Prepare to traverse the shadowy domain of alien lore and skyward mysteries. Here we delve into the mysterious story of the 1966 Westall UFO experience where the ordinary lives of over a hundred Australians were marked forever by an extraordinary encounter. Their testimonies, woven into the fabric of Australia's rich UFO history, stands as a beacon for enthusiasts and skeptics alike.
Our narrative arcs back to ancient times, addressing the Australian pyramids and the spellbinding Wandjina rock art through the lens of celestial inquiry. Dare to question the origins of these marvels. Could they be the artifacts of star-born wisdom, left for humanity to ponder? Is the land of Australia the remanent of the lost mythical civilization known as Lemuria? It may be that the indigenous Aborigines preserved this knowledge in the form their oral traditions and spiritual beliefs about the universe.
Hello everybody, thank you for joining us on Alien Talk Podcast. This is the show where we discuss all things about aliens and UFOs and, as always, where we push the limits of our understanding. We are your inquisitive and truth-seeking host, joe Landry and Laurie Oldford, and we appreciate all of you for continuing to tune in even after we take a hiatus. Last time we were with you. Steven and Leslie Shaw joined us to talk about their experiences in ufology and to share a little about the background that inspired them to write their book Who They Are and What They're Up To. It's available through Amazon and the eBook. It can be purchased off of Kindle, so we encourage everyone to check it out, both the book and the podcast episode. And speaking of books available on Barnes and Noble and Amazon, our novel yes, our novel was just published and released the last week. Finally, it is now out there to be read.
Laurie:
Yes, it is. We are very excited about it too. The book is titled Battle Planet A. D.: Relic of the Gods. It is available in three formats on Kindle, eBook, paperback and hardcover. It's a historical slash science fiction novel set in the ancient biblical past with a connection to 1947 and the Roswell incident. But it has action, it has adventure and mystery, and we hope you, when you do read it and we think you will, hopefully and we believe you won't be able to put it down.
Joe:
Yeah for sure, and this book was no easy task for us. It was five years in the making Laurie, you and I went back and forth sharing our ideas about the manuscript and all that entails and the character arcs, not to mention the time we put into it with editing and then having to deal with the publisher. But that's all behind us now and the novel is finally here. We hope you all are able to get a copy of it and let us know your thoughts through our social media pages and even through Amazon or through Barnes and Noble. And Laurie, you also just came back from a week-long vacation in Mexico, isn't that right?
Laurie:
Yeah, that's right, Joe. My wife and I went down to Cancun for our Valentine's Day gift to one another, so how we were able to go and enjoy the beaches and the Maya ruins before all the spring breakers arrived.
Joe:
Yeah, no kidding, that place is a hotspot for college spring break. Anyway, it must have been nice, and you sent me a photo of you standing near one of the intricate Mayan pyramids down at Chitzenitza. That was about your trip there.
Laurie:
Yeah, it's a really good time that we had. I mean, we first visited the Maya ruins of Tulum, which was about an hour and 15 minutes south of Cancun, and then the next day we drove two and a half hours to Chitzenitza, where we were able to finally see that great El Castillo, the castle also known as the Pyramid of Cucacot, who is also the Mayan deity. He is also known as to the Aztecs as Cucacot and to the Incan Empire as Viracocha. Anyway, we see the photos of this pyramid over and over again and it just doesn't do it justice. I was in awe that, standing there, looking up at it with great admiration a truly remarkable feat of engineering. I loved it.
Joe:
Yeah, it truly is.
Joe:
They are fascinating to see, especially up close and being right there.
Joe:
But it's good to have you back, you and your lovely wife, here safe and sound, and we're all glad that you had a great time and that you got to see up close how the Mayans displayed their sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and architecture. Ancient temples are found throughout the world, and most of them attest to the skills and mathematics and engineering that people had a long time ago, and we in our modern age are amazed at this that civilizations from the distant past were able to build things like pyramids. Everyone is familiar with the pyramids in Egypt and Central America, but they are actually found in quite a few places that you wouldn't expect, like Australia, and that brings us to our topic today, which is the extraterrestrial sightings and encounters that are said to have taken place in the land down under. And yes, there are pyramids there too, like the Ballandean Pyramid and the Gimpy Pyramid in the State of Queensland. So, just as with the Egyptians and the Mayans, we find evidence of people having an advanced aptitude for specialized construction of monuments all the way down in Australia.
Laurie:
Yeah, I've always wanted to go there, still do, and it's on one of my list of places to go. But one thing about it is it is known for being home to some of the most unique animal species on earth the koala, the wallaby, the platypus, the kangaroo all in Australia. So I think it would be great to see all of them in their natural habitat and, of course, you never want to mess with the kangaroos.
Joe:
No, you don't want to mess with the kangaroo. I've watched videos of them. They know how to box. Stay away from them. Yeah, I would love to go to Australia. One thing I think would be hard for me to get used to is how the seasons are reversed there.
Joe:
The winter for us is summer for them. Right now. We're going into spring, but they're going into autumn. That's the way it is for everyone living in the southern hemisphere Argentina, chile, new Zealand, south Africa those places all have Christmas as a summer holiday. December 25th is the start of summer down there.
Laurie:
Yeah, but just like up here, we're used to that the way it is now, but I mean they're used to that there. They probably think the way you know the weather is up here during that time. You know it's weird to them. So you know how it is up here in June, with hot weather and long hours of daylight. That's how Christmas is for those folks. So which, yeah, that would be kind of an odd experience for us here in North America who no Christmas as being cold, dark and wintry. But you know, two of the cities around the world that are in the top 10 for downloads of Alien Talk podcasts are in Australia, and those are Sydney and Melbourne. So a huge shout out to all of our listening listening fans in the land down under. We really appreciate your support for the show. You guys have been amazing.
Joe:
And indeed we do. Thank you to everyone everywhere who has helped put our podcast on the map. And yes, today we want to look into some of the well known reported accounts of UFO sightings in Australia, but also we also want to examine some of the legacy of alien encounters that have been reported there for many centuries. And there have been quite a few UFO sightings in Australia throughout the decades from the 1950s to the 1990s. These sightings were of objects that were from white circular craft all the way to big glowing balls to larger objects hovering over roadways and beaches, and the oldest sighting actually goes all the way back to 1868, where an alderman in Parramatta, new South Wales, named Federick Bingham, saw that he something in the sky that he described as a park more appropriate for traveling in the water, but it was floating in the sky before it landed in Parramatta Park.
Joe:
Now, australia is unique and it is both a country and a continent. It is pretty large, almost three million square miles, and it is comprised of six states, one of which is the island of Tasmania. It has been inhabited by indigenous people known as the Aborigines, who are believed to have dwelt there since before the Mesolithic age, which is over 20,000 years ago, for about as long as indigenous people have been living in North and South America, and just as there are legends and myths that exist with Native Americans about gods, spirits and star- beings, so too are there ones espoused by the Aboriginal Australians.
Laurie:
Yeah, just like here in places like the American Southwest, we find that over in the desert regions of Australia, there are hundreds of native artifacts and petroglyphs that depict strange beings, many of them disproportionately large, that come into the myths of the people from up in the sky. So, for instance, something known as the wandjinaa of the Worwora tribe in the Northern Territory has seen painted on their cliff walls. They are big, looming spirit figures that are believed to have been the creator gods who came down from the stars and gave knowledge and law to the people. Now, this, of course, is a similar concept found in other cultures, one of which from none other than the Sumerians with their stories of the Anunnaki. Now, we'll elaborate a little more on the wandjina in a bit, but think about this when you do. The wandjina are depicted as having similar appearance and sound of name, as gods from some Native American cultures, and they are known as the kachina, I mean, who they believe was descended from the stars and taught them law and order and civilization.
Joe:
Yeah, and the stars to the Aborigines serve a very important purpose, and one of the most important constellations is that of the Pleiades, just as it is the Roman and Greek traditions Also within the repertoire of Aboriginal mythology our narratives about visitors who arrived in Australia long before the Europeans began to colonize it in the 17th century. According to Anthony Wheeler, with the Omega Science Digest dated July 1, 2004, there is a narrative that people from Egypt or Phoenicia may have traveled to Australia thousands of years ago, time after the British had arrived. There were certain tales that were being told about how voyagers from Arabia had been there a few hundred years prior. So supposedly this is meant to serve as an anthropological link explaining the presence of pyramids. But many of the questions about pyramids being in Egypt have a basis in ancient astronaut theory, as we've talked about before. So if there is a possible extraterrestrial connection with those pyramids in Egypt and elsewhere in the world, would there also be such a connection with the ones in Australia?
Laurie:
I'm sure there could be, just like other parts of the world that tend to be hotbits for UFO and alien manifestations, like the Middle East, American Southwest, Russia, etc.
Laurie:
We see that Australia has populations that are immersed in a history that talks about wonders in the sky, so it's really no surprise that there are a considerable number of sightings there and that the Royal Australian Air Force has been investigating them since before the 1980s.
Laurie:
You know, one of my favorite researchers and authors is Paul Anthony Wallace, who resides near Melbourne, and many of you have heard of him and have most likely watched his YouTube videos on the series called the YouTube channel, called the Fifth Kind TV. He was a preacher in the Anglican Church and, just like us, he still has ties to the Christian congregations. He has also written several books on the ancient alien theory and has probed the narratives of ancestral religions to find insight into what is told about our human origins, and the titles of some of his books are the Eden Conspiracy, escaping from Eden and Echoes of Eden. But the one by him that I really like is the Scars of Eden, because he thoroughly documents a UFO incident that was reported in 1966 near Westall in Queensland. This was one that caused quite a stir back in the day, and it is quite similar to the 1990s Zimbabwe UFO incident that we recently discussed. It actually turns out to be the biggest mass sighting in history of Australia.
Joe:
All right. It made newspaper headlines. The Dand enong Journal ran with the headline of Flying Saucer Mystery School. Silent. What Was It? And a local TV station covered the story and within a few runs it was swept under the rug, as usually does happen with these kinds of things, and, like you said, it turns out to be a very widely known UFO encounter on record and like very much like the one that was reported in Zimbabwe, and it was first caught on by schoolchildren, just like an incident.
Joe:
In this case, a young man at Westall High School ran into his science class around 11 o'clock in the morning on April 6th in 1966. And he was shouting with excitement that there were things in the sky, things he was calling Flying Saucers. So naturally everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, quickly went outside to take a look and what they saw were three saucer-shaped craft hovering over the area of the school. Now, supposedly there were over 100 students and faculty who witnessed this, but it was from more than just one school. There was another school not far away called Westall State School, where students and teachers had also seen the same objects in the sky. Those were taken of them and they do show the objects in the sky. They can be seen on, you know, by downloading on a Google search for Westall UFO incident, and they show the objects as gray discs. One of these things were said to have touched down near the school grounds and actually landed before taking off again into the air.
Laurie:
Yeah, and that craft touched down in a wooded area and left imprints in the ground and then it lifted off to about 12 feet in the air, turned itself on an angle and bolted off at a very high rate of speed from a hovered position. You know, after that, five fighter jets had already arrived to accept the three, the three craft, by the time they were flying over the area. And after that the police cars, military jeeps, soldiers, you know they all showed up to cordon off the security area. But what's even more disconcerting is what is seen when a TV reporter is shown talking to one of the students. But one of the men in black came up.
Laurie:
You know, guys in dark suit had walked up to the interview, to the interview, and he stops it and in the background you see another guy in a dark suit having an argument with the chemistry teacher who was taking photographs of the of the craft. He then snatches the camera away and later on an assembly was held at the high school and the principal announced to the 200 students and teachers who witnessed the ordeal that no one is to mention anything about the incident or they will be disciplined. His words were nothing happened this morning and any child who claims that something did happen will be punished. So you can only imagine the fear and frustration felt when those witnesses and you know, and how those and how this affected the narrative of this incident.
Joe:
Yeah, it definitely would have affected the narrative of the incident if people were afraid to ever talk about it.
Joe:
But there is an even more eerie and uncanny aspect to this, and it involves a female student only know her by the name of Tanya, and she was taken to a nearby hospital after this encounter.
Joe:
Apparently, she was so freaked out by it and so frightened that she went to hypopolymic shock, and so she was transported there but never went back to the school ever. About a week or so later, her friends went over to her house to pay her a visit, and someone who wasn't one of Tanya's parents or family member has answered the door. Of course, the girls asked about Tanya and how she was doing, and that person told them that Tanya didn't live there and actually never had lived there. So they were predestined upon hearing this, because they knew for sure that this was Tanya's house, but it was not a trace of her or her family, or even from what they could see, their cars or their furniture at that house. They simply were erased. She was erased from existence, and she and her family just vanished, and to this day no one knows where she is or what, if anything, ever happened to her.
Laurie:
Yeah, that is strange and weird. So I mean, after this, the Australian government downplayed the entire thing and claimed it never happened. The official statement was a weather balloon, a go figure or a classic instrumentation balloon from a military installation. We've all heard that before. That, of course, doesn't match up with what the witnesses claim to have seen. Now, supposedly, that news station that was interviewing people back then had an archive of that incident that was recently opened and it should have shown the whole clip of that report, but it had been cut out from the film reel Again. Everything wiped away.
Laurie:
But in an article by Ali Foster in newscomau dated August of 2018, states that in the 52 years since the event occurred well, it's now more like 58 years, since we're in 2024.
Laurie:
But there has been worldwide speculation about what people saw, with some believing it was absolutely an alien encounter and others pointing the finger at the Australian military were testing new technology, possibly in cooperation with other nations like the US and the UK.
Laurie:
And Foster continues by saying that there is audio recording that's been greatly overlooked and it was done by researcher James T Kiball, who interviewed Andrew Greenwood, one of the teachers, who was a witness In it.
Laurie:
Kiball recorded himself talking about his interview with Greenwood, so unfortunately it's not the interview itself. But yeah, he retells how he found out about how the hysterical student ran into the building and the terrified look he had on his face as he disrupted the whole classroom. And he said he thought this child had become deranged or something so he didn't take any notice. But when the child insisted that this object or these objects were in the sky, he decided to go out and have a look for himself and he saw it and described it as a round silver object about the size of a car or just a tad bigger, with a metal rod sticking up in the air. And then the five planes came and surrounded the object and they did everything possible to approach the object and he said how they all avoided collision on trying to get close to that object. He will never know.
Joe:
Well, the whole thing definitely left its mark on the people of West Hall. As it is. They built a slide and monkey bar set at a playground that is made to look like a flying saucer, and there is a commemorative patch that was designed to be worn and it depicts a scene with a UFO being chased by fighter jets above the ground where children are standing looking up at it. And this certainly is not the only UFO event to be recorded in Australia. In January of 1988, it was a case of a rather bizarre kind of abduction in an area called Noorbor Plain, which is on the outskirts of the Great Victoria Desert. A family named the Knowles were driving outside the city of Perth when they noticed a big ball of light falling them for a few hours, and then it actually had come in contact with their car as it was moving. This story was picked up by a newspaper in Adelaide, in which they claimed that they were actually picked up off the ground, that the entire vehicle was airborne and they were inside the vehicle screaming in terror.
Laurie:
Yeah, and they said that it went on for about 90 minutes straight. As Sean, the one who was driving, was flooring it, he was trying to run it. Their report to the police later seemed to suggest that they experienced missing time, as there were like discrepancies in how they recalled when it started and when it ended as they traveled further along the road than they should have for their speed. According to abc. news. au dated February 18, 2018, the public statement by the police department in the town of Seduna was that the glowing object picked the car up off the road, shook it quite violently, mind you, and forced the car back down on the road with such pressure that one of the tires was blown. So, this is a little like the Biddy and Barney Hill case, but perhaps even a little more terrifying, since the nose seemed to be fully aware the whole time that they were being manipulated by a UFO and fearing they would die.
Joe:
So it would seem that there really is a plethora of such stories in Australia and that many of them are shrouded in mystery, perhaps even more so than they are here in the States. Some of them are pretty remarkable. I mean, remember, the oldest sighting on record goes all the way back to 1868. I mean, there are stories that tell of the mythological connections that seem to be between the Australian Aborigines and aliens. Right, Laurie?
Laurie:
Yeah, that is correct, joe, and one of the stories is about the Wangeena we had mentioned earlier in an article by abcnitau titled Aboriginal Art Depicting Wangeena Figure that Sparked Aliens Theory, to be Reclaimed by Traditional Owners. It's by Aaron Parquet, dated December 4th of 2016. The original or Aboriginal families in Western Australia's north are finding ways to reclaim the sacred image of the Wangeena. They are believed to be the tall spirits drawn on thousands of caves and are considered to be sacred by a few tribes that believed the Wangeena is a supreme being that created Australia and established law and order. Parquet wrote about another, about author Mike Donaldson, who wrote quite a bit on the Kimberley Rock Art and its discovery by settlers. It was the 1837 British explorer, george Gray, who discovered the wall art and assumed, as the other explorers did, that these paintings and drawings could not have been done by the Aborigines and thought that shipwrecked sailors must have done it.
Laurie:
The Wangeena were described as having large, round heads, halo-like headgear, large eyes, slim nose and no mouth. Now that to me sounds a lot like the descriptions of Alien Grace. Donaldson actually came out against author Eric Von Danigan by saying his quote is it was just ignorance on Von Danigan's part, the kind of ignorance that goes back to the people who initially, 100 years ago, thought that Aboriginal people were not so sophisticated enough to do those paintings. Of course, we soon learned that they were very sophisticated and could paint all these wonderful things. So that's just one guy's crazy story that thought they were spacemen or something. So the problem with Donaldson's statement towards Von Danigan is that he calls it one guy's crazy story.
Laurie:
Now, this was Donaldson's opinion and doesn't mean his interpretations of who the Wangeena were are correct either. Now, they could very well have been spacemen, because the descriptions are eerily similar to Alien, grace and match stories from other cultures from around the world and this is easier to believe over the Wangeena being spirits, because spirits are not supposed to be wearing robes or gowns. This seems to always get overlooked, even in biblical narratives. So, yes, the Aborigines drew and depicted what they saw thousands of years ago on their cave walls, which was most likely the images of their teachers from the stars. It was even determined that the writing depicted on the headpieces of the Wangeena wasn't Chinese or Arabic, which destroys the theory of other human cultures landing there before the British. And the greatest reason as to why we know this is in the drawings themselves. If they were other humans, don't you think their Aborigines would have drawn them more human-like in appearance and not have referred to them as spirit beings? So the point is, van Danigan's opinion is just as valid as Donaldson's.
Joe:
Well, we've talked about the belief in the existence of Lemuria and Mu from other episodes and, interestingly enough, the Aborigines do make reference to the great ancestors of the past and their sophisticated knowledge. That's sort of impregnated within the mythological and religious traditions of the Aborigines. And just to give a little synopsis, there are these hypotheses that one time there were highly advanced civilizations that were around thousands and thousands of years ago and that they were wiped out by a cataclysmic flood. So there's Atlantis, which is traditionally assumed to have been located somewhere in the Atlantic, but there are other possible places where they think it could have been. Then there is Lemuria, which is traditionally thought to have been in the Indian Ocean, but there are also other possible places right. And then there is Mu, which is traditionally thought to have been in the Pacific Ocean. Again, there could be other possibilities. Nobody knows for sure exactly where these land. You know the place that the civilizations were located under countless theories as to where they're actually, you know could be. But over the last few centuries scientists and historians have speculated that the islands that are scattered throughout these oceans and there are, you know, thousands of them in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, atlantic as well that these could be sections of those lost lands, of those lost continents.
Joe:
Now, Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophy School believe that the existence of these civilizations from the past, like Atlantis, Lemuria, symbolize a sort of golden age of human advancement and enlightenment, and it influenced artists and writers who tried to illustrate the untouched beauty of Australia as somehow being what is left of Lemuria in all of its pureness and sacredness.
Joe:
And according to Brian Hofton, with New Dawn Magazine dated July 2007, novelist and essayist Rosa Campbell Prayad portrayed Australia as the last remnant of ancient Lemuria and she believed the myth of the lost continent had been based on fact and used the Theosophical notion to present an idolized primeval history of Australia as is embodied by the Aborigines. And then there's an anthology of what is known as the Lemurian Nobles. It was written in 1890 and it's an adventure romance written by George First Scott that tells of the adventures of Dick Howard, who discovers the remains of legendary Lemuria out in the Australian desert, out in the outback. The plot involves reincarnation, pygmies, a monster and an occult figure called the Yellow Queen. So it's full of a lot of mythical elements. So if there is any extraterrestrial connection to these lost continents like Lemuria, then there would certainly be one within connection with the modern continent of Australia.
Laurie:
Wow, yeah. So, I mean, Australia has a great history and its fair share of great UFO and alien encounter stories and there is quite a phenomenon of UFO interest going on over there or down there, and we both hope to visit there someday. So, a big thank you once again to all of our faithful listeners down there in Australia and New Zealand for your continuous support. And for next episode, be sure to tune in, because we're going to be discussing the Baltic Sea Anomaly. So that should be an interesting episode and we hope you listen in for that one.
Joe:
Yeah, this is a feature that was discovered only about 10 years ago and from sonar imagery it's about 200 feet deep in the Baltic Sea, I believe off the coast of Finland.
Joe:
It's most as you say. Many scientists believe it is a natural feature, a rock feature on the ocean bed, but it looks very manmade. In fact, if you look at images from the sonar that were taken from the ship scans, it really looks like the Millennium Falcon at the bottom of the ocean. So, leaving some to speculate that this might be a man-made feature, or it might even be the remains of an alien spacecraft that's at the bottom of the ocean in the Baltic Sea, and it's fairly large too, so it's larger than the ships that we're familiar with. So, they're not really sure what it is kind of a for grabs there in terms of what the opinion is. So, yes, thank you all for listening and yes, that will do it for today. We really enjoyed today's show and we hope you did as well, lori, and I love the research that goes into each and every episode we do for Alien Talk Podcast, and please remember to visit our website, www. alientalkpodcast. com.
Laurie:
That's right. And of course, be sure to get a copy of Battle Planet AD, Relic of the Gods, our newly published novel that's now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Com.
Joe:
Definitely, and we think all of you will really like the novel. So take care everyone and stay curious.