A 60-Year-Old UFO Secret Uncovered: Family Breaks Silence...!

There’s a sugar cane farm in far north Queensland. It feels isolated, private.

About five minutes’ drive from the farmhouse is a lagoon. These days bulrushes just cling to the edge of the murky brown water. But 60 years ago it was thick with them.

Something happened in those bulrushes that is still unanswered today.

In fact, the questions it raised ended up becoming so much bigger than the mystery itself.

At first light, a boy and his father sling rifles over their shoulders and trudge barefoot through squelching grass.

They’re hunting — for proof of UFO landings on their sugar cane farm.

A young Shane Pennisi trails in lockstep behind his dad, Albert, eyes fixed on the swarm of mosquitoes surrounding him as they approach the lagoon.

“The whole of his back would be just black and they’re all full of red blood,” Shane says.

They survey the scene for any disturbance to the bullrush reed bristling from the murky water and triple-check that no crocodile has spilt into residency during the recent floods.

Best stay armed, just in case.

With last night’s sleep still clinging to the corners of their eyes, they hoist the rifles above their heads and slide into the warm marsh.

Paternal bonding comes in all shapes and sizes.

Wading through stagnant, larval-rearing water in search of “saucer nests” is just part of the daily routine for this father-son duo.

Something happened here that knocked the family off its axis and tormented a mild-mannered man for the rest of his life.

An impression left in this very lagoon would grow into a roaring wave of global crop circle fever.

And there are still secrets to tell almost six decades on.

An unlikely protagonist

George Pedley was a wiry young banana farmer in Far North Queensland when he encountered what he later described as a flying saucer.

The gentle bachelor in his 20s worked the plot of land beside the Pennisi cane farm at Euramo, just south of Tully, and built a rough but sturdy shack for his tractor and tools.

It was the era of the space race.

Aliens, UFOs and interplanetary exploration were part of the pop cultural furniture.

Less so, perhaps, around Tully.

The town then, as today, prided itself on being the wettest place in Australia — a simple agricultural and logging community carved into the skirt of a rainforest-blanketed mountain.

It seemed an unlikely spot, with an unlikely protagonist, for a mystery that would foreshadow a rash of UFO and crop circle reports all over the world.

Even so, in the grips of a sweltering wet season in January 1966, Tully went into a tailspin.

The sighting

Shane Pennisi was seven years old at the time and living on the same cane farm in the single-storey house he still calls home today.

He remembers his whole family pulling into the driveway after a beach trip on the afternoon of January 19, 1966 to find their neighbour sitting on their front steps.

George Pedley had an uncharacteristic look of agitation etched across his face.

“He started stuttering a bit. Something had happened.”

Shane’s dad Albert spoke with George for a few minutes before they all hopped in the ute — adults up front, kids clinging on in the tray — and drove to a horseshoe-shaped lagoon at the edge of a cane paddock.

That’s when they saw it.

A perfect circle of flattened bullrush reeds in the middle of the water, about nine metres in diameter and floating like a pontoon.

There were no markings around it — no trail from machinery that might have fabricated the unusual imprint.

Back at the house, George opened up about his experience.

He had been driving his tractor that morning when he heard a tremendous “hissing” noise and hopped out in search of a punctured tyre.

The tops of sugar cane plants with clouds in the background. 

“He heard the hissing getting louder and louder. Then he turned around and looked up,” Shane says.

“He saw a UFO. Just above the treetops — tilted like it hesitated, and then it was gone.

“Then he looked back in the lagoon and saw the water swirling.”

Shane clearly recalls his neighbour picking up two teacup plates from the table, tipping one upside down and placing them lip to lip.

This was what he had seen.

A flying saucer, illuminated with bright lights and hissing away in a puff of blue vapour.

The term “gone troppo” is Australian slang for being driven mad by excessive heat and possibly a few too many swigs of the flagon.

George was not a drinker.

Still, the banana farmer couldn’t shake the suspicion he had contracted an acute case of the tropical malady.

“George being George just thought, ‘I’m just seeing things,’” Shane says.

George went back to the shade of his shed and boiled a billy to get his faculties in order.

Questions were piling up.

After a while he returned to the lagoon and discovered this floating mat of reeds, almost woven in a clockwise swirl into a perfect geometric circle of botanical fabric.

Or so the story goes.

The bush telegraph

Police were eventually called and word of this weird encounter spread like a contagion as the small-town rumour mill went into overdrive.

It was dubbed a “saucer nest” — a sort of prototype crop circle two decades before the latter term would become popular — and everyone wanted a look.

Cars roared onto the farm in their hundreds, with yahoos knocking over cane, drinking beer and climbing the reedy pontoon, which could hold a man’s weight with no trouble at all.

It was a lot for a seven-year-old boy to take in.

Shane remembers the dust from the traffic being so thick that his mum couldn’t hang the washing.

“It was one car after the other,” he says.

“They parked anywhere they could, they walked over plant cane … broke down trees … they just walked through the lagoon.”

The family was eventually forced to retreat to their nearby beach shack until things died down.

It would take a while.

News reports all over the country featured photos of the splayed, flattened reeds, and reporters spent the night getting mauled by mosquitoes in hope of experiencing a visitation.

They never got one, but they did get plenty of fodder for a readership desperate for anything to do with aliens, flying saucers and cosmic expeditions.

How do you explain the unexplainable?

Wild theories started popping up about what could have caused the strange phenomenon.

Obviously it wasn’t aliens … was it?

Everything from helicopters and reed-eating grubs to whirlwinds and waterspouts were proposed as logical culprits.

There was even a theory that the purported saucer nest had been created by ducks swimming in a circle.

George’s honesty and mental stability were questioned in news articles and cartoons, and to his dying day he felt slighted about being publicly ridiculed.

Locals who knew him and the landscape were more inclined to believe his story.

A woman reading a photocopy of a newspaper story about the Tully saucer nest. 

Valerie Keenan was a child when saucer nest mania swept through Tully.

Her dad, a cattle station owner from one of the area’s original pioneering families, was already something of a UFO enthusiast.

“He would sit out on the lawn in this chair and observe the night sky and talk about what he would do if someone, a UFO landed,” she remembers.

He was one of a few locals to receive an invitation from George to visit the saucer nest shortly after its discovery — and he brought Valerie in tow.

For all the interest in George and his encounter, there remained a secret to which only a handful of people were privy.

It went almost entirely unnoticed by all those hundreds of trespassing sightseers and headline-chasing journalists.

Given the media circus was in full swing, Albert and George weren’t keen on bringing too many others into the fold.

But Valerie knew.

There were more so-called saucer nests in horseshoe lagoon.

Even stranger, these shapes would keep appearing on the farm for decades to come.

Keith says seven of these shapes were scattered across the farm — and he would investigate similar reports over the years.

For some, saucer nests had become the subject of genuine scientific inquiry.

Unfortunately for believers, their credibility was dealt a catastrophic blow in 1991 when British artists Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted they had faked hundreds of the celestial glyphs across the UK since the 1970s.

In a bizarre turn of events, those British artists pointed to what happened at Horseshoe Lagoon in Tully as their inspiration.

But authorities were not simply dismissing reports outright.

Brett Biddington is a former Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) intelligence officer who spent years investigating UFO reports for the military.

He was once tasked with driving to Bendigo after local media went into a frenzy over strange lights appearing in the sky in the 1980s.

He got a first-hand glimpse of how the hunt for a headline can whip up hysteria and misinformation.

“It tends to be both sensationalised and somewhat trivialised in the general media,” he says.

Brett says military interest in UFOs was very real, but not because of any perceived threat from little green men.

“There was intense interest by both sides in the Cold War — the United States on the one hand, the Soviets on the other, to try to understand what the level of their technologies were with regard to space,” he says.

RAAF investigations into UFOs wrapped up in the 1990s and never really kicked off again Down Under.

A small percentage of cases remain unexplained, like what happened in Tully.

Some measure of vindication

George Pedley’s memorial plaque at the Tully cemetery features a small embossed figure of a horse cocking its front leg and the epitaph: “Husband, father, grandfather and brother.”

A man’s life summed up in five words.

He was a quiet farmer who, according to those who knew him, never sought nor enjoyed the limelight that was thrust upon him.

To this day, his widow, Helen, chooses not to speak publicly about the saucer nest incident out of respect for her late husband and the derision he experienced.

However, she has meticulously collected snippets from decades of newspaper and magazine articles that mention the encounter and neatly compiled them in a manilla folder at the local library.

George died aged 85 in 2022, around the time a fundamental shift was happening in the public perception of UFOs — or UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena), as they’re often now called.

Three years ago, the United States government published a report into 144 UAP sightings between 2004 and 2021.

It was inconclusive in terms of identifying the nature of these phenomena — but it did not rule out the possibility of advanced tech from foreign nations or extraterrestrial sources.

In 2022, the US Congress held its first hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years.

A new government branch called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was also created to investigate UAPs across, as the name suggests, all domains — air, sea, land and space.

Suddenly there is an acknowledgement that not all encounters can be written off as hoaxes or the creations of overactive imaginations.

If this shift does provide some measure of vindication to witnesses, it has arrived too late for old George.

Dozens more nests over decades

If there was one person who never doubted George’s reliability as a witness, it was his neighbour, Albert Pennisi.

He would visit the lagoon every day for decades, jotting down notes of any disturbances and sending them back to UFO researchers in Brisbane.

A high-resolution image of a lagoon with bullrush reeds lining the edges and murky water within the lagoon.

Drone photograph of the Tully River with mountain in the background.

Shane remembers his dad on the phone, speaking in code to those researchers to avoid government infiltration — and even connecting a camera to electromagnetic equipment so it would automatically shutter if a disturbance was detected in the lagoon.

To this day, he believes there was government surveillance of the activities at the farm.

There was a reason for all this cloak-and-dagger stuff.

The Pennisis had a secret.

Valerie Keenan and her dad were among a select few locals who were shown the other saucer nests that had also appeared that fateful January in 1966.

“There was another lagoon on the other side, and we saw another three pads, different sizes, different shapes,” she remembers.

“It was just sort of like something had come down from above — and where we saw the other three, there was no way in the world you would have got a vehicle of any kind in there.”

And it didn’t stop there.

Those early mornings spent waist-deep in the lagoon with parasites lapping at their veins and rifles held above their heads were not the most comfortable father-son expeditions.

But for Shane, they were beautiful moments spent with the man he idolised.

And they didn’t always come back empty-handed.

The pair never saw a spacecraft themselves, but Shane swears saucer nests kept appearing until about a decade ago.

“I couldn’t tell you the number … 25, 30, more,” he says.

“Towards the end, I didn’t even keep marking it down.

“You know, it’s very scary for your kids. I saw but I didn’t mark it down.”

The last saucer nest

Shane says the last “marking” appeared about 10 years ago.

He says over the past 20 years the frequency of appearances has decreased, which the family attribute to the changing landscape of more scrub being cleared for cane.

It seems odd to come out almost 60 years on with these sensational new claims, but Shane has his reasons.

The recent shift in public perception towards UFOs is one factor, but there’s something much more existential than that.

That seven-year-old boy is now an old man himself, and this lagoon is where he feels closest with his dad.

But it’s time to sell the farm.

Shane recently survived serious heart surgery and his kids won’t be taking over the reins.

He’s terrified that whoever buys the farm will bring in the dozers and fill the lagoon to fit in a few more rows of cane.

“What’s the biggest thing that’s going to hurt me? It’s this. Walking away from it,” Shane says.

“I’ve got to walk away from it all.

“It’s my life. I’ve got to leave and forget and don’t look back.”

Shane’s voice trembles as he sits in the same dining room where Albert and George drank tea after that very first sighting in 1966.

He feels like a weight has been lifted.

“I’m the last that’s going to be involved in it, so now’s the time for the public to know.”