TV MINI-SERIES – Developed / Financing
A Geoffrey Wright project.

On the 6th of April, 1966, hundreds of students and four teachers at Westall High School, on the south-eastern edge of Melbourne, saw a grey, saucer-shaped craft, about twice the size of a family car, flying back and forth at unearthly speed, and hovering overhead plainly visible for half an hour.

This is not fiction, these are actual events.

Two of these teachers were science teachers; ANDREW GREENWOOD and BARBARA ROBBINS. Barbara, armed with the science room’s 35mm camera, excitedly snapped photos of the object. Two more saucers seemed to be higher up in the sky.

When the main saucer seemed to land in a nearby plantation, scores of students ignored their teachers, racing to jump the school’s back fence to get a closer look. After crossing market gardens and splitting up to tear along the maze-like trails of The Grange, one sole girl had pulled ahead; the school’s best runner, a Yukoslavian immigrant: TANYA. Seconds behind Tanya was another 13-year-old girl, whose name no-one seems to remember.

What happened next remains unclear.

The two girls were found lying on the ground, dazed, as the saucer lifted off, turning on its side to shoot away. It left a circle of flattened grass. Tanya woke from her daze and became hysterical. The other girl remained silent.

The events at Westall are counted among the world’s top 10 UFO incidents. And yet ‘The Westall Incident’ remains largely unknown to the Australian public. But those hundreds of children, and their teachers, remember what they saw that day, and continue to demand answers.

Westall, the series, extrapolates what might have been behind the events of that day. Weaved from dozens of witness testimonies, and a handful of created characters, it enables speculation as to the ultimate nature of The Westall Incident. It gives the witnesses the dramatic agency that they were denied at the time to investigate this mystery, enabling them to explore, through the insights of contemporary science and historical insight, a possible explanation for the events at Westall.

Inspired by the events reported in 1966, Westall tells the story of Westall High student, SOPHIE, whose mind has been merged with the artificial intelligence of a UFO forced to make a landing while investigating a rival alien presence on Earth. When military authorities learn of Sophie’s alien contact, they seek to capture her, while humans under the control of the rival alien force move in; resolved to kill.

Westall will be an utterly unique and audacious television event, grounded in one of Australia’s greatest unsolved mysteries.