CONFIRMEDENHANCED ×212I know what a cloud does. I have spent fifty years looking at clouds hoping they’ll do something and they mostly don’t, and when they do, they do it in the direction of the wind. That’s the whole deal with clouds. That’s the arrangement.
On Thursday 17 May 2012 something shaped like a cloud sat over the Big Dam for two hours and eleven minutes with a thirty kilometre an hour westerly blowing straight through it, and it did not move one inch.
Timeline
1:40 pm. Noreen says “what’s that” from the clothesline, which is how most of the Collective’s major sightings begin. Lens shaped object, grey-white, hard edge all the way round, sitting at maybe a thousand feet directly over the dam. Big. Dr Faraday later estimated 400 metres across, or 40, or 4, you know how he is.
1:45 pm. Camera out. Every other cloud in the sky, and there were plenty, moving steadily east, as you’d expect, because of the westerly. This one: nothing. Pinned.
2:10 pm. I noticed the lights. Along the underside, a row of seven, dull orange, evenly spaced, steady. Not flashing. Not aircraft lights. Just on. Like a verandah.
2:30 pm. Rang the Bureau. Got the recorded message. Rang the other number. Got a young fella who said “lenticular cloud, mate, they form over terrain and stay put”. I said there’s no terrain, it’s a dam, the highest thing for sixty kilometres is the silo. He said “well, the silo then”. I said the silo is in town and this is over my dam and also IT HAS LIGHTS ON IT. He said he’d pass it on.
3:00 pm. Cheryl arrived. Said it was “a big one” and that she could “feel the hum in her implant”. Stood under it with her arms out for twenty minutes. Nothing happened, which she says is “typical, they never come when you’re ready”.
3:51 pm. It went. Not east with the wind. Straight up. Got smaller and smaller, lights still on, and then it was a dot and then it wasn’t.
The correspondence
I wrote to the Bureau that evening, formally, with the photos. Their reply, three days later: “The image is consistent with an altocumulus lenticularis formation. These can appear stationary relative to the ground. The ‘lights’ are most likely sunlight catching the lower surface.”
I replied that I had been photographing the underside of that cloud for two hours while the sun went across the sky and the lights did not move or change, and that if the sun was catching the lower surface it was doing it in seven places at once in a straight line, which is not how the sun works, I’ve looked.
They replied: “We have nothing further to add.”
I replied with a list of eleven further questions.
They did not reply.
I replied again asking if they had received the eleven questions.
They did not reply.
The Collective has logged this as a concession. When the Bureau of Meteorology, a body whose entire purpose is to tell you what is in the sky, stops answering questions about what is in the sky, that is not silence. That is an answer.
Dr Faraday’s assessment
- Shape: “lenticular, which is their word for saucer, they just don’t like saying saucer”
- Edge: “hard, and I have never seen a hard cloud”
- Lights: “seven, consistent with the seven lights reported under the 1997 Phoenix craft, and also under the Wandoona Lights the same night, I have a chart”
- Movement: “none, then vertical, which is the signature”
- Cloaking: “partial, they were clearly trying, 7/10”
- 10 Faraday Units
A word from management
It was a lenticular cloud. We get them. They sit over the dam because the dam is a big cold flat thing in a hot paddock and the air does something, the young fella from the Bureau explained it to me after Warren hung up on him. The "lights" were the sun on the ripples in the bottom of the cloud and if you look at the photos they do move, slowly, as the sun goes round. I have told Warren this. He has logged it as a concession. I don't know what to. — Noreen
Where this leaves us
A craft the size of the Wandoona showground sat over my dam for two hours, lit up like a motel, in full view of three adults and a dog, and the official position of the Commonwealth is that it was weather with an opinion.
I’ll tell you what I think. I think it was the big one. The one the little ones come from. I think it came to look at the dam, and the reed bed, and the Top Paddock, and the Burnt Circle, and I think it was taking stock. Doing an inventory. Working out what’s still here and what they’ve already got.
Nine hundred head. Minus Beryl. They know. I know. The Bureau knows and has decided to stop answering the phone.
Keep watching the paddock. And when it’s a cloud, check it’s moving.
— Warren
Document U8MC-12-0205. Status: CONFIRMED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.