The Bilbul Light: Ivan Soliani's Riverina UFO, Griffith 1977

Griffith, New South Wales. July 1977. The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area was about to live through its biggest news week. Ivan Soliani worked as a pre-press photographer at The Area News, the local paper, and his family owned the Yenda Shoe Store. On Friday 15 July 1977 the paper's front page carried a headline that would follow him for decades: "further sighting of Riverina UFO". Further. Something had already been seen over the Riverina. Those earlier reports have never been traced.

The exact night was never recorded. It was that Friday, or a night or two before. Soliani told the story himself, forty years later. "A friend and I had gone to the movies, and we went home to his place in Bilbul." Bilbul is a small village a few kilometres north-east of Griffith. "At about 11pm at night we were talking outside his house when we saw this bright light in the sky."

It wasn't moving. It hung there, flashing ultra bright colours, red, green and blue, over a constant white. Soliani did what a newspaper photographer does. "I got the camera out and took a few photos."

According to Soliani, "the police said they saw it", and so did staff at Griffith Base Hospital. The 1977 front page, as summarised in 2017, named police and nurses among the witnesses. It also placed the flying saucer "over Leeton", the next town east of Griffith. That may describe where the light seemed to hang rather than where anyone stood. No statement from the officers or the nurses themselves has surfaced.

The photographs never came back. "I had to send them to the UFO Centre, along with the negative. I never got them back." The attention did come. "I got an extreme amount of attention. All the national media wanted to talk to me."

Then the week turned dark. At around 6:30pm on Friday 15 July 1977, the day the UFO headline ran, anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay vanished from the Hotel Griffith car park. A royal commission later found he had been murdered by a mafia hitman. James Bazley was convicted in 1986. The body has never been found. Staff at the paper received death threats and checked under their cars for bombs. "This apparent coincidence would have fuelled conspiracy theories at the time," the paper wrote in 2017. Former Griffith High teacher John Robinson recalled "all sorts of theories about what happened to Mr Mackay, with some saying he was taken on a plane." No source suggests anyone seriously claimed Mackay was taken by a UFO.

No hoax claim has ever been made. No explanation was offered in 1977, or in 2017. No official investigation has been found in Australian archives or UFO catalogues.

There is a familiar candidate. A stationary, very bright light flashing red, green, blue and white is the classic description of a bright star or planet twinkling through low, turbulent air. Nobody has yet checked the sky over Griffith on that July night.

Oliver Jacques of The Area News revisited the week for its 40th anniversary and compared the case with the Frederick Valentich disappearance over Bass Strait in 1978. One of his articles misdated the sighting to 1997, a typo the rest of the story corrects. The original July 1977 editions are held at Griffith City Library. Somewhere in those pages, perhaps, is the first Riverina UFO.