Reports of Unidentified Flying Object – Fishing Boat Encounter
That same night of the famous encounter, the tuna fishing boat Monika was buzzed by a strange maneuvering light. The sighting was confirmed by police at Port Lincoln, home of the Australian Southern Bluefin fleet. The skipper was requested to report to the station when he arrived in port, for an interview, but due to the ridicule already being dished out by armchair debunkers , the crew declined. (The owner of Monika told me that the crew only saw an unexplained light. A newsman invented the story that the crew spoke in slow-motion voices during the incident.) However, witnesses from another vessel of the same fleet did respond to the police request, and later a report from one of the observers (name in VUFORS files) , given to me by the policeman who conducted the interview, follows :
I am a resident of Canada, and at present I am having a holiday on my relative’s vessel, Empress Lady. I reported an incident which I saw whilst on watch on the fishing vessel . What I saw was not a usual sight. I am used to looking into the night sky and looking at stars and have seen aircraft flying overhead at night. What I saw on this particular night was none of these.
It was about 12 :30 a.m. I was walking around the vessel , on watch . At the time we were positioned on the Australian shelf, in the Great Australian Bight. I had been looking into the sky, and around the horizon . . . u sing binoculars to assist my vision. My attention was drawn toward the north about 20° off north , to starboard. I saw a bright light; at first I thought it was a star, but on looking and concentrating on it, I saw that it was much brighter than the stars . I used the binoculars to view this light and could clearly see several green lights just above the edge of the light and several red lights just below the edge of the light. The light remained stationary. I observed the light for up to thirty seconds and then went below and called out another deckhand, who also viewed the light .
We watched the light for another ten seconds, and it then moved off at a fast rate and went out of sight over the horizon. It traveled towards the north. I do not know what caused the light-it was much brighter than the stars . The sky was crystal clear. In my own mind it was something other than a star, but I do not know what. This event occurred several days after the sighting in Western Australia, and I was not aware of that sighting until the next day when I read it in the papers .