“They said, “Yes, we’ve got you.  You’re the centre aircraft.”  I said that’s correct.  They then said to me, “Who are the other two aircraft,” and I said, “I don’t know.  I was hoping you would tell me, because I didn’t think there was anyone up here. “ They said, “Well there shouldn’t be, and they certainly shouldn’t be that close to you.” 

Making headlines in December 1954 is the now infamous ‘Sea Fury’ encounter.  On August 31st, 1954, Lieutenant J.A. O’Farrell was returning to Royal Australian Navy Air Station Nowra after flying across the country in a Sea Fury Aircraft. 

At about 7:10pm while near Goulbourn, NSW, O’Farrell saw a bright light approaching at speed almost head on.  It crossed in front of his aircraft taking up position on his port beam, where it appeared to orbit. 

A second ‘bright light’ was seen at nine o’clock, passing about a mile in from the Sea Fury before turning in the position where the first light was observed. 

According to the pilot, the crossing speeds of the lights were the fastest he’d ever seen.  He was flying at about 400km/h. 

Radar operator at Nowra base Petty Officer Keith Jessop confirmed the presence of two objects near the Sea Fury on the G.C.I. remote display. 

The two lights reformed at nine o’clock before disappearing on a north-easterly heading. 

O’Farrell could only make out “a vague shape with the white light situated centrally on top.”  The Directorate of Naval Intelligence at the time wrote that O’Farrell was “an entirely credible witness” and that he “was visibly ‘shaken’ by his experience, but remains adamant that he saw these objects”

“These two aircraft came in quite close to me and I could really see the dark mass and that they were quite big, but I couldn’t make out any other lights or any other form of an aircraft.  With that they took off and headed off to the north east at great speed.” – J.A. ‘Seamus’ O’Farrell. 

During his 1973 visit to Australia, Dr. Josef Allen Hynek was able to interview the pilot involved in this now famous incident.  Talking to UFO researcher Bill Chalker about the interview, O’Farrell stated,

“The interesting thing he said was that all of these sightings had been made by professional people in aviation.  By that he meant they were military pilots, military aircrew, civil aviation operators, air traffic controllers, and the like, or airline pilots.  These were the ones he was now (1973) going around meeting the people themselves and investigating.  All the others he had written off and had been able to explain down to some other phenomena.  It came to the point where he said, “Your sighting cannot be explained away.”  And he left it at that.  To this day I wouldn’t know where it came from or where it went. 

“Later the guy who became the chief Defence scientist, John Farrands, was very interested in it too, and he had done a lot of early investigations in most of the reports when he was chief defence scientist and in the period just before he became chief defence scientist.  He had a talk with me.  I was a friend of his.  I used to meet with him at lunch.  He went over it in great detail.  He knew it all.  He agreed it was something that couldn’t be refuted.  No matter how hard they tried, and they tried very hard to knock it all back.  They checked everything from medical, down to when was the last time I had had a drink…”

To this day, the ‘Sea Fury’ Incident remains one of the best unexplained radar visual UFO cases on record in Australia. 

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