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trouble is audible on the audio tape. ] 9:12:04 R: Delta Sierra Juliet—Roger. What are your intentions? 9:12:09 V: My intentions are—ah... to go to King Island —ah, Melbourne, that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again... it is hovering and it's not an aircraft. 9:12:22 R: Delta Sierra Juliet. [A pause for seventeen seconds during which a very strange, metallic-sounding pulsed noise is audible, with no discernable pattern in time or frequency. ] 9:12:49 R: Delta Sierra Juliet, Melbourne. Valentich was never heard from again. Valentich's description of "a green light and sort of metallic like, all shiny on the outside" is important. In the years following the event, a colleague obtained reports from twenty eyewitnesses in the region, describing an erratically moving green light in the sky at that same time of evening as Valentich's flight. Years later, I traveled to the resort town of Apollo Bay, Australia, and interviewed Ken Hansen [4] who was forty- seven at the time of the incident in 1978, and his two nieces. Hansen was driving with the two girls when they noticed, in the sky above, the lights from a plane along with a large green light. The presence of that second light was so unusual that Hansen decided to pull over, stop, and get out of his automobile. He said that when he did so, he clearly saw a second large, greenish, circular light "like it was riding on top of the airplane." Its visual size, as he described it, was equivalent to that of a tennis ball held at arm's length, with a ratio between it and the plane of about four to one. Assuming this estimation is accurate, the UFO would be about forty-eight feet across. Its green color was similar to the navigation lights on an airplane. Hansen noticed that it kept a constant distance above and slightly behind the airplane's lights, while he watched for about fifteen to twenty seconds, until both lights disappeared from sight. He told his wife that evening about the large green light, as well as his coworkers the next day, before he knew anything about what Valentich had reported. When we met, his nieces confirmed the details provided by their uncle. I was able to obtain much valuable information by going to the site with Hansen where he had pulled over in his car, because he - 41 The story of Valentich's encounter with a UFO and subsequent disappearance was reported by the media throughout the world, garnering much attention. Despite the coordinated efforts of private pilots and the Australian government's search-and-rescue airplanes, no trace of him or his airplane has ever been found. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that he probably crashed into the sea between three and twelve miles offshore, but we will likely never know what happened. The nature of the large 9:12:28 V: Delta Sierra Juliet—Melbourne ... End of transcript. reconstructed for us what he saw.