Frederick Valentich mystery.

The unexplained disappearance of Frederick Valentich

Frederick Valentich hasn’t been seen since.

The existence of aliens has been a hot button topic of debate for a long time. While many people can comfortably acknowledge the fact that

given the vast expanse of universe around us, alien life is likely, those same people are hard pressed to entertain the thought of aliens actually hopping in their intergalactic craft and hovering down to earth for a friendly (or not so friendly) visit. Alien encounters are hard to find in legitimate historical records, but they do exist. One of the strangest documented accounts is the infamous Valentich Disappearance.

On October 21st, 1978 Frederick Valentich was flying his Cessna 821L airplane on a 125 mile training flight over Bass Strait, en route to King Island, Australia, when he told the air traffic controllers that he had just been buzzed by a UFO. Frederick said the ship had a green light, and wondered if he was being harassed by a military jet or if someone was playing a practical joke on him. Valentich reported that there was something wrong with his plane engine, and that the ship in question was hovering and definitely not a regular aircraft. Next there were strange metallic scraping sounds, and that was it – that was the last time anyone saw or heard from Frederick Vaentich. After a two week investigation, the Department of Transport determined they could not explain Valentich’s disappearance.

That same evening, numerous Australian citizens called in UFO sightings, many of them reporting a strange green light in the sky, lending a certain amount of credibility to Valentich’s distress call and creating quite the buzz around the incident, especially from UFO enthusiasts. There were even some eye witnesses who watched Valentich’s plane fly overhead, trailed by a green light.

Despite his father’s assertion that Fred was not the type of person to make up stories, some skeptics suggest that Valentich staged his own disappearance and safely landed the plane elsewhere. While this is certainly possible, it seems unlikely that someone would pull a publicity stunt and then never return to claim his attention. If Fred was running from someone or something and wanted to vanish, an elaborate UFO hoax (that most would not believe) to cover it up makes far less sense than simply claiming engine trouble.

A more reasonable claim from skeptics is that Fred simply lost his bearings, imagined something strange, and crashed into the sea. Some say that Fred saw the strange lights because he was flying his plane upside down and saw his plane’s reflection in the water. But how does that explain the eye witness accounts corroborating Fred’s story?

While a UFO does not always mean aliens, many people are convinced that outer space creatures were directly responsible for the unexplained disappearance of Frederick Valentich. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, and does not specify what type of creature is flying the thing – it could be human or otherwise. After looking through the evidence, it seems clear that Fred was indeed trailed by a strange green light just before he vanished without a trace, and it’s easy to understand why Fred called it a UFO – after all, it was a flying object that he could not identify.

One alternative explanation that actually does make sense is that Fred was, for whatever reason, stalked by an advanced military aircraft and ended up either dead or permanently missing because of it. Conspiracy theorists claim that the government’s technology is at least fifty years more advanced than anything the public is allowed to see, and maybe for a few minutes Fred got to see it.