Melton police UFO pursuit

Melton sits on the plains west of Melbourne, Victoria. In 1983 the farmland around it held more than paddocks and horse studs. The Australian Army ran an HF receiving site at Rockbank and an HF transmitting site at Diggers Rest. Bill Chalker later described Rockbank as a Defence Signals Directorate facility, part of the UKUSA signals intelligence network.

00:40, 22 July 1983. Phone calls began reaching Melton police station. Residents were reporting an object over the town. Constable Peter Ferguson was on night shift with Constable Raymond Ellens. Around 01:00 to 01:30 they saw it themselves. Low. Fifty to a hundred feet up in one telling, about 200 feet in another. They lit it with the van's spotlight.

The accounts describe two shapes. Seen from the side, the first looked like a gyrocopter. About 20 ft long and 3 to 4 ft high, an open frame with a "tail section similar to tubular steel, with bright light on fin and red strip on fin." It made "a whirling sound (not like a conventional helicopter)."

The second passed directly overhead. Ferguson's statement: "we shinned the spotlight onto its underside and observed it to be of gun metal grey in colour and to have the appearance of a very large rubber raft with two lights inset in the front and two white lights on the rear and a red flashing light in the centre." It was approximately 30 feet in length and 20 wide. A low pitched hum. About 70 to 80 kph. Sergeant Barry Harman saw it too. "My immediate observation was that of two large round lights, very similar to the lights of a motor car, approximately 40 cm in diameter."

At about 02:40 an object was seen on the ground in a paddock behind Toolern Vale Stud. Ellens and Ferguson searched. They found nothing. At about 5.00 am it was back. Ellens: "The object appeared to be travelling slowly directly towards the antenna array." Chalker wrote that it seemed to turn about to avoid the antennas. Ferguson recalled it travelling "across farm land very low to ground popping higher as it came to fences." The last sighting came between 05:45 and about 06:10. Dawn was breaking.

Ferguson says a security breach alert was raised. Chalker wrote that "the intelligence world was in an uproar." The police statements apparently reached RAAF files, and archive documents record "no military aircraft in the air at the time." Radar remains contested. One account mentions a momentary blip at Tullamarine at 01:00. The 1983 news report reportedly said there was nothing on radar. John Auchettl investigated soon after and presented the case at the 1996 Australian UFO Conference.

In 2023 a thread on Metabunk proposed a Bell 47 helicopter. The open tubular tail boom with a red stripe fit. So did the subdued piston engine. Low daytime flights need no flight plan. The raft might be the same machine seen from below.

Then, in 2024, Ferguson joined the thread. By then a veteran of the Victoria Police Air Wing, Ferguson rejected the idea. No down draft. "virtually no sound only a low humming like a vacuum cleaner." Others noted a Bell 47 can stay up for only about 2.5 hours. A gyrocopter was confirmed parked at Fogarty's Field that night. Ferguson's verdict: "man made but it didn't fit anything I understand to be able to hover, fly etc with no noise."

No photographs. No physical traces. No hoax claims. What remains is three police officers, their statements and sketches, and a witness who has never wavered: "I know what I saw that night!"