Frederick Valentich Disappearance

On the evening of October 21, 1978, 20-year-old pilot Frederick Valentich departed Moorabbin Airport near Melbourne, Australia at 6:19 PM in a Cessna 182L on a flight to King Island across Bass Strait. Valentich was a student pilot with approximately 150 hours of flight experience and held a Class Four instrument rating. His stated purpose was to collect crayfish. He was due to arrive at King Island at 7:00 PM.

At approximately 7:06 PM, Valentich contacted Melbourne Flight Service and asked if there was any known air traffic in the area at 4,500 feet. When told no, he reported an unidentified aircraft passing over him approximately 1,000 feet above. Over the following six minutes, he provided a continuous and increasingly distressed description: the aircraft had a long flat shape, four bright landing lights, a metallic exterior, no discernible wings or tail. It was traveling at speeds too high to track, then slowing and circling his aircraft. He reported it was 'playing some sort of game' and hovering directly above him. He noted it was 'not an aircraft.'

At 7:12:28 PM, Valentich transmitted: 'It is not an aircraft.' The last sound recorded on the Melbourne Flight Service tape was 17 seconds of a metallic scraping or grinding sound, described by some analysts as consistent with metallic abrasion and by others as unidentifiable. Then silence. Neither Valentich nor his aircraft were ever found, despite an extensive search by the Australian Department of Transport covering the water and coastlines of Bass Strait and King Island.

The Australian Department of Transport's formal investigation, completed in 1982, classified the cause of Valentich's disappearance as 'unknown.' Investigators explicitly noted they could not exclude the possibility that the reported aircraft played a role in the disappearance. On the same evening, multiple independent witnesses across southern Victoria and Bass Strait reported an unusual green light in the sky at approximately the same time and in approximately the same location. A film crew near Cape Otway photographed an unidentified bright light in the sky at 6:47 PM — approximately 20 minutes before Valentich's last transmission.