It is not an Aircraft

A young pilot flew out over the water at dusk, started describing something to the man on the radio, and got about as far as a person can get before the sentence stopped. You’re tuned to G Z S, one ninety-seven point seven, and this is Transmissions from the Fringe.

October twenty-first, nineteen seventy-eight. Evening. A twenty-year-old Australian named Frederick Valentich takes a small Cessna up for a short hop across Bass Strait, the stretch of cold water between the mainland and Tasmania. Routine flight. Clear sky. And somewhere over that water he keys the radio and asks Melbourne air traffic control a strange question. Is there any other aircraft in my area. He is told no. There is nothing else up there.

But Valentich says there is. Something above him, maybe a thousand feet up. Big. Moving fast. Bright lights on it, like landing lights. It passes over him at speed, and then it comes back, and it starts pacing him, sitting off his aircraft and not leaving. His engine starts running rough. His voice is steady, and then it is not. The controller keeps asking him to identify the aircraft. And Valentich, the last full thing he ever says, answers. It is not an aircraft.

Then the radio fills with a sound. The men who heard it described it the same way. Metallic. Scraping. A pulsing, like metal drawn over metal, for about seventeen seconds. And then the carrier cut, and the channel was empty, and Frederick Valentich and his airplane were gone. They searched the strait for days. They never found him. Not the man, not the Cessna, not a seat cushion, not an oil slick. The official finding was that the cause could not be determined.

There are dull explanations, and some of them are probably right. A disoriented young pilot, flying at night over black water with no horizon, can lose track of up and down. He may have been looking at his own lights reflected in the sea. Maybe he flew a slow circle down into the water, certain the whole time he was straight and level. That is the likely story, and it is its own kind of horror. A kid drowning in the dark, certain he was being followed. But the likely story still has to explain that sound. Seventeen seconds of scraping metal, going out over the radio while a boy says the thing above me is not an aircraft.

The strait kept him. Whatever happened up there happened in the dark, over deep water, with one witness, and the witness is the thing we cannot find. All we have is the recording, and a young man’s voice, calm right up until it was not, telling the truth as he saw it. It is not an aircraft.

This has been Transmissions from the Fringe. The dial stays warm. G Z S.