughes, and that Facebook page that will keep you in touch with anything that happens.
So, you know, should anything occur at any time, check in with the Facebook page because I will put news of whatever has happened, you know, in any sphere of my involvement.
Let's put it that way.
I will put it there on the Facebook page.
And, you know, the nice thing about today is we broadcasters always have an outlet because of the freedom that being able to communicate digitally affords you.
It's a wonderful thing.
When I was a kid, we couldn't have done that.
You know, if we'd wanted to reach people independently, then what would you do?
You'd duplicate cassettes and hand them out on street corners and you'd maybe reach 100 people if you were lucky.
These days, the world is, you know, as a comedy character says in the UK, the world is your lobster.
The world's your oyster, quite literally.
Did Frank Sinatra sing that?
I'm not sure.
Anyway, look, I'm just rambling on now.
This edition of The Unexplained is going to be a longer version of my recent conversation with Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthard.
We're going to talk about, among other things, in Australia, the Westall case, the biggest mass UFO sighting in Australia's history, 1966, 200 witnesses that we know about, a school affected, and I will play you the entire interview, including the intro, so I won't say too much about it now.
Please keep in touch with me.
It's lovely to hear from you.
It's nice to know that here in the northern hemisphere, we are out of winter, pretty much.
And all I can say is thank the Lord for that.
Way to contact me through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can email me from there.
Thank you very much indeed.
And I don't use Facebook Messenger, so please don't contact me through Facebook Messenger because I don't see messages sent that way.
Okay, let's get to my conversation from my radio show recently, the remarkable, the extremely talented Ross Coulthard.
Now, we're going to talk about something that we have discussed here before, but I don't think in as much detail.
And I believe, as I think you will by the back end of this, that what we're about to discuss is one of the most fascinating, unsolved mysteries of all ufology.
And the reason I think we haven't been talking about this, I'm talking about us as a community more in recent years or indeed in recent decades, is because of where it happened.
It happened in Australia.
And sometimes stuff that happens in Australia, it's a long way away from here, long way away from the US, doesn't get the same kind of play that stories which occur in other parts of the world do.
It's just the way that it works.
Okay, so let's tie into this story from Australia.
UFO week.
It's back on Blaze TV from March the 28th.
The last one was absolutely storming.
It's every night at 9 p.m.
Terrific content.
A lot of it brand new content, range of new investigations, also some respected presentations like James Fox's excellent documentary, The Phenomenon we talked with him about here.
Also shows about a case that I'm fascinated by, the Carp, Ontario case from Canada.
And this one, the Westall school case from Melbourne, Australia, 56 long years ago.
It was April the 6th, 1966.
And in Melbourne, Australia, it was seemingly just like any other day.
Until something appeared in the sky over the suburb of Westall and a school in that suburb.
This boy come running in saying, Mr. Greenwood, Mr. Greenwood, there's these things in the sky, there's these things in the sky.
We looked up and we just saw this saucer type thing taking off.
It wasn't a plane, it wasn't a balloon, it was nothing like that.
A lot of the kids took off towards where it seemed to go.
All the students were just running all over the place, hysterical.
Went to a high school as a teaching situation ceased.
My girlfriend and I sat on the fence, climbed the fence, the school boundary, and we were crying thinking it was the end of the world.
They were children then, half a century on.
What they experienced on that day in April 66 still affects them and is still within their minds an unsolved mystery.
And you know that when you don't get resolution to a thing in your life, it can give you problems.
It can bug you for your entire life.
And in the case of some of those kids who had an experience we will discuss, that is certainly the case.
To the guest, Ross Coulthard, he's been on this show before, multi-award-winning investigative journalist in Australia, most recently for Australian News and Current Affairs programme 60 Minutes.
If you haven't seen 60 Minutes, it is an extraordinary piece of journalism every week, wonderfully presented.
Ross was previously chief investigations reporter for the Sunday Night News program, also writer of the book in the domain in which we are talking at the moment, ufology, author of the book In Plain Sight, an international bestseller.
So, the Westall School case, just to flag it up for you before we get Ross on from Australia now, the biggest mass UFO sighting in Australia, but seemingly suppressed.
Ross Coulthard, sorry about the long introduction there.
How are you?
I'm very well.
Thank you, Howard.
I think I might just pack up and go home.
You've just done such a great job doing a comprehensive review of Westhall.
It is an amazing place.
And look, I can say this honestly, mate, as an investigative journalist who came into the subject of UFOs, UAPs with a high degree of skepticism, I was brought round by this story.
This is one of the foundation myths of Ross Coulthard's conversion to the fact that the UFO phenomenon is real.
It really is truly one of the most amazing stories in the history of the phenomenon.
Listen, Ross, as somebody who's been through that conversion too, in radio, yours, in television, it's a difficult thing to do, or it was certainly when you and I were first getting interested in these things, because I don't know about you, but I sat even recently on BBC news desks, as recently as five or seven years ago.
And because people working with me knew that I do what I do, you know, on the side, as it was then, they subjected me to what we call ridicule and didn't really believe that I could be seriously pursuing these things.
I'm wondering if your journey was similar.
Oh, very much so.
I mean, I was working on the ABC, which is Australia's equivalent of the BBC, and a very eminent public broadcaster.
And I was on the top panorama show equivalent called Four Corners.
And I can remember one of the very senior people in Australia's Air Force took me aside in a bar and said, why don't you chaps do stories about UFOs?
And I remember I said, well, because they're BS, they're rubbish.
You know, everybody knows that.
It's tinfoil hat crazy stuff.
And he looked at me and I wish I could say who it was.
But he said, no, they're not.
And I remember this chill ran up my spine and I realized I was talking to somebody who was privy to all the most top secret information about UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.
And in the course of an evening, he called over to me individual pilots who were flying reconnaissance aircraft, fighter pilots in this bar, and they all told me what they'd seen.
And a lot of them described viewing lenticular disk metallic objects close to their aircraft.
And all of them, every single one of them, said they would never talk about it on camera because I was there filming another story, a completely different story.
And I said to them, why?
Why wouldn't you talk about this?
And they said, well, probably the same reason you guys don't report it in the media.
There's a stigma.
There's a ridicule that's been attached to this subject.
And I have to admit, Howard, that was, for me, one of the turning points.
And then I heard about the Westall 1966 case.
And that really convinced me because there are over 200 witnesses to this case that a very clever guy in Australia called Shane Ryan has collated.
He's done phenomenal work.
He's interviewed individuals who've got this memory from, as you say, 56 years later.
And what happened that day is mind-blowing.
It is.
I want to get into the detail of that, but let's just ask this question that is a bit of an elephant in the room.
It's a big thing, and I think we need to bring it forward.
200 people witness a thing.
They take away for more than 50 years a memory of that thing, those who survive, that is indelible.
They recall it differently because people's recollections of the past are always different.
We can understand that.
And yet, and yet, and yet, this case does not make international headlines and is pretty much forgotten about for decades.
How can that be?
Well, the only newspaper that reported it in the national press was the Melbourne Age, which is a very prestigious paper, and it just declared that it was a weather balloon.
Object, perhaps balloon, unidentified flying object seen over the Clayton Morabbin area yesterday morning, probably a weather balloon.
Hundreds of children and a number of teachers at West Org School saw it during the morning break.
Nothing to worry about.
Go home, go to your homes, forget about this.
It really wasn't a problem.
Now that was, I can tell you, categorically, Howard, am I allowed to swear on this program?
It depends on the gradation.
Complete bullshit.
It was absolute rubbish.
And the thing that really woke me up to it was coming down to Melbourne from Sydney, where I live.
And a very good friend of mine had organized to meet some of those witnesses on the 55th anniversary of the Westall incident on the 6th of April, 1966.
And all these people drove.
They were so passionate about what they'd seen that day.
They drove from all over Victoria.
Some came from interstate.
They drove for hours because they wanted to share their story.
And so we stood there on the field where they'd been playing as little children, little 10, 11, 12-year-old kids.
And they'd looked up and they'd seen something that irrevocably changed their lives forever.
And, you know, I've done a lot of stories as a journalist where I've investigated things and you test witnesses, you test witness accounts.
And what blew me away was the consistency of the accounts that these kids gave, now adults.
You know, they all described something the same.
And we had this amazing moment where I took them to a local building where we had a room set up and we gave them lunch.
And then I sprung it on them and I gave them each a pad, a drawing pad.
And I said, I don't want you to talk to each other.
I want you to individually draw what you saw.
And I don't want you to share it with each other.
And so we had about six or seven people there who drew what they saw.
And this was 55 years later.
And they drew each of them a lenticular metallic disc-shaped object that was 10 to 15 feet across, like the size of a sort of an aeroplane.
And it was mind-blowing because it was etched in their memory.
And to this day, I'm just absolutely amazed by the detail and the quality of the witness statements and the fact that there was very clearly, my friend, and journalists, as you know, don't say this often because we always assume a screw-up before a conspiracy.
But in this case, I really do think there was a conspiracy by the authorities to cover this whole incident up.
And it's the biggest mystery, frankly, in my country that I can think of, frankly.
It's never been resolved.
Hundreds of people, not just school kids, local residents, school teachers, they saw this object, these objects hovering over the school.
They were clearly, intelligently controlled.
They were showing a capacity to do things far beyond known technology.
You know, whatever they were, they were doing, displaying flight maneuvers, speeds, phenomena like this kind of blue glow around the machine that was beyond anything that we know.
And the interesting thing about it was in that era, 1966, there were no mobile phones.
Nobody got photographs.
Well, there was one teacher that took a photograph.
And we'll get into that because that's fascinating in itself, yes.
Yeah, she had it confiscated off her.
But the thing that really astounds me about this case is for each and every one of those people, they were so moved.
You know, I was quite touched as a journalist because I just somewhat impetuously said, look, what about we do a reunion on the 6th of April, 2021?
I think, if I'm correct, that was the 55th anniversary of the sighting.
And I kind of expected two or three people to turn up.
20-something people turned up from all over Australia.
They were so driven.
They were so happy that a journalist was prepared to take their sighting seriously that they literally dropped everything and drove many for hours across the country to come and talk to me on a field on a very wet, cold, rainy day in Melbourne in April last year because they wanted to share their story.
And for them, it was for each and every one of them the single most important thing that had happened in their lives.
And it had needled away at those kids, adults as they are now, for more than half a century.
And the sense of that comes through on this documentary, which will air on Blaze TV.
Absolutely palpably, you can see in each of their faces, you know, those who go back to the site, those who talk to camera about it.
You can see the intensity of this.
And one thing that I think we have to bring out, and then we'll take a break and then we'll come back and unpick the details of this, Ross.
But one thing that we have to point out that I think screens from this is it's a long time.
It's 56 years now.
And you told me that you got them together and you asked them to write down what they recall, draw a picture, and they all drew much the same picture.
Now, there are two things actually that flow from that.
I don't know about you.
I find it hard to remember what happened when I was 38.
Going back to when I was, which of course is just a couple of years ago, but going back to when I was 8 or 11 or whatever, 9 or 10, I would find pretty damn difficult because it's just a fog.
I have some nativity play and that's just about it, really.
But no, this is etched very firmly on their imagination.
So that's a remarkable thing.
The other remarkable thing about this is because it was not reported and because it didn't go around the world, because it's been pretty much suppressed or it's been quiet for all of these years, nobody can point the finger at those people and say, well, of course, you're all singing from the same hymn sheet because you've all watched the TV reports, because there were pretty much no TV reports.
No, well, exactly.
And it's interesting because, you know, there are these pompous skeptics.
One of my favorite skeptics is Brian Dunning, who's this American person who asserted categorically that it was probably a weather balloon.
He says, oh, a weather balloon was the likely explanation.
You know what?
He has no idea.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Because the interesting thing is, there's a teacher there, Andrew Clayton.
He was the science teacher.
It was his classroom that the little girl came running into saying, Mr. Clayton, Mr. Clayton, there's a UFO.
There's a UFO.
And the amazing thing was he walked out onto the playing field and saw what these kids saw.
And the incredible thing is, he was told to shut up about what he saw.
He was actually ordered by the Australian Air Force and an official that he suspects was from our intelligence service to be quiet about what he saw, or he would jeopardize his teaching career.
And it's interesting because he spoke anonymously to my friend James Fox when James did his documentary a few years ago.
But I managed to persuade Andrew to speak to us on camera.
And he's a very, very brave fellow because he maintains to this day that as he stood on that field and looked up on a clear blue sky day at around about 10.30, 11 o'clock in the morning in this suburban schoolyard in the back of southeastern Melbourne,
he looked up and he saw a lenticular metallic disc-shaped saucer craft hovering probably 50 feet above him.
And it's really interesting.
He's a science teacher.
He's a very careful person.
He's very, very careful to describe what he says.
He doesn't say it was aliens.
All he says is it was clearly intelligently controlled and it was a metallic disc-shaped object.
And so you've got people like that, impeccable witnesses who at the time were adults.
They weren't excited little school kids.
There's no issue of this being some kind of conflated story that little children concocted in a playground.
Because there are also landscape gardeners who were working in the gardens adjacent to this siting.
At the time, this is now a very busy suburb and it's full of houses, but at the time, it was a garden area.
It was full of market gardens.
And a lot of those people spoke privately as well about what they've seen.
And they testified that what they saw was, again, exactly what the children saw.
And even better, as we'll get into later, one of the people that I spoke to, and this is in the excellent documentary that we're talking about, one of the people that I spoke to, Terry, she actually walked up to the object because one of them landed or hovered just above the ground in an area of bushland adjacent to the school.
And her sighting is absolutely extraordinary because she got to within two or three meters of this object hovering in a bushland area.
And she held her hand up against the object and felt heat emanating from it.
It truly is.
It's quite extraordinary.
And the amazing thing about this, Howard, is that not one statement has ever been made by anybody in government to explain what it was that those kids saw 56 years ago.
The government has never attempted to try to explain this phenomenon because they know the volume of witnesses is so intense.
I rather suspect that they expect that if they just ignore it and don't say anything, it will go away.
But one of the things I discovered when I was doing my investigation, I actually found somebody whose father wrote a secret report for the Australian government into this incident.
And it's amazing because there's no doubt in my mind, I very, very rarely, as a journalist, believe in cover-up.
But in this case, I do sincerely believe there was a cover-up.
Let's park it there.
We'll be back in just seconds here on Talk Radio, the Unexplained, talking with Ross Coulthard in Australia about the remarkable Westall school incident from 1966.
Now, I would hazard a guess that if that had happened in the United Kingdom, even with our culture of secrecy here, and boy do we have that, I think we invented official military secrets in the United Kingdom, and it's still going on today in a big style.
I have a feeling that this would have got more media coverage and wouldn't have been closed down so easily.
But as you've just heard Ross say, this was effectively shuttered and stopped on the premise that if you talk about it more, you're going to draw attention to it.
So for 50 years or so, very little attention was drawn to this amazing case.
200 witnesses, Ross has been telling us, which is astonishing.
Documentary about this, we're talking about Westall 66.
It's part of UFO Week on Blaze TV.
Available to you from March the 28th on Freeview and also on Sky and also online on Catch Up.
Back to Ross Coulthard.
So Ross, this is an astonishing story.
I mean, it's very easy to run out of superlatives for this because none of them really cover it.
Let's unpick the chronology of it then.
You know, the way that it's told in terms of, for example, that Vox pop that we played, that little section of clipped interviews at the very top of this.
One kid sees something, then they all do, and then the teachers start to notice.
But just unwind it for me.
Okay, so it's 10.30 in the morning, and it's a beautiful day.
It's a lovely sort of, normally at that time of the year, it's a little bit chilly, but the skies are normally really clear.
And on this particular day, it was a very clear day.
We know that from the weather records.
And this is a school, the Westall High School, which is now a secondary college in Melbourne.
It's in suburban Melbourne, one of our biggest cities in Australia.
And a lot of the kids are, there's immigrant kids, mainly from the UK, who've come out recently with their parents because there was a lot of immigration back then.
Well, there was the assisted passenger cost in those days, so it made it easy for them.
Exactly.
So, you know, a lot of them are battlers.
You know, they're people who are sort of finding their way in Australia, but they're all gorgeous little kids.
And I've actually met a lot of them as adults and they're beautiful people.
Anyway, what happens is the first anyone knows about it is a child runs into a classroom and they're so excited because they've been out on the field playing for a physical education class and they've looked up and they've seen these objects.
And the teacher, who's one of my sources, Andrew, he sort of asks the child to calm down, but he eventually gives up because the kids are so excited.
And So the whole classroom runs at high speed out of the classroom and sprints onto the football field.
And by that time, there are other children running from classrooms all over the school.
And there's even a teacher with a camera, by the way.
And they're all looking up at these three elliptical, metallic, disc-shaped objects hovering, probably no more than 50 feet above the school ground.
And it's almost surreal.
I mean, I've seen pictures of what they've drawn because they are clearly craft of some kind.
And what's really interesting is Morabbin Airport, which is a big light aircraft airport, is only about two or three kilometers from the school.
And there are aircraft from Morabbin Airport, which are clearly in pursuit of these objects.
And as the kids watch, and as local resident adults watch, and the science teacher and other teachers watch, as these aircraft move towards these elliptical disc-shaped objects, they literally, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, they flit across the sky.
One moment they're southwest, and in a moment they're northwest.
And the plane, little light plane with single-engine Cessna, chugs around the sky and goes to the northwest.
And as it gets there, the disk's almost playing with them.
It flits away again.
And this happens for several minutes.
And these kids are watching this absolutely agog.
And then what happens is one of the objects starts looking like it's almost in trouble and it starts descending.
And there's an area of bushland probably about a kilometer from the school where all the kids used to go to smoke cigarettes and do naughty things.
And the kids start running towards the fence of the school to see where this aircraft, this craft is landing.
And the teachers are obviously panicking, going, no, children, stop, come back here a moment, you know, come back here immediately.
And some of the kids are really fast.
And one of them, Terry, is this gorgeous girl who is now in her 60s.
And she's as naughty now as she was back then.
And she actually runs ahead with two other girls.
And they actually get into the bushland and get to a clearing where this disc, this object is landing.
And it never actually physically, as far as I can see, it never actually physically touches the ground, but it's hovering above the ground.
And Terry describes, and in fact, there's another young woman that I've spoken to now who's corroborated Terry's story.
Terry describes this object hovering in the bushland.
And it's quite chilling because as she holds her hand up, she can feel the heat from the craft.
And then as she watches, it rises about 15 to 20 feet in the air.
It goes to a 45 degree angle.
And then bang, it's a kilometer away.
It's like instantaneous movement.
The acceleration must have been extraordinary.
And it's joined up again with the two other craft that it was with.
And then these craft, in a kind of a formation, they literally just flit in an instant to the horizon and they're gone.
Now, what amazes me about this whole incident is when these three little girls who'd gone to the bushland came back, one of them fainted.
And what's fascinating is there was immediately a massive military response.
Multiple witnesses have described soldiers arriving in either Jeeps or Land Rovers.
Some describe American accents.
Some believed that there were Americans involved.
Yes, the uniforms apparently were, as described, unfamiliar.
The other thing that is unfamiliar and unusual is the fact that the military response to this, and the kids and those who witnessed this attest to this, was suspiciously immediate.
Yeah, now, it's really interesting because one of the debunker skeptic theories is that this was a runaway balloon from a secret project called Highball, a high-altitude balloon project that was being used secretly by the Americans in an adjacent city called Sale in Victoria, quite close to Melbourne.
And they were using the highball balloons to monitor radiation levels because the British tests were going on at Maralinga and also the Soviets were exploding bombs on the other side of the South Pole.
And they thought that this might be a good way of testing to see whether there was radiation coming into the atmosphere.
And so there's been a theory postulated that this might simply have been a balloon.
But the thing that fascinates me is that when I put this proposition to the adults, I specifically looked at the adults who had recollection of the event, notably Andrew, the former science teacher.
And they just scoffed at that idea.
They were actually contemptuous of the notion that this might have been a balloon.
They actually said to me, look, there is a distinction between a balloon and a solid metallic object with lights and kind of a plasma glow.
They knew what they were looking at.
They were looking at it from no more than 50 feet, which is what, the length of a tennis court.
It was just above their heads.
They are categorical that this was not a balloon.
But what's interesting is that we do know that because of the highball balloon program, there were Americans and Jeeps and those uniforms in proximity to Melbourne at the time.
The highball program had closed down, but there were still Americans operating in Melbourne at the time.
And that's a possible explanation for why some of these children, and indeed some of the adult witnesses, describe seeing American uniforms and American trucks.
And what's interesting, what's really interesting is there are witnesses, including police, former police, who say that the area where the object allegedly landed In the bushland was cordoned off by military, men with guns.
And the police assisted in that cordon.
And for the next three or four days, there was an exhaustive investigation of the landing site.
And I've actually spoken to numerous witnesses who've seen on the days after the landing, they saw military patrolling this site.
They saw men with Geiger counters, soldiers with Geiger counters measuring the levels of radioactivity on the site.
They saw the soil, actually, and afterwards, people actually went and found children sneaked back into the Grange, which was this bushland area.
And they saw from a very close distance the soldiers hovering over these circular depressions in the ground.
Almost like little mini, we know them here in the UK, mini crop circles.
Yeah, something had made an impression on the ground that had flattened ground.
One of the things, Ross, sorry to jump in, but one of the things that is reflected in the documentary from Blaze TV's UFO week, West Horse 66.
Let's get the plug in there.
One of the things that is reflected there is a guy who was a university student then, so he wasn't a school kid, who went to the site and must have heard about it somehow.
And he reflected the huge security operation that was there.
But I think I'm right in saying that he is the one in the documentary who says that that site was cleaned up pretty rapidly afterwards, that they effectively shaved the grass, they removed the signs.
So whoever was there was very keen that it should leave no impression.
Oh, absolutely.
And my friend Shane Ryan, who's done an enormous amount of the extremely good work on this whole subject, he's a phenomenal researcher.
And what he's done is he's tracked down all these witnesses, including the university student that you talk about.
And there are multiple.
I mean, I'm trained as a lawyer before I became a journalist.
And so you know how to assess evidence.
And the thing that really impresses me about this case is the degree of consistency of the evidence of multiple direct corroborative witnesses who say clearly what they saw.
And in some cases, these people have not had an opportunity to match their stories up.
These are people that have independently verified to Shane what they saw.
And it's really quite extraordinary because multiple people say there was a cleanup that took several days.
It went on for ages.
And all throughout that period, the public was refused access to this very popular park area.
And it's quite funny.
I mean, if you go there today, Howard, you'd have a laugh because the local council built a children's playground.
And there in the center of a children's playground is a replica of a UFO.
It's quite funny.
Well, at least that's going to mean that this incident is marked and remarked for a good long time, hopefully.
But amazing that it was closed down in this way.
And part of that cover-up process didn't happen on the site.
It happened at the school where children were, by today's standards, interrogated and effectively given the impression by officers of some organization who'd visited the school that nothing much happened there and there was nothing to see and nothing to be talking about.
They were told that in assembly.
And we have to say the headmaster comes across, and he's no longer with us to speak for himself, but he comes across as somebody who is not exactly a facilitator in these things.
He sounds to me as if he is a sceptic.
He sounds to me as if he is somebody who just wants to close this down and move on.
So he was the right man for the authorities in the right place at the right time, it seems.
Yeah, I think we have to put this in context too, Howard.
I mean, this was the Cold War.
I mean, just four years previously, we'd had the Cuban missile crisis and the world had come close to nuclear war.
I mean, you and I grew up, I assume as you're as old as me, you know, we all grew up.
I grew up with the same generation.
Yeah, I think we all grew up with that ever-present threat of annihilation with mass nuclear war.
You know, we were all told that there was a likelihood that the world was going to have a nuclear exchange.
And so when authority, when in this case, the military and the police came into the school and also the intelligence services, I suspect, came into the school and actually told the headmaster, look, this has to be kept quiet.
You know, I'm sure that happened.
I think the headmaster did what he felt he was honorably bound to do.
I don't think he was a bad chap.
I just think he was told to do it.
And yes, the children were told, there are multiple witnesses for this, the children were told at assembly that they hadn't seen what they thought they'd seen.
They were told that it was just a balloon and to stop worrying about it and to get on with their lives.
And it's really interesting because a lot of them did.
A lot of them forgot about it.
And it wasn't until decades later that they actually thought to themselves, why did I keep that secret?
Why did I not talk about this?
And that's the really fascinating thing is that a lot of them just glibly accepted the assurances that they were given.
It says a lot about how suggestible we are as human beings.
And that's the great thing about this documentary.
I mean, I remember when I first watched this documentary, and it's an absolute pearler.
I really strongly recommend it.
I wish I'd made it.
It basically told the story in a really methodical way, and it blew people's socks off.
And the funny thing about it is, as you rightly observe, Howard, it didn't get any traction in the mainstream media.
And chillingly, a network I used to work for, Channel 9, the old GTV television studios in Melbourne, they sent out a TV crew to record what had happened because they'd heard about this story.
And we know that they put a story to air because it's actually recorded in the documents that there was a story broadcast about Westall that day.
But when I went looking and when my friend Shane, the researcher who'd done a lot of the work on this, went looking For the film canister, it wasn't there anymore.
And we just don't know whether somebody removed it to try and hide what happened, or whether, more likely, to be honest with you, the TV network figured we've got piles of film here.
Let's just dump some of these old films.
Who's going to watch all these old news stories anymore?
Even something as remarkable as that.
It depends how it was documented on the film can.
But, you know, in the documentary West All 66, we're shown an empty film can with just a note inside.
And that's it.
There is no copy of it.
There's not much documentation about it.
That's all we know.
So apart from that one film and one newspaper piece that was written, that's it.
But there was a man, you did mention this, and just before we get to our next break here, I think we need to talk about this.
You said that there was a man who made a journal of this, who wrote about this.
Well, actually, there's multiple people who wrote about this, but it's better than that.
What's really interesting is, and this is completely amazing to me, I've got a longtime source who's been a contact of mine for years, who worked at the very highest levels of a department in the Australian government.
I wish I could say who he is, but he's asked for anonymity.
He's still alive, and he's an absolutely unimpeachable source.
And so when last year I posted an invitation for people to come to the Westall reunion on the 55th anniversary, all of a sudden I get a phone call from this guy who's living overseas.
And he said, why are you doing a story on the Westall UFO story?
And I laughed and I said, good heavens, why are you, of all people, ringing me about this?
And he said, because my dad wrote the secret report for the Department of Supply into the Westall UFO.
Secret report.
And this is amazing because the Department of Supply is now a non-existent government department.
It was absorbed mainly into the Department of Defense.
But it was actually set up so we could help you chaps, you lovely Brits, blow your bombs in a place called Maralinga in South Australia.
And so when in your wisdom, you decided that you wanted to develop a nuclear weapon, you, in your defined wisdom, decided that it was too unsafe to explode nuclear weapons in Britain.
So you chose, oh, thank you, Australia.
And so there was this place called Maralinga in a completely empty part of the South Australian desert, where for many years the Brits tested both nuclear weapons and also ICBMs into continental ballistic missiles.
And the interesting thing about it is an official who was involved in that program went on to work in Melbourne and he was dragooned when the Westall incident happened to write the definitive investigation for the Department of Supply, which is the department that serviced Maralinga.
He was asked to explain what had happened.
And his son is my source.
And not only his son, his daughter.
And so his son and daughter clearly recall that in April 1966, when they were fairly young kids, he was, I think, 13 or 14 and the daughter was a bit younger, they recall their father being picked up for several days and taken off to Clayton, South Clayton in Melbourne in a Humber car and taken to essentially prepare the report.
And every evening he would come home and he'd often sit there with people and discuss what they'd seen.
And little children, being as they are, their ears waggled and they listened.
And it was amazing to me because my source, my good friend, heard his father discussing what had happened at the Westall school.
And he knows his father prepared a report because his father was so rattled, so perturbed by what he'd seen and heard during his investigations that he actually prepared a copy of the report and kept secretly a copy of the report in the family home.
And the children heard the father talking to the mother about how if anything happened to him, a copy of this report was to be used at her discretion because he was so concerned about what he'd uncovered.
And incredibly, you're going to laugh when I tell you this part.
He told the missus, the wife, that when he died, the report was to be destroyed.
And that's exactly what she did.
She burned the report in the family backyard.
And you said, had she read it?
Is any of it recalled?
No, that's the amazing thing about it.
This is such a different era.
But my friend has agreed to testify for me to the Australian National Archives in a confidential affidavit.
And he's prepared to swear that he saw his father preparing this report and that there must be somewhere in the archives of the Department of Supply, there must be a copy of this report.
But for the moment, even though there's been an exhaustive search done by the National Archives of Australia, and I think they're doing it in good faith, I don't think they're trying to conceal anything, they haven't found it to date.
But I rather suspect it's a bit like the Raiders of Lost Ark, Howard, you know, that Harrison Ford film.
Somewhere in a dusty archive that's probably about a mile long, deep underground, there's probably a cardboard box with the Westall UFO 1966 report.
And it's probably stamped top secret.
And you know what?
I don't think we'll ever get to see it.
So even under, I mean, in the United Kingdom, we have the so-called 30 years rule that doesn't always apply to everything if it's particularly secret.
There are also in America and the United States and in Australia, and rather in the United Kingdom and in Australia, there are freedom of information requests.
Even so, the paper trail for this, you think, is going to stay shrouded in secrecy, as they say?
Well, I don't think that, I honestly don't think, because I've actually pulled rank.
I've actually, I'm a senior journalist in this country and I've actually asked our Defense Department to mount a really good search.
And I'm pretty well convinced they've looked pretty hard.
But to be honest with you, I think when something like the Department of Supply was shut Down and the British moved off from Australia and abandoned their nuclear weapons testing.
The last thing people were worried about was keeping a record of all the stuff that was stored away.
So, probably what they've done is they've shoved it into boxes.
It's probably sitting in a dark cave somewhere deeper in the Defence Department.
And frankly, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars, I suspect, to actually hire somebody to go in there and look for it.
Or possibly, just as we conclude this segment, possibly shipped out to another country if another military was involved and those documents are not even in Australia now, which is a fascinating thought.
Russ, this is an astonishing case.
Defies finding superlatives that fit it, but it is.
What can be done about it at this remove, at this distance in time, bearing in mind the documentation, media reports, everything seems to be missing about this.
But those who went through it, the 200 witnesses, the surviving teachers, the headmaster's not with us anymore, but the teachers who do survive, absolutely convinced that something big enough to have it completely closed down and to warrant a huge investigation happened on that day and subsequent days in Westall in 1966.
Okay, well, let me tell you, there was indubitably a cover-up, my friend.
There's a teacher, a science teacher, Andrew, who agreed to speak to me so long as I sort of protected him to some degree because he's worried about people attacking him or, you know, criticizing him.
But he told me that two weeks after the incident, he'd given an interview to a local newspaper, the Dandenong Times, I think it was, which is a suburban newspaper in Melbourne.
And he described what he saw, which was this lenticular metallic disc.
And that night at his private home, there was a knock on the door.
And he's described in a really chilling way, and it really angers him to this day, how there on the doorstep was a chap dressed in Air Force uniform, quite a senior officer.
And there was another man dressed in what he assumed was, he was an intelligence officer dressed in civilian clothing.
And they basically threatened him.
They said, if you talk about this anymore, we will shut you down.
We will say you are a drunk, that you get drunk on the job as a school teacher and you will never work again as a school teacher.
And so Andrew, as a young 20-something lad, was terrified about that.
And he's now in his 70s and he was furious that they did this to him.
And we just got him at the right time, to be honest.
He very kindly agreed to be interviewed by me and he went candidly through the circumstances of what happened.
So I only tell you that story to the extent that I think that there was a very deliberate official cover-up at the time.
Now, I don't believe I've actually spoken to very, very senior people in our Defense Department and in our National Archives, that they are as keen as you and me to find out what happened.
Because whatever the cover-up was about, they don't know about it.
And I'm sure they don't.
But I suspect the Americans do.
And so one of the things I am doing is I'm trying to find out from America's National Archives whether there are any records of what American personnel were in Melbourne at that time.
And I'm trying to find out if any report went back to the US.
But what's really interesting is the teacher that I spoke about, Andrew, he was interviewed by Professor James MacDonald, who was a UFO investigator working for the American Defense Department and the intelligence services.
And Macdonald came out to Australia and did an audio interview with Andrew, which I've got a copy of, where incredibly, 50, what is it, 54, 52 years ago, Andrew basically described what he'd seen in 1966.
It really is quite extraordinary because it matches exactly the story that he gave me last year.
And so that's the thing that I find is really interesting about this case.
And there's another thing I'd draw your attention to.
There is a phenomenon of whatever this is, these objects visiting schoolyards, and assuming for a moment that they're intelligent life forms, assuming for a moment that this might be, say, an alien life form or an extraterrestrial life form.
There's another incident that took place at a school in Zimbabwe called Rua.
I think it was in 1994.
And there's a film coming out about that very soon.
There seems to be a pattern of school children having these sightings.
And a lot of the more hysterical debunkers and skeptics say, oh, yes, yes, it's just schoolchildren making up these stories.
You know, they sit around in the playground and they make these stories up.
Or indeed, they call it mass hysteria.
And that was certainly the description of the aerial school case in Zimbabwe.
Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about, the Rua case.
And the really interesting thing is that it's now come out because of some great work done, again, by my friend James Fox and by other filmmakers, a guy called Randy Nickerson, who's bringing out a movie, I think, this year, later this year.
It really is the case that there were adult witnesses as well.
Again, in that case, there were teachers who saw what the kids saw.
And so there's a pattern here of objects that appear to be intelligently controlled visiting schools and engaging with little children.
Now, I don't know why that is, because in the case of the Westall case, there's no witness that's ever said that there was any kind of communication or intelligence.
There's a couple of people I've spoken to who've said that they felt that they were being scanned, that they were being watched, that they felt that there was an intelligence behind these objects.
But there's nobody that said what the kids at Rua at Ariel in Zimbabwe described, which is this sense that they actually engaged allegedly with alien beings and had some kind of telepathic communication.
But there's actually a book that's been done that I'm in the process of reading at the moment, which describes UFO sightings over schools.
And there's another one I've been hearing from people in Wales of all places in the United Kingdom where children also saw very similar incident where metallic lenticular disc-shaped objects hovered over the school.
There's a whole strange cluster of cases in West and South Wales that are definitely worth you looking at.
Yeah, no, it's breathtaking and it's absolutely fascinating to me.
And I've actually sat down with ministers of our government, very senior defence officials, and I've got the pool to be able to do that.
And I've said, look, seriously, are you guys involved in a dirty cover-up?
You know, is there some sort of secret that we're not meant to know about Westall 1966?
And they swear to me it's not the case.
They say, we'd love the answer to this as much as you.
You know, a number of them have watched the excellent documentary that your listeners and viewers are about to see.
And, you know, they're as vexed and puzzled by it as we are.
But you know what I think?
There is one consistent thing that goes on behind the scenes.
And that's the Americans.
I am sure, absolutely certain, the Americans know what Westall was all about.
And I don't think they told their Australian ally all that much about it.
But I can tell you that the chap that I know whose father wrote the report about Westall, he said that his dad was absolutely rattled and shocked by the experience that he had of investigating that case.
And he never described to his son what he saw, but the family became much more aware of the possibility that we are not alone.
Isn't it amply demonstrated in that case from Australia in 1966?
As I say, if it had happened in North London, I think it might have got more play.
But I'm glad that you're one of the people who's not going to rest until you get more answers about this.
And I agree with you.
I think the answers, or certainly the circumstantial evidence about this, may well reside in files in the United States.
So good luck with your continued searches on that, Ross.
And thank you very much for talking with me.
Just one quick thing.
You wrote a great book called In Plain Sight.
We both know that so much has happened over this last year, the delivery of that interim report in Washington and what was supposed to flow from it, the supposed, you know, course trajectory towards disclosure, the fact that some people are saying now that, you know, more Tic Tac UFOs are being cited and these things are not going away.
Are you updating the book?
I will be, sir.
And more importantly, I'm going to be doing much more investigative journalism into the subject matter.
I mean, just, for example, today, I'll leave your listeners with this amazing bit of information.
Just today, across the ditch from you guys in London, Alain Juliet, who's the former head of the Deja SA, the Direction Générale External Sécurité, the Spy Service for France, one of the most senior defense intelligence officials in the French government.
He went on an interview and revealed that he was briefed about USOs, underwater submerged objects, which he said were tracked by the French traveling at greater than the speed of sound underwater.
These are extraordinary admissions, absolutely extraordinary admissions.
And we really are getting to the stage.
I think there's a momentum building for the gradual release of a report that's coming out in October this year, where the Congress will reveal what the Pentagon and the intelligence community know about UAPs.
Because in December last year, they were ordered by legislation, by an act of Congress.
They were told, you do not get your defense appropriations.
There will be no money for the Defense Department of the U.S. unless you fess up and tell two congressional committees what you know about the UAPs.
Nothing focuses the mind like money.
Yeah, we're all holding our breath, waiting to see what happens.
But I'll be honest, my friend, I'm a bit cynical and sceptical.
I rather suspect the cover-up will continue.
It's a drama that seems to play on and on and on.
And when you're told it's a three-act play, well, it's a lot more acts than that.
And I suspect there are more acts to come.
Ross Coulthard, always a pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you very much for bridging the miles and the time zones.
Please have a good weekend.
You too, sir.
All the best and all the best to your listeners.
Longer version of my conversation with Ross Coulthard from my radio show, Ross and I will speak again.
I think he's such a good broadcaster and journalist, a remarkable character, and he's done some terrific research.
So like I say, we will speak again.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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