theozfiles: VANISHED?

Here from my personal archives is my original report on the Valentich mystery prepared between October 1978 and January 1979 and published in the newsletter "Australian UFO Researcher" by the UFO Investigation Centre (UFOIC - known as UFO Research (NSW) between 1976 to 1991, with the original name UFOIC readopted in 1991, when a new organisation registered the name UFOR(NSW). The latter organisation formed in 1991 and continues to operate today. UFOIC also continues to operate under my direction as a low profile loose networking group. See my UFOIC blog for details).

This article is presented here in its raw original form to capture the period, complete with typewriter creation, typos, paper white, and no doubt errors etc. If you don't know what a typewriter, paper white, foolscap paper size etc are, you had to be there. We created a newsletter on a shoestring budget. Anyone out there who wants to use OCR or retype this article in word processing format please do so and if you send me a copy I will love you for it :-)

Some of the content may well be corrected by subsequent research, but this is a snapshot of a mystery that had us transfixed then, and today, 35 years later still is a mystery in many ways.

Consider the plea for assistance in my previous post particularly if you were a farmer in South Australia, NSW or Victoria, who witnessed a close proximity encounter between a Cessna aircraft and an apparent UFO.

To set the mood of this retrospective here is a picture of David Reneke and I at the group's first press conference one month before the Valentich disappearance where the group was presenting data that saw 1978 as the year of the UFO. Little did we know what was going to happen a few weeks later. We did know that it had been an extraordinary year so far for unexplained UFO activity. Then it just went through the stratosphere. The 3 covers of the newsletter that carried this article are also included. To those thinking - the wild and wooly look - it was the 70s - you had to be there.