The Kimba Glowing Doorway Encounter

The Eyre Highway runs across the northern Eyre Peninsula, through long empty stretches between Iron Knob and the town of Kimba. On Sunday 4 February 1973, at about 9:50 pm, three vehicles were travelling that road towards Kimba, minutes apart.

Brian Hunt and Sharyn Finckler, two young people from Kimba, had stopped by the roadside for a call of nature. While they were stopped, a motorist named Max Inglis overtook them. About 400 metres further on, Inglis saw a rectangular orange glow in a clearing on the right hand side of the road. He thought it might be an accident and slowed. Then he felt there was something odd and waited to see what the car behind him would do.

Hunt drove past the spot. He saw what seemed like a red flare and looked back. There was a rectangular shape of orange-red light, 3 m high and 1.5 m wide. In it was a sharply defined figure, like a normal human figure, dressed in white all over, "like a white space suit." It was apparently motionless, some 60 to 90 cm above the ground, arms and legs pointing down.

Hunt accelerated away and pointed for Finckler to look. She saw an orange rectangle with a white spot on top. Turning in her seat, she watched the glow appear to spread right across the road behind them. Seeing the car accelerate away, Inglis also drove off at speed.

About 10 minutes later a truck driver from Ceduna, Allan Degnor, came along the same road. He saw what looked like a large caravan doorway with a figure in white in the middle.

Hunt and Finckler reached her house at 10:30 pm. Her father saw that Brian was white faced and trembling, so much so that he was unable to hold a cigarette on his own. The local police were called. A constable accompanied them back to the site. No traces were found.

Keith Basterfield and fellow Adelaide researchers Dean Piovesan, Peter Horne and Peter Howell took up the case. They found Inglis and Degnor independently. Basterfield's team visited the site, took soil samples and had them analysed to see if there was anything unusual. No result has been published. They found no vehicle tracks and no marks of anything entering or leaving. The Whyalla News covered the case on 16 February 1973. A year later Basterfield wrote it up as "Strange Affair on the Kimba Road" in Flying Saucer Review, and his monograph now sits in the files of the Center for UFO Studies.

No hoax claim has ever been made. No conventional explanation has been put forward. The witnesses' own first readings, an accident and a red flare, gave way to something they could not name. Later web summaries sometimes credit Kimba with a temperature inversion mirage. That idea belongs to another Eyre Highway case, the Knowles family encounter on the Nullarbor in 1988.

Michael Swords of the Center for UFO Studies saw Kimba as a spectacular instance of the window or doorway type. He pointed to the two-dimensionality of the space, which suggested to him that "an opening had occurred in that location from another place."

Speaking to the ABC in 2018, Basterfield was candid. "That's not your typical flying metallic saucer but it's a very, very strange set of observations by a group of independent people." Then he added the line that still hangs over the case. "And we never did get to the bottom of it."