Joy Clarke was in a science class, eagerly waiting for the lunchtime bell, when the classroom door crashed open.
“A student began telling our teacher there were things in the sky – flying saucers. We all burst out laughing,” Joy, 72, recalled.
“But the bell for lunch rang and so us kids and our teacher bundled onto the oval. Sure enough, there were three flying saucers in the sky!”
On Wednesday, April 6, 1966, Joy, then 12, was one of a few hundred people at Westall High School, in Melbourne’s south-east, who witnessed something that has never been officially explained.
FLYING SAUCERS
“I wasn’t scared, but I instantly knew that I was seeing something that wasn’t from this world,” said Joy, speaking to Woman’s Day in 2021.
For about 20 minutes, she watched as three silver saucer-shaped craft ducked and dived above the school.
“They were moving all over the place,” said Joy, then a sales representative who now lives in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
“Then we saw ordinary planes trying to follow the UFOs but they couldn’t catch them. At one point the flying saucers disappeared behind a clump of pine trees. They then rose into the air again, turned on their side… before they shot up into the air and disappeared.
“A few kids took off to follow the flying saucers when they landed behind the pine trees, in a grassed area called The Grange.”
Minutes after the craft vanished, Joy remembered army trucks, unmarked vehicles and men in black suits swarming around the school.
During a special assembly, students were told by the principal not to mention what they’d seen, telling students the unusual sighting was a weather balloon.
“If it was only a weather balloon, why did the army, air force, police and men in black arrive?” Joy pointed out.
COVER-UP
After school, Joy went to The Grange with her older sister. Where the flying objects had lowered to the ground, a circular area about the size of a netball court had been flattened and was darker than the rest.
“I’ve been back to The Grange and it’s quite eerie for me because of what happened – it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” said Joy.
Silence from government agencies about what really happened at Westall that day, along with attempts to discredit what students, teachers and those living around the school claim they saw, has led to frustration.
Missing documents and flight logs have only fuelled the possibility of a cover-up.
In 2014, newly unearthed government documents suggested the flying saucers may have been high-altitude balloons used to monitor radiation levels after nuclear testing in Maralinga, SA.
NOT FROM THIS WORLD
But Joy and many of the other Westall witnesses are adamant the mysterious crafts they saw were not from this world.
“All we want is for someone to stand up and say, ‘Yes, something unusual happened at Westall’, because I know what I saw – I didn’t see a weather balloon, I saw UFOs.”
The ABC’s Australian Story has marked the sixtieth anniversary of the mysterious event with a new programme that includes new interviews with witnesses, including Joy, to the confounding event.
Tania Vassie was there that day, aged 13, and just wants to know the truth.
“What frustrates me and I think all the other pupils,” Tania, who became a marketing and business manager, told the ABC programme. “is the attempt of having it buried.
“If it really was nothing of significance, well, let’s explain it. I think that’s all that everybody wants to know. Please, tell us what it was.”
