The UFO that flew over Nobbys and Newcastle beach

A lady, now in her early 70s, shared her story after reading our column on Dean "Vern" Garner's close encounter with a massive black triangle-shaped UFO at New Lambton Heights on top of a ridge in 1999.

The lady's son was born in December 1969. To help him fall asleep, she and her then husband would put him in a carry basket in the backseat of the car and go for a drive.

It was late January, around 7pm to 7.30pm, so it wasn't completely dark.

"That's when we used to take my son for a drive," she said, adding that they were living in Broadmeadow then.

At that time, there was a "big white wooden fence" at Nobbys "where you walk out to the breakwater".

"We stopped the car, I got out and looked up," said Carol, who didn't want to reveal her surname, due to fears that people would think she was crazy.

She saw a bright round light. At first, she thought it was the moon. "It was very vivid, round and strong," she said.

She quickly realised the moon was in another part of the sky. She said to her husband, "If that is the moon, what the hell is that?"

"The round light started to jut in a triangle, really really fast," she said.

That is, the lights were flashing in a triangle shape.

"It was just above Nobbys, up in the sky. I looked back up and bent over the fence to try and get a really good look at it. With that, it started to come down straight at me, like it wanted to look at me as well. I had the feeling it was trying to get my attention.

"As it came at me, it was starting to get bigger. That was when my ex-husband screamed at me to get in the car.

"As we took off, I was looking back to see what it would do. It flew over Newcastle beach and up over the [Royal Newcastle] hospital. No aircraft could go that fast."

The next morning on the radio, a surfer said he also saw a UFO.

"He said it flew over his head as he was waiting for a wave to come," Carol said.

"The surfer said it flew at such speed, like no aircraft he had ever seen."

Carol, who was 20 at the time, said she had never spoken about the UFO, except to her kids.

"I often wonder what it would have done if I'd stayed there. I wondered what it's objective was, coming down at me like that. My husband and I agreed never to talk about it again."

Carol said she was a logical person and "I believe there's logic in everything".

"But I've never been able to see the logic in what happened. My ex-husband was the same - that there's an answer for everything. But he couldn't put an answer to this one."

She believes UFOs are "just keeping an eye on us".

"I don't know why - whether they just want to keep an eye on how we progress."

If you remember the 1970 UFO at Nobbys or have a UFO story of your own, drop us a line at topics@newcastleherald.com.au.

In the mid-1960s, a group of UFOs were seen in the skies above Newcastle, Birmingham Gardens, Belmont, Bolton Point, Muswellbrook, Singleton and Cessnock.

Topics recalled the events in a 1997 column. Wallsend resident Sam Parsons said "a mysterious set of lights flew in formation through dark Hunter skies in the mid-1960s".

Thousands of people around NSW reported seeing the orange-coloured lights.

"From what I can remember, there were five or six lights flying at a great height and speed," Sam said.

Chad Watson, who was writing Topics at the time, delved into the Herald archives and found a front-page story from March 5, 1965 that declared "FLYING GROUP SKY MYSTERY".

"Airport officials suggested the lights could have been meteorites, but a Sydney astronomer believed they were moving too fast for natural phenomena," the story said.

Did anyone catch the UFO documentary on Channel 7 on Sunday night, titled The Phenomenon?

Five-time Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart and the 7News Spotlight team conducted a special investigation into the UFO phenomenon.

Coulthart revealed a cover-up in Australia of a UFO sighting at a school in 1966.

About 200 staff, students and residents witnessed three UFOs described as "metallic discs" and "flying saucers" over a football field at Westall High School in Melbourne.

"It was a grey, almost cylindrical or cigar-shaped object which moved with some degree of precision in the sky," recounted Andrew Greenwood, then a year 9 science teacher.

Andrew was threatened by military officials at the time to keep quiet about the incident.

Terry Peck, then aged 11, saw the "flying saucer craft" on the ground.

"I could feel heat and hear this buzzing sound and I could see purple lights all around it. Within a minute, it raised up off the ground really slowly to probably about three or four metres, then it turned on its side and almost disappeared. It went straight up. I looked up in the sky and could see the other two [UFOs], " she said.

Christopher Mellon, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence for intelligence, said in the documentary that UFOs were "the biggest story ever".

"We may be on the threshold of getting some answers within our lifetime," he said.

US intelligence agencies are set to table a report on UFOs to Congress this month. The unclassified report is expected to provide "detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence".

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