This year marks the 50th anniversary of the most documented UFO case in Australian history – the April 6, 1966, sighting of a flying saucer by over 200 witnesses, who saw it fly overhead for several minutes before briefly landing and taking off again near two schools in the Melbourne suburb of Westall.
The Westall UFO case has been the subject of several
Australian news reports and
documentaries, which have tried to find answers to the mystery of what precisely had landed. Recent whistleblower testimonies provide a compelling answer – the flying saucer was part a secret Australian aerospace program involving the development of antigravity technology in cooperation with the U.S. and Great Britain.
There have long been unconfirmed reports that the US, along with the United Kingdom, began developing a secret space program with the assistance of Nazi scientists extracted from Germany soon after the end of World War II. Early Nazi flying saucer prototypes called “Vril” were allegedly secretly removed from Germany and shared equally by the US and Britain as required by wartime agreements.
These technology exchange agreements date back to Britain’s
“Tizard Mission” where a delegation of British scientists led by Henry Tizard traveled to the U.S. in September 1940, and shared British technologies in advance of an expected Nazi German invasion of Britain.
What is undisputed fact is that 1500 leading Nazi aerospace scientists were extracted to the USA under Project Paperclip, and hundreds of others were evacuated to the United Kingdom by an elite military group
called T-Force which forcibly abducted them when necessary.
The former Nazi scientists were put to work in U.S. and British laboratories to develop a new generation of rockets based on the V-2, which were ultimately used to establish nuclear ballistic missiles and also the NASA space program.
Other Nazi scientists were allegedly secretly assigned to develop antigravity space craft using principles of high energy plasma and high voltage electrostatic charges.
High energy plasma, which would circulate around a highly conductive ring at very high revolutions per minute, was a speciality field of one of the Nazi scientists brought to the U.S. by Project Paperclip. Professor Winfried Otto Schumann. He was allegedly involved in developing the first Vril flying saucers in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
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Schumann’s name appears on the list of scientists requested by the US Army Air Force (predecessor to the US Air Force established in September 1947) back in 1946, which suggests that his speciality was important for highly classified aerospace projects being studied at the highly classified Dayton, Ohio, aerospace facility.
The first documented reference to electrostatics as a means of antigravity propulsion (electrogravitics) can be found in a
1928 British patent by Thomas Townsend Brown for an electrogravitic device called a gravitator. This has come to be called the Biefeld-Brown Effect, and was incorporated in a 1952 bid by Brown to the U.S. Navy to build a fleet of flying saucer craft called
Project Winterhaven.
According to official records, Project Winterhaven was turned down by the U.S. Navy and a subsequent attempt by Brown to fund it through a non-profit foundation resulted in failure. In December 2015, William Tompkins, a retired aerospace engineer
came forward to reveal that the U.S. Navy had secretly funded the development of flying saucer craft after all.
According to Tompkins, this was done by the Navy approaching private aerospace contractors such as Douglas Aircraft Company, to design and eventually build an assortment of antigravity vehicles.
Tompkins, revealed that while he worked at Douglas’ Advanced Design (1951-1963), he was responsible for submitting
designs for kilometer long space craft using antigravity technologies, to the U.S. Navy in “unsolicited bids.” These early designs were used for constructing U.S. Navy space battlegroups which began deployment in 1984, as the Solar Warden Space Program.
The U.S. antigravity space program involved leading think tanks and aerospace companies such as Douglas Aircraft Company and the RAND Corporation, which was an
off-shoot of Douglas. At the time, Douglas was the leading U.S. manufacturer of advanced military aircraft, and had created a classified think tank called Advanced Design, which was split off to form RAND,
according to Tompkins.
Tompkins said that he was directly involved in a
covert Navy intelligence program, which had discovered during World War II that up to 30 different flying saucer prototypes had been developed by the Nazis. These Nazi prototypes, or designs for them, were closely studied in U.S. and British laboratories after the war.
Douglas Memo Confirming Antigravity Research by William Tompkins superiors – Click image to enlarge
Further, Tompkins states that he worked under two senior scientists at Douglas, Dr. William Klemperer and Elmer Wheaton, who were actively researching antigravity principles and UFOs. Wheaton left Douglas in 1962 to take charge of similar projects at Lockeheed’s Skunkworks. Tompkins has supplied a document (on right) that confirms that his superiors were working on antigravity in the 1950’s, as he claimed.
Similar antigravity research was underway in Great Britain involving think tanks and leading aerospace companies. In 1956, a London based organization called “Gravity Rand” published a scientific discussion paper called
“The Gravitics Situation,” which revealed the extensive research being conducted by leading aerospace scientists in Britain.
The U.S. and Britain were not alone in researching or developing antigravity technologies. In 1956,
Interavia Magazine reported: “There are gravity research projects in every major country of the world. A few are over 30 years old.” Among these countries was Australia, a staunch ally of both Britain and the U.S.
In Australia, the Aeronautical Research Laboratories (1949-1994) was actively involved in classified antigravity research, according to a research physicist, Stan Deyo. Deyo has revealed that when he traveled to Melbourne, Australia in May 1972, he was given a letter of introduction to the head of Aeronautical Research Laboratories, located at Fishermans Bend, where Deyo could continue the antigravity research he had earlier begun in the U.S.
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The letter was written by Dr. James B. Maxfield, a Texas radiologist, who was recommending Deyo as someone familiar with antigravity research, who could help the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in its own program. According to Maxfield’s letter, first released in Deyo’s book,
The Cosmic Conspiracy, Maxfield had an interest, as did the father of the Hydrogen Bomb, Dr. Edward Teller, in the field of antigravity.
According to Deyo, Teller headed the antigravity research program in the U.S., and was actively assisting major allies such as Australia and the UK in their own respective programs. Deyo provided a
second letter from Dr. Maxfield, discussing a planned future visit by Teller to Melbourne, which was part of a secret U.S. and Australian cooperation on antigravity technology.
Support for Deyo’s claim is found in an article published in November 1955 by the
New York Herald Tribune, which identified Teller’s leading role in U.S. antigravity research:
The initial steps of an almost incredible program to solve the secret of gravity and universal gravitation are being taken today in many of America’s top scientific laboratories and researcher centers… These include Dr Edward Teller of the University of California.
Deyo’s testimony is further supported by Bob Lazar, an innovative rocket propulsion engineer turned whistleblower, who says that it was Dr. Teller who recruited him to join a classified facility at Area 51 called S-4, where he witnessed nine antigravity spacecraft that were being secretly studied. According to a former CIA Agent, Kewper,
who claims to have visited S-4 in 1958, four of the flying saucer craft were early German designs, two of which were called “Vril”.
Finally, in his autobiography,
Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics, Teller confirms his friendship with Dr. James Maxfield who had contacts with some of Australia’s leading industrialists (p.496). This included Lang Hancock, a very wealthy Australian mining magnate who was Maxfield’s personal friend. Teller’s biography confirms the role Maxfield played in organizing at least two of Teller’s trips to Australia where he met with Hancock and other influential Australians.
During his May 1972 Melbourne visit, Deyo was surprised to learn how knowledgeable the Australian scientists were about antigravity principles, and even witnessed a prototype flying saucer craft at one of the Aeronautical Research Laboratories workshops at Fishermans Bend.
Tompkins and Deyo’s testimony, along with that of
other whistleblowers, suggest that from the 1950’s, Australia closely worked with Great Britain and the U.S. in developing antigravity spacecraft, some of which resembled flying saucers. This establishes the possibility that the 1966 Westall incident was part of a classified antigravity vehicle test.
As the
top graphic illustrates, Fishermans Bend is only 25 kilometers flying distance from the Westall area (now South Clayton), across Port Phillip Bay. Furthermore, it is only 30 kilometers across the Bay from Australia’s oldest aviation facility located at the RAAF Base Point Cook.
If Australia was testing antigravity vehicles, then either Fishermans Bend or Point Cook could have been used since both are adjacent to Port Phillip Bay where the craft could fly over a large body of water largely undetected.
Such a possibility is supported by some of the witnesses to the Westall incident who described camouflaged military personnel – thought to be American special forces – who quickly sanitized the flying saucer landing area. The rapid response of some of the military personnel – as little as 20 minutes according to
witnesses – suggests the personnel were stationed nearby to monitor a test.
One Australian UFO researcher, Keith Basterfield, has found that a classified program called HIBAL involving high altitude balloons, was officially scheduled for a launch on April 5, 1966, one day before the Westall incident, but could have actually occurred on the same day. While he proposed Project HIBAL as a
possible explanation for the Westall sighting itself, a more plausible answer is that it was a cover program for a more highly classified flying saucer program.
Leaked National Security Agency files by Edward Snowden confirm that the military intelligence community in the U.S. and its Echelon partners (Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand) will use a classified program as a
cover for an even more highly classified program.
The flying saucer issue, as pointed out by Wilbert Smith, a former Senior Engineer with the Canadian Department of Transportation, were the
most classified matter in the U.S. national security system. Consequently, a classified high altitude balloon program (HIBAL) would have been a very effective cover for a more highly classified Australian flying saucer program.
NSA leaked slide showing SENTRY EAGLE program where different DHS, DOD, and NSA classified programs are hidden within less classified national programs. (NSA). Click to Enlarge
Given Maxfield’s two letters to Deyo in 1972, revealing Maxfield and Teller’s interest in antigravity research, this suggests that the 1966 visit also very likely involved antigravity research. Consequently, the April 6, 1966 Westall flying saucer incident can be linked to Teller’s first visit to Australia four months later, and was possibly a test of an antigravity flying saucer, where HIBAL was used as a cover program for national security reasons.
Finally, we have the not insignificant fact that Rear Admiral Rico Botta, identified by Tompkins as the U.S. Navy officer in command of
a covert espionage program with 29 spies in Nazi Germany, learning about the development of antigravity spacecraft, was born and raised in the Australian city of Melbourne, before emigrating to the U.S. in 1908, at age 18.
The cooperation between the U.S., Britain and Australia in developing and testing of flying saucer craft using principles of antigravity, dating as far back as the 1950’s, provides a compelling explanation for some of the many UFO sightings in Australia. Among these, the 1966 Westall flying saucer incident stands out as one that likely has a very worldly explanation – the top secret cooperation between Australia, the U.S. and Britain in developing antigravity vehicles for a secret space program.
Michael E. Salla, Ph.D.
[NOTE: An upcoming Australia Tour with Dr. Michael Salla in three cities – Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney – in July/August 2016, will present documents and whistleblower testimony about the “Origins of Secret Space Programs”, and how this may help finally answer one of Australia’s greatest UFO mysteries. Tickets and further information about my Secret Space Programs Australia Tour are
available online.]
