Australian pilot Frederick Valentich vanished after seeing a strange ‘aircraft’ buzz his plane
ON a fine spring evening 40 years ago a young pilot and his plane vanished near Cape Otway. No trace has ever been found.
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IT was a fine spring day, with a smattering of cloud in the sky, when 20-year-old pilot Frederick Valentich took off from Victoria’s Moorabbin Airport. The time was about 6.19pm, 40 years ago tomorrow on October 21, 1978.
Valentich had only been a pilot for two years, but had 150 hours flying time and was looking to build up more airtime hoping to one day become a commercial pilot.
For this trip he rented a single engine Cessna 182, and logged plans to fly to King Island, flying southwest toward Cape Otway before heading southeast toward the island, a route he had followed several times before.
Although he told his family he was going crayfishing, according to records he told Moorabbin’s air traffic control that he was picking up some friends as passengers. The two might not have been mutually exclusive as he may have been taking passengers to fish with him, but people would later note the inconsistency. Records also show that he hadn’t informed King Island airport that he was on his way, which would have been crucial for the lights to be lit on the runway when he arrived after sunset. But he may have been relying on radioing ahead to get the lights lit when he was closer.
The flight was uneventful until, just after 7pm, he made contact with Moorabbin’s control tower asking if there were any other aircraft near him because he was being buzzed by something he couldn’t identify.
He was answered by Airflight Service Controller Steve Robey who told him there was “no known traffic” in the area.
Robey asked “What type of aircraft is it?” and the pilot replied “I cannot affirm. It is four bright, it seems to me, like landing lights.”
Valentich then told Robey: “The aircraft has just passed over me at least a thousand feet above”, also saying that the craft had been “playing some sort of game. He’s flying over me two, three times at a time, at speeds I could not identify.”
He described the craft disappearing, then approaching again and hovering above him “orbiting” him, a shiny metallic object with a green light. His last words were: “It is hovering and it is not an aircraft.” After which there is a “strange pulsed noise” but nothing more is heard from the pilot.
Nothing was ever heard from Valentich again and no confirmed wreckage from his plane has ever been found. It remains one of Australia’s great aviation mysteries.
Valentich was born on June 9, 1958, in Melbourne. From an early age he was fascinated by aircraft. He tried to join the RAAF but was rejected because he lacked the educational prerequisites, having only gone to year 10 at Keilor Heights High School.
But he was determined to fly. He went to a private college and took flying lessons, earning his pilot’s licence in 1977 but failing on several occasions to pass exams for a commercial pilot’s licence.
By all accounts at the time he took his final flight in October 1978 he was well adjusted, had a girlfriend and was doing volunteer work with the Air Training Corps, and was still trying for his commercial licence. There was no suggestion he had committed suicide.
Later in the evening after the disappearance people reported seeing strange lights in the sky in the area of Cape Otway and talk turned to alien abduction.
He was known to be a UFO enthusiast and firmly believed in the existence of alien life, but his father Guido said he was not obsessed with it. After searches failed to find any trace of the aircraft Guido told one newspaper, “All I am worried about is that he was released in a different area, very far away from where he was taken.”
More prosaic theories about his disappearance suggested that he may have become disoriented and delusional and simply crashed. But despite sounding genuinely distressed on the radio, Robey believes that Valentich didn’t sound confused. If he had mistaken the lighthouse for a strange long aircraft and crashed in the water nearby there would have been debris and his conversation with the flight controller wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did.
In 1983 a cowl flap from a Cessna was found about 320km away from Cape Otway, but it has never been confirmed as belonging to Valentich’s craft.
Valentich was not the first mysterious disappearance over Bass Strait. In 1920 the sailing ship Southern Cross was lost there and veteran flyer Captain W.J. Strutt and his DeHavilland DH9A aircraft vanished while searching for the ship.
In October 1934 a Holyman Airlines DH86 aircraft with 12 people aboard vanished. No trace was ever found. Aboard the aircraft was Bert Warren, whose son David would later develop the Black Box flight recorder.