"It's Not an Aircraft": The Pilot Who Vanished Mid-Sentence Over Bass Strait

On a Saturday evening in October 1978, a young pilot flying a small plane over the sea between mainland Australia and Tasmania called air traffic control in Melbourne with a question.

Was there any other traffic near him?

No, they said. Nothing.

Over the next six minutes, he described something flying around his plane. Something big. Fast. With bright lights and a green glow and a shiny metal surface.

His engine started to cough.

And then he said the words that have made this one of the most famous radio recordings in aviation history.

"It's hovering. And it's not an aircraft."

The microphone stayed open. The controllers heard a strange metallic noise. And then nothing.

Frederick Valentich and his plane were never found.

Who was Frederick Valentich?

Frederick Valentich was born on June 9, 1958. In October 1978, he was twenty years old, living in Melbourne, and he wanted one thing more than anything else. To fly for a living.

He had about a hundred and fifty hours of flying time. That is enough to be a competent private pilot, but not much more. He held a class-four instrument rating, which meant he was allowed to fly at night, but only in clear weather, where he could see where he was going.

He had big ambitions and a rough record. He had applied twice to join the Royal Australian Air Force and been turned down both times, for not having the required education. He was studying part time for his commercial pilot's license, and had failed the exams more than once. Just a month before he disappeared, he failed three more subjects.

He had also gotten into trouble in the air. He had once flown into restricted airspace near Sydney and received a warning. Twice, he had deliberately flown into cloud, which he was not qualified to do. Authorities had considered prosecuting him.

And there was one more thing about Frederick Valentich that matters to this story.

He believed in UFOs.

His father later said Frederick was a firm believer, and that he worried about being attacked by one. Six days before his last flight, he talked with his girlfriend about the possibility of being taken away by a UFO.

The flight

On the evening of Saturday, October 21, 1978, Valentich took off from Moorabbin Airport, a small airfield in Melbourne's southeastern suburbs.

He was flying a Cessna 182, a common single-engine four-seat plane. Its registration was VH-DSJ. On the radio, that made his call sign Delta Sierra Juliet.

His destination was King Island, a small island in Bass Strait, the stretch of ocean between the Australian mainland and Tasmania. The flight was about a hundred and twenty-five nautical miles. Out over the coast at Cape Otway, then across open water to the island.

He gave different reasons for the trip. He told flight officials he was going to pick up friends. He told other people he was going to get crayfish. Investigators later found that neither story checked out.

He also did not let King Island Airport know he was planning to land there, which was standard procedure.

It was getting dark. The sun had just set.

Six minutes

At about six minutes past seven that evening, Valentich was over the water, south of Cape Otway, at around four and a half thousand feet. He called Melbourne Flight Service.

He asked if there was any known traffic below five thousand feet.

The controller checked. No known traffic.

Valentich said there seemed to be a large aircraft nearby, below five thousand feet.

Over the next few minutes, the conversation went like this. We are staying close to the published transcript.

Valentich said the aircraft had four bright lights. He said it looked like landing lights. He said it had just passed over him, about a thousand feet above, at high speed.

The controller asked him to confirm he could not identify the aircraft. He confirmed.

Valentich said it was approaching from the east. Then he said something that has stuck with people ever since. He said it seemed like the pilot was playing some sort of game. Flying over him two, three times, at speeds he could not identify.

The controller asked him to describe it.

Valentich said it was a long shape. That it had a shiny metal surface. That there was a green light on it.

At one point, he said it had vanished. Then he said it was coming back toward him from the southwest.

"It's not an aircraft"

Then Valentich reported a new problem.

His engine was rough idling. He said it was coughing.

The controller asked what his intentions were. Valentich said he was going to continue to King Island.

And then, just after twelve minutes past seven, he made his last transmission. He said the strange aircraft was hovering on top of him again.

"It's hovering," he said. "And it's not an aircraft."

The microphone stayed keyed. For several seconds, controllers in Melbourne heard a strange noise on the frequency. It has been described as metallic, scraping, rhythmic. Most accounts put it at about seventeen seconds long.

Then the transmission ended.

The controller called him. No answer. Called again. Nothing.

Delta Sierra Juliet never spoke again.

The search

An alert went out that night. By the next day, a major sea and air search was underway.

An RAAF P-3 Orion, a long-range maritime patrol aircraft, flew over Bass Strait. Eight civilian aircraft joined. Ships in the area were asked to keep watch. In total, the search covered more than a thousand square miles of ocean.

They found nothing. No oil slick. No wreckage. No life jacket. No body.

The search was called off on October 25, four days after he vanished.

The Department of Transport investigated. Its conclusion was short. It could not determine the reason for the disappearance. It listed the outcome as presumed fatal.

The cowl flap

For years, there was no physical trace of Valentich or his plane at all.

Then, about five years later, a piece of metal washed up on Flinders Island, northeast of Tasmania.

It was an engine cowl flap, a small panel from around the engine of a plane. In July 1983, the government's air safety investigators asked the Navy's research laboratory whether it could have drifted there from the search area. The investigators said the part came from a Cessna 182 within a range of serial numbers that included Valentich's plane.

It was not definitive proof. But it is the only physical evidence ever linked to Delta Sierra Juliet.

The other reports

After the story hit the news, other reports came in.

Some people said they had seen strange lights in the sky that night over the area. UFO researchers have pointed to accounts of a green light moving erratically, and an aircraft in a steep dive.

There are a few things worth knowing about that.

First, the reports came in after the news broke, not before.

Second, the Mount Stromlo Observatory noted that there was a meteor shower that night, with between ten and fifteen meteors visible per hour. Meteors can glow green.

And third, there is a photograph. A man named Roy Manifold took pictures of the sunset near Cape Otway Lighthouse that evening, and one shows a blurry object over the water. Some UFO groups claim it shows something leaving the sea. Skeptics think it is most likely a bug or a bird, out of focus.

The theories

So what happened to Frederick Valentich? There are four main explanations.

The first is that he became disoriented. This is what many aviation experts believe.

Remember, he was inexperienced, he was not trained to fly by instruments alone, and he had a history of flying into conditions he was not qualified for. Over the sea at dusk, with no horizon, a pilot can lose track of which way is up. Some investigators suggested he may have been flying in a tilted or even inverted position, and that the lights he saw were his own lights reflected on the water, or the lights of a nearby island.

In 2013, two researchers, James McGaha and Joe Nickell, proposed a more specific version. They argued Valentich got caught in what pilots call a graveyard spiral, a slow, tightening, descending turn that feels level to the pilot. They pointed out that a steep spiral could reduce fuel flow to the engine, which might explain the rough running. And they suggested the lights he saw were not a craft at all, but the planets Venus, Mars and Mercury, and the bright star Antares, which were low in the sky that night.

The second explanation is that he staged his own disappearance. His plane had enough fuel to fly far beyond King Island. It never appeared on radar. And on that same evening, police received reports of a light aircraft landing mysteriously near Cape Otway. But there has never been any direct evidence that Valentich survived.

The third is suicide. It has been suggested. But a UFO researcher named Keith Basterfield, who interviewed his doctors and colleagues, said the people who knew him found this almost impossible to believe.

The fourth is the one that made the case famous. That he encountered something genuinely unknown, and it took him.

The case for that rests almost entirely on his own words on the radio, and his belief in UFOs. One writer, Brian Dunning, pointed out something interesting: the way Valentich described the encounter closely matches a scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a hugely popular UFO movie that had come out less than a year before.

What we still don't know

More than forty-five years later, Frederick Valentich is still missing.

The government never found a cause. The plane has never been recovered. The only physical trace is a cowl flap on a beach on Flinders Island.

What we have is six minutes of radio. A young man who loved flying and believed in UFOs, alone over the sea at dusk, describing something he could not explain. An engine that started to cough. And a final sentence that people have argued about ever since.

"It's hovering, and it's not an aircraft."

Was he disoriented, looking at his own lights in the water? Did he fly somewhere else and start a new life? Or did he see something none of us can explain?

What do you think he saw?