Burkes Flat UFO – The “Bent Headlight Beams”

At about 8:00 p.m., Ron Sullivan, was travelling on a straight sealed section of the Dunolly-St.Arnaud road, near Bourkes Flat, in central country Victoria. Ahead in a pasture off to his right, Sullivan observed an unusual light.

He first took it to be a tractor, engaged in night plowing, but as he drew closer, Sullivan began to see a most unusual light display, located at ground level.

The following things happened quickly as he drew closer to the scene, and then passed it. He was paying attention to both the light display in the pasture on his right and the road when he observed the following sequence of light display in the strange phenomenon in the pasture.

Initially, as he approached, Sullivan saw a white phosphorous type of light on the ground that appeared to be about 15′ in diameter. It opened up and there was another white oval on top of it, about 30′ in height, coming down making the shape of a cone, with a 15′ bottom diameter and 20′ top diameter.

And in that cone were tubes of colored lights, all the lights as you see as you look through the spectrum, all the colors of the rainbow red, blue, indigo & purple. Travelling up and down, or they seem to be, from the small oval to the bigger oval at the top. They were going up and down in shafts.

Then gradually the top seemed to come to meet the bottom, They seemed to close in, making a transition of one light oval, similar to first view, everything then just disappeared. The last thing Sullivan saw of the light display was just a spot on the ground, a light spot, become smaller and smaller, to nothing.

Meanwhile, as he was driving, he observed that his car headlight beams suddenly appeared to be pointing in a direction off to the right in the direction of the strange light display and also seemed to be, bending back on an axis with the object in the pasture. As he got closer, the angle of bending of his cars headlight beams became more acute.

He thought his car must have been heading off the road to the right, and immediately compensated by turning it to the left. He found he was now heading directly towards a tree on the left hand side of the road. He turned the car to the right to regain the direction of travel along the straight section of road, thoroughly confused and leaving behind the display in the pasture.

He had his car lights checked and found them to be working properly. Later in Maryborough he found that a young man from Carnegie, Gary Taylor, was killed in a car accident at Burkes Flat on the night of April 6th, two nights later. Sullivan reported his experience to police.

At the accident site, it was determined that Taylors car had collided with the same tree that Sullivan almost collided with 2 nights earlier. Directly opposite the tree in the pasture, about 70 yards from the roadway, coincident with where Sullivan saw the strange light display, a shallow depression was found in the plowed earth.

It was a little over 3′ in diameter and only a few inches in depth. The depression was cleanly scooped out of the sandy soil with no apparent debris around it.

There were no human or animal tracks around the area. The property owner indicated the depression had not been there when he had finished plowing.

There appeared to be no explanation for the depression or the light display.