UFOs of the Outback: How a ghost town became Australia’s ‘Area 51’ after baffling sightings of ‘conscious’ glowing orbs that NO ONE can explain

‘What the f**k is that?’ a young jackaroo on a remote cattle station asks the other three blokes riding rough in the tray of a HiLux ute.

‘Lindsay…. that’s a Min Min light! And if it catches up to us, we’ll all disappear into the sky,’ a rugged Indigenous stockman named William replied in terror.

Baffled and confused, Lindsay turned and asked: ‘What the hell is a Min Min light?’

Since the dawn of man, every ancient civilisation has detailed strange sights in the sky.

Ancient Egyptians carved hieroglyphs of ‘sky gods’ into their monuments, the Romans reported seeing ‘gleaming’ lights above their cities at night, while Hindu mythology and the Bible mention glowing ‘chariots’ hovering among the clouds.

Australia also has its own version of UFOs – or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) as they’ve now come to be known after a rebrand by NASA.

And the first recorded encounters with ‘conscious’ glowing orbs unfolded in the 1870s, in the remote Queensland mining outpost of Min Min.

Since then, it has become a hub for the strange phenomenon, with hundreds of documented sightings leading it to be dubbed Australia’s Area 51.

In the year 2000, a Min Min light tourism centre even opened up there, welcoming thousands of visitors from across the world each year. 

Resting on a lonely stretch of road between Boulia and Winton, in the central west of the Sunshine State, the tiny community sprang to life as the first commercial copper mines in the region were established in the 1860s.

‘The first recorded sightings were in 1879 at the Min Min pub,’ Karen Savage, a tourism officer at the Min Min Encounter centre in Boulia, tells me.

‘But local Indigenous people say sightings go back as long as there have been people here.’

There are many differing beliefs surrounding Min Min lights, depending on what part of the country they appear.

Some say the lights are there to guide lost travellers back home, while others fear the orbs lead wandering souls to their doom.

Many also claim the lights appear out of nowhere, just to play tricks on them.

‘We don’t know why this area has become a hub. But we do know that the prevalence of sightings here are far higher than the rest of Australia,’ Ms Savage says.

‘They can appear, disappear and reappear. It can be just one light or it can be multiple lights and while most of the sightings are white, there are also recorded sightings in various different colours – like green, blue, purple, yellow.

‘Local Indigenous people in the Boulia area mainly see them as a light that would guide them home.

‘In other areas, they see the lights as ancestral spirits in unrest – and dangerous.’

That’s certainly the case for local Aboriginal people in the Barkly Tablelands region of the Northern Territory, where one of the country’s largest cattle stations, Alroy Downs, is located.

Lindsay Pyne travelled to the area to work as a jackaroo in the mid 1990s, when he was just 17.

For many rough and ready country kids who had just left high school, it was a rite of passage to head to the Outback and muster cattle before settling on a trade.

Nowadays, the uniquely Australian custom has largely given way to gap-year Contiki tours overseas.

Keen for adventure and unafraid of hard work, Lindsay fit in perfectly with the no-nonsense crew of stockmen.

Among them was an Aboriginal elder in a cowboy hat named William – who wore black stubbies and a blue singlet every day, with tattered R. M. Williams boots and no socks.

‘The bloke who owned the farm said he couldn’t run the joint without William because he knew every square inch of the property – and being an elder, he just knew everything there was to know about the bush as well,’ Lindsay tells me.

‘He took a shine to me and when we’d get sent off in groups of two or three, I’d often go with him and he would often tell me things about the dreamtime.’

Because the property was so large, the men would be camping away from the homestead about 50 per cent of the time.

According to Lindsay, if they were more than 150km out, they would just set up camp, if it was less than that, they’d ride their horses back to the homestead or pile into a ute.

On this particular day, they were right on the boundary and it was getting dark.

But after a gruelling day’s work, they decided to head back for a warm shower and comfy bed.

‘I was on the back of the ute with him and I looked over to the right and there it was – this weird white light – maybe the size of a soccer ball,’ Lindsay recalls.

‘I thought it was the spotty of a roo shooter. But you’ve gotta understand, where it was coming from, there are no tracks. It’s tufted grass, so you couldn’t even ride a motorbike through there.

‘So there is no way someone was hunting out there or in a vehicle.’

Lindsay says he wasn’t afraid – until he saw the look of horror on William’s face.

‘He said to me, “If the light comes we’ll all disappear into the sky.” He was hysterical,’ Lindsay recounts.

‘Everyone looked up to him so we were more scared of it because of the way he was reacting to it. You gotta understand that this is the toughest guy you’d ever meet.’

William slammed on the roof of the twin cab and told the driver to gun it.

While encounters and descriptions of Min Min lights vary considerably, one of the most common observations is that the orbs appear ‘intelligent, conscious and curious’.

‘It sort of moves with you and always feels like it’s getting closer. It started off the size of a soccer ball and then got bigger and bigger,’ Lindsay says.

‘It kind of seemed like it wanted to follow us or something. It’s hard to explain.’

Despite the enduring mystery, there are many possible scientific explanations for what could cause the phenomenon.

One theory is known as Fata Morgana – which takes its name from the Italian term for the Arthurian sorceress the Morgan Fairy, who was said to lure sailors to their deaths with bewitching lights, like fairy castles in the air.

Fata Morgana occurs when a layer of warm air rests over a layer of cooler air, causing light rays, from tens or even hundreds of kilometres away, to bend in a narrow band around the horizon.

When these temperature inversions happen, it can often create a mirage or make objects appear distorted.

A famous example of this is when ships can appear as though they are floating above the water.

Others believe sightings of Min Min lights are merely just lights from camp fires, far-off moving vehicles, aircraft or buildings.

But no definitive explanation has ever been proven.

The eerie inside story of Australia’s most infamous UFO sighting: Witnesses threatened, a government cover-up and the official report so explosive it was destroyed after the death of its author 

By Steve Jackson for Daily Mail Australia 

There was no sound to begin with, just an eerie shape, looming in from the distance. Some say it looked like a giant silver cigar, others a flying saucer, a metallic disc, shimmering overhead.

As the craft slowed to a hover above Westall High School, the children in the playground started screaming. One of the eyewitnesses, Mary Eastwood, said it felt like ‘the end of the world’. Students were running around, hysterical, or throwing themselves to the ground in panic. Mary and her friend sat on the perimeter fence, dumbstruck.

The only thing we know for sure almost 60 years later is that something strange and unnerving happened at the school, just south-east of Melbourne, on an April morning in 1966. Official efforts to dismiss the eye-witness reports by insisting the ‘craft’ was nothing more than a stray weather balloon have never quite succeeded and a secret government report into the incident has never been released.

Indeed, that explosive report – authored by a high-ranking aviation official – is believed to rubbish the official explanation that the mysterious object was a high-altitude balloon.

So, it is no surprise that many of the people at Westall that day – students, teachers and residents of nearby Clayton South – resolutely believe what they saw was an alien spacecraft, a UFO. And now, even more astonishingly, a leading UFO investigator says what they actually encountered might have been a captured alien craft deployed as part of secret U.S. military tests.

Author Ross Coulthart has spent decades investigating the Westall incident and is convinced the truth has been deliberately covered up.

The key to the mystery lies in the secret official report into Australia’s most significant mass sighting of an unidentified craft which is still buried away in the bowels of the Department of Defence archives.

According to sources familiar with the document, it was compiled in 1967 by an engineer – known only as ‘Mr X’ – who was working as the Assistant Controller of the Aircraft, Guided Weapons and Electronics Supply Division of the government’s now-defunct Department of Supply.

Coulthart claims only two copies of the ‘Westall Papers’ were ever made. One was destroyed by Mr X’s widow on his orders after his death, while the other remains hidden from public sight.

‘One of the things that happened in the wake of the Westall incident was that an official, who was very senior in Australian aviation, was retained by Defence to write an investigation into what took place that day,’ Coulthart tells Daily Mail Australia.

‘He’s since died… but I have spoken with the son of the man who wrote the report.

‘He says his father worked on the report in the family home and that he became aware as a child of the fact that his dad was travelling to the Westall school for three or four days in a row in what became an extraordinarily intense investigation.

‘And his father was so freaked out by what he discovered – the implications of what he learned – that he gave a secret copy of the Westall Papers to his wife and told her to keep it hidden away in a particular location in the family home.

‘He made her promise she would destroy it when he died but, essentially, that was his insurance policy.

‘Mr X’s son doesn’t know what was precisely revealed in that document, but he does have a strong recollection of his father’s position on the Westall incident, and believes the truth went well beyond the simple spy balloon explanation.

‘He watched his mother burn the report in their back garden after his father died but there is another copy that was the filed with the Department of Supply.’

Coulthart, a five-times Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist, says the mystery file was transferred to the Defence archives after the Department of Supply was dissolved in June 1974.

INTELLIGENTLY CONTROLLED CRAFT

Andrew Greenwood was a teacher at Westall High School when the unexplained incident occurred – and says he was later threatened into silence.

He vividly recalls a ‘hysterical’ student running into his Year 9 science class during first break, claiming there was a flying saucer in the sky. While dubious at first, Mr Greenwood nonetheless went outside and was shocked to see a bright silver object ‘the size of a car’ hovering in the air near the school.

He said the object began to slowly rise into the sky before it was approached by five aircraft. Whenever these aircraft drew close to the silver object, it quickly darted in a different direction before stopping again.

The cat-and-mouse encounter continued for about 20 minutes before the object landed briefly in a nearby field – known as the Grange Reserve – then shot away and vanished into the sky entirely.

Within 40 minutes, air force and army personnel poured into the area in military vehicles and formed a secure barrier around the reserve. But, knowing the area well, Mr Greenwood and dozens of students were able to sneak in and see what was going on.

‘[We saw a] circular area, like trampled grass,’ Mr Greenwood says. ‘And there were guards around it and there were people in there with equipment.’

Mr Greenwood remains convinced the object he witnessed was an alien aircraft.

‘I saw a craft. A mechanical object intelligently controlled hovering above me,’ he told Coulthart in The Phenomenon, a documentary released in 2022.

He added that after discussing the incident with local news reporters, Mr Greenwood received an unexpected – and unwelcome – late-night visit at his home from two men claiming to be government officials.

According to him, one was wearing plain clothes and the other a high-ranking air force uniform. They told him his recollection of the incident was incorrect – and he would be well advised to stop talking about the encounter.

‘When I tried to explain to them that they weren’t there – I was – and I knew what I saw, well, the first suggestion was, ‘You’d be ill-advised to go on saying that because clearly you were drunk on duty and will have to be reported to the education department and of course you will lose your job’,’ he says.

‘Absolutely, I was threatened. I was told that I should not say anything.’

He believes the intimidating visit was part of a government conspiracy to cover up the country’s largest mass UFO encounter.

EYEWITNESSES THREATENED 

One oft-reported explanation for the Westall incident is that the object could have been a runaway high-altitude atmospheric balloon from the HIBAL program at Mildura Airport, about a six-hour drive away in Victoria’s north-west.

The program was established by Australia’s Department of Supply in conjunction with the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1960. It purportedly used white and silver high-altitude balloons to sample the levels of radioactive elements injected into the stratosphere by atomic experiments in the Pacific Ocean.

But Coulthart – who has led investigations across ABC’s Four Corners, Nine’s 60 Minutes and Seven’s Sunday Night flagship news and current affairs programs – is convinced there is a more sinister explanation.

‘Andrew’s account is extraordinarily credible,’ Coulthart tells Daily Mail Australia.

‘And he’s adamant that what he saw was something anomalous that he couldn’t explain away as a balloon or anything like that.

‘In fact, he says categorically that it was not a balloon of any kind whatsoever, that it was clearly some kind of craft.

‘He says he saw an elliptical, metallic disc-shaped object moving in some intelligent way.

‘And he’s not the only one. There are well over 180 witnesses who saw the exact same thing – people like Terry Peck, who has a particularly vivid memory of what she saw, and who is equally adamant ‘it was not a balloon’.

Peck, a former student at Westall, provided Coulthart with a series of drawings of what she saw hovering above her school.

Recounting that fateful April day, she claimed she jumped over the school fence and raced towards where the UFO had landed in the pines.

By the time she arrived, two other classmates were already there. One of them, a girl, was hysterical. Peck alleges the student was carried off in an ambulance and never came back to school.

What happened next still troubles her. 

‘We all got called to an assembly… and they told us all to keep quiet,’ she says.

‘I know this sounds corny, but I know what I saw. It was not a balloon. It was a machine, a craft.’ 

‘I’d absolutely just like someone to come forward from the services just to say, “Yes, it did happen, and it landed and there was a cover-up”.’

Coulthart says he has since spoken to multiple people who attended the assembly who all shared the same story. 

‘They all describe how there were officials from the government and people in uniform who were standing up the back of the hall who were listening to what was being said to the students,’ he says. 

And it wasn’t only the students being warned.  

‘We’ve spoken to firemen who attended the incident, and numerous people who were told – threatened – that if they talked about this, this was a national security issue, and that they should shut up about it,’ Coulthart says. 

‘Moreover, when the recovery operation happened, there were American-accented personnel driving American left-hand-drive jeeps.

‘So, it’s just absurd to try to patronise these witnesses by saying, ‘You don’t know what you saw, it was just a spy or weather balloon’. That’s bollocks, absolute rubbish.’

PUBLIC LEFT IN DARK 

Coulthart has spent years pushing for the Westall Papers to be made public, but fears they may remain locked away in the Defence Department forever. In the absence of the full report, he has been able to assemble only tantalising pieces of the jigsaw.

‘Certainly, there was detailed analysis that was done: soils removed, there were radiation detectors used, Geiger counters used,’ Coulthart says.

‘It was the most extraordinarily intense investigation and the public has been completely left in the dark.

‘I suspect there was a finding [in the Westall Papers] that the object was American technology. I am convinced the Americans have been using Australia as a secret location for testing of technology – non-human technology – that became too sensitive to test in places like Area 51, the Nevada Test Range.

‘There’s been an ongoing Cold War between the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans over who gets access to this retrieved, non-human technology – and fighting for the knowledge of how to use it and how to develop and replicate it.

‘We’ve moved beyond the argument about whether these things are real. It’s been formally admitted that they’re real.

‘What we have now is a continuing attempt at a feeble cover-up by the Pentagon and the intelligence community, which, I suspect, believes that it can derive some kind of hegemonical American military advantage from the technology that it is hiding.

‘That is why the public is being lied to about incidents like Westall, and why this is being concealed.’

THE ROAD AHEAD 

The Westall sighting has become one of the most enduring of Australian mysteries.

The incident has not only featured in a raft of popular documentaries, but has also been commemorated at the site itself with a UFO-themed playground. 

Officially, the Department of Defence will not comment on the existence of the Westall Papers and critics continue to dismiss Coulthart’s work. However, the investigator says that despite the passage of time, he will continue to push for the release of Mr X’s secret report.

‘I have been vilified and attacked for investigating the technology involved in these kinds of encounters,’ he tells me.

‘Numerous people I have spoken to have told me it is routine for people who are working inside this secret program to be intimidated and threatened with death if they reveal what they know.

‘But there is no amount of intimidation or bullying or threats that will stop me from investigating this. It’s too far down the track.

‘This is the biggest story in human history, and I know it’s real.’