The Exmouth diamond craft escort, North West Cape (1991)

North West Cape, Western Australia. Six kilometres north of Exmouth stood US Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt, an American base about to be handed to Australia. Annie Farinaccio was 25 in 1991. She worked at Roebourne Regional Prison, counselling prisoners on finding work. Late that year she went to a party at the base, and needed a ride home.

Two officers, named in the book only as Kevin and Alan, drove her in a four-wheel-drive Toyota security vehicle. It was about 2:30 a.m. Then Kevin spoke. "It's back. Grab the camera." And then: "Look up!"

A diamond-shaped craft was "hovering literally straight above the vehicle." Long, with the rear edge chopped off. Dark grey, though not as dark as the night sky. Rows of lights ran toward the tip. It hung perhaps 100 feet above them, as long as two to three cars. Completely silent.

It rose straight up on the right side of the moving car, then dropped almost instantly on the left. "It moved so fast my eyes couldn't follow it." Alan photographed it through the windscreen as it followed them for about a kilometre. At last it shot upward and seemed to settle in the scrub a few hundred metres from the road, a light shining from underneath. The officers wanted to stop. Annie did not. "I was crying. 'This is crazy. Take me home'."

Two days later, two US military policemen came to her family home. Her elderly mother confirmed the visit. They took Annie from her workplace to a top-secret section of the base. For several hours she was questioned, asked to draw the object and told it was probably a weather balloon. "I said, 'I don't give a shit what you say. It wasn't a weather balloon.'" Both officers sat in the room, heads bowed. One told her: "Please shut up … Shut up before you get us all killed."

Alan later said the film had been printed at a shop on the base and shown to colleagues. He was taken into custody. His camera, prints and negatives were seized. When Annie and her cousin visited him, he told them never to come back.

The account appeared in 2015 on the blog of researcher Keith Basterfield, who confirmed it by phone. In 2021 journalist Ross Coulthart told it in the 7NEWS Spotlight documentary The UFO Phenomenon and in his book In Plain Sight. Coulthart says he is in "no doubt whatsoever" that the Americans ran a secret investigation. No US or Australian record of it has surfaced.

A weather balloon does not fit a craft that hovered low and paced a car. Coulthart showed Annie a picture of Lockheed's "Hopeless Diamond" stealth design without naming it. Similar, she said, but different at the top and tail. A researcher named Marler noted that "the stealth bomber does not hover."

The record has gaps. Basterfield's version dates the encounter to 1992/1993 and calls the photographer Brian. The officers' agency shifts between the Federal Protective Service, the Australian Protective Service and the Australian Federal Police. Neither officer has spoken publicly. The photographs have never been published.

North West Cape has other stories, among them a large black sphere that two US Navy personnel watched hover over the base in daylight in 1973. But this one stands apart. A craft over a moving car. A roll of film. Two frightened men in a room. The pictures have never been seen.