Case · C-054
Nullarbor 1988: the light that followed the Knowles family's car
Eyre Highway near Mundrabilla, Nullarbor (Western Australia) · Australia · Jan 20, 1988
In flight Civilian witnesses Physical traces
Unexplained
- What happened
- At about 4 a.m., on the Eyre Highway near Mundrabilla, the Knowles family, traveling from Perth to Melbourne, saw a light approaching the car and recounted that the vehicle had been lifted and then dropped back onto the road, with a tire blowout and a deposit of dark dust. At the Mundrabilla roadhouse the family spoke with two truck drivers who had traveled the same road at about the same time. A few hours later a forensic police investigator took a sample of dust from the roof of the car; the case was later studied by private researchers, including Keith Basterfield and Bill Chalker.
- Proposed explanation
- No official conclusion is on record. According to Keith Basterfield's catalog, half of the roof dust sample, analyzed in the United States, contained clay and salt particles, and a second sample of black dust, analyzed through the researcher Richard Haines, turned out to be brake dust; Reader's Digest also reports the hypothesis of a temperature inversion that is said to have distorted the lights of a distant truck. No hypothesis has been verified.
- Official investigation
- Police (collection of a dust sample from the car)
Sources
- Keith Basterfield, A Reference Catalogue of UAP Reported from the Nullarbor Plain Region of Southern Australia (Project 1947, 2013) (analysis)
- 14 things you never knew about UFOs, including the night one followed a family across the Nullarbor (Reader's Digest Australia) (press)
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