‘Giant triangle’: Aussie’s ‘mind-blowing’ UFO encounter

An Aussie real estate agent has revealed a “mind-blowing” UFO sighting that he says “changed the course of my life”.

Clark Watson has been interested in researching UFOs all his life.

But on February 1, 2023, what was once a casual hobby suddenly became “very real” when he had a “mind-blowing” experience of his own.

The real estate agent, from Albury in southern NSW, was staying at a hotel in Wyong, north of Sydney, to attend a training course when he had what he claims was an “up close” and personal sighting.

It was around 9.30pm when, according to Mr Watson, he watched a white, blinking light come in from the several kilometres out over the ocean, moving in a way that was “impossible to explain”, before being joined by a second light.

The objects “darted around the sky” and “buzzed over the town” at incredible speed.

“They chased each other around the sky like dogs at a park,” he said. “These things instantly go from standing still to the other side of the sky.”

The objects came in over Tuggerah Lake from what he estimated to be around 1500 feet, then “swooped down to the ground, probably as low as 200 to 300 feet”.

“They came over the top of my hotel,” he said. “I could have hit them with an arrow.”

Clark Watson filmed several strange lights. Picture: Supplied

They “came in and formed a Ferris wheel in the sky”, and “had a strange interaction with another one”.

A three minute mobile phone video filmed from his balcony shows several indistinct, flickering white lights moving around the sky.

“Wow, it’s kind of like a big pinwheel rotating around itself,” Mr Watson says in the video.

“That is the f**king wildest thing I’ve ever seen.”

At one point two lights are seen “dancing” around each other near a third, solid bright white light which does not move, before heading back the way they came.

“One’s just sitting there,” he says, referring to the third object. “What’s he doing? It’s actually a bit creepy. Look at him, just sitting up there.”

The short excerpt from the full sighting “roughly shows about 10 per cent of what I could actually see with the naked eye”, he noted in the video description.

“The ones I saw were just bright white, very different white to a star,” he said. “A lot brighter than the stars — the brightest thing in the night sky. Crystal-clear objects darted around the sky.”

About an hour later, Mr Watson “saw a triangle come in from the ocean”.

“It was about an acre in size — it was huge,” he said.

“It just hovered at an altitude of about 400 feet. I had no idea what it was. It was absolutely mind-blowing to witness it, [it was like] nothing I’d ever seen on earth. My mind couldn’t categorise it.”

He added the giant triangle, which had dim lights on the corners and was not bright like the earlier objects, looked “organic”.

“It looked like snakeskin — charcoal and brown,” he said.

UFO researcher Clark Watson. Picture: Supplied

Mr Watson said he had long been interested in the topic “but it wasn’t until 2023, after 20 years of being a researcher, that I had my own really profound experience, saw an object up close”.

“That changed everything for me,” he said. “It became very real to me. It was here, it was active. That’s when I really got involved.”

The strange sighting inspired Mr Watson to sign up as a volunteer field researcher with the Australian chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a US-based non-profit which collects reports of UFO sightings across the world.

Interest in UFOs, or UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) as they are now known, has reached fever pitch in recent months following an unprecedented push for disclosure by US Congress and a flurry of fantastical claims from alleged whistleblowers about shadowy government crash-retrieval programs.

“We’re averaging probably five to 10 cases per week now that come through,” said Mr Watson, who stressed he was speaking in his personal capacity and not on behalf of MUFON.

The role of MUFON investigators is “sorting the wheat from the chaff”, attempting to rule out any earthly explanations for sightings.

“The field investigator looks for the possibility that the witness misinterpreted what was seen,” the group says on its website. “Common objects that a witness may consider to be a UFO include Chinese lanterns, aircraft, drones, astronomical objects, and light reflections.”

Mr Watson said MUFON resolutely stayed away from any speculation about alien bodies, crashed spacecraft or shadowy conspiracies.

“MUFON is in the sceptic game,” he said.

“We’re not interested in anything we can’t verify. We’re trying to collect good witness accounts backed up with data. We will look at what was in the air at the time, any festivals, events. Over 70 to 80 per cent are misidentified aircraft or planets or weather events, any number of things. They’re all UFOs until they’re not.”

Wyong on the NSW central coast. Picture: Supplied

In July, there were 410 sightings reported to MUFON, mostly in the US with 327 reports. Australia had just seven, “a quiet month for us”.

“The stigma in Australia remains, people are very hesitant to speak about it because it’s kind of still a silly subject,” Mr Watson said.

While the number of UFO sightings remains “relatively low”, he said this may be partly due to reluctance to report — but that this was beginning to change.

“What’s happening is a transition in Australia where people are feeling more comfortable talking about this,” he said, noting one recent case he looked into was someone coming forward to report a sighting back in 2015.

“People have been sitting there … to be an experiencer without a support group can be quite lonely. People see things they can’t explain, but don’t have anyone to share it with. They can’t actually ever talk about it with anyone, they get labelled as crazy.”

People who have been something strange in the sky “can ring us and get a bit of comfort”, and sometimes “relief” if it can be explained prosaically.

“Quite often it’s the other way,” Mr Watson said of cases that remained more mysterious. “They feel justified, vindicated.”

Australia has a few “hot spots”, including Gosford, south of Wyong where his own sighting occurred, which has a “rich history” of UFO sightings.

They are typically around the coastal areas, although he noted this could be due to the denser population.

Other hot spots include the Nullarbor Plain — where in 1988 a family claimed their car was chased down the highway by a large, glowing object and lifted off the ground — the top-secret Pine Gap US spy base in central Australia, and the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney.

Australia has a number of famous cases dating back decades, like the mysterious disappearance of 20-year-old pilot Frederick Valentich over the Bass Strait in 1978.

The 1966 Westall sighting remains unsolved. Picture: Supplied

But Mr Watson said the “single most compelling sighting, and probably in the top 10 globally” was the 1966 Westall incident in Melbourne, when hundreds of students at Westall High School in Clayton South witnessed one or multiple UFOs fly over the school before landing in a nearby reserve.

Australia officially stopped investigating UFOs in the 1990s.

The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) now refers reports of sightings to civilian groups, according to documents obtained under freedom-of-information laws by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2016.

During the Cold War, the RAAF collected hundreds of reports of UFOs — which are now held by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) — but about 90 per cent were later determined to be aircraft, satellites, meteors, space debris, stars and planets.

Seven per cent could not be investigated due to lack of time or information, leaving 3 per cent attributed to “unknown causes”.

In deciding to cease investigating UFO reports in 1994, the RAAF reasoned that this 3 per cent “presented little or no threat to security”, according to the NAA.

The previously secret Department of Defence policy documents show the decision was not announced to the public to avoid conspiracy theories and controversy.

“While America and Brazil are coming out and saying yes these are anomalous objects, our government stays completely silent on it,” Mr Watson said.

“Australia is subservient to America. I think we’ve just placed ourselves in a subservient position and been instructed this isn’t a topic to talk about.”

This was the “big problem” for UFO research in Australia, he added.

“The most credible sightings are where you have multiple sensor data [and] witness data,” he said.

“The US is presenting witness data from fighter pilots, sensor data. Our government will not engage with the topic at all. What you’ve got left is witness accounts.”

And witness accounts, he conceded, are “just stories”.

“My case to me is a grand, profound moment in my life,” he said. “I saw something that changed the course of my life — but it’s just a story. There’s no evidence it happened other than me standing there.”

Mr Watson said that was part of the driving force of MUFON.

“They say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said. “We say extraordinary claims require extraordinary investigations. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Originally published as ‘Giant triangle’: Aussie’s ‘mind-blowing’ UFO encounter