Herald Sun, Edition 1 UFO Mystery deepens 15-10-2000
Written by AYR ADMIN   
Friday, 07 April 2006
Sunday Herald Sun, Edition 1 - FIRST
SUN 15 OCT 2000, Page 016

UFO mystery deepens
By PAUL TAYLOR   

The Bass Strait disappearance of pilot Frederick Valentich was not
the first of its kind, PAUL TAYLOR reports

DISTURBING parallels have been drawn between the disappearance of
Frederick Valentich's plane in 1978 and two others in the 1930s.
All three vanished in October, all while flying in ideal conditions
over Bass Strait.
The last radio calls from Mr Valentich, 20, and eerie photographs
taken on the evening of his disappearance on October 21, 1978, have
the air of an X-Files episode.
A four-engine plane with 12 people aboard went missing in October
1934 and another with five on board disappeared in October 1935.
The most notorious aviation disappearance in Australia, that of
Valentich and his Cessna 182, has defied all investigations.
Dr Richard Haines, a former NASA research scientist, dismissed
suggestions that Mr Valentich had arranged his death or become
disoriented while the plane was upside down.
Dr Haines said he believed Valentich did not say the unidentified
craft was ``stationary'', as the transcript of Mr Valentich's
conversation with the Melbourne control tower states, but instead
that it was ``chasing me''.
Mr Valentich radioed Tullamarine airport that there was a
``thing . . . just orbiting on top of me. It's got a green light and
sort of metallic like, it's all shiny on the outside''.
Mr Valentich's last words were: ``. . . that strange aircraft is
hovering on top of me again . . . it is hovering and it is not an
aircraft''.
In a book released tomorrow, Melbourne writer John Pinkney reveals
how he stumbled across the two remarkable precedents, and how
descriptions of those cases echo reports of the Valentich case. Both
happened long before the terms UFO (unidentified flying object) and
``flying saucer'' had become common.
On October 19, 1934, 12 people were aboard the Miss Hobart, one of
the most powerful planes then flying in Australia, when it
disappeared.
Witnesses told of the drone of a plane's engines suddenly stopping
and of strange lights and a peculiar cloud low over the sea.
The following October, the Loina, an aircraft carrying two pilots and
three passengers, plummeted into the sea almost within gliding
distance of the Flinders Island airfield.
In his book A Paranormal File, Pinkney says he was alerted to the
earlier cases by a woman after a lecture in Melbourne.
He had been lecturing on the subject of UFOs, and the Valentich
mystery in particular, when an old woman came up to him as he was
leaving.
``She asked: `Do you know about the passenger planes that vanished
over Bass Strait?','' he said.
``I didn't, and she said: `Go and look it up in The Herald library --
October 1934 and October 1935'.
``I went to The Herald the next day and saw what she meant. There, on
the front pages of The Herald, the Sun News-Pictorial and The Age
were headlines of events that pre-echoed the disappearance of
Valentich four decades later.''
The key to advance the claims of UFO involvement in the disappearance
of Mr Valentich and his Cessna was a series of six photographs taken
by camera enthusiast Roy Manifold.
Pinkney writes: ``Roy had set up an Olympus tripod camera and taken
six photographs of the sunset over Bass Strait.
``The first three frames show a perfect spring sunset. On the fourth
picture, a mountain of water erupts from behind a rock in the calm
sea.
``In the fifth shot the ocean is flat calm again. And in the sixth
photograph, a strange object can be seen streaking upward from the
ocean and into the sky, in a visible blur of speed.''
Soon after the disappearance, Pinkney took negatives to the chief
photographer at The Australian newspaper, Mike Arthur.
After ascertaining there was no fault in the negatives, no flaw in
the emulsion and no hitch in the processing, Arthur said the object
was real and had been in the sky over Bass Strait at sunset.
The caption that accompanied the picture on page one of The
Australian the next morning pondered whether this might have been the
UFO that took Mr Valentich.
Pinkney then writes: ``The RAAF's response was swift. Without
troubling himself to study the original photographs, a spokesman
announced that the UFO we had reproduced was nothing more than a
cumulus cloud in its dying stages.''
It did not take any time to knock over that finding.
``Roy Manifold had taken his photographs at roughly 20-second
intervals (an estimate borne out by the sun's position in the six
frames),'' Pinkney writes.
``The `cloud' only appears in the sixth picture, nine degrees into
frame. If, as appears, it is about 1.5km from the camera, this
remarkable cloud must therefore have been travelling at 193kmh.''
The Manifold photographs were then subjected to assessment by
physicists and aerospace engineers at the United States organisation
Ground Saucer Watch.
The critique, signed by director William Spaulding and photographic
consultant Fred Adrian, found the ``Bass Strait object was extremely
bright when compared with other features in the photographs. Judging
from the intensely reflective area at its `top', it was possibly
metallic in construction''.
The scientists found the object was about 1.6km from the camera and
was about six metres in diameter. The scientists concluded the image
was a bona fide unidentified flying object of moderate dimensions,
apparently surrounded by a cloud-like exhaust or vapor residue.
On October 19, 1934, the new mail plane Miss Hobart, which was
carrying 10 passengers from Launceston to Melbourne, disappeared over
Bass Strait. The aircraft -- a DH86 with four Gipsy VI engines -- was
one of the most powerful in Australia. The owners, Holyman's Airways,
said that even had two of its engines failed, it could have
maintained height.
Miss Hobart transmitted her final message at 10.20am, when she was
13km from Wilsons Promontory.
Co-pilot Gilbert Jenkins radioed: ``Everything OK. Captain Holyman
requests that Captain Haig of the Vacuum Oil Company meet him at
Laverton at 11.30am.''
On October 2, 1935, a second airliner, the Loina, went missing over
Bass Strait.
With three passengers and two crew aboard, the plane had left
Melbourne's Essendon airport for Launceston at 8.15am. At 9.51am the
captain, A.N. Evans, radioed that his height was 1000 feet and that
he was approaching Flinders Island.
The Herald summed up the situation in that afternoon's headline: ``
`About to land' she radioed -- then silence.''
Later in the day, searchers found wreckage that mystified them. They
retrieved three twisted chairs and a petrol tank so astonishingly
telescoped it suggested the plane had nose-dived at a colossal rate.
Particularly puzzling was a charred patch, about 10cm in diameter,
found on a fragment of flooring.
Shreds of carpet stuck to the fragment and grooved marks suggested
someone had tried to stamp out an intensely localised fire.
The rest of the aircraft and its human cargo were nowhere to be found.
`A Paranormal File', by John Pink ney (Five Mile Press, RRP $24.95).


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