Journalist Danielle O’Neal and her podcast team spent months investigating the mystery of crop circles in Australia. Nearly 60 years ago, in the country town of Tully, a local spotted an unexplainable flying object in the sky. Later, crop circles were discovered. Below, Danielle shares the story of her investigation into Tully’s crop circles.
There was an overpowering aroma that fell somewhere between the sweetness of a pancake breakfast and the bitterness of a mechanic’s garage. “The smell of molasses smacks you in the face, doesn’t it,” my local colleague asked, grinning from ear to ear. This was the smell of business as usual in the Far North Queensland town of Tully. Cane bins rumble along train tracks in the shadow of a dominating sugar mill right in the main street.
The stories I’d been told of Tully were true. This was a working-class town, alright, built on the backs of hard-working farmers in cane, cattle and bananas. But I was here today for a different story. A nearly 60-year-old mystery that altered the lives of a handful of those very same salt-of-the-earth farmers. One that also opened a Pandora’s box of UFOs, crop circles and the unexplained. As clouds of sugar-filled steam billowed from the mill, it was clear the unanswered questions this enigma raised were still bubbling away under the surface.
The crop circles appear
On a clear morning in January 1966, banana farmer George Pedley, in his late 20s, was driving his tractor through the neighbouring Pennisi family’s sugarcane farm. He was passing a lagoon when he saw what he described as a flying saucer. Initially, George would recount, he’d heard a loud hissing and thought he’d blown a tyre. As he got off the tractor, the hissing became louder and he realised his tyre was intact. Looking up, he saw a large object he recounted as two saucer dishes facing each other, hovering above the lagoon. It then shot off above the treetops.
Soon after, he spotted something else inexplicable in that horseshoe-shaped lagoon. In the middle of the murky water, tall reeds were now woven into a 30-foot diameter circle.
The so-called “flying saucer nest” – a term predating crop circle terminology – was so peculiar it became national news. Hundreds of sightseers flocked to the sugarcane farm to see it for themselves.
The man who discovered the crop circles in Australia
By all accounts, George Pedley was a humble, hardworking bushie type who was far too busy to waste his time making up stories of flying saucers. Getting to the bottom of what had really happened in Tully – and why believable people say seemingly unbelievable things – was the premise of the podcast I was here to make: Expanse: Uncropped.
I’d planned to meet a sugarcane farmer in Tully. I’d spoken to him on the phone earlier in what had been one of the vaguest conversations of my life. “There’s more to this than anyone realises,” Shane Pennisi had said elusively in that very brief conversation we had before I took the journey up north.
Shane was seven years old when this UFO mystery descended on his family’s cane farm. He still lives and works there to this day. To get there, I drove about 15 minutes outside of the Tully township, to an even smaller farming locality called Euramo. Sunny weather. Odd. After all, Tully is one of the wettest places in Australia.
Shane was expecting me, but I had no clue what to expect in return. He’d had too many people call him up and try to put words in his mouth. My research into what happened here was limited to old archival newspapers. Even on the phone, he could tell we were serious about understanding what truly happened here. He’d said if I came to Tully, we’d have a cuppa and go from there.
Meeting a local who remembers the crop circles in Australia
Meeting Shane for the first time in person, in the single-storey farmhouse he and his wife called home, wasn’t like I anticipated. The cautious man who wouldn’t divulge any meaningful information over the phone was suddenly warm and charismatic. Where was the tinfoil hat or doomsday bunker?
After a very pleasant smoko, Shane and I jumped in his ute and cruised between the cane fields to that fateful lagoon. A narrow dirt road eventually opened up into a wide, grassy glade with a horseshoe-shaped lagoon the only noticeable landmark. Shane and his late father, Albert Pennisi, had very deliberately left this area untouched because of how important the events that took place here were to them. It was a lot to take in.
Shane began pointing out where his neighbour, George, had seen the UFO: The towering treetops it supposedly shot through when it took off, and where the reeds had been flattened and woven to become the saucer nest. The story was told as a matter of fact. For Shane, there was no doubt that what George saw on that summer’s day was real.
The fateful day in 1966
Back in 1966, Shane had spent the day at the beach with his family and came home that afternoon to find George on their front steps, white as a sheet. Visibly shaken, George had shared what he’d seen that morning, taking them to the lagoon to see what had been left behind with their own eyes.
This was a version of George that Shane had never seen before. The unflappable George was a regular at their family table after a hard day’s work on his banana farm next door. Shane and many others described George to me as the last person you’d expect to come out with a story about a flying saucer. It just wasn’t like him. But what he showed them – and what was eventually reported to police and printed in newspapers across the country – seemed truly out of this world.
As word quickly spread about the “flying saucer nest” in tropical Queensland, the ensuing media storm saw those involved hunker down. At first, George faced the media, earnestly recounting his unbelievable experience to whoever was asking. It wasn’t long until the coverage soured, and his tale from the tropics became fodder for mockery and ridicule.
Doubting the crop circles
All kinds of alternative explanations were thrown around about the crop circles in Australia. The local copper’s report said he thought it could have been a helicopter spinning upside down, and that George had mistaken it for a flying saucer. Other explanations included crocodiles fighting, birds mating, or an elaborate hoax. The closest thing to an official conclusion came from the Department of Air. It reckoned the most likely cause was willy willies or waterspouts, a weather phenomenon. But those explanations, even today, don’t stack up with the people who know the landscape and George’s character.
The mild-mannered banana farmer quickly retreated from the media spotlight, right up until his death two years ago. Even today, George’s relatives won’t speak publicly about his flying saucer sighting because of the derision he experienced. The Pennisi family quickly realised that they didn’t want to share his fate, so when unexplainable phenomena continued to happen on their farm, they kept it quiet.
Other unusual happenings in Tully
There’s a saying in Tully that if you can’t see the top of the mountain, it’s raining. If you can see it, it’s about to rain. The sunny day I’d first experienced, similar to the weather when George had spotted the flying saucer, was rare. As the rain set in during my trip, I’d arranged to meet with other locals, people who’d known George and were around when the mysterious saucer nest first appeared.
Many of these people also had their own experiences of the unexplained – strange lights in the sky, Yowies and other mysterious happenings in the dense scrub. One of those locals was Ron Hunt. He was in his twenties back in 1966 when George reported seeing a flying saucer. Around the same time as George’s sighting, Ron was driving his own truck across the Tully River Bridge in the early hours of the morning.
“I saw this light come down below the mountaintop level. It was low, and it just went from west to east,” Ron told me. “I was like the Mayor of Hiroshima. I said, ‘What the hell was that?’ and the hair in the back of my neck went up.”
But the taboo surrounding the UFO topic meant he kept it quiet.
Investigating crop circles in Australia leads to more questions
When my team investigated, it turned out the 1966 Tully nest was just the beginning of unusual activity on the Pennisi farm. That fact hasn’t come to light before today. Shane says these mysterious “nests” have appeared dozens of times over the decades – the last of them about 10 years ago. Peculiarly, there was never another UFO sighting like the one George had on the farm.
“What gets me is how they knew to do it when nobody was ever around,” Shane tells me. He isn’t sure about who “they” are, but he’s open to possibilities, including extraterrestrial.
The more Shane revealed, the more new questions began piling up. Not just about the additional nests on the property over decades – some of which were backed up by photographs. There were also new questions about government surveillance.
Was there a cover-up?
To this day, Shane believes that the Australian security and intelligence agency ASIO monitored his family after the 1966 sighting, but the Pennisi family kept it all quiet. They didn’t want to become a spectacle.
I’d connected with Shane at a unique time in his life. For decades, he’d kept all this quiet, but after recent major heart surgery, he wanted to tell his story in detail for the first time.
Looking into this story was bringing up uncomfortable questions around believability, conspiracy and truth. Making the podcast, I found myself returning over and over again to the same question: What happens when people say seemingly unbelievable things?
The crop circles in Australia get military attention
It wasn’t just in Tully. I spoke with lifetime Australian UFO researchers who’d taken a scientific approach to data collection and analysis of unexplained phenomena. While it might’ve been easier to write it all off as ‘tinfoil hat’ nonsense, it was increasingly hard to dismiss what people were telling me.
It turned out that even the Australian military had spent decades interested in the topic.
The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) spent more than 30 years as the official body for investigating UFO reports – then termed “unusual aerial sightings”. Witness testimony, documentation and air force analysis would all end up in the RAAF’s UFO files. The overwhelming majority of the UFO reports could be explained by mundane causes, like weather, but there is a small percentage of cases that even the Air Force still can’t explain. Tully’s saucer nest is one of those incidents.
Rising interest in crop circles in Australia and the world
As the podcast team and I spent months re-examining this Queensland UFO mystery from almost 60 years ago, the broader topic of UFOs had a spike in public interest. The United States Congress has recently held several hearings into UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), and NASA has put its hand up to conduct a serious scientific inquiry. However, even NASA has had to keep the identity of its director of UAP research a secret because of the ridicule and taboo surrounding the topic.
None of these international endeavours has so far turned up direct physical proof of an extraterrestrial explanation, but they also haven’t been able to rule out that option. UFO researchers claim that momentum is brewing, and it’s hoped these big institutions approaching the topic without stigma will finally provide some science-based answers.
The case of the Tully saucer nest has remained surrounded in interest because, even after almost 60 years, nothing compelling has come out to explain or discredit what occurred.
In fact, revisiting the story again only turned up even more questions. Was it all an elaborate hoax? One that busy working-class farmers kept up their entire lives? Was it perhaps some kind of natural phenomenon that could still be explained by rigorous science? Or – potentially the most uncomfortable possibility – was it something that we don’t yet understand?
Listen to Danielle O’Neal’s podcast, Expanse: Uncropped.
This article was originally published in the April 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
