The Westall school sighting

At about 11 a.m. on 6 April 1966, students at Westall High School in Melbourne's south-east poured out of class to watch a silver-grey object — described as a cup turned over a saucer — cross the school grounds at low altitude, descend out of sight toward the Grange Reserve, and then climb away at speed, shadowed by several light aircraft. Estimates put more than two hundred students and teachers on the oval. Some who reached the reserve described a flattened circle in the grass.

What followed has drawn as much attention as the object: witnesses describe personnel arriving quickly, the science teacher's photographs being confiscated, and the headmaster instructing the school not to speak of it. The Dandenong Journal put the sighting on its front page twice, complaining that the Air Force and the Department of Civil Aviation professed no knowledge of the aircraft or the object.

Half a century of searches — by researchers and by the witnesses themselves, many of whom reunited for Rosie Jones' 2010 documentary — has produced no RAAF or DCA file on the event, in an era when the RAAF logged unusual aerial sightings as routine. Australia's largest mass daylight sighting therefore rests on its witnesses and its contemporaneous press, with the official record contributing only a silence that no search has explained.