Sighting near Exmouth in Western Australia in 1991, reported by Annie Farinaccio and two police officers, of a large diamond-shaped craft over the coast road beside the North West Cape naval communication station. On Farinaccio’s account she was later interviewed at length by American military police and pressed to accept a weather-balloon explanation, which she refused to sign.
Why the book opens with it
Ross Coulthart puts this case in the prologue of In Plain Sight rather than opening with Roswell, and the choice is the book’s method in miniature: a named Australian witness, police corroboration, a joint facility, and declassified National Archives files recording decades of anomalous sightings around the same base on one side, public ridicule on the other. It is also the case he could report first-hand rather than inherit.
What it rests on
Farinaccio’s account and the recollection of the officers with her. The interrogation and the pressure to sign are hers alone; no document has been produced for either. The base’s own file history is separate and is checkable.
Connections
North West Cape · Ross Coulthart · In Plain Sight · Westall 1966 · Valentich Disappearance 1978 · Pine Gap