Many years ago my brother and I witnessed a UFO chase that resulted in one of the craft crashing into a tree which still bears its visible scars today, some 30 plus years later.
This is not a sci-fi story. This is a true account to the best of my ability that describes actual events which occurred during Feb 1980. I have told this story before, to close friends and some UFO groups. These people are likely to be the only ones who are prepared to listen. I am not a pilot or naval officer, nor do I hold any position of authority, I am an ordinary, moderately “successful” Joe, albeit, slightly off centre. To some extent this lack of social status also allows me a certain amount of freedom.
I believe that most witnesses of such events experience a negative response. This response I am very familiar with. It includes the usual expression of disbelief and a barrage of plausible explanations. One often gets caught up in trying to convince the listener that his judgement and interpretation were accurate. It is fortunate that I’m not overly concerned about being labelled as a kook, and even recognise that I may have travelled quite some distance down this unusual path without looking back to see where it all began.
I have since read many UFO cases and recognise that it is the inclusion of detail which is necessary to create credibility. The social status of a witness is even more influential. I am unable to vary this factor, but can offer a detailed description. It is the detail that offers readers an opportunity to experience the event as seen from the eyes of the witness, and allows the reader to respond and judge for them-selves as to whether they would have reached the same conclusion. After all, these events are not like a movie, where the camera seamlessly follows the action through scenes to paint a clear and comprehensible story.
The Stirling event began shortly after my twin brother and I went to bed on an ordinary Thursday night during Feb 1980. We were 10 years old, and it was the start of a new school year. He called out to me from his room. “Phil….come and check this out.” We lived in Aldgate on Coromandel Rd, our house was positioned high on the side of a valley that looked towards the Stirling Township. The house was reasonably modern, and the land recently subdivided into allotments of around 6000 sq. meters. Few houses were built and the land was sparsely treed, not like it is today, some 38 years later. We had a perfect view of the valley. Toward Stirling, and around 1km away, a line of trees followed a gentle ridge forming the end of the valley. The slight rise blocked us from the lights of the township centre which lay 1km further on past this ridge.
I jumped out of bed and ran into my brother’s room to see what had caught his attention. From the window we saw a bright yellow object slightly larger than the apparent size of Venus, bobbing around just above the tree line at the end of the valley. We guessed it must have been in the vicinity of the Stirling wood yard and Gould Rd, which lay just past the ridge. It hovered 50m to 100m above ground level. Although we didn’t discuss distances or other metrics at the time, we considered all of this detail later. The object appeared to have some purpose. It wobbled slightly as it hovered and then moved with haste back and forth, and then resumed its hover. It was a mild summer night and very clear, the air was still and there was no noise. In the past we had watched over our valley many times and had seen helicopters, and listened to cars as they wound their way through the Aldgate S’s up Mount Barker rd. towards Stirling. The sound of the car engines travelled down the valley, and we could hear the noise clearly until they past the ridge and became more muffled. (Later when selling the house a prospective buyer also commented on this effect) On this night, there was no noise, no car engines, just silence. Not that this was unusual, there were fewer people in the hills back then. But there was no engine noise from this bobbing light at the end of our valley.
We watched for several minutes with interest, and recognised that this object was certainly not behaving like conventional aircraft. Shortly a second object appeared. It emitted a red light. It entered our view from above and approached the yellow object. It was similar in size and also had a slightly larger apparent brightness of Venus. The red object zoomed up to the yellow object, stopped and reversed, and then did it again as if to prompt a reaction. And it got one! The Yellow object took off with the red object in close pursuit. They zoomed around, zigzagging across the sky with extreme speed and acceleration, like a couple of blow fly’s on steroids. They crossed the valley-head back and forth many times in a hectic paired chase. When older I attempted to estimate some of the velocities based on the time it took to move a measurable distance between landmarks, and the possible accelerations involved. The results were extraordinary, so it is better that I describe what I saw and let the reader do the calculations. From a stationary position the object accelerated, travelled half a kilometre and then instantly reversed with-in around half a second (give or take). Throughout the chase, the yellow one seemed to get stuck mid-flight and shake back and forth as if caught by some invisible force. Then it freed its-self and the chase continued. There seemed to be no apparent inertia. The craft changed direction and reversed without changing speed, like a ping pong ball does when hit with a bat. The motion almost had a cartoon like quality to it. This chase went on for several minutes. Eventually the yellow one sped off at extraordinary speed to our right, and disappeared behind the hill. Had I blinked, I would have missed it. The red one had also gone. Neither myself, nor my brother were certain whether the red one had followed or simply left. We waited for quite some time after the sighting to see if the objects would re-appear, but they did not. I estimate that the total sighting lasted for around 15 minutes or within that proximity.
At some point during the sighting, we ran into our parent’s room to persuade them out of bed, but were told to go back to sleep, so we resumed viewing the spectacle. A friend suggested that we must have been gob smacked by this sighting. The reality is that at 10 years old, one is open to experience without overwhelming emotional involvement. We were certainly impressed, and recognised that these objects were not within the human inventory, but the feeling was more like “oh, so this is what a UFO must look like”. The lack lustre response from our parents compounded the “ordinariness” of the event.
The next day was a “school day”, after that it was the weekend and we were planning to visit our grandma then. I headed back to my room and went back to bed. I believe that we must have talked about the event at school on the following day, but the subject couldn’t have gained significant attention as I can’t recall a great deal of conversation about it. Only that it seemed interesting.
On Saturday we arrived at “Gran’s” house. The first thing she did was present us with a cutting from the local paper, the “Advertiser” I think. It reported a UFO crash in Stirling on the same night and time that my brother and I had witnessed the chase. There was a compellingly clear connection. At this point our parents became interested and our credibility had been fully restored with an apology and some level of regret for not joining the witness box when requested.
The story was reported by Daryl Browne, 7th or 8th of Feb 1980. He described hearing a load crash, and had terrified pet dogs. He went outside to see what had happened. When he went around to the back of the house where the noise had come from, he could hear a tree creaking and groaning. Upon pointing his torch into its upper branches he saw a yellow craft measuring around 8 meters in length. He described it as a speedboat shape. It was wedged between the broken branches, and causing the tree to groan under its weight. A branch measuring around 30cm in diameter had been knocked from the tree. Daryl called the authorities, but the craft managed to take flight before they arrived, leaving no wreckage, only damage to the tree as evidence. You can Google his version of events for more detail. One website containing his story is called Project 1947 by Loren E. Gross – page 20
Although I recognised this as an incredible event, it seemed unrelated to ordinary life and I mentally filed it away in to the “camp fire and ghost story” section of my mind. My brother did the same and we both let the event rest in peace for the following 30 years.
Fast forward to the introduction of the internet with a download speed that allows one to do more than pay bills, the year is 2009, South Australia. I decided to dig up that old story and look for Daryl, the house he had lived in, and maybe even the tree if I were lucky. I would like to add that this quest began very slowly but picked up speed as I began to understand the significance of this phenomenon. I Googled a map of Stirling, searched my memory for where I had believed the events had taken place and looked for a likely trajectory that would lead me to the crash site. Daryl Browne failed to come up in any search so I had to rely on my own investigation. The clues which I had at my disposal, thanks to various news articles were: Big pine tree out back of house, Horses kept at property and the name of the property XXXXX.
The chase had been fast and furious, and we had not seen the craft re-appear. I made an assumption that it was likely to have finished immediately after disappearing from view. I marked a line on the map extending along Gould Rd where the craft had been travelling and then marked a plot area north of the Freeway. This represented my search area. I drove to this location, aware that many large plots of land existed within this region of the Stirling district, but I could find no sign of XXXXX and large pines were a common feature. Eventually I picked the property of my best guess and headed down the driveway. At the end was a pretty cottage and marked on the wall was the name XXXXX. Not bad hey! And out the back of the house was a stand of large cypress pines. There were around a dozen to choose from. Despite the really, really poor copy of a photograph showing the tree in question, it did provide significant clues. The branches extended nearly all the way to the ground, ruling out all but one tree. The photo also showed something that was only evident once standing there on site. This was the slightly unusual angle of the ladder. It became clear that the tree grew at the bottom of a now visible embankment and the ladder must have been placed at the top of the embankment leaning awkwardly against the tree. This tree had to be it. To add a little more certainty, visible damage and a large unusual scar cutting vertically through an upper limb existed on the side facing the likely trajectory. The damage faced the clearing cut by the wide freeway, making a direct path for any fast moving object.
I did eventually find Daryl’s family who, although did not witness the crash, confirmed Daryl’s description and certainty of the events. Their belief was that he was telling the truth. They also confirmed some of the smaller details. Darryl had passed away only months before I had begun looking for him (1959 - 2016). These findings gave me absolute certainty that my interpretation of the events were spot on. The objects that my brother and I had seen were advanced craft of some description, they were physical, and they were at odds with each other. We had seen the objects disappear behind this hill, and now I had confirmed that this was in fact the location reported by Daryl.
Following this I began to bring up the UFO topic in conversation when the opportunity arose. I suppose that I am even more pushy now. Soon I found other witnesses. Two contacts even described a chase similar to the one I had witnessed. One of them involved a crash which was cleaned up by the military. Although I failed to confirm with the witness whether she had seen two ufo's in a chase, or one ufo and military jets. The other was described to me before I had exposed any part of my own experience, eliminating the possibility of being a copy-cat. This report involved two jets pursuing two ufo's. The descriptions and details were incredibly similar to my own. I then printed my experience within some of the UFO groups and received many returning stories. These stories were varied, but had overlapping details, often describing the similar movement and acceleration of the craft involving hypersonic speed, and a few more chases. What became clear was that there were many more witnesses than I had previously believed possible, and that these events were not uncommon. MUFON and NUFORC record between 5,000 and 10,000 sightings per year. It has been estimated that this represents 1/10th to 1/100th of the true scale. Not every second person has such a compelling experience, but the overall numbers are large. If there is any truth to even a fraction of these reports, then humanity truly needs to wake up.
I hope this gives the reader a birds-eye view of how I began investigations into this enormous topic, and how my views have progressed. I am unable to verify other people’s accounts, but I am able to compare similarities between them, and compare reports with my own experience and understanding of what is possible. Without a personal experience it would be easy to dismiss something that appeared to rub against our scientific beliefs. But having personally witnessed the extraordinary capabilities of these craft I am compelled to include these accounts within the realm of possibility, especially when some compare so closely to my own sighting.