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Speaker 1: Hello, it's Richard maclin Smith here. Sadly, due to some very frustrating audio issues, this week's episode will be postponed until next week. On the flip side, I'm currently working on bringing Unexplained to video, so with any luck, from next week you'll be able to watch episodes as well as listen to them. Until then, we're going back to the archive for a rerun episode. It's been calculated that the likelihood of the human race being the only sophisticated life form in the Milky Way is a one in sixty billion chance. The Milky Way is one of two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. The following story is considered by many eufologists to be among the most compelling pieces of evidence of an alien visitation to our planet. Just what happened in the skies off the coast of Melbourne, Australia in nineteen seventy eight has never fully been accounted for. It's a mystery that remains to this day unexplained. This is Unexplained, Season two, Episode three, The Last Flight. At one pm Eastern Time on Wednesday, February twenty second, two thousand seventeen, NASA held a live press conference to make an exciting announcement they had discovered a peculiar solar system located roughly forty light years from Earth. At the heart of the system was an ultra cool dwarf star. It was first spotted in twenty sixteen by astronomers using the Trappist telescope in Chile, and so it was named Trappist one. The star appeared to be orbited by two Earth sized planets. In the months that followed, a team of astronomers led by Michael Gillon from the University of Liege, working with NASA's Spitzer telescope, made a further incredible discovery. What they found was described by Spitzer Center manager Sean Carey as the most exciting discovery in the history of the department. What Hilon's team uncovered was not two Earth sized planets, but seven. Furthermore, three of the planets were found to be occupying the crucial Goldilocks zone, an area of orbit necessary for the potential for water to pool on a planet's surface. Such a discovery is the first time ever that so many potentially habitable planets had been found surrounding one single star. Not only that, but the masses and radii of these specific planets mark them out as possibly the best ever to warrant further investigation for life, or at the very least, a habitable ecosystem that could one day be explored. In the words of NASA's Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zebucan, the discovery gives us a hint that finding a second Earth is not just a matter of if, but when. What we have in this story is a major step forward towards answering one of the questions that is at the heart of so many of our philosophies, and that is are we alone? You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard maclin Smith also on the panel at NASA's February press conference with Sarah Seger, Professor of Planetary Science and Physics at MIT and author of the Seger equation. The equation is considered by some to be an improved rendering of the famous Drake equation. In nineteen sixty one, the astronomer and physicist doctor Frank Drake devised his equation to estimate the number of communicative extraterrestrial civilsations that are likely to exist in the Milky Way galaxy. Drake's equation takes into account a number of variables, such as the rate of star formation, the average number of planets that orbit stars, as well as to which fraction exactly such planets might actually host sophisticated life forms. Although the equation was intended partly as a point of discussion, many critics were quick to argue that any attempt to estimate such a number would involve too big a margin of error to be reliable. However, a recent paper published by astrobiologists Adam Frank of the University of Rochester and Woodruff Sullivan of the University of Washington offered an interesting new approach to the question. Rather than trying to estimate the possible number of other extraterrestrial civilisations in our galaxy, they instead asked what were the odds that the human rais might be the only one. Their answer equated to roughly a one in sixty billion chance. So, when you also consider that the Milky Way is thought to be only one of two trillion galaxies in the known observable universe, not only is it unfathomably unlikely that other civilizations don't exist in the universe, but it is entirely plausible that some may already have flourished and died out millions of times over before our own. We might then wonder, much like the great physicist and Ricofirmi, if it is so likely that other sophisticated life forms exist out there, why have we never seen them, to which many, of course would reply, but we have. The following story is considered by many euthologists to be amongst the best evidence of an alien visitation to our planet. What happened exactly in the skies just off the coast of Melbourne, Australia in nineteen seventy eight has never been fully accounted for. It is a mystery that remains to this day unexplained. It was love at first sight, and as is often the case, it was completely unplanned. It was some time in March nineteen seventy eight, and Ronda had only recently turned sixteen. That night, she was accompanying her neighbour's son Peter, to his regular Friday social event at the Flight sixteen Air Cadet headquarters in Maryborough, Melbourne. Peter had only recently joined the Australian Air Training Corps and was eager to share his exciting new world with Ronda. What he hadn't banked on was bumping into Fred. Peter had been showing Ronda around the company buildings when Fred stepped out of a nearby office and right into her path. He was dark haired, handsome, and elegant in his steel blue uniform. He introduced himself to Ronda as Fred Valentich before turning back to Peter. As the pair talked, Peter shifted uncomfortably whenever Fred's eyes glanced away towards Ronda. The next week, Peter was overjoyed when Ronda
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agreed to join him at the Cadet's Saturday night dance. Sadly for Peter, however, who Ronda was really hoping to see that night was Fred. Sure Enough, immediately after she arrived, she spotted him holding court with some friends at the back of the room. Unbeknownst to Ronda, Fred too had been hoping all evening that the two of them might meet again. There was only one problem, Peter, but Fred had a plan. It was well known that Peter's ill mother had given him a pager in case she might ever need him at short notice. At some point in the night, after waiting for just the right moment, Fred slipped away from his table to use the payphone outside. Moments later, he watched from the side of the hall as Peter received the message with a look of disappointment on his face. Of course, Fred KNEWTT was a cruel trick, but this was love, and sometimes that's all that matters. Peter gestured his apologies to Ronda and made his way out of the club. As Fred returned to the end of Ronda's table, he was almost certain he could see a look of relief cross her face. It hadn't gone unnoticed by Ronda that as the evening progressed, Fred seemed to be making his way further and further up the table, until finally he was sitting next to her, and so they would remain for the rest of the night as the hours drifted by timelessly. The following Monday, Fred met Ronda's parents, and by the end of the week the pair had agreed to make it official. A few weeks later, Ronda was introduced to Fred's family at his home in Avondale Heights, where she met and fell in love with his parents, Alberta and Guido, his twelve year old brother Ricky, and his two twin sisters, Olivia and Lara. It was easy to see why Ronda was so smitten by Fred. He was fun and easy to be around, kind and well mannered, not to mention dashing in his training Corps uniform. But there was one thing that would have to be accommodated. It was Fred's dream to be a commercial airline pilot, and he dedicated himself to the task obsessively. Every spare minute was spent at his flight school or with his nose buried inside one of his training text books. Meeting up on week nights was completely out of the question, but come the week end they were like any other teenage couple. Fred wasn't a big drinker, but he loved going out with Ronda, perhaps his favorite moments being the ones they spent on Mount Dandenong, where they would just sit and take in the view as the evening sun gave way to the Melbourne city lights. And when Fred got the chance to clock up more flight time, Ronda was only too happy to accompany him. She loved the sensation of it, especially when the plane would break through into brilliant sunshine, the cloud stretching out below like a soft blanket, almost as if you could step out and walk across it and up there alone with Fred. She'd never felt safer, even when he would loop the loop on one of his acrobatic flights. As Ronda got to know Fred a little better, there was one thing that stood out more than anything. It was his meticulous nature, whether it be making sure his car was running smoothly, the pride he took in how he dressed, or most markedly in his approach to his flight training. By mid May, Fred had clocked over one hundred and forty hours and had graduated to a Class four license, allowing him to fly at night. By way of celebration, Fred took Ronda on a six hundred mile flight to Spear's Point in Newcastle to visit her favorite uncle, Michael. It had been the perfect day, but the following morning, as the pair prepared to fly home, Fred seemed concerned. He was convinced that someone had tampered with the plane. After a short time in the air, the column on the joystick seemed to be loosening. Never one to leave anything to chance, Fred made an emergency descent towards Bankstown Airport in Sydney. Moments later, Much to his shock, a military helicopter appeared from nowhere and ordered out of the sky. In his eagerness to get the plane down, Fred had strayed marginally into a restricted airspace. Minutes later, Fred and Ronda touched down in Bankstown, but the incident would inevitably go down as a blemish on Fred's record. His abject disappointment in himself was a reminder to Ronda just how seriously he took his training. A few months later, on September seventeenth, just over four hundred miles south of Melbourne, across the bas Strait to the far side of Tasmania, a lighthouse keeper spotted something strange in the sky. The keeper worked at the Matsaika Island Lighthouse, located off the southern coast of mainland Tasmania. He had just completed his evening rounds when he noticed an unfamiliar light in the sky. It was extremely bright and appeared to be half moon in shape. Moments after he spotted it or the power in the lighthouse inexplicably cut out bizarrely. After rushing to fix the problem, the keeper found no blown fuses or tripped circuit breakers. Five minutes later, the generator kicked into action and the power was restored. The keeper returned to his previous lookout point to find the strange light still hanging in the night sky. A closer look with binoculars revealed what appeared to be a small red dot in the middle of the light, which seemed to move to the side as if the light was turning. Ten minutes later, the power cut out again and remained out for fifteen minutes before it was finally restored, but again with no obvious cause. Moments later, the lighthouse keeper watched as the strange light eventually began to shrink, as if moving away from the island, until it had completely disappeared. Back in Melbourne a few weeks later, on Friday thirteenth of October, Fred and Ronda drove to their favorite spot up in the Dandenong Ranges. That night, they talked for hours as down below the Yarra Valley stretched out before them, blanketed by the warm, luminescent glow of a setting spring sun. Fred had never been more happy. Having just turned twenty, he was passing his exams and was well on the way to becoming a
commercial airline pilot, and of course, he also had Ronda. At some point, Fred pulled a box from his pocket and opened it to reveal a ring. Will you marry me? He asked. They'd known each other little over six months, but everything about this felt right. They laughed at the madness of it all. Ronda could barely hide her excitement as Fred slipped the friendship band onto her wedding ring finger. But then for a second she paused. Not only was it Friday the thirteenth, but wasn't it bad luck to place a friendship ring on the wedding ring finger? She thought, But Fred didn't believe in such things. Besides, she would have the real thing soon enough. In the meantime, he asked that she keep it all a secret until Ronda's seventeenth birthday in December. Ronda didn't see Fred for the rest of the week, preoccupied as he was, with preparations for his latest milestone, a flight across open water. But on the Friday, Fred drove to Ronda's house and the pair made arrangements to meet for the flight the next day. Ronda agreed that she would meet him at the airport if she could get off work in time before he left that night, they kissed on the doorstep, a kiss that seemed to last a life time. Next morning, on Saturday, October the twenty first, Fred was up at six a m. Buzzing with excitement as he went over the flight plans in his head. After completing a shift at the Aussie Disposal store at one through nine Puckle Street where he worked, Fred was soon on the freeway, racing towards Moorabin Airport in southeast Melbourne. Fred had a three hour lesson to negotiate before he could take his flight, but as was often his way, he arrived early, so he did what he always did in such circumstances. He took out his textbooks and revised until one thirty when the class began. Back in West Preston, Ronda was eagerly awaiting the end of her shift. She had arranged with her parents to drive her down to the airport after her shift, but was being held up by a delayed co worker. Ronda had no choice but to cover until she arrived, but as the minutes ticked by, Ronda lost her ride. She would miss this flight, but Fred would be home before long, and after all, she had the evening's dance to look forward. To down at Moorrabin Airport. Fred was disappointed not to find Ronda waiting for him by his car after the lesson. In truth, the thought of flying over the water alone made him a little nervous, but a quick meteorological briefing revealed that the weather would be on his side, and with sunset not due for another two hours, he would have more than enough time to complete the journey before it got dark. At seventeen twenty three hours, Fred lodged his flight plan at the briefing office. He would fly southwest along the coast to Cape Otway before heading south over the bas Strait to King Island at the north of Tasmania, before returning back to Moorabin Airport. There was still no sign of Ronda, but Fred decided to give her a few more minutes and headed off to grab some food. In the meantime. There was a new place that had just opened nearby that he liked to go, and so it was a short time later that Fred was sat in his car, eating McDonald's and gazing out wistfully at the sea he was soon to cross. When he finally made it back to the airport, with time running out and Ronda yet to arrive, Fred had little choice but to set off alone. After a further round of checks, he jumped into the Sesna vh D s J taxied the small plane to the edge of the runway before taking off into the early evening sky. Back in West Preston, Ronda had returned home and was getting herself ready for a night out with Fred, excited to hear all about his trip to King Island, but by the time it had got to eight pm, Ronda was growing concerned that there had been no word from Fred. Ronda never made it to the dance, but instead spent the night sat all made up on her bed, staring out her window at the street below for any sign of her fiance. At some point, she must have fallen asleep, as she found herself being woken by the sound of the ABC news drifting in from her father's bedroom. She couldn't quite make out all of it, only that an unnamed pilot had gone missing over the Baths Strait. Ronda's heart sunk deep into her chest. After taking an age to get through to Moorabin Airport, when they eventually picked up, Ronda received the devastating news the missing pilot was Fred. Over the next few days, wave after wave of search and rescue teams were dispatched unsuccessfully in the hunt for Fred's missing plane. For Rhonda and Fred's family, their grief would have been unimaginable For the authorities. There were plainly only two likelihoods. One that Reread had got into some kind of difficulty, perhaps becoming disorientated over the water, leading to a catastrophic pilot error, or he had deliberately flown his plane into the sea. Since Fred had been taking a routine path over a manageable stretch of water, as noted in the cause analysis report, it is most probable that the wreckage would have been sighted, but the plane had disappeared without a trace. And then something extraordinary came to light. On Wednesday, the twenty fifth of October, Fred's father, Guido, was invited to listen to the final recording of Fred's air traffic control communication to formally identify the pilot. As soon as the recording crackled to life, Guido's heart broke for the thousandth time as the voice of his son came out of the speaker. But what everybody in the room heard next chilled them all to the Bone. At nineteen hundred hours, Fred reported arriving successfully over Cape Otway before heading south over the open water. The next communication was received at nineteen hundred and six hours, Melbourne. This is Delta Sierra Juliet. Is there any known traffic below five thousand? Delta Sierra Juliet No known traffic. It seems to be a large aircraft below five thousand. What type of aircraft is it? I cannot affirm. It has four bright It seems to me like landing lights.
Melbourne, this is Delta Sierra Juliet. The aircraft has just passed over me at least one thousand feet above Roger and it is a large aircraft. Confirm unknown due to the speed its traveling. Any air Force aircraft in the vicinity Delta Sierra Juliet. No known aircraft in the vicinity, Melbourne. It's approaching now from due east towards me. It seems to me that he's playing some sort of game. He's flying over me two three times at a time at speeds I could not identify. Delta Sierra Juliet and confirm you cannot identify the aircraft. Affirmative it's not an aircraft. It's a long shape. I cannot identify more than that. It has such speed. What I'm doing right now is orbiting, and the thing is just orbiting on top of me. It's got a green light and a sort of metallic like it's all shiny on the outside. It's just vanished. Delta Sierra Juliet confirmed that the aircraft has vanished. Ah. It's now approaching from the southwest. Roger, what are your intentions? My intentions are to go to King Island, Ah, Melbourne, that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me. Again. It's hovering and it's not an aircraft, and then there is nothing. Melbourne attempts communication again, but after seventeen seconds of dead air at nineteen hundred and twelve hours, Fred's radio falls silent. Within days, Fred's gripping final transmission made its way to the press. Before long, the papers were awash with speculation concerning Fred's fatal encounter with a UFO, and then something else emerged. Six weeks previously, Sergeant Jack Woodward of Curry Police on King Island had received a call concerning strange lights that had appeared off the north of the island. A nurse at King Island Hospital had seen them too, with two other witness going as far as to write into the King Island News on September twentieth. We are writing to your paper, they said, to see if anyone other than ourselves has seen any sightings of strange moving lights in the sky. The Department of Transport were quick to quash the rumours, with one spokesman suggesting that if Fred's plane had inverted, he would have seen the light from Cape Otway and King Island houses reflected on cloud cover above him. But not only were there no clouds in the sky that night, As the spokesman was forced to admit, the conditions were near perfect and would have afforded Fred almost unlimited vision. Reports from Fred's friends and acquaintances began to emerge. They revealed a sober, studious and diligent flight student with the steely determination to succeed, with one friend noting that Fred was never prone to panic, as Ronda had also attested during her many hours of flying with him. Fred's instructors, Warren Dunlop and Martin Dalton described him as sincere and sensible, a little quiet at first, but quick to open up once he got to know him. For Alberta and Guido, the evidence spoke for itself, and with the papers more than happy to exploit their grief for the cosmic speculation, there was little room for anything
else. As for sixteen year old Ronda, she had barely had time to grieve, such was the incessant hounding of the press. At one point she even fled to a motel in Cape Otway, only to find a crowd of journalists waiting for her in the foyer. And the truth was there really was nothing more that she could tell them. After two weeks, the search for Fred was called off. However, although they may not have found the wreckage, in the subsequent widening of the investigation, something new was about to come to light. It seemed that Fred had not been entirely honest with his parents or Ronder. On November one, the investigative team received a letter from Captain Edwin Robert Barnes, a former tutor of Fred's in nineteen seventy six. Fred had failed in his attempt to join the Royal Australian Air Force. It was not entirely unexpected, since not only had Fred left school at sixteen, but his academic record had been poor, but Fred would not be deterred, and he resolved that whatever he lacked in intellect, he would work ferociously hard to make up for in effort. Although he would never realize his dream of making the Air Force, he could still make it as a commercial airline pilot. Sadly, this ambition, too, hit a snag when in nineteen seventy seven Fred sat for and failed all five of his commercial pilot's license theory exams. It was at this point that an instructor, impressed by Fred's determination, recommended that Captain Barnes helped dutor him through his resets. In Barnes letter, he speaks with great warmth and affection about the boy who, having not made it to the Air Force, nonetheless attended Squadron Headquarters in a civilian capacity, working without pay or allowances, until accepted into Squadron staff as an airman, a boy who, despite failing his exams, was a battler with the determination and stability to achieve his goal of becoming a commercial airline pilot. Fred eventually re sat his exams in July of nineteen seventy eight, and Barnes was overjoyed when Fred called him up in mid September to tell him with great excitement that he had finally passed. Only it was a lie, a lie that Fred had been hiding from not only his beloved tutor, but also his family and Roonda. Suddenly, some of the more confusing aspects of Fred's final days had taken on a different shape. Why he had proposed to Ronda on Friday the thirteenth, a week before the day they regularly celebrated as a monthly anniversary. Why if he was intending to land at King Island, he hadn't requested landing lights to be turned on. Or why he told Rhonda that he'd be back to take her out, but told his father that he wouldn't return till at least ten pm. Is it possible that, rather than having been plucked from the sky by an unknown entity, Fred had, in a sense already been taken away some time ago by something else equally intangible. In the end, had this young man whose only dream was to prove to the world that he had what it took to be a pilot finally been broken by the crushing realization that, no matter how hard he tried, his head would never match up to his heart. A young man too paint to reveal the truth to his family and Ronda, to whom he felt he had promised so much. Thank you as ever for listening. Unexplained as an Avy Club production podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reaches online through x and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, forward Slash Unexplained Podcast. Mm hmmm, mm hmmm, h m h m hm h m hm h m hmmm