THE "BENT HEADLIGHT BEAMS" AFFAIR
The Burkes Flat close encounter involved the reported "bending" of car headlight beams and a related physical trace. A car fatality at the same spot has been connected with the UFO incident at the site. If the observation is to be accepted as accurately observed, in this one case we have an experience that seemingly defies the laws of physics -- the famous "bent headlight beam" case of Victoria.
At about 8 pm, on April 4th, 1966, Ron Sullivan, a streel construction busi nessman from Maryborough, was travelling on a straight sealed section of the Dunolly - St. Arnaud road, near Burkes Flat, in central country Victoria.
Ahead in a paddock off to his right, Sullivan observed an unusual light.
He first took it to be a tractor, engaged in night ploughing, but as he drew closer, Sullivan began to see a most unusual light display, located at ground level. The following things happened quickly as to drew closer to the scene, and then passed it.
Sullivan was paying attention to both the light display in the paddock on his right and the road. He observed to his s urprise that his car headlight beams 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 seemingly coincident with the objects position in relation to the paddock and road. As he got closer the angle of bending of his car's 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. Sullivan turned the car to the right and regain the direction of travel along the straight section of road, thoroughly confused and leaving behind the strange display in the paddock.
Sullivan observed the following sequence of light display in the strange phenomenon in the paddock. Initially, as he approached Sullivan saw a white phosphorous type of light on the ground, that appeared to be about 15 feet in diameter. Sullivan told me:
"It opened up and there was another white oval on top of it, about 30 feet (in height, coming down making the shape of a cone (with a) 15 feet bottom diameter and 20 feet to diameter - and in that cone were tubes of coloured lights - all the lights as you see as you look through the spectrum ("all the colours of the rainbow") ... red, blue, indigo and 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."
Ron Sullivan had his car lights checked and found them to be working properly. Back 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. Sullivan reported his experience to police. At the accident site, it was determined that Taylor's car had collided with the same tree that Sullivan almost collided with 2 nights earlier, as he fought to control his car during the "bend headlight beam" episode. Directly opposite the tree in the paddock, about 70 yards from the roadway, coincident with where Sullivan saw the strange light display, a shallow depression was found in the fallowed ground. It was a little over 3 feet 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 fallowing. There appeared to be no explanation for the depression or the light display.
The Victorian group, VFSRS (later Victorian UFO Research Society) undertook some investigations at the time but published only a brief report.
Chalker, B., The Bent Headlight Beam Case Revisited, UFORAN, 5:3, May-Jun 1984, 17-29.
http://www.project1947.com/forum/bctrace2.htm