SA’s X-Files, Part 1: UFOs, crop circles, tunnels and the Somerton Man
We’ve delved into some of SA’s weirdest mysteries – including a UFO that chased a car, the truth about Adelaide’s underground network, crop circles, and an unbreakable spy code.
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We’ve delved into South Australia’s history to find the weirdest, most baffling and oldest mysteries we can find – here’s part one. Stand by for a UFO that chased a car, the truth about tunnels under the CBD, crop circles, and an extraordinary story about spies, codes, a dead man and true love.
The family car chased by a UFO on the Nullarbor
The Knowles family set out from Perth for Melbourne, in the hope of finding new jobs. Instead, a terrifying and violent 90-minute encounter with a UFO on the Nullarbor Plain left them so shaken they turned around and headed home.
The family claim the glowing UFO, shaped like an egg in an eggcup, chased and even lifted their car off the road, dropping it so heavily a tyre burst.
During the height of the encounter in January 1988, they said their voices became distorted and sounded like they were in slow motion.
They said they drove at speeds up to 200km/h, that the car was covered inside and out by a black ash, and that the UFO landed on the roof, leaving dents.
The incident on January 20 made world headlines, with many treating their story with scepticism – so much so that the Knowles family retreated from public view before being allegedly duped by an Adelaide marketing man, and losing the car after failing to continue its repayments.
WHAT THE FAMILY SAID
Here’s what the Knowles family – mother Faye, Patrick, 24, Sean, 21, and Wayne, 18, (ages at the time of the incident) say happened while driving their Ford Telstar, about 40km east of Mundrabilla near the SA-WA border.
It was a little before 5am when Sean swerved to miss a huge “bright glowing” object on the road.
It was bright and white with a yellow centre, shaped like an egg in an eggcup and about a metre wide, high enough to block their view.
“It was a weird-looking thing and we stopped to go back and have a look at it,” Sean told The Advertiser.
Walking towards the object, they became frightened and ran back to the car and drove away.
“It chased us and at one stage when we were trying to get away we were doing up to 200km/h,” he said.
He said the object, which was humming like a transformer, landed on the roof with a thump, pushing down the car and then lifting it from the road.
His mother reached out the window to touch the object, which she said felt hot.
“She told me it felt like a rubber suction pad,’’ he said.
When Mrs Knowles brought her hand back inside, it was covered with a fine dust.
While suspended in the air, their voices were distorted and it appeared as though they were talking in slow motion.
“I wound down the window – it came in the car like smoke,” Mrs Knowles told Channel 7. “We thought we were going to die. We were going silly. Something was going into our heads.”
Patrick said: “Something seemed to be on top of us. We looked around but it didn’t seem to be there. It seemed to kind of grab the car.
“I wound up the windows and the car began to smoke up inside. It smelt like dead bodies or something smelt really foul, like gas or something.’’
He said he felt as though his brains were being pulled from his head.
When the car dropped to the ground it blew a tyre.
The family hid in a bush and after about 30 minutes replaced the tyre and drove to the Mundrabilla roadhouse, where truckie Graham Henley said he also had seen the bright light in the area in his rear-vision mirror.
“It was hovering above The Basin on the sweeping stretch of road just flickering in and out between the trees,” he said.
He said the family was in a state of shock and even their dogs were cowering in the car.
“The whole car smelt like bakelite or just like as if you’d blown a fuse,” he said.
“A soot was all over the car and there were four dents as though the car had been picked up by a magnet.
“I cannot explain it but all I know is that I saw four very terrified people at 4.45 on Wednesday morning.”
Police investigating the incident said the car had a dented roof and was covered with an ash-like material.
Ceduna policeman Sergeant Fred Longley said Mrs Knowles and her sons were obviously distressed when they walked into the police station.
“They were in a terrible state – even though it was five hours after the incident. Something happened out there. Their car, even after being driven all that way, still had black ash – or dust – over it. Even on the inside. Where did that come from? There’s no soil like that out there, only sand.”
And Ceduna officer Sergeant Jim Furnell said the car had dents in the roof “as if something had landed on top”.
THE INVESTIGATION – AND THE THEORIES
Two theories emerged. First, that it was debris from a meteorite, which would explain the ash and the smell. Second, light from a car beam refracted and distorted by warmer air lying over colder air.
A research physicist from the University of Wollongong, Glen Moore, told The Advertiser at the time it was probably a rare sighting of a falling, disintegrating meteorite.
The Knowles family’s description of a bright light, violent shaking, vehicle damage, smell and the deposit of powder-like material was consistent with the falling disintegration of a carbonaceous meteorite.
Bright lights spotted by tuna fishermen in the Great Australian Bight at the same time supported the theory.
Nine months later a bus driver reported a similar light near Mundrabilla. Allan Brunt, former regional director of the Bureau of Meteorology, gave a much more banal, but still fascinating reason: weather.
He said on both nights there was warmer air overlying colder air across a wide area of the Nullarbor Plain.
Called a temperature inversion, it can refract and bends the light’s path, making it seem higher than it is. It also distorts its shape, colour, size and intensity.
Mr Brunt believes the Knowles family saw the refracted light of an approaching truck.
“It was the distorted image of its headlights which was so frightening and bizarre,” said Mr Brunt.
The rest was “their own imagination whilst in a state of fright”.
The tuna fishermen probably saw the refracted light of another ship and the bus driver, Mr Brunt believes, saw Jupiter.
He said the flat desert conditions of the Nullarbor Plain make it an almost perfect place for UFO spotting.
WHAT ABOUT THE ASH AND DAMAGE?
Analysis of the ash found it wasn’t extraterrestrial. It was from the interior of a burnt-out brake lining. The blown tyre was consistent with a high-speed tyre blowout.
The dents on the roof were insignificant, and it couldn’t be established if they were there before the UFO report.
Sean said he was doing 200km/h to escape from under the UFO.
According to the manufacturer, the Telstar could never reach that speed on the ground. Tests in Adelaide – conducted with the car’s wheels off the ground on jacks – took the speedo to 200km/h.
But – and here’s a big but – according to the 1990 UFO Report by Timothy Good, the “dust” was also analysed at the Philips Laboratory by Dr Richard Haines in July 1988.
He concluded the dust taken from the interior of the car was different to the dust sampled from the exterior.
And he found the interior dust was not from the brake system of the car.
Unusually, it possibly contained sodium chloride – or salt – and the atomic element astatine, which is only produced synthetically. It would have decayed by the time the Knowles arrived at Ceduna, where the samples were taken, giving just a possible reading.
It did contain oxygen, carbon, calcium, silicon, potassium – and fibres of typical pipe insulation.
An officer later said just a few specks of dust had been recovered from the car, pointing out it had been driven 500km to Ceduna after the incident and townspeople had swarmed all over it, rendering it almost valueless for forensic evidence.
Investigation of the Knowles’ story was difficult for both sceptics and UFO researchers because they were reportedly paid by a TV station, which forced people to mediate with it to speak to the family.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Four months after the Knowles’ encounter, they had moved out of their Perth home, saying their former friends and acquaintances thought they were crazy.
They said the incident had cost them about $18,000, and they lost the car because they couldn’t meet the repayments. The six weeks away from home took the rest of their savings.
They claim a Wes Johnstone of Multi-Level Advertising took the car and promised to make them rich with promotional appearances.
“He told us it could be used in television commercials, a documentary and taken around shopping centres where people would pay to see it,” Faye Knowles said.
“But we didn’t get a cent; we don’t even know if the car was promoted at all, and now we have lost it.”
The 1984 blue Telstar was auctioned in June 1988 for $7050 to Gary Hancock, of Southside Motors.
At the time, The Advertiser reported Mr Johnstone had stored the car for five months but hadn’t been heard of since February 1989.
And Patrick said he was fed up with sceptics who disputed the UFO encounter.
“We are trying to forget the sharks who promised us money from our experience – they only wanted to use us,’’ he said. “We just want to get on with our lives, find jobs and settle down somewhere in Perth where people do not ridicule us in the street.”
Adelaide’s baffling crop circles
It was December 1994, and aliens may or may not have visited a wheat paddock in Northfield, SA.
The crop circle was first spotted by Alison Light as she flew into Adelaide on December 9.
Using a street directory she tracked down the pattern to a wheat crop in Northfield – in a paddock owned by the then-Department of Agriculture.
The circle was later measured to be 15.3 metres wide and made by flattening the wheat in an anticlockwise direction. The stalks were unbroken. Wheat in side appendages had been pushed towards the circle.
The entire pattern faced north-south, in line with the Earth’s magnetic field.
Was it the intricate undercarriage of an alien spacecraft? A message to then-South Australian premier Dean Brown about outsourcing the government’s IT? Just their way of saying hello?
The discovery was immediately attributed to UFOs by the late SA crop circle expert and “Mr UFO” Colin Norris, who called it “marvellous”.
“It’s ‘it’ as far as I’m concerned,” he told The Advertiser. “There’s nothing about this that’s a hoax. It’s perfect.”
John Earl, the administrative officer of the South Australian Research and Development Institute, which cropped the land, was baffled.
“There’s no sign of people moving to or from the circle. None of the stalks were broken, and if somebody got in there with a roller, they made a very good job of it,” Mr Earl said.
So where did it come from? Tests by found nothing radioactive or magnetically charged.
Reportedly, radio station SAFM claimed responsibility – and then said they’d been joking when police suggested the perpetrators could face charges.
The culprit was never found. Cue Close Encounters music.
But creating crop circles isn’t solely the domain of UFOs landing in our food supplies.
In 1991, English pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley took credit for most of the crop circles across southern England made since 1978.
Using simple tools such as a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in a straight line, they say they made complex crop circles in England – which others then copied all over the world into the 1980s.
They made a circle for journalists, which was later declared authentic by a “cereologist”, or someone that advocates paranormal explanations of crop circles. They then revealed their hoax to the world, spurring on even more copycats.
SA’s first recorded crop circle was about Christmas 1971 at Tooligie Hill on the Eyre Peninsula, when farmer Rob Habner found a small circle in his crops, thought to be about 1.15m wide.
Reports of crop circles date back to the 1600s, with theories of fungi killing the roots or wind. Crop circles seem to appear mainly in developed Western or secularised countries – such as Japan – and not in Muslim countries.
But back to the Northfield pattern – it didn’t last long. It met its fate at the blades of a harvester just days later, a government department unmoved by the aliens trying to communicate complex problems with SA via its grain.
The area is now housing. You might even live on top of the crop circle.
Look up!
The Somerton Man
The mystery of the Somerton Man – the well-dressed body of a man found propped up against a sea wall at Somerton beach in 1948 – may involve anything from Cold War-era Soviet spies to a double-agent’s love child.
Or just the simple case of a spurned lover who never got to see his sixteen-month-old son and died, somehow, on a beach, minutes away from his beloved.
What it does include is possible poison, indecipherable codes and ancient Persian poetry. And a still unidentified dead man.
There is much unknown about the case of the Somerton Man.
Here’s what we know. He arrived in Adelaide by train on November 30, 1948.
He leaves his suitcase at the Adelaide railway station, buys a train ticket to Henley Beach but then takes the bus to near Glenelg.
His actions during the next few hours are unknown, but they were his last – he’s found dead on Somerton beach, propped up against a seawall at 6.45am on December 1. He is only five minutes’ walk away from the house of a Jo Thomson – also known as Jestyn – in Moseley St, Glenelg.
In his pockets are the used bus ticket, the unused rail ticket, two combs, chewing gum, cigarettes, and matches. Intriguingly, a half-smoked cigarette was balanced on his shirt collar, suggesting he died quietly – or was placed there after his death.
The labels have been cut from his clothing.
At a post-mortem, the pathologist calls it an unnatural death. A suspected exotic poison, but no trace was found.
On January 14, 1949, an unclaimed suitcase believed to be his is found in Adelaide Railway Station’s cloakroom.
Many of the labels were removed from the clothing in the suitcase and the jacket he wore had a front gusset and stitching used only on garments made in the US.
THE POETRY AND THE CODES
From here, the mystery deepens. On April 1949, police find a tiny piece of rolled-up paper with the words “Tamam Shud” – meaning “finished” in Persian – sewn into the dead man’s trouser pocket. The words appeared to be torn from a book.
A Glenelg doctor comes forward with a rare copy of The Rubaiyat by Persian poet Omar Khayyam – it had been thrown into his car, which was ostensibly parked in Jetty Rd, Glenelg, on the night of November 30.
Ultra-violet light on the book’s back page turns up more mystery – undeciphered codes.
This led to claims the man could have been an assassinated Soviet spy.
That’s getting away from the facts, of course, but wait … there’s more.
A phone number in the back of the book is Jo Thomson’s. She claims she gave her copy of The Rubaiyat away to an Alfred Boxall and initially identified the deceased man as Boxall.
Boxall turns up alive. With his intact copy of The Rubaiyat.
Jo, who was to be married, and died in 2007, told police she didn’t know who the Somerton Man was.
Her daughter, Kate Thomson, says she accepts her mother was a Soviet spy who may have had a hand in the murder of the Somerton Man.
“She had a dark side, a very strong dark side,” Kate told 60 Minutes last year.
What’s more, Jo also had a son, Robin, to another man. Robin’s former wife Roma Egan and their daughter, Rachel, believe Robin – who has died – may be the son of the Somerton Man and Jo Thomson.
In June 1949, a coronial inquest is unable to determine cause of death and an open finding is delivered. The man is buried at West Tce Cemetery.
WAS JO THOMSON A SPY?
University of Adelaide professor Derek Abbott became fascinated with the case after trying to break the codes, even falling in love with and marrying Rachel Egan after getting in contact with her about the case.
For Prof Abbott, the simpler explanation is the one most likely one.
: Everyone loves the spy angle but I can’t find any evidence whatsoever,” he said.
“You can access old ASIO records through the national archives – and we have done a run on the nurse’s names and Alf Boxall – and nothing comes up. It just doesn’t stack up as a spy thing.”
Even the codes don’t appear to be actual World War II codes, he says.
“We’ve analysed that statistically over and over using computer software, they match the first letters of English words.
“It doesn’t appear to have the structure of a secret code and isn’t structured in the way World War II codes were constructed.”
So how did the man die, if it wasn’t murder?
“The inquest believed it was unnatural and likely a poison – but in those days, if you didn’t know the cause, you’d put it down to a poison, that’s what pathologists trained in the Victorian era did.
“Today, you might look at the possibility the guy asphyxiated. He was found lying in an awkward position, his head against wall.”
However, back to those codes – some believe it’s what’s inside the codes that matters. Gordon Cramer, a research member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, says micro writing is inside the codes – and refers to the de Havilland Venom – a British post-war jet, which was still on the drawing board at the time.
Mr Cramer says the Somerton Man’s death coincided with the visit to Adelaide of high-ranking British officials and weapons development at Woomera – the later site of nuclear testing.
Prof Abbott doesn’t agree there’s micro-writing inside the code letters, and because the Somerton Man’s copy of The Rubaiyat went was lost by police in the early 1950s, all we have left is pictures – which he says are too low-res for a proper examination.
He believed the micro-writing is the mind seeing patterns.
Last year, the Somerton Man was exhumed for DNA testing after then-attorney general Vickie Chapman gave it the go ahead. There’s no news on that front.
The tunnels under the CBD
Are there tunnels under the city? The short answer is yes, but not as many as you’d think.
The idea of tunnels under Adelaide’s CBD has fascinated many, leading to longstanding rumours of passages beneath the city that link up Adelaide’s older buildings.
It’s thoughts of dank, dark, clandestine passageways allowing people to scuttle unseen from building to building that see the rumours grow.
These days the tunnels that did exist are either filled in or beautified, sanitised and … well, almost boring.
And the supposedly secret tunnel network never actually existed in the first place.
According to SA historian Deb Morgan, who used to work for the State Heritage Unit and wrote a paper on some of Adelaide’s tunnels, many passages started out as basements or cellars built beneath city buildings, which had walls removed – for example, the cellars under the Lion Hotel.
“Most houses had cellars and it’s a short step from digging a cellar to tunnelling through to another one,” she said.
“Tunnelling itself was nothing special – SA was founded on miners and mining skills, so digging a tunnel would have been a piece of cake for many of the miners and engineers of the 19th century and early 20th.
“You’d just have to ask why they would bother to dig a tunnel under a road – if they could just walk across at ground level.”
Ayers House has cellars, and so do historical homes in North Adelaide – some of which were originally underground living areas, tunnels connecting the homes with old servants’ quarters or as security against attacks.
Most of the rumours started from the two tunnels that do exist – the several passages and rooms under the old Treasury Building on Flinders St, now the Adina Hotel, and a long-disused railway line that runs diagonally under King William Rd.
WHAT THERE IS, OR WAS:
• Air raid shelters at the northern end of Victoria Square during World War 2
• A tunnel that once connected the Torrens building with the Old Treasury Building, but is now filled in
• Several existing passages under the Old Treasury Building
• A tunnel under King William Rd, which was turned into partially underground railway line linking the old Adelaide railway station to where the Jubilee Exhibition Building on North Tce used to be (now the University of Adelaide)
• Underground cells beneath the Sir Samuel Way Building courthouse, which are now unsafe and no longer accessible
• Service tunnels under the Royal Adelaide Hospital
• “Tunnels”, which were probably storage bays, exposed during work on railway station platforms in the 1970s and may not have been underground when they were built
WHAT PROBABLY NEVER EXISTED, OR THERE’S NO EVIDENCE FOR:
• A tunnel linking the Adelaide Post Office with the Old Treasury Building
• A tunnel linking Parliament House and Government House (for secret meetings between the Governor and MPs)
• A tunnel linking the basement of Old Parliament House with the railway station (rumoured to allow politicians to escape the rain)
• A tunnel extending all the way under North Tce to Pulteney St or even Frome Rd, with a railway line that linked to other North Tce businesses via secondary tunnels and underground station platforms
• A tunnel linking Ayers House (which once had nurses’ quarters) with the RAH
The best place to see tunnels under Adelaide are the ones under the Adina on Franklin St, which is in the city’s oldest building – the Old Treasury Building.
Inside the old Cabinet room, in that heritage-listed building, history was made – for example, the decision to give women the vote.
Underneath it are passageways linking up different sections of the building. The wide, well-lit tunnels – complete with fire extinguishers and fire alarms – are now hired out for functions such as wedding or parties.
Coal, then gold bullion, was stored there during the gold rush in the 1850s in what were then Treasury Vaults, according to National Trust volunteer Grant Morgan.
The gold was smelted down in another room that no longer exists and turned into coins because of a shortage of currency in SA.
“So many miners had gone to Victoria to try to make their fortune,” Mr Morgan said.
“And with the risks of bushrangers involved in coming back with gold, the government organised supervised trips to and from the gold fields.”
Known as the Adelaide pound, about 24,000 of the gold coins were made and stored in the tunnels.
“It was about the size of a 10c piece – they were strictly illegal, but were used as unofficial currency for some years until the gold rush had subsided,” Mr Morgan said.
One underground room still contains a furnace that dates back to the 1860s. It was used for lithography – to speed up the process of map making. The lands title office was in the building at the time.
Next to it are the two glass window shutters standing open around a block of concrete in the wall.
It’s a filled-in tunnel that Mr Morgan suggests may have been the start of a passage leading under the street to the post office.
This tunnel has long been rumoured to exist – but Deb Morgan said she’s never found evidence it was real.
The room also contains a well under the floorboards – covered, but not filled in.
Another blocked-off tunnel under the Adina, hidden in an alcove that now houses a large airconditioning unit, once led to the Torrens Building, which was on the eastern side of Victoria Square and housed government offices.
It’s a strange sight – blocks of stone centuries old next to modern technology.
This was probably the only passage that linked two buildings underground – but was filled in when the Adina took over the building, Mr Morgan said.
“I had taken people on tours through it until the hotel came along,” he said.
“But the hotel didn’t want to be responsible for tunnels that didn’t bring income.
“I’d love to still be able to bring people through it – it is a bit sad.”
The other significant tunnel in Adelaide’s underground history was last seen in 1973.
It started life as a small crossing under King William Rd about 1840 to allow cattle and soldiers’ horses to avoid what’s now King William Rd when grazing them.
Then, in the 1887, it was turned into a railway spur line, starting at the old Adelaide railway station on the corner of North Tce and King William Rd and running under the road.
It ran behind Government House and to where the Jubilee Exhibition Building and Exhibition Oval used to be – until it was demolished in the 1960s for University of Adelaide buildings.
The railway and tunnel was closed in 1928 but again saw light in 1973, when a section of it was rediscovered during excavations for the Festival Centre.
Ms Morgan said the city council at the time believed the bluestone-line tunnel, which was 15 feet wide and about 30 feet long, would have made a “grand addition and counterpoint to the modern architectural form of the new Festival Centre … while allowing patrons to cross the road in safety”.
But the cost escalated to as much as $140,000 and the project was abandoned – “laughably cheap” now, according to Margaret Anderson, the CEO of History SA.
For Ms Anderson, the tunnels could be as interesting as the fascination people have with them.
They are a remarkably persistent urban myth – it keeps popping up. People have a fascination with what you can’t see.”
The tunnel has now been backfilled with quarry rubble.
Grant Morgan said the romance of tunnels under cities is what nurtures their continuing myth.
“The rumours seem to be very common when you talk about tunnels – people get romantic ideas from movies such as The Third Man.
“Tunnels create these legends – people always ask me if there are ghosts. I can’t promise them ghosts.”
Deb Morgan said the stories of extensive tunnels under the city may have also sprung from the gold bullion stored under the old Treasury Building, and the need to securely transfer valuable goods and government documents between locations.
“I think that would be overkill really – Adelaide was not exactly a wild west town at the time,” she said. “People just like the idea of a mystery, something hidden from view and the possibility of secret goings-on.”
Editor’s note: A version of this story originally ran on Advertiser.com.au in 2015