On April 6, 1966, hundreds of students and staff at a school outside Melbourne Australia saw what one witness described as “a round-humped object with a flat base” hovering near the school grounds for 20 minutes while circled by civilian aircraft. The object landed in a nearby field and then lifted off and vanished, witnesses said. Many reported that police and military personnel later inspected the site in the suburb of Clayton South. In the words of the Australian daily The Age, Westall is “one of Australia's most compelling UFO mysteries.”¹
“FLYING SAUCER MYSTERY: SCHOOL SILENT What was it?”² proclaimed the headline in the local newspaper, the Dandenong Journal, over a story reporting that "students and staff have been instructed to talk to no one” about the incident. An article in The Age suggested the object was a weather balloon launched from a nearby airport.³ While skeptics have since argued the object was a radiation-detecting balloon launched from that same airport, eyewitness statements cast doubt on those explanations.
Andrew Greenwood, a science teacher at the Westall School and self-described UFO skeptic, told researcher James J. Kibel that the movements of the object when approached by the civilian aircraft was “the most amazing flying” that he had ever seen. “Every time they got too close to the object it would slowly accelerate, then rapidly accelerate and then move away from them and stop,” Greenwood said. “Then they would take off after it again and the same thing would happen.”⁴
One man, who identified himself only as a former navigator for the Royal Air Force of Australia, wrote a letter to the editor of Dandenong Journal, in which he said that Greenwood's report was a "reasonably accurate" description of a nylon target drogue, a wind sock towed by one plane for the others to chase.⁵
Shane Ryan, a lecturer at the University of Canberra who interviewed dozens of witnesses in the early 2000s, found that students were familiar with light aircraft because of the school’s proximity to Moorabbin Airport. Although the UFO was of similar size, Ryan recalled that "everyone said straight away that they knew it was not a plane," nor a weather balloon. ⁶
When interviewed for the 2010 documentary, “Westall ’66: A Suburban UFO Mystery,” many former students recalled being frightened and amazed by what they saw. One reviewer of the film described the witnesses as “active, attentive people who have lived with a memory that brought them ridicule, and censure, but the stories they tell and the pictures they draw show that they have not forgotten what happened.”⁷
Victor Zackry, a Westfall student, told researcher Bill Chalker in 2008 that the school’s headmaster encouraged him not to talk about the event because it might hurt his future chances of a career in art. Zackry said he followed the headmaster’s advice until others started coming forward in 2006, and he felt more comfortable reporting his own experience. Based on Zachry’s recollection, Chalker did a forensic drawing depicting the aircraft he saw.⁸
There are discrepancies in the witness accounts.
“Some people say there was just one but I reckon there were three,” said Suzanne Savage, who was 13 years old at the time. She told the Melbourne Herald Sun in 2017 that the objects “were hovering over the trees and then went down into the trees and disappeared for a minute or two then rose back up, sort of banked on its side and then took off at a 1,000 miles per hour.”⁹
The Westall students were mistaken, declared reporter Mark Dunn in a August 2014 article for the online edition of the Herald Sun “What landed [at Westall School] was an errant high altitude balloon used to monitor radiation levels,” he asserted.
A “runaway” balloon from the Australian government’s HIBAL (high altitude balloon) project was the likeliest explanation, Dunn said. “Each test balloon lifted a 180 kilogram payload and was followed by a light aircraft tasked with tracking it and triggering its 12-meter parachute via radio signal.”
Citing documents found in the Australian National Archive by researcher Keith Basterfield, Dunn suggested one balloon “may have been blown off course and came down … near Westall High School, alarming and baffling hundreds of eyewitnesses, including teachers and students.”¹⁰
Chalker countered that it was “a big stretch” to suggest that wind “caused a HIBAL parachute and payload to come down low, then go in varying directions, at times faster than light aircraft in the area, then turn and quickly disappear. That’s a pretty impressive performance for a balloon and payload at low altitude.”¹¹
The Westall School sighting was recounted in a 2021 episode of the Netflix series, Top Secret UFO Projects. In the show James Fox, a UFO investigator and filmmaker, presented a photograph that he says was taken two days before the sighting by a young engineer who lived 17 kilometers away.
The site of the alleged encounter has been turned into a memorial park to commemorate the Westall Incident.¹²
