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Westall / Clayton South Incident (1966; Australia)

A few things on this one:

The 'disappearing' witness has recently come forward; they recall the UFO and running to look at the site but didn't see anything land, although they do remember finding a circle of flattened grass. Their 'disappearance' was real albeit mundane, in that the family moved shortly afterwards for work reasons.

The 'weather balloon' explanation is a bit more interesting in that the proposed stimulus was a high altitude nuclear monitoring balloon - a secret project at the time. These were accompanied by a chase plane (although not multiple planes). This doesn't match every witnesses' story, but is a reasonable / fair match overall.
 
Looking at the descriptions again, along with the early audio interview with Greenwood, the biggest problem with the HIBAL balloon explanation is Greenwood's assertion that the object 'jumped' around the sky quickly, in addition to occasionally appearing stationary or moving more slowly. Other aspects, such as the colour, size, shape, etc, could be reconciled with a balloon, as in this particular case could the arrival of military personnel afterwards. Keith Basterfield claimed to have identified a specific HIBAL launch that could be the culprit (flight 292) although most project records have been destroyed, and flight 292's entry was, frustratingly, missing from the logbook of the chase plane pilot!

http://stratocat.com.ar/bases/42e.htm

The subsequent apparent takeoff of the balloon / object was explained by Skeptoid - as usual, based on someone else's solution - as a separate sighting of a towed target drogue - which is again possible I suppose, although again it doesn't completely fit with even some contemporary descriptions of the original sighting.

Overall the balloon is a reasonable generic fit, with some issues in specific details. Again this seems to come down very much to whether you trust witness descriptions. In this case they are fairly consistent but one of my main concerns is that most of them, eg Greenwood, had been primed to look for something very unusual - in his case by someone running into the class and announcing a "flying saucer". From that point everyone would have been looking out for strange things.

As usual these days it's hard to search for information on this case due to search results being dominated by crappy podcasts, so here are a couple of links to actual ufologists debating the HIBAL solution:

Basterfield

Bill Chalker

Bill Chalker again
 
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Paul_Exeter said:
The ongoing search for official documents on the Westall case:

https://ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-continuing-search-for-australian.html
Click to expand...

I really think they're not going to find anything on this one.

There doesn't have to be anything particularly sinister about this as records do get purged and these sort of reports don't seem to get high priority. One of my favourite cases, Michael Swiney's sighting while flying a Gloster Meteor at Little Rissington in 1952, was written up in a report that was still on the file as late as 1975, when Swiney requested access to it, but which had disappeared - supposedly destroyed with other pre 1962 files - when he asked for it again after retirement.
 
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The excellent Three Dollar Kit blog has now tackled Westall:

https://threedollarkit.weebly.com/westall-quickread.html

Included is this video of the Hbal balloon:

"A Hibal was launched the day before the Westall sighting. Its payload may have included classified instrumentation from NASA. The balloon apparently drifted south overnight, was almost certainly spotted 38km north of Westall the next morning, and ended up over the high school. The separate components (balloon, parachute, payload) may be the reason that some witnesses saw more than one UFO. The landing site was possibly near a factory about 1km south of the school where workers saw burn marks (caused by a battery fire) and military personnel clearing the land."


I don't expect everyone to agree with the conclusions of this detailed analysis from Three Dollar Kit but it is certainly a valuable addition to the research undertaken thus far
 
The useful thing about that article is that it combines Basterfield's HIBAL solution with another suggestion already out there (a towed target drogue) to explain the discrepancy between several accounts, notably that of Greenwood, and a possible balloon.

The real revelation is that a couple of former pupil witnesses had popped up on the Westall Facebook group to say yes, they'd seen the object on the day, had thought it was obviously a deflating balloon, and had thought nothing more of it
 
BS3 said:
the biggest problem with the HIBAL balloon explanation is Greenwood's assertion that the object 'jumped' around the sky quickly, in addition to occasionally appearing stationary or moving more slowly
Click to expand...
My sighting was the same year, and probably involved the same phenomenon; a high-altitude balloon of some sort.

Memory can play tricks, but I seem to remember losing sight of the object on several occasions, after which it was seen in a slightly different place - this sort of observation may have been interpreted as 'jumping around'.
 
eburacum said:
My sighting was the same year, and probably involved the same phenomenon; a high-altitude balloon of some sort.

Memory can play tricks, but I seem to remember losing sight of the object on several occasions, after which it was seen in a slightly different place - this sort of observation may have been interpreted as 'jumping around'.
Click to expand...

The balloon certainly sounds as if it could have explained most of the observations reported at the time, particularly as by the time it partly deflated / came down to low altitude it might have been taking on some unusual shapes. I hadn't realised that these particular balloons were made of a very thin, light material (unlike standard weather balloons).
 
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