The Balwyn UFO Photograph

April 1966. Balwyn, Melbourne. James Johnson Kibel was a company director, an engineering businessman and a member of the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society (VFSRS). His parents' house was being renovated. A carpenter, David English, was working inside.

Saturday, 2 April. 2:21 pm. Kibel stepped into the garden to use up the last of the film in a Polaroid Model 800. The Polacolor film was about two years past its expiry date. Then he saw it. Something very shiny, "just like a mirror", resembling "a big mushroom with the stalk pointing towards earth."

He later described it to Prof. James E. McDonald. It came down "in a sort of bouncing motion, like a, rather like a yo-yo." It stopped, tipped onto its lower edge and hovered for about half a second. It pivoted until the stalk pointed at him. Then it "Jerked violently upwards 30 or 40 feet" and curved away at "unbelievable speed", gone behind the trees. About six seconds. No sound. Then a loud boom, "similar to the sound jets make when going through the sound barrier."

He had taken one frame. He pulled the film and ran for a witness. English saw nothing in the sky, but he remembered the words: "I have photographed something peculiar in the air. It may have been a bird but let us see what comes out on the film." The two men watched the Polaroid develop.

On 12 April the Herald ran the picture under the headline "Blimey! Now it's a flying mushroom… All in a Balwyn garden." Early reports hid the photographer behind names like "Mr X" and "James Brown." Four days after the photo, about 20 km away, came the Westall mass sighting.

Peter Norris of the VFSRS interviewed both men. The society reported that the print and its enlarged copies "show no sign of multiple exposure, montage or any other tampering." Norris was blunt: "I know the man personally and I am certain this is not in any way a hoax." Official circles, he wrote, had "so far completely ignored" it. No RAAF investigation is on record.

APRO saw it differently. Dr B. Roy Frieden of the University of Arizona found "a jagged line of discontinuity running across the centre of the photo, through the cloud field", as if two photos had been joined. APRO classed it as a possible hoax. NICAP's Ralph Rankow stayed on the fence: "I can't prove that it was a real UFO, and I can't prove it was a hoax." In 1975 and 1976, Ground Saucer Watch declared: "The photograph is a montage."

Kibel had his answer. "The line was due to it being an old film and the state of the emulsion caused that." In 2017 François Beaulieu, after more than a year with a high resolution scan, agreed. He blamed developing chemicals, and argued that the roof reflected in the object was the roof in the frame. His verdict: "the picture is a single exposure of the actual scene."

Sceptics on Metabunk suggested small nearby objects, from a desk bell to a pram hubcap. Charlie Wiser pointed back to that first remark about a bird. Keith Basterfield and Dean reviewed the file for Project 1947 in 2016. Without the original print, they could not settle it.

Kibel appeared in James Fox's documentary The Phenomenon in 2020, handling the photograph. "I gave up arguing about it some 40 years ago," he said. He died in 2021 without agreeing to a modern analysis. High resolution scans of what is described as the original have since been made for Bill Chalker. No analysis has been published.