Australia's Real X-Files: How Top Australian Government Scientists Pushed To Investigate UFOs
For 11 years, between 1952 and 1963, the British Government conducted open air nuclear tests in Australia, at the Montebello Islands off Western Australia and at the remote outback sites of Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia’s Great Victoria Desert. Among the many who worked on these secret tests was a young physicist called Harry Turner. What he witnessed and investigated during his time in the desert – mysterious unidentified anomalous phenomena – galvanised his view that UAPs are very real and that they should be taken seriously and properly investigated.
It is fitting in this our inaugural news feature for NHIR’s website launch, to pay tribute to the scientific rigour and curiosity shown by Harry, who went on to become one of Australia’s most senior defence intelligence scientists. His story is of a scientist who defied the ridicule and stigma thrown at the UAP-UFO mystery. It’s a narrative that challenges the mainstream largely default assumption that Governments and scientists have always ridiculed and dismissed the subject of UAPs. For during his time at Maralinga from 1956 to 1964, and indeed for the rest of his life, Harry Turner actually did the scientific work into UAPs, investigating firsthand sightings of the phenomenon that have only recently been revealed in once Top Secret declassified government files. And he almost pulled off his push for Australia to have its own UFO investigation flying squad – in defiance of considerable America pressure.
Disgraceful things went on during Australia’s atomic tests. There’s one location called Kuli that is still so contaminated with plutonium it’s impossible to clean up. For some crazy reason, in what were euphemistically called ‘minor trials’, radioactive plutonium was either set on fire or blown up, spraying deadly waste everywhere.
The local Maralinga Tjarutja people called the land ‘Mama Pulka’ – Pitjantjatjara for ‘Big Evil.’ In what became a national scandal, there was terrible suffering in the years following the tests because many aboriginal people, who were pushed off ground zero, were carelessly exposed to fallout dubbed the ‘black mist’. Incredibly, 30% of the British and Australian servicemen who were exposed to these blasts died of cancer, although a Royal Commission inquiry in the mid-80s was unable to say if each cancer case was caused by the tests. That inquiry also revealed how radioactive fallout fell far further than predicted, as far as Australia’s east coast capital cities; these shocking dirty secrets were all covered up until decades later.
But, buried in the long-suppressed atomic test files is an intriguing cluster of unexplained UAP sightings. The clear concern among security officers was that some potential adversary might be monitoring the British missile and atomic bomb tests, so these sightings of unknown ‘craft’ were taken very seriously. At the Woomera rocket test range in 1952, multiple independent witnesses attending an open-air cinema saw a cylindrical shaped object pass overhead, one witness saying he could even see two portholes in the object which had internal lighting[1]. One early sighting intrigued the young Harry Turner most of all; In early May 1954, radar at the Woomera Rocket Range detected what it recorded as a ‘misty grey disc’ at 60,000 feet, speeding off at nearly 6000 km/h. An English scientist had watched the object through his binoculars as it crossed the path of an approaching RAAF Canberra jet bomber.
Because he took an interest in UAPs, Harry Turner investigated many of these strange sightings. In July 1960, a security officer at the Wewak test range reported what looked
like a balloon on fire. Checks soon revealed none of the range balloons were damaged. It soon emerged that five other witnesses had seen the glowing object. The files show those keen to dismiss the sightings (patronisingly) described[2] Harry Turner, as a:
…health physics officer, who possesses an inquiring mind, made an independent investigation and extensive calculations. He is of the opinion that the light was not the result of a natural phenomenon but caused by an unidentified flying object, either a cone from a satellite or a ‘flying saucer’.
It's an intriguing coincidence of history that the Woomera Range commander, Colonel Richard Durrance, later admitted to Harry Turner that in 1952 he had witnessed one of the most dramatic UFO sightings in history. Turner revealed[3] how Durrance confided he was in a Washington DC radar room (presumably USAF) during both weekends of the famous 1952 Washington DC UFO sightings while based with the Australian military mission in Washington. It was these extraordinary multiple sightings by both military pilots, multiple radar operators and both civilian and military witnesses over the US capital on two consecutive weekends, July 19-20th and July 26-27th 1952 – glowing objects doing hypersonic speeds and seemingly impossible manoeuvres – that generated a massive ‘UFO flap’ in the media at the time. The sightings by a mass audience of apparently anomalous objects forced the USAF into its biggest press conference since World War Two – in which Major General John Samford, the head of USAF intelligence, forlornly attempted to convince a sceptical media that the objects were misidentified meteors and stars or the result of temperature inversions over the capital. Intriguing that Durrance found himself at Woomera two years later in what was clearly a hot-bed of UFO activity.
At the end of Britain’s atomic testing in 1964, Turner joined Australia’s Joint Intelligence Bureau (later JIO), the precursor to what is now Australia’s Defence Intelligence
Organisation (DIO), the down under equivalent of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Together with a group of like-minded scientific colleagues, he began a push for JIO to fund the creation of a scientific team to actively investigate UFOs. It was clear also the JIO scientists knew there would be resistance to the idea from the Americans because in one 1968 letter seeking information from the Australian Defence Attache in the United States, a colleague of Turner’s insisted that:
…because of the emotional connotations of any sort of work on UFOs, I suggest the reason for our interest be kept from the US authorities at this stage.[4] [his emphasis]
This was an era in Australia where government science was well funded; there was a freedom and independence of thought in JIO that would likely be unthinkable in its DIO equivalent today, given how closely Australia has since allied with the US as part of its Five-Eyes agreement. Australia’s Air Force [the RAAF] increasingly took the view, encouraged by the Americans, that investigating UFOs was a drain on limited resources and of little scientific merit. In December 1969, when the US Air Force [USAF] announced it was terminating Project Blue Book, ceasing all UFO investigations on the claim that further work could not be justified on either national security or “the interest of science”, the RAAF cited this decision approvingly. But the JIO scientists, including Harry Turner, believed the evidence strongly warranted continued investigation into the phenomenon and they pushed for more resources to allow that to happen.
By November 1969, as researcher Bill Chalker discovered[5], Harry Turner wrote a memo to his JIO bosses stating that he had support for rigorous UFO investigations from several senior scientists across multiple Government agencies, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Standards Laboratory, the Defence Department’s
Science & Technology division and even the Chief Defence Scientist Arthur Wills. Turner wanted a “rapid intervention team” to investigate cases where UFOs had left physical evidence. He even requested the scientific team should have an aircraft on standby. It was quite literally a proposal for an Australian Government X-Files-style investigation team with the backing of some of Australia’s most respected scientists.
By 1971, even JIO’s director Robert Furlonger was convinced of the need for a UAP investigation team, but he did not want to have to pay for it. In a submission to the Defense Department suggesting that UFO investigations be transferred from the Air Force [RAAF] to the Department of Supply, Director Furlonger said that, on the evidence:
There appears to be sufficient evidence from RAAF and US reports of investigation of UFO sightings to indicate that some reports cannot readily be explained by natural phenomena or man-made activities. Thorough investigation of selected Australian reports of UFO sightings seems to be warranted, but the effort should be restricted to those occurrences that cannot easily be explained[6].
Furlonger was no lightweight, impressionable bureaucrat. A very senior and well-respected public servant, he went on to become Australia Ambassador to Indonesia and the first head of one of Australia’s top intelligence agencies, the Office of National Assessments. He was a very powerful proponent for Harry Turner to have in his corner.
Accompanying Director Furlonger’s proposal to Australia’s Defence Department was a report prepared by Harry Turner that remains one of the most astonishingly candid and fearlessly independent analyses of the so-called ‘UFO Problem’ ever compiled (and made public) by a public servant anywhere. By this time in 1971, Harry Turner was a very senior government scientist, the head of JIO’s Nuclear Branch, and he let rip in his opening paragraph:
The early analyses of UFO reports by USAF intelligence indicated that real phenomena were being reported which had flight characteristics so far in advance of U.S. aircraft that only an extra-terrestrial origin could be envisaged[7].
Harry went on to explain that the USAF’s Office of Special Investigations [AFOSI] had misused Project Blue Book’s UFO investigations as “…a means of publicly ‘debunking’ UFOs”. He also noted, that far from being sceptical about UFOs, the USAF had begun a crash program into anti-gravity propulsion:
To initiate such programmes decades ahead of normal scientific development would indicate that the U.S. Government acknowledged the existence of advanced ‘aircraft’ which presumably used a gravity-control method of propulsion. An additional motivation could have been the fear that the USSR would achieve this goal before the U.S. …By erecting a façade of ridicule, the U.S. hoped to allay public alarm, reduce the possibility of the Soviet taking advantage of UFO mass sightings for either psychological or actual warfare purposes, and act as a cover for the real U.S. programme of developing vehicles that emulate UFO performances. The RAAF together with many other countries of the world give credence only to the USAF public façade and appear to have uncritically accepted the associated information. This information has been widely discredited by retiring U.S. service personnel formally engaged on UFO investigations, as well as by scientists and private citizens.
Turner’s breathtakingly critical report went on to make further scathing findings about the conclusions of the 1968 US Condon Report, which set out the findings of a two-year study into UFOs under physicist Edward Condon. Funded by the USAF, the report was eventually pilloried as an obvious Air Force whitewash designed to legitimise the decision the following year to shut down the USAF’s 17-year study of UFOs. As Turner noted:
The conclusions of the Condon Report conflict with its own contents and has been discredited by many reputable scientists including the UFO scientific consultant to the USAF [Dr J. Allen Hynek].[8]
He argued:
It would appear wrong for Australia to remain ignorant of the true situation. We lack an intelligence viewpoint that can assess the nature and possible consequences of the problem, a scientific viewpoint that could derive scientifically valid data from the reports and a public relations viewpoint that can honestly satisfy public interest. To overcome these deficiencies in the Australian investigation of UFOs, it would seem that a strong case exists for the acceptance of the RAAF suggestion that another government department assume responsibility for the investigation and analysis of UFO reports.[9]
But that was not the end of Turner’s blowtorch. In a detailed and clearly very well-informed analysis he delivered a robust assessment of the ‘U.S. Official Attitude to UFOs’, suggesting the US was concealing what it knew about an extra-terrestrial explanation for the phenomenon. Turner set out how, as early as 1947 the Air Technical Intelligence Centre [ATIC] had assumed a responsibility to investigate the initial reports of ‘flying saucers’. By the end of 1947 he highlighted how:
…most of the [ATIC] investigators were focussing on an interplanetary rather than a Soviet origin. These opinions were crystallised into a written estimate that was sent to the Pentagon in September 1948. When the interplanetary conclusions were rejected on the grounds of insufficient hard evidence, a reaction set in at ATIC against trying to unravel the UFO problem.[10]
Turner’s report also detailed how, in the wake of the 1952 UFO flap across the United States, which included the extraordinary July mass sightings over Washington DC:
A component of USAF intelligence considered that UFOs were interplanetary spaceships which were about to make closer contact. To prepare the public for this possibility, 41 previously classified reports were released for publication between August 1952 and February 1953. These reports contradicted the earlier official USAF policy of dismissing the reports as misidentifications etc.[11]
Then, he described how America’s Central Intelligence Agency [the CIA] instead pushed for public investigations into UFOs to be abandoned yet it wanted the collection of data to be privately intensified. How public awareness of UFOs was tightened by an order to all service personnel prohibiting discussion of UFOs, with defaulters facing up to ten years jail or as much as a $10,000 fine. And how multiple intelligence officers who knew a great deal about the UFO reality, including former founding CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter:
…all publicly stated that the US Government knew UFOs were extra-terrestrial but was withholding this fact from the public.[12]
Turner did what a scientist should do in his analysis of the USAF’s reporting of UFOs, he analysed the data. He explained how one Project Blue Book Special Report into the UFO flaps of 1952-53, “…although biased in favour of a natural explanation for UFOs,
nevertheless showed mathematically that the evidence favoured an explanation that was scientifically unknown.” Yet that section of the report had been withheld from the US public, instead publishing a public ‘summary’ that failed to allude to that contradictory data. It seems highly likely Harry had inside information from frustrated members of the US Project Blue Book team because his analysis was very well-informed. Turner told his JIO bosses how Bluebook had done a statistical analysis of the unknown objects population to determine the likelihood that it was similar to the identified objects. It showed the odds were ten thousand trillion trillion to one. Yet that statistical analysis was later publicly and implausibly misrepresented as ‘inconclusive’. Turner savaged the USAF’s obvious attempts to cover-up what the statistics were suggesting - that there was no prosaic explanation for a vast number of sightings.
Turner also explained how many of America’s leading scientists and aerospace corporations were suddenly being funded by the USAF into extensive anti-gravity research, 46 separate projects, yet there was no public evidence that there was any scientific basis to support such an endeavour.
Such an intensive onslaught on the gravity enigma was entirely irrational from the standpoint of conventional science and can only be rationalised within the context of a firm belief that UFOs were real and that the intelligence behind them knew how to control gravity.[13]
Finally, Harry turned his blowtorch on Australia’s Air Force, the RAAF for using implausible default astronomical excuses to explain away unidentified objects:
In support of the RAAF’s admission of scientific disinterest [into UAPs] an identification list of all sightings made between 1960 and 1965 contains 15 identifications of Venus, not one of which is valid. In every case Venus was in a totally different part of the sky or not even above the horizon. Out of 37 meteor identifications, only 9 could possibly be meteors and even several of those cases would be doubtful. … In general, the RAAF attitude has been guided by the USAF public releases which were aimed at allaying public interest by denying the reality of UFOs. Consequently, most of the Australian reports were given identifications without a great concern for rational correlation… As a result there has been a negligible scientific analysis of the data and most opinions expressed by DAFI have been largely a reflection of the USAF public attitude.14
Turner closed by suggesting it was preferable for Australia to act independently of the US and to:
…initiate a programme that is scientifically sound and intellectually honest towards unravelling the UFO mystery.[14]
Turner revealed in an interview with Bill Chalker how his criticisms of the Australian Air Force’s DAFI investigators after one investigation of mid-1969 sightings in Western Australia eventually led to his access to the DAFI UFO files being withdrawn. Harry Turner’s boss, Bob Mathams, JIO’s Director of Scientific Intelligence, told Chalker that he did not encourage Turner’s UFO interests and that “JIO’s dance with UFOs was almost entirely driven by Turner’s interest.”[15] But the evidence on Government files suggests otherwise, that many of Turner’s scientific colleagues shared his view that UFOs were indeed a legitimate field for scientific investigation.
It was soon clear what the Australian Air Force’s response would be to Turner’s incendiary UFOs report. Within two months, one of the DAFI officers commented:
I accept the US assessments without question and consider that it would be a waste for we here in Australia to spend valuable time and money in further detailed investigations.[16]
In 1974 Australia’s Department of Defence reorganised its scientific services into a new organisation called the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). And it was in DSTO that Harry Turner found he still enjoyed support from both Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist, John Farrands, and his deputy, George Barlow. But even their backing was not enough in the face of the RAAF’s strident opposition to further UFO investigations. As Bill Chalker coins it, “Turner’s secret ‘UFO science war’ effort ended.”
The need for scientifically driven government UFO investigations continued to be recognised by DSTO. Its files show that in January 1981, as acting Chief Defence Scientist, George Barlow, acknowledged that:
…there remains a small core of reports which are competently reported, and cannot be readily ascribed to astronomical objects, artificial satellite re-entry or meteorological/optical phenomena… The most interesting of these are those which leave physical evidence, which most frequently consists of burnt or flattened vegetation. In more affluent days, DSTO had proposed one or two ‘flying squads’ equipped with magnetometers, radiation counters etc. to try to capture some hard-core evidence…. Unfortunately staff ceilings and financial restrictions intervened, and that situation still persists…[17].
Sadly, it appears that any hope of continued funding for government UFO investigations in Australia was finally strangled by tightening budget imperatives and strident RAAF resistance. And that is where any Australian Government interest in continuing UFO investigations finally died.
Fifty years on, there is solid empirical data that can be taken from proper study of UAP sightings that the new NHIR Institute believes makes the subject worthy of scientific investigation. If Government won’t do the work because of limited budgets and a belief that the science to be gained is not worth the effort, then NHIR intends to prove them wrong.
For 11 years, between 1952 and 1963, the British Government conducted open air nuclear tests in Australia, at the Montebello Islands off Western Australia and at the remote outback sites of Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia’s Great Victoria Desert. Among the many who worked on these secret tests was a young physicist called Harry Turner. What he witnessed and investigated during his time in the desert – mysterious unidentified anomalous phenomena – galvanised his view that UAPs are very real and that they should be taken seriously and properly investigated.
It is fitting in this our inaugural news feature for NHIR’s website launch, to pay tribute to the scientific rigour and curiosity shown by Harry, who went on to become one of Australia’s most senior defence intelligence scientists. His story is of a scientist who defied the ridicule and stigma thrown at the UAP-UFO mystery. It’s a narrative that challenges the mainstream largely default assumption that Governments and scientists have always ridiculed and dismissed the subject of UAPs. For during his time at Maralinga from 1956 to 1964, and indeed for the rest of his life, Harry Turner actually did the scientific work into UAPs, investigating firsthand sightings of the phenomenon that have only recently been revealed in once Top Secret declassified government files. And he almost pulled off his push for Australia to have its own UFO investigation flying squad – in defiance of considerable America pressure.
Disgraceful things went on during Australia’s atomic tests. There’s one location called Kuli that is still so contaminated with plutonium it’s impossible to clean up. For some crazy reason, in what were euphemistically called ‘minor trials’, radioactive plutonium was either set on fire or blown up, spraying deadly waste everywhere.
The local Maralinga Tjarutja people called the land ‘Mama Pulka’ – Pitjantjatjara for ‘Big Evil.’ In what became a national scandal, there was terrible suffering in the years following the tests because many aboriginal people, who were pushed off ground zero, were carelessly exposed to fallout dubbed the ‘black mist’. Incredibly, 30% of the British and Australian servicemen who were exposed to these blasts died of cancer, although a Royal Commission inquiry in the mid-80s was unable to say if each cancer case was caused by the tests. That inquiry also revealed how radioactive fallout fell far further than predicted, as far as Australia’s east coast capital cities; these shocking dirty secrets were all covered up until decades later.
But, buried in the long-suppressed atomic test files is an intriguing cluster of unexplained UAP sightings. The clear concern among security officers was that some potential adversary might be monitoring the British missile and atomic bomb tests, so these sightings of unknown ‘craft’ were taken very seriously. At the Woomera rocket test range in 1952, multiple independent witnesses attending an open-air cinema saw a cylindrical shaped object pass overhead, one witness saying he could even see two portholes in the object which had internal lighting[1]. One early sighting intrigued the young Harry Turner most of all; In early May 1954, radar at the Woomera Rocket Range detected what it recorded as a ‘misty grey disc’ at 60,000 feet, speeding off at nearly 6000 km/h. An English scientist had watched the object through his binoculars as it crossed the path of an approaching RAAF Canberra jet bomber.
Because he took an interest in UAPs, Harry Turner investigated many of these strange sightings. In July 1960, a security officer at the Wewak test range reported what looked
like a balloon on fire. Checks soon revealed none of the range balloons were damaged. It soon emerged that five other witnesses had seen the glowing object. The files show those keen to dismiss the sightings (patronisingly) described[2] Harry Turner, as a:
…health physics officer, who possesses an inquiring mind, made an independent investigation and extensive calculations. He is of the opinion that the light was not the result of a natural phenomenon but caused by an unidentified flying object, either a cone from a satellite or a ‘flying saucer’.
It's an intriguing coincidence of history that the Woomera Range commander, Colonel Richard Durrance, later admitted to Harry Turner that in 1952 he had witnessed one of the most dramatic UFO sightings in history. Turner revealed[3] how Durrance confided he was in a Washington DC radar room (presumably USAF) during both weekends of the famous 1952 Washington DC UFO sightings while based with the Australian military mission in Washington. It was these extraordinary multiple sightings by both military pilots, multiple radar operators and both civilian and military witnesses over the US capital on two consecutive weekends, July 19-20th and July 26-27th 1952 – glowing objects doing hypersonic speeds and seemingly impossible manoeuvres – that generated a massive ‘UFO flap’ in the media at the time. The sightings by a mass audience of apparently anomalous objects forced the USAF into its biggest press conference since World War Two – in which Major General John Samford, the head of USAF intelligence, forlornly attempted to convince a sceptical media that the objects were misidentified meteors and stars or the result of temperature inversions over the capital. Intriguing that Durrance found himself at Woomera two years later in what was clearly a hot-bed of UFO activity.
At the end of Britain’s atomic testing in 1964, Turner joined Australia’s Joint Intelligence Bureau (later JIO), the precursor to what is now Australia’s Defence Intelligence
Organisation (DIO), the down under equivalent of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Together with a group of like-minded scientific colleagues, he began a push for JIO to fund the creation of a scientific team to actively investigate UFOs. It was clear also the JIO scientists knew there would be resistance to the idea from the Americans because in one 1968 letter seeking information from the Australian Defence Attache in the United States, a colleague of Turner’s insisted that:
…because of the emotional connotations of any sort of work on UFOs, I suggest the reason for our interest be kept from the US authorities at this stage.[4] [his emphasis]
This was an era in Australia where government science was well funded; there was a freedom and independence of thought in JIO that would likely be unthinkable in its DIO equivalent today, given how closely Australia has since allied with the US as part of its Five-Eyes agreement. Australia’s Air Force [the RAAF] increasingly took the view, encouraged by the Americans, that investigating UFOs was a drain on limited resources and of little scientific merit. In December 1969, when the US Air Force [USAF] announced it was terminating Project Blue Book, ceasing all UFO investigations on the claim that further work could not be justified on either national security or “the interest of science”, the RAAF cited this decision approvingly. But the JIO scientists, including Harry Turner, believed the evidence strongly warranted continued investigation into the phenomenon and they pushed for more resources to allow that to happen.
By November 1969, as researcher Bill Chalker discovered[5], Harry Turner wrote a memo to his JIO bosses stating that he had support for rigorous UFO investigations from several senior scientists across multiple Government agencies, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Standards Laboratory, the Defence Department’s
Science & Technology division and even the Chief Defence Scientist Arthur Wills. Turner wanted a “rapid intervention team” to investigate cases where UFOs had left physical evidence. He even requested the scientific team should have an aircraft on standby. It was quite literally a proposal for an Australian Government X-Files-style investigation team with the backing of some of Australia’s most respected scientists.
By 1971, even JIO’s director Robert Furlonger was convinced of the need for a UAP investigation team, but he did not want to have to pay for it. In a submission to the Defense Department suggesting that UFO investigations be transferred from the Air Force [RAAF] to the Department of Supply, Director Furlonger said that, on the evidence:
There appears to be sufficient evidence from RAAF and US reports of investigation of UFO sightings to indicate that some reports cannot readily be explained by natural phenomena or man-made activities. Thorough investigation of selected Australian reports of UFO sightings seems to be warranted, but the effort should be restricted to those occurrences that cannot easily be explained[6].
Furlonger was no lightweight, impressionable bureaucrat. A very senior and well-respected public servant, he went on to become Australia Ambassador to Indonesia and the first head of one of Australia’s top intelligence agencies, the Office of National Assessments. He was a very powerful proponent for Harry Turner to have in his corner.
Accompanying Director Furlonger’s proposal to Australia’s Defence Department was a report prepared by Harry Turner that remains one of the most astonishingly candid and fearlessly independent analyses of the so-called ‘UFO Problem’ ever compiled (and made public) by a public servant anywhere. By this time in 1971, Harry Turner was a very senior government scientist, the head of JIO’s Nuclear Branch, and he let rip in his opening paragraph:
The early analyses of UFO reports by USAF intelligence indicated that real phenomena were being reported which had flight characteristics so far in advance of U.S. aircraft that only an extra-terrestrial origin could be envisaged[7].
Harry went on to explain that the USAF’s Office of Special Investigations [AFOSI] had misused Project Blue Book’s UFO investigations as “…a means of publicly ‘debunking’ UFOs”. He also noted, that far from being sceptical about UFOs, the USAF had begun a crash program into anti-gravity propulsion:
To initiate such programmes decades ahead of normal scientific development would indicate that the U.S. Government acknowledged the existence of advanced ‘aircraft’ which presumably used a gravity-control method of propulsion. An additional motivation could have been the fear that the USSR would achieve this goal before the U.S. …By erecting a façade of ridicule, the U.S. hoped to allay public alarm, reduce the possibility of the Soviet taking advantage of UFO mass sightings for either psychological or actual warfare purposes, and act as a cover for the real U.S. programme of developing vehicles that emulate UFO performances. The RAAF together with many other countries of the world give credence only to the USAF public façade and appear to have uncritically accepted the associated information. This information has been widely discredited by retiring U.S. service personnel formally engaged on UFO investigations, as well as by scientists and private citizens.
Turner’s breathtakingly critical report went on to make further scathing findings about the conclusions of the 1968 US Condon Report, which set out the findings of a two-year study into UFOs under physicist Edward Condon. Funded by the USAF, the report was eventually pilloried as an obvious Air Force whitewash designed to legitimise the decision the following year to shut down the USAF’s 17-year study of UFOs. As Turner noted:
The conclusions of the Condon Report conflict with its own contents and has been discredited by many reputable scientists including the UFO scientific consultant to the USAF [Dr J. Allen Hynek].[8]
He argued:
It would appear wrong for Australia to remain ignorant of the true situation. We lack an intelligence viewpoint that can assess the nature and possible consequences of the problem, a scientific viewpoint that could derive scientifically valid data from the reports and a public relations viewpoint that can honestly satisfy public interest. To overcome these deficiencies in the Australian investigation of UFOs, it would seem that a strong case exists for the acceptance of the RAAF suggestion that another government department assume responsibility for the investigation and analysis of UFO reports.[9]
But that was not the end of Turner’s blowtorch. In a detailed and clearly very well-informed analysis he delivered a robust assessment of the ‘U.S. Official Attitude to UFOs’, suggesting the US was concealing what it knew about an extra-terrestrial explanation for the phenomenon. Turner set out how, as early as 1947 the Air Technical Intelligence Centre [ATIC] had assumed a responsibility to investigate the initial reports of ‘flying saucers’. By the end of 1947 he highlighted how:
…most of the [ATIC] investigators were focussing on an interplanetary rather than a Soviet origin. These opinions were crystallised into a written estimate that was sent to the Pentagon in September 1948. When the interplanetary conclusions were rejected on the grounds of insufficient hard evidence, a reaction set in at ATIC against trying to unravel the UFO problem.[10]
Turner’s report also detailed how, in the wake of the 1952 UFO flap across the United States, which included the extraordinary July mass sightings over Washington DC:
A component of USAF intelligence considered that UFOs were interplanetary spaceships which were about to make closer contact. To prepare the public for this possibility, 41 previously classified reports were released for publication between August 1952 and February 1953. These reports contradicted the earlier official USAF policy of dismissing the reports as misidentifications etc.[11]
Then, he described how America’s Central Intelligence Agency [the CIA] instead pushed for public investigations into UFOs to be abandoned yet it wanted the collection of data to be privately intensified. How public awareness of UFOs was tightened by an order to all service personnel prohibiting discussion of UFOs, with defaulters facing up to ten years jail or as much as a $10,000 fine. And how multiple intelligence officers who knew a great deal about the UFO reality, including former founding CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter:
…all publicly stated that the US Government knew UFOs were extra-terrestrial but was withholding this fact from the public.[12]
Turner did what a scientist should do in his analysis of the USAF’s reporting of UFOs, he analysed the data. He explained how one Project Blue Book Special Report into the UFO flaps of 1952-53, “…although biased in favour of a natural explanation for UFOs,
nevertheless showed mathematically that the evidence favoured an explanation that was scientifically unknown.” Yet that section of the report had been withheld from the US public, instead publishing a public ‘summary’ that failed to allude to that contradictory data. It seems highly likely Harry had inside information from frustrated members of the US Project Blue Book team because his analysis was very well-informed. Turner told his JIO bosses how Bluebook had done a statistical analysis of the unknown objects population to determine the likelihood that it was similar to the identified objects. It showed the odds were ten thousand trillion trillion to one. Yet that statistical analysis was later publicly and implausibly misrepresented as ‘inconclusive’. Turner savaged the USAF’s obvious attempts to cover-up what the statistics were suggesting - that there was no prosaic explanation for a vast number of sightings.
Turner also explained how many of America’s leading scientists and aerospace corporations were suddenly being funded by the USAF into extensive anti-gravity research, 46 separate projects, yet there was no public evidence that there was any scientific basis to support such an endeavour.
Such an intensive onslaught on the gravity enigma was entirely irrational from the standpoint of conventional science and can only be rationalised within the context of a firm belief that UFOs were real and that the intelligence behind them knew how to control gravity.[13]
Finally, Harry turned his blowtorch on Australia’s Air Force, the RAAF for using implausible default astronomical excuses to explain away unidentified objects:
In support of the RAAF’s admission of scientific disinterest [into UAPs] an identification list of all sightings made between 1960 and 1965 contains 15 identifications of Venus, not one of which is valid. In every case Venus was in a totally different part of the sky or not even above the horizon. Out of 37 meteor identifications, only 9 could possibly be meteors and even several of those cases would be doubtful. … In general, the RAAF attitude has been guided by the USAF public releases which were aimed at allaying public interest by denying the reality of UFOs. Consequently, most of the Australian reports were given identifications without a great concern for rational correlation… As a result there has been a negligible scientific analysis of the data and most opinions expressed by DAFI have been largely a reflection of the USAF public attitude.14
Turner closed by suggesting it was preferable for Australia to act independently of the US and to:
…initiate a programme that is scientifically sound and intellectually honest towards unravelling the UFO mystery.[14]
Turner revealed in an interview with Bill Chalker how his criticisms of the Australian Air Force’s DAFI investigators after one investigation of mid-1969 sightings in Western Australia eventually led to his access to the DAFI UFO files being withdrawn. Harry Turner’s boss, Bob Mathams, JIO’s Director of Scientific Intelligence, told Chalker that he did not encourage Turner’s UFO interests and that “JIO’s dance with UFOs was almost entirely driven by Turner’s interest.”[15] But the evidence on Government files suggests otherwise, that many of Turner’s scientific colleagues shared his view that UFOs were indeed a legitimate field for scientific investigation.
It was soon clear what the Australian Air Force’s response would be to Turner’s incendiary UFOs report. Within two months, one of the DAFI officers commented:
I accept the US assessments without question and consider that it would be a waste for we here in Australia to spend valuable time and money in further detailed investigations.[16]
In 1974 Australia’s Department of Defence reorganised its scientific services into a new organisation called the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). And it was in DSTO that Harry Turner found he still enjoyed support from both Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist, John Farrands, and his deputy, George Barlow. But even their backing was not enough in the face of the RAAF’s strident opposition to further UFO investigations. As Bill Chalker coins it, “Turner’s secret ‘UFO science war’ effort ended.”
The need for scientifically driven government UFO investigations continued to be recognised by DSTO. Its files show that in January 1981, as acting Chief Defence Scientist, George Barlow, acknowledged that:
…there remains a small core of reports which are competently reported, and cannot be readily ascribed to astronomical objects, artificial satellite re-entry or meteorological/optical phenomena… The most interesting of these are those which leave physical evidence, which most frequently consists of burnt or flattened vegetation. In more affluent days, DSTO had proposed one or two ‘flying squads’ equipped with magnetometers, radiation counters etc. to try to capture some hard-core evidence…. Unfortunately staff ceilings and financial restrictions intervened, and that situation still persists…[17].
Sadly, it appears that any hope of continued funding for government UFO investigations in Australia was finally strangled by tightening budget imperatives and strident RAAF resistance. And that is where any Australian Government interest in continuing UFO investigations finally died.
Fifty years on, there is solid empirical data that can be taken from proper study of UAP sightings that the new NHIR Institute believes makes the subject worthy of scientific investigation. If Government won’t do the work because of limited budgets and a belief that the science to be gained is not worth the effort, then NHIR intends to prove them wrong.
