The Canterbury Bowling-Green "Humming Top" Saucer

Late 1966. Dr Michael J. Duggin, a physicist at the CSIRO National Standards Laboratory in Sydney, carried a letter of introduction from Dr J. Allen Hynek. It said Duggin was "collecting information on UFOs and is part of an International effort to collate information". That December he told RAAF Squadron Leader Baxter he was working with Hynek and Jacques Vallée. A few months later, the effort found a case in his own city.

March 1967. About 10:10 in the morning. It was raining in Canterbury, a suburb of Sydney. Mrs Manhood went out to fetch her small daughter from beside the bowling green next to the family home on Wairoa Street. One catalogue places the green at the Canterbury Women's Bowling Club, where her husband was green keeper.

She saw a strange circular object descend out of the clouds and hover over the green. Inside, her sister, Mrs R. Coleman, was on the phone to their mother. By that same account, the line died as Mrs Manhood screamed. Mrs Coleman ran out to join her. Both women saw the object at the height of the telephone wires.

It was dark grey to black, with no significant markings. Duggin's report put it at the size of a small car at tree-top height. The press said a small plane. It made a noise like a child's humming top. It came within 100 feet of the sisters. It moved at less than 30 mph, and its outline changed gradually from circular to elliptical.

After about five minutes it passed just over the railway embankment. A third woman, Mrs Clavis, watched it cross. Roughly a minute and a half later it rose again, climbing at about 70 degrees at fairly good speed toward a break in the clouds. Mr Manhood saw only this last stage. To him it looked like a balloon high in the sky.

The Sydney Sun-Herald ran the story under the headline "Sisters hysterical at sighting. WEIRD 'SAUCER' OVER CANTERBURY." It described a "strange round thing" with a "weird humming sound" that "came down to tree-top level". The sisters, it said, "watched the saucer's flight for 10 minutes." Even the date drifted. Bill Chalker gives 8 March 1967. The INTCAT catalogue gives 1 March. The newspaper itself appears to be the Sunday edition of 12 March.

Duggin took the case. He checked with the Weather Bureau, Mascot airfield and Mascot radar. "No confirmatory details were found, but a balloon was ruled out." His written report went to Hynek. "It is highly improbable that any balloon could (1) change its aspect from circular to oval or elliptical, (2) travel at a low altitude and suddenly climb again," he wrote. And: "It is virtually certain that no balloons were in the vicinity of Canterbury at the time."

A balloon was the only ordinary explanation anyone formally weighed, and Duggin rejected it. Mr Manhood's own comparison keeps the question alive, though he saw only the climb. No one has suggested a hoax. No photographs are known.

The case travelled through Flying Saucer Review, a book by R. Tambling and Chalker's The OZ Files in 1996, where he called it "a striking close encounter in the Sydney suburb of Canterbury." By 1971 Duggin was urging scientists to "form world-wide panels".