Woomera Radar and Binocular Sighting and Harry Turner's Scientific Appreciation (1954)

Woomera, 1954. The Long Range Weapons Establishment ran a rocket and guided weapons range across the South Australian outback. That year the Directorate of Air Force Intelligence, or DAFI, was already uneasy. After the Drury film affair and a wave of sightings in Victoria, it asked a nuclear physicist to take a fresh look at its flying saucer files.

Wednesday, 5 May 1954. At about 1600, the operator of an AA No. 4 Mk 6 radar at Post "R" saw an unidentified target appear on High Beam. Range about 60,000 yards. Bearing 355 degrees. It was approaching the post.

It curved over the post in what he called a "Hyperbols". Then it went out at a bearing of about 90 degrees, passing behind Spotting Tower "S2". He timed it over 15,000 yards. Ten seconds. That "would make its speed approximately 3600 M.P.H." Craftsman Keane watched it with him. Because the target was followed to 70,000 yards on High Beam, the operator judged its height "would be greater than 60,000 feet."

About three hundred yards away, at Post R1, a man listed as "Vickers-Armstrong" stood by the Security Officer's Hut, watching a trial through binoculars. A Canberra was approaching. Something crossed its path, turned to his right and headed back the way the Canberra had come. Directly over the aircraft, it slowed. "I found it very hard to believe what I was seeing, so I shut my eyes and then looked again through the binoculars and the object was still stationary over the flight path of the Canberra."

Through the glasses it appeared the same relative size as the Canberra, but over the top of them he saw nothing. When he looked again, he could not pick it up. "It was perfectly circular all the time and a dark grey colour, and gave the appearance of being translucent." It did not glisten or look shiny. Turner later recalled that the Canberra crew could not see it.

On 20 May the Range Superintendent forwarded both statements, noting the two men "give corroborative accounts of what each observed." The file was classified Secret. The case reached O. H. "Harry" Turner, who summarised it as a "misty grey disc", estimated at 10 feet, with a speed of 3600 mph measured on the trace. Turner reviewed DAFI's cases from 1950 to 1953 and drew on Donald Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space. His conclusion was striking. The reports "tend to support the… conclusion… that certain strange aircraft have been observed to behave in a manner suggestive of extraterrestrial origin."

He proposed a scientific investigating panel. DAFI rejected it as impractical. Word from Washington that Keyhoe had "no official status whatsoever" undercut the report, and Turner's access to the files was later withdrawn. The report stayed buried until 1982. That year Bill Chalker, the first civilian given access to the RAAF UFO files, found it with Sqn Ldr Ian Frame.

No official explanation is on file, and no hoax has been alleged. Questions remain all the same. The two statements give times about 45 minutes apart. The height was inferred, not measured. Turner's 10 foot estimate sits awkwardly beside an object that looked as large as a Canberra. The radar operator's diagram is missing from the file. Later retellings added a rapid climb into the upper atmosphere that neither witness described.