A FOOTNOTE to yesterday's column about the search for extra terrestrial life promised "my UFO experiences" today. At the risk of destroying my remaining credibility, here goes.
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Soccer training, aged 10 or 11 in 1970 or 1971. We played and trained at Homelands Avenue, Carlingford, a hillside oval with expansive views south over Rydalmere and Ermington and the industrial area of Silverwater.
One winter evening, training drew to a halt as more and more of us stopped to look at the four bright lights suspended in a diamond shape over the industrial skyline.
My father, who was coach at the time, and a couple of other adults were with us as we watched these things hang in the sky where they should not have been.
I have no clear memory of how it ended but my feeling is they flew off suddenly and that the adults were distinctly unsettled.
Number two. I'm on a prawn trawler in the Gulf of Carpentaria near Groote Eylandt in 1983. That year's diary, with sighting details, is in a box in the roof, but my best estimate is June or July of that year.
The evening before the skipper of a boat working with us had burst on to the radio with unsettled urgency.
"Take a look at that! Can you see it? Will you take a look at that!?" I've left out the string of expletives but he called our attention to a flaming orange ball he said was sinking slowly into the sea not that far from his boat.
We could see nothing and though he was absolutely adamant, we put it down to drink, which he was somewhat fond of.
Same time the next day I knew exactly what he was on about. Another deckhand and I stared with dropped jaws at a glowing orange ball that was low in the sky on our starboard bow. We watched as it sunk slowly towards the waterline, its perfectly circular outline shimmering as if with heat, until it disappeared below the horizon.
It was not the sun which had already disappeared on the other side of the boat shortly before. I had an instamatic camera, but it was out of film.
Three. About six weeks later I was on a barramundi boat sailing up the western side of the Gulf towards Gove. Up there, the night sky is blanket of stars and the boat owner, Rudi, and I were standing on deck watching a parade of moving lights. "They are satellites," Rudi said. I was happy to agree, until both of us watched one of them trace an orderly and distinct loop-the-loop before continuing on its way across the sky. "Satellites don't do that, Rudi," I remember saying.
Number four is the hard one, because logic says it's ours, not theirs.
Sitting on top of Fort Scratchley at dawn one day soon after Christmas in 1995 (the year is a best guess without checking 18-year-old Herald rosters), I was looking north over Stockton Bight when two lights appeared low in the sky over Williamtown RAAF base.
Imagine a clock face, with one light at 9 o'clock, the other at 3 o'clock. After a while, they began to move, each of them scribing a semicircle through 180 degrees to take the place of the other. They then reversed the procedure, taking about a minute all up.
Then they took off. One out to sea, the other west over land, at unbelievable speeds.
The reason I was there was because a Herald reporter of the time with contacts at the base had been rung the afternoon before, telling us to be at Williamtown at five the next morning because - and these were the exact words - "They're putting it up, you've got to be there." I lived at Newcastle East at the time, and Fort Scratchley seemed a logical place to watch from. As it happened, it was after 5.30am by the time the show began. My colleague - the one who'd gone to Williamtown with the camera - gave up the ghost about 5.20 and went home.
We rang the RAAF base later that day, but they told us nothing had happened and everything was shut for the Christmas break.
To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies: "They would say that, wouldn't they."
But I know what I saw.