Sources:
The Oz Files by Bill Chalker, pg. 114-115.
UFOs Down Under by Barry Watts, pg. 111-117.
Script:
It’s common knowledge that your headlights typically travels forwards. But there are a few exceptions to that rule, including one that defies the laws of physics and all that we know. But I’ll get into that a little bit later.
What happened on April 4th, 1966, that made an unassuming evening drive on a Western Victorian highway one that won’t ever be forgotten? Join me as I yarn about the Burkes Flat Incident.
(Time of the season instrumental intro)
Ah, the swinging sixties. If I had to choose a favourite decade, it would be this one, even if I admittedly romanticise it. What’s not to love? There’s the catchy music, big hair, groovy fashion, changing times and attitudes… (Intro music end abruptly)
and countless UFO encounters all over the world.
April 4th 1966 was an ordinary day for most, but not everyone. Especially not for a Maryborough-based businessman named Ron Sullivan.
Now Ron Sullivan was a steel construction businessman and was 38 years old at the time of this incident.
On the evening of April 4th, Sullivan was travelling on the Wimmera Highway en route to Wycheproof. The plan for the evening included staying at a motel in the town to rest, so that he could go to a job site the following morning. As he drove on, the night was clear and serene, and it was just a run of mill drive Sullivan did pretty much weekly for his job. However, this night proved otherwise.
Sullivan approached an area known as Burkes Flat, and he noticed to his right a light in a paddock that he assumed was a tractor working late in the night. However, as he drove closer, he realised after a while he was very wrong. But then looking in front of him, Sullivan was shocked at what he was seeing. The light beams coming from his front headlights were bending towards the right, as if the bigger light to the right of his vehicle pulling the beams towards it, illuminating the fence on the side of the road rather than what’s straight ahead. Based on diagrams drawn by Sullivan, the beams looked like they were bent at an angle, with the vertex pointed towards the mysterious source of light coming from the field. I’ll have the diagram he drew up on Instagram to better illustrate what happened.
Additionally, it felt as though the car itself was being veered to the right with the light beams, but this was no more than a mere optical illusion and the car was in fact actually still travelling straight. He also felt a strange, tugging sensation at his chest when this all happened. When Sullivan turned the steering wheel left to correct the sensation of going right, he had almost hit a large tree by the side of the road. In a panic, he slammed on the brakes, totally slowing down the vehicle, and looked to the source of the strange light, and saw the strangest thing imaginable.
The light was milky white and oval shaped, and it didn’t appear to cast any shadows and was roughly 5 meters in diameter. Talking to Ufologist Bill Chalker, Sullivan then stated that the light opened up, revealing another white oval above it, only this time it was longer than the first oval; being 30 feet across, or roughly 9 metres. The bigger oval floated above the smaller one, making a sort of cone shape, and in the cone were different tubes of colours, like the colours of a rainbow which looked gaseous. The colours moved up and down and the lights moved towards one another, combining and forming one oval. Then, the light shrank to point of vanishing. And again, Sullivan was shrouded in darkness.
He carried on the drive, arriving in Wycheproof and checking in to the motel. However, the businessman didn’t get one wink of sleep that night. He couldn’t help but think about that bizarre spectacle he saw a while ago.
The next day, Sullivan drove back home to Maryborough and told his wife about the incident. Initially, he didn’t want to tell anyone else because he felt that he would be labeled a loony, but he then had a change of heart and went to the press. Sullivan felt obligated to tell someone else what he saw due to news he heard.
A few days after Sullivan’s initial encounter, tragedy struck. 19 year old Gary Taylor, an electrical engineer from Carnegie, was driving on the Wimmera Highway when he suddenly lost control of his car and crashed into a tree. The young man unfortunately passed away. Upon hearing the news, Sullivan was saddened, as one would be. But then he realised that the tree that Gary Taylor crashed into was the exact same one he almost hit a few nights prior. It was far too coincidental to the point it was uncomfortable, so Sullivan decided to come forward with the incident, even if that meant he’d be ridiculed.
Sullivan contacted Hugh Hunter, a friend that worked for the local paper, The Maryborough Advertiser. He told Hunter about something strange he witnessed not too far away from the crash site. So on the Good Friday, the 8th, the two men went to the area to conduct their own investigation. They went into the paddock to look for any clues. After a while, Hunter saw something on the ground that was of interest; an impression. Quote: “It was a little over 3 feet, roughly a meter, in diameter and only a few inches in depth and looked odd in the fallowed ground. There were no foot or paw prints around it, just a bare impression in the ploughed ground.” Unquote. The farmer that owned the paddock didn’t see anything suspicious on the ground as he was ploughing it on the day that Sullivan saw the colourful spectacle.
However, the police didn’t believe that an enigmatic light show was the cause of Gary Taylor’s death, and that Sullivan’s encounter a few days beforehand likely had nothing to do with the fatal accident. The coronial inquiry detailed that the driver was likely speeding at 112 kilometres per hour, leaving a skid mark roughly 20 metres long before impact.
Subsequently after the strange events, Sullivan had several visitors come to him. Two men from the Air Force popped into his office and asked him a few questions about the incident, taking notes, and leaving as quickly as they arrived. He also had a phone call from somebody asking if he was interested in speaking with them regarding the strange thing he witnessed. Not too long after, two men dressed in suits showed up at Sullivan’s door. Sullivan assumed that they were government officials, and they carried a black covered book that had various diagrams of flying saucers and aerial anomalies. He pointed to one kind of looked like a cone, but it still wasn’t exactly the thing he saw. Perhaps, it was merely one of a kind.
Now the question on my lips and maybe even yours is, what was that thing?
Skeptics would presume that this thing could possibly be a mirage… but of what exactly?
Or perhaps seeing the lights and feeling like you were being pulled or whatnot may have been a medical episode. For instance, people that suffer migraines or seizures experience what is called an ‘aura’ before they have an episode, and a symptom of an aura is seeing flashing or flickering lights in their vision and feeling overall strange. However, we don’t know Ron Sullivan’s medical condition at the time or if he had migraines or whatnot.
Additionally, I don’t really think a man, who was a well-respected businessman at the time, would make this sort of thing up for attention or clout. I mean, he didn’t even want to tell anyone else about what happened because people would think he was crazy. But he only told the public after the tragic accident that occurred in the exact same place where he saw the light, because he and others speculated that Gary Taylor may have experienced something similar—but we’ll never know. Also, Sullivan didn’t believe in UFOs, especially at the time of the bizarre event, and it wasn’t until much later in his life that he started to change his mind and consider the possibilities.
Sullivan had described the lights to look gaseous, so maybe, not solid. Could it be that what he saw was natural gas burning up, like a will-o-the-wisp kind of thing? But based on the manoeuvres and transformations that this object was doing, it seems as though it had some sort of intelligence about it. And let’s not forget about the odd depression in the ground that the farmer knew nothing about. What could have caused that? Some people suggested that Sullivan may have seen a meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up, and caused the impression on the ground. However, there was no sign of the soil in or around the impression being burnt.
And of course, there’s the bent light beam conundrum. While it’s not impossible for light to bend, especially when it travels through—say glass or water, it does in fact bend. Now I’m not a science buff, so please correct me if I’m wrong, or feel free to be more technical. So according to a quick google search, I learned that gravity warps space and time, and light. And the strongest entity in space that has a crapload of gravity is a black hole; with a gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape it. Now going back to Ron Sullivan’s encounter. This bright light display that he saw could have a very strong gravitational pull; to the point that the headlight beams bent towards it and that Sullivan himself felt like he was being physically pulled towards it too. But there is something about this theory that doesn’t exactly add up. While the headlights and the driver were dragged to the right, the vehicle itself was still travelling straight on the road, meaning that it was not affected by this pull. Which makes this incident even more unexplainable and confusing.
It’s worth noting that over the decades, bits and pieces of Ron Sullivan’s testimony have slightly changed, for instance, in later interviews he had described the impression in the ground to be deeper than a few inches. Though, that doesn’t mean to say that he’s unreliable. I mean, if anyone asked me to recount an event that happened, say, ten years ago, I don’t think I’ll be able to accurately remember all the details either, and I may say something different to what I said in earlier retellings.
Now another thing I need to mention is that on the night Sullivan saw the odd light, police stations that were in surrounding towns such as Maryborough, Castlemaine, and Newstead have had influxes of reports of flying saucers and strange objects in the sky. So let’s just say that Sullivan wasn’t the only one to witness something strange.
Anyway, there seems to be more questions than there are answers regarding this incident.
In my opinion, even if I try and think about this logically and realistically, I personally can’t fathom what could have possibly caused this incident. Though, I won’t draw the conclusion that aliens or inter dimensional beings are involved because there are a lot of enigmatic phenomena that do happen in our world that we simply cannot explain. Perhaps we’re not advanced enough in science to fully comprehend it. But on the contrary, it just may be something out of this world. We don’t know, and that’s what makes this case perplexing and extraordinary.
But what do you think? Let me know your thoughts.
Thank you for tuning in and thank you for being patient. I know this was meant to be recorded and uploaded last week, but I ended up with a bad cold last week, and I’m still kind of going through the tail end of it.
Anyway, I better leave you to it. If you haven’t already, please give Bizarre Yarns a generous rating if you’re enjoying the podcast. A higher rating may convince more people to tune in, and it’ll give me a lot more motivation. If you have instagram, please follow me on there because I’ll be posting updates and additional visual information regarding episodes I publish. Also, please feel free to spread the word! Recommend this podcast to your friends, family, coworkers, and the tree-loppers—even if they can’t hear you over their chainsaws.
So my listeners, I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week. Look after yourselves. Also, lock your doors and windows and don’t ignore the invisible entity your pets are interacting with.
Have a good one!
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