The Believer, page 21
He is in Australia to talk about Roswell—talking about Roswell being what Don does best, and what Don has done with Oprah, Larry King, Shirley MacLaine, Peter Jennings, Montel Williams, Fox Good Day LA, NPR, BBC, NBC, ABC News, CBS 48 Hours, CNN Investigates, Sci Fi Investigates, National Geographic Channel, Smithsonian Channel, the Travel Channel, Learning Channel, the Disney Channel and many more. But today he is going to tour the site of Australia’s largest mass UFO sighting, and on the way there George (white goatee, blue wraparound sunglasses) is telling Don (black goatee, gold-rimmed aviators) one of the best stories I have ever heard.
On the evening of October 21, 1978, twenty-year-old George was outside his parents’ house near Moorabbin Airport waiting for his girlfriend when he saw a white Cessna with blue trim flying overhead.
“I can’t help it,” George says to Don in the passenger seat. “I always have to look up and watch a plane go over. That’s just me. I have to watch them.”
“That’s me too,” Don agrees warmly.
“That’s three hundred people going past having a cup of coffee!” George enthuses. “That’s fascinating, you know?”
Young George stood watching as the Cessna flew towards the setting sun. Nothing unusual except for the thought that popped into his mind: Don’t take your eyes off that plane. The girlfriend never showed up and he eventually went inside. Next day, he heard on the news that a search was underway for a plane that went missing over Bass Strait, the pilot believed to have run out of fuel. Soon the headlines changed: Pilot reported seeing a UFO before he vanished.
Years later, an acquaintance told George that he had a flying lesson the day Frederick Valentich disappeared. He entered the airport with his instructor to sign the plane back in—they walked in discussing the lesson and were told to shut up because a conversation was happening between Valentich and the air traffic adviser. “And everybody was listening,” George says. “He said every time Fred spoke, you could hear an unusual noise over the radio, some sort of interference was coming through. He thought it had the Doppler effect, which meant that something was going past the plane. Now, I haven’t been able to pick that up, and nobody else who’s heard the tape has been able to pick up that sound . . .
“But there was definitely a continuous static and interference coming through his radio, which wasn’t on any of the other planes communicating at the same time,” George continues urgently.
“That would’ve been the classic EM,” Don nods, staring ahead through the windscreen. “Electromagnetic effect.”
“Electromagnetic radiation of some kind was interfering with the radio,” George agrees. “But, of course, Fred said, ‘I’ve got my engine running at twenty-three, twenty-four hundred RPM and the engine’s coughing.’ And at that point, the adviser says to him, ‘Okay, what are your intentions?’ Because the adviser knows he’s six minutes out over the ocean in a single-engine plane, it’s nearly dark and now he’s reporting an engine problem. So the adviser asks, ‘What are your intentions?’—meaning are you closer to come to the land or are you going to go to the island. I think Fred just misinterpreted the question, he said, ‘Ah, my intentions are to go to King Island.’ It was one of the last things he said. And he said almost immediately after that, ‘Melbourne, that strange object is hovering on top of me again, it is hovering and it’s not an aircraft.’ And a couple of seconds after that, he said, ‘Melbourne—’ and was interrupted midsentence because there was a collision—an aerial collision.”
“What about the scratching noise?” Don asks about the unidentified noise that filled the remaining seconds of the transmission. “The sound of the metal?”
“That came straight after,” George replies, steering the car through a busy shopping strip. “He said, ‘Melbourne’ and then he was cut off and there was this chich chich chich—which I believe was the sound of the propeller cutting into the surface of something else.”
“Striking the surface of something else,” Don echoes.
George explains that his friend, UFO researcher Bill Chalker, has uncovered a potential explanation for that “something else.”
“There was a lot of UFO activity happening in central New South Wales,” he says. “A place called Coonabarabran. Did I miss the road I was going to take? Ah, no, I didn’t, gotta keep going straight.”
Coonabarabran is a small town near the Siding Spring Observatory, home to the largest optical telescope in Australia. It sits on the edge of an ancient volcanic mountain range located in Warrumbungle National Park, the first Dark Sky Park in Australia—land free from light pollution and possessing an “exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights.” It is a place, Bill Chalker will later tell me, where it seems everyone has a UFO story. On Thursday, November 17, 1994, the front page of the Coonabarabran Times reported that two days prior, six people had reported a UFO sighting to police after seeing bright lights above the road south of town. “It was described as a large diamond shape which made no noise,” the article stated.
“It was a farming community up in the mountains,” George says, steering past a Vietnamese bakery, a chemist. Chalker had gone up there with a mate in 1995 to investigate sightings. Everyone they talked to said, “Go talk to Laurie.”
Laurie, a local character who made it into the papers for protesting restrictions on gun ownership, ran the hardware store. It was his habit to ask customers whether they’d had any unusual experiences, documenting anything he was told in a notebook or, if he was in a rush, on the backs of receipt copies.
“They went and tracked Laurie down, and Bill was recording the conversation and I’ve got a copy of this tape,” George says, explaining that he’s listened to it a hundred times.
Laurie said that the stories he’d collected were a real mixed bag but that the best one was from a South Australian farmer who had bought a property in the area and came into the shop one day. The farmer told Laurie that the day after Valentich disappeared, he was out on his South Australian property harvesting lucerne hay when he heard an unusual noise, a screaming-type sound, and figured a bearing had gone in his harvester. So he stopped and uncoupled the mechanical drive to have a look, but the noise kept going.
“‘Well, hang on,’ he goes, trying to work out how come he could still hear it,” George continues. At this point, the farmer realized that he was in shadow. Looked up. Saw a huge circular object hovering over him. Going by the length of the tractor, he reckoned it was about thirty metres across.
“A lot of these farmers are pilots,” George explains, “’cause they do their own crop dusting. And his understanding of aviation is you have to have a bit of forward movement just to stay aloft, but this thing wasn’t moving fast enough. He thought, ‘This thing’s gonna crash down on me.’ So he ran away from his tractor, to get clear of it.”
Looking at the saucer from the side, he saw it had a dome on top with a black strip which he took to be a weather seal. “He said there was a doorway in it but no doorhandle. And he said it was like a church door—with an arch on top,” George says. The farmer described the saucer as having two rows of rims spinning in opposite directions. One row spun so fast he had to blink to see that it was actually spinning, the other row moved slowly. And together they made the screaming noise which grabbed his attention in the first place.
“Then he said there was two large openings at one end which he thought was exhaust,” George explains, peering up at the signs as the street opens out onto a wider road. “He could see shimmering heat coming out of one of them and spurts of flame coming out the other. And he thought, ‘Yeah, this thing’s in trouble.’ But then he said, as this thing was turning around, there was an aircraft stuck to the other side of it.”
It was a Cessna.
“And on the tape, Bill says, ‘What? The whole aircraft?’ And Laurie says, ‘Yep, the whole aircraft.’ The tail was hanging down, the wings were backed up against this thing like it’s run into it and the wheels were sticking out. And he could see the registration number of the plane.” The farmer hadn’t heard that Valentich had gone missing at this point, George explains, but he scratched the registration number of the Cessna into the paint of his tractor with a nail before the object flew off over a ridge in the direction of a nearby army range.
“Well,” Don asks calmly in his deep bass, “was it correct?”
“It was the number of the missing plane,” George says, his voice wavering slightly.
“What are the chances?” Don says. “What are the chances? What. Are. The. Chances.”
Chalker has called the account from the farmer an “extraordinarily bizarre and unbelievable claim.” He tried for years to track down further information. “You can’t begin an investigation when you don’t have a name,” George says, explaining that, because of the ridicule factor, the farmer told Laurie his story on the basis of anonymity and Laurie did not violate that accord when recounting it to Bill. “That’s the trouble, that’s what we’re up against. We’re racing against the undertaker and we’re also racing against the ridicule factor.”
I will find out later, from Bill Chalker’s blog, that the mate he went to Coonabarabran with was Rob Tilley. When I ask Rob about this, he says that he remembers going up there with Chalky but doesn’t remember that conversation specifically, which is implausible only if you don’t know how many strange conversations Rob has actually had.
Apparently, Laurie is now dead and his notebook has been lost, although George would like to try, at least, to locate the tractor.
“Farmers are a tight group,” Don says. “Somebody needs to go from farm to farm.”
“I got on to the Lucerne Growers Association,” George says. “We thought we might have had a name but we couldn’t get anywhere. You know about reversing tapes and hidden messages?”
“Yes, yes,” Don says with some enthusiasm. “Like the old Beatles—playing the record backwards . . .”
“I reversed it at the point where he’s describing the guy getting off the motorbike and coming in to buy something, where he’s skirting around not telling the name,” George says as the low buildings of Westall Secondary and Primary School pop into view. “And in reverse it sounds like a name pops out. So I tried to investigate that. The name sounded like Ian. Anyway, I’ve got it. This is the Westall school.”
35
Halfway Home
Lynn
At seventy, Lynn is the oldest resident at the shelter where most of the staff and residents call her Ms. Evans, the honorific extended only to her and the director, a formerly incarcerated social worker whom Lynn knows “from inside.” Lynn is usually the first to leave in the mornings, around 7:30 AM. At this early hour, she will ignore the rancid communal fridge and the dry cereal packets on a card table in the common room in favor of the smoothie blender she keeps at her office—an unbelievable luxury—and walk to the subway next to younger women and men holding juices that cost more than she earns in an hour.
Besides being a domestic violence counselor, a teacher, a writer, a cook, an artist and a skilled knitter of baby clothes, Lynn is also a paralegal. She works near Wall Street for one of the remaining sole practitioners in the area, whose office is over a café near the water. When she is not typing or filing, she is out serving documents around the city, handbag on one side, cane on the other. She is invigorated by the walking, by the city, by the interesting work and by the trust placed in her by her boss, who also has a felony conviction, having served time as a younger man for armed robbery before a nun encouraged him to enroll in college courses. Even if she did mind the walking, Lynn would do it anyway. Having arrived in the city four months ago as a seventy-year-old woman with no savings, no family and no home, she needs the job.
Lynn is never the last to return to the shelter. She gives herself a good buffer before the 9:00 PM curfew stipulated by the terms of her parole. She walks in around 6:00 PM and stops by the desk of the resident aide at the front door for a friendly chat while her bag is searched for contraband and her name is entered for the night’s count, the shelter having its own curfew of 10:00 PM. There are days she gets in a bit later, depending on the train, the weather, how long it took her to walk the three blocks from the subway, past the stalls of T-shirts and bongs and cheap jewelery and sunglasses where the owners come out to greet her with a hug while she asks about their families.
She will sit for a while in the common room where the TV is always too loud and rarely plays the news, which she would prefer to watch. Where there is no fresh air on account of the leftover fast food on the tables and the dirty microwave and the stinking fridge and the cigarette smoke wafting in from the small courtyard. This is a place where women who would not choose to be in the same room sit close together avoiding eye contact, passing judgment, mostly containing the desire to hurt each other in order to use one of the three computers or watch the TV or sit anywhere beside the street during the hours when their bed is off limits. Lynn usually finds someone to talk to, something to talk about. If required she will hold her ground, speak strongly to someone and not look away, but usually she is smiling. She sits for a while among the life of the house, adding a row or two to the tiny sweaters with thoughtfully chosen buttons she knits for the children or grandchildren of people she knows. Counting stitches in her head, acutely aware of where each row ends and that the sum will be more than its endings.
Lynn broke bones in prison, lost more teeth, a lump from her breast, her gallbladder. She fell in love, went through menopause. She learned about the internet from movies. Saw a mobile phone for the first time on a guard in a prison transport van; she used one for the first time when she was released in mid-2017.
When you arrive in prison, Lynn explains, you are given a piece of paper called a time computation sheet that tells you how much time you have to serve before you are eligible for parole. In 1982, Lynn was given a time comp sheet informing her that her first parole board meeting would be on October 30, 2007, a date that felt like science fiction. This would be like someone telling you, in 2021, that you would not be able to go to a grocery store or visit your family or cook in your kitchen or read your own book on your own couch until—all things going well—2046.
She folded it up and never looked at it again.
“If I looked at that every day,” she explains, “I would be doing twenty-five years every day.
“So, I decided right then and there, I was going to do today. Every morning I got up, and I said, ‘Well, I gotta do today.’ Every. Single. Morning. For thirty-five years.”
When women learned she was doing twenty-five to life, they would say to her that they didn’t know how she could do it, that they were struggling with lesser sentences. And she would reply, simply, “We have the same time.”
What do you mean? We don’t have the same time, they would say. I’ve got a two to six.
You have today, Lynn would say. Why are you worrying about two or six? You have today. Ask God or whoever you talk to for strength for today, and you can do today. You can do anything for a day. Tomorrow you can ask again. That means you and I have the exact same sentence. Twenty-four hours.
“I realized, right away, that if I was going to try to make something of my life, I couldn’t do twenty-five years steaming out of the ears. People do, I saw them when I got there, and I was like, ‘I’m not her and I won’t be her.’”
Seeing twenty-four hours instead of twenty-five years meant that Lynn did not put her life on hold, did not give in to self-pity or rage. Instead, she found an intensely practical lifeline that utilized both her leadership skills and her intellect.
“The directives are a funny thing,” she says, explaining how she set about learning the law that authorizes the Department of Corrections to set certain policies and procedures in prisons. “How to run the mail room, how to run the package room, how to run movement lines, how to inspect your fence every shift so that you know you don’t have a breach. Everything. What was urgent, what was routine, what was required to give us, what was elective that we could petition for.”
Policies and procedures had to comply with the directives but beyond that each prison superintendent was given a certain discretion. “They can give you slightly more than the directive allows, but not less,” Lynn says.
Using this information, Lynn successfully lobbied for change. Approved sick days were better communicated to work managers to stop the frequency with which ill inmates were being unjustly penalized. A craft market was authorized at which inmates could sell greeting cards, blankets, clothes and jewelery ahead of Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day and the start of the school year. Correctional officers thought she was a troublemaker but Elaine Lord, the superintendent of Bedford Hills Correctional Institution, appreciated her efforts and hired Lynn as her secretary, a role she held for twenty years.
She tutored in the evenings. Helped initiate a domestic violence program. Joined the Long Termers’ Committee, mentoring women who had nearly served their time, helped them prepare for release by teaching resumé writing, job-interview skills, advising on parole applications. She worked in the kitchen and law library, earned her qualification as a paralegal.
They say that you can get used to anything. This is not what I mean when I tell you that Lynn made for herself a life in prison. It never became her norm. What I mean is that she never surrendered her sanity or her capacity for joy to factors beyond her control.
“I wasn’t going to let it break me because if I was ever able to come home, I wanted to be okay, I wanted to be upright,” she says, explaining how she knew women who died by suicide, others who ended up in psychiatric wards. “I anchored myself with work and service. If I’m not doing something to help elevate the place, and the people, I feel like I’m part of the problem.”
