THEY TOOK BERYL: the night a saucer lifted a Droughtmaster out of the Top Paddock

CONFIRMEDENHANCED ×212

I have told this story at the Royal, at the CWA hall, to the police, to the Department, to the insurance, to a man from the Bureau who wrote nothing down, and to my wife, who has heard it the most and believes it the least. I am now telling it to the internet, which Shane says is forever.

The night

It was raining. It is always raining when they come, which Dr Faraday says is because the craft “seed the cloud for cover” and Noreen says is because it was March.

At approximately 2:40 am the dogs went off. Not barking. Humming. Both of them, in the same note, which I later had Dr Faraday identify on the piano at the CWA as a B flat. I went out on the verandah with the Panasonic because I had been filming the dogs for the Wandoona Show video and it was still on the fridge.

Over the Top Paddock, at a height of roughly “higher than the windmill, lower than the moon”, there was a disc. Grey-green. Lights around the rim going anticlockwise, which anyone who has worked cattle will tell you is the wrong way. It made no sound except the dogs.

Then the beam.

The beam

It came down in a column about the width of a cattle grid and the colour of a servo at night. Inside it, rising at a steady pace, was Beryl. Ear tag QLD-0447-B. Nine years old. Best cow on the place, quiet, good mother, won Reserve Champion at the 1991 Show and should have won it outright but the judge was from Roma.

She went up like a sock out of a dryer. Legs down. Looking at me. I have the tape. I will always have the tape. The Men in Beige have asked for the tape four times and the answer is still no.

The disc closed up underneath her like a camera and went straight up, no run-up, no noise, gone. The rain stopped about a minute later, which I noted at the time and Noreen said “it was a shower, Warren”.

The morning

In the Top Paddock where Beryl had been standing there was a circle of flattened, scorched grass nine metres across. No tracks in. No tracks out. No blood. No footprints. No receipt. The other cattle were all up the far end of the paddock standing in a tight group facing the gate “like they wanted to make a statement”.

I rang Senior Constable Taggart at 6 am. He attended at 9:15 am, looked at the circle, looked at the sky, looked at me, and filed it under Livestock: Miscellaneous. I have asked for it to be moved to Livestock: Taken and he says that is not a category.

At 10:05 am the Men in Beige arrived. Two of them, in a white Commodore, slacks the colour of a manila folder. They asked to see the tape. I said no. They left a pamphlet about drought assistance. We were not in drought. Draw your own conclusions.

What the Bureau says

I wrote to the Bureau of Meteorology because I did not know who else to write to and the pamphlet had their number on the back. They replied that the Wandoona district had experienced “a shower and a lenticular cloud” and “possibly Venus”. I have a cow missing and they have given me a planet.

Why this site exists

Shane built this page in 1996 on a computer we got from the school when they got the new ones. It started as one photo and a paragraph. It is now, according to Shane, “the fourth or fifth biggest site of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere that isn’t run by a company”. People write in from everywhere. They have all lost something. A cow, a night, a Tuesday, a sense that the sky is just the sky.

I am not a scientist. Dr Faraday is a scientist, by post. I am a grazier who watched his best cow go straight up in a column of light and has spent thirty years being told it was a cloud.

Beryl, if you are reading this, which Dr Faraday says is possible, the Top Paddock gate is open. It has been open since 1994.

Keep watching the paddock.

— Warren

Document U8MC-94-0001. Status: CONFIRMED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.

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