In plain sight, p.1
In Plain Sight, page 1





DEDICATION
For all the truth-tellers out there. Thank you especially to all
the anonymous whistleblowers with the courage to shine a
light into dark places. And, once again, all my thanks and
love to my wife Kerrie and my daughters Lucy & Millie.
Thank you for making life a joyful journey.
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
1 Let’s Hope They’re Friendly
2 Roswell: Implausible Denials
3 The Launch of Project Blue Book
4 A Worldwide Phenomenon
5 Hard Evidence
6 Cracking the Cover-up
7 Confusion or Cover-up?
8 The Black Triangles
9 The Disclosure Project
10 Skinwalker Ranch
11 Tic Tacs from Space
12 The Hunt for ‘The Big Secret’
13 Would the President Know?
14 We Can Handle the Truth
15 Sharing the Guilty Secret
16 To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences
17 Verified Unidentified
18 Art’s Parts
19 The New Science of Metamaterials
20 The Astronaut and ‘the Spaceman’
21 Not Made by Human Hands
22 Gordon Novel: Fact or Fiction
23 Dr Salvatore Pais’s Puzzling Patents
24 Lock Your Doors!
25 The Biggest Story Ever . . .
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Endnotes
Acronyms
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
About 2.30 on a pitch-black morning on Australia’s remote North West Cape, Annie Farinaccio walked out of a late-night party at the United States Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt. It was late 1991, shortly before the US was due to hand over the site to Australia. The handover was happening amid mounting concern about the base’s covert role as one of the cornerstones of America’s submarine-launched nuclear missile defence. In the event of nuclear war, launch orders from the US would be sent out by the station’s powerful transmitters to submarines across the adjacent Indian Ocean. Exmouth locals had no idea their sleepy town would likely be obliterated in a nuclear exchange; they just valued what the ‘Yanks’ brought to the local economy in this isolated community and were sad to be seeing them go.
The party at the base that night was to farewell some American friends who were returning home due to the handover. But Annie had stayed too late and now, she realised, she had no way of getting home – the few local taxis in this remote part of Australia had stopped for the night. So when two Australian Federal Protective Service police officers, who she knew as Kevin and Alan, kindly offered to give her a ride back into Exmouth, five kilometres south, she gratefully accepted.
Annie squeezed in between the two men on the bench seat of their four-wheel Toyota drive security vehicle and the three set off for town.
A few minutes into the journey along the barren cape’s empty coast road, Kevin looked up. ‘It’s back. Grab the camera,’ Annie recalled him saying. Then Alan began to fire off photographs through the windscreen at something overhead that Annie could not yet see.
‘Eventually, Kevin pulled my head forward. “Look up!” he said. Then I saw it. A long diamond-shaped craft hovering overhead with the rear edge chopped off, rows of lights running towards the craft’s tip. It was a dark grey colour but not as dark as the night sky. It was 100 feet above us at most. “What the fuck is that?”’ Annie asked.
The policemen told her they had no idea, but that the same object had followed them the previous night. The next minute, the craft shot straight up from the right-hand side of the moving vehicle, before dropping down almost instantaneously on the left-hand-side of the car.
Annie screamed as they hurtled down the road, with the ‘craft’ in apparent hot pursuit. It followed them along the road for a kilometre. Then it shot up into the sky and appeared to land in the scrub a few hundred metres off the road, a light now shining from underneath.
Kevin wanted to stop and take pictures of it on the ground, but, Annie says, ‘I was crying. “This is crazy. Take me home.”’
The two police officers agreed and drove as fast as they could to the edge of Exmouth, where they dropped Annie off before rushing back to get their pictures.
‘I ran to my home on the other side of town, and I ran into the house and locked the doors. I was so freaked.’
Today, Annie is in no doubt that what was hovering above them that night was a craft moving at incomprehensible speed. She does not care if people think her account sounds crazy. ‘It moved so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it,’ she says. ‘We were all freaking out.’
Two days later, two American military policemen walked into Annie’s workplace in town and asked her to come with them. Legally, the US had no jurisdiction, but she went with them anyway. ‘I didn’t at that stage relate it to what we saw,’ she says. ‘I thought I was in trouble for being on the base drinking at night.’
The taciturn policemen drove Annie straight into what she knew was the top-secret section of the US base. ‘I’m mouthing off at this stage, saying, “I must have done something really bad,”’ she laughs.
Once inside, they led Annie into a room. Sitting in front of a group of Americans in uniform were the two police officers, Alan and Kevin. Annie knew most of the Americans on base but here she recognised only one – the American commander. The others had clearly flown in from somewhere else. There were also three or four men in civilian suits.
‘I felt pissed off at this stage. One guy did the talking. He asked me, “What did you see?” I said, “I saw a UFO.” They got me to draw it and asked me more questions about it. “You do realise that what you saw was a weather balloon?” I laughed at that,’ Annie said. As a child, Annie had lived on a station outside Exmouth and her father frequently launched weather balloons. ‘Weather balloons don’t look like what I saw,’ she recalled telling the man. ‘Then one of the APS policemen sitting next to me – they both had their heads down – said: “Please shut up . . . Shut up before you get us all killed.”’
The interrogation went on for a few hours. It was clear that the two Australian policemen had been there a lot longer – they appeared scared and dejected from the hours of questioning. Annie admits that she arced up at the Americans for trying to bully her into saying what they wanted her to say.
Annie is an intelligent university graduate who previously ran her own businesses. At the time of the sighting, she was working at the nearby Roebourne Regional Prison, counselling prisoners to help them find work. Fair to say, she was not easily rattled. ‘I said to them, “I don’t give a shit what you say. It wasn’t a weather balloon. It was a UFO. I’m not saying what you want me to say. I know I saw a UFO.”’
The Americans clearly had no idea what to do with an uncooperative Australian local and, eventually, they took her home. The first thing Annie did was ring her cousin, who had long been inquisitive about what was really going on at the base. He drove to Exmouth and they both visited Alan at his home.
Alan admitted the photographs of ‘the craft’ were printed at a printing shop inside the base and the two officers had shown them to colleagues. ‘Next thing, they were in custody. They searched the photo-machine, and they took his camera, the pics and the negatives,’ Annie says. Alan told her the photographs clearly showed an intelligently guided craft, not physically landed but hovering just above the ground. But, he said, every image he took was confiscated, along with his camera.
As Annie tells it, he was seriously rattled by the experience and told her and her cousin never to come back.
Annie’s elderly mother in Exmouth also confirmed part of the story. She clearly remembers the two military policemen first came to the family home, so she directed them to Annie’s workplace, where her colleagues watched her being escorted away.
* * *
Annie knows her story sounds implausible, but she’s adamant it’s true. And she’s not alone. Witnesses to strange objects in our skies have told stories like this for decades. And yet, they are rarely investigated or taken seriously by the press. The default position for mainstream media has long been to dismiss such accounts, even to ridicule them. After all, they sound wacky and, without official corroboration, such tales are most often spiked before the public gets to hear about them.
However, overwhelming evidence shows that many governments, including Australia’s, take such unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings very seriously indeed. Across the world, declassified government reports and well-corroborated witness sightings show that military and intelligence services are well aware of a persistent pattern of strange unidentified objects seen at and around sensitive military facilities such as Australia’s North West Cape naval communication station. Declassified files held in the Australian government’s National Archives reveal that anomalous sightings of unexplained objects at North West Cape have been officially reported to the Australian Air Force for decades by soldiers, tourists, a senior American officer at the base, and a local fireman. Annette’s disturbing sighting report is not an isolated incident at all. At the very least, it warrants further investigation.
But, as I have discovered, there is a huge disconnect between the public ridicule automatically directed at claims of unidentified aerial phenomena and the long-concealed
More recent reports of UAP sightings are increasingly being verified on radar and other sensor systems, as well as photographed or videoed, and these events are often corroborated by multiple witnesses. The sightings also feature something that even the US military now admits it cannot prosaically explain. In fact, US government and military insiders I have interviewed for this book admit they have knowledge of technology operating in our skies, oceans and orbit that far exceeds known human science. It often appears to be intelligently controlled, presenting to those who recorded it on video and tracked it on radar as a ‘craft’ of some kind.
Like most journalists, I’m generally reluctant to believe in coverups or conspiracies. But I believe that governments are not telling the public the full story about UAPs. What are these ‘craft’? Is the extra-terrestrial hypothesis, albeit confronting, even able to explain this high strangeness? And why are they hiding in plain sight?
Chapter 1
Let’s Hope They’re Friendly
Recorded sightings of strange objects in Antipodean skies can be found right back to the 19th-century period of early European settlement. For thousands of years before that, Indigenous Australian Aboriginal rock art and dreamtime stories described the eerie alien faces of the Wandjina cloud and rain spirits, and also what are known today as the Min Min lights. European settlers later reported seeing fuzzy hovering white, sometimes colourful, orbs of light tracking them as they moved through outback country. It is part of folklore that the luminescent orbs and discs, first reported by Europeans near the settlement of Min Min near Boulia in Queensland, would follow people, often disappearing when approached and then reappearing in a different spot. I once reported a story in the Gulf of Carpentaria in Far North Queensland, interviewing a venerable Aboriginal elder known as Blue Bob, who knew the landscape like the back of his hand. Had he seen the Min Min lights, I asked? He chuckled and referred me to images of saucer- and orb-shaped objects that appear in Aboriginal art across the country. ‘We see them all the time. They’ve always been in our stories,’ he told me matter-of-factly. He thought it very funny that scientists recently claimed to have solved the mystery of these lights; it had recently been declared Min Mins were merely a trick of the light caused by distant bright truck headlights. ‘Didn’t see too many trucks around these parts a few thousand years ago,’ he roared with laughter.
Early Australian newspapers carry intriguing accounts of odd lights and even craft or metallic airships in the sky. What is possibly the earliest official ‘mystery aircraft’ flap recorded in government files came in 1930 when a Royal Australian Air Force Squadron Leader George Jones was sent to Warrnambool in Victoria to investigate reports of mystery aircraft seen flying inland over the coast. ‘They were not aircraft belonging to us and, as far as I could find out, they were not aircraft belonging to any other powers,’ Jones later acknowledged.1 Jones rose to lofty heights, becoming the Royal Australian Air Force’s Chief of Air Staff during the Second World War, and was later Air Marshall Sir George Jones. The Air Marshall also openly acknowledged that he witnessed a ‘UFO’ during his career – ‘a brilliant white light at the bottom of a shadowy shape like a transparent balloon’ – and this convinced him of the need for serious research into the phenomenon. He even supported civilian research groups such as VUFORS – the Victorian UFO Research Society.
The 1930s was an extraordinary era of aviation exploration. One of the most fascinating sightings was by renowned British aviator Francis Chichester over the Tasman Ocean in 1931 as he attempted the first solo flight between New Zealand and Australia. He said that, after a series of ‘bright flashes’, he saw ‘a dull grey-white airship coming towards me. It seemed impossible . . . Except for a cloud or two there was nothing else in the sky.’ Next thing he knew, it had disappeared, then it reappeared with a dull gleam of light on its nose and back. His sighting remains unexplained. Sir Francis Chichester’s epic biography The Lonely Sea and the Sky acknowledged that what he saw ‘seems to have been very much like what people have since claimed to be flying saucers’.2
Decades later, when I was a teenager living in New Zealand, shortly before Christmas 1978, I was initially intrigued then disappointed by a dramatic sighting in my home country. A cargo aircraft was flying along the north-east coast of New Zealand’s South Island near the Kaikoura mountain ranges, when multiple people onboard made dramatic claims of witnessing glowing UAP lights following the cargo plane. Not only were the lights caught on radar and seen by multiple people onboard, they were also filmed on a later return flight by cameraman David Crockett and reported by Australian TV reporter Quentin Fogarty.
As this episode unfolded during the Christmas holiday silly season when the news business normally slows down, sensational claims of a filmed ‘mass UFO sighting’ took off in the international press after Quentin Fogarty’s dramatic in-flight account was broadcast around the world. ‘We’ve just heard from Wellington radar that we’ve got an object about a mile behind us and it’s following us,’ he reported in-flight on the darkened plane. ‘Let’s hope they’re friendly. It’s really getting a bit frightening up here. There’s a whole formation of unidentified flying objects behind us.’
Through the viewfinder, following the lights shooting around the cargo plane, the cameraman described seeing a classic ‘flying saucer’ shaped object, with a brightly lit bottom and a transparent sphere on top. But when we all finally got to see the TV images, while they showed distant unexplained lights, the vision was underwhelming. It did not show an apparent craft or object of any kind behind the darting lights – certainly not a ‘flying saucer’. After some initial excitement, like most people, I surmised the whole story was a flap about nothing much, that there would be some prosaic explanation.
One reason for my scepticism was because two months earlier, in October 1978, across the Tasman Ocean in Australia, a 20-year-old Melbourne-based pilot Frederick Valentich had disappeared while piloting a tiny Cessna aircraft over Bass Strait on a flight to King Island. Shortly before he and his aircraft disappeared, Valentich was recorded telling Melbourne air traffic control that he was being followed by a huge illuminated shiny metal craft hovering above him. Some of his dramatic last words, as his engine began rough idling, were: ‘It’s hovering and it’s not an aircraft.’ Then the transmission was interrupted by strange pulsing sounds and his radio cut out. The Valentich story was still lurid tabloid news fodder and, as news of the NZ Kaikoura sighting hit the Christmas holiday newspaper and TV news weeks later, Valentich’s disappearance was still inflaming ‘UFO fever’. There was frantic speculation in the press that the New Zealand Kaikoura or Australian Valentich cases were proof of aliens. I cynically took the view that the Kaikoura sighting was all a dramatic overreaction to the still unsolved Valentich mystery across in Australia.
Under political pressure to allay public concern, and with the intense scrutiny of the world’s media, the Royal New Zealand Air Force delivered a report into the incident one month after the Kaikoura sighting and announced it had solved the puzzle, asserting that everyone on board the plane was simply confused by ‘natural but unusual atmospheric phenomena’.3 The public was assured that air force investigators had interviewed ‘all the witnesses’ involved in the sightings on the nights of 20 and 30 December 1978 and that atmospheric conditions during the sightings events caused the freak effects on radar and in visible light. The report suggested that the witnesses were confused by squid boats using powerful lights on the ocean below, or perhaps by an especially bright planet Venus. One issue with the Venus explanation was that the first sighting, at 2.30 am, was well before Venus should have been visible at that altitude, and the planet was at a very different angle in the sky to where the lights appeared. So, the report to the NZ Minister of Science suggested that what everyone saw was the ‘planet substantially refracted by the atmosphere’.4
The air force also quaintly reassured the good folk of New Zealand that the Ministry ‘totally discounts the possibility of visits to New Zealand . . . of alien aircraft or other flying machines . . . Defence does not share the view of those who believe we are visited from outer space’. It was definitely case closed, as far as the Royal New Zealand Air Force was concerned, and, like the majority of the public, I accepted that explanation and got on with life. However, the fact is that despite an official government investigation, the Kaikoura sighting remains one of the world’s most well-recorded unexplained UAP sightings.