There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone in which an anxious man spots a demonic creature out his plane window. When I saw the episode as a child, the jump scare with the demon’s face, looming large outside the glass, nearly made me cack my dacks (as we used to say back then). To this day, I still have some residual terror about looking out cabin windows in the dark.
Spare a thought, then, for Frederick Valentich, a young pilot who disappeared over Bass Strait on an evening flight to King Island on 21 October 1978. Before the pilot vanished, he reported a strange object hovering above his plane: a long, shiny, metallic thing, with flashing green lights. His last words were “it’s not an aircraft” before the transmission cut out.
Despite an extensive search, no trace of Frederick and his Cessna was ever found.
Today, people still wonder: what did Frederick see that night? Was he being stalked by an alien aircraft? Or was his judgement clouded by his belief in UFOs? Some speculate that he may have seen a military plane, or the beam of a lighthouse, or perhaps even his own lights reflected in the water. Others speculate that Frederick may have staged his disappearance, or that he carried out an elaborate suicide.
Frederick’s story has stayed with me and my family because we were on a flight over Bass Strait the night he disappeared. I cannot recall the details, but my dad remembers our pilot telling us a plane had gone missing. A few days later, newspapers were ablaze with headlines about Frederick’s last radio call: “Pilot tells of UFO then vanishes.”
My latest survivalist thriller, The Wreck (Allen & Unwin), is inspired by this real-life tale, but focuses on a fictional pilot named Donovan “Van” Spector, who disappears in 1977.
The main action takes place twenty years later, when the pilot’s wreck has been spotted on a remote island in the Strait. A group of adventurers sets sail to uncover the truth – but ends up stranded. On the island, the survivors must confront a terrifying reality: their lives are in danger, no one is coming to their rescue, and a sinister presence is watching them in the shadows.
The book plays on Bass Strait’s reputation as the ‘Bermuda Triangle of the South,’ a wild and treacherous body of water, with a grim history of shipwrecks and missing aircraft.
But The Wreck is also a love letter to the Strait as a place of sanctuary, an area abundant in water and wildlife, and a potential retreat from the fall of civilisation.
So, The Wreck is a little bit Twilight Zone, a little bit X-Files, and a little bit Lost. It’s also a whole lot of suspense and a whole lot of jump scares . . . but hopefully nothing that makes you cack your dacks.
More info here.