Nexus Magazine, Volume 4, #3 (April-May 1997)

My research into the subject of Australian fireballs began about two years ago in early 1995. A colleague and friend, John Watts, of geological consultants Mackay & Schnellmann Pty Ltd, asked for my opinion on earthquake risk in an isolated area of the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia (WA).

John knew of my long experience in the Laverton region, conducting geological and geophysical field exploration surveys there for gold mineralization - hence his approach to me for scientific advice concerning an odd series of events that occurred in this area of WA in May 1993.
 

THE BANJAWARN FIREBALL EVENTS

Whilst visiting a small underground gold-mine John had noticed a Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper article, dated 1 June 1993, attached to the barracks’ kitchen fridge door. This reported that on 28 May 1993 at 23.03 hrs a meteor fireball was seen by several observers to be flying from south to north between Leonora and Laverton. This was immediately followed by a significant 3.9 Richter-scale earthquake - picked up by 23 seismic receivers around WA and the Northern Territory (NT).

Ed Paul, a geophysicist at the AGSO (Australian Geological Survey Organization) Mundaring Seismic Observatory near Perth, had received several telephone calls from the public, as had the Laverton Police. Ed had reasoned that there was a possible connection between the meteor fireball and the quake due to an impact with the ground.

The small gold-mine (the Alycia mine) experienced this quake event as underground three-inch steel pipes sheared clean in half and drives and shafts collapsed. My friend John has done a considerable amount of earthquake risk assessment during his consulting career and thought that this damage pattern was more like instantaneous blast damage, as is normally caused by big explosions, rather than standard earthquake damage. The key to this was the underground damage, and the type of damage caused, in comparison to the more normal quake mine damage which is usually limited to surface building collapse caused by quake-induced seismic ground waves.

Many observers reported that the fireball passed overhead making a pulsed roaring noise, similar to a very loud road-train diesel engine, and that after the seismic wave hit they heard a huge, long-drawn-out explosion - similar to a very major, but long-drawn-out mine blast, but somehow peculiarly different. (Note: The seismic ground wave moves much faster than the speed of sound from an explosion).

At the time we reasoned that Ed Paul was probably correct and that a meteor fireball (a bolide) could have impacted explosively into the ground and caused the apparent "earthquake" by impact or by airburst-explosion shock-wave induction. This area of WA has had no recorded quakes since seismographs were first installed in 1900, nor Aboriginal racial memory of any quakes.

As such an impact event is a major geological curiosity, often observed in the Earth’s geological record but rarely recorded as occurring in human history, we decided to embark upon a private research project to document the event - leading, we hoped, to scientific fame and glory. We did not then appreciate just where this research work and interest would lead...

I visited the area in May and June 1995 and began to interview, by personal visit or telephone, the inhabitants of a 300-kilometre-radius area centered upon Laverton. This Eastern Goldfields region of WA is semi-desert and very isolated with an extremely low population density. It contains several very large sheep stations, a couple of small gold-mining towns (Leonora and Laverton - click right map), plus several isolated gold-mine sites, a few gravel or dirt roads, a lot of thick mulga bush and gum-tree scrub vegetation with some sand dune fields and spinifex-grass cover.

I hired a light plane so I could visit outlying stations and Aboriginal settlements to search for eyewitnesses and for "ground zero". This took some three weeks. A summary of all currently available witness data follows:

A large orange-red spherical "fireball" with a very small bluish- white conical tail had flown from low down in the south over observers to the north. Some observers reported that the fireball was cylindrical in form and more yellow-blue-white in colour. It was heard as a pulsed, roaring or loud diesel-engine sound - well before it passed overhead. It dropped off no glowing fragments, and had no long, luminous tail or sparks - as is common meteor activity. Its speed was similar to a 747 jetliner or a fast jet-plane and was obviously less than the speed of sound since loud noises were heard in advance of its arrival.

The sounds heard before the "object" arrived were most definitely not "normal" electrophonic sounds as have been quite commonly reported from historical meteor fireball events. Such electrophonic sounds are experienced as weird "pings" and "whees" of low-volume intensity and are not fully understood at this time, but they are believed to be due to hertzian electromagnetic (EM) waves produced in the bolide plasma trail and propagated at the speed of light to the observer - in advance of the bolide.

These sounds are thought to couple harmonically with the inner ear or cause nearby objects to vibrate sympathetically, thus producing the characteristic low-volume sounds. No sonic booms were reported, and no observer believed that any explosion was heard until the object had got to ground level, or very nearly so, behind low hills or treeline cover and then exploded or impacted.

The fireball object flew apparently parallel to the Earth’s curvature in a long, "nap-of-the-Earth" arcing trajectory at low altitude (possibly some 1,000 to 2000 meters), from low down on the southern horizon - not with a "normal" meteor’s inbound high-angle, high-altitude trajectory.

The fireball lit up some observers and their vicinity as it passed overhead. Its flight trajectory was observed over a distance of least 250 km - although it probably had a much longer flight path well out over the southern Indian Ocean from Antarctica. It then appeared to arc down towards the ground before it disappeared out of sight behind trees or low hills.

This was followed by a near-blinding, massive high-energy burst of blue-white light that rippled for about three to five seconds. This lit up the windless, cloudless, moonless night sky as if it were daylight. Observers could see for some 100 km in every direction at ground level - "as clear as day". The energy intensity involved in this light flash was similar to the light flash generated by a significant nuclear blast, and in many respects the incident strongly resembled a night-time nuclear test.

A huge red-coloured flare then shot vertically skywards for some considerable distance (several kilometers?). This event was immediately followed by a massive seismic ground wave that hit the observers nearest to "ground zero" such that rocks and beer cans vibrated off tables and the ground shook so violently that persons tending a campfire fell over.

Then followed a very loud, major explosive blast that was heard over a 250 km by 150 km corridor. Minor quake damage was reported as far as 150 km southeast of ground zero (the other directions, excepting Leonora to the southwest, being largely uninhabited). Located that night in Laverton was an engineer - with Gulf War experience of missiles and aircraft breaking the sound barrier - who described it as,

"definitely a major explosive concussion-wave blast [not a sonic boom], similar to, but much bigger than, a normal open-pit mine blast".

A large, deep-red-orange-coloured hemisphere of opaque light, with a silver outer-shell lining, then rose from ground level to hover around over the "ground zero location". This structure, when fully developed, was approximately three times the size of a typical Goldfields setting Moon, as seen by observers located 30 to 50 km away (in other words, it was very big), and it "bobbed around a bit for nearly two hours before disappearing suddenly - as if someone threw the light switch off".

This "half-soup-plate structure", looking like a "deep-red, very large and half-set Sun", was seen by two observers from widely separated locations, one at the Banjawarn station buildings and one at the Deleta station buildings.

Dogs at both locations went totally berserk, whining and howling and attempting to get off their leads whilst the aerial light hemisphere was up. Presumably there was an ultrasonic or EM wave propagation to which the dogs were extremely sensitive.

Aboriginal prospectors who were camped very near to ground zero at the Freeman’s Find gold prospect were extremely spooked by the event, believing that it was "the end of the world". Some of them thought that they had witnessed a "jumbo jet" crash behind a range of low hills.

They gathered their swags (bed rolls) close together as they were too scared to sleep apart. In the morning they climbed a hill to look for fires in the distance but could see no smoke. They quickly departed the area for the safety of Leonora.

One Aboriginal stockman observer, located at the Banjawarn station buildings, believed that he was witnessing a fairly slow-moving "UFO" and became very worried that they were going to land and abduct him and his two companions - since it flew directly at him and then passed, very noisily, low overhead before going into its final downwards-arcing plunge.

Almost exactly one hour after the first big event, three observers located at the Banjawarn station buildings saw a second, much smaller fireball which they described as being more of a blue-green-white colour. It appeared to rise from ground level, but definitely rose from behind distant trees well south of the station perimeter, and then flew to the north in a high mortar-shell-type arc before coming down to ground level behind distant bush. Its flight path was divergent to the north-northeast when compared to that of the first major fireball event of that night.

This later event then created a second but very small explosion and concomitant minor ground shake, similar to the first event but much smaller in size and with no resultant rising hemisphere of opaque light. A prospector located north of the Mulga Queen Aboriginal settlement also reported seeing parts of this second event.

This second event does not appear to have been of sufficient enough magnitude to register on AGSO seismographs. However, analysis of the best AGSO seismic records by USGS (US Geological Survey) energy conversion equations suggests that the energy involved in the first main event quake was probably of the order of one to two kilotonnes of TNT equivalent. The blast itself was probably bigger, as not all such explosive energy is transmitted efficiently into the ground and along the Earth wave path to the seismic observatories.

The main fireball eyewitness "explosion ground zero" was located near to the northern edge of Banjawarn station, whereas the calculated AGSO quake epicenter fix was close to the southern perimeter of Banjawarn station, the difference reflecting the difficulties involved in calculating accurate quake epicenters from remote seismographic locations.

In spite of the excellent eyewitness "ground zero impact" cross-fixes, a considerable time in the air in a Cessna-172 failed to find any crater or ground anomaly of any kind there or anywhere else in a 300-km-diameter search area. Ground and air examination of the nearby Celia fault lineament produced no evidence of any movement on this structure.

Banjawarn is arguably the most isolated station area in the Eastern Goldfields region of WA. This sheep station has gained notoriety since its purchase the same year (1993) by the Japanese Aum Supreme Truth (Aum Shinrikyo) sect - of 1995 Tokyo subway gas-attack fame. Research soon showed that a Japanese Aum Supreme Truth sect representative - deputy leader Hayakawa - had been inspecting sheep stations for sale, around and including Banjawarn, in early April 1993.

Hayakawa initiated purchase procedure for Banjawarn in late April 1993, desiring to "conduct experiments there for the benefit of mankind". The station actually changed hands when papers were signed and a bank cheque was provided on 1 June 1993 - only three days after the fireball event. However, the agreement regarding the sale to the Aum sect was completed on 23 April 1993 - some 35 days prior to the fireball event.

As the 28 May 1993 event did not appear to fit any normal meteor impact scenario, we began to joke that the Aum sect had probably sent a cruise missile with a pulse jet engine and detonated a nuclear weapon on the uninhabited desert fringe immediately north of Banjawarn station...

Meteors usually travel at hypervelocities, greater than 25,000 mph, and do not normally fly low-speed, "nap-of-the-Earth", low-level (1,000-to-2,000-metre-altitude) trajectories. They usually have long, luminous tails and drop-off fragments, and are not documented as triggering earthquakes.

Pressure changes due to storms (or, possibly, pressure waves created by a meteor flypast) are known to trigger quakes in stressed-plate regions of the crust, but this region can hardly be assigned a high-stress fault signature, given the total lack of such quake events in human memory. It is a very stable Archaean Age cratonic shield area, with the nearest location demonstrating quake activity being located in the Fraser Ranges, some 500 to 600 km to the south, east of Norseman.

In response to recent ABC radio interviews given by the author, three truckies reported seeing yet another fireball soon after starting work at 5.00 am one day (exact date unknown) in May or June of 1993. Their "Moon-sized" fireball flew from south to north at low level (some 1,000 meters) with a high-speed jet-plane velocity. It was yellow-orange-red in colour and had a very small blue-white tail. It lit up the early morning dark sky in an intense blue- white light flash that silhouetted the countryside as it headed immediately west of Laverton directly for Banjawarn station. As the truckies were sitting next to loud diesel engines of their own, they do not know if this third Banjawarn fireball made any pulsed, roaring noise.

This third fireball held a course that would not only pass over Banjawarn but might ultimately have reached the Exmouth Peninsula in far northwest WA.

Now, for three fireballs to be heading towards Banjawarn is just too much of a coincidence for a meteor-type event.

Meteors of this size are very rare events, let alone three heading around May-June 1993 into one small space on the Earth’s surface at Banjawarn. If we assume that fireball no. 3 was seen at 5.00 am on 29 May 1993 - and thus followed fireball no. 1 by six hours, as in, say, a south-to-north-traveling chain of bolides (rather like the recent Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts on Jupiter) - we have a problem with the meteor theory, for in that six-hour period the Earth would have rotated 90 degrees about its north-south axis and fireball no. 3 should have come in over East Africa!
 

OTHER FIREBALL EVENTS IN AUSTRALIA AND NZ

Since the May 1993 event, there have been many other reports (in excess of 1,000 and often of multiple events) concerning aerial fireballs and associated light-energy emissions. They involve exotic, spherical fireballs making diesel freight-train noises (although there are some noiseless variants), flying long trajectories over different parts of Australia. Isolated but similar reports have also originated recently from New Zealand.

These fireballs have been observed in all our Australian states (as late as 4 February 1997), and in many cases have exhibited variations on and combinations of the following actions: very-low-altitude; nap-of-Earth trajectories; small-to-nonexistent tails; no fragment drop-off; apparent velocity often very slow and commonly less than that of sound; no associated sonic booms; considerable and sudden changes in course, as well as speeding up, stopping dead, reversing course and flying vertically upwards into space; creation of intense vibration of ground and housing during flypast; explosion in massive blue-white arcing light displays with major explosive sound events or silent, intense light-flashes; regular creation of power generation overvoltage outages and other electrical effects.

The Banjawarn case demonstrates a cause-effect relationship with a 3.9 Richter-scale earthquake, and other fireballs have possibly been related on at least two occasions to 3.0 to 4.0 Richter-scale earthquakes in eastern Australia.

If meteors are the source of these observations, then lately we appear to be continually encountering a very odd species of meteor that exhibits a previously undocumented, very exotic behaviour and a very high statistical rate of arrival in Australia, apparently (until recently, i.e., 1996) largely ignoring the rest of the world.

Other possible causes such as natural-gas fireballs, min-min lights and earthquake stress lights may be easily discounted by many aspects of these multiple fireball events - but not least because of their usually very-low-energy output when compared to the very large energies involved in these recent Banjawarn fireball incidents.

However, possible scenarios such as off-planet alien UFOs, or Earthbound powers testing new exotic power-plant, military spacecraft and/or EM weapons systems, cannot be so easily discounted.
 

THE PERTH FIREBALL EVENT

Probably the most spectacular of these fireball events was that which occurred at approx. 2.00 am on 1 May 1995 above Perth, WA. At that time, a large spherical orange-red fireball with a small conical blue-white tail was observed as it flew from the Indian Ocean over Bunbury, in southwestern WA, in a north-northeasterly direction at a relatively high altitude, apparently with a trajectory that was parallel to the Earth’s curvature. The altitude of this fireball is open to question as many observers thought that it was not very high in the sky, but newspaper reports later placed it at several kilometers in altitude.

The fireball soon arrived above the eastern side of the City of Perth (population >1 million) and was seen and heard by many eyewitnesses over its 150-kilometre land-flight trajectory. Observers reported that the "object" emitted a loud, roaring, pulsed noise - similar to a diesel freight train - before it arrived, and that it flew at a steady velocity similar to a high-speed jet aircraft. There was no report of a sonic boom.

Whilst moving over the eastern part of Perth, near Midland, the fireball reportedly stopped dead in the sky and the tail inverted through the fireball to point towards the previous direction of travel! Then there was an enormous burst of blue-white arcing light-energy that briefly lit up the city and its suburbs as clear as daylight for many kilometers. In many ways the event was similar in force level to a nuclear blast. A loud, vibrating, massive explosion-cum-seismic wave reverberated around Perth, causing the city buildings to shake and books and objects to fall off shelves.

Several observers reported that, at the instant of the explosion, four white lights raced apart from the centre of the main "object" and formed a right-angled white cross in the sky. No actual object was seen at any time - just a bright orange-red fireball of light emission and its very small blue-white-light conical tail.

One observer reportedly told the Perth Astronomical Observatory of seeing sparks drop off the fireball during its flight and that it had a long tail or streak of orange colour. All other police and public eyewitnesses reported that the fireball had no tail (or, at best, a rudimentary, very short tail) and that they definitely saw no sparks. They noted that it was spherical or cylindrical in form, as defined by light-energy emission.

About half the city’s population, some 500,000 people were estimated to have been woken up by the violence of this explosive, seismic-wave event. The ground vibration wave was picked up by the AGSO Mundaring Seismic Observatory as a paper analogue recording lasting some two minutes, timed at 17.57 UTC, i.e., commencing at 1.57 am WA time.

This event raised some discussion in the WA press over the next few weeks and was generally explained in the media by the Perth Astronomical Observatory as the explosion of a meteor fireball with a power of one or more megatonnes of TNT equivalent, at an altitude of several kilometers. Surprisingly, this event was apparently not widely reported in the world press. One would think that something with a force level equivalent to a large hydrogen bomb detonating above a city like Perth would be worthy of great discussion. Obviously it was not loud enough to wake Canberra...

Reports soon came in of small lights and strange aerial noises that had moved to the north-northeast of Perth towards the small town of Toodyay and beyond, on the night in question. Amateur meteor astronomers spent a considerable amount of time interviewing farmers out that way but no meteor fragments have been recovered to date (December 1996).

Later reports noted that on the same night, some 1,900 km to the north-northeast of Perth, a couple situated on Sunday Island, near One Arm Point north of Broome in the Kimberley region of WA, were woken some time around 3.00 am by a loud, roaring, pulsed diesel-engine noise, "similar to a D9 bulldozer or tank engine", advancing directly towards their front door. This noise rose to a crescendo and books and objects fell from their shelves. The seismic ground-vibration wave and sound event lasted for one to two minutes.

Believing they had experienced an earthquake, the family listened to the early morning ABC radio, but the only story was of the explosive meteor fireball event above Perth. A check of the Mundaring seismic records has shown that no earthquakes of any magnitude at all occurred at Sunday Island or anywhere else in their region that night.

One possible interpretation of these events is that a meteor fireball exploded on contact with the Earth’s denser atmosphere high above the east of Perth and that small fragments, including a very large fragment, flew north-northeast over Toodyay, eventually to be heard flying low over Sunday Island in the Kimberley region.

This meteor interpretation ignores the fact of the fireball’s slow speed, reportedly similar to that of a jet plane. Due to its roaring sound being heard before it arrived, the fireball apparently travelled at less than the speed of sound at some 750 mph. Most meteors are generally hypervelocity objects flying at many thousands of miles per hour, often greater than 25,000 mph.

The meteor hypothesis also ignores the strange aerodynamics of an "object" that reportedly stopped dead in the sky, whilst the very small luminous tail inverted through the spherical fireball. Moreover, it ignores the lack of recovered fragments from so great an explosive event, and the accumulated evidence from many other similar fireball events that have occurred throughout Australia in recent years.

Observations of the fireball’s flight, or effects associated with the event, cover some 2,000 km in strike across WA and thus allow a reasonably reliable attempt at reconstruction on a globe from a planetary perspective. The trajectory starts somewhere to the south-southwest of Perth - possibly in the Indian Ocean or in Antarctica - and projects north-northeast towards the northeastern coast of Japan and across the centre of the Siberian Kamchatka Peninsula. If continued, the trajectory would cross over northern Alaska and over Arctic Canada to emerge into the Atlantic somewhere near Nova Scotia.

It is interesting that the projected trajectory skims Antarctica along its coast near Enderby Land. At this location is a complex of three research bases: the Japanese bases of Syowa (approx. 40° East) and Mizuho (approx. 45° East and inland), and the former USSR base of Molodezhnaya (approx. 45° East on the coast). Further northwest, the former USSR base of Novolazarevskaya (approx. 15° East on the coast) also lies approximately upon the projected trajectory. The former USSR also has bases ringing the coast of Antarctica at the following approximate locations: 92°E (Queen Mary Land), 105°E (Vostok, inland near the South Magnetic Pole), 163°E (Oates Land), and 224°E/44°W) (opposite the Rockefeller Plateau). These bases effectively give a good arc- coverage of the entire globe from the radio transmission viewpoint.

The Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia was the site of the infamous KAL 007 incident. Recent research by David Pearson, published in his book, KAL 007: The Cover-up, concerning this 747 jumbo-jet shoot-down by the Soviets, suggests that KAL 007 was attempting to gain intelligence on a very large transmitter site located in the central part of the peninsula.

It has been suggested by Japanese journalists (Archipelago magazine) as well as American scientific researcher Tom Bearden that this Kamchatka transmitter is one of a series of former Soviet EM weapons complexes.

Such weapons are believed to have the ability to transmit explosive and other effects, such as earthquake induction, across inter-continental distances to any selected target site on the globe, with force levels equivalent to major nuclear explosions.

Evidence for the existence of such exotic weapons is given in part in a "Voice of Russia" radio broadcast on their Science and Engineering program of 23 December 1996, where they discussed modern Russian electromagnetic weapons of the microwave plasma variety. The following is a part-transcript of that program, featuring the interviewer Yekimenko and the science authority Boris Belitsky:

Yekimenko: How would a microwave generator be used ’in anger’, Boris?

Belitsky: It would be used to fire a plasmoid - that is, a blob of plasma - into the path of an incoming missile, its warhead or an aircraft. The plasmoid would effectively ionize that region of space and, in this way, disturb the aerodynamics of the flight of the missile, warhead or aircraft and terminate its flight. This makes such a generator and its plasmoid a practically invulnerable weapon, providing protection against attack via space or the atmosphere.

Yekimenko: Boris, I hate to ask this question, but still... The generals and scientists who speak of this weapon - they couldn’t be bluffing, could they?

Belitsky: Oh, no. This is evident if only from the fact that a few years ago, in 1993, at the Russian-American summit in Vancouver, the Russians proposed a joint experiment in testing such generators - or plasma weapons, as they are called here - as an alternative to the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI. In such an experiment, which was proposed to be code-named Trust, the system would be used to repulse a missile attack. In this way, Russia hoped to strengthen the new climate of post-Cold War security in the world.

These comments of course emphasize that many observed "objects" in the night sky may in fact have no mass associated with them at all, and are actually holograms of light being given off by slugs of dense EM energy, these being held in place by three or more transmitters’ Tesla wave outputs manipulating plasmoid blobs in 3D space.
 

SILENT FIREBALLS

Another fairly typical (but silent) fireball event occurred in October 1994 at the iron ore mining town of Tom Price in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

One night in mid-October 1994 a family was having a patio barbecue at about 8.30 pm. They saw a very large red-orange-coloured ball of fire moving at very low altitude directly towards them at a steady, slow, light-aircraft speed (100 mph?) at an altitude of 200 to 300 meters. It was bigger than the Moon in apparent size.

They rang the local police to alert them to a possible aircraft on fire. The two policemen raced outside to watch. By now, half the town (population of some 4,000) was outside watching the fireball. From front-on it appeared to be a fiery orange-red-yellow colour; from the side it appeared to be yellow-white and pulsing up and down in light intensity (as captured on video).

Our original barbecue observers, by now some 200 meters directly below the "object", reported that it was an intense ball of orange-red fire or plasma with the fire swirling in a spiral pattern and the flames disappearing internally upwards into "a central black hole" or void within the spherical mass of flames.

The fireball had no tail and made no noise at all, and there was no ground seismic/noise wave as experienced in many other recent Australian fireball events. It was described as a sort of "implosion ball of flames", with all the fire or flames originating in local space outside the fiery, spherical form, and then being sucked into the centre where they disappeared:

"like a moving plasma ball in a local space-time warp around a central black hole"

"Never ever seen anything like it before, therefore difficult to describe accurately"

(Really aware people, these outback mining families!)

The observers said that the fireball took about five to seven minutes to cover the distance from a line of hills west of Tom Price to a line of hills to their east. At this point it flashed a bright blue-white colour that lit up the area; then it took off at very high speed, moving very quickly to the east and disappearing almost instantly. Other observers simply believed that it just disappeared with the intense, bright blue-white light-energy emission flash/explosion, but with no explosive noise.

The observers turned around to look back to the west. Immediately, a second fireball appeared in the west, following the path of the first. It flew slightly lower, but at the same slow light-aircraft speed (i.e., about 100 mph) and, similarly, at constant altitude. Again it flew directly over the barbecue observers and was identical in all respects to the first fireball. Likewise, it moved at very high velocity to the east and disappeared in a massive blue-white flash of light-energy.

This was followed by a third fireball that was exactly the same size and traveled exactly the same low-level altitude (nearly in the treetops), exactly the same slow flight-speed, exactly the same course, and again disappeared at high speed to the east in exactly the same kind of light flash.

The time between the appearance of each separate fireball "pulse" was almost identical. Observers reported that after the first one had disappeared to the east, they swung around to look west, only to find that another fireball had arrived; and after that second one disappeared, they turned again to the west to see that a third fireball had arrived straight away - just like clockwork!

There remains a difference of opinion between observers as to exactly how many fireballs were seen in sequence that night. All observers agree that two fireballs were seen, but several claim that three were actually seen, but that strange time-space-mind distortion effects were in operation (emanating from the fireballs) such that confusion reigned immediately, during and after the sightings, leading to disagreement and argument over the exact number of discrete fireball events.

This entire sequence of events (or parts thereof) was seen by many of the inhabitants of Tom Price, i.e., possibly well over 2,000 people. Many eyewitnesses attempted to take photographs, but when they got their developed film rolls back from Perth they discovered their photos showed good family snaps and only white blanks where the fireballs had been! The films were developed by friends and were not tampered with, suggesting that X-ray or similar EM radiation from the fireball may have fogged the film.

One video camera recording (similar to this one) was made, but later accidental over-recording meant that only two minutes of this incident remained - taped as a pulsing light or fireball, as seen from well south of the fireball track. This videotape has since been appropriated by a UFO researcher in New South Wales and has never since seen the light of day.

All residents were shocked by what they had observed, eventually believing that someone deliberately wanted them to see these fireballs as some sort of test over an isolated outback town. They confirm that the object appeared to have no solid mass when seen close up, but from a distance many thought they were seeing an aircraft on fire - but the second and third fireballs disabused them of this idea. No one could align their sighting with anything within their experiential memory. Some thought that "it was like the end of the world" - that same expression yet again!

The two policemen were taken the next day to a point halfway to the Paraburdoo townsite (residents there also saw the fireballs to their north that night), located some 50 km south of Tom Price. The policemen were briefed by "officials" on what had occurred and thereafter refused to discuss the evening’s events with their friends in Tom Price.

Being a small town with few inhabitants, and pretty lonely if the other residents cold-shoulder you, one policeman later admitted that he would like to say what it was all about but had been ordered to keep his mouth shut and it was more than his job and life were worth to say more.

The residents of Tom Price discussed these events for days, but attempts to go public on Perth TV were met with ridicule and loony epithets.

They noticed that the fireballs had flown from the direction of the Exmouth Peninsula "US radio communications base" and knew that, in spite of recent newspaper publicity claiming that "this base has been deserted by the USA and handed over to the Australian government", there were still many Americans to be seen in the town of Exmouth who continued to live and work at the base (as is the case even now, in early 1997). Many suspect that there is a secret underground part to this base which contains peculiar, large aerial systems at ground level.

It was later discovered that the Dampier power station, further northeast, went off line at the time of the Tom Price fireballs due to a huge overvoltage pulse on the transmission lines.

Residents of this district have commonly seen or even been followed by bright white lights whilst traversing roads at night near the coast and adjacent to the Exmouth base area. They report that these lights move at low or high speed, at low or high altitude and commonly alter their courses.

Very bright white glows have been observed at night emanating from uninhabited bushland just to the east of Tom Price. Fireballs have been reported on several occasions in the period 1973 to 1994 as flying from Exmouth towards the east and the Great Sandy Desert.
 

SECRET WEAPONS TESTING AND OTHER SCENARIOS

In this Tom Price instance we appear to have a possible direct link to US bases. Thus it is feasible that high-powered EM weapons systems are being tested by the USA - or some other foreign government - on Australian soil, or that off-planet alien UFO interest in the Exmouth US base is being demonstrated in these sightings.

Regular passage of three such slow-speed fireballs, ultimately increasing rapidly to very high speed, occurring at exactly equally- timed intervals, along the same very-low-altitude trajectory and course, cannot involve any normal meteor or bolide-train event. These fireball events do not appear to represent any known natural phenomenon, and certainly appear to fit the alien UFO, secret military spaceplane-testing or EM weapons-testing scenarios.

Eyewitness information about the interior of the Exmouth Peninsula "US VLF submarine communication base" proves to be extremely interesting. The main transmitter (Tx) site consists of one very high central aerial called "Tower Zero" positioned upon a low hilltop and surrounded by 11 equispaced smaller towers (each about 1,000 feet high). Each tower is connected by aerial wire forming a series of three concentric circular loops (in excess of 2.5 km diameter). Tower Zero is encased in wood/asbestos sheeting to form a very high, enclosed oblong box, and has a two-man elevator running up the inside of the tower. The top inner aerial shape is surrounded by a larger enclosed box.

The aerial array utilizes enormous quantities of copper tube and wire "ground counterpoise" arrays buried in the ground under the entire complex.

Access into the hillside tunnel opening takes one into a large (at least three-storey) underground section at the base of Tower Zero. Here is something like the innards of a giant "transistor radio" with a huge heavy-duty copper-wire coil some 50 feet high and 15 feet in diameter - all supported on hardwood (Jarrah) frames fixed with wooden (Jarrah) nuts and bolts! Sections are lined with stainless- steel sheeting. There may be further and deeper sections under the copper coil which were not seen by this eyewitness.

There is a large power station at the site, possibly running on gas from boreholes into a large natural-gas reservoir nearby.

Although officially recently handed over by the US Navy to Australian Navy control, the base still has many US "consultants" who live in the nearby town of Exmouth. The Jarrah fittings and copper coil in Tower Zero were installed in 1968, after the main building contractor teams had left the facility.

Supposedly this Exmouth Tx site is transmitting VLF or ELF radio messages to submarines. However, this eyewitness description of the underground wooden frame and giant coil is a dead giveaway. It perfectly describes major elements of Tesla’s Wardenclyffe, Long Island, Magnifying Energy Transmitter - and his earlier Colorado Springs research versions. The wooden construction is required to handle very high voltages and very high frequencies (possibly as high as microwave-band frequencies) by containing the induced coil electrostatic wave from discharge. It is not needed to handle very low frequencies (VLF) or extremely low frequencies (ELF).

Tesla claimed in 1908 that he could hit any antipodean planetary city with an enormous EM energy pulse, delivered in microseconds, that would "create an explosion equivalent to more than the power of the extant world navies’ combined ’Dreadnought’ battleship broadsides" (i.e., a huge force similar to that of a nuclear explosion) from just such a device.

Therefore, it would appear that the Exmouth US Tx site contains "Tesla" or "scalar" EM weapons systems and has been active since about 1969, i.e., in time to conduct the 1970 and earlier tests for which we see evidence, due east of there in the Great Sandy Desert, as many grid rows of 10-km-spaced earthquakes, looking like a chessboard - each of 3 to 5 Richter power.
 

EARTHQUAKES TO ORDER

In 1965, this section of the Great Sandy Desert area was (uniquely for Australia) covered by high-altitude U2 aerial photography, paid for by the US Government. Why?

In 1966, the French oil company Aquitaine Oil (now called ELF Aquitaine) took out a large oil exploration permit in this most isolated and difficult-to-access area of Australia. Canberra even paid half the exploration costs to help explore the hinterland. No other company known to me ever got this type of deal - especially to explore an area of poor conceptual potential in a poor geological environment when many easier-access and far better geological environments with excellent conceptual potential existed elsewhere in Australia and were open for acquisition and exploration.

Aquitaine commenced exploration in 1967 and carried out aeromagnetic, ground gravity, seismic traverse, and ground VLF/ELF EM studies. (These EM techniques were quite rare and odd exploration techniques to be used in oil exploration.)

In 1968-69, Australian Army MPs with 4WD Jeeps were airlifted into the Great Sandy Desert to round up a couple of hundred nomadic Aboriginal tribespeople and ship them out to Broome. This region was declared "off limits to the public", and all access tracks into the desert were guarded by Military Police.

The published reason for this was the danger from a series of test launches from Woomera in South Australia, over the Great Sandy Desert and Broome, of the British Blue Streak missiles, and of the European four-stage space rocket satellite-launching system. (They even got this one into orbit eventually in early 1970 and 1971.) Thereafter, the British missile program and the European space effort were rather mysteriously and suddenly closed down.

In 1970 Aquitaine did no field work. In late March 1970, a series of concentrated 3.0 to 5.0 Richter-scale earthquakes commenced in the eastern Great Sandy Desert. (Note: no earthquakes have ever been known there since seismometers were installed in WA in 1900; also, there is no Aboriginal racial memory of quakes in this region.)

These quakes stopped in early October 1970, only to recommence the following year. Isolated quakes have continued every year since 1970. The late March to early October period is the only viable field period in this region - due to the extreme temperatures of 50+ degrees Centigrade in the months of November to February.

In 1972-73, Aquitaine drilled two stratigraphic holes (both dry) and walked away from the permit. Their annual exploration work reports (1966-1973) should be on ’open file’ at the WA Mines Department library in Perth; however, they are listed as confidential. No copies exist in Perth as they are held under lock and key in Canberra at the AGSO (ex-BMR) offices. This situation is unique in all my WA exploration experience.

In 1973 the BMR (Bureau of Mineral Resources) published a report about the strange explosion of new earthquakes in the eastern Great Sandy Desert. This report contained incorrect quake epicenter maps - apparently biased not to show the strange, regular positioning of these quakes along a 10-square-kilometre-spaced grid over an 80 km by 70 km area, with a central two-kilometer- spaced series of quakes along two lines forming an apparently central ’aiming point’ cross.

The 1996 AGSO Mundaring Observatory epicenter data demonstrates this regular quake epicenter pattern very well. The accuracy of epicenter determination is thought to be +/-10 km. Other Australian areas of dense quake distribution show chaotic elliptical area spreads clustered statistically around central points - not regular grid lines of quakes marching through the desert. These quakes are not due to seismic explosives - unless they used several kilotonnes at each shot hole!

The Great Sandy Desert earthquakes are distributed almost exactly due east of the Exmouth VLF Tx site and, intriguingly, are also located upon a Magnetic North Pole great circle route from Exmouth’s sister transmitter complex located at Cutler, Maine, on the northeastern seaboard of the USA near the Canadian border.

Thus, if the several sightings concerning fireballs emanating from Exmouth (reported during the period 1973 to 1994) to the east towards the Great Sandy Desert are taken into account, it would appear that this area of Australia has been utilized for the testing and eventual deployment of a diabolical EM weapons system of prodigious power.

Slugs of EM energy could have been fired from Exmouth and steered or explosively initiated from Cutler, and/or other US global transmitter sites onto the target test range within the Great Sandy Desert to initiate major earthquakes in a region previously and totally devoid of same.

On a globe one can see that the great circle geographic polar route north from Exmouth passes through the following locations:

• Hong Kong

• Thule (US air base in Greenland)

• Cutler, Maine (known VLF Tx)

• Arecibo, Puerto Rico (known VLF Tx)

• Tucumán, Argentina (known VLF Tx)

• Palmer and Amundsen-Scott US Antarctic bases

• back to Exmouth Tx in NW Australia

Such a series of Tx sites would allow good coverage of the entire planet.

Interestingly, the Puerto Rico site is a near exact antipodean site for Exmouth, and both sites are areas where UFO sightings are common - especially Arecibo, where I suspect the sightings are mainly atmospheric Tesla light-energy-emission ’UFOs’ from the testing and operation of both Tx EM weapon sites.

There are many fascinating coincidences in this research. Take for instance the case of Harold E. Holt, Prime Minister of Australia from 26 January 1966 to 19 December 1967. He disappeared whilst swimming one Sunday - apparently after reporting to family and close colleagues over the preceding days that he had discovered something about the USA, its activities here and its future intentions, that deeply offended and worried him. Intending to raise these issues in Cabinet and then Parliament on the following Monday, he was never seen again.

Rumours of CIA assassination, shark attack or removal by Chinese submarine have continually surfaced over the years. Recent stories even suggest that Holt is alive and well in China...

The Exmouth Peninsula communications base is now called the "Harold E. Holt Naval Communication Station". One would think that the Australian Federal Police or ASIO/ASIS could have solved the disappearance and/or possible murder of an Australian Prime Minister in some 30 years. One does not have to look too far for a connection and possible line of enquiry.

Then there is the case of the two young cattle-station hands who died under very mysterious circumstances a few years ago in the Great Sandy Desert - on the very seismic grid-lines put in by Aquitaine Oil, and within the very area of the Great Sandy Desert "earthquake test range"...

It would appear to be high time for Australians to do something about this state of affairs - since we actually host a weapons system that has led clandestinely to the deaths not only of Australians but quite probably of tens of thousands of fellow humans in many countries across the globe.

But all of that - the science of earthquake-inducing EM weapons systems and their recent deployment and use on planet Earth by Russian, Japanese and American forces - must wait until the next article in this series.