US Military Officials Tried to Quash an Australian UFO Sighting in 1991

Excerpt from the book: “In Plain Sight” by Ross Couthart                                July 23, 2021                                        (nzherald.co.nz)

• In late 1991, Annie Farinaccio of Exmouth, Australia was attending a party at the US Naval Communication Station Harold E Holt. Now that the base was closing and being ‘handed over’ to the Australians again, Annie was seeing off some American service member friends who had been stationed at the submarine base and would be returning home to the USA.

• But Annie had stayed too late. It was 2:30 am and she had no way of getting home. Two Australian Federal Protective Service police officers whom she knew offered to give her a ride back into Exmouth, 5km south, and she gratefully accepted. Annie climbed into the front seat of the four-wheel Toyota security vehicle, squeezed in between Kevin and Alan, and the three of them set off for town.

• A few minutes into the journey along the empty coastal road on a pitch black night, Kevin looked up and said, “It’s back. Grab the camera.” Alan began to fire off photographs through the windshield at something overhead that Annie could not yet see. “Look up!” Kevin said. Annie then saw a long diamond-shaped craft hovering 100 feet overhead, with the rear edge chopped off and rows of lights running towards the craft’s bow. It was a dark grey color but not as dark as the night sky. “What the fuck is that?” Annie asked. The policemen told her they had no idea, but that the same object had followed them the previous night. The next minute, the craft shot straight up from the right-hand side of the moving vehicle, before dropping down almost instantaneously on the left hand-side of the car.

• Annie screamed as they hurtled down the road with the UFO craft in hot pursuit. It followed them along the road for 1km. Then it shot up into the sky and appeared to land in the scrub a only few hundred meters off the road with a light now shining from underneath. Kevin wanted to stop and take pictures of it on the ground, but Annie was crying: “This is crazy. Take me home.” The two officers agreed and drove as fast as they could to the edge of Exmouth where they dropped Annie off before rushing back to take their pictures.

• “I ran to my home on the other side of town, and I ran into the house and locked the doors,” says Annie. “I was so freaked.” Today, Annie has no doubt that what was hovering above them that night was a craft moving at incomprehensible speed. She does not care if people think her account sounds crazy. “It moved so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it,” she says. “We were all freaking out.”

• AFPS police officer Alan had his UFO photos developed at the base printing shop. The photographs clearly showed an intelligently guided craft that didn’t physically land but hovered just above the ground. Alan and his partner Kevin showed the photos to their colleagues. The next thing they knew they were in custody. US military officials took Alan’s camera, all of the photos and negatives, and searched the photo processing machine.

• Annie is a university graduate who has run her own businesses. At the time of the sighting, she was working at the Roebourne Regional Prison, counselling prisoners to help them find work. Two days after the incident, two US military policemen visited Annie’s elderly mother at her home in Exmouth asking for Annie. Her mother directed them to Annie’s workplace. Then Annie’s colleagues watched as two American military policemen walked into Annie’s workplace in town and asked her to come with them. She knew that legally, the US had no jurisdiction, but she went with them anyway. “I thought I was in trouble for being on the base drinking at night,” she said.

• The military policemen drove Annie straight into the top-secret section of the US base. Once inside, they led Annie into a room. Sitting in front of a group of Americans in uniform were the two police officers, Alan and Kevin. Annie knew most of the Americans on base but here she recognized only one – the American commander. The others had clearly flown in from somewhere else. There were also three or four men in civilian suits.

• “One guy did the talking,” said Annie. “He asked me, ‘What did you see?’ I said, ‘I saw a UFO’. They got me to draw it and asked me more questions about it. ‘You do realize that what you saw was a weather balloon?’ I laughed at that.” As a child, Annie had lived on a station outside Exmouth and her father frequently launched weather balloons. “Weather balloons don’t look like what I saw,” she told the man. “Then one of the APS policemen sitting next to me – they both had their heads down – said: ‘Please shut up … Shut up before you get us all killed’.”

• The interrogation went on for a few hours. It was clear the two Australian policemen had been there a lot longer. They appeared scared and dejected from the hours of questioning. Annie admits that she was not easily rattled. “I said to them, ‘I don’t give a shit what you say. It wasn’t a weather balloon. It was a UFO. I’m not saying what you want me to say. I know I saw a UFO’.” The Americans had no idea what to do with an uncooperative Australian local. Eventually, they took her home.

• Annie knows her story sounds implausible, but she’s adamant that it’s true. And she’s not alone. Witnesses to strange objects in our skies have told stories like Annie’s for decades. And yet they are rarely investigated or taken seriously by the media which has always taken the default position to dismiss and ridicule such accounts. Most often, such tales are spiked before the public gets to hear about them.

• Overwhelming evidence shows that many governments, including Australia’s, take such UFO/UAP sightings very seriously indeed. Across the world, declassified government reports and well-corroborated witness sightings show that military and intelligence services are well aware of a persistent pattern of strange unidentified objects seen at and around sensitive military facilities such as Australia’s North West Cape naval communication station. Declassified files held in the Australian government’s National Archives reveal that anomalous sightings of unexplained objects at North West Cape have been officially reported to the Australian Air Force for decades by soldiers, tourists, a senior American officer at the base, and even a local fireman.

Australia has a long history of encounters with unexplained aerial objects, stretching from

indigenous stories to modern mysteries. Are they aliens? Top-secret man-made machines? And why is discussion of UFOs seen as the preserve of crackpots and conspiracists? Celebrated journalist ROSS COULTHART probes the phenomenon both Down Under and overseas in his new book In Plain Sight – and in this edited extract demonstrates why it can be such a chilling topic.

About 2.30 on a pitch-black morning on Australia’s remote North West Cape, Annie Farinaccio walked out of a late-night party at the United States Naval Communication Station Harold E Holt.

It was late 1991, shortly before the US was due to hand over the site to Australia. The handover was happening amid mounting concern about the base’s covert role as one of the cornerstones of America’s submarine-launched nuclear missile defence. In the event of nuclear war, launch orders from the US would be sent out by the station’s powerful transmitters to submarines across the adjacent Indian Ocean. Exmouth locals had no idea their sleepy town would likely be obliterated in a nuclear exchange; they just valued what the “Yanks” brought to the local economy in this isolated community and were sad to be seeing them go.

The party at the base that night was to farewell some American friends who were returning home because of the handover. But Annie had stayed too late and now, she realised, she had no way of getting home – the few local taxis in this remote part of Australia had stopped for the night. So when two Australian Federal Protective Service police officers, who she knew as Kevin and Alan, kindly offered to give her a ride back into Exmouth, 5km south, she gratefully accepted.

Annie squeezed in between the two men on the bench seat of their four-wheel Toyota drive security vehicle and the three set off for town.

A few minutes into the journey along the barren cape’s empty coast road, Kevin looked up. “It’s back. Grab the camera,” Annie recalled him saying. Then Alan began to fire off photographs through the windscreen at something overhead that Annie could not yet see.

“Eventually, Kevin pulled my head forward. ‘Look up!’ he said. Then I saw it. A long diamond-shaped craft hovering overhead with the rear edge chopped off, rows of lights running towards the craft’s tip. It was a dark grey colour but not as dark as the night sky. It was 100 feet above us at most. ‘What the f**k is that?'” Annie asked.

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