Sighting record / 1960
Tuesday morning, 15 November 1960. A USAF JB-57 was cruising at 40,000 feet, 15 miles north of Launceston, Tasmania. The navigator called out an aircraft approaching low on the left. The pilot looked. It was no aircraft. It was round, flat and translucent, fuzzy at the edges, "somewhat like that of a 'poached egg'", about 70 feet across. It closed at more than 800 knots. Within seconds it slid under the left wing. The pilot banked at once for another look. The sky was empty. The report vanished into an RAAF file for two decades, until Bill Chalker found it and turned it against the official story of another Tasmanian sighting.
November 1960. RAAF East Sale, Victoria, was hosting a quiet American detachment. According to Philip Dorling's history of Operation Crowflight, three U-2 and four JB-57 aircraft were there to fly secret high-altitude radiological sampling missions. The JB-57s came from the 4950th Test Group at Kirtland AFB.