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Long Range Weapons Research Establishment (WRE); * Bureau of Meteorology; * Department of Civil Aviation; ¢ "The Committee". carry out at various other Archives offices around the country. All the files you see as digital copies on- line can be viewed on your personal com- puters in the luxury of your own homes. These records are currently held at the head office of the National Archives in Canberra. And contrary to conjecture from some who are very quick to imply we won't find anything new in our recently released gov- ernment files, we have uncovered hundreds of pages of documents that have never seen the light of day, so statements of that nature are completely without substance. What do we know now that we didn't know a year ago? Ina word, plenty! We know that Australia—especially the RAAF and the Long Range Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera— was deeply involved with other governments and vari- ous intelligence organisations, including NASA, in joint space programs and the sharing of information relating to anything space based. So my first file has something to do with international co-operation and interest in this subject. Moondust on the Internet, I came across a 42-page file released under the USA Freedom of Information Act which clearly demonstrates a link between UFOs, the United Nations and Project Moondust. On the first page of these documents, the subject header simply reads "Project Moondust", and dates from November 1973. It concerns the recovery of what may have been Soviet satellite debris. However, also included in this 42-page package are documents on a 1978 discussion concerning the potential of having the United Nations undertake UFO investigations, report on UFO sightings and retrieve crashed objects from different countries. It also mentions the recovery of a spherical object (said to have landed smoothly) in Buenos Aires in 1984. So Moondust was very much a global project. But a singular statement made by the Prime Minister of Grenada and recount- ed by the American delegate to the United Nations leaps out at you on page 9 and reads as follows: ..the recent report of the abduction of a Cessna aircraft in Australia seemed to him to be a compelling reason for the United Nations to "come alive to its responsibilities and take a serious look at the UFO phenomenon, to which Planet Earth has been conspicuously exposed since 1947". Two words immediately caught my atten- tion in this phrase: the word "abduction", which was used to describe the disappear- ance on 21 October 1978 of Frederich Valentich—not crashed, lost or missing at More recently, under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act we obtained over 600 pages of information, but this figure is due to increase very shortly by a further 2,300 pages because the RAAF has kindly granted us access to another 38 files—enig- matic files, to say the least. These 38 files were suspiciously unavailable the first time we asked; then we were told they had been destroyed. On our last request, these files were located and made available because this time we went through a different chan- nel. So sometimes it all depends on whom you speak to. Currently all these files from the depart- ments previously mentioned total some 12,000-odd pages and have cost AURA over A$1,800 to date to obtain. Unfortunately I can only present a few reports in any detail due to our limited space, so at least you will get to know something about the content of these files and the extent of their information. I have tried to be as diverse in subject matter as I can with my chosen examples, just to demonstrate the intriguing number of very different cases recorded in these files. Some may be familiar to you as famous Australian cases, and others you won't have heard of. I want you to see that the Australian Government did keep detailed files on our most famous cases (see table 1). Rather than have other researchers labori- ously go through every one of the thousands of pages at the Archives looking for some- thing in particular, we wrote brief notes on the content of every page in every file. By doing this, anyone can go to these file sum- maries and scan through them to find what they're looking for, like an index—keeping in mind, of course, that the NAA files were obtained under the 30-year rule, which makes 1973 the most current record we are able to access at this present time. But I tell you that when Ist January clicked over this year, another 14 files appeared on our standard search. However, files released under the FOI Act can be a lot more recent, so don't think we are only lim- ited to files prior to 1974; we're not. We have also conducted register searches at our local National Archives Office in Adelaide, something we will endeavour to What was Project Moondus?? In 1953 the USAF 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron was created. Its purpose was to recover downed enemy aircraft during the Korean War. In 1957 it was expanded to recover objects and debris from space vehicles that had survived re- entry from space to Earth, and in 1961, according to a United States Air Force memo, it included UFOs. While researching the topic of Project "I don't know who's responsible for this crop circle, but I bet they have a degree in Behavioural Psychology." NEXUS +59 DECEMBER 2004 — JANUARY 2005 www.nexusmagazine.com