The Kangaroo Ground Revolving Lights

In August 1909 no powered, controlled aircraft had yet flown in Australia. That would not come until 1910. Britain had already been gripped by mysterious airships that year, and New Zealand had its own wave in July and August. A Sydney paper mocked the New Zealanders for their "AERIAL HYSTERIA". Just a few days later, the Australian reports began.

Saturday night, 7 August 1909. A farm at Kangaroo Ground, about 26 km north-east of Melbourne. The Rev. B. Cozens of the Port Melbourne Seamen's Mission was there with his wife. Their neighbour J. Swain, a monumental mason with premises in the city, was there with his two sons.

"At 10 o'clock on Saturday night my wife and I saw two beautiful revolving lights high up in the air above the Dandenong Range," Cozens said. The lights hung about six miles apart, about half a mile above the top of the range. "These lights whirled like the propellers of ships, slowed down, dipped, and rose again, as if they were beating up in a zig-zag course against the wind." They changed from white to red and then to blue, "as if they were revolving beacons with three-coloured slides."

The five witnesses watched until about midnight. Slowly one light sank until it had nearly disappeared behind the ranges. At about 2 am Cozens got up again. The second light "had also nearly disappeared in the same place". Then he saw "five more very dim in the distance, driving up in the track of the ones we had seen."

His impression was clear. "The whole impression of their movements was that of machinery."

Cozens went to the office of The Argus in person to make a statement. It appeared on Monday 9 August. The next day the paper printed a letter from North Malvern residents. At about 10 pm on both Friday 6 and Saturday 7 August, they had seen a strange light rise in the direction of Mt Dandenong, sometimes red and then blue, travelling west before it disappeared.

Then the wave spread. Moss Vale and Goulburn. Bulli. Dorrigo, with the first daylight sighting on 1 September. Perth, Hobart, Kalgoorlie. The last came at Fremantle on 5 September. Unlike the British, Australians did not blame a foreign power. The mystery craft were "the object of curiosity, not suspicion".

No official body looked into the lights. In 1909 none existed. Keith Basterfield, cataloguing early Australian reports, noted that the changes from white to red to blue "are indicative of the colours of a star due to atmospheric scintillation." For the wave as a whole, W.E. Raymond of Sydney Observatory pointed to Mars near opposition, while others pointed to Venus and Jupiter in conjunction. In 2016 the ABC floated the aurora australis. Greg Gerrand of State Library Victoria observed that the Argus report itself "offers no explanation".

Historian Brett Holman identified Kangaroo Ground as the first report of Australia's 1909 scareship wave. Holman stressed that it described no airship, only "beautiful revolving lights". In 2016 the story resurfaced beside the return of The X-Files, whose premiere quizzed Fox Mulder on Kelly Cahill's 1993 encounter in the same Dandenong hills.