TULLY

Opening

At about 9 a.m. on 19 January 1966, George Pedley, a 28-year-old banana grower, was driving a tractor past Horseshoe Lagoon on Albert Pennisi's property at Euramo, near Tully in far north Queensland. He heard a loud hiss over the engine, like air leaking from a tyre, then saw a grey object about 25 feet across rise from the reeds, spin, and climb away to the south-west.

Where it had been, he found a near-circular patch of reeds, about 32 by 25 feet, flattened clockwise into a floating mat. Police measured it the next morning and the RAAF took samples. The "saucer nest" became Australia's best-known physical trace case, and one of the earliest flattened plant circles on record anywhere.

Timeline

19 January 1966, about 09:00Pedley, on a tractor about half a mile from Pennisi's farmhouse on Rockingham Road, sees the object at about treetop height, roughly 25 yards ahead. In the police report it rises vertically to about 60 feet, dips slightly, then climbs away at about 45 degrees, rotating the whole time. The report puts the sighting at about 15 seconds; a later researcher's account puts it at about four.

19 January, afternoonPedley returns to the lagoon with Pennisi, who wades out and finds he can swim under the mat of reeds. Pedley later tells police the flattened reeds were green when he first saw them and had turned brown by that afternoon.

19 January, 19:30Pedley reports the sighting to Tully police.

20 January, 07:00Sergeant A. V. Moylan goes to the site with Pedley, then phones the RAAF base at Townsville. Flight Lieutenant Wallace sends a sighting questionnaire and later confirms that no service or civil aircraft were operating in the area at the time.

21 January, 15:30At the RAAF's request Moylan returns and takes a sample of the swamp grass. He sends it, with the completed report, on 26 January.

Late January to February 1966More nests turn up in the area, some with no sighting attached. On 11 February the Secretary of the Department of Air, A. B. McFarlane, replies to a civilian research group: tests and interviews found "nothing of significance", the University of Queensland found nothing unnatural in the samples, and locals said such nests were fairly common at the onset of the wet season.

17 December 1973Answering a query from The Australian, the Defence Department's public relations director, G. J. Odgers, gives the official view: the most probable explanation was a willy-willy, a small whirlwind, that flattened the reeds and lifted debris to about 30 feet.

Key figures

George Pedley was the only witness to the object. His account reached the RAAF through a police questionnaire that Sergeant Moylan filled in from interviews, not in Pedley's own hand.

Albert Pennisi owned the lagoon and saw the nest on the first afternoon. According to ABC reporting in 2024, he visited the lagoon almost daily for decades afterwards and sent notes on any disturbances to UFO researchers in Brisbane.

Sergeant A. V. Moylan of Tully police made the first official record. His own view, written into the report, was that a small helicopter had flattened the reeds and Pedley had mistaken the shape of a rotor in bright sunlight. He also noted the objection: there was cleared land about 200 yards east where a helicopter could have landed far more safely.

Bill Chalker, an Australian researcher, later found the original police report in the RAAF files and published its contents, which is why the case can be checked against its first paperwork rather than the press.

Physical and documentary trail

The record here is better than for most landing cases. It holds Moylan's police report and RAAF sighting form dated 26 January 1966, the grass sample, Wallace's covering minute on air traffic, the RAAF Operational Command forwarding note, McFarlane's February 1966 letter, Odgers' 1973 letter, and photographs of the nest taken within about two days. The police report is now held by the National Archives of Australia.

The physical description in the police report is specific: grass flattened in clockwise curves down to the surface of about four feet of water, reeds uprooted from the mud, no scorching of grass or nearby trees, and no smell of combustion.

This headquarters believes that the depressions of the swamp grass were caused by small isolated waterspouts.

There is no photograph of the object, and no published laboratory report beyond the one-line University of Queensland finding relayed by the Department of Air.

Things you might not know

• The swirl was nearly filed backwards. Moylan first typed "anti-clockwise" on the RAAF form, then typed over it to read "clockwise". The direction of the swirl has been misreported ever since.
• The RAAF asked for a sample "from the scorched area". There was no scorched area. Pedley told police there was no burning on the grass or the trees.
• The first official suspect was a helicopter. Sergeant Moylan's own theory was a small helicopter mistaken in bright sunlight, not a whirlwind and not a craft.
• A local electrician had seen it before. Wallace Evans of Tully told Moylan he had seen similar markings in a swamp at Kurrimine Beach and was sure a whirlwind sucking up water had made them.
• A crop-circle theorist got the time wrong. According to Chalker, the British meteorologist Terence Meaden worked from the belief that Pedley's sighting was at 9 p.m., not 9 a.m.
• The mat floated free. Pennisi found the water under the flattened reeds clear enough to swim beneath.

Competing explanations

A craft that sat on the water. Pedley saw a solid object rise from the exact spot where the nest was found, and the hissing, rotation, and departure fit his account as given. Nobody has shown a fault in his honesty. The weakness is that the object left no trace beyond flattened, uprooted reeds, which ordinary weather can also produce.

A whirlwind or waterspout. This is the RAAF's view from 1966 and the Defence Department's in 1973. A spinning column over water can uproot and swirl reeds clockwise, hiss, and carry debris to treetop height, where a startled witness could read it as a solid grey shape. The clear, hot morning is the difficulty: willy-willies form readily in heat, but the University of Queensland's explanation leaned on line squalls and thunderstorms, which a clear sky does not fit.

A helicopter. Moylan's idea. The RAAF found no aircraft operating in the area, and Moylan himself pointed out the safer landing ground nearby.

A hoax. Nobody confessed, nobody was caught, and uprooting and swirling a 30-foot circle of reeds in four feet of water by hand would be hard to do without leaving signs. Pedley gained nothing that has been documented.

Later life of the case

Chalker records further activity at Tully in 1969, 1972 and 1975, and later attempts to detect UFOs there by remote sensing and filming. In the 1980s and 1990s British crop-circle researchers adopted Tully as an early example of their own theories, which Chalker argued misread the original reports. In 2024 the ABC revisited the case with the Pennisi family and a former RAAF intelligence officer, Brett Biddington.

Finding

Settled: a real circle of uprooted, clockwise-swirled reeds appeared in Horseshoe Lagoon on 19 January 1966, was seen by the landowner that afternoon, measured by police the next morning, and sampled for the RAAF. Pedley reported a solid object rising from that spot, and no aircraft were in the area. The strongest reading is a whirlwind over the lagoon, which accounts for the swirl, the hiss, and a spinning shape. An unknown craft can't be ruled out, but the record doesn't require one.

What still will not resolve: whether what Pedley saw for those few seconds was solid. Only he saw it, and the one instrument that might have settled it, a camera, wasn't there.