Maureen Puddy Encounters, Mooraduc Road

Mid 1972. Maureen Puddy was a housewife from Rye, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, with no earlier interest in UFOs. Her son was in hospital after a school accident. Her drive home ran along Mooraduc Road, between Frankston and Dromana.

Monday 3 July 1972. About 9:15 pm. Popular accounts say 5 July, but her own handwritten RAAF note gives the 3rd. A blue light appeared behind her Holden station wagon. She thought it was a helicopter. It made no noise. The object looked like "two saucers placed lip to lip", glowing with a "silver-blue iridescent light". No seams. No windows. When she stopped, she heard a low hum, like a moving elevator. She panicked and drove off at speed. It kept pace. "It followed me approx 8 miles," she wrote. She reported it to police at Rosebud.

On the night of 24 July, a voice kept her awake, calling "Maureen" over and over. The next night, at the same spot, the road lit up again. Her engine died "as if the ignition had been turned off". The car "glided to a stop." She felt sealed inside "a completely closed, vacuum tube."

A voice, "too perfect, just like a mechanical recording", spoke inside her head. "All your tests will be negative. Tell the media. Do not panic. We mean no harm. You now have control." The car restarted. The object had hung above her for about five minutes. Then it "Just vanished." That night William and Mary Beale of Main Ridge saw a "Pinkish glow" that "appeared suddenly over tree-tops."

Early 1973. Puddy said voices were calling her back to "the meeting place". She asked Judith Magee and Paul Norman of VUFORS to come with her. On the way, a figure appeared on the seat between her and Magee, "completely clad in a type of gold foil suit." Only Puddy could see it. At the site it beckoned her to follow. She refused. Then she slipped into a trance and described a circular room with no doors or windows, and a "mushroom" shaped machine. "I can't get out!" she cried.

Garry Little and Bill Stapleton, who also interviewed her, recorded a figure "1.6m tall" with "long, blonde hair" and a suit like white satin. Headlights of oncoming cars shone "through him". He never spoke aloud.

The RAAF checked. No military helicopter was operating. A weather balloon went up from RAAF Laverton, but nearly two hours after the first sighting. For 25 July the verdict was plain: "The cause (or likely cause) of this sighting cannot be determined." Senior Constable Cox found her "a rational woman not given to great flights of fancy", though the RAAF noted her written form "differs markedly" from her first phone call.

Magee called the entity experience "purely psychic", closer to mind control or hypnosis than abduction. She suggested the mushroom machine matched a small suction-cup compass on Puddy's own dashboard. Puddy agreed.

Magee wrote the case up in Flying Saucer Review. In 2012 Keith Basterfield transcribed the RAAF files held by the National Archives of Australia. Basterfield called it "one of the oddest Australian cases of its type". It began much like the Yerecoin and Boyup Brook cases in Western Australia, then became far more complex. Case indexes list it as a close encounter with vehicle interference and communication.