In 1978, a 20-year-old pilot named Frederick Valentich disappeared. He had been attempting a training flight between the Australian mainland and Tasmania. He was flying a Cessna 182L, a light aircraft, and was a moderately experienced pilot, clocking roughly 150 hours of flying time. On the evening of October 21, Valentich departed from Moorabbin Airport headed to King Island Airport, a 125-mile trek over the Bass Strait. At 7:06 PM, Valentich radioed the Melbourne Flight Service to report an unidentified aircraft following him at 4,500 feet. The service told him there was no traffic near him at the time. Valentich insisted he could see a large unknown aircraft near him, which appeared to have four bright landing lights, all illuminated. He claimed it passed 1,000 feet above him, moving at high speed. For another 5 minutes, he reported the aircraft’s movements. He claimed it moved toward him, that he thought the other pilot was toying with him, and that it was “orbiting” above him. A few minutes after first radioing the Melbourne Flight Service, Frederick Valentich reported that he was having engine trouble. The radio officials asked him once more to identify the other aircraft. “It isn’t an aircraft,” he managed to respond, right before the transmission was cut off. The last sound the radio officials heard was a “metallic, scraping sound.” Radio officials at the Melbourne Flight Service assumed that Frederick Valentich had crashed, but an initial sea and air search of the area he was last reported in turned up nothing. Five years after Valentich went missing, an engine cowl flap washed ashore on Flinders Island and was identified as having come from the Cessna Valentich was flying. The case remained a topic of conversation among conspiracy theorists for almost 40 years, though no new information was ever collected until 2014. A UFO Action group in Victoria claimed that an unidentified farmer saw a 100-foot aircraft hovering over his farm the morning after Valentich went missing. He also claimed that Frederick Valentich’s missing aircraft was stuck to the side of the UFO, leaking oil. The only problem is that the Victoria UFO group never learned the name of the farmer. Despite recurring reports of UFO sightings, and Ufologists insisting that Frederick Valentich’s disappearance is UFO related, there has been no real explanation of his disappearance, and the mystery continues to haunt Australia’s conspiracy theorists today.
