The Rosedale White-Acres Landing and the Empty Water Tank

Rosedale is a small town in Central Gippsland, Victoria. In 1980 George Blackwell, 54, worked as a farm worker and caretaker on a cattle property called White-Acres, some 8 km from town. He lived on the farm. That night he went to bed at about 10:30 pm.

Just after 1 am on Tuesday 30 September 1980, a screeching whistle woke him. The cattle were bellowing. A horse was running in apparent panic. From his bed he saw it. A domed disc-shaped craft, flashing orange and blue lights, went across his field of vision from left to right, about 8 to 10 ft off the ground. It progressed over a paddock, passed by a haystack and appeared to rest over a distant, open-topped, 10,000 gallon concrete water tank. It hovered for about a minute. Then it landed beside the tank.

Blackwell dressed and rode his red Suzuki 100 motorbike to within about 50 ft. He described a white dome on top of a larger orange section, with circular windows or lights. Investigators recorded it as about 26 ft wide and 15 ft high. He told the Gippsland Times: "Then I saw this thing, about 10 to 15 feet high with a row of lights, like portholes…" He felt a strange sensation in his body, "like a jelly on a plate". The whistle rose to an "awful scream".

A black tube-like part appeared at the base. Then a sudden bang. A rush of hot air so powerful he almost lost his balance. Stones, cape weed and cow manure fell away from the object, and it moved out of sight to the east. His Timex had stopped at 1:10 am.

The ground told its own story. A ring of blackened, flattened grass 28 ft across, pressed flat and tight to the ground in an anticlockwise direction. Six spokes of relatively undamaged grass crossed the ring, matching the spokes Blackwell said he saw beneath the craft. The yellow flowers inside the circle were gone. The tank was empty, with no sign of spillage. The mud at the bottom sat piled in a cone about 2 ft high in the centre, although the outlet was on the side. Draining it normally, investigators estimated, would take about 72 hours.

Blackwell fell ill. A sharp headache returned at the same hours every day for 7 to 8 days, with night sweats, vomiting and diarrhoea. His watch kept stopping and starting for about three days. One cow, frothing at the mouth, hid under a shed. The cattle would not go near the marked site.

The property owner called the Gippsland Times, which ran the story on its front page on 1 October 1980. GTV 9 television news filmed the mark within days. About two weeks later, Paul Norman and Pat Gildea of the Victorian UFO Research Society inspected the site. Norman found no radiation.

In December 1980, Bill Chalker, Keith Basterfield and Gary Little arrived. They interviewed Blackwell for six hours, took soil and rock samples, gathered weather data and tried to trace a truck driver who said a strange object had followed him between Traralgon and Rosedale around 1 am. The samples were indeterminate. Under J. Allen Hynek's scheme they classed it as a CE-II, a close encounter with physical traces. Chalker called it one of the best examples of "a close encounter of the second kind" in Australia. Their write-up left it unexplained.

No hoax claims appear in the record, and no named critic has published a specific explanation. UFO Insight rates the case inconclusive, citing gaps in the evidence. Questions remain. Nobody checked the tank's level just before the event. The investigators came three months later. The truck driver was never identified in any published account.

For Blackwell, the cost was personal. Gippslandia reported in 2020 that he ended up being run out of town, unable to bear the taunts. The same piece recalls that a year later, near Briagolong, water went missing again and identical burn marks were found in a paddock. Today Rosedale is retold beside other stories of UFOs taking water, from New Jersey to Gosford.