From a strange object witnessed by hundreds of Melbourne schoolchildren to unexplained lights tracked on radar over Kaikōura, and a family who claimed something followed their car across the Nullarbor, our part of the world has produced some of the most enduring UFO stories anywhere.
We have never been better equipped to explain what’s in the sky — and never more fascinated by the small percentage we can’t.
Here are 14 things worth knowing about the world’s most persistent mystery.
1. Australia’s strangest school day was 6 April 1966.
At Westall High School in Clayton South, Melbourne, students spilled onto the oval to watch a silver-grey object with a domed top drift across the sky and drop behind the treeline.
Estimates put the number of witnesses at more than 300, including students and teachers. Some described aircraft circling the object. Others reported flattened circles in the grass at The Grange.
The likeliest explanation is a runaway high-altitude balloon from a radiation-monitoring programme, blown off course from Mildura.
But six decades on, the witnesses — now in their seventies — have never budged.
2. A young pilot vanished over Bass Strait, mid-sentence.
Frederick Valentich was just 20 when he took off in a Cessna 182L for King Island on the evening of 21 October 1978.
During the flight, he radioed Melbourne air traffic control to report an aircraft above him. It had four bright landing lights and a green glow, he said, but it wasn’t behaving like a normal plane.
“It’s not an aircraft,” he said.
Then came a sound like metal scraping.
Then nothing.
No body has ever been found and no confirmed wreckage located. A cowl flap from within his aircraft’s serial range washed up on Flinders Island five years later.
The disappearance remains one of aviation’s strangest mysteries — made all the more unsettling because Valentich was describing what he saw as it happened.
3. New Zealand’s UFOs were caught on film — and on radar.
On 21 December 1978, strange lights appeared off the Kaikōura coast and Wellington air traffic control picked up targets on radar.
A television crew, including Melbourne reporter Quentin Fogarty from Channel 0, chartered a spot aboard a Safe Air Argosy cargo plane to investigate.
On the night of 30–31 December, the crew filmed the lights themselves while the aircraft’s radar reportedly showed something below them.
The footage was broadcast around the world.
The official explanation was considerably less dramatic: squid boats, with their powerful lamps reflecting off low cloud.
4. A family drove 90 minutes with something on the roof.
In the pre-dawn darkness of 20 January 1988, the Knowles family were crossing the Nullarbor on the Eyre Highway when a strange light appeared ahead.
They described it as being “like an egg in an eggcup”.
The family claimed their car was lifted, a tyre blew and a fine black ash settled over the vehicle.
Investigators found brake dust, a burst tyre consistent with high-speed driving, and residue that turned out to be clay and salt — exactly the sort of material you might expect on a car travelling across the Nullarbor.
Meteorologist A.T. Brunt later suggested a temperature inversion had distorted the headlights of a distant truck, turning something ordinary into something monstrous.
If so, the family’s very first instinct — that a truck was coming — may have been right all along.
5. Australia’s crop-circle mystery may have started in a Queensland swamp.
On the morning of 19 January 1966, banana farmer George Pedley was driving his tractor near Horseshoe Lagoon, close to Tully in far north Queensland, when he heard a hiss loud enough to cut through the engine.
He looked up in time to see something rise from the reeds and disappear.
What it left behind became famous: an oval roughly nine metres across, with reeds flattened into a neat clockwise spiral.
The press dubbed it a “saucer nest”.
The Department of Air suspected a willy-willy.
Whatever caused it, the Tully “saucer nest” became one of Australia’s most famous UFO stories and an early chapter in the modern crop-circle phenomenon.
6. Both Australia and New Zealand eventually closed their UFO files.
Australia’s RAAF stopped investigating UFO reports in 1994, with the decision formalised in a Defence Instruction two years later.
The reasoning was straightforward: only around three per cent of reports could not be explained, and none presented a security threat.
New Zealand took a different route.
On 22 December 2010, the New Zealand Defence Force released roughly 2,000 pages covering reports from 1954 to 2009.
They included sketches of saucers, descriptions of strange occupants — including one witness who described figures wearing pharaoh-like masks — and samples of what another witness claimed was extraterrestrial writing.
The official verdict was considerably more restrained: the Defence Force had collected the reports but had not substantiated their claims.
7. Right now, someone is probably filing a UFO report.
The National UFO Reporting Center in the US has been collecting reports since 1974 and has logged more than 180,000 sightings.
In the first six months of 2025 alone, 2,174 sightings were reported to have occurred — rougehly one every two hours.
That’s a single reporting centre in a single country.
Nobody has ever successfully counted the global total.
8. “Flying saucer” may have been a journalist’s mistake.
On 24 June 1947, American pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine objects streaking past Mount Rainier.
He described them as moving at extraordinary speed and compared their motion to a saucer skipping across water.
Arnold later insisted he was describing how the objects moved, not what they looked like.
Newspaper reports interpreted the comparison differently.
And just like that, the “flying saucer” entered popular culture.
9. The US Air Force investigated for 22 years, then walked away.
Project Blue Book ran from 1947 until 17 December 1969.
It examined 12,618 reported sightings.
Of those, 701 were classified as “unidentified”.
The Air Force concluded that none threatened national security and none represented evidence of spacecraft.
The 701 cases were never necessarily solved. They were simply closed as unexplained.
10. Belgium’s most famous UFO photograph was made from styrofoam.
Between November 1989 and April 1990, thousands of Belgians reported seeing silent black triangles.
Two F-16s were scrambled.
One photograph from the wave became one of the most reproduced UFO images of the era.
There was just one problem.
In 2011, the photographer admitted the picture was a hoax.
The “UFO” was a triangle cut from styrofoam, painted black, with torches attached to its corners and suspended from a string.
11. Then the Pentagon reopened the question.
The US All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — AARO — now investigates what it calls unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP.
Its latest report, released in July 2026, recorded 319 new cases and 1,870 cases in total.
It resolved 370 of them as balloons, birds, drones, aircraft, satellite flares and other ordinary objects.
Nine cases were flagged as requiring additional scientific analysis.
None showed evidence of technology originating beyond Earth.
12. Almost 100 objects appeared off the coast of Virginia.
Buried in that same report was a particularly intriguing case.
The US Navy documented around 100 airborne unidentified objects, along with two probable uncrewed vessels on the water, off Virginia.
The case remains open.
And AARO’s admission is perhaps more interesting than the sightings themselves: sometimes there simply isn’t enough reliable sensor data to determine what an object was.
Unidentified doesn’t necessarily mean extraterrestrial.
Sometimes it means the data isn’t good enough.
13. You can now watch the footage in your pyjamas.
On 8 May 2026, the US Department of Defense began publishing declassified UAP material on a public website.
Five batches later, the archive contains hundreds of videos, images and documents dating as far back as December 1944, when night-fighter crews over Germany reported mysterious “foo fighters” following their aircraft.
More material is expected to be released.
For a mystery once discussed mostly in whispers, the evidence is now increasingly available for anyone with an internet connection to examine.
14. The most likely thing you’ll see tonight is a satellite.
Here’s the anticlimax — and perhaps the most interesting part.
Every one of the 44 space-domain reports resolved by AARO in its latest tally turned out to be sunlight reflecting off satellites.
With tens of thousands of satellites now orbiting Earth, and long trains of them visible after launches, there has never been a better time to mistake something ordinary for something extraordinary.
So the next time you see a strange light moving silently across the Australian or New Zealand night sky, there’s a good chance there’s a perfectly rational explanation.
Probably.
And that’s the quiet joy of the whole UFO mystery.
Almost everything has an answer.
Almost.
