Skylab Falls on Esperance, 11 July 1979
America's first space station came down early, scattering pieces across the Western Australian outback. The town of Esperance jokingly fined NASA $400 for littering. A US radio host paid it in 2009.
Tag: Australia
8 case files, newest first.
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The Somerton Man, 1948: "Tamam Shud" and a Name at Last
A well-dressed man was found dead on Somerton beach in Adelaide on 1 December 1948, with no identification and a scrap reading 'Tamam Shud' sewn in his pocket. For 74 years he was unknown. In 2022 a genealogy team named him as Carl 'Charles' Webb; police have not formally closed the case.
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Frederick Valentich, 21 October 1978: "It's Not an Aircraft"
A 20-year-old pilot flying a Cessna over Bass Strait told Melbourne air traffic control that a large craft was flying above him. Then the radio went to a metallic noise and he was gone. The Department of Transport's file, now public, could not find a cause.
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Westall, 6 April 1966: A Melbourne School and a Saucer
Around 11 a.m., pupils and teachers at Westall High School in Melbourne's southeast watched an object descend into a nearby paddock and leave. Dozens of witnesses, a few newspaper stories, and decades of argument followed.
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The Yowie: Australia's Hairy Man
Since the 19th century, settlers have reported a tall, hairy ape-like figure in the Australian bush, later called the yowie. Folklorists link the colonial stories to Aboriginal traditions of hairy beings, which are not the same thing. No specimen has ever been found.
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Fisher's Ghost: the Campbelltown Murder (1826) and the Ghost That Arrived in 1832
Australia's most famous ghost story says Frederick Fisher's spirit sat on a fence rail and pointed to his own grave. The 1826–27 newspapers report the murder, the search, an Aboriginal tracker and a trial, but no ghost. The apparition first appears in print in an anonymous poem in 1832, and in 1841 the man said to have seen it denied it.
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After 1936: The Thylacine's Paper Trail
The last known thylacine died in a Hobart zoo on 7 September 1936. Two years later an official party was searching western Tasmania for survivors, and eighty years after that the state government was still logging reports of striped animals crossing roads at dusk. This case follows the records, not the animal.
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The Bunyip Skull: Sydney, 1847, and the Freak Foal That Fooled a Colony
A skull found on the Lower Murrumbidgee in 1846 was hailed in the Sydney Morning Herald as proof of an unknown animal. Five months later, in the same paper, a naturalist identified it from its milk teeth as a malformed foal. Then the skull disappeared.
