Australian UFO History: February, 1947: 'White Egg-Shaped Objects Moving At Incredible Speed'

'WHITE EGG FLYING OBJECTS' REPORTED IN AUSTRALIA IN EARLY 1947

What a surprise. There is no mention of UFOs, spacecraft, aliens or flying saucers in this Australian newspaper story from February, 1947 about mysterious 'egg-shaped' objects spotted in the skies.. The term "Flying Saucers" hadn't been invented by newspapers yet. 

People saw something strange in the sky at night, in Port Augusta, Australia, shortly after the end of World War II, they reported it, newspapers wrote it up. There was no speculation that "aliens" were involved, or that the objects were from another planet, because people had not yet been trained by news media to think of unusual objects in the sky that way.

The below story is from early February, 1947. The Kenneth Arnold sightings that saw American newspapers popularise the term 'Flying Saucers' didn't happen until June 1947.

Text: 

"PORT AUGUSTA, Feb. 6, 1947.

While working in the yard at the Commonwealth Railways work-
shops yesterday morning Mr. Ron Ellis and two workmates claim to
have seen five strange objects in formation pass across the sky from
north to south.

The objects were white or light pink, and were shaped like an egg.

Mr. Ellis said that he could not give an accurate estimate of the
size of the objects, but they were casting shadows, and judging by
his experience with aircraft in the RAAF during the war he considered they were about the size of a locomotive.

Although the objects kept on a direct course at a height of about
6,000 feet they appeared to be quivering, he said. Owing to their great
speed they were out of sight within a few seconds.

Any question of the phenomenon being an optical illusion was dis-
pelled by the fact that a few minutes later both Mr. Ellis and his companion gave an identical description of what they had seen.

Their description was verified by another member of the workshops
staff who said that he had also seen the objects."

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Fascinating, isn't it? How such stories were once reported?

Supposedly reliable witnesses with flying experience, who saw something they didn't recognise in the sky. They rejected suggestions they had seen an optical illusion, but they were not accused of being "crazy" and nobody suggests they might be from another world. They didn't know what it was, and neither did the newspaper. 

That was it. 

Big difference to just a few years later, when anything that could be whipped up into 'Are Aliens Watching Us?!' and 'Flying Saucers Attack!' headlines became the Fear standard.

The objects that couldn't be explained should not induce wonder or mystery, but Fear that Earth is being threatened.

Note: I predict a 'UFO Researcher' will take my research and the news clipping I found and reproduce it on a popular YouTube or podcast episode without credit by late October, 2024.

Department Of Defence Only Public Statement On UFOs, 1977 : 10% Of Australian Sightings Can't Be Explained

The 1977 documentary UFOs Are Here screened on Channel 9, in prime time from memory, and had a monumental impact amongst Australian kids who'd been fed a steady diet of UFOmania by popular culture for most of their childhoods. The doco wasn't only discussed amongst kids in the playground the next day, teachers were bombarded with questions from students about it, t00.

As a doco, looking back at it now, UFOs Are Here! is a strange, scattershot 'They're Lying To Us! treatise, with some curious claims that the American Pine Gap base near Alice Springs isn't just a surveillance station but an advanced flight technology workshop, and the existence of a scientific 'Cosmic Conspiracy'.

However, the doco also covered some interesting Australian history, and has a bunch of great interviews with computer geeks, eccentrics, director Steven Spielberg, flogging the film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and everyday people who saw something strange in the sky and can't find explanations for what they witnessed.



A rare public statement on UFOs by the Australian Department of Defence :



The most likely explanation for nearly all "officially unexplained" UFO sightings, at least in Australia, was and still is test flights by classified military aircraft, which makes the official statement, above, by the DoD a wry invitation for witnesses to keep speculating about extraterrestrial, instead of local war industry, origins for the strange things they'd seen in the skies.

A UFO Encounter Of The Third Kind At Milne Bay

Rowan Callick digs up extraordinary letters from an Australian Anglican missionary, William Gill, detailing a spectacular UFO sighting at Milne Bay, in Papua New Guinea, back in 1959 (excerpts) :

"Last night we at Boianai experienced about four hours of UFO activity, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are handled by beings of some kind. At times it was absolutely breathtaking.

"We watched figures appear on top - four of them - no doubt that they are human.

"Two smaller UFOs were seen at the same time, stationary. One above the hills west, another overhead.

"On the large one, two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the centre of the deck . . . were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or setting up something (not visible).

"One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same."

"As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFO apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth."

"...there was nothing eerie or other-worldly about any of this. It was all so ordinary, as ordinary as a Ford car.

"It looked a perfectly normal sort of object, an Earth-made object. I realised, of course, that some people might think of this as a flying saucer, but I took it to be some kind of hovercraft the Americans or even the Australians had built. The figures inside looked perfectly human."

There were almost 40 other witnesses, and the encounter lasted for hours.

Read The Full Story Here

The Australian and/or American military were obviously test-flying some very interesting new aircraft in PNG during the Cold War, piloted by crews bored enough by their tasks to want to do something to excite the locals, and willing to flash their lights in return to the blinking torch light coming from William Gill and his friends below.


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A short vid of claimed UFO footage shot on the weekend in Australia, featured on the front page of YouTube :

Australia's Bermuda Triangle? Or Is It Australia's Area 51?


A Google Earth image of the Exmouth military base discussed in the below story.


By Darryl Mason

I've been mulling over ideas for a long-short fiction story about UFOs in Australia, particularly about a UFO visit to a dying country town. Googling UFOs and Australia turns up some interesting stuff, some of it mundane, some of it apparently unexplainable, and some of it downright loco.

Whatever they are, there sure are a shitload of reports about UFOs zipping, zapping, whipping and zooming across Australian skies.

Naturally, the government knows all about it.

According to this site the UnOpposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is "keeping mysteriously quiet on the topic" of UFOs. I think that means he was momentarily stunned into silence when quizzed by a stranger in the street about The Great Australian UFO (You Know Something! Tell Me!) Cover Up :

Michael Cohen, of All News Web, happened to chance upon Mr Turnbull and ask him a few questions regarding UFO related topics, probably the first time he was asked anything on the topic by any media outlet.

Some of his answers were startling.

On whether he would disclose what the Government knew about UFO and Alien visitation and contact with humans he was rather evasive, claiming he wasn't sure they knew anything and if they did they weren't telling him or anyone he knows.

Then he made the surprise revelation: "That information would be above top secret, highest classification of secrecy". This was a truly remarkable comment. He also mentioned that 'Australia hasn't had its Roswell yet' to which our reporter replied 'That's not exactly true.'

When asked if he believed earth is being visited by Aliens and whether he believed in UFO's he simply reversed the question and asked our reporter if he did. Yet the impression gained was that he knew more than he was prepared to give away.

Typical Turnbull. Full of secrets. Fun secrets. I want to see Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report hammering Turnbull about his top secret UFO knowledge and their secret bases in Australia.

And maybe Turnbull can be quizzed more thoroughly on what he knows about the recent mid-air incidents with Qantas jets and how they are not what they appear to be. If you really fire up the imagination, you can clearly see that UFOs had to involved :

Both incidents occurred in almost the exact same spot over the mysterious town of Exmouth in Western Australia. The town happens to contain two highly restricted military bases as a well as the Learmonth Solar Observatory which is also used for planetary defense including ionosphere monitoring and meteor detection and tracking: A great cover for actual UFO related activity.

The Naval Communications Station Harold E Holt is notoriously secretive regarding its activities and reportedly denied any connection to the events. Even Less is known about the RAAF base Learmonth or the very secretive Learmonth Solar Observatory: tellingly managed by the US Air Force. Almost nothing is known of the NASA established Learmonth Magnetic Observatory, now also under US Air Force control.

The question must be asked: Is Exmouth Australia’s Area-51 and are UFO’s either being monitored from here or even using a landing base in the region as a stepping stone for exploring earth?

Yeah, it is a question that must be asked. Someone has to go after Turnbull again, he sounds punchy when people start demanding UFO discolsure from him. He must be made to detail the truth about Australia's Secret UFO Earth Exploration Terminal & Lounge Bar at Exmouth, with all those alien spacecraft landing strips cleverly disguised as dirt access roads for radar tower engineers.

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At Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, there used to be this amazing little museum (under the revolving restuarant, near the Three Sister lookout at Echo Point) that featured wall displays of newspaper reports, illustrations and sometimes even photos of supposed local sightings of UFOs, big cats and Yowies.

To a six year old, learning that wild, ravenous panthers and tall, hairy monster men roamed the mountains was fairly mundane stuff. I already knew from watching Leonard Nimoy hosting Great Mysteries Of The World on Saturday afternoons that monsters stalking urban-fringing forests was no big deal, in the United States, England or Australia.

But that little Echo Point museum also went into great detail about (naturally) top secret UFO bases operating freely in the isolation of the Blue Mountains. They were hidden inside some of the mountains, if I remember rightly, and huge slabs of cliff face would open so massive alien aircraft could zoom into the clouds, all but undetected by earth-based lifeforms.

Even at six years old, the bullshit alarm beeped a little as I wandered that pokey little museum, but what fantastic imaginative fuel it was to feast on before going to the lookout to search the trees and cliffs for just the faintest sign of those UFO base entrances, and exits, that I truly hoped were actually there.

That little museum, and its fantastical local tales of alien spacecraft and forest monsters, long gone now, always made those family trips to the mountains just that little bit more exciting.

I lived in the Blue Mountains twenty years after those family visits, and I saw a lot of weird, unexplainable shit late at night, up there, but most of it involved locals stumbling home from the Gearins Hotel. And I never accidentally came across any entrances to secret UFO bases either, on any of the many long walks through the bush. Not that I was really looking...

Well, maybe....sometimes.