A new hypothesis to explain the 6 April 1966 Westall, Australia, incident

Australian researcher Keith Basterfield has proposed a non-UFO explanation for this incident. One of the key factors in this incident involving hundreds of Australian school children, has been that Westall witnesses say that the official Australian government response was so swift, that they must have known the object was coming.

Basterfield has researched a 1966 joint program between the former US Atomic Energy Commission and the former Australian Department of Supply which has caused him to form a working hypothesis which explains Westall in non-UFO terms.

His hypothesis is bound to be controversial but it does explain many elements of the case, as described in original documents from 1966.

See for yourself at his blog post at:

ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com.au...

Pauline.

a reply to: scullydana49

Good theory too bad he could never test it.

What is the original incident? Must be some sort of device landed near the school?

a reply to: tinner07


UFO landed or something along those lines, I always thought it was a tow target but this theory is pretty interesting also.

it was indeed an ufo that landed on a school yard and was witnessed by many school children as well as at least 2 Teachers. This was the subject of an early episode of "Close Encounters." If memory serves all the former school children had another get together fairly recently on the same school ground where they first saw the ufo.

a reply to: tinner07

from the official source of doublespeak itself
westall "ufo" thing
"all hail xenu!"

Oh look, another convenient secret government project involving balloons. This time, a project with a name that had already been used by the Allies in World War 2 . Yet again, the proponent of the theory neglects to mention that, whilst the operations these balloons were used on might well have been secret however, there was absolutely nothing secret about the balloons themselves. Ergo, there was absolutely no contemporaneous reason for the authorities to have shown up, said "Our Balloon, nothing to see here" and then made that plain in any news release.

I am not big on UFO's, but I think I remember reading about this particular case. If it is the one I am thinking of then I don't see how a balloon could be a plausible explanation. Although many people like to question whether the witnesses got the details correct, this case has so many witnesses that it is quite likely that the details we received are fairly accurate; details including the behavior of the craft, what it looked like, etc.

Again, if I remember correctly, didn't this object land and then take off again at a decent rate of speed? I think that it also did some other things that balloons just cannot do. So I do not understand how the balloon hypothesis could be correct, since essentially a balloon is just a blob of gas-filled cloth or cloth-like material. They can take on various shapes when disturbed by wind or some other force, and could even take on the shapes of other reported UFO's, but their behavior is quite predictable. Depending on the type of gas inside them, and the volume of that gas as well as the volume of the void which holds the gas, the balloon will either rise, fall, or hold its altitude.

Depending on other forces, and whether there is a payload and how that payload is attached, a balloon can pitch, roll, or yaw as well, but none of these maneuvers look "unnatural" by any means. Especially if the balloon were on the ground, where it could be viewed closely. If it had come down already, yet still had enough gas to maintain a solid shape, it should have been obvious to those present that this was something manmade. There is nothing intricate about a balloon. It is quite simple, and quite simple-looking.

Coupling the fact that balloons look a certain way with the fact that balloons follow a pretty regular set of behaviors, the sighting could not have been a balloon. If certain things were witnessed, and corroborated by other witnesses, and those things are outside the realm of possibility in terms of balloon behavior, how can anyone claim this is a feasible explanation? All of the witnesses would have to be wrong to mistake a balloon for what was described, and not only would they all have to be wrong, they would all have to missed the relatively obvious fact that the object looked like a freaking balloon, lol. I just don't find it plausible.

I think even reports with only a single witness are often times fairly accurate in the general or large details, although minute details are more likely to be misconstrued or overlooked, and with multiple witnesses the chances of the reports being real increases, if the witnesses corroborate one another. And when you have a group the size of the one we are talking about in this case, and the fact that their testimonies agreed for the most part, it is not very likely that they described something that didn't happen. So if what the actions and characteristics they described are accurate, and a balloon cannot perform those actions or did not have those characteristics, it tells me that the object was not a balloon.

Why would so many people mistake a balloon for a saucer!!!

Thread about this case in my sigy.

I don't know why it is so hard for people to accept the Occam's razor explanation - it was ET contact. Oh, I forgot, ET's don't exist so despite overwhelming evidence another explanation must be found, just like Roswell, and the gullible humans who cannot think for themselves and must be told something exists or is true by the MSM/government/science before they believe it is true.

a reply to: PlanetXisHERE

I'm not trying to push my own thread, but follow the link in my sigy to see the desperation of those who just will not accept what it obviously was.
Two craft landed, seen by many school children and many adults, and they come up with such things as "mass halucination".

originally posted by: PlanetXisHERE
I don't know why it is so hard for people to accept the Occam's razor explanation - it was ET contact. Oh, I forgot, ET's don't exist so despite overwhelming evidence another explanation must be found, just like Roswell...

Roswell? Brazel's own testimony said "wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks". That really sounds like an intergalactic space fairing species, not at all like 1950's technology! Occam's razor my friend...

Secondly, IQ scores are normalised so that the average is 100. This means that there are as many stupid people as there are smart people. What if the 'sighting' in question was witness by normal folk, as opposed to smart folk? Their assessment would be biased by definition; seeing what they expected to see, rather than thinking the problem through and coming up with the most likely explanation. That's why witness testimony is so bad. People see whatever television has conditioned them to see!

Here you go, if you're not familiar with the basics:



And here's the documentary:

Mass sightings are by far the most credible, but when mass sightings happen at the White House and still people don't believe then it seems futile to try to convince them. Mass hallucination eh? Wow, a brain dead retard wouldn't accept that explanation. UFOs have always intrigued me and I wasn't sure what to believe, until I saw the MANY credible witnesses admit they had seen UFOs. Astronauts, pilots etc. people who are fully aware of how conventional aircraft should move. Moreover, astronauts in space who have seen craft sure as hell won't be seeing anything man made in the 60s. It's not like there were many countries venturing into space then. I'm also sure they can tell the difference between 500 mph and 2,000 mph. The sighting at the school is a great example of how narrow minded some people can be. If people want a UFO to come land on their head before they believe then why do they even visit this forum? If only to discredit then perhaps they have another agenda...