One day during August 1979 two young friends of the author, Mark Harris and
David Hodges, were hiking out to the Ruined Castle Rock formation in
Jamieson Valley south of Katoomba.
The time was around 9am when, partly hidden in
the trees in a gully below the forest track, they spotted a large metallic silver object.
Climbing down through the ferns and vines, they realised that it was a domeshaped
object about 8-10m high and at least 20m in width, and that it had crushed
trees and foliage as it came to rest on the forest floor.
Here, they realised was a UFO. They could not detect any windows around the
craft. Then feeling a bit uneasy they climbed back up to the track. At that time in the
morning there were no hikers in the area yet. If there had been, they said to me later,
they would have had witnesses.
Mark and David began hastily walking back toward the Golden Stairs, a steep
climb out of the valley onto Narrow Neck Plateau. However, just after they began
their hasty departure a strange thing happened to both of them.
They experienced a ‘memory blank’ which completely blanked out their knowledge of everything that
happened to them between the time that they saw the craft until they reached the top
of the Plateau. Looking at their watches upon reaching the Plateau, they found that
their walk from the spot where they had seen the craft had taken them 1 hour and 20
minutes.
The mystery craft must have gone un-noticed by any other hikers and campers
that might have made the walk out to Ruined Castle that day and could have been
mistaken for a rock obscured by silvery shining ferns.
I later made a visit to the spot
and realised how well hidden the craft must have been, and that my friends had keen
eyes to have noticed it. By then of course the mystery craft had gone, perhaps flown away the night
after the boys had found it.
What a pity neither of them had a camera with them, I
thought at the time.
The story may not have ended there, for in the next few weeks following Mark
and David’s discovery of the UFO, strange incidents occurred around Ruined Castle.
One night an eerie green glow lit up the formation; and on another evening strange ‘white glowing humanoid figures’ were seen moving about in the forest depths by campers.
One young couple asleep in their tent on another night, were woken up by a
bright, silvery glow that enveloped their two-man tent.
Thinking it to be the torches of
other campers that might have made their way along the Ruined Castle track in the
dark, the couple emerged to see a 1.8m tall, “human-like glowing form”, as they said later.
‘It immediately strode up to the woman, appeared to grasp her with both its arms,
then pass right through her. At this point she fainted, while before her shocked male
companion the “human-light form” appeared to fade away to nothing!
Weird? Many other people in Australia and worldwide have made similar
claims.