UFO Landing

The UFO event took place on Eyre Peninsula at our old place on Kimba Road, about a kilometre or so outside a tiny town called Cowell.

Saltbush and mallee, iron ore country, a mangrove harbour, the cobalt blue gulf waters and an enormous sky. There was one salty creek just putside town, and an enormous deposit of jade yet to be discovered out in the near by miniscule hills and, it must be said, that all the colours of daytime were dreary compared to the rivers and mountains of New South Wales where we’d all been born.

A couple of decades after The Event, closely following my return to New South Wales, Garry Wiseman, a wise-man/psychic took me to a UFO exhibition way up high in Sydney’s Centre Point Tower. At that exhibition I noted that many who’d had realistic sounding experiences of a UFO sighting, had been non-believers prior to the experience.

Back when I’d seen that UFO myself, I wasn’t only a non-believer, I openly scorned all those around me who believed in such things, though like the rest of the family, I was kept up to date with the various claims through our then favourite magazine, The Australasian Post.

My sister and my father were believers. My sister was interested in Astrology, Psychic Phenomena, Superstitions and I let her know what I thought of such rubbish.

It was more difficult to denigrate our father who was usually out gambling and liked to begin on his beers first thing every morning. At first it had seemed romantic to rejoin our Daddy, who’d disappeared from our farm in Nimitabel five years previously, but it wasn’t long before doubts arose!

A fan of Erich Von Dannekin (and Jack Kerouac), his favourite personal stories concerned his love of animals and native bush, his isolated wanderings around the home town of Old Jindabyne in The Snowy Mountains as well as the various visions that had come to him in those times.

Years later I realised that although our philosophies differed, we had a similarity in terms of taking notice of impulses and vivid dreams.

His most sacred story was of a moment sometime in the Forties when he was very young, alone in the bush, and a voice came to him.

‘WILL YOU CONSENT TO BE AN EMMISSARY FROM OUTER SPACE?’

‘YES,’ said he and although the story never lost its power for him, we became pretty bored by it as our lifestyle degenerated and he appropriated any money, possessions and assets we managed to accrue, including the funds for my long promised education at a private school where I’d planned as soon as this gift arrived as was promised by my grandmother, to study languages ancient and modern.

As it turned out, hearing voices was regarded as dangerous activity in the Nineteen Sixties and Daddy was eventually committed to Glenside Hospital in Adelaide and given pills which spun him out and made him think he had wires in his brain. Then he was given Shock Treatment a process stronger in those days than now, which he reckoned, spun him out far worse than the pills.

Years later, while tripping on acid as we did back then, I asked him what effect those treatments had had on him and he said that, symbolically he’d understood the experience through a dream he’d had where the doctors had cut his brain into quarters and replaced the parts differently.

At the time in question, the UFO year, 1965, he was very recently returned, depressed and despairing from Glenside and after I saw the UFO instead of him, I believe that he never forgave me for ‘appropriating’ his experience even though I’d have been delighted for it to have occurred to anyone or anything else in the universe!

This was the background to the event, which occurred in our place in an atmosphere already extremely charged.

Although we drearily attended the school where our mother taught and got through the general domestic cycles, the home hours were filled with accusations, hysteria and shriekings. I hated the School, and was mystified that my Mother appeared to believe that I was doing ‘naughty things’ with male class-mates (who I despised and wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole).

And then (if that wasn’t enough already), there were paternal evening denouncements of all us on the evenings our father happened to drop by. My mother and myself were ‘Crawlers’, since I did much of the housework and cooking while she worked as many three jobs to support his gambling as well as keep food on the table. I forget my sisters’ crimes although both of them moved into the arena of house work support as the elder sister departed the craziness.

As the evening tirades proceeded, I shut my eyes and prayed for escape.

So it was an unbelievable level of irrational din as well as the hateful school caused me to decide to reduce my sleeping hours because that seemed to me to be the only way to achieve silence and peace.

Every evening, I went to bed as early as possible and waited until everyone else slept. Then I’d gather my cache of sacred objects, don warm clothes over my pyjamas and steal out to the kitchen.

The process was carefully planned. As the one who’d chopped the mallee roots for the stove each morning, I’d retrieve the wood I’d hidden in the shed, revive the fire and drink tea as I read Keats’ poems, Shakespeare’s plays, and checked my scrap book of Beatles pictures. I also had a beauteous small vase given to me by a kindly Minister’s wife… no one around me grew flowers, but I loved the vase anyway.

There were other objects, such as a notebook in which I could pen my own dark and probably awful verses, and most nights I also included a knife amongst the objects. We’d been studying Julius Caesar at school and there were a lot of stabbings in that play. At times I seriously contemplated suicide and possibly could have attempted it apart from hating the thought of the mess.

Silence, isolation, peace, the power of words… it was bliss. Who cared that my day-time levels of stress increased and my teachers expressed concern to my mother? WHO CARED?

Obviously, the savouring of beautiful bitter plangent words accompanied by a few cups of tea meant a few journeys to the back yard in order to pee.

This led to other sacred moments. The dun jade and grey landscape of day-time couldn’t be seen at all at that time of night. The sky, a massive blanket of black velvet spun with the glowing brilliant points of stars and planets in that clean air, was as good and even better than Keats’ most glorious words…

No way would I travel down the clay soil path to pee in the ramshackle pit dunny in the far corner of the yard. Two or three times a night, before saying goodnight to night shortly prior to dawn and the renewal of the dins and blames, I’d gaze into the depths of the eastern sky, noting the bejewelled sky shifts before squatting to relieve myself next to the grape vine close to the back wall of the house.

And this was the happiest time until…

One ordinary evening from that extraordinary time, I opened the back screen door.

(No one locked their places in 1965.)

As usual, I took a deep breath and gazed again at my favourite part of the sky. There was no moon. It must have been well after three AM and I think that the month was October, chilly.

SOMETHING WAS WATCHING ME!

I felt it before I saw it. Despite the fact that I was growing my hair long in an attempt to resemble The Beatles’ girlfriends, I felt my hair stand on end. My spine crawled and my body turned to ice.

I turned my eyes south east toward where the creepy feeling originated, about forty-five degrees, and there it was, a huge silver disk, shimmering, aware and hovering over our decrepit dunny!!!!

I still don’t know how long I stood there frozen with terror.

I don’t know in that phase of astonished unconsciousness whether there were more details. I’ve read stories of folks who were ‘taken up’, including a chap who claimed that ‘they’ had prepared a very nice hamburger for him, but I had no sense of leaving my body, which remained rooted in horrified fear fast to the earth.

The silver object eventually began to spin, and then, spinning ever more rapidly, it moved faster than anything I’d ever seen before, faster than anything I could have comprehended and disappeared rapidly into the area of the sky that I’d been happily gazing at in what already felt like a previous life time.

I was flabbergasted that something could move so far and so fast!

(Of course we’d seen some Sci Fi earlier in the 60’s when we’d lived in the township and attended the local Institute on Saturday nights for the double movie features, the cartoons and the out of date newsreels, but those space ships looked pretty creaky and you could sometimes see the strings attached.

These days, Special Effects can move a fake space ship as rapidly as that ship moved that night but pre Special Effects, that was, that night, another terrifyingly unimaginable thing!

So the silver lens disappeared and gradually, as paralysis dissolved, terror arose.

I felt like a three year old, running as fast as that dam ship had flown, to my parent’s bedroom and my mother’s side of the bed.

‘Mummy, Mummy, there’s a fuf-fuf-fuf flying SAUCER in the back yard!!!

As understandably cross and confused about her circumstances as was reasonable in terms of our general circumstances, my Mother could move pretty fast when the situation demanded. She slid into her slippers and her dressing gown and grabbing the torch, she rushed down the hallway to the back of the house and outside.

I was too frightened to follow.

I don’t remember the rest of the evening at all, except that it was the end of me staying up late by myself at night-time.

The story flew through the town like wild fire, so there must have been a house-hold fuss and maybe everyone else was wakened. I was embarrassed when I became the centre of attention.

Mr Gittins who had a telescope and followed astronomy told me learnedly that Venus was doing something strange on the horizon that night and that everything was perfectly explicable.

I’d previously wondered if he was an idiot and concluded from that statement that he might be. I’d have preferred an interesting phenomenon on that vast Eastern horizon, even a vision of a remote Goddess to what had really happened.

I didn’t like to talk about it, although it seemed as if every body else had something to say. I heard my Mother telling Mrs Cornelius at The Shop that when she’d run outside, she hadn’t seen anything at all, but that the whole atmosphere of the place was the most uncanny feeling that she’d ever felt in her entire life and that she believed me….

There’d been a few reports of sightings, a recent one in Port Pirie, and someone in town decided to ring The Adelaide Advertiser and tell them about a sighting in our actual town.

We didn’t have telephone or even television at home so the call came through to Mummy at school who told the reporter it was none of his business, and that at least was a relief. It wasn’t just a fascinating phenomenon to me, it was also a crisis of Faith!

All in all I was pretty relieved the following year, to get to Port Lincoln High School where athletics, drama and new problems almost caused me to forget…

I stayed at a Hostel in Port Lincoln and told the story a few times, enjoying the impact it made. Toilets were generally separated from main buildings in those times and it happened frequently that I had to walk class-mates to the loo after dark if reference had been made to mysterious objects in the sky.

At one point I decided that it had been simply a dream, a story, that is, until my Matriculation Year when I went back to Cowell for holidays and found that my Flying Saucer was still a topic of conversation and wonderment in the town.

When my Mother said,

‘I don’t know exactly what did happen, but I’ll say this. I’ve NEVER seen Robin or any one else in such a state of terror!’

My heart sank as I realised that it had happened after all!

That year I’d read The Bible several times.

The Holy Writ didn’t come across as two dimensional as some interpretations I’d encountered. However the Old Testament featured Fiery Chariots and Revelation certainly had the flavour of that last late night excursion to our old back yard so I stuck to my Christianity for a couple of years… until I read the history of the Vietnam War which was supposed to be a defence of all the good in Christianity and my Faith finally collapsed.

It wasn’t good to be faithless. Attempts at Political Correctness proved to be as transient as some of the other more ephemeral philosophies I later explored.

Oh yes, there were breakdowns in 1965, and more to come in the years that followed.

A Psychiatrist tried Largactyl on me in 1969. It was horrid and there was nothing beautiful in life for me from that drug. A close friend took it away from me.

(I’ve since met friends who’ve been much helped by that drug, but they have a condition which it may assist. I realised eventually that I have Asperger’s and possibly, rather than Schizophrenia my Father could have been Aspergian also.

(He’d been sent to a fancy School at age thirteen where he was bastardised. His life thereafter had little stability. He fled our family when I was four, began a new one in South Australia. That new family then left him. We had re-joined him in 1959, travelling across the country in Mummy’s little black Austin. He’d sold that car and bought a new one with no reference to my Mother practically as soon as we arrived in Cowell.)

Eventually we all left South Australia, the place of ley lines and strange magnetics and all of us returned one or two at a time eventually to the East Coast and New South Wales. In 1973, the year of my daughter’s birth, Mummy finally fled South Australia forever.

My Philosophical ground was eventually discovered in 1974, the year after my daughter was born when I began to study Religions and Philosophies. I encountered Jung in the second year of my studies and, believing that he was nonsensical, I set out to disprove him!

Ah, hubris!

Since I had to read his collected works and the works of those who held him in both high regard and low, I was pretty busy for a long time. Eventually, writing my own dreams and several conference papers on Jung, I was grateful to include Jean Piaget in my studies.

Jung wrote a book about UFO’s in the Fifties. In it, he suggested that as human beings we’ve often seen visions such as Gods and Goddesses, sometimes collectively, sometimes singly. He asserted that a Hindu may see Krishna, a Catholic may see the Virgin and Child and so on. Apart from the odd fiery chariot, he proposed that the emergence of flying saucers is also a religious vision of a technological nature.

Whether they be huge ‘Air Ships’ or spinning disks, they many well be simply visions from our technological era.

I’m not sure I agree entirely with this interpretation, but descriptions of the ‘numinous sacred experience’, the sensations of awe and terror certainly were applicable to what happened that night.

There’s more scholarship regarding cultures these days even if some have suffered the blight of advancement, but I believe that Jung opened the doors to a respectful apprehension of different cultures. The question of his ‘influence’ on Science, I finally answered in 2000 after much study and thought.

When I encountered the philosophical era where it seemed that the mind might be expanded by sacred drugs (discovering fairly quickly that these forms of recreation may disrupt other life arenas), I once had a glimpse in a dreamlike state of windows in that disk of humanoid creatures speaking with each other and to me.

What followed had to be simple. Life was too complex to go too far into that one and I was by then becoming far more interested in how human beings express meaning in their environments and in their personal existence.

However, if I ever clearly remember anything else about the whole thing, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I was in a state of mental extremis and nagging me about the whole issue is, why did the UFO choose to settle over our dire old dunny? WAS it a scientific exploration from another cosmos after all?

After all, modern archaeologists analyse spoor to discover the diets of ancient species… There would have been a fair bit of processed beer down there thanks to a certain party…