The Valentich disappearance

On the evening of 21 October 1978, twenty-year-old Frederick Valentich flew a Cessna 182L from Moorabbin toward King Island. At 7:06 p.m. he asked Melbourne Flight Service whether any known traffic was below five thousand feet; there was none. Over the next six minutes, in a transcript preserved in the accident file, he described a large aircraft with four bright landing lights passing above him, orbiting him, shining at him — 'it seems to me that he's playing some sort of game' — then: 'it is hovering, and it's not an aircraft.' His final transmission was cut by seventeen seconds of a sound the investigation described as metallic scraping. Nothing was heard again.

A four-day air and sea search found no trace. The Department of Transport's Aircraft Accident Investigation Summary Report, issued in May 1982, recorded that the reason for the disappearance could not be determined. Five years later an engine cowl flap consistent with the Cessna's serial range washed up near Flinders Island; the aircraft itself has never been found.

Explanations on the record run from disorientation under a night horizon — the investigation's implicit favorite — to a staged disappearance, to the object his own voice described. The transcript, the empty traffic picture, and the undetermined finding are the documents; the archive holds them in that order.