Flying Saucers at Woomera

Well. Yesterday I got my hands on the formerly secret UFO file from Woomera. I did not have to wait for it to be retrieved from the National Archive stores as the file was already out - a UFO researcher had been using it the day before. (Who are they? I am dying of curiosity).

The file is very interesting reading and not what I was expecting. I'm not sure what I expected, really. There is a 1953 letter from the Air Force to the Superintendent of the Long Range Weapons Establishment (the organisation which ran the rocket range at Woomera), asking the the LRWE appoint a liaison person to talk to the president of the Australian UFO Society, Fred Stone. Stone and his colleagues were concerned that legitimate UFO sightings could be confused with launches from Woomera. As I learnt from Bill Chalker's book on Australian UFOs, societies like this one were just being set up in the early 1950s. There are also accounts of several UFO sightings at Woomera.

There is no hint that the observers were subscribing to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis of UFO origins. But these people were ballistic and aeronautical scientists, accustomed to observing aerial and high atmosphere phenomena on a regular basis. It does make you think. (Can I really be saying this?) And there were security issues that would make the unidentified appearance of aerial stuff of concern.

Tomorrow I will complete my work on the file and move onto the more relevant topics of Woomera's participation in Project Vanguard.