The craft made a buzzing sound, illuminated trees as it settled, and was supported by a large tripod-type landing gear. When it rose to three hundred feet, it accelerated swiftly toward the northwest, leaving no exhaust or trail. These men had all been skeptics regarding UFOs, but no longer. Tilse went back the next day to photograph a circular impression on the ground at the site; its inside diameter was twenty feet and confirmed by local police as a perfect circle. A police investigation also found damaged trees and other landing traces. The regional director of civil aviation accepted the incident report as genuine, and Australian authorities interrogated the men at length.49
UFOs were being seen in both hemispheres, north and south. On June 4, they were also seen in space. Astronauts James McDivitt and Edward White were orbiting the Earth during the Gemini 4 mission. While the mission passed over Hawaii, and as White was sleeping, McDivitt saw a “weird object” with some sort of “projections” on it “like arms.” He photographed the object with a movie camera. Soon after, both men saw two similar objects over the Caribbean. McDivitt later had this to say about what he saw:
I noticed an object out the front window of the spacecraft. It appeared to be cylindrical in shape with a high fineness ratio. From one end protruded a long, cylindrical pole with the approximate fineness of a pencil. I had no idea what the size was or what the distance to the object was. I do not feel that there was anything strange or exotic about this particular object. Rather, only that I could not identify it.
After McDivitt turned the film over to NASA, the photographs disappeared. James Oberg, a flight controller at the Johnson Space Center who later became well known as a UFO skeptic, stated that McDivitt’s eyes were affected by an accidental urine spill inside the capsule and were half-blinded by the sun’s glare. These two facts, said Oberg, prevented him from recognizing the Titan
The remote region of Antarctica also became the scene of significant UFO activity. On June 19, members of the Chilean military saw a large, lens-shaped flying object maneuvering on an erratic path at the Chilean station in the Antarctic. Not much more is known. On July 2, the English base in Antarctica at Hallet reported sighting an unidentified flying object for eight to ten minutes. Then, on July 3, Argentina reported an extraordinary encounter over its base in Antarctica. According to Argentina’s secretary of the navy, with corroboration from the Chilean military, this is what happened: At 7:40 P.M. on Deception Island, a large, lens-shaped flying object, looking like a classic flying saucer, moved on a zigzag trajectory, maneuvering over the base. It then hovered motionless for about fifteen minutes. It interfered with radio communications, and its speed and maneuverability were beyond the capabilities of any man-made device. In addition, magnetic tapes registered the object, which caused strong interference with variometers used to measure the Earth’s magnetic field. Thirteen members of the Argentine garrison and three Chilean sub-officers saw the object with high-powered binoculars. The crew took ten color photographs through a theodolite. Everyone at the base believed strongly that this was no terrestrial aircraft.
British scientific personnel learned of the report, and the incident was reported in one American newspaper, the July 7, 1965, issue of the
THE WAVE OF 1965: JULY
Over at Dayton, Blue Book either ignored or explained away the amazing UFO encounters of the year. The Antarctic encounter left no resonance in the States. Instead, Blue Book continued its insipid reporting of supposed “unknowns,” of which there were a mere two during the month of July, of 135 reports received. 52
