Colin Kelly was a year 7 schoolboy kicking a football on the oval in Melbourne’s south-east in 1966 when something in the sky caught his eye – and changed how he looked at the world forever.
Kelly, now 71, was one of about a dozen former students of Westall High School in Clayton South who met on Saturday – the anniversary of that fateful day – to commemorate the event they cannot explain.
Witnesses of the of 1966 Westall UFO sighting.Credit: Joe Armao
The group say they are among hundreds who witnessed a UFO or multiple UFOs fly above the school on April 6, before landing in the nearby Grange Reserve.
Kelly, who was outside for a PE class, said he heard the object before he saw it. Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw three round aircraft – the largest about eight-metres across – hovering above the power lines some 200 metres away.
“Back in those days, we called them flying saucers,” he said. “It was only about 30 of us out on the oval and we’re all just looking around and going, ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’”
How The Age covered the Westall UFO sighting in 1966.
After the recess bell rang, Kelly says hundreds of students ran outside to witness the unidentified objects land in the nearby reserve – the location of the group’s meet-up on Saturday.
The City of Kingston has since built a children’s playground there, featuring a silver UFO with red slides to reflect the incident.
The reported sighting has inspired a documentary – Westall ’66: A Suburban UFO Mystery – books, a musical, podcasts and ongoing media attention.
Witness accounts vary; some say there was one UFO, others report a bright-spherical light they are unable to explain. At least one Westall witness at the Grange on Saturday said what happened at school after the sighting seemed to be being embellished.
Former student Terry Peck has given her account multiple times, saying she jumped the school fence and ran towards the UFO’s landing site in the pines. Two classmates had beaten her there and one was screaming hysterically, she told a history podcast.
Despite effort from journalists, historians and UFO enthusiasts to uncover documentation about an official response, none has emerged.
The Westall incident occurred amid a spike in UFO sightings during the Cold War, which academics have put down to a social phenomenon caused by widespread paranoia.
Clarke Watson, a member of US-based volunteer group Mutual UFO Network, said attitudes had recently shifted towards a more scientific approach to examining the unexplained.
At the Grange to speak to witnesses, Watson told The Sunday Age he was part of a group of investigators in Australia who gather information on UFO sightings, sceptically analysing reports and contributing to a public global database.
“It is probably in the top five mass sightings worldwide,” Watson said. “In Australia it’s not really widely known but overseas it gets referenced a lot because it was seen by children that, when independently interviewed, told the same story.
“There were also a group of teachers that actually claimed to have seen it, there were photos that were claimed to have been taken, and there was government intervention very early on.”
Clarke Watson became interested in investigating UFOs after witnessing a flying object he could not identify.Credit: Joe Armao
There have been reports that former science teacher Andrew Greenwood managed to photograph the UFO – before authorities confiscated the camera.
Greenwood was reported in The Australian to have said he saw a “classic cigar-shaped object that looked like grey metal” that he perceived was intelligently controlled.
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In 1966, The Age reported the weather bureau had released a balloon at Laverton at 8.30am and that the westerly wind blowing at the time could have moved it into the area where the sighting was reported.
“It was most certainly not a balloon,” Greenwood said in 2021. “I’ve had 55 years to think about it, and I honestly can’t come up with anything.”
On the 58th anniversary, Watson said many people who’d reported the sighting still battled mental health issues as a result of not being believed. He said destigmatising an event they’d been told was ridiculous would go some way to providing them vindication.
For him, the truth is out there: “An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
“Imagine trying to explain electricity to someone 150 years ago? There’s this amazing thing that you can’t see, touch, feel or understand, but it’s going to refrigerate food and it’s going to light your house.
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“That’s what this is like, electricity always existed, we just had to discover it.
“The other side of the coin is that if there is a nonhuman intelligence interacting on this planet, on whatever level it is, whether it’s a spiritual thing, whether it’s a scientific thing, whatever it may be, it’s exciting. It’s an exciting thing.”
Kelly said he felt an urgency for answers to the phenomenon that made him look to the sky that day.
“It definitely happened,” he said. “I’d love it in my lifetime to at least find out what, I think they owe me on that one.”
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