The Bass Strait Beaufort pacing incident (T.R.H. "Ricky" Royal)

Bass Strait separates Victoria from Tasmania. During the Second World War, No. 1 Operational Training Unit of the RAAF flew large numbers of Australian built Beaufort bombers over its dark waters at night, from Victorian bases including East Sale and Bairnsdale. Beauforts figured heavily in the official list of planes that went missing without trace in the area. T.R.H. "Ricky" Royal was an NCO pilot with the unit. He would later say that one night in February 1944, something joined him out there.

It was about 2:30 a.m. The Beaufort was at 4,500 feet, cruising at around 235 mph. Then, as the earliest account puts it, "this dark shadow appeared alongside and kept pace."

Royal never saw the whole thing. Only its rear end was visible, about 15 feet of it, lit by "the reflection of light of the exhaust." The object appeared to have a flickering light. It belched flame from the rear.

For 18 to 20 minutes it held a distance of 100 to 150 feet from the bomber. During that time, Royal said, "All radio and direction finding equipment refused to function." Then the shadow accelerated to approximately three times the speed of the Beaufort. And it left.

Royal reported the encounter on his return. In his words, "the whole incident was laughed at." Bill Chalker, retelling the story in The Oz Files in 1996, wrote of the crew of the Beaufort and said the pilot was laughed at by superiors. No crew names have ever surfaced.

The story stayed out of print for 13 years. It first appeared in 1957, in The Australian Saucer Record, the bulletin of the Australian Flying Saucer Research Society. By then Royal lived in Scarborough, Queensland. He became a founding member of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau, now UFO Research Queensland.

In 2004 the Disclosure Australia Project sent a researcher in Canberra to examine Royal's personal service records. The pilot was real. He was confirmed as an NCO pilot with No. 1 Operational Training Unit in early February 1944. But the squadron diaries did not name him, and nothing showed a flight over Bass Strait. Keith Basterfield reported the findings in 2005, in his catalogue of Australian observations by aircraft crew members.

No one has formally accused Royal of a hoax. Still, doubts linger. The account emerged late, through a witness who had become an active ufologist, and no 1944 paper trail exists.

Patrick Gross, who catalogues the case, weighs Royal's confirmed service against the missing records and the delay. His verdict: "Possible extraterrestrial craft, possible invention." Later popular retellings added that the object "shot upward" and vanished, details absent from the earliest versions. Memory can drift over 13 years. Other aircraft crossed the strait at night in large numbers, yet nothing offered so far accounts for the dead radio or the threefold burst of speed.

The case now belongs to the lore of the Bass Strait Triangle, the stretch of water made famous by the disappearance of Frederick Valentich in 1978. It sits beside an older tale from 1942, when an RAAF officer described a bronze airfoil flying parallel to his aircraft. Royal's shadow remains a story with a real pilot behind it. And no record of the flight.