Program: 03 Uncropped | The UFO files

Danielle O’Neal VO: In 1973, a white Torana packed with three young men was cruising along a highway in South Australia, a long way from Queensland. They were headed to a little place called Bordertown.

Keith Basterfield: It was summer. It was blue skies, no clouds, completely clear. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: It was good farming country, a blur of livestock and crops passed their windows as they sailed by. 

They’d packed a spirit level and a Praktica film camera.

Keith Basterfield: We're all in our late teens, dressed in jeans and t-shirts because of the weather.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: They turned off into a long dirt driveway, the wheels crunching on the gravel. 

Keith Basterfield: Surrounding the farmhouse were just acres and acres and acres of oat crops. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Keith Basterfield was one of those teens, excited and looking out the window at the golden crop waving in the breeze. That's what he’s here to see. 

Keith had moved down under with his family from England five years earlier, and brought with him this fascination with the sky. 

Growing up he’d spent hours gazing out his bedroom window at the expanse above him. 

Keith Basterfield: The night sky was absolutely beautiful to look at and that got me interested in astronomy and the inevitable question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: A question that led to this white Torana pulling up at a typical country farmhouse in 1973, dust billowing in their wake. 

Keith Basterfield: The farmer himself he came out when he heard the car pull up to his drive. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: In that broad Australian accent of someone who works the land, he said; 

Keith Basterfield: ‘Right, well, we'll go out and have a look’. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Keith and his mates followed this South Australian crop farmer as he led them through the paddocks of oat. Just like George had led Shane and Albert to that lagoon seven years earlier.

Keith Basterfield: You could hear a rustling sound as you pushed the crop apart. We were all fairly silent, just wondering what on earth he was going to show us.  

And then he simply said, have a look. 

We came across a freshly made, swirled circle where the crop had been pushed down in an anticlockwise direction and woven like a mat.  

There was no footprints around it, there was no other markings. It appeared that it would have had to have been made from the air, because there was no way of getting through the crop without damaging the crop. 

Danielle O'Neal: How did you inspect it there on the ground?  

Keith Basterfield: I sort of just knelt down, uh, touched the crop, ran my fingers underneath the matting, lifted up the matting. 

And then he said, come and have a look at the next one. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: One by one, the farmer reveals seven of these flattened, woven patches in his crop.

Keith Basterfield: And they seemed to be of different ages, and they didn't form a regular pattern. They were in a bit of an arc formation.  

We thought, well, what on earth are we talking about here?  

Danielle O’Neal VO: It was seven years since the small, wet town of Tully in far north Queensland had exploded into the headlines with claims of a flying saucer and a mysterious, swirled circle left behind in some reeds.

And now, in another state, with another farmer, it was happening again. 

That wasn't all. 

In the years after George made that now infamous report, accounts of strange encounters and physical traces left behind flourished across Australia. 

Archival UFO sighter: I thought, ‘Gee, the moon's bright tonight’, and I looked up and I saw this thing 

Archival UFO sighter: Well, when I first saw it I thought it was a plane.  

Archival UFO sighter: I just had to believe the circumstances. I mean, the three of us saw it. We were all sober. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: When George and Albert contacted the cops they had no way of knowing that it would set off a chain of events, spawning a phenomena that would chase them for decades. 

And everyone was looking for answers. 

Answers that might be held in the government's UFO files. The record of all the sightings and reports – just like from Tully – gathered from right around the country and locked away, out of sight. 

But there was one person who wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He wanted eyes on those documents, classified or not. 

I'm Danielle O'Neal, this is Uncropped. Episode three: The UFO files.

Standing baffled, surrounded by a swaying oat crop, the young Keith Basterfield wanted to understand what he was seeing. 

So there he was, with spirit level and camera, documenting.

The more we talk, the more I realise that inquiring, questioning, is a big part of who Keith is. He’s got a scientific mind, always wanting to try and test and verify.

Keith Basterfield: We said, ‘Well, can we see if we can make one?’. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: They used their feet to try and replicate the crisp swirls of these mysterious circles. 

Keith Basterfield: It was obviously completely different and it looked amateurish and man-made compared to the actual circle that we saw. So it really puzzled us.  

And then we spoke to the farmer and he said, ‘Well, one thing I'm going to tell you is that a couple of weeks ago, over this very paddock, I saw a red light one night. Very unusual red light, and it was just above the crop. And then it went away’.  

And he never saw anything else. And then, when he was out looking at his crops, he came across the circles. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Now this is the part of the story where the inclination can be to just kind of ease gently out of the conversation, but it wasn’t the first Keith had heard about this kind of thing.

He’d been checking out and investigating unexplained sightings for a few years now. And that scientific brain wanted to know, what were these unexplained flying objects?

The circles of disturbed earth, they were tangible marks he could examine. That he could test and try and verify. 

But getting people to open up about it, or even report it, in this climate?

Archival news reporter: Well, so far, I haven't seen anything even vaguely resembling a flying saucer or even a flying cigar. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: With this coverage?

Archival news reporter: It's not that everyone thinks he's seen a flying saucer, far from it. Many townsfolk think it's a huge joke. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Good luck. A big chunk of the media was openly dripping in skepticism.

Archival news reporter: Maybe it is the beer, at least it's one explanation for seeing things. 

Archival news reporter: What do you think about this flying saucer of business generally? Do you think it's a bit of a laugh? 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Inevitably these cases made for a good yarn. But, there were people open to... possibilities. 

Archival news reporter: The Victorian Flying Saucer Society meets every month to discuss and assess recent sightings.  

Archival UFO sighter: I didn't believe in them. I made fun of them until I saw this one. 

Archival UFO sighter: They come from the other planets. Some of them may come from the center of the Earth. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: And the key organisation tasked with trying to tease all these reports apart and work out what was fact and what was fiction, or at least unverifiable, was the Department of Defence. 

More specifically, the Royal Australian Airforce. The RAAF. 

Every report made, gathered up, noted down. George’s strange experience filed alongside hundreds of others.

And Keith? Well, he kept doing his own investigations and sent a bit of work the air force's way.

Keith Basterfield: We had a relationship in South Australia, for example, with a lieutenant whose job was to collect, uh, UFO reports and to analyze them. 

We had several chats with him. He took us seriously. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Even so, as the years passed Keith started to suspect the RAAF was on a different page to him. 

There was this report he made, he documented 4 firsthand experiences, wrote it all up in a technical report, submitted it, and... 

Keith Basterfield: The Air Force explanation was ignis fatuus, which is Latin for swamp gas. And we thought come on, five people, three different vehicles, all reporting the same thing. Seriously, swamp gas?  

And that's when we knew that the Air Force really wasn't interested in looking for any unconventional explanation amongst their own reports.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: Although, according to reports the RAAF was looking into things. And a warning, this archival has a wild music choice. 

Archival news reporter: The RAAF has investigated nearly 600 UFOs in the past 12 years. Only 1 percent have been inexplicable.  

But if there really are aliens circling overhead, one wonders why they would choose a quiet country town. Melbourne, perhaps Canberra, but why Traralgon? 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Keith worked out pretty quickly that a lot of the people he was speaking to realised what they were saying sounded kinda nuts. 

Keith Basterfield: The farmers at first wouldn't talk to us. They didn't want to talk about strange things like UFOs.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: A few years before he was walking around that oat paddock trying to recreate the flattened circles that had appeared there, he’d had another encounter with a different farmer, and it stuck with Keith.

He’d read about these strange lights appearing again and again in the sky around another South Australian town called Clare. 

But when he made his way out there to investigate, no one was having a bar of opening up to some random teenager from out of town. 

Keith Basterfield: It's only through the local newspaper editor who introduced us to one farmer, and then another farmer, and then another farmer.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: Finally, introductions made, this farmer started to open up. 

Keith Basterfield: And he said, ‘I want to tell you about what happened to me. I haven't spoken to many people about it’.  

He said, ‘This is going to sound very, very strange and weird’. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: The story he told started one morning in broad daylight with the farmer standing there in the barn. 

Keith Basterfield: And he had a mental impression that he should go out and look up in the sky.  

He said, ‘I can only describe it as a thought formed in my mind that I should go and look at the sky. And so I went outside, and in the clear blue sky I saw a pearl shaped object about the size of the full moon floating along very slowly, along a range of hills. There was no sound and it disappeared in the distance’. 

 And he said, ‘I feel silly talking about the fact that I had a mental impression to go and have a look at it’.  

He said, ‘It was almost as if it wanted me to see it’.  

And that always stuck with me as, what a thing to say.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: The clear self-consciousness in this story strikes me. Like, the farmer is at pains to show that he knows this is a wild story. 

This isn’t the last time that I’m going to hit this contradiction of someone very down to earth, telling a story about something that seems totally... unbelievable. Kinda like George and Albert. 

And this contradiction feels very uncomfortable. It would be so much easier to categorise and process this story if the farmer was a clear kook. 

I can imagine this was what people in Tully were grappling with when honest, hardworking George Pedley told them what he saw. 

Danielle O'Neal: There are some people who would say UFOs are like almost the antithesis of science. No evidence, kind of pseudoscience. What do you say to that kind of perspective? 

Keith Basterfield: I would challenge people to do their own fieldwork before they start putting alternate hypotheses together.  

If your observations agree with your hypothesis, then you can turn your hypothesis into a theory.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: As the reports of sightings proliferated there were some people, like Keith, trying to take a systematic approach to documenting and examining everything. 

Archival news reporter: These slides are something special and they come in a special little kit called a UFO identification kit, complete with instructions. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: This scientist, Dr Don Herbison Evans, even tried to get people to carry around this kit. He was like, let's just get the data. 

Archival news reporter: Do you subscribe to the view that we are being visited by, uh, beings from other worlds?  

Dr Don Herbison Evans: There's insufficient evidence to say yes or no.  

Archival news reporter: You won't commit yourself?  

Dr Don Herbison Evans: Not until we have much better evidence. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: And this is the thing, whatever you think of the reports Keith was hearing, or those reports piling up over decades in the government’s UFO files overseen by the RAAF, the idea of at least trying to objectively verify and document and understand doesn't seem that wild.

But something was going to happen, a decade and a half after Tully kicked off, that would help banish this topic to the wastelands of scientific inquiry. Almost for good.

Archival news reporter: They've baffled scientists and UFO watchers. Gigantic circles appearing mysteriously overnight in England's cornfields.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: Yep. More mysterious circles. 

This time? On the other side of the world. A long way from Tully. 

Peter Salleras: That was pretty quick to come on my radar and I thought, ‘Whoa, it's happening again’.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: It was now the early 80s, fringes and polka dot dresses had been replaced by teased perms and spandex, and these mysterious circles that started appearing in England were given a new name. 

One that would immortalise them in pop culture. 

Crop Circles. 

And suddenly, it wasn’t just locals in Tully coming up with theories about how they appeared. 

Archival news reporter: The work of extraterrestrial higher intelligence. That's been the most popular theory. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: And we’re not talking the odd circle here or there. We’re talking hundreds, across more than a decade.

Archival news reporter: These complex and beautiful patterns have turned up in fields of wheat or corn all over the world. And once someone does happen upon one, then everyone pipes up. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Was it people? Or were aliens leaving coded messages for humans in these crop designs?

Archival Raëlism believer: Mankind hasn't got the ability to create something like this. There is no doubt they are authentic.   

Danielle O’Neal VO: These UK designs got way more intricate than the simple circles that were popping up in Australia. They're actually quite beautiful, these geometric patterns and swirls. 

This was a major cultural moment. It'd spawned movies like 'Signs' with Mel Gibson years later. 

That's about someone moving to a farm, where these crop circles start appearing and then he gets alarmed when alien activities start popping up around the world. I'm getting shades of Tully in that.

For a whole generation, crop circles became more than just an unexplained phenomena. They were a cultural icon. I mean, they were on a Led Zepplin album cover.

Anyway, they set off a firestorm of debate as scientists, UFO enthusiasts, and anyone with an opinion basically argued the toss about what might be behind them. 

Nancy Talbot: One night observed columns, brilliant, brilliant tubes of light coming straight down from the sky, very quickly, which made a crop circle right in front of my eyes. 

Doug Bower: How on earth intelligent people, professors et cetera, can just walk into a cornfield and see some flattened corn and make all this out of it over the years?  

Nancy Talbot: We've slowly built up a huge number of field workers all over the world. There are several, there may be six, seven hundred of them now. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: So, finally there were some scientists looking into this. And they were convinced there was something really weird happening. 

This was Nancy Talbot, from a US research group dedicated to studying crop circles.

Nancy Talbot: We've examined in great depth, this is hundreds or thousands of plants taken from inside each one of the formations. What we have found are a number of changes in the plants which are consistent around the world. One is a node lengthening.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: The node's like that raised bumpy bit on the stem of the plant.

Nancy Talbot: The second structural change are holes literally blown out at the nodes usually farther down the plant stem. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Wild right?

But, not everyone was on board with these explanations, with the hypothesis that it was ‘extra-terrestrial beings’ zooming down and leaving coded messages. 

The whole topic had hit such fever pitch, that experts and defence peeps from all around the world were headed to the UK to get to the bottom of it.

It seems like at this moment a mainstream interest in investigating crop circles and UFOs, all these unexplained, unusual phenomena could have taken off.

If not for two men in a pub on a Friday night, who got bored with discussing watercolour painting. 

Archival news reporter: Finally this morning, Britain's mysterious corn circles, which have appeared in fields across the country, are apparently the work of two ageing artists who've enjoyed deceiving scientists for the past 13 years. 

Archival news reporter: Doug Bower and David Chorley say they're the brains behind the phenomenon. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: A few beers in this particular Friday, Dave and Doug had this great idea, and it kinda snowballed. 

Doug Bower: As the years rolled by we started doing certain patterns. And as you see today, we got quite complicated in them.   

David Chorley: It was all fun, people were having fun. We had lovely art forms in fields. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Confronted with the evidence, a lot of people swallowed their pride and admitted they’d been wrong. 

But there were people who insisted not all circles are the work of hoaxers. There still are.

I’d love to speak with Doug and Dave, it’s pretty nuts they managed to pull the wool over the eyes of pretty much everyone for more than a decade. 

They’ve both died, but I get the sense from watching old footage they were just cheeky practical jokers. 

Until they finally decided it was time to come clean. So they invited in the camera crews to watch them at work.

Doug Bower: The publicity gained in momentum as the years went by. And, well, you know what's happened since then.  

I mean, 13, 13 years we've had it now. But when you reach the age of 67, you find you can't keep threading down corn year after year. 

Archival news reporter: They used two wooden boards, a piece of string, and a sighting device attached to a baseball bat to carve corn circles that have baffled the experts for more than a decade. 

David Chorley: We used to laugh, we used to talk to each other when we’re doing this. But all it is, is flattened corn. If you walk in, you've flattened it.  

Archival news reporter: At the time there was a lot of interest in UFOs, and Doug remembered Queensland farmers making circles in their crops back in the 60s as a joke.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: And here it is. They were inspired by what had happened in Tully. Except, that wasn’t a joke. 

But now, decades on from the initial wave of ridicule that poured down on George and Albert, they were being pulled into an international hoaxing story. 

Archival Patrick Delgado (scientist): This is a hoax and it is easy for us to see that it is a hoax. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Which only cast more doubt on George and Albert’s experience. 

Within a week an Australian newspaper was phoning up the Pennisis. Checking in, ‘Are you sure yours are real?’.

George could move as much as he liked, but he couldn’t outrun what his innocent report back in January, 1966 had unleashed. 

I’ve spent way too much time thinking about all this and what it meant for these down-to-earth farmers I met in Tully. Including talking it all through with my, very patient, husband.

Danielle O'Neal: Uh, I, like, I can totally respect Dave and Doug, the hoaxers, artistically - what an incredible sociological moment.  

But far out, I can't help but kind of hate Dave and Doug for what they've done. They have made things so confusing. Like, you Google crop circles and it says, ‘They were made by supernatural forces named Dave and Doug’. That's a pretty amazing title from the New York Times, by the way.  

Obviously they've both passed away now and I am sure they were wonderful people, but far out they make it hard to do a podcast about UFOs because their legacy still lives on. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: When the news broke that two men in their 60s, that's Doug Bower and David Chorley, were ‘fessing up to a decades-long hoax that had hoodwinked some bright scientific minds, well let’s just say it didn’t go down brilliantly. 

There were red faces and a fair share of 'I told you so's'. And it feels like all this really locked in this idea of a ‘them’ and ‘us’. 

You were either a rational and thought it wasn’t worth exploring, or you were kind of a nut for believing there might be something to look into.

And somehow in the years since the whole crop circles, alien, UFO thing have all got wrapped up together into this thing that's weirdly controversial.

Like bring it up at family dinner and expect some weird reactions. 

As I'm discovering when I tell people what project I'm working on. 

When did we get so bad at listening to people with wildly different beliefs to our own? 

I do wonder if it's partly that thing of once bitten twice shy. This hoax made a lot of people look pretty stupid. But actually, there are still unanswered questions about some circles. Like those ones in Tully. 

But, it’s like we can't hold two truths at once in our minds. Its either a hoax, or its not. But maybe both can be true.

That cultural taint that cemented itself in the wake of the crop circle hoax reveal was something that researchers of UFOs or unusual phenomena had been pushing against for years. 

That young, tanned surfer-looking guy on the failed road trip, Bill Chalker? He was diving deep, down the UFO rabbit hole. 

By the 80s he was well on the way to becoming one of Australia’s chief UFO researchers.

Like Keith, Bill was just - how about some science?

Bill Chalker: Science should be about focusing and doing a careful examination of things, you know, open, open inquiry. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: But, he knew all about the ‘UFO eyeroll’. 

Bill Chalker: During the seventies, I found out about a UFO sighting that occurred back in 1970. We went into this area and found a classic burnt area about 30 feet wide. 

It was a very clear-cut correlation with where this UFO had seemed to land. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Bill reached out to a scientist, explaining the intricacies of the case. 

Bill Chalker: He said, it sounded like a classic case but you don't want to make that public.  

You're better off saying that you're interested in witchcraft than flying saucers. 

He knew that within the mainstream of the scientific research area, if you start to make yourself the focus of UFO enquiries then it doesn't bode well for your ongoing scientific career path.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: It seems like the pop culture UFO depictions have majorly affected how the entire field is viewed. Or dismissed. 

Something I've realised is that when I talk to people about UFOs, everyone has their own idea of what that acronym means.

Like UFOS - flying saucers full of little green men.

Or, like UFO as in literally unidentified flying object. Which, again, not that wild a concept. There's probably stuff out there we can't explain. 

But things like E.T., or the X Files often mean that if we drop the clanger 'UFO' people fill in all these blanks with whatever cultural knowledge they have to hand. 

Bill Chalker: Therein lies part of the problem. Unfortunately, a lot of it gets kind of minimalised and trashed by casual media engagement. 

There's something worthwhile that's been recurring, that would benefit from serious scientific engagement. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: But with people reluctant to put their name to anything with a whiff of paranormal, people like Bill stepped in to try to conduct whatever inquiry they could. 

But 1981 found him bedbound, recovering from appendicitis, so Bill decided he could use the time to see if he could get access to the collection of all official UFO reported sightings in Australia. 

The government's UFO files. 

Bill thought;

Bill Chalker: What the hell, I'll start doing a ringing campaign to the Department of Defence and keep it up until I got a response.  

It took literally over a year of a bit of, I get a letter back eventually saying, yes, you can have access to the files. 

I think they were just expecting me to turn up, have a look at the files for an hour or two and go back home happy. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: That's not what happened.

Bill Chalker: Got there promptly at 9am at the Russell offices. A very austere, concrete looking building,  

Danielle O’Neal VO: Bill had dressed for the occasion. Gone were the cut off shorts and long blonde hair of a decade earlier.

Bill Chalker: I was there trying to ensure that I didn't come across as a, as a wild eyed kind of whatever, off the street kind of thing. Trying to convey that this was a serious investigation of the files. Short hair, a bit of a beard, tie. 

I was shown through and given the vacant office of the Director of Public Relations of the Department of Defence. He was on Christmas holidays.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: The secretary showing him in pointed out the photocopier if he needed it, then left Bill to settle in. 

Bill Chalker: While I sat there waiting in comes the secretary and a couple of people dragging along these large postal sacks full of files.  

And I thought, ‘Well, that's pretty unusual way of conveying files’.  

But then I got them all out, organized them all on the desk, started to systematically go through them, basic details down to try and get an idea of what were they.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: Then Bill heard these hurried footsteps coming.

The Secretary turned up and I was told that these files hadn't been declassified yet. 

I shouldn't be looking at them.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: Oops.

I mean I know it was the Christmas holidays, but doesn't someone check that stuff?

Bill Chalker: So they went off and some poor harried person had to spend the next hour or two hurriedly stamping every single page ‘declassified’ with an autograph and I just thought, you've got to be kidding.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: The files eventually made their way back into the office. Declassified this time. 

Sitting there sorting it all out for a week in this austere room, some of the files seemed pretty significant to Bill. 

Bill Chalker: A file that referred to a report that was written in 1954 by a Melbourne based nuclear physicist, who had a security clearance, concluded that a residue of the data represented evidence of extraterrestrial craft.  

And that was in a secret report to Air Force Intelligence in 1954. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Evidence of extraterrestrial craft? As in, like, Alien craft?

That's a big deal to be buried in this mess of files jumbled in postal sacks. 

Ron Hunt: I saw this light come down 

Valerie Keenan: Moved up and down, sideways 

Shane Pennisi: Tilted, like it hesitated, and then gone. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: These things we’re hearing about all happened decades ago, back when hard copies were the only copies.

I haven't seen this particular file for myself, but I’ve seen others and from the research I’ve done Bill’s experience in that director’s office stacks up. 

And that wasn't even all of it. 

Bill Chalker: I was able to establish on that first visit that I was probably examining about a third of the Department of Defence's UFO files.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: What the hell was in the rest?

Bill wanted to find out exactly that. Armed with the information he had teased out of those postal sacks;

Bill Chalker: That allowed me to make very concrete requests for other specific files and over the space of two years, I documented in very fine detail what I found.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: He knew there were things he wanted to get to the bottom of as he dug around in all these files. There was a case he was already aware of.

Bill Chalker: The North West Cape case from 1973.  

Danielle O’Neal VO: North West Cape, a US military communications base.

All very top secret and hush hush. So much so that when he finally got access to those UFO files... this one was missing.

Luckily before that, he’d read this report from the deputy commander of the base.

Bill Chalker: Who was driving between the support to the base itself and he observes what appeared to be an object hovering over the mountains, that seemed to take off at extraordinary speed.  

There was a separate report from an Australian fire captain working on the base. And he was just checking facilities and then he observes a dish shaped object with a sort of a disc around the bottom, like a satin ring-shaped around the bottom.  

And it seemed to be hovering there for a while, and then it seemed to take off at extraordinary speed. 

The reports were fairly close to each other in terms of timing. So we had two separate witnesses to what appears to be the same event. 

It seemed to be unexplained to them. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: Then the penny dropped. 

Bill Chalker: The date of the sighting was on the same day as that base was used to issue a full nuclear alert to American forces within the Indian Pacific and Pacific region. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: There is no way for me to tell if these things are linked. But it does seem like a coincidence. 

Something unknown in the sky, in the middle of the Cold War mind you, and on the same day a nuclear alert is issued. 

But all this information had been squirrelled away and seemingly forgotten.

Which seems odd. A nuclear alert is kinda a big deal. 

Which makes what happened next surprising.

Brett Biddington: The logic drove me to eventually recommend that we desisted, or no longer, worried about unusual aerial sightings. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: And there are a lot of people with thoughts about that. 

Jeremey Corbell: You guys got to catch up in Australia. 

Nobody wants to be the fool. Nobody wants to admit they've been lied to. Nobody wants to admit they've been lying. 

Danielle O’Neal VO: I’m Danielle O’Neal and this is Uncropped, Season four of the ABC’s Expanse podcast. 

Don't forget if you’re loving the show, follow it and tell your friends. It helps other people discover and enjoy it too. 

I'm this season's 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 Iningai land.