Perth, Australia aircraft encounter

Australian researchers Keith Basterfield and Paul Dean have completed their investigation of the 19 March 2014 "near-miss" between an Australian aircraft and what the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, described as an "unknown."

Here is a link to the blog post which contains the full report:

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

Pauline Wilson

Nice find...That was a seriously close encounter with something that could have ended badly. kudos to the pilot. S&F

a reply to: scullydana49

From the link,

The pilot, male, age 26 utterly ruled out the possibility of the object being a weather balloon
* The object was travelling in the opposite direction to him, not merely hovering or floating
* He and the co-pilot registered "complete shock"
* Air Services Australia confirmed that no other flight crew reported seeing the object (via ground radio when he landed)
* When he thought the object might collide with his plane, he sought a heading change from ATC, but this was denied. He therefore changed course himself
* The object was still going "up," as well as travelling horizontally when it passed his aircraft
* He estimated it was only 100m from his aircraft at most, he said it could have been as close as 30m
* It had the ratio dimension wise of a cigarette, i.e. long and thin
* He said it was green in colour, military green actually, even though the ATSB report cites the colour as grey
* The strobe light on front had a flash frequency of a second interval at most. It was whitish in colour, and not red, or blue, or any other colour
* The total duration of the event did not exceed 15 seconds
* A very rough estimate of the speed of the aircraft at the time was perhaps 450km/hr, despite being on a landing approach
* No other aircraft crew reported seeing anything. There was no radar image of the object. ASA staff saw nothing on radar
* It definitely went past the aircraft on the left hand side
* The pilot undertook a voluntary drug, urine test upon landing
* He has no idea what it was, and didn't want it to happen again
*There were 53 passengers on board at the time
* No one told him, not to discuss the incident.

Interesting find you have here, s&f

a reply to: scullydana49

Nice work as usual over at Keith's blog.


The detail about the colour of the object prompts a few questions. Firstly, would the colour be changed in the report deliberately (to obfuscate identification) or was it a reporting error? Secondly, it raises the issue of other colour details being reported incorrectly in previous reports.

The military colouring obviously suggests a military origin. This begs the question of what technology were they seeing? What airframe is tubular and minus visible wings? I guess it's possible the profile of wings might have been pointing directly at the crew so they couldn't see them? That's one idea and perhaps the speed made recognition of tail fins impossible too?

However if they had time to request a course correction, and have it refused, one would think they had enough time to observe tail fins and wings.

Without wings or fins, how did it maintain lift?

This takes us into notions of missiles or missile-type projectiles and how many of them ever have strobing lights? Puzzling.

a reply to: SecretKnowledge

The pilot reported that the object was cylindrical in shape and grey in colour. It was at about 3,700ft AMSL and in controlled airspace. The crew did not receive a traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) alert. The airspace below 3,500ft AMSL was military restricted airspace and the Australian Defence Force was not operating UAVs and was not aware of any UAV operations in the area at the time of the incident. The ATSB was not able to confirm the details of the object or identify any UAV operator in the area at that time."

This piece sounds interesting to....


Great find..

a reply to: 0bserver1

It was green in colour - 'military green.'

How can safety board get it so wrong, especially in the matter of the object's colour, Pilot emphatic it was military Green. Safety board says grey??

originally posted by: smurfy
How can safety board get it so wrong, especially in the matter of the object's colour, Pilot emphatic it was military Green. Safety board says grey??

Maybe the Pilots writing of the report and the word Green looked like Grey to whoever typed up the report.

a reply to: Kandinsky

Top Cover. Long loiter, sub munition armed cruise missile. Launches as a missile, wings and tail pop out after engine start. It's been seen in that area before.

Credit given for the pilots interview here, as we all know, not alot of pilots will come forward when they think they have an encounter with a ufo. The description here of a "strobe light" effect is similair to quite a few other pilot encounters over the years, and also mentioned the object was tailing or following them is also frequently mentioned when pilots encounter a ufo in the reports. Sounds to me like a credible encounter with an unidentified flying object. Australia still is a ufo hotspot.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Why a strobe on a missile?

a reply to: Zaphod58

I can see how the description of the object would lead you to that suspicion. However Woomera is the place for testing and it's a couple of thousand miles away from Perth. Would a missile be fired over the skies of a heavily trafficked city at 09:13? I've been having a quick look for bases local to Perth with capacities for launching missiles...no joy so far other than Base Pearce.

I'm not saying it isn't a missile. To confirm it will take identifying the potential bases where a missile could be launched from. We've got altitude of 4124ft -/+ 50' and no idea about the size of the object. He describes the object as 'going up' so we have a sense that it was on an upward trajectory which is suggestive of recent launch. The bearing of the object was approximately NE; this seems counter-intuitive as it would presumably involve a dry landing.

It's a pity the FOIA for radar data takes longer than the 30 days for keeping radar tapes. By the time they got the permission, the live tapes had been recycled.

Make no mistake, Keith Basterfield is a solid researcher and has good ties in aviation. He'll cover a lot of bases before he posts anything on the matter. He's a very good skeptic.

a reply to: abe froman

It's being tested still. You need a way to optically track it.

a reply to: Kandinsky

Top Cover is air launched, and they did say he was over an MOA.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Is this the Top Cover you're referring to? Link

a reply to: Kandinsky

Yep. A buddy of mine saw it flying NOE in Australia a few years ago. The first part of the flight the wings and tail are folded.

a reply to: data5091

I a sure you what ever you see up there
in the skies is man made
They have been making flying dics now for
for quite a while along with long cigar shaped
objects,they test them quite a bit
and hope we think they are made by aliens
how stupid are we
And then all the films they make /think about it aliens
trying to wipe us out or a big float of water to wash us
away 'even te kids moveis the same ,so many of them /
_javascript:icon('')
Von Braun had interesting things
to say on these matters not so much alien
but the same old story fool the peolpe put the truth in thier face
and the people will get it confused /God the powers that be
must be laughing mithy hard at us /////


thier power source is quite different

a reply to: Zaphod58

Hmmm. Sounds about right. At least, it's likely to be something along those lines.

a reply to: Kandinsky

I know there's an offshoot of it they haven't announced, as well as a couple others, but that was the first thing I thought of with the description.

a reply to: Zaphod58

What's the deal likely to be with the white strobe? Would it be designed to be visible only to aircraft at similar altitudes? Would it be deactivated in foreign/hostile airspace? Why would something like this be active in a busy traffic corridor?

Questions.