CONFIRMEDENHANCED ×212It was Thursday, it was raffle night, and the meat tray had just been drawn when Davo from the depot stood up in the beer garden and said, quietly, which is not like him, “Warren. Warren. Look.”
I looked.
What we saw
Across the whole southern sky, from roughly the silo to roughly the cemetery, a line of amber lights. Seven at first. Then nine. Then, by the time Cheryl had the camera out of her bag, eleven, in a shallow arc, like the lights on the underside of something very large that had decided to park.
They did not move. They did not flicker. They were not the colour of anything we make. Dr Faraday, who was at the bar, described the hue as “an amber beyond amber” and later, more formally, as “amber”. They were silent. The whole beer garden was silent, which, if you have been to the Royal on raffle night, you will know is the most unnatural part of this whole account.
The publican, to his eternal credit, suspended the raffle. The meat tray sat on the bar for twenty minutes with nobody looking at it. I have been going to that pub for thirty years and I have never seen a meat tray left unattended for twenty seconds.
The arc
I am not an engineer but Dr Faraday is a former television repairman and he made the point, on the night, with a beer coaster, that eleven lights in a perfect arc with equal spacing do not happen by accident. Birds do not do that. Planes do not do that. Flares, and we will come to the flares, certainly do not do that, because flares fall down, and these went nowhere.
He measured the arc against the top of the silo with his thumb and calculated the object’s width at “a kilometre and a bit”. When I asked how high it was, he said “that depends how big it is”, and when I asked how big it was, he said “that depends how high it is”, and this, he told me, is the fundamental problem of the field.
Twenty minutes
At 8:41 pm by the clock over the bar, the lights went out. Not one at a time. All at once, like somebody flicked a switch, or like the thing turned and showed us its edge. The beer garden breathed out. Somebody ordered a round. The raffle resumed and Cheryl won the meat tray, which she says is unrelated and which I have logged.
The other end of the world
It was not until the following week, when Shane got the news up on the school computer, that we learned the rest of it. On the same night, our Thursday, their Thursday, thousands of people in Phoenix, Arizona watched a formation of amber lights hang over their city in a V. Same colour. Same silence. Same length of time. Their air force said flares. Our air force said flares.
Two air forces, two continents, one word. Draw your own conclusions.
Dr Faraday has plotted both sightings on the globe in the CWA hall and run a piece of string between them, and the string passes, as near as he can make out with a globe that size, directly through the Earth’s core. He is not yet prepared to say what that means. He is prepared to say it is “a very straight string”.
The flares
I rang the RAAF. I rang them several times. A pleasant young woman eventually told me that Amberley had been conducting “routine night exercises” and that what Wandoona had seen was most likely “illumination flares, viewed at distance”.
I said to her, love, we are six hundred kilometres from Amberley. She said flares can be seen from a long way off. I said not six hundred kilometres they can’t, and she said she wasn’t in a position to comment on the maximum visibility of flares, and I said no, I don’t suppose you are.
We know what flares look like. We live here. The Hennessys let off flares every New Year’s and they go up, they go orange, they come down, and one year they set fire to the tennis court. These lights did not go up, did not come down, and did not set fire to anything, which I think is the strongest evidence I have ever put on this website.
A word from management
I was at home. I would note for the record that eleven people in a beer garden on raffle night is not a scientific panel, that Davo has previously reported a UFO that was the Southern Cross, and that Cheryl winning the meat tray is not an anomaly because Cheryl buys forty tickets. — Noreen
Where it stands
The Collective has classified the Wandoona Lights as CONFIRMED on the basis of eleven witnesses, eleven photographs, one suspended raffle and a very straight string. The Men in Beige came on the Saturday. They had a drink. They asked for the photographs. Cheryl said she’d posted them to her sister. They left a pamphlet about responsible service of alcohol.
The publican has put a small brass plaque on the beer garden wall. It says 13.3.97 — We All Saw It. He has also raised the price of the raffle tickets, which Dr Faraday regards as a separate matter.
Keep watching the paddock. Keep watching the beer garden. Keep watching, frankly, anything.
— Warren
Document U8MC-97-0101. Status: CONFIRMED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.