Editing UFOs An International Scientific Problem (section)

=== Case 10. Moe, Australia, February 15, 1963 ===

To maintain a certain international tone, in keeping with the title of my
remarks, I close with another interesting sighting made in a distant area.
With the aid of the Melbourne VFSRS group, I was able to interview Australian
farmer Charles Brew and his son Trevor last summer. They operate a small dair'
farm east of Melbourne, near Moe, Vic. My interview was carried out in the
milking shed where Brew and his son were working at about 7:00 a.m. on Feb. 15,
1963, when an unusual object swooped down nearby.

It was already light on this summer morning, although rainclouds lay over
head. Trevor was working in a part of the milking shed where his view of the
eastern sky was obscured and he did not see the object during its short-dura-
tion passage nearby. Charles Brew, however, was standing in an opening, with
a full view to the eastern sky when the object descended towards his shed and
cattle-pens at an angle that he put at about 45°. The object might be loosely
described as a domed disc, estimated by Brew at 25 ft in diameter, gray in
color except for a transparent dome on top. Around the circumference of the
object he saw an array of scoop-like or bucket-like vanes or protuberances.
As the object swooped down, almost as if to land on the hillside nearby,
the cattle and horses reacted in violent panic which Brew’described (in his
own terms) as unprecedented. It descended to an altitude that he judged to
be 75-100 feet, as estimated by the height of a tree near its point of minimal
altitude. Then, after seeming to hover near the tree for a few seconds, it
began a climb at roughly 45°, continuing on its westward course and passing up
into the cloud deck again.

The dome was not rotating, but the central section and bottom portion
appeared to be rotating at about once per second, Brew judged. The spinning
motion caused the protuberances (Brew thought) to generate the swishing noise,
somewhat like a turbine noise, that was clearly audible not only to Brew but
also to Trevor, located inside the shed and not far from a Diesel unit power-
ing the milking machines. The sound was even audible over the latter local
noise-sources, Trevor stated.

It took some time to recover the animals that had bolted, and those
already inside the fenced area were strongly disturbed for some time. Brew
stated to me that it was many days before any of his cattle would walk over
the part of the hillside pasture over which the object had momentarily
hovered. Brew himself reported an uncommon headache persisting for a number
of hours after the incident, but whether this was fortuitous cannot be con-
cluded .

Brew has been interviewed many times by Australian UFO investigators
without any reasons being found to discount his unusual sighting. My reaction
to Brew was similar. It is unfortunate that the son was not in position to
confirm the sighting, but he confirms the unusual sound ("like a diggerydoo",
as Brew put it). The object is similar in its general features and size to
that seen by a witness I interviewed in New Zealand, Mrs. Eileen Moreland.
Her July 13, 1959 observation, like Brew's, and like that of many other UFO
witnesses, is extremely difficult to explain in present-day scientific
or technological terms.

The foregoing constitute ten UFO cases from fairly widely ranging geo-
graphical areas, and spanning almost two decades of time. They are intended
to be illustrative but not "representative", since one of the baffling
features of UFO reports (easily scoffed out of court by the skeptic) is the
remarkable variety of shapes, sizes, and maneuvers reported. No mere sample
of ten cases can give any feeling for that puzzling range of UFO phenomenology.
Nor can a mere ten cases out of the thousands that now are on record in offi-
cial or unofficial files convince a properly skeptical scientist that we are
dealing here with extraterrestrial surveillance (the hypothesis that my 
studies suggest as most likely). One must carefully examine not tens but 
hundreds of such reports before the weight of evidence is seen in some per-
spective. The difficulty has been that very few scientists have carried out 
such examination to date, and hence the low a priori probability of extra-
terrestrial surveillance leads most scientists to discount such a possibility.
Hence, the above ten illustrative cases are only intended to convey a
general impression of the puzzlement that inheres in so many UFO reports, to
suggest that possibly we do have here a problem of considerable scientific
interest. In my own opinion, the UFO problem may be the greatest scientific
problem of our times; but I do not expect ten cases to convince doubters. I
was most certainly not convinced by the first ten good cases I had checked.
But I was quite intrigued, and hence kept' checking. Many more scientists must
do the same and add the weight of their opinion pro and con the extraterres-
trial hypothesis. - (23)