Westall ’66: A Suburban UFO Mystery, directed and edited by Rosie Jones, is a riveting and unique look at what happened in the Westall suburb of...
Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery - Top Documentary Films Top Documentary Films Browse List Top 100 Search Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery 2010, Mystery - 49 min 85 Comments 8.40 Ratings: 8.40/10 from 291 users. Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery, directed and edited by Rosie Jones, is a riveting and unique look at what happened in the Westall suburb of Melbourne in 1966. Westall High School was the center of the biggest mass UFO sighting in Australia, yet the event was deliberately suppressed. Jones and her team try to find out why. At the mention of UFO's, you may be bracing yourself for a film peppered with tin-hat wearing conspiracy theorists, but you may have to revise your opinion. Candid eyewitness accounts reveal active, attentive people who have lived with a memory that brought them ridicule, and censure, but the stories they tell and the pictures they draw show that they have not forgotten what happened. As the film progresses, a variety of techniques maintain the delicate and deliberate balance of fact and opinion. Jones marries the austerity and somberness of statistics, recordings, and interviews with playful sketches, poignant clips, and animated narration. This approach underscores a commitment to present an objective, transparent film that is visually diverse. Jones' commitment to neutrality has a similar effect on the participants and overall tenor of the film. Consequently, we hear students, laborers, community members, researchers, and others talk about what occurred on that fateful April day, and the curious happenings that followed. They all report seeing something above the paddock that did not look like anything they had ever seen. Some saw it land; some saw it fly away. However, they were all told by school authorities, or police, or other officials in uniform to keep quiet. Many of them were punished and ridiculed if they tried to talk about it, and so they kept silent. Still, they remember what they saw, and thus, the mystery persists. In the end, Jones successfully delivers a film that may fascinate you, intrigue you, or simply encourage you to keep listening. Share this Documentary:FacebookTwitterRedditEmail More great documentaries Last Chance HighSociety - ★8.21 On Chicago's West Side, there is a school for the... Why Do We Talk?Science - 58 min - ★7.85 Talking is something that is unique to humans, yet it... Free to Learn: A Radical Experiment in...Society - 69 min - ★6.90 Free to Learn is a documentary that offers a... We Need to Talk About IslamReligion - 68 min - ★7.37 The documentary film We Need to Talk About Islam... 85 Comments / User Reviews Cancel replyCommentName* Email* Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ ohkissoff - 10/18/2021 at 23:02 Likely a malfunctioning extraterrestrial probe built by the lowest bidder Reply ↴ Lady Shepherd - 10/03/2021 at 10:25 I saw one UFO hovering in the sky above me at Salisbury North SA in 1966. That evening three were photographed flying over an Adelaide beach by a News photographer. I don't know the date and I haven't been able to track down the photos that were in The News newspaper but I will keep trying. The object I saw was metal and the sun was glinting off it which is why I noticed it. It was in the same place for the five minutes or so I looked up at it before I went on to the shops. It had gone when I returned about 15 minutes later. Reply ↴ joslyn moses - 08/25/2021 at 21:01 The same in the USA, they take away cameras, camcorders, any evidence and never return any item taken. We know what we saw...……. Reply ↴ Gabby - 01/04/2022 at 09:34 I have seen a UFO just like these people did. I was hunting deer on a day lease in Texas in 2010. I got in my deer stand real early, about 4:45 am, and noticed some lights flashing behind some trees on ground about 100 yards from my deer stand. The flashing lights slowly started rising, when it reached above the tree, it was hovering, a saucer shaped metallic object with white/yelowish lights around edge of saucer shaped object, flashing as it spun, no sound at all coming from this object. I got a good look at it threw my gun scope, it had a red light on top of a dome. It hovered there for about 10 minutes as I watched the object threw my gun scope. The flashing lights gave me a good outline of this object as I watched it. Then it shot off at amazing speed about a mile or two and hovered, then it would shoot off to another location at super sonic speed. I watched this object for about a hour, watching it shoot all over the place, until it shot up to the stars, and disappeared. Just like these people say, I know what I saw. I have hunted deer for years, and have never seen anything like this before this day, have not seen any thing like this since. But, I seen it, and I got a good look at it. I have kept what I seen a secret, until I revealed what I saw to a UFO group in Texas recently. I was a disbeliever before I seen this, now I know there is something out there, even if you don't believe, I know what I seen, it was a flying saucer, a UFO. ben - 05/30/2021 at 07:42 both sources and videos mentioned two sauces put together. Reply ↴ ben - 05/30/2021 at 07:40 In 1966 - 11 days later, multiple police officers from Ohio chased an unidentified flying object into Pennsylvania. Their chase stopped in Conway, Pa. It wasn't long before an Air Force official interviewed them and easily explained away the sighting. April 6, 1966 (this video) vs April 17, 1966 (same size shape, teasing / playing with the public, slow and fast maneuvers - sounds like the same ufo). Not sure of anymore ufo sightings around the world at this time. Reply ↴ Leo - 05/29/2021 at 03:02 The correct name of the Universe is The Universal Dimensions , there are many forms of Human Life in different Dimensions .To understand how the Universal Dimensions works is more than the human mind can possibly ever grasp, your world is one of the least advanced worlds . The Universal Dimensions has no beginning no end it is eternal, If you could travel as far as can be seen upon reaching you would see that there is no end , and so on and so on... Reply ↴ peruda hudson - 12/16/2020 at 12:51 mass hysteria? mass hallucinations? absolute garbage. they said the same about the ariel school incident in s africa. Reply ↴ DD - 09/10/2019 at 17:38 wish we knew more about the girl Tanya who seemed to be the one who got closest to the extraterrestrial craft. She came back hysterical was taken away in an ambulance and never returned too school. her friend went to her house the next day and an English woman answered the door and said that she never lived there. apparently someone did get in touch with her as an adult and she says she has no memory of the event nor does she ever wish to talk about it. something happened to her for sure! Tragic I believe she suffered from the experience although I hope she is doing ok. Reply ↴ albert miller - 06/28/2019 at 08:32 The one thing wrong with this (and many other) presentations on you tube, is the loud background music , which prevented me from understanding the conversation. It doesn't happen in nature....we don't need dramatic music. Reply ↴ DEVON - 12/14/2017 at 23:44 clearly gov technology not Aliens. Why would an intelligent race come all this way just to hover about and hide from us. Picture the colonists from Spain and UK travelling the atlantic arriving in spain and creeping around hiding in the bushes! It wouldn't happen, they either trade with, teach and mingle with the less advanced natives (rare) or kill pillage and loot. Reply ↴ EZ60 - 08/25/2019 at 17:46 Government technology testing an exotic craft over an elementary school? Sorry that doesn't work. Rene Meyer - 11/06/2019 at 21:11 This is a good comment because of your context of using the past as a precedent of the present. However, you could easily debunk your theory by saying that what the children saw was actually us coming back from the future to observe and not interfere. Jon - 09/08/2017 at 18:55 Contemt prior to investigation is evidence of indoctrination. Reply ↴ EZ60 - 08/25/2019 at 17:47 Good answer. Courtlandt - 05/09/2017 at 23:57 An interesting video. As I was not present at the time of this alleged event, I thus have no way of knowing what actually did, or did not, happen that day. I have only the video doc. to rely upon for comment. First: I suppose that is natural, even prudent, to take the extraordinary claims espoused by the children (at the time of the incident) of Westhall regarding the events of April 6th 1966 with a healthy measure of incredulity as to their actuality, much less their accuracy. Indeed, one need not be a skeptic to realize there is no possibility of ever proving that what they say occurred actually did occur. And even if there were substantive and undisputed evidence supporting their claims, this would still not constitute absolute proof of UFO's having landed near their school. And while it appears that many of the former students have arrived at exactly this conclusion, this is simply a product of what they experienced that day, but is not proof. Second: All of the evidence presented by the doc. is of an anecdotal nature, but it is NOT typical eyewitness evidence drawn from normal memory. There's a type of memory called a "flashbulb memory". This is an extremely accurate, indelible, Visual type of memory that is encoded in the brain when one is confronted with news of a powerful, emotionally charged event. A typical example of this might be the shocking and/or unexpected birth/death/return/betrayal of a person intimate to you, or any other circumstance, event, etc with which you identify closely. A flashbulb memory lets you remember in great detail exactly where you were, what you were doing, saying, thinking, and feeling at the moment you received the news. For me, one unforgettable flashbulb memory was when I and my entire 6th grade class watched the shuttle Challenger explode before our eyes. Such memories Never fade or even become fuzzy. There is no doubt that every child at Westhall has exactly this type of memory of what they saw that day. This is telling evidence that SOMETHING extraordinary happened to ALL of them that day. Third: I find it beyond extraordinary that the intelligence services of Australia, and likely the US as well (the only military in camouflage at that time in Aus. thus the soldiers who rapid responded to the grange landing site) would find it necessary to bully and intimidate school children into silence, and threaten the only adult witness with career ruin if they ever mentioned what they thought they saw that day to anyone, even each other. Clearly it must have been a matter of highest national security for them to do this to these implausible witnesses, else they wouldn't have run whatever super-secret operation they were running in broad daylight in the midst of a highly populated urban center. (It is also noteworthy that, 45 years later, the only witness wishing NOT to be interviewed on screen in the video was the science teacher. Careers are not the only that can be threatened with ruin, I suppose.) Fourth: The fact that the Military did seriously investigate the Westhall incident and yet not even a trace of such an investigation can be found, even by civilian researchers trained to uncover such clandestine investigations, bespeaks of the importance of the event in terms of national security interests. (What happened to the channel 9 news reel reporting on the event??) Fifth: To my mind.... there are still several other minor, yet puzzling, facts a concerning the authorities acid reaction to the alleged events at Westhall, no matter if it were a secret government project gone awry or extraterrestrial/extra-dimensional/etc. UFOs finding earth, or something else in-between. But this one stands out amongst them all. What did happen to Tania??? postscript; Here I will assume that most (if not all) of the facts presented are factual and accurate and I will speculate on Tania's possible fate and the reason for the Government smothering of any and all info regarding Westhall. Remember..... Tania seems to be the only student likely to have come into some sort of actual contact with any of the craft. So maybe...... the reason why the military arrived so quickly is because they were told just before the crafts landed, exactly where to go by the pilots of the saucer-like craft themselves. The authorities were being taught the lesson of just how easy it is for the saucer pilots to go at anytime, anywhere they like, and do anything they wished. This includes landing at a children's school during recess in broad daylight and then luring the students to their landing site where they could then be mortally afflicted in either mind or body.... or both. And after making good in this demonstration, the authorities realized they must NEVER EVER allow the public at large to have the slightest inkling of just how powerless our governments and militaries are in protecting our children and planet. This fanciful deduction unfortunately does seem to fit the observed facts........ and I sincerely hope absolutely none of it is right. Reply ↴ dd - 09/10/2019 at 17:44 Like your comments! I too think Tania is a big part of this story maybe the biggest. Don Anderson - 11/17/2019 at 13:46 Someone was paying attention in English class, evidenced by his willing display and broad vocabulary. Don Anderson - 11/17/2019 at 13:48 An intersting account of your thoughts. Smo - 04/30/2022 at 06:29 A bit more is uncovered in the documentary The Phenomenon by James Fox and there's also an interview with the science teacher. Mary Anne - 04/16/2017 at 12:39 What happened to Tania? Reply ↴ Alison Ellis - 03/21/2017 at 22:28 The teacher committed suicide - Mmmmm, I just bet he did. Reply ↴ Allan - 01/04/2017 at 11:44 I had a daylight sighting. It was a perfect sphere, no seams, no wings, no sign of propulsion. Completely silent. Color of polished lead. I looked up metals later and found that beryllium was the closest visual match. Ever since that day in Florida I have been fascinated with finding others who might have had a similar experience. I found the interviews in this film to have a strong sense of truth to them. Also, thru the years I have grown to have a distaste for skeptics. They always hide behind their smarty pants comments. They truly have no idea how completely stupid they are. Reply ↴ TB - 07/17/2016 at 13:31 Having been there at that time I can tell you all this was no balloon or man-made device. Nothing...not even today...moves that fast and in silence Reply ↴ Fred - 02/16/2016 at 16:29 Another famous case, at least in Australia, is the "Disappearance of Frederick Valentich" (see Wikipedia page). Interesting. Reply ↴ Remsey - 01/10/2016 at 11:45 I have seen a so called UFO in 1994 the Netherlands. It was an experience that made a lot of impact. It flew low and made a full stop from I guess 300km/hr to 0. It then made a cross shaped sign horizontally (left/middle/right/middle and continued its journey. My mother said...do you see it! Do you see it! I said yes yes and by then it was gone. It changed my view of life and I am 100% convinced we are not alone in this universe. My opinion: They only show themselves to individuals. They will not land on a square in a big city because they respect our lives. They do collect organic material and perhaps they terraform other planets with our life. Earth may even be terraformed in the past. After all life developed on earth with an enourmous speed. One earth layer it was not present, the next it was. Reply ↴ jimmy zhim - 01/08/2016 at 16:06 excellent although it's no longer available? Reply ↴ Tarek - 11/13/2015 at 23:44 Its a real flying object, but its highly likely from the evidence in this film, that this was a secret black project, and not an alien craft. The fact that military type people were on the scene in minutes is significant, they were on standby. The governments lie to us in clever ways, just enough spin and staged acting to put us off the scent into thinking its aliens. I am not ruling out possibility that alien / interdimensional beings and craft could exist, but dont choose the choices presented to you, make your own informed choice. Reply ↴ EZ60 - 08/25/2019 at 17:50 Your response, because it's easiest to believe, does not make it true. An open mind would begin by not assuming that this must have been an event based a prosaic explanation. agent_788 - 09/07/2015 at 04:39 I think the people who are living with the blinkers on and believe everything they are told and follow all the rules are usually the skeptics - the more open minded individual is usually the non skeptic when it comes to the subject of alien life - but the fact remains we are not alone - whether you like it or not Reply ↴ Jason13 - 09/07/2015 at 01:26 I wish everybody would learn a bit about how eyewitness testimony is incredibly unreliable. We like to think "we know what we saw," but we really don't. I know that can be unsettling, but it's true. If you're looking to kill 45 minutes watching a fun documentary, just watch some TED talks about eyewitness testimony or watch any brain-centric programs about perception. (Just consider the sources, beware of neuro-bunk!) Those sorts of programs may help you consider these types of cases in a new and interesting light :-) Reply ↴ EZ60 - 08/25/2019 at 17:52 That's wrong. Eye witness testimony is more often than not factual. Degree of reliability or the lack thereof doesn't make a testimony inaccurate. Carl Hendershot - 08/29/2015 at 12:52 Different from the norm and I found it very interesting. Reply ↴ anon - 05/08/2015 at 02:37 if i could only have one question answered with a full explanation id accept theres no such thing as a ufo...so heres my question what do we have that can travel from one end off the horizon to the other in a click off a finger...still waiting ...guess ill be waiting as long as the dead people in this video ... Reply ↴ jessij - 03/20/2015 at 04:31 I want to know what happened to Tania!! Reply ↴ Joe Schmoe - 03/05/2015 at 19:48 I am always cautious and skeptical regarding this topic. However, I do believe there is something to these types of encounters, as a whole. To those immediately dismissive of the subject, I suggest a couple of points to consider relative to "evidence": 1) Relative to first-hand accounts: When it comes to eye-witness accounts, many of us in the Western world live in society, with systems of justice, wherein people are convicted by their peers and punished based solely on the first-hand testimony of others. 2) Relative to lack of photo/video proof: how many photos/videos exist of automobile accidents taken right as they occur? Probably as many as there are of anomalous objects available on social media currently. 3) Credibility of witnesses: Certainly there are those out there that are eccentric, simply seeking attention or straight mentally ill that report these types of encounters. However, the scope and scale of the population involved, across every geographical boundary and culture, there have been reported encounters and/or sightings. Just 20-30 years ago, study of black holes was border-line pseudo-science, extremely controversial and considered detrimental to careers of those in scientific community. Theoretically, it was likely, but no one had first-hand account. Conversely, with respect to the phenomena here, there are plenty of former military officials, pilots, and even astronauts that have provided their own encounters. Statistically, can we rule them all as insane, delusional, mistaken or suffering from mass hysteria? What if just one is right? Reply ↴ Bob - 01/13/2015 at 22:20 This offered One thing, the par… truncated (17,090 more characters in archive)