The Knowles Family Nullarbor Encounter

January 1988. The Knowles family was leaving Perth, bound for Adelaide and then Melbourne. Faye Knowles and her sons Patrick, 24, Sean, 21, and Wayne, 18, rode in a recently bought blue 1984 Ford Telstar with two dogs aboard. Sean was driving. Ahead lay the Eyre Highway and the long dark of the Nullarbor Plain.

Wednesday, 20 January. About 4:20 am. Some 40 km west of the Mundrabilla Roadhouse, a light appeared over the road ahead. The family took it for an oncoming truck. "It was a small light and all of a sudden it became big like this, like a big ball," Faye said. It was bright and white with a yellow centre, shaped like an egg in an eggcup.

Sean swerved and nearly hit a car towing a caravan. The light seemed to chase a truck heading the other way. Then it came back. Then it pursued them. "It chased us and at one stage when we were trying to get away we were doing up to 200km/h," Sean said.

A thump on the roof. Faye put her hand out of the window. She felt something soft, warm and spongy. Her hand came back covered in black dust. A foul smelling mist came into the car. Their voices went slow and low. The dogs went frantic. Patrick said it felt like his brain was being sucked out. Sean briefly blacked out.

The police statement put it plainly. It "picked the car up off the road, shook it quite violently and forced the car back down on the road with such pressure that one of the tyres was blown." The family hid in roadside bushes for about 15 minutes. "It couldn't find us," Faye said. They changed the tyre and drove on.

Truck driver Graham Henley was on the same road at about the same time. He saw a light in his rear-view mirror and likened it to "a big fried egg hung upside down". He met the family afterwards. The crew of a tuna boat in the Great Australian Bight also made a report that night.

At Ceduna, in South Australia, police examined the Telstar. "Something happened out there," Sgt James Fennell told UPI. Constable Bob Hagen added: "After checking their car and seeing them, we think there could be something in this." Four small dents were reported in the roof. A police forensic detective sampled the dust within hours. The results were ordinary. Clay and salt. Richard Haines identified the black dust as brake dust. Researchers Keith Basterfield and Ray Brooke said chequebook journalism by a TV station got in the way.

In 1989 A.T. Brunt, former Regional Director of the South Australian Bureau of Meteorology, proposed a superior mirage. Weather balloon soundings showed a temperature inversion. The light, he argued, was the distorted headlights of a vehicle about 100 km away, and the burst tyre was consistent with high speed driving. Psychologist Robert Bartholomew later pointed to small group panic, driven by fear, 13 hours of driving and lack of sleep.

At first, Basterfield thought it "appeared to be an extraordinary example of a close encounter that had left physical traces." He later concluded: "It was simply a case of misunderstanding, of seeing a light in the distance, a tyre bursting and those things had built up into a story." The family consistently maintained their account was true. The case lives on in skeptical journals, podcasts and reposted 1988 news footage.