DOSSIER 06: Ancient aliens built the Big Dam (and who taught HIM?)

CONFIRMEDENHANCED ×212

Everyone who has ever stood on the wall of the Big Dam at sunset has felt it. The size of the thing. The straightness of the wall. The way the water sits in it like it was always meant to. And everyone who has felt it has turned to me and said the same thing: “Your father-in-law built this?”

Noreen says yes. Noreen has a photo. This dossier is about what the photo does not show.

1. The structure

The Big Dam is an earth-wall dam on the eastern side of Boolaroo Downs, 1.4 kilometres from the house. The wall is 190 metres long, 6 metres high at its highest point, and dead straight. The dam holds roughly 40 megalitres when full, which it was last in 2011, and has never, in living memory, failed, leaked, silted or gone off, which is more than can be said for the bore.

The spillway is cut into solid rock at the northern end. Not dug. Cut. The faces are flat. Dr Faraday has measured the angle of the spillway floor at 3.2 degrees, which he describes as “an angle somebody chose”.

2. The official story

The official story, which I have heard at every Christmas since 1979, is that Len Bowditch, Noreen’s father, built the Big Dam in the winter of 1961 with a Caterpillar D7 dozer he borrowed from the shire, a theodolite he borrowed from a surveyor in Roma, and his brother Col, who “mostly held the staff”.

The photo exists. I have seen it. A man in a hat on a dozer, in front of a half-finished wall, with a smaller man holding a staff. On the back, in pencil: Len & Col, the Big Dam, July 61.

I do not dispute the photo. I dispute what we are being asked to conclude from it. A photo of a man on a dozer in front of a wall proves a man was on a dozer in front of a wall. It does not prove he knew what he was doing. It does not explain the alignments. And it does not answer the question I have been asking at Christmas since 1994, to a table that goes very quiet:

And who taught HIM?

A certificate from a course in Roma. I have asked to see the course. Nobody can produce the course. Draw your own conclusions.

3. The alignments

In 2009 Dr Faraday and I spent a year surveying the Big Dam with a compass, a spirit level, a protractor and Shane’s phone, which has a thing in it. We found the following.

The solstice. On the morning of the winter solstice the sun rises directly along the line of the dam wall, from the spillway end. On 21 June 2009 we stood at the southern end of the wall at 6:48 am and watched the sun come up at the far end “like a ball rolling down a gutter”. Dr Faraday wept. I had the camera.

The servo. The dam wall, extended as a line to the south-west, passes through the Wandoona servo. Not near it. Through it. Through the ice freezer, in fact, which is where the Servo Rectangle appeared in 2002 (see Dossier 04). The servo was built in 1974, thirteen years after the dam. Either the servo was built on the line deliberately, by a man called Russ who has never shown the slightest interest in anything, or the line was there first and the servo was placed.

The Top Paddock. From the centre of the dam wall, a bearing of 312 degrees runs directly to the Burnt Circle where Beryl was taken. Dr Faraday calls this “the departure vector”. Noreen calls it “the direction of the Top Paddock”.

The Tully diameter. The reed circle of 1996, nine metres, sat precisely at the eastern end of the dam, where the water is deepest. A nine-metre craft needs a nine-metre pad. A nine-metre pad needs water for cooling, or cover, or whatever they use it for. The Big Dam provides it. The Big Dam was built, I put it to you, to provide it.

4. The engineering

Here is what the Len theory asks you to believe. A grazier with a borrowed dozer, no engineering qualification and a brother holding a stick built, in one winter, a 190-metre wall that is still straight, still watertight and still standing fifty-three years later, with a rock-cut spillway at a chosen angle, aligned to the solstice, on the one bearing that would later matter.

Here is what my theory asks you to believe. Somebody showed him.

I am not saying the visitors drove the dozer. I have thought about it and the cab is too small. I am saying that in the winter of 1961 a man stood on a bare hillside with a theodolite he did not know how to use, and something told him where to put the pegs. He may not have known what it was. He may have thought it was the course in Roma. Col, who held the staff, is still alive in a home in Toowoomba and when asked about the dam in 2012 said “Len just seemed to know”, then asked who I was.

Len just seemed to know.

5. The rock

The spillway rock is the key physical evidence. The faces are flat, the floor is at 3.2 degrees, and when Dr Faraday struck it with a hammer in 2010 it rang. Granite does not ring. He has tested this on several other rocks around the district, which now have marks on them, and none of them ring.

The shire says the rock was blasted and the faces dressed with a pick. There are no drill holes. Noreen says the drill holes are under the water. The water is 6 metres deep and I am not going down there, and neither is Dr Faraday, who tried in 2011 with a snorkel from the Show and came up after forty seconds saying “it’s very dark and there’s something in there”, which Noreen says was a yabby.

6. Objections, and why they are wrong

“Lots of dams line up with the sunrise.” Lots of dams run east-west because that is where the gully goes. Our gully runs north-east. Len had to cut across it. He chose to.

“The servo thing is a coincidence.” There are perhaps forty buildings in Wandoona. The chance of a random line passing through the one with the Rectangle behind it is, by Dr Faraday’s calculation, “very low” and by Shane’s “about one in forty, Uncle Warren”. I have asked Shane to redo the calculation.

“Your father-in-law was just good with a dozer.” He was. He was also, by all accounts, a man who did not read instructions, did not take advice and did not ask for help. Such a man does not go on a course in Roma. Such a man is taught.

“You just don’t like that Noreen’s dad did something impressive.” This was raised at Christmas 2012 by Noreen’s sister and I will address it only to say that I have the greatest respect for Len, who was a hard man and a good one, and who, if he had been visited, would have told nobody, which is exactly what happened.

7. Conclusion

The Big Dam is the finest structure in the district and the only one that works. It is aligned to the sky, to the servo, and to the place my cow was taken from. It was built in one winter by a man who “just seemed to know” and a man who held a stick. It has a nine-metre pad at the deep end and a spillway that rings.

The Collective’s position is that the Big Dam was designed by a non-human intelligence and executed by Len Bowditch, with Col, and that the certificate from Roma, if it exists, was issued afterwards to cover it. The matter is filed as UNVERIFIED BUT TRUE pending the drill holes, which are under the water, where they would be.

Keep watching the paddock. And the dam.

Appendix A — Features of the Big Dam not yet explained

• Why the water is always 2 degrees colder at the eastern end (Noreen: “shade”).
• Why the cattle will not drink from the eastern end (Noreen: “mud”).
• Why the reeds at the eastern end grow back in a circle (Noreen: “that’s how reeds grow, Warren”).
• Why the wall has never needed repair (Noreen: “because Dad built it properly”).
• Why Len never built another dam, anywhere, for anyone, despite being asked (Noreen: “because it nearly killed him”).

Appendix B — Items recovered from the dam

One plank (2006, returned to the Hennessy boys with a note). One Panasonic VHS-C battery (1994, Warren’s, dropped on the night). One snorkel (2011). One set of dozer tracks on the bed, visible in the 2019 drought, running in a dead straight line to the deep end and stopping, which Noreen says is where Len parked it and I say is where it went in.

Document U8MC-DOS-06. Status: UNVERIFIED BUT TRUE. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.

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