The Mundrabilla Bus Sighting

The Eyre Highway crosses the Nullarbor Plain, linking South Australia and Western Australia across hundreds of empty kilometres. In January 1988 it had already made headlines. A Perth family, the Knowles, reported an encounter near Mundrabilla in which their car was said to have been lifted. Nine months later, the same stretch of road produced another report.

Monday 17 October 1988. About 1 a.m. Central Standard Time, by the investigator's account. One newspaper put it at about 12.15am.

A Pioneer Express coach was travelling west, about 20km west of the Mundrabilla Roadhouse. At the wheel was Peter Chapman of Ceduna, South Australia. There were 25 passengers aboard. Most were asleep.

A light appeared. According to the Canberra Times, it "came up behind the bus, then flew beside it about 50 metres away and about 100 metres off the ground." Chapman later described it on television. "It was about 60 feet above the ground and was about 15 feet round. It was very bright."

It held position on the northern side of the coach. "It passed around the back of the bus and I looked in the rear vision mirror and it followed us for about four miles." UPI called it a "ball of fire". Other accounts called it a bright white light.

Chapman drove at high speed to escape. He woke five passengers, and they saw it too. Press reports said seven passengers saw it. Then the highway bent. "We went around an S-bend and I looked across and it just disappeared completely."

At Eucla, Sgt George Johansen took the report. He said police took it seriously, and that Chapman "is not one of those people who makes things up." Chapman had been reluctant to report it at first, and was upset by it. Constable Don Blackshaw told UPI that police had visited the scenes of both 1988 sightings and found nothing untoward. Colin Norris, director of the Australian UFO Research Group, thought extraterrestrials were using the remote area to study people.

Keith Basterfield examined the case in a 1988 report for UFO Research Australia and identified the light as the planet Jupiter. A.T. Brunt, a former Regional Director of the South Australian Bureau of Meteorology, then looked again at the request of Ian Ridpath, and his findings appeared in The Skeptic in 1989. Jupiter's position, at azimuth 040° and elevation 26°, "seems correct", he wrote. The nearest temperature sounding, at Forrest, about 100km to the south, showed a marked inversion. Brunt argued that "refraction in the inversion layer would have changed this normally bright light into a distorted and enlarged image."

One passenger thought the light was a reflection of the headlights of a transport behind the coach. A westbound goods train between Denman and Hughes lay on the right bearing, but it was about 170 km away with hills in between. Brunt rejected it. He also saw the January case at work. "There seems no doubt that the first incident helped to precipitate the second."

The accounts never fully lined up: four miles or about 10 miles, twenty metres up or a hundred, five witnesses or seven. Today the Mundrabilla bus sighting survives mostly as a footnote to the Knowles case, as Case 24 in Basterfield's Nullarbor catalogue on Project 1947. "They would not be the first to call planets 'UFOs'," Brunt wrote. For Chapman, the night was frightening enough that he hesitated to tell anyone.