UNVERIFIED BUT TRUETranscribed by Shane from a phone call to the Royal Hotel on a Friday night. Macca was in the cab and the reception came and went. Where the line dropped, we have marked it.
Righto. Warren said just tell it like it happened, so.
I do Adelaide to Perth and back, fridge van, mostly meat going west and nothing going east, which if you think about it is a bit suss in itself but that’s a different website. Twenty-two years on that road. I have seen roos the size of a Camry, I have seen a bloke pushing a wheelbarrow at Madura at four in the morning, I have seen a wedge-tail take a hubcap. I’m not easily impressed and I’m not a UFO bloke. I’m a get-there-and-get-paid bloke.
East of Eucla
Nineteenth of January, bit before midnight. Clear. No moon. You know how out there the stars go right down to the ground on both sides like you’re driving through the middle of them. I come round that long bend east of Eucla and there’s three lights up ahead, off to the left over the scrub. White. In a triangle. Big one. Not moving.
Now. First thing you think, roadhouse. Second thing, another truck pulled up with his spotties on. Third thing, plane. I’ve been past that stretch four hundred times, mate. There’s no roadhouse there. There’s no nothing there. And a truck doesn’t park a hundred metres up in the air, and a plane doesn’t sit still.
So I pulled up. Engine running, because you don’t turn her off out there for anything. And I sat and I watched it for forty minutes by the dash clock. It did not move. Not a wobble. Three lights and between them a sort of darker dark, like someone had cut a triangle out of the sky and forgotten to put anything back.
Took the photo. Had a smoke. Had another one. Radioed. Nothing on the channel but a bloke near Balladonia singing.
Then it moved. All at once. Like it remembered something. Went from stopped to gone-west in the time it takes to say it, no noise, no wind, no nothing, and that was that. Or I thought that was that.
It wasn’t that
Three hundred k’s later, coming into Ceduna, sun just starting to think about it, and I look in the mirror and there’s three lights.
Same triangle. Same spacing. Sitting back behind me maybe a k, same height, keeping pace. Had been, for all I know, the whole way. You don’t look in the mirror much on the Nullarbor, there’s nothing in it.
Here’s the thing people don’t get. I wasn’t scared. I was annoyed. Because I was coming up on the servo and I had been thinking about that pie since Nundroo and I thought, this is going to be a whole thing now.
So I pulled in. And it ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ — [line dropped] — over the back of the car park, over the dongas where the roadworks blokes sleep. Just sat there. Lights on. Waiting.
I went in. Got the pie. Steak and mushroom. Got a coffee off the machine, the big one. Talked to the sheila behind the counter about nothing. Came back out, and it was still there, and I swear to you I looked up at it and I held up the pie, like, what? And it didn’t do anything, but it didn’t do anything in a way that I’d call pointed.
I ate the pie in the cab with it watching. Best pie I’ve ever had, probably, but I’d put that down to the circumstances.
Logic
Everyone’s got an explanation. Keith somebody from Wandoona wrote to Warren and said it was the Nullarbor Roadhouse. I have had a pie at the Nullarbor Roadhouse too and it has never once followed me to Ceduna, and I’d know, because I’d have told it to stop.
RAAF, someone said. Mate, if the RAAF have got a triangle that can do stopped-to-gone with no noise and then tail a fridge van for three hundred k’s and hover over a servo at dawn without one single person in Ceduna looking up, then good on ’em, but they want to stop wasting it on me, I’ve only got meat.
What I reckon is this. It was curious. It’d been sitting out there on its own for who knows how long, and I was the first thing that stopped and had a look back, and it thought, I’ll see where this one goes. And where I went was Ceduna, for a pie. And it waited, because that’s manners. And when I pulled out onto the highway after, it was gone, and I’ve not seen it since.
I’ve got no theory about what it was. I’m not Dr whatsisname. I’ve just got the photo and the pie, and I know which one I’d put money on.
[line dropped]
— tell Warren the fridge’s playing up and I’ll ring him Tuesday.
Macca has since confirmed the fridge was fixed and was, in his words, “unrelated, probably”.
Document U8MC-01-0304. Status: UNVERIFIED BUT TRUE. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.