When I started seriously looking into a decades-old UFO mystery, I expected my colleagues would giggle and raise their eyebrows at the topic.
I never could have predicted the scar tissue I would find.
The first clue was a phone call.
I had tracked down a farmer who was seven when this all started on his family sugar cane farm in far north Queensland, and who still lives on the very same property.
Shane Pennisi sounded kind, warm and very firm: he didn’t talk about this on the phone. “See me if you come to Tully,” he said.
I then contacted relatives of the key witness in this mystery.
George Pedley was a salt-of-the-earth banana farmer who supposedly saw the flying saucer and discovered an inexplicable “saucer nest” left behind.
I was informed George had endured significant ridicule for telling people what he saw. And because of that, he didn’t talk about it publicly, right up until his death a few years ago.
This may have happened almost six decades ago, but it was still very raw and real for the people involved.
It was a UFO story, but it was also a human story.
Tully’s 1966 saucer nest was so inexplicable it made national news and drew hundreds of sightseers. (Supplied: Dorothy Jones Library Heritage Collection, Tully)
Diving into a taboo topic
The UFO topic has a long history of ridicule, stigma and taboo.
A lifetime UFO researcher I interviewed had been told studying witchcraft would be better for his scientific career.
Because of that stigma, people usually close off to speaking about this topic, particularly if they get a whiff of judgement.
So how do we get people to open up when there’s a genuine risk of ridicule? And what might they say if we listen with curiosity, rather than judgement?
UFO-themed attractions at a museum in Roswell, New Mexico. (Wikimedia Commons: Jirka Matousek under Creative Commons 2.0)
That was the premise of season four of the ABC Expanse podcast: Uncropped: to see whether we could tell the story of Tully’s saucer nest mystery in a more empathetic way, by focusing on the humans at the heart of it.
Trying to understand this UFO mystery took me from a mosquito-laden Queensland lagoon, to the Australian government’s UFO files, to the halls of Congress in the USA.
Subjective truth
By its very nature, unexplained phenomena are hard to define in terms of absolute truth.
With the Tully case, it’s an objective truth there was a mysterious circle in the lagoon.
But was it a UFO that caused it? We don’t know.
Some people firmly believe yes; others are sure it must have been something more earthly.
This arena can show us a lot about how to talk when everyone is coming to the conversation with their own version of the truth.
How do we tell these stories while also maintaining a healthy skepticism? Or, in the case of bombshell claims coming out of the United States, not provide a place for conspiracy to flourish?
Investigating UFOs was like walking a tightrope between empathy and scepticism. (ABC: Dominic Cansdale)
That question led me to an increasingly popular concept called radical empathy, introduced to me by author and journalist Ginger Gorman.
It was the idea of holding people in unconditional positive regard and seeking to deeply understand their experience first, before coming to any conclusions.
Ginger had employed this technique to understand the inner worlds of online trolls. Could it also be applied to my understanding of the polarising topic of UFOs?
The initial goal was to understand where somebody was coming from with a completely open mind, leave any preconceived judgement and any tin-foil hatter baggage at the door.
And that was the place where people started to open up.
When people say a seemingly unbelievable thing
One of those people was Shane Pennisi, the farmer I spoke to on the phone, who was just seven when the flying saucer mystery began.
When I did meet him face-to-face in Tully, he told me that what happened on that farm in 1966 was just the beginning.
Mr Pennisi points out where the original and subsequent saucer nests were found. (ABC: Dominic Cansdale)
While there were no more UFO sightings to report, he said more than 30 of those mysterious saucer nests had appeared over the years, the last one being about a decade ago.
But the family kept it quiet, because of the media circus and ridicule George Pedley had faced.
I, like most people, like to think I’m both skeptical and believable.
But making a podcast about a story like this inevitably gets you thinking what you would do if you experienced something unexplainable, and that brings up some uncomfortable questions:
Who would I tell? Who would believe me? How would others respond to me?
The answers to these questions are just as uncomfortable and revealing today as they were in 1966.
Follow Expanse: Uncropped on the ABC Listen App to hear every episode of season four.
