Hello. Thanks for having me on the show. I've spent the last ten years looking into aviation anomalies, and I've heard the tape myself. There is one case that keeps me up at night. It happened back in October of 1978, down here in Australia. A twenty-year-old pilot named Franklin Vance took off from Moorabbin Airport in a Cessna 182. He was heading for King Island across the Bass Strait. It was supposed to be a routine flight to pick up some crayfish for his family. The weather was perfect. Visibility was unlimited. But Franklin never made it to King Island, and neither he nor his plane were ever seen again.
What makes this case haunt me isn't the disappearance itself..it's the six minutes of radio conversation recorded right before he vanished. I've heard the tape myself, and I've gone over the transcript of his communication with Melbourne Flight Service a thousand times. Flight Service audio tape is mentioned in reports - Phoenix' It started at seven oh six in the evening. Franklin radioed the controller, a man named Simon Reynolds. Franklin asked if there was any known traffic below five thousand feet. Reynolds checked his instruments and told him there was no known traffic. That's when Franklin said, 'Seems to be a large aircraft below five thousand.'
This is where it gets strange. Franklin described a large aircraft with four bright landing lights passing over him at incredible speed. He couldn't identify the model, but he said it was moving too fast to be anything conventional. A moment later, the object approached him again from the east. Franklin told the controller, 'It seems to be playing some sort of game.' He said it was flying over him two, maybe three times at speeds that were impossible for a standard aircraft.
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