Hoards of people descend on the Pennisi property to take a look at this ‘saucer nest’, sending the family running for cover. Turns out, in the years to come that would be the least of their worries. Rumours of covert surveillance and odd happenings leave the people at the heart of this mystery looking over their shoulders.
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Credits
Host: Danielle O’Neal
Supervising producer: Piia Wirsu
Sound designer and producer: Grant Wolter
Executive producer: Blythe Moore
Additional production: Dominic Cansdale and Chris Calcino
Uncropped is the latest season of Expanse, the ABC’s award-winning documentary history podcast.
Credits
Shane Pennisi: We're sitting in the dining room, through those windows.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Once the word was out through the bush telegraph that George Pedley had supposedly seen a flying saucer on Albert’s property, and it had left a mark behind, people just started arriving at the Pennisi’s farm.
Shane Pennisi: Dust. I'm not kidding. Dust. It was one car after the other. Hundreds. Hundreds. Mum couldn't put the washing out.
They went down there, they parked anywhere they could, walked over plant cane. They climbed through into the scrub over there, broke down trees, things, they just walked through the lagoon.
As soon as I heard, they just had a bug in them to come and have a look.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Young shy Shane, dressed in his too-big hand me downs watched on, wide-eyed.
His dad, patient, kind-hearted Albert, was fending off the questions that were flying like bullets.
Shane Pennisi: Did you see it? What do they look like? Are they aliens? And all they could say was, ‘I've seen what you've seen’.
They wanted to hear answers. They wanted to hear an answer. Well they couldn't give it to ‘em.
I didn't like it at all. I just wanted to get the hell out.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Albert asked the police if they could stop the hoards from coming.
Shane Pennisi: He just looked at dad and said, ‘Unless I put my men here I think we're going to have a hell of a job. We'll have to put a whole big fence around, and barricade around the whole farm’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Instead, Shane's parents decided to shelter the kids as best they could.
Shane Pennisi: It was a no brainer. Just get away.
Danielle O'Neal VO: They packed up the station wagon and headed back to their beach shack, Albert going back and forth to take care of farm business.
I wonder if at this point, they started to get a glimpse that everything had changed.
The circular, swirled, matted reeds left behind by... whatever George saw. It turns out that was only the beginning.
There were other mysteries brewing. Ones that would leave Shane looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.
Everyone was trying to answer the question, ‘What happened out there?’. But I’m beginning to wonder if the better question is really, ‘What the hell happened next?’.
I’m Danielle O’Neal, and this is episode two of Uncropped.
The local cop, who' d gone out to the ‘saucer nest’ site with George, Sergeant Moylan, had called the the Royal Australian Air Force when he’d got back to the station.
They were the ones who looked into these reports of unexplained aerial sightings.
Moylan wrote up a report.
Report (read): In this matter I formed the opinion that the depressed area in the swamp grass had been caused by a small helicopter and that the observer, in the early morning bright sunlight shining on the rotor, may have mistaken the shape.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Once his report landed with the air force, further communications were labelled ‘restricted’.
Meanwhile, the media was doing what the media does. This was a story too good to be true.
The headlines wrote themselves.
Flying Saucer seen near Tully
Saucers are here again!
Did a saucer land here?
Saucer ‘nests’ riddle
Danielle O'Neal VO: The papers carried pictures of the circle, reeds splayed and flattened, under splashy headlines.
George and Albert were a national sensation.
And the Tully library still has those clippings.
Danielle O'Neal: This is the one from the Woman's Weekly, Her article is all about how she just got bitten by so many mosquitoes.
Danielle O'Neal VO: A collection of everything to do with George's saucer nest. And everything that followed.
Danielle O'Neal: I don't like these cartoons. It's like a cartoon with little alien men in a flying saucer.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The cartoonist has drawn a farmer, George presumably, as this kind of big-chinned, long-nosed bogan.
Danielle O'Neal: Oh, there's the original story I think. Yeah, we've seen that one. What legitimate scientist is going to go and study that if that's the portrayal it is getting in the media?
Danielle O'Neal VO: As I go through these reports and cartoons I'm starting to get a sense of the skepticism and ridicule.
Whatever you think of what George reported, it’s a pretty brutal response.
Originally George was quoted in a lot of these articles. But soon after, he said no to pretty much all media.
I don’t take this to mean he didn’t care any more. What happened out there on that lagoon clearly mattered to him, right up to his death a few years ago.
Even today, people in Tully are really protective of George because of what he went through.
Valerie Keenan: I'm sorry, George Petley was an honest man. He wouldn't have made it up.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Valerie Keenan’s a long-timer from Tully. She was a kid when this wild story took over her town.
Valerie Keenan: It became an intrusion in his life. I don’t think he would have made it up, he wasn’t that kind of man.
I think a lot of people from out of town were unfair to him. I think a lot of locals supported him, but I do think that it was a really hard time for him.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Which is why only a few trusted locals in Tully were let in on what happened next.
Valerie Keenan: We'd come from Davidson Road out onto the highway and then down to the farm. There was a gate you had to go through, just an old, rutted old track, a bit of grass growing up the middle.
VO: Valerie, her dad and brother were in the car with George under sunny skies.
It was a few days after this mysterious circular saucer nest, as it was being called, appeared.
They’d been invited along by George to come and check something out.
Valerie Keenan: We had to walk through grass, 10, 15 minutes.
There's a photo here I've got that shows where the main pad was. Well, if you go from the photo towards the back and around we walked right through heavy tea tree scrub, and there was another lagoon on the other side.
And we saw another three pads, different sizes, different shapes.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Three more unexplained circles
Valerie Keenan: It was just like something had come down from above and where we saw the other three there was no way in the world you would have got a vehicle of any kind in there.
And then we're left again with another question in our minds.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The questions were piling up..
Peter Salleras: I've never been into science fiction. Cause it's bullshit basically. I more like factual stuff or stuff that can happen.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Peter Salleras was a kid too when the Tully saucer nests appeared. As you can hear he’s pretty straight down the line.
But then, George.
Peter Salleras: I just remember as a 12 year old thinking, you couldn't do this if you tried.
I have no doubt that George was telling 150 percent of the truth.
And I wouldn't say I've seen anything that even goes close to being as, as so unexplained as that nest.
Danielle O'Neal VO: And David Macdonald, in his 20s and something of a tracker he would get called in to find tourists lost in the thick Queensland bush.
So, he was pretty used to picking up small details.
David Macdonald: I've been through scrubs and swamps from here a hundred kilometres that way and more that way. And I've never seen nothing like it before.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Everyone was asking, what the hell was going on? Would George really have created such an elaborate gag?
It doesn't matter who you speak to in Tully, everyone says the same thing. He’s just not the sort of person to make shit up.
Still, investigators were struggling to cut through the hype to work out exactly that: was this banana farmer having them on? Just what had caused this mysterious mark?
A few days after the first saucer nest appeared, 13-year-old Erroll Gallant was sitting at the kitchen table, eating his cornflakes before school in Innisfail, about half an hour’s drive from all the action.
His dad, Ken, wasn’t the sort of man to sit down and chat over breakfast.
The way Erroll tells it his dad was an... exacting man.
The sort of bloke who played eye spy with his young kids, to win. I spy something starting with... E, I.
Erroll Gallant: Electrical insulator. Were we ever going to get it?
Danielle O'Neal VO: So it seems very on brand to me that he was a part of the Civilian Military Forces, sort of like the army reserves.
And in that capacity, he was the man called in to officially investigate after the local copper made his report.
To get boots on the ground and try and get to the bottom of this outlandish story that was coming from this little rain soaked country town, Tully.
Erroll Gallant: He was just being an eyewitness for people down south. They believed they could take his word at 100 percent of what he saw and what he witnessed and he would supply photographic evidence to them.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This report Ken put together, which judging from his eye spy game would have been meticulous, was handed up the military chain.
But Erroll has these memories of his dad being pretty hacked off about the response.
Erroll Gallant: It was put in the papers that, uh, the official version that it was, uh, ducks swimming around in circles that had burnt the grass off.
Yeah, he was quite disgusted. He'd come home and said, ‘Look, you know, this is really something that we should be looking into seriously’.
And, you know, they just sort of brushed it under the carpet.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The investigators take was in. There’s nothing to see here.
Correspondence from the secretary of the Department of Air said investigations hadn't turned up anything significant.
They reckoned the most likely explanation was weather. Willy willies or water spouts.
This George guy must have been mistaken.
But, the people who knew him and the landscape weren’t satisfied by that explanation.
They trusted George. And his account.
He's not who you might imagine when you think of someone who’s be likely to see a UFO. Not a tin foil hat in sight.
David Macdonald: The only one I know that you have to believe was George Pedley
Danielle O'Neal VO: These days David MacDonald has white hair and keeps his reading glasses in the front pocket of his work shirt. But back in 66 David was a young man who'd see his mate George around town or at the local dance.
Honestly? He's one of the few people who will open up to me about George.
I'd love to sit down with George and hear what happened to him first hand, but obviously I can't.
I can only imagine how cutting this mockery must have been for someone so honest though.
I was hoping to speak to George's family, people close to him, to understand what that was like. But to this day they don't speak about George publicly because of what all this did to him.
David Macdonald: They say ‘You're a nut’, ‘You're, an idiot’, you know. ‘Go and see a shrink’, things like that. ‘Did you see anything or not? You're an idiot’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: There were weeks of endless questions, jokes, and media coverage.
And then something far more earthy hit. A big flood.
So, with all of that he walked away from his little slice of land adjoining the Pennisis.
From the shack he'd built with his own hands.
The banana farm he'd poured years into.
He gave it all up in the hopes of finding a fresh start.
David Macdonald: Albert told me he went out and helped him move his stuff out of the shack.
Danielle O'Neal VO: He packed up and started again, 30ks away.
But it wasn't going to be easy for George to leave behind the legacy of that January morning.
There was no way the media was letting go of a story this good.
Because anything space-related was a money spinner in the 60s.
It sold papers.
The race to get man on the moon was in full flight.
And the telly, if you were lucky enough to have one, was airing Lost in Space and the Jetsons.
Flying saucers and UFOs were hot!
Archival news reporter: So far I haven't seen anything even vaguely resembling a flying saucer or even a flying cigar. But thousands of people, in fact millions, do believe they exist.
Archival news reporter: What do you think they are?
Archival woman: They are real. They come from the other planets. Some of them might come from the centre of the Earth.
Danielle O'Neal VO: So heady times for a young banana farmer to see something he described as looking like a flying saucer.
Valerie Keenan: Dad was always interested in those kinds of things. He used to subscribe to magazines from America about unknown phenomena.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Young Valerie, who George had let in on the secret of those other saucer nests grew up a bit out of Tully on the big expanse of a cattle property.
A good place to see the night sky.
Valerie Keenan: Dad would take a chair out onto the lawn. It was quite open, this is Mount Tyson here which is just behind us, and our house was further back this way, but big expanses of cattle plain.
But, he would sit out on the lawn in this chair and observe the night sky and talk about what he would do if a UFO landed. And, you know, wanted to take, take us away or wanted to do scientific research or whatever. And he was always keen to, you know, why not?
Danielle O'Neal VO: Valerie was at home one evening when a call came through, on the family's landline with a spiral dialler- an essential for the mid 1960s.
Valerie Keenan: Dad's brother rang from Townsville and said that he'd been told about this star in the sky that was moving in odd ways.
And Dad had an old grrader that was wall surplus. So we climbed up on top of that because it was the highest thing around
Danielle O'Neal VO: The night air had a chill.
Valerie Keenan: And we eventually found it, a star.
It just moved up and down, sideways, at an angle, different ways, up and down around the place.
Danielle O'Neal VO: And then...
Valerie Keenan: This thing, this star, it just went. Like a shooting star, but up, up into the sky and away from us.
And I got really scared, absolutely terrified, and started to cry ‘cause it was something that obviously Dad couldn't explain. And it was something I certainly couldn't understand.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This isn’t the only story Valerie has, and she is by no means alone.
It seems like whoever you talk to in Tully, just about everyone has a story about some weird experience.
Ron Hunt: Did I come home and tell you about that light, Love? I was agitated about it.
Ron’s wife: Yeah, you were.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This is another Tully institution. That ‘unofficial town mayor’ Ron Hunt.
Ron Hunt: When I was driving the truck across the Tully River bridge I saw this light come down below the mountaintop level. And it was low, and it just went from west to east, and I was like the Mayor of Hiroshima. I said, ‘What the hell was that?’. The hair in the back of my neck went up.
Danielle O'Neal VO: But most of these people, they kept their experiences to themselves. Because who wanted to cop what George had, right?
I'm starting to get this sense of what the aftermath of this moment was like for the people in Tully.
After I'd chatted with Shane for a while about what he experienced as a seven-year-old, we jumped in his battered farm ute and he took us down to where it all started.
Shane Pennisi: Okay, so this is what we used to call the first, first lagoon, the first crossing.
You imagine when it's flooding, so you'd have to walk down and try and get across.
And sometimes it's quite eerie, you know, especially going through the water ‘cause you're always nervous. You always got to stop and look around behind you to see if a handbag is following you.
Danielle O'Neal: A handbag?
Shane Pennisi: A crocodile.
Danielle O’Neal: Ohhhh.
Shane Pennisi: This is Horseshoe Lagoon.
Danielle O'Neal: Are you feeling okay?
Shane Pennisi: No, yeah, I'm just contemplating what I should say and what I shouldn't say.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Shane, his entire family really, have been sitting on a lot of secrets for a long time. And not just what happened in January 1966.
Shane Pennisi: It mostly happened in the wet season.
Danielle O'Neal VO: A few years after the hundreds of sightseers had flocked to their farm, now 10-year-old Shane was out walking with his dad Albert.
Shane Pennisi: We would have to walk down the farm. Usually when it was flooding or there was, the water was up. We'd do that early in the morning, taking rifles.
Danielle O'Neal VO: They were for the crocs, sorry, 'handbags’
Shane would trail along through the swarms of mosquitoes behind Albert, who was carving a path through the water, rifle held high over his head.
Shane Pennisi: I'd walk behind him and the whole, whole of his back would be just black. And they're all a big swarm around your head and around your body, and they're all full red - blood.
Danielle O'Neal VO: At first, nothing. Almost as if everything was back to normal.
But then, wading through these croc-infested, mosquito laden swamps...
Shane Pennisi: We started seeing a few more landings, markings.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Sorry, more nests?
These aren’t the-ones Valerie saw with George. This was years later.
Shane says these nests kept coming.
Never as big as the first saucer nest. But still, striking and strange.
Shane Pennisi: You know that buzz you get? The tingly feeling? So even as you're walking down sometimes, I'd get this, ‘Oh, there's something there’.
We all had this sense on this farm, anyway, you get around, down to there and you look around, ah, there it is.
It's something you can't explain.
That's when Stan Sears was really in the scene then.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Stan Seers was the president of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau. For obvious reasons he was quite interested in what was going on at the Pennisi's.
In February 1969, Albert called Stan to let him know he'd found another nest in Horseshoe Lagoon.
Stan caught a flight from Brisbane to Cairns as soon as he heard, arriving into the farm late at night. It was pouring down rain, of course.
At daybreak, the weather was fine and Albert drove Stan down to the lagoon on his tractor.
He used all the film in his camera taking photographs of it,Brisbane.
This became somewhat of a protocol when Albert noticed another saucer nest on the property. Call Stan Seers and document everything they could.
Shane Pennisi: It wasn't just one landing or two landings there were several, many.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The Pennisis attributed these circles, landings, to more UFOs visiting the farm. Although, they never had a UFO sighting like George had.
Shane Pennisi: W at gets me is how they know when to land, when there's no one around.
Danielle O'Neal VO: That’s a good question, and it goes to the heart of the UFO conundrum. With all these people looking for them, how do we not have concrete evidence?
But still, there was a curiosity in Albert about whatever they were.
Shane Pennisi: There was a real upset that he never got to meet them.
And I still use this to this day, he said to me, ‘If you find the tractor, stopped in the paddock and not me anywhere, look on the mud guard to see if UFO is written in it and if you see UFO written on the mud guard or in the dust don't worry, I've gone for a bit of a spin’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The idea of some visiting life form creating these marks is obviously a very different explanation to the official conclusion that it was weather.
As they documented these circles that kept appearing, Albert and the family kept it all underwraps. After what happened last time.
Albert just kept his own private record.
Shane Pennisi: Dad just kept on marking it down and documenting it.
Take a note where it was. Walk home, mark it in the book. Date. Time. Roughly how big. Whether it was small, medium or large.
It was only an exercise book. You don't make anything obvious, hey? Just in case.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this sense of distrust coming through in the way Shane is telling me this story. Just in case of what?
As we speak, there's moments where he pauses, and then leans in as if he's letting me in on the secret.
And what he tells me, I don’t really know how to take it.
In 1969, to see if they could find out what the hell was going on Stan Seers had organised quite a high-tech sounding camera to be rigged up down at Horseshoe Lagoon.
Shane Pennisi: So it would shoot across and the movie camera would get three quarters of the lagoon.
It was always on. There was, Dad would always go down if the battery was getting flat, he would change the battery over and check on it every day.
Until one day, one morning he went down, there was another marking and the camera had gone off. It had run through the whole film.
Danielle O'Neal VO: A whole reel of film, of.. whatever was making these markings.
Shane Pennisi: Packed it up, took it into the Tully post office to post off because it had to be developed.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This is where the story gets complicated.
As it’s told, when that little film canister arrived at Kodak in melbourne it was empty.
Shane Pennisi: It was intercepted at Tully Post Office.
Danielle O'Neal: How did you find that out?
Shane Pennisi: I think Dad started investigating, and ASIO had a man put in the Tully Post Office. That's what we were told.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Then? Shane says Albert was given the tip off - from an ex-military guy - that their whole family was being monitored because of what happened that January in ‘66.
Shane Pennisi: Didn't realise it. But, that didn't worry Dad. As he always said, ‘I've got nothing to hide. What am I doing?’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: I must admit, my alarm bells are going off at this point. What have I got myself into? ASIO?
It was starting to feel like we were entering conspiracy theory territory. Shane didn't have much in the way of evidence for this massive allegation of long-term government surveillance and interference with the post.
Danielle O'Neal: Did you get the film back at any stage?
Shane Pennisi: Never. Never. And after the 30 years or something when we were allowed to ask for documentation and stuff back, it was refused and I think he was told there was nothing on it. So, why wouldn't they even just let him look at the film?
Danielle O'Neal VO: Hang on a sec, you mean they admitted they had it?
Shane Pennisi: Yeah, they said it was empty.
Danielle O'Neal: How did this communication happen?
Shane Pennisi: I can't, I can't remember. But I remember Dad being disappointed.
All he wanted to do was see what was on that film.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Honestly, my first journalistic instinct was to leave all this out. Because that's often how things work in the media
If it doesn't fit the story, or is complicated and takes too long to explain, you cut it out. Or write around it.
But I feel like this is important. Because we can’t understand people if we only know half the story.
Even if what we’re hearing sounds, frankly, bananas. So, instead I pulled this thread.
I've been able to ascertain this:
1. The Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau, headed up by Stan Seers, was of interest and monitored by ASIO in 1959.
Seriously, it’s there in black and white in the national archives. So it doesn’t seem outrageous to me if this was still happening ten years on.
2. Stan Seers wrote a detailed account of the film's disappearance in an article published that same year. In it he said the police even got involved to try and get some answers. According to another UFO researcher the local MP did too.
3. There was a UFO folklaw in the 60s that if you see a flying saucer, don't send the images to Kodak because they'll be confiscated.
And to me this could go either way. Maybe it happened a bit, or maybe the story has been told enough times that it’s come to be taken as truth.
And lastly Albert was interviewed himself about a decade ago saying he still didn’t know exactly what happened to the film.
The national archives have said they don’t have anything in their database matching a search for ‘Albert Pennisi’, with reference to ASIO.
I’ve also asked ASIO to confirm these allegations. They declined to provide an on the record response.
So it’s hard to conclusively say what was, or wasn’t, happening.
Nothing I’ve found is proof of foul play. But it does make me understand why those initial claims that sent off alarm bells in my mind might not seem so outlandish, especially to Shane.
Danielle O'Neal: What were they worried that your dad was doing? What were they worried about?
Shane Pennisi: Ah, I'm not really sure, but it was all about whether he was falsifying stuff. Whether he was a scam. That's what I gathered.
How could you make that? You can't make a marking like that. Was he going to do it just for his own pleasure?
Danielle O'Neal VO: I get the sense from Shane that the only thing that will put his mind at ease is if the authorities confirm his version of events.
Shane Pennisi: Everything had to be in a code after that film disappeared. So Dad would ring Stan Sears up and tell him, ‘Your relations have popped in’.
And, Stan said, ‘Oh, how long are they staying?’.
And Dad would say, ‘Oh, just a couple’.
And that meant had two markings. Lo and behold, two days after Stan would be up.
Danielle O'Neal VO: We might never know if this cloak and dagger was necessary.
But, the impact of their lived experience of all this on Albert, on young Shane, that’s undeniable.
And it helps me make sense of why they have been so tight-lipped about all this for so long.
And why they want to get to know someone, look them in the eye over a cuppa, before they open up.
The legend of what had happened in Tully just continued to grow. It was now one of the ‘classic cases’ of UFO lore.
So, in the early 70s when this young, slightly ragged, surfy-looking dude in T-shirt and cut-off jeans turned up, Albert was cautious.
Bill Chalker: It was a bit of a hot day, storm clouds looking as though it was going to beat a path to the door.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Bill Chalker had a beaten-up old backpack slung over his shoulder, scuffed from being dragged in and out of apple carts and ute trays on the great post-school surf trip.
Albert walked up to the gate to intercept him, machete stuffed into his belt at his side.
Bill Chalker: A lot of people thought he was a bit intimidating.
Danielle O'Neal VO: In this gruff voice Albert called out;
Bill Chalker: 'Whatchya doing here, mate?’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Bill introduced himself.
Bill Chalker: I'm just this weird guy that had this long-term interest in UFOs and I'm really interested in what really happened rather than how the media reported it. So, uh, he liked that, I think.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Albert opened up his doors and invited Bill in.
This tanned and long haired surfer, not your stereotypical UFO-guy.
But Bill had been fascinated by what had happened in Tully.
Bill Chalker: By then it had, was almost legendary; Horseshoe Lagoon. Particularly amongst the UFO community.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Albert introduced Bill to his sons, including Shane, and took him on the grand tour of the lagoon.
Bill Chalker: It was sort of, uh, pretty brackish at that stage. I was already up to my neck, one of Albert's sons that said, ‘Oh, better be careful there because we've got taipan snakes’.
I launched myself out like a missile or a UFO coming outta the water.
I said to him, ‘You could have, you could've told me about that before I went in!’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The taipans didn’t dull Bill’s enthusiasm for investigating. He never really stopped looking into unexplained aerial sightings and physical trace cases.
And there were a lot more sightings about to land. What had started in Tully was about to go global.
And Bill wanted eyes on what the government had. The secret UFO files.
Where all the restricted correspondence and reports, like the one Erroll’s dad Ken put together, were stored away safely out of sight.
Were the answers in there?
Bill Chalker: We've got a bit of a problem here. We just need to, uh, declassify them.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This is Uncropped, Season four of ABC’s Expanse podcast.
If you’re loving the show, follow it and tell your friends. It helps other people discover and enjoy it too.
I’m Danielle O’Neal, host and producer. This episode was written by me and my supervising producer Piia Wirsu. Sound engineer and producer is Grant Wolter. Executive producer Blythe Moore. Thanks to Dominic Cansdale and Chris Calcino for additional production.
This podcast was recorded on Gulgnay and Inningai land.