Frederick William Birmingham's "Machine to go through the air", Parramatta 1868

Frederick William Birmingham was born in 1821 in Westport, County Mayo, Ireland. He began survey work at 17. He arrived in Australia in 1852 and settled in Parramatta, working as a civil engineer and licensed surveyor. He served as an alderman and was engineer to the council on the local water supply works. He went insolvent in 1866, and his alderman career ended in early 1868.

The night of 25 to 26 July 1868. Birmingham stood under the verandah of his cottage in Duck's Lane. He saw "the Lord Bishop of Sydney's head in the air looking intently upon me", travelling east. Then "the Premier's head twice appeared".

A voice came from an unseen source: "That's a machine to go through the air." Birmingham answered that it looked "more like a vessel for going on the water". It was an ark. "A brown colour (rubber!) all over", with "faint, flitting shades of steel blue" like "magnified scales on a large fish." It moved in a zig-zag, stopped, and descended some twenty feet "as gently as a feather on the grass", about 20 yards away.

A spirit followed it in. It looked "like a neutral tint shade (white?) and the shape of a man in his usual frock dress." It invited him aboard. "Then come." Birmingham wrote that "we were lifted off the grass and gently carried through the air and onto the upper part of the machine."

The deck sounded hollow, and three steep steps led down to a pilot house. One table stood inside, covered "with material like oilskin, or perhaps iron covered with rubber cloth tightly". The sides were "extremely thick, about six inches". The spirit handed him printed papers of figures and formulae. "It is absolutely necessary that you should know these things but, you can study them as you go on."

Then, "I found I was alone in the ark!" He fell into his usual sleep. He woke next morning, deeply impressed.

He wrote it up in a memorandum book titled A machine to go through the air. A.D. 1873. In 1875 he published "To London in four days!", proposing an ark-shaped machine about 42 ft long. More visions followed in 1873. His last design, the "Rover", is dated 29 September 1892. He died on 16 December 1892.

The story surfaced through Bill Chalker, who received a 15-page copy of the memorandum in 1975. It had been copied in the late 1950s by T.V. Homan of UFOIC. Chalker found no apparent anachronism and judged a hoax "quite remote". Herbert Rumsey had retold the story in 1911, and in 2023 archivist Michael Organ found Birmingham's 1875 letter. In August 2024 Chalker examined handwritten extracts, apparently in Birmingham's own hand, at the University of Sydney.

Birmingham called it "a wonderful dream" and "a vision". Flying machines were already on the colony's mind, including Dr William Bland's 1851 plans for a steam-powered "Atmotic Ship", though Chalker says the ark was "nothing like Bland's airship". Others see an early close encounter: invitation, levitation, a tour of the craft, instruction from the being. Keith Basterfield lists it among pre-1947 Australian reports. Today, candle-lit tours at Old Government House recall "the first documented UFO sighting in Australia in Parramatta Park".