Disappearance of Frederick Valentich — Pilot Radios Craft Flying Over Him, Then Vanishes

On October 21, 1978, 20-year-old Australian pilot Frederick Valentich departed Melbourne in a Cessna 182 for a flight to King Island across the Bass Strait. During the flight he radioed Melbourne Flight Service to report an unidentified aircraft that appeared to be playing games with him by orbiting above his plane. In a calm but increasingly alarmed voice, Valentich described the object as metallic and shiny with a green light. It had a rough idle and was not an aircraft as he knew them. His final transmission before 17 seconds of metallic scraping sounds and complete silence was: "It is hovering and it's not an aircraft." Neither Valentich nor his aircraft were ever found. An extensive search of the Bass Strait turned up no wreckage or remains. The Australian Department of Transport investigation was inconclusive, ruling out instrument failure, spatial disorientation, and hijacking but declining to offer a definitive cause. On the ground, witnesses across Victoria independently reported seeing a bright object moving erratically in the sky around the same time as Valentich's transmissions. A photograph taken at Cape Otway that evening reportedly shows an unidentified object in the sky, though its connection to the incident has never been definitively established. The case remains one of the most remarkable in aviation and UAP history.