Chapter Fifteen
UFOs over the
Blue Mountains
The vast Blue Mountains region, situated to the west of Sydney NSW stands out from all other parts of Australia as a place rich in unexplained mysteries. It is also the most prolific ‘hotspot’ in Australia for UFO sightings. Hereabouts hardly a week passes without someone seeing strange objects in the sky, day and night! Mystery flying craft have, for generations, been reported seen descending from the skies, or rising up from out of the very depths of the valleys of the Blue Mountains.
It is a phenomenon about which officialdom remains silent. A conspiracy of silence – why? In the course of this, and the chapter to follow, the reasons will become clear to every reader.
The four campers stood transfixed. There, hovering motionless above the trees in the night sky was a brilliant silvery-gold glowing disc-shaped object, at least 20m across, lighting up surrounding bushland while emitting a low humming sound. Then, after about a minute, the sound grew in intensity and the glow faded, at which the mysterious craft rose into the night sky to be lost from view amid the tall overhanging trees. This incident took place in the rugged Burragorang Valley, south of Katoomba in January 1992, and is but one of hundreds that have been reported to me over the years.The four campers in question informed me that they had been asleep by their campfire, when they were woken up by a loud humming sound coming from above the trees in the deep gully in which they were camped. It was then that they realised the surrounding area was lit up by the glow from the mysterious flying craft. Rising quickly to their feet, they tried to observe the object but could detect no markings, windows or other features other than the disc shape. “The shape just grew dark and rose up out of view, leaving us quite shaken”, said one of the men.
It appears that some people in high places don’t want the general public to know about the mysterious goings-on in the Blue Mountains skies. For some years I have been unable to have Blue Mountains UFO reports released in the local media, with the RAAF dismissing the claims of eyewitnesses as nothing more than “natural phenomena”.
Yet what can be ‘natural’ about a 20m wide, brightly glowing silvery-gold disc-shaped flying craft?
Roughly east of where the aforementioned incident took place, up Lake Burragorang lies Kedumba Valley on the north side of the lakes’ shore. The Kedumba Valley adjoins the Jamieson Valley on the eastern side of Mt Solitary. A road blazed down the cliffs on Jamieson Valley’s east side links the old Kedumba Valley Farm with Wentworth Falls via Kings Tableland.
The Kedumba Valley, like the adjoining Jamieson Valley, is a thickly-wooded region, interspersed with the rubble of countless creek-beds active only when fed by heavy rains from above the valley.
It was hereabouts in September 1970 that a camper, Rod Parker, entered the area on horseback. He had been asked by the property owners to keep an eye out for a few head of cattle that had gone missing in the area. Instead, he stumbled upon a 10m width circular depression. There was also a strange smell about the area that Rod could not identify. Whatever it was, he could see that some large heavy object had rested there only hours before, so heavy in fact that it had crushed over large gum trees with trunks between 20 and 30cm or more in thickness, and made a circular, spinning depression 60cm deep at its centre in hard, rocky ground.
“I had a sneaking suspicion that I had found one of those flying saucer landing places. It was beside the depression that I found numerous hoof prints in the soil, but otherwise I found no other trace of the missing stock while I was in the valley”, he told me when I interviewed him. After returning home he decided to phone the RAAF Base at Richmond, north of Penrith to report his eerie discovery. The voice at the other end had the perfect solution to the mystery.
“About this time of year Mr Parker, large flocks of migrating ducks frequent the Warragamba region, and rest at night in swamps where they congregate in large numbers, leaving circular depressions in the crushed reeds when they fly off. So obviously Mr Parker, what you found was nothing more than a depression left by migrating ducks”. “Yes”, replied an exasperated Rod, “Ninety-ton ducks”! and hung up. “What I found was no duck nest. What do they take people for. I’m no idiot”, Rod said to me.
The nearby Warragamba Dam and its township has had its fair share of UFO sightings over generations. And although a “saucer nest” found on one farm there in 1972 had proven to be the circular car skid marks of someone having done a ‘wheelie’, there have in fact been a number of other “saucer nests” found in the deep scrub hereabouts, in locations inaccessible to vehicles. These have measured up to 10m in width like the ‘nest’ found by Rod parker.
Sydney-based eminent UFOlogist, Bill Moser, suggested at the time of Rod Parker’s discovery that we carry out an expedition to the area, search around the site and collect samples, such as soil from the ‘saucer’ depression for analysis by scientists, but by then the valley had been sealed off to the general public, covered by a blanket of secrecy which persists to the present day across the entire Burragorang region.
At the time of Rod Parker’s find, a camping group on Mt Werong in the Burragorang Valley sighted a yellow light travelling horizontally with a skipping motion and almost stopping at times; while a truck driver travelling through Mittagong one night, had been frightened by a 200ft [60m] wide “flying disc” that descended upon him.
Three “huge yellow-glowing flying saucers”, were seen to zoom over the farmlands of the Bowral district around 2am on the night of May 21st 1972, by one property owner, ‘Bob’. He observed them to fly from the southeast just under cloud level, “making an explosion-like sound” as they disappeared over the northwest end of the Burragorang Valley. “I phoned Richmond RAAF Base to report what I’d just seen and the bloke at the other end just hung up on me!”, he told me later.
My father, the late Mr W.F. [Bill] Gilroy did not believe in the existence of UFOs. That was until the night of 1st March 1972. The time was 10pm as he lay in his bed looking out of the west facing bedroom window of our [then] North Katoomba home. At that moment he was surprised by a large saucer-shaped silver glowing object that seemed to pass quickly and silently over our home toward the west, disappearing in seconds. The night was misty and there was a very low cloud cover, which meant the strange craft had passed very close to ground level.
Regrettably, I did not see the craft as I was seated in the lounge room watching TV [which at that moment suffered bad interference for a few seconds]. No sooner had my father seen the strange object than he got out of bed and told me what he had just seen. He said although he had never before believed in “flying saucers”, he did now! Over the next few days I received a number of other reports of what appeared to have been the same object, from people on the lower [eastern] Blue Mountains and as far west as Bathurst and Orange.
One dark night that same year, the Edelbuttel piggery, just west of Katoomba township and just off the Great Western Highway, near the cliffs overlooking Megalong Valley, was the scene of probably the most startling UFO landing incident anywhere on the Blue Mountains up to that time. The owner of this now long-closed piggery, was Mr Bernie Edelbuttel, and friend of Heather and I. On the night in question he was taking a bath, while his wife was washing dishes in the kitchen, looking out the kitchen window, which faced the piggery and fowl sheds to the west [Megalong Valley] side of the property. Staying with them was here brother and his wife.
The time was 9pm on this dark night when, as she glanced out the window, Mrs Edelbuttel saw an orange light moving above the trees and then descend among them behind the pig sheds. Summoning her brother and his wife she pointed out to them through the window, the eerie orange glow, some 200 yards away.
Thinking the glow to be from the lamps of spotlight shooters, she soon fetched Bernie. At this stage the brother-in-law had just left the house, intending to investigate the glow. Walking up past the pig sheds, he moved toward the trees. It was then that he got the shock of his life when he saw what was creating the strange glow.There among the trees was a disc-shaped craft of considerable size emitting the glow, which at such close range was blinding! The glow was so bright that it lit up the whole area. Later it would be revealed that many motorists passing along the highway had also observed the glowing craft in the distance. The craft had lights surrounding it, with one central light in the centre of its dome. It was this dome light which emitted the blinding glow. Then the glow faded rapidly away, leaving the mysterious craft almost invisible in the darkness among the trees.
By this time, realising what he was looking at, the brother-in-law became seized with panic and ran as fast as he could back to the house. Equally panic-stricken, the family locked and bolted every door and every window in the house, meanwhile someone phoned the police. All this time the pigs, usually noisy like the dogs in any disturbance, had remained deadly silent. At first the police treated the phone call as a joke and took no notice of it. However, after repeated calls, two officers were sent to the farm to investigate the matter.
Within minutes the two constables arrived in their vehicle. They drove up toward the pig sheds, they alighted, hoping to see the object for themselves, but found nothing, as the mysterious craft had already vanished as silently as it had first appeared. The Edelbuttel UFO incident made the media and soon brought forth numerous eyewitnesses who had seen the same glowing object pass over Katoomba that night. One of these eyewitnesses was a Megalong Valley farmer.
The farmer’s story was that he had been standing outside his house when, from over the Katoomba cliffs he observed a large, approximately 9.15m wide, dark object descending slowly and silently into the valley, to land in a deserted field some distance from the farmhouse. There it remained for a full 10 minutes as the farmer watched. Then, silently as before, the mystery object rose into the air and rapidly gained speed as it flew off into the darkness.
Some investigators later suggested that perhaps the UFO had been malfunctioning, and that its occupants – for it was certainly being operated by intelligent beings – had landed first at the Edelbuttel’s, then in the valley below in the course of carrying out repairs. Whatever the reasons for the UFOs landings, it was certainly no Earth-based craft. One explanation which failed to hold water came from RAAF officials, who claimed the object had been a malfunctioning RAAF helicopter, whose crew had landed to carry out repairs!