HMAS Derwent leads HMAS Swan and HMAS Geraldton during exercises off the West Australian coast, 1988.
1992 Departing Darwin on 13 March, Derwent participated in Exercise KANGAROO 92 with Swan and Torrens. Pilotage Training for the SEAACs enabled Derwent to visit Noumea and the Whitsunday Group during the months of June July. A Reduced Activity Period commenced from the 15 August until the end of the year.
It is around 2am on a crystal-clear night on the bridge of the Royal Australian Navy destroyer escort HMAS Derwent when Australian Navy serviceman Andrew Roberts and four other colleagues on night watch duty notice the cylindrical object hovering 500m off the ship’s port bridge wing.
“I looked up and there was this long cylindrical silver object, about 20m long, with a heat-haze around it,” Andrew recalls.
“It was following the ship no more than 500m away. We could see it very clearly in the night sky. I called out to the officer-of-the-watch and five of us all looked up at this thing for at least a good minute.
“As we watched it suddenly instantly accelerated and then disappeared into the distance. The acceleration was amazing, instantaneous. It just disappeared in the blink of an eye.”
It was 1992; the destroyer was headed back to its home base of HMAS Stirlingin WA after an ‘up-Top’ Asian deployment.
Andrew was a sonar technician onboard at the time, but he would later qualify to become one of the elites of the Australian Navy’s special forces – a Navy Clearance diver.
Thirty years on, he is adamant that what he saw was not a conventional aircraft, balloon, or drone; indeed, he can think of no prosaic explanation for what he and his shipmates saw.
But he admits it was neither reported to his superiors nor noted in the ship’s log, probably because of the stigma associated with reporting such anomalous objects.
Unreported sightings
“I was so intrigued by what we’d seen I went down to the radar room and spoke to the radar ops centre to see if they’d seen it on screen; they hadn’t.
“Looking back now, I wish we had reported it but while reporting such things was neither discouraged or encouraged, we were puzzled as to what it was and we kind of let things lie, never passing the sighting on,” he says.
This was something not of this world
“I also went to the communications centre and checked if there was any comms’ with aircraft or passing ships. There was nothing out there apart from us. So, it went unreported. Part of the issue with that is, what would people think if you do report it because there’s such a stigma attached to UFOs.”
Andrew told me how he was aware from colleagues of other sightings on Navy vessels, including one where a glowing giant sphere followed a ship at sea.
Another former Navy sailor, Elliott Seiffert, told 7NEWS Spotlight how he and another sailor witnessed glowing lights high above their patrol boat at sea, probably in orbit, doing manoeuvres and speeds far beyond known human technology.
“I think it was non-human technology,” Elliott said.
“This was something not of this world.”
A drawing of a UFO that appeared over Exmouth in 1973. Credit: Supplied
Again, his sighting went unreported. As I write this article, within hours of our broadcast of 7NEWS Spotlight: Secrets Of The UFOs, other former and serving military have emailed and messaged with numerous other accounts of such sightings.
Last month Australia’s Air Force chief, Air Marshal Mel Hupfeld, told Parliament’s Senate Estimates’ Foreign Affairs Defence & Trade Committee hearing that Australia had no plans to follow the United States’ Department of Defence by formally investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).
The Air Marshal insisted his pilots had not reported any recent sightings of unexplained objects in the sky.
Under questioning from Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, the Air Force boss confirmed he was not formally aware of the US Pentagon investigation report into UAPs (tabled on June 25 in the Congress).
There is no doubt that CAS Mel Hupfeld has the ‘right stuff’; he is a highly decorated and well-respected former fighter pilot.
He earned the Distinguished Service Cross for his combat squadron command role during Middle East deployments. But both he and Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne responded to the Senator’s serious questions with mild amusement at the ‘UFO’ angle.
The minister commented that it was the first time she had ever seen questions being asked in Estimates hearings about “such an issue”. If they intended to mock the senator’s questions, that was a serious misjudgment.
A security threat?
The evidence of Andrew Roberts and numerous other serving and former servicemen and women who have spoken to 7NEWS Spotlight suggests that sightings of anomalous phenomena are not being reported as they should be to the military command that should know about these UAPs. For, surely, any sighting of a massive cylindrical object hovering near a Navy vessel on active service should be mandatorily reported?
It was a critical feature of the Pentagon’s UAP report to Congress that, in a reversal of decades of denial, the investigators admitted the 143 sightings between 2004 and 2021 that they investigated did pose a critical concern for flight safety and also a possible threat to national security.
A 1950 document released by the FBI under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts Section, shows a Federal Bureau of Investigation report of “flying saucers” in New Mexico sent to then-Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1950. Credit: FBI/AP
There is no reason to suppose that Australia’s experience would be any different but the lack of any reporting requirement across all branches of the military means that no data is being kept on the phenomenon, when the overwhelming evidence from the USA suggests it clearly should be.
“There seems to be a phobia about reporting anything in the military that cannot be explained,” Andrew Roberts tells me.
Much of the mainstream media is still catching up with the fact that the US Pentagon has formally admitted that the mystery surrounding UAPs is real and very much unexplained.
The stigma attached to UAPs appears to also be discouraging military personnel from coming forward to report what they are indeed seeing while on active service.
Growing interest
Since our documentary The UFO Phenomenon aired on Channel 7 in May and more recently was released internationally on YouTube, the response from viewers has been phenomenal and unprecedented.
Public interest in the acknowledged mystery of UAPs is intense. Somewhere between seven and eight million viewers have watched the program either on free-to-air, on 7plus or on YouTube.
The publication of my book In Plain Sight has also drawn a massive audience response around the world.
Many of those who have got in touch with me are military service or intelligence veterans from Australia or the United States with extraordinary stories to tell of mysterious sightings of anomalous phenomena, which, most often, went unreported to military commanders.
I suspect the dismissiveness by military commanders and their subordinates to unidentified aerial phenomena is not some dark conspiracy by Defence and/or intelligence agencies to suppress the existence of UAPs.
Could it be that most of them are as confused as we all are about what these objects might be, and it is easier to ignore or ridicule the mystery than to deal with it?
What is not well understood is that the ridicule and stigma still attached to the issue of weird objects in our skies (and oceans, and orbit) is a throwback to the legacy of a critical decision made by American intelligence agencies back in the 1950s, well-recorded in now released historical Government archive documents, showing that the US Central Intelligence Agency worked with the US Air Force to use ridicule and mockery to discourage both the media and the public from reporting the phenomenon.
Ironically, half a century ago in Australia, one of the most prominent insiders demanding an official military investigation into the reality of UAPs was himself a senior official of Australia’s Department of Defence.
In 1971, Harry Turner was the head of the DOD’s Joint Intelligence Organisation Nuclear Branch.
He had witnessed and investigated numerous sightings of anomalous objects, apparently intelligently controlled craft, seen hovering over the secretive British nuclear weapon tests in the South Australian desert at Maralinga during the 1950s and 1960s.
On 27 May 1971, Harry wrote a strong memo to his military bosses flatly declaring that, “The early analyses of UFO reports by USAF intelligence indicated that real phenomena were being reported which had flight characteristics so far in advance of US aircraft that only an extraterrestrial origin could be envisaged.”
He explained how the CIA had become alarmed at the overloading of military communications during the mass sightings of 1952 and considered the possibility that the USSR may take advantage of such a situation.
His memo, now available in Australia’s National Archives, openly admits how America’s top spy agency persuaded the US Air Force to use the Project Blue Book investigation, “… as a means of publicly ‘debunking’ UFOs …”
“By erecting a façade of ridicule, the US hoped to allay public alarm,” Harry Turner told JIO, to, “…reduce the possibility of the Soviet taking advantage of UFO mass sightings for either psychological or actual warfare purposes, and act as cover for the real US program of developing vehicles that emulate UFO performance.
“The RAAF together with many other countries of the World give credence only to the USAF public façade and appear to have uncritically accepted the associated information.
“This information has been widely discredited by retiring US service personnel formerly engaged on UFO investigations, as well as by scientists and private citizens,” Turner told the DOD.
Taking UFOs seriously
This week the US Congress moved to formalise efforts to force the military and spy agencies to take reports of UAPs far more seriously.
Legislation now before the House would require regular public reports to Congress on UAPs, including whether the US Government is keeping any crashed non-human craft or technology under wraps and even tracking any biological effects from these encounters.
The United States at least is reversing its once covert policy of ridiculing UAPs and is now acknowledging the reality of the Phenomenon.
Confidential briefings have been given to key Congressional leaders that are now driving a serious response.
On October 19, the administrator of America’s space agency NASA, Bill Nelson, admitted one explanation for the mysterious unexplained US Navy sightings might well be some kind of extraterrestrial intelligence.
“Who am I say Planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilised and organised like ours?” the NASA chief told his audience.
It would seem Australia’s military still has a lot of catching-up to do to deal with the new UAP reality.
Watch 7NEWS Spotlight: Secrets Of The UFOs on demand now on 7plus.
