The Purnong Landing dome of coloured lights

Purnong Landing sits on cliffs above the eastern bank of the Murray River in South Australia. A cable ferry carries the road across the water. Mannum lies about 32 kilometres away by road. Adelaide is about 115 kilometres to the west.

In the autumn of 1959, South Australia was in the middle of a wave of reports. On 23 March, a strange object was reported at Adelaide. On 31 March, Barry Neale saw a glowing reddish-orange object with a row of portholes at Port Elliot. On 29 April, at Blackwood, Rod Lightfoot made a 10-second time exposure of a spinning saucer shaped object with a row of steady lights.

It was 0210 hours on 13 March 1959. Two men were driving a truck near Purnong Landing. Their surnames were Towill and Briggs. The truck crested a hill. Ahead of them was a "dome" illuminated by coloured lights. The men stopped and watched. The object was about ten metres in diameter. It went through "a regular sequence of colour changes."

Then the lights all went out. The men approached on foot from about a hundred metres away. As they did so, the object "took off silently at a forty-five degree angle." It "was lost to sight after twenty minutes, in the southern sky." No beings were seen. No effects on the men were reported.

Briggs later added a detail. On the evening of 13 March 1959, he said, some nurses had seen a similar object near Purnong Landing. The nurses are not named. No account from them survives.

The night before, on 12 March, six-year-old Kim Marks reported a "man in red" in his bedroom at Purnong Landing. The figure had a "crimson face" and wore "a red jacket and trousers, with white trimmings." Hours later, the family reportedly saw a "multicoloured luminous object" near the property. No source links the two reports directly.

The story appeared in the Adelaide Advertiser on 24 March 1959 and in the Australian Saucer Record the same year. No Royal Australian Air Force file has been found for it.

The only investigation on record came much later. On 26 December 1972, Keith Basterfield and Garry Little interviewed Briggs, about 13 years after the event. Basterfield entered the case in his catalogues of South Australian and Australian reports. He coded it as a close encounter of the first kind, with two male witnesses.

No hoax claim has surfaced. No conventional explanation has been published. The detailed account rests on an interview given 13 years after the event. Michael Hervey's 1969 book UFOs Over the Southern Hemisphere printed the date as 13 March 1954, an error Basterfield flagged.

The Purnong Landing dome remains a quiet case. No photograph, no film, no radar. Just two men, a truck on a hill above the Murray River, and a lit dome that went dark and left without a sound. It lives on in Basterfield's catalogues, in Hervey's book, and in modern retellings of strange encounters on South Australian roads.