Terry Brown

FLYING saucers, crop circles, missing film, disappearing files, denials, military cover-ups, threats and shadowy Men in Black.

It couldn't happen here? More than 100 witnesses to one of the world's biggest UFO mysteries are adamant that it did, in broad daylight in Clayton South on April 6, 1966.

And 44 years later, many are still fuming that the military response and the incident itself have been erased from records.

They want some official acknowledgment that something weird happened above and behind Westall high and primary schools that morning.

London's Telegraph newspaper rates it as the fifth- greatest UFO mystery.

A documentary - Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery - premieres on Austar and Foxtel's Sci-Fi Channel at 8.30 PM today. Producers hope it will flush out an official who can say what the military were doing and what they found.

Researcher Shane Ryan has spent five years tracking 110 witnesses, but could find no one official, and no record of a military response.

But locals remember it vividly, saying it lasted days.

A TV crew covered the incident and it screened on the 6 pm news, but the film canister from the job was recently found empty in the station archives.

Several witnesses say they were warned off speaking by sharply-dressed men in dark suits, in the principal's office and at home.

The Dandenong Journal reported the incident on its front page two days in a row, with interviews with witnesses.

Many were school pupils who say they saw flying saucers from their school yards. Some ran to Grange Reserve, where the craft appeared to have come down.

Terry Peck, 56, was among them, and says she saw a silver, classic-shape saucer rise up.

"I was about 6 m away from it. I think I saw some lights underneath it. We all got called to an assembly... and they told us all to keep quiet."

Retired engineer Kevin Hurley, a Monash Uni student then, said: "There were army or air force people going around the area with geiger counters or metal detectors. After 44 years, I reckon they need to come clean on this."