The Westall School Incident

[Pumpkin_ace]

Hi everyone,

Firstly, apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere.

TLDR - What are the views held by skeptics on the Westall school case? Personally I think that while it can not be presented as scientific evidence or indeed be subject to anything beyond conjecture - I do think that if forced to guess - that this is the single best evidence of NHI.

I generally agree with the skeptical consensus on most UFO cases. I accept that human memory is fallible and that 'mass psychosis' and mass hysteria are real. However, and this isn't the primary purpose of this post but - I also submit that spontaneous group hallucination is both different and indeed not something that any peer-reviewed scientific paper has suggested to be a real. Therefore, 'mass hallucination' (in the sense of a crowd fabricating an object where none exists) is highly unlikely compared to misidentification. We must assume they saw something physical. Which is what I'm guessing most of you already accept. At the risk of being verbose, I think it's also worth pointing out the reality that the profile of the witness descriptions were formed consensually in the moments directly following the event. This consensus emerged from the event itself, not from the aftermath. So the question can/should focus primarily on what it is that was seen according to the witness testimony. I'm assuming that this is an uncontroversial statement.

I struggle to accept the HIBAL / Balloon explanation for the Westall 1966 case because of the sheer magnitude of error it requires us to attribute to the witnesses. I accept that a pilot might mistake Venus for a moving craft due to autokinesis (lack of reference points). But in Westall, we have a large group of witnesses on the ground, with static reference points (trees, fences), describing a structured event, not just a light in the sky.

The consensus description includes:

• A metallic discoid, not a translucent balloon payload.
• A "cat and mouse" behavior with light aircraft (hovering, then accelerating away).
• Trace Evidence: The circle of flattened/scorched grass observed by witnesses immediately after.

My issue is that the HIBAL theory requires us to believe that hundreds of witnesses didn't just misidentify a balloon, but collectively hallucinated a set of physics (rapid acceleration, defying wind direction) that were completely absent. Is there a limit to how far a crowd can mistake one thing for another?

• If a balloon is drifting at 20km/h, and a crowd reports it moving at "unbelievable speeds" (faster than the Cessnas chasing it), is that still just "misperception"?
• At what point does the explanation (Balloon) become so divorced from the data (Witness Reports) that it is no longer reasonably viable?

If we are forced to deduce the nature of the object based on the profile of behavior consistently reported (rapid acceleration, hovering, structure), a balloon simply does not fit the data.

I am not claiming this proves "Aliens" in a scientific sense. But if we must choose the "Best Fit" for the narrative described, non-human technology fits the description far better than a drifting balloon. I mean this is almost a question in and of itself: If we accept that the(or any) object was technological, and displayed performance beyond human capability in a given time (in this case 1966), then deductive reasoning leaves NHI as the only viable explanation. I'm not claiming that this case can provide any substantial scientific data. I guess I am engaging this on a casual level that it more akin to: If I was forced to guess.

I'm interested to hear if there are other historical cases where a crowd this size mistook a passive object for a hyper-active, maneuvering craft to this extreme degree. But more so I am interested if anyone can offer any other explanations for this case.

 

[NoParty]

Hi everyone,

Firstly, apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere.

TLDR - What are the views held by skeptics on the Westall school case? Personally I think that while it can not be presented as scientific evidence or indeed be subject to anything beyond conjecture - I do think that if forced to guess - that this is the single best evidence of NHI.

I generally agree with the skeptical consensus on most UFO cases. I accept that human memory is fallible and that 'mass psychosis' and mass hysteria are real. However, and this isn't the primary purpose of this post but - I also submit that spontaneous group hallucination is both different and indeed not something that any peer-reviewed scientific paper has suggested to be a real. Therefore, 'mass hallucination' (in the sense of a crowd fabricating an object where none exists) is highly unlikely compared to misidentification. We must assume they saw something physical. Which is what I'm guessing most of you already accept. At the risk of being verbose, I think it's also worth pointing out the reality that the profile of the witness descriptions were formed consensually in the moments directly following the event. This consensus emerged from the event itself, not from the aftermath. So the question can/should focus primarily on what it is that was seen according to the witness testimony. I'm assuming that this is an uncontroversial statement.

I struggle to accept the HIBAL / Balloon explanation for the Westall 1966 case because of the sheer magnitude of error it requires us to attribute to the witnesses. I accept that a pilot might mistake Venus for a moving craft due to autokinesis (lack of reference points). But in Westall, we have a large group of witnesses on the ground, with static reference points (trees, fences), describing a structured event, not just a light in the sky.

The consensus description includes:

• A metallic discoid, not a translucent balloon payload.
• A "cat and mouse" behavior with light aircraft (hovering, then accelerating away).
• Trace Evidence: The circle of flattened/scorched grass observed by witnesses immediately after.

My issue is that the HIBAL theory requires us to believe that hundreds of witnesses didn't just misidentify a balloon, but collectively hallucinated a set of physics (rapid acceleration, defying wind direction) that were completely absent. Is there a limit to how far a crowd can mistake one thing for another?

• If a balloon is drifting at 20km/h, and a crowd reports it moving at "unbelievable speeds" (faster than the Cessnas chasing it), is that still just "misperception"?
• At what point does the explanation (Balloon) become so divorced from the data (Witness Reports) that it is no longer reasonably viable?

If we are forced to deduce the nature of the object based on the profile of behavior consistently reported (rapid acceleration, hovering, structure), a balloon simply does not fit the data.

I am not claiming this proves "Aliens" in a scientific sense. But if we must choose the "Best Fit" for the narrative described, non-human technology fits the description far better than a drifting balloon. I mean this is almost a question in and of itself: If we accept that the(or any) object was technological, and displayed performance beyond human capability in a given time (in this case 1966), then deductive reasoning leaves NHI as the only viable explanation. I'm not claiming that this case can provide any substantial scientific data. I guess I am engaging this on a casual level that it more akin to: If I was forced to guess.

I'm interested to hear if there are other historical cases where a crowd this size mistook a passive object for a hyper-active, maneuvering craft to this extreme degree. But more so I am interested if anyone can offer any other explanations for this case.

Hi. Welcome. Just FYI: There's a search box in the upper right, so it's easy to put in "Westall" or "1966."

Then you can see what's already been said, here. I don't know that it's ever had it's own thread (?) but it has been brought up while discussing other things.

I'm definitely not the best one here to address Westall: Witnesses contradicting each other, combined with the balloon angle
was enough for me to lose interest. But I betcha some others here can help you with it a lot more. And again, welcome...

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

Hi. Welcome. Just FYI: There's a search box in the upper right, so it's easy to put in "Westall" or "1966."

Then you can see what's already been said, here. I don't know that it's ever had it's own thread (?) but it has been brought up while discussing other things.

I'm definitely not the best one here to address Westall: Witnesses contradicting each other, combined with the balloon angle
was enough for me to lose interest. But I betcha some others here can help you with it a lot more. And again, welcome...

Cheers, Yeah I don't think it's had it has ir's own thread. But yeah fair enough but I would say that the witnesses contradicting each other is fairly superfluous imo. A lot of the supposed contradictions are not so much contradictions but differing perspectives. In other words people have cited contradictions in regards to the fact that different people have given different accounts of how many craft there were and at what time precisely the cessnas showed up etc. But I'm pretty sure this just indicates the fact that people may have been in different locations or fixated on different things and not everyone followed the object as it landed in the wooded area near by aka 'The Grange' etc. Overwhelmingly the testimonies align - including from one person who was alone and working on a farm situated next to the school. I would say that I do get a slight sense of caution when I hear the discrepancies between how many 'craft' there were. But I also think such discrepancies do not really warrant ignoring the overall consensus or that they are without reasonable explanations.

But also - the hill that I will die on is the one that refutes the the balloon theory. Not because I want to die on this hill but because it seems so clearly invalid- With one caveat- that we are taking the witness testimony at face value. If one takes it at face value the descriptions contain various characteristics such as speed which forbid the possibility of a balloon. If we are not taking the description as being an accurate/truthful telling of a real physical object then I feel one should substantiate why exactly.

But yeah thanks for letting me ask this question. I am mildly obsessed and zealous about this case and would love to really get clarity on it so I can stop thinking about it haha.

 

[Mendel]

TLDR - What are the views held by skeptics on the Westall school case? Personally I think that while it can not be presented as scientific evidence or indeed be subject to anything beyond conjecture - I do think that if forced to guess - that this is the single best evidence of NHI.

Your post ails from a lack of evidence.

Here's a view most of us will share. Brian Dunning wrote 16 years ago https://skeptoid.com/episodes/208 :

So what can we conclude about the Westall UFO? Not very much. The weather balloon is a likely explanation for the first half of the event, and the drogue is at least one very reasonable possibility for the second half. There's good reason to doubt that many of the story elements, like the military conspiracy and the craft having landed, ever happened at all. The story certainly has no holes in it that can only be filled with extraterrestrial aliens, and indeed no credible reason to suggest anything unusual. "I don't know" does not mean "I do know, and it was a spaceship", so for now, the Westall '66 UFO remains one of many question marks in the books, just not a very bold or especially intriguing one.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westall_UFO#Explanations

Australian newspaper The Age described it at the time as a weather balloon: "Object Perhaps Balloon – An unidentified flying object seen over the Clayton-Moorabbin area yesterday morning might have been a weather balloon. Hundreds of children and a number of teachers at Westall School, Clayton, watched the object during morning break. The Weather Bureau released a balloon at Laverton at 8:30 am and the westerly wind blowing at the time could have moved it into the area where the sighting was reported". The newspaper also said a number of small aeroplanes circled around it. However, a check later showed that no commercial, private or RAAF pilots had reported anything unusual in the area.

The witness accounts of a weather balloon do explain a lot, as they match how witness accounts are distorted in general. On a plane crash, where the pilot basically wiggled the tail off by abusing the rudder, half of the witnesses reported seeing fire and smoke.

And the aircraft bit is also suffering from a large hole in the evidence.

You can, of course, choose to believe the eyewitnesses against these odds, but nobody thinking skeptically will call it "good evidence" for NHI.

If you doubt that, ask yourself if you can prove from the evidence that it wasn't a ghost they saw.

 

[JMartJr]

But more so I am interested if anyone can offer any other explanations for this case.

Hi! The reason I really dislike hese cases where we have witness reports and pretty much no supporting evidence is that they really cannot be usefully analyzed.

So explanations of the case are always going to be speculative, and depend heavily on how much of what was reported each of us somewhat arbitrarily decides to believe.

As is to be expected, there are contradictions in what witnesses report ... this would be expected whatever they saw because people notice different things, interpret what they notice differently and remember things differently, both initially and as time passes, memories morph in our heads, and as feedback from other witnesses, researchers or just interested folks who discuss it with the witness add and subtract details from/to the story.

This does not mean the witnesses are lying, it means they are the proud owner/operators of human brains, and that is the way our brains work.

As to likelihood of what it might be, I'd agree that IF you assume the reported details that don't match a balloon well are accurate and reflect reality, then at first pass NHI would possibly be more likely than a balloon. BUT... to me, things that are known to exist get a lot of "bonus points" over things that have not been shown to exist. We know balloons exist and are frequently flying around in our atmosphere. We do not know if alien life exists (though we debate the likelihood frequently), if life exists elsewhere we have no idea if any of it is intelligent, if so we have no idea if any of it has the ability to travel between stars, if so we do not know if any of it has ever come here.

We also know that humans have frequently witnessed things like re-entering space junk and reported it as a large cigar shaped UFO with rows of port-holes. We know people have seen the planet Venus and chased it in their cars, believing that it was moving away from them (but staying in sight) and stopping to hover when they stopped, and sometimes reversing course to chase the car when they gave up the chase and drove back towards where the started. All that is to say, we KNOW that mundane things can generate extraordinary reports.

Because of all that, I would not personally rank these cases that lack supporting evidence as being of much use at all in trying to make the case that NHI are flying around here on Earth.

Sorry for the extreme long windedness, I'm prone to that! And I am not telling you what or how you should think, just explain what I think and why.

PS: Can't cite the space junk and Venus cases at the moment, will have to get home and dig out the physical books they are in!

 

[Mendel]

the descriptions contain various characteristics such as speed which forbid the possibility of a balloon. I

People who misjudge the size of the object also misjudge the distance. People who misjudge the distance misjudge the speed.
Small and slow and near looks the same as big and fast and far away.

 

[Ann K]

If a balloon is drifting at 20km/h, and a crowd reports it moving at "unbelievable speeds" (faster than the Cessnas chasing it), is that still just "misperception"?

There were never any pilots reporting anything unusual, so we don't even know if there WERE any planes chasing it. Therefore the "faster than the Cessnas" is an uncorroborated comment. Need I point out that "unbelievable" speeds are, simply, unbelievable?

Once again, as seen at the Ariel school, the witnesses spoke with each other before their statements were taken, and their stories varied over the years. I was unable to find the number of students who claimed to have seen the thing, but there were certainly many who did not.

 

[Mendel]

There were never any pilots reporting anything unusual, so we don't even know if there WERE any planes chasing it. T

If there were planes, we know that from their position, being closer, it didn't look unusual.

 

[John J.]

Therefore, 'mass hallucination' (in the sense of a crowd fabricating an object where none exists) is highly unlikely compared to misidentification. We must assume they saw something physical.

Hi @Pumpkin_ace, welcome!

You're probably right that specific hallucinations, in the literal sense of that word, cannot be shared.
Narratives/ descriptions can be shared, though. Witnesses of an event may well talk to each other.

One of the remarkable things about the Ariel Primary School accounts (over 60 children) from Zimbabwe, 1994 is how varied the descriptions (and drawings) of aliens were- but within groups of friends, the resemblance of the drawings is striking: Two girl's drawings of slender long-haired figures wearing polka-dot clothes contrast with some of the boy's short, large-headed bald aliens in black clothing "like diving suits". It is likely some of the children talked about what they saw, or thought they saw, with their friends.
Threads The Ariel School, Zimbabwe UFO sighting - has it ever been debunked?
and Ariel School UFO - glinting reflections through vegetation how to visualise?

We must assume they saw something physical.

It makes sense to consider what might have been seen, but there is a precedent for very large numbers of people reporting seeing strange phenomena when it seems very unlikely that there was anything unusual to be seen.

"The Miracle of the Sun" (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun) in Fatima, Portugal in 1917 was apparently witnessed by thousands of people. A large crowd gathered to witness a miracle prophesised by three children. Many saw the Sun zig-zag in the sky, "dance", radiate bright colours, zoom toward the Earth (accounts vary) and were deeply affected. Many others present saw nothing, and cameras present didn't record anything unusual.

The consensus description includes:

• A metallic discoid, not a translucent balloon payload.
• A "cat and mouse" behavior with light aircraft (hovering, then accelerating away).
• Trace Evidence: The circle of flattened/scorched grass observed by witnesses immediately after.

Translucent balloons can appear to be metallic. In 1948 US Air National Guard pilot Captain Thomas Mantell died trying to reach too high an altitude in pursuit of a UFO. He was pursuing a (translucent, polyethylene) Skyhook balloon.

According to former U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, no one at the tower could recall Mantell's description of the object, but "saucer historians have credited him with saying, '...It looks metallic and it's tremendous in size...'"

Wikipedia, Mantell UFO incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantell_UFO_incident

As @JMartJr pointed out, there are several well-known accounts of people (including police officers) "chasing" Venus in their cars and claiming it hovered, briefly landed, sped away, acted as if aware of their presence etc.

An area of flattened or scorched grass is perhaps not in itself evidence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft landing, even if it's in the area of a UFO sighting. Note there are no photos of the claimed affected areas.

Students variously described a circle of grass as burnt, "boiled" or pressed down. One student interviewed by a local newspaper described a vague circular area flattened by the wind. Students also reported varying numbers of circles from one to three. On 9 April 1966, air force personnel and UFO enthusiasts visited the field but reported nothing of interest.

Wikipedia, Westall UFO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westall_UFO

The claim about aircraft might be open to question,

The Age (Australia) 7th April 1966 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=cxZVAAAAIBAJ&pg=2083,1126946

If we accept that the(or any) object was technological, and displayed performance beyond human capability in a given time (in this case 1966), then deductive reasoning leaves NHI as the only viable explanation.

The "accept" and "and" have to do a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence!

Even if we take the accounts of light aircraft being present as accurate (when evidence might suggest otherwise) an aircraft flying much faster than a (for example) Cessna 172 and capable of hovering wasn't beyond human capability in 1966, the first Hawker Siddeley P.1127 flew in 1960. We know light reflected off aircraft can make them hard to identify or appear as indistinct bright blobs.
It's hugely improbable that a P.1127 or Kestrel (1964 on) or any similar aircraft played any role in the Westall school events (I think we can rule it out completely) but we know those aircraft existed, and had flown, before that time.

 

[MonkeeSage]

Forum member @Charlie Wiser has a series of articles on the Westall case, examining the Project HIBAL balloon hypothesis and RAAF cover up hypothesis, looking at original reporting, witness statements in detail and linking to primary sources. I'm not including this to shut down the discussion here, only because it's a good compilation of primary source material and cleanly lays out the hypotheses and evidence.

This is from the summary page:

For the evidence to back up this brief summary, please read the complete pages on Westall from the start. The PR Disaster hypothesis elaborates on Keith Basterfield's Hibal hypothesis, as well as synthesizing other possibilties.

The PR Disaster hypothesis

THE CASE

• On Apr 6, 1966, one or more UFOs drifted over Westall High School (then a semi-rural outer suburb of Melbourne, Australia) during morning recess. Children watched one "flying saucer" go down behind trees 300 meters away, then apparently shoot up to play cat-and-mouse with several light aircraft before vanishing.
• The children were told not to talk about the "flying saucers" and there are only a handful of contemporaneous accounts. Adult witnesses were warned or threatened to keep quiet.
• This "cold case" was revived in 2010 by the documentary Westall '66, which showcased the testimonies of the witnesses as adults. They are confused about the cover-up and want answers.

A EXPLANATION FOR THE SIGHTINGS

• The first part of the event was most likely a scientific balloon from Project HIBAL (launched from Mildura) that failed to self-destruct at the end of the mission, causing it to stay aloft, drift toward Melbourne, and slowly descend. This is what a Hibal balloon looks like as it moves on the wind. These huge translucent balloons do not resemble weather balloons. They carry a 200-300kg payload of scientific instrumentation which is dropped on a parachute at the end of the mission, located during descent by a chase plane, and retrieved by a waiting ground crew.
• A Hibal was launched the day before the Westall sighting. Its payload may have included classified instrumentation from NASA. The balloon apparently drifted south overnight, was almost certainly spotted 38km north of Westall the next morning, and ended up over the high school. The separate components (balloon, parachute, payload) may be the reason that some witnesses saw more than one UFO. The landing site was possibly near a factory about 1km south of the school where workers saw burn marks (caused by a battery fire) and military personnel clearing the land.
• The second part of the event closely resembles an RAAF training exercise, where aircraft chase a wind sock for target practice. Flight school instructors from Point Cook flying Winjeels (similar to Cessnas) would have been the pilots, directed to carry out the exercise in a new location that morning. The RAAF had a policy to fake UFO investigations to cover for other activities, so this exercise may have been scrambled once it became apparent the balloon was drifting towards a populated area, to distract from what was happening on the ground and create plausible deniability.
• The apparently physics-defying capabilities of the UFO(s) have been embellished over the years. Initial accounts can be explained by the known behaviors of the mundane objects seen.
• Some witnesses did recognize at the time, or later, that what they were seeing was a deflating balloon. They feel their voices are shouted down by the majority who believe they saw flying saucers.

THE COVER-UP

• Witnesses were silenced or ridiculed because the authorities wanted to cover up the PR disaster of a fatally heavy payload that almost landed in a school yard. The landed payload was also dangerous - it could cause ground fires, and contained explosive squibs.
• Had the incident become public, it could have ended Project HIBAL. During that month, Australia and the US were in negotiations to extend the program a further 3 years. Despite a catalogue of near misses unrelated to Westall, the risks appear to have been downplayed. The project was extended.
• For reasons unknown, the cover-up continues to this day - no records have been found of anything unusual happening at Westall either in the RAAF's UFO investigation files or in the Department of Supply's HIBAL files.

CLOSURE
If and when supporting documentation comes to light and the PR Disaster hypothesis (or something like it) is borne out, the witnesses will learn that a 300kg payload almost fell on their tender heads - and yet despite the potentially disastrous risks, Project HIBAL continued dropping its payloads all over Australia for another 15 years.

Source: https://threedollarkit.weebly.com/westall-quickread.html

The full series starts here: https://threedollarkit.weebly.com/westall.html

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

Your post ails from a lack of evidence.

Here's a view most of us will share. Brian Dunning wrote 16 years ago https://skeptoid.com/episodes/208 :

So what can we conclude about the Westall UFO? Not very much. The weather balloon is a likely explanation for the first half of the event, and the drogue is at least one very reasonable possibility for the second half. There's good reason to doubt that many of the story elements, like the military conspiracy and the craft having landed, ever happened at all. The story certainly has no holes in it that can only be filled with extraterrestrial aliens, and indeed no credible reason to suggest anything unusual. "I don't know" does not mean "I do know, and it was a spaceship", so for now, the Westall '66 UFO remains one of many question marks in the books, just not a very bold or especially intriguing one.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westall_UFO#Explanations

Australian newspaper The Age described it at the time as a weather balloon: "Object Perhaps Balloon – An unidentified flying object seen over the Clayton-Moorabbin area yesterday morning might have been a weather balloon. Hundreds of children and a number of teachers at Westall School, Clayton, watched the object during morning break. The Weather Bureau released a balloon at Laverton at 8:30 am and the westerly wind blowing at the time could have moved it into the area where the sighting was reported". The newspaper also said a number of small aeroplanes circled around it. However, a check later showed that no commercial, private or RAAF pilots had reported anything unusual in the area.

The witness accounts of a weather balloon do explain a lot, as they match how witness accounts are distorted in general. On a plane crash, where the pilot basically wiggled the tail off by abusing the rudder, half of the witnesses reported seeing fire and smoke.

And the aircraft bit is also suffering from a large hole in the evidence.

You can, of course, choose to believe the eyewitnesses against these odds, but nobody thinking skeptically will call it "good evidence" for NHI.

If you doubt that, ask yourself if you can prove from the evidence that it wasn't a ghost they saw.

Okay so it's incredible the gulf between how we see this haha.

So firstly you quote this person who says "The weather balloon is a likely explanation for the first half of the event, and the drogue is at least one very reasonable possibility for the second half."

Okay but why?
where is your evidence?

As far as I can see there is nothing that I have said that should require additional evidence. I don't need to evidence the reality that the witness testimony is what it is. I'm simply engaging with that. But you seemingly do not engage with the testimony as if it is evidence.

In fact politely I say your post is infuriating haha. What is humorous to me is the Frankenstein explanation you've come up with though. So a weather balloon that can fly at speeds of 500 km arrive and leave with no wreckage found. Then out of no where there happens to be a Drogue in the same place and same time.

But I feel like this goes back to one of my core points actually. Basically one must determine how to interpret the witness testimony. Do you accept the descriptions or not? Because I'm unclear what exactly your position is there. Because the only data we have is the witness testimony. But you present the only data there is as noise. Because when one does focus solely on the testimony it does not fit balloon at all. So the question really is why exactly do you dismiss the witness testimony?

And how many people are there that 50 years later are still meeting up to talk about an event that lasted 20 minutes for which they all describe as one of if not the most impactful moments of there lives? - like objectively that is unique - and hence the very definition of unusual. Like no curiosity there?

I feel like your argument is almost saying 'Witness testimony is unreliable therefore if someone sees something unusual it's a balloon.'

The crash thing you refer to is also just a false equivalence. A 10 second occurrence isn't the the same as a 20 minute long experience. your conflating misperception with a suggestion that 100s of people spontaneosuly hallucinated entire categories of physics.

"The witness accounts of a weather balloon do explain a lot" No, none of the witnesses claim to have seen a weather balloon.

You asked: Can you prove from the evidence that it wasn't a ghost they saw?"

This is a category error. My argument is based on deductive profiling. Ghost's nominally do not have metallic surfaces or have sizes larger than a car. Balloons do not hover at low altitude then accerlate at speeds in excess of a plane. NHI/unkown tech does fit the profile of a metallic aerial vehicle. Conversely I am guessing this btw. On the other hand you are more conjectural than the most avid of conspiracy theorists(okay i'm exaggerating but you get the point.) You assert nonsenisaccal explanations as truth and then accuse me of lacking evidence without specifying what evidence is absent.

In terms of the Laverton Balloon.
If the wind was blowing at 10 km/h (required to get it there), the balloon would have drifted over 3 km during the 20-minute sighting. It would not appear to "hover"; it would drift steadily past. I mean am I crazy here haha - the balloon claim doesn't make contact with reality at all.

So okay that was a bit of a an all over the place response but here is my key point:

Either we engage with this event on a basis that takes the witness testimony at face value or we invalidate the witnesses. If you think the testimony is invalid then I think you should argue why that is. If you do take the testimony as presented then you must not offer explanations which clearly defy these descriptions on very basic levels.

Also i'm not really saying it's good evidence. But that's like also a catch 22 argument. It presumes the scope of sceinific metholodgy is universal. An I mean the court system depends on witness evidence so it's kind of strange to pretend like it is so fallible as to suggest that one should just default dismiss it. And again I did say I was engagign this purely on a 'if I had to guess level'. I mean rougue waves didn't have good evidence for a long time I guess. Anyway. Anyway I dk sorry for overly meandering reply.

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

Hi! The reason I really dislike hese cases where we have witness reports and pretty much no supporting evidence is that they really cannot be usefully analyzed.

So explanations of the case are always going to be speculative, and depend heavily on how much of what was reported each of us somewhat arbitrarily decides to believe.

As is to be expected, there are contradictions in what witnesses report ... this would be expected whatever they saw because people notice different things, interpret what they notice differently and remember things differently, both initially and as time passes, memories morph in our heads, and as feedback from other witnesses, researchers or just interested folks who discuss it with the witness add and subtract details from/to the story.

This does not mean the witnesses are lying, it means they are the proud owner/operators of human brains, and that is the way our brains work.

As to likelihood of what it might be, I'd agree that IF you assume the reported details that don't match a balloon well are accurate and reflect reality, then at first pass NHI would possibly be more likely than a balloon. BUT... to me, things that are known to exist get a lot of "bonus points" over things that have not been shown to exist. We know balloons exist and are frequently flying around in our atmosphere. We do not know if alien life exists (though we debate the likelihood frequently), if life exists elsewhere we have no idea if any of it is intelligent, if so we have no idea if any of it has the ability to travel between stars, if so we do not know if any of it has ever come here.

We also know that humans have frequently witnessed things like re-entering space junk and reported it as a large cigar shaped UFO with rows of port-holes. We know people have seen the planet Venus and chased it in their cars, believing that it was moving away from them (but staying in sight) and stopping to hover when they stopped, and sometimes reversing course to chase the car when they gave up the chase and drove back towards where the started. All that is to say, we KNOW that mundane things can generate extraordinary reports.

Because of all that, I would not personally rank these cases that lack supporting evidence as being of much use at all in trying to make the case that NHI are flying around here on Earth.

Sorry for the extreme long windedness, I'm prone to that! And I am not telling you what or how you should think, just explain what I think and why.

PS: Can't cite the space junk and Venus cases at the moment, will have to get home and dig out the physical books they are in!

Thanks for the cogently written and clear response.

"they really cannot be usefully analyzed."

Agreed. I am engaging with this in a purely conjectural way. While some might say that is pointless, I don't think we should ignore the logical inferences that can—and therefore potentially should?—be made from the data we do have.

"things that are known to exist get a lot of "bonus points" over things that have not been shown to exist."

I understand the rationale of your point here. However, the historical record shows that things we didn't know existed can still exist. For example, we didn't know the Coelacanth existed until a fisherman caught one. It is not prohibited by the laws of physics for someone to witness something that is currently unproven or unknown to science.

"we KNOW that mundane things can generate extraordinary reports."

Agreed. But if hundreds of witnesses report seeing something they have never seen before, on balance, doesn't it make sense to assume they probably did see something unique? If we assume that, we should then logically engage with their actual descriptions of what they saw which would thusly be A) They are misidentifying a known object (Balloon) but failing to recognize it? or B) They are correctly describing an unknown object? Or am I stepping down the wrong logical path there?

On your final point: Regardless of the ultimate cause, one cannot refute the abnormality of the reaction and the clearly non-prosaic nature of this event. It should still present a curiosity.

Because, logicaly, we are left with two options:

They saw non-human technology.

They are an example of an extremely strange, as-yet-unexplained phenomenon of a nature unknown (psychological? chemical? etc).

I reiterate this because if the object was actually there as described, then non-human intelligence remains the most likely answer. If it wasn't infact 'there' as described, then we are looking at a psychological event that defies our current understanding of how crowds work. Or we are to assume that 100s of people cannot tell the difference something that is a balloon and something that is not a balloon in circumstance free from any influences that would modify human perceptive abilities(as Westall) Either way, it is an anomaly worth discussing regardless if evidence of NHI or not.


Okay I feel like my response was extremely longwinded too so sorry for that haha. Hope my points make sense. Your points did make sense.

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

People who misjudge the size of the object also misjudge the distance. People who misjudge the distance misjudge the speed.
Small and slow and near looks the same as big and fast and far away.

With a limit. The craft as they say effectively left the ground 'instantaneously' so either we accept that it was very fast like they say or we must search for a way to explain how they could possibly misperceive this. I feel like you are not really taking the witness testimony as it has been stated.

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

There were never any pilots reporting anything unusual, so we don't even know if there WERE any planes chasing it. Therefore the "faster than the Cessnas" is an uncorroborated comment. Need I point out that "unbelievable" speeds are, simply, unbelievable?

Once again, as seen at the Ariel school, the witnesses spoke with each other before their statements were taken, and their stories varied over the years. I was unable to find the number of students who claimed to have seen the thing, but there were certainly many who did not.

Yeah I don't know why I sued that analogy. I simply meant to say that the witnesses who saw it take of it consensually attest it to be travelling extremely fast I think. The word unbelievable in this context I presume is not denoting disbelief but a specification of the extreme speed supposedly seen.

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

Yeah I don't know why I sued that analogy. I simply meant to say that the witnesses who saw it take of it consensually attest it to be travelling extremely fast I think. The word unbelievable in this context I presume is not denoting disbelief but a specification of the extreme speed supposedly seen.

Agree it's patchy information though. But not so patchy that one can't safely conclude something weird might have happened.

 

[kotare]

hi, interesting case, can't offer much on mass hallucinations, but a quick google shows me lil ol New Zealand releases 6 weather balloons (radiosondes) a day
https://www.metvuw.com/upperair/
there must be hundreds of them a day worldwide (couldnt easily find a number) and yet the only one ive ever actually seen was a student art project (and quite impressive it was too) so a relatively common object that i suspect few people are really familiar with?

 

[Charlie Wiser]

Overwhelmingly the testimonies align - including from one person who was alone and working on a farm situated next to the school.

This is incorrect. The worker on the farm (Paul Smith) saw something entirely different:

"I've always felt uncomfortable because my description is so totally different from what the school kids saw."

Paul Smith, 2017 VUFOA conference [timestamped link - go back a few minutes to hear his entire testimony

His sighting closely matches a crashing/crashed Hibal balloon caught in the trees at the Grange.

I would say that I do get a slight sense of caution when I hear the discrepancies between how many 'craft' there were. But I also think such discrepancies do not really warrant ignoring the overall consensus or that they are without reasonable explanations.

But also - the hill that I will die on is the one that refutes the the balloon theory. Not because I want to die on this hill but because it seems so clearly invalid-

The first half of the sighting very closely matches a deflating Hibal balloon.

The second half of the sighting - which is all that teacher Andrew Greenwood saw - the cat & mouse chase and strange movements - matches an Air Force training exercise where planes chase a target drogue.

 

[Charlie Wiser]

the profile of the witness descriptions were formed consensually in the moments directly following the event.

Your assertion is not supported by any evidence. We only have four contemporaneous testimonies:

• Andrew Greenwood (science teacher) (interviewed in the paper and a year later by James McDonald)
• Marilyn Eastwood (now Smith) (interviewed in the paper)
• Joy Tigue (now Clarke) (filed a report with VUFAS)
• a student article in the primary school paper (anonymous author Jeff H claiming to be a witness)

If you're referring to the multiple adult witnesses who have been telling their story since the mid-2000s, this is decades later and stems initially from Shane Ryan's Yahoo Group (now a Facebook page) where all the testimony was available to everyone as it dribbled in over the years.

This consensus emerged from the event itself, not from the aftermath.

In Shane's initial publishing of the testimonies in the Yahoo Group, there were a huge number of discrepancies in both the sighting and the events following (arrival of the military etc.). What you'll find in reportage since 2010 (when Shane's doco Westall '66 came out) is summaries of the event as if there is a consensus. You need to look at individual testimonies to realize there was not, at first.

In tracking adult witness testimonies since the Yahoo Group, we see details changing to align with each other as well as some details being dropped because they weren't corroborated by others. Here's witness Joy Tigue (now Clarke) remarking on it (interestingly, she herself later fell victim to it):

Why do so many people carry other people's memories, stories, perceived facts about the events as if they were almost their own?

Source: Joy Tigue in Shane's Westall Yahoo Group, Apr 17, 2006.

• Trace Evidence: The circle of flattened/scorched grass observed by witnesses immediately after.

The circle evidence is extremely tenuous. Andrew Greenwood couldn't find any circles:

There were [reports] of course from the several groups of the children later on, that they'd seen one of these typical nests, but I didn't see one myself. It would be the perfect area to see one in - lots of long grass. But I didn't see one myself, although I looked around for quite a while.

Source: via McDonald, 1967

VUFOS investigator Judith Magee visited the day after and attributed the circles to strong winds:

She said she and two other members of the society last Friday went to the scene of the sighting, and discovered "a couple of circular patches where the grass had been flattened."
These could have been formed by an object landing or taking off.
However, Mrs Magee said strong winds had been blowing during the week, and these could have caused the grass to be flattened.

Source: Dandenong Journal, Apr 14, 1966 archived here.

She took photos of these circles - nothing was burned, the circles aren't perfect, and the grass is flattened not twisted in amazing ways. (The concept of perfect circles with grass stems twisted or burned emerged later, probably influenced by the descriptions of crop circles along with the standard idea of what a UFO landing site looks like.)

[Source: Magee, J. (1970, Jul). 'Nests' and 'landing pads' in Australian Flying Saucer Review No. 2. VUFORS.]

Not too impressive, are they. The child is Joy Tigue, a primary witness who filed a report, and this was the best circle she could present.

From the primary school article by Jeff H - note there's no mention of intricately twisted grass stems or burning:

After school two friends and I went to the field where the object had descended. [He doesn't specify if it was the Grange.] ... We waded through the waist-high grass making for a gap in it. Suddenly were there. We found ourselves standing in a spot where the grass had been utterly crushed against the earth. It was an area of about 25-30 feet in diameter.

Source: Clayton Calendar (Term 1, 1966). Eyewitness account of a flying saucer [Newsletter of former Clayton Primary School]. Archived here.

Shane was told of circles in many different locations: Researcher George Simpson listed 10 locations (Westall Yahoo Group, 2007) but Shane narrowed it down to "between 3 and 5" which means he ignored some reports. (Thus he tacitly admits that any testimony can be ignored as "bad memory" if the person collecting the reports decides to ignore it. This in turn creates the illusion of a consensus when summary articles are written up.)

But only one UFO was reported to have landed (setting aside Victor Zakry's bizarre testimony). One UFO could not have made many circles. Therefore, it seems likely these circles weren't made by the UFO, but that they were common features of the semi-rural landscape.

My issue is that the HIBAL theory requires us to believe that hundreds of witnesses didn't just misidentify a balloon, but collectively hallucinated a set of physics (rapid acceleration, defying wind direction) that were completely absent. Is there a limit to how far a crowd can mistake one thing for another?

When reconstructing the timeline, it becomes clear that the second part of the sighting was something entirely different from the first. See my post above.

 

[Scaramanga]

I generally agree with the skeptical consensus on most UFO cases. I accept that human memory is fallible and that 'mass psychosis' and mass hysteria are real. However, and this isn't the primary purpose of this post but - I also submit that spontaneous group hallucination is both different and indeed not something that any peer-reviewed scientific paper has suggested to be a real. Therefore, 'mass hallucination' (in the sense of a crowd fabricating an object where none exists) is highly unlikely compared to misidentification.

I'd ask.....why do people ONLY ever spontaneously mass hallucinate UFOs or ghosts ? Why don't 200 people driving down the motorway ever spontaneously hallucinate a giant marshmallow swallowing half of Denver ? Why don't they ever all hallucinate a service station where there's just tumbleweed and desert ? Why don't people all hallucinate a completely different ending to Game Of Thrones ? Why's it always those damned aliens ?

Of course, the other explanation is that 'mass hallucination' is just a convenient load of nonsense.

 

[Mauro]

I'd ask.....why do people ONLY ever spontaneously mass hallucinate UFOs or ghosts ?

They don't. Ie. @John J. already referenced the Fatima 'miracle of the sun'. What's hallucinated depends on the context, and the zeitgeist.

 

[Scaramanga]

A metallic discoid, not a translucent balloon payload.

My understanding of the story is that one of the kids got close enough to briefly get on the craft. I am sure I saw that claim in one of the documentaries on the matter. Gonna have to look that up and find the relevant bit.

 

[Scaramanga]

They don't. Ie. @John J. already referenced the Fatima 'miracle of the sun'. What's hallucinated depends on the context.

You can't really compare with Fatima. That was an event where everyone was already religiously primed. What's more...it is quite possible that the witnesses did see precisely what they claimed to see, but that it was a phenomenon known as a 'crown flash'....which is quite rare but there are videos of it.


Source: https://youtu.be/zGKC1hZQSog


I can see how an extreme case of this might lead to claims of 'the sun moving'. And sure enough, the rain had stopped and the sun came out just as the Fatima 'miracle' happened.

 

[Ann K]

They don't. Ie. @John J. already referenced the Fatima 'miracle of the sun'. What's hallucinated depends on the context, and the zeitgeist.

I'll note that the "miracle of Fatima", viewers were not gathered there randomly. They were there because they had been told what to expect. (They had also been primed by their religious experiences to believe in miracles.) Between previous expectations and post-event discussions, there are plenty of reasons to suggest that "mass hallucinations" don't arise spontaneously, but are triggered.

Edit to add: the triggering mechanisms might be entirely benign and commonplace. I've previously described a road I traveled regularly, where a large brown mailbox and a smaller white mailbox were positioned such that I "saw" a cow about to step through the shrubbery into the road every time I passed. The illusion remained strong, no matter how many times I'd seen it before.

 

[Ann K]

Why don't 200 people driving down the motorway ever spontaneously hallucinate a giant marshmallow swallowing half of Denver ?

I've seen (and eventually I've been in) enormous dust storms rolling in from the desert. "A giant marshmallow swallowing half the Organ mountains" is entirely within the realm of events which might trigger such a hallucination.

 

[John J.]

I'd ask.....why do people ONLY ever spontaneously mass hallucinate UFOs or ghosts ?

Of course, the other explanation is that 'mass hallucination' is just a convenient load of nonsense.

Agreed, in the sense that hallucinations cannot be shared. By definition they are subjective, and not reports of something that is objectively there. Misidentifications are not hallucinations. Groups of people can make the same misidentification.
Groups of witnesses to the same event sometimes appear to reach a consensus account of what happened (not necessarily deliberately).

Witnesses might talk to each other about what they have seen. This can effect what some later recall seeing, or what they believe they saw.
The Asch conformity experiment of 1954 demonstrates that a significant proportion of people will, in laboratory conditions, give incorrect estimates of the relative lengths of clearly visible lines if they hear a majority of others (unbeknownst to them stooges of the researcher) give the same incorrect reply.
"Asch conformity experiments", EBSCO website https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/asch-conformity-experiments,
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

The example of Fatima was given because the witnesses believed they saw something significant (indeed miraculous) when it seems very unlikely there was anything unusual to be seen. There is no evidence of unusual weather at Fatima, yet thousands believed they saw something extraordinary (not just unusual, vaguely interesting or notable) on that one day, not on any other days with similar weather.
@Scaramanga and @Ann K are almost certainly right that priming, faith and expectations played an enormous role amongst those who claimed to see something miraculous, these are factors that the "positive" witnesses might have had in common- they were socially shared.
Some people present might have felt obliged to conform to the narrative that something miraculous was seen (conjecture, though).

Whether there was anything "out there" to be seen at Ariel Primary school is (I think) undetermined. But it is possible that the coincidental class discussion about UFOs, and the equally coincidental aerial fireball seen over Zimbabwe in the preceding days, had some influence on the children. It seems likely that the (very) different descriptions of aliens correlates with different groups of friends; what were taken to be objective depictions of aliens by UFO enthusiasts are perhaps more likely to be the result of the imaginations and shared chatter (perhaps shared experiences of entertainment/ media) of groups of children.

There is no evidence that we know of of "priming" amongst the students of Westall school, though most would probably have been familiar with the idea of UFOs as alien spacecraft. Many social/ cultural influences on Australian children (particularly in cities like Melbourne) wouldn't be massively different to those found in the USA or UK; there had been a 1964-1965 children's TV series about visiting aliens (The Stranger, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Australian_TV_series)).

@Charlie Wiser ( post #12, post #13) comments on accounts of the Westall sighting changing over time and becoming aligned, coalescing around the UFO/ extraordinary events narrative. More prosaic accounts by witnesses become ignored by those pushing the narrative of an extraordinary event.

 

[Ann K]

More prosaic accounts by witnesses become ignored by those pushing the narrative of an extraordinary event.

Well ..."I didn't see anything" doesn't sell newspapers.

 

[Mendel]

As far as I can see there is nothing that I have said that should require additional evidence. I don't need to evidence the reality that the witness testimony is what it is. I'm simply engaging with that. But you seemingly do not engage with the testimony as if it is evidence.

In fact politely I say your post is infuriating haha. What is humorous to me is the Frankenstein explanation you've come up with though. So a weather balloon that can fly at speeds of 500 km arrive and leave with no wreckage found. Then out of no where there happens to be a Drogue in the same place and same time.

You have not quoted any witness testimony in your thread starter post. All you have delivered to this thread are paraphrases. Read https://www.metabunk.org/threads/posting-guidelines.2064/ to understand that Metabunk does not operate like that. I'm not going to engage with you on something that is not in the thread.

Also, I have not come up with any explanations. Your thread starter question was literally, "What are the views held by skeptics on the Westall school case?" Brian Dunning is a respected Skeptic, he has written an article on this case which I linked, if you want to engage with it, quote from the article and adress what he says there. @ mention him and he might even respond, but it's been 16 years, and maybe not very interesting to him today.

I've also referenced Wikipedia, and I apologize for not having referenced Charlie, which I should have but forgot.

That's 3 strong arguments, but you choose to instead believe cherry-picked witness statements, which means there's very little to gain from any further exchange, especially when large parts of it don't relate to any actual evidence.
I'm not pivoting to What happened at Westall? without evidence. Less so because we already have good explanations you could choose to engage with.

With a limit. The craft as they say effectively left the ground 'instantaneously' so either we accept that it was very fast like they say or we must search for a way to explain how they could possibly misperceive this. I feel like you are not really taking the witness testimony as it has been stated.

We've encountered many instances of "instantaneous acceleration" for mundane phenomena, usually of the sort "I looked away for a moment, and then it was gone" or "the light got smaller and went out" or "the camera jerked". Or even "the aircraft that was flying towards/away from me flew a 90⁰ turn". It's not an uncommon misperception at all. My take is that either it wasn't very fast like they say, or we must search for a way this could physically happen. You are of course entitled to your take, but I like mine better because both branches have precedent.

 

[John J.]

In terms of the Laverton Balloon.
If the wind was blowing at 10 km/h (required to get it there), the balloon would have drifted over 3 km during the 20-minute sighting. It would not appear to "hover"; it would drift steadily past. I mean am I crazy here haha - the balloon claim doesn't make contact with reality at all.

Windspeed changes. It might have been higher early on, but progressively lessening. Or it might have been a bit blustery, gusts at times but not others.

 

[Charlie Wiser]

My understanding of the story is that one of the kids got close enough to briefly get on the craft. I am sure I saw that claim in one of the documentaries on the matter. Gonna have to look that up and find the relevant bit.

We have one witness Terry who says she saw the landed craft in the Grange and got close enough to feel its heat. (Again I'm ignoring Victor who claims he along with many other witnesses saw two craft for two hours alongside the school - nobody else corroborates this and his timing doesn't work.)

Terry's testimony in terms of what she saw, what she did, what the UFO did, and who else was there, has changed drastically over the years in ways that bad memory can't account for. And there's no evidence she told any other students at the time. Nobody corroborates it, including another student Tanya whom Terry claims was present at the Grange in varying states of hysteria or consciousness.

I don't think it's worth going into detail for discussion here, but (at the risk of self-promotion) I've collected her stories over the years and compared them here (scroll down to "Case study: Feeling the heat") with quotes and linked sources. As an example of how her story got more and more amazing, she initially told Shane Ryan (reported in Yahoo Groups in 2007, and in his doco 2010) that the UFO was rising up in the air and overhead when she arrived at the Grange, but by 2016 the UFO was landed in front of her for a few minutes before taking off (so she had time to approach and feel its heat).

 

[JMartJr]

Windspeed changes. It might have been higher early on, but progressively lessening. Or it might have been a bit blustery, gusts at times but not others.

Direction can also change. A balloon blowing towards the observer can seem to hover, as these planes do -- the planes are moving faster than a balloon!


Source: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NzfMmuHnvi4?feature=share

 

[Ann K]

A balloon can also get snagged by a tree or something. If there's a trailing line of anything, it could even have been entangled in long grass, perhaps causing a mashed-down space in the grass before it got free.

(This is pure speculation on my part! I don't know the specifics of either terrain or balloon.)

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

This is incorrect. The worker on the farm (Paul Smith) saw something entirely different:

"I've always felt uncomfortable because my description is so totally different from what the school kids saw."

Paul Smith, 2017 VUFOA conference [timestamped link - go back a few minutes to hear his entire testimony

His sighting closely matches a crashing/crashed Hibal balloon caught in the trees at the Grange.


The first half of the sighting very closely matches a deflating Hibal balloon.

The second half of the sighting - which is all that teacher Andrew Greenwood saw - the cat & mouse chase and strange movements - matches an Air Force training exercise where planes chase a target drogue.

Thanks for this link and time stamping it - I appreciate it!

And you are right to point this out. He indeed does describe something that no one else has. He describes seeing an aerial like object(in that way it's similar) - as transforming from a solid object into "light and a rainbow," appearing to shimmer and dissolve into a "torch of light" rather than remaining a fixed, solid machine.

He himself is adamant it wasn't a balloon and I think his description contains almost no correlation with the profile of a balloon. I mean the changing colors and the fact that it was moving through trees which he said would have kind of snagged a balloon refute the notion that what he describes is akin to a balloon.

When he says the visuals are completely different he isn't implying that therefore the objects themselves are not connected. One can have different visuals of the same thing. I assume that he was witnessing the same thing as it doesn't really make sense to conclude that two totally unique aerial phenomonenme happen to reoccurring at essentially the same time and location. Foundationally the testimony is similar(aka metallic craft moving at same altitude(relatively I think) etc) so I do think his statement is unintentionally misleading in a way.

He watched it descend into the pine trees at "The Grange," which is exactly where the students saw it land/hover. the fact they both saw it being chased by the same planes into the same patch of trees at the same time makes it virtually certain it was the same object - just perceived or seen behaving with different attributes.

Consider the analogy of a truck: from one side it has a logo, from the other it is blank. If that truck then turns on a siren or opens its doors, it displays shifting behaviors that might make it look like a different vehicle depending on when or where you see it. Yet, it remains the same truck regardless of the perspective or state it is seen in. We can potentially guess this because the vehicle may possesses consistent features that persist regardless of perspective and state. i.e wheel size or the fact that it remains a truck in and of it's self. But if those markers also correlate with with specific timing and geographic locations then we can elevate the conclusion that it is the same truck to near certainty. If one person sees this hypothetical truck in one location and another sees it moments later just 50 meters up the road, with the same wheels and doors or whatever the likelihood of it being two separate objects becomes highly implausible - even if only one of them had seen the side with logo on it. I started writing this analogy and am not sure how useful it is tbh but anyway haha. Those are my thoughts.

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

For some reason I can't reply directly to your 2nd post @

Charlie Wiser​

But I feel you do have a strong point about memory contamination. And I think it's true to say that changes in testimony like the grass did occur. But the fundamentals the saucer shape remain consistent. I feel you are focusing on the smaller differences over time as opposed to much more fundamentally similar consistencies?

 

[Pumpkin_ace]

For some reason when I click reply to the posts above it is now saying
Oops! We ran into some problems.
The requested page could not be found.
I want to reply but dk why this is now happening? :/

 

[JMartJr]

And I think it's true to say that changes in testimony like the grass did occur. But the fundamentals the saucer shape remain consistent.

A saucer shaped UFO is so deeply ingrained in the culture, this seems unremarkable. Particularly in older UFOlogy, before the modern fixation on orbs and tick tacks...

 

[FatPhil]

A saucer shaped UFO is so deeply ingrained in the culture, this seems unremarkable. Particularly in older UFOlogy, before the modern fixation on orbs and tick tacks...

As I compose this post in a building dating back to the early fifteen-hundreds, I think your "deeply ingrained in the culture" for something that's not even a hundred years old seems a bit of a stretch, a lot of a stretch. Heck, it's probably more modern than fancy things like sliced bread and electric guitar.

 

[Charlie Wiser]

And you are right to point this out. He indeed does describe something that no one else has. He describes seeing an aerial like object(in that way it's similar) - as transforming from a solid object into "light and a rainbow," appearing to shimmer and dissolve into a "torch of light" rather than remaining a fixed, solid machine.

He himself is adamant it wasn't a balloon and I think his description contains almost no correlation with the profile of a balloon. I mean the changing colors and the fact that it was moving through trees which he said would have kind of snagged a balloon refute the notion that what he describes is akin to a balloon.

It is extremely likely he (and the other witnesses) had no idea what deflating Hibal looks like, so their assertion it wasn't a balloon isn't relevant. They repeatedly say today that it wasn't a weather balloon, which is a strawman (for the Hibal hypothesis anyway).

What he describes seems very like a Hibal in the sunlight, given it's made of semi-transparent material.

There was an opening between the pine trees in the Grange and the land which was a lot lower, the trees were a lot lower over there, and there was an opening. And it was just sitting there about 20 feet above the ground, not far at all... and it went into the pine trees. [as he's talking, he wafts his hands gently to demonstrate] But the trees didn't move. It wasn't a solid object going through there. It was some sort of residue or gas that went into the trees. There was nothing left of it.

Paul Smith, 2017 VUFOA conference

It's not really clear what he means and nobody asked follow-up questions to clarify, but it seems to me he's saying it went into the aforementioned gap between the trees.

Other evidence suggests it did not land in the Grange at all (Terry's testimony aside, the other girls who ran to the Grange didn't see it) but in the field behind it where the Army was later seen and the grass was burned. Crashing Hibals can set the grass alight if the battery catches fire. [Thorn, S. (2021). Project Hibal. - he is a technician who worked on the Hibal project at Mildura during this timeframe and wrote a memoir] This field is visible from the offices to the southeast of the school/Grange, and Shane Ryan has witnesses who saw activity there.

Which would mean that from Paul's perspective, he saw the object go down behind the Grange, not into it.

When he says the visuals are completely different he isn't implying that therefore the objects themselves are not connected.

I didn't imply that either. I was refuting your claim that "Overwhelmingly the testimonies align." The fact is that the testimonies aren't the same, yet they are all describing the same event. Logically, what this tells us is that some testimonies are not accurate (a normal aspect of human perception and psychology). That's why I tend to emphasize the contemporaneous accounts over the ones decades later.

Foundationally the testimony is similar(aka metallic craft moving at same altitude

No, Paul did not say it was metallic and he doesn't describe it darting around high in the sky or floating over the school. "It was just sitting there about 20 feet above the ground".

(relatively I think) etc) so I do think his statement is unintentionally misleading in a way.

Any single testimony could be unintentionally misleading. What's different about Paul is that he was a not in the playground with the excited/hysterical kids. He was uninfluenced by peer pressure. He didn't jump to the conclusion that it was a flying saucer. He just describes what he saw. I think his testimony is likely to be more accurate, although there's no way to know at this stage.

He watched it descend into the pine trees at "The Grange," which is exactly where the students saw it land/hover. the fact they both saw it being chased by the same planes into the same patch of trees at the same time makes it virtually certain it was the same object - just perceived or seen behaving with different attributes.

No, it was not chased by planes into a patch of trees. You have the timeline wrong. The "flying saucer" floated over the school and went down behind the pines. Then the second part of the sighting began with the planes. Greenwood came out (at recess) and a "beam of light" (his description) was pointed out to him high in the sky. It darted around, appearing to defy physics, playing "cat and mouse" with the planes until it vanished.

 

[Charlie Wiser]

For some reason I can't reply directly to your 2nd post @

Charlie Wiser​

But I feel you do have a strong point about memory contamination. And I think it's true to say that changes in testimony like the grass did occur. But the fundamentals the saucer shape remain consistent. I feel you are focusing on the smaller differences over time as opposed to much more fundamentally similar consistencies?

Unless you quote the parts of my post you're referring to, your general assertion here can't be properly addresssed.

The "saucer shape" is accounted for by a deflating Hibal. The later "beam of light" high with the planes in the sky is accounted by a target drogue training exercise.

As an example of "focusing on the smaller differences" - relating to the circles as an example: witnesses do describe different locations and different qualities to the circles. But I showed there's no evidence for anything unusual regarding the circles that can't be accounted for by contaminated recall. If I didn't focus on these smaller differences, you could still plausibly assert that the circles are evidence that a UFO landed, right? But they're not.

 

[JMartJr]

As I compose this post in a building dating back to the early fifteen-hundreds, I think your "deeply ingrained in the culture" for something that's not even a hundred years old seems a bit of a stretch, a lot of a stretch. Heck, it's probably more modern than fancy things like sliced bread and electric guitar.

We applying "depth" to different axes here, I think! Another way I'd phrase it would be "at the time of the sighting, UFO/Alien Ships were connected with the idea of being saucer/disk shaped was a widely held meme across the culture(s). UFO =ed Flying Saucer in the culture at that time,.

 

[John J.]

But I feel you do have a strong point about memory contamination. And I think it's true to say that changes in testimony like the grass did occur. But the fundamentals the saucer shape remain consistent. I feel you [@Charlie Wiser] are focusing on the smaller differences over time as opposed to much more fundamentally similar consistencies?

Please check out @Charlie Wiser's work on the Westall school sighting, Three Dollar Kit website, particularly
'I Know What I Saw (Part 1) "Sorry to burst your balloon"', https://threedollarkit.weebly.com/westall-event-pt1.html.

There are several eyewitness accounts from people who say they saw a balloon, and one account of possible debris from a shredded balloon;
Rob N.:

a bit overwhelming, never seen anything like it, but was definitely floating in wind, not under own power... WAS NOT A BALLOON shape I saw, was sheets of shiny material... Everyone knew it was rubbish blowing around until someone yelled, flying saucer. Then mass hysteria took over."

I doubt true "mass hysteria" occurred, but maybe some sort of social contagion played a role, as it might have done at Ariel school. In passing,

If it wasn't infact 'there' as described, then we are looking at a psychological event that defies our current understanding of how crowds work.

(My emphasis).
Psychologists/ social scientists have known people sometimes behave differently- and irrationally- when part of a group or crowd since at least Gastave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895 (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popular_Mind):

n the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others".

Not all the witnesses at Westall school claimed to have seen something unearthly, as @Charlie Wiser demonstrates.
Some clearly say they saw a balloon. We know Hibal ballons were in use, launched from Mildura, around this time, and some drifted further than the distance from Mildura to the school in Melbourne.
The accounts of witnesses who saw a balloon are (it seems to me- so I guess anecdotally) rarely mentioned by UFO enthusiasts, but I suspect they still count them as witnesses when talking about the numbers involved.