It’s 1982, and a young UFO researcher is sitting in a director’s office at the Department of Defence headquarters in Canberra eager to get his hands on information he’s been dreaming of for years — the Australian government’s UFO files.

Wearing slacks and a tie, with a tidy short haircut, Bill Chalker wants to demonstrate this is a serious scientific endeavour.

Then he sees two postal sacks full of files being dragged into the austere government room.

There they are.

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The secretary leaves the room and Bill hurries to get to work, documenting what he can.

“But that inspection was interrupted by them returning, saying, ‘Uh, we’ve got a bit of a problem here. We just need to, uh, declassify them’,” Bill says.

“So, they went off and some poor harried person had to spend the next hour or two hurriedly stamping every single page ‘declassified’ with an autograph and I just thought, you’ve got to be kidding.”

RAAF’s UFO files

Up until the 1990s, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) was responsible for investigating UFOs — then called Unusual Aerial Sightings — in Australia.

Over the decades, the RAAF received thousands of reports from civilians, researchers and military personnel.

In the wider context of the space race and the Cold War, the air force was interested in this information.

“Not because the RAAF had any insight into a threat from aliens or green men … but rather there was a very real Cold War imperative … to be able to understand the early days of space, rocketry and satellites,” says former RAAF intelligence officer Brett Biddington.

The RAAF would investigate all manner of reports and documentation would end up in the UFO files.

Most UFO sightings and encounters could be dismissed as being caused by mundane things like weather, but there was a small percentage of cases that remained unexplained.

Those were the cases that interested people like Bill — who wanted to know what these UFOs and unexplained phenomena were.

Bill says accessing detailed information from the RAAF was almost impossible for interested civilians.

“They might send you the odd couple of files, heavily redacted,” he says.

“I was keen to get beyond that.”

Accessing the files

In the early 80s, Bill — who was working as a chemist in food science — found himself bedridden with a case of appendicitis.

“It was during the recovery of that that I thought, what the hell, I’ll start doing a ringing campaign to the Department of Defence and keep it up until I get a response,” he says.

“I finally got a response saying, ‘Yeah, OK. We’ll organise some access to the files.'”

It took about a year of badgering, but at 9am on a January day in 1982, Bill walked into the Russell Offices in Canberra, the administrative headquarters of the Australian Defence Force and the air force.

He would spend a week looking through the files and documenting relevant cases, which, after the minor hiccup on day one, were declassified.

What he found? Well, he says a lot.

Bill saw references to a secret report in 1954 by a nuclear physicist, Harry Turner, commissioned by the air force.

“[Harry Turner] was asked by the Director of Air Force Intelligence … to do a scientific appreciation of their early case data,” Bill says.

Other files gave an insight that some in the RAAF saw the investigation of UFOs as a burden on resources.

There were also cases Bill was already aware of that he wanted to get to the bottom of as he dug around in all these files — one of which was a UFO sighting at the North West Cape US communications base in October 1973, reported separately by two employees at the base.

“What was seen by the deputy commander of the base and the fire captain was way beyond any kind of aircraft, drone or whatever may have been available to the military at that time … certainly according to the lieutenant commander,” he says.

“The date of the sighting was on the same day as that base was used to issue a full nuclear alert to American forces within the Indian Pacific and Pacific region.”

But when Bill examined the UFO files in 1982, that case was missing.

“So they’d been obviously removed at some point, but we clearly knew that there was evidence for this case,” he says.

Cased closed

Not without controversy among interested civilian groups, the air force closed its UFO files in the 1990s.

“I was challenged to think about what was core and not core in the context of the intelligence function,” says former RAAF intelligence officer Brett Biddington.

“And so, logic drove me to eventually recommend to the chief of the air force that we would save a little bit of effort within the intelligence function in the air force if we desisted or no longer worried about unusual aerial sightings. 

“And that’s why the policy ended up being changed.”

Official systemic UFO investigations never really kicked off again in Australia.

The UFO files were sent to the National Archives of Australia, hundreds of which are digitised and available online.

In the United States, UFOs — now termed UAP — are back on the agenda in a big way, with the US Congress holding its third hearing into UAPs last month.  

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