It was way back in the 1950s that a flying saucer landed in Lambton Park.
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Lambton’s Phil Mahoney was a kid at the time – about eight years old.
He remembers the day vividly. How could he forget?
His neighbour, a bloke called George Bunn, was sitting in a men’s shed, opposite the park’s rotunda. George was having a drink there, after the pub had closed.
“George Bunn was sitting there and he saw a silver object coming through the sky and land next to the rotunda,” Phil recalled.
“It sobered him up that much, he ran up to the local police station and told the local sergeant all about it.”
George was a well-known drinker.
The sergeant told him “the drink’s got to you, I’ll drive you home”, Phil said.
“Anyway, the next morning, the council gardener/park ranger walked over near the rotunda and thought ‘someone’s burnt a fire last night’.
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“He couldn’t work out what it was. It was a complete circle about 40 metres in diameter.
“He went up to the police station to report it.”
Then it hit the sergeant: this was where George Bunn said he saw the flying saucer the night before.
George was a resident of Devitre Street in Lambton, which is where Phil lived.
The next morning, word got around the neighbours that George had seen a flying saucer land.
“So we all went down to the park,” Phil said.
“I was the youngest of eight kids. So all my brothers and sisters headed down the park to look where the flying saucer landed,” he said.
“The grass didn’t grow for 18 months on that burnt patch.”
Years later, the grass there would grow in unusual clovers.
“You’d get six-, seven- and eight-leaf clovers,” Phil said.
“It was the most rare finding of clovers in that particular spot where the flying saucer landed.”
Phil had originally thought that George was the only witness to the UFO landing.
But one night on “Graeme Gilbert’s 2SM Super Radio Network”, a listener rang up and said “my dad was with George Bunn the night that he saw the flying saucer land in Lambton Park”, Phil said.
Phil thought this made sense because blokes “used to drink in pairs” at the men’s shed in the park.
Phil has a theory that the flying saucer landed in the park because it was attracted to the rotunda, which “had a flying saucer-type surface on top of it”.
Phil also surmises that space aliens may have been keeping an eye on Lambton for years because “it was the first suburb in Newcastle to have electricity”.
“They would have seen that from space,” he said.
An artist impression of the flying saucer that landed in the park was sketched by Ken Shilling and published in the book, The Story of Lambton: A Suburb of Newcastle.
Send your UFO stories to topics@theherald.com.au.
Westfield Parking Trick
Topics wrote last Friday that our Foxtel was on the blink.
We rang Foxtel and spoke to someone overseas, who advised us to “turn the HDMI cable around”.
This made no sense to us. But lo and behold, it worked.
Warners Bay’s Garry Sullivan told Topics a similar story.
“Recently my wife and I were shopping at Westfield Kotara. Upon leaving the complex, my wife put the parking ticket in the machine at the exit, only for it not to open the barrier.
“Not knowing what to do and with many cars starting to form up behind us, one of these motorists came up and suggested that my wife press the ’red button’.
“Upon doing so, a voice was heard to ask what our problem was. My wife advised she had placed the ticket into the machine with the arrow correctly pointing toward the machine, but the barrier remained closed.
“The voice then suggested that she reverse the ticket, with the arrow pointing toward her. This she did and lo and behold, the barrier opened.
“We live in a world of weird and wonderful things.”
That we do, Garry, that we do.
