Bill Chalker

William Chalker is Australia's most prominent UFO researcher, active since his hometown of Grafton, New South Wales, became the center of a national UFO flap in 1966 — the same year as the famous Westall mass sighting near Melbourne, which he later spent decades re-investigating. Trained as a chemist (B.Sc. Hons. in chemistry and mathematics from the University of New England), Chalker brought a scientist's insistence on primary documents to a field often short on them, serving as the Australian representative for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization from 1978 to 1986 and the New South Wales state director for the Mutual UFO Network from 1976 to 1993. He is best known for his 1996 book The Oz Files: The Australian UFO Story, a comprehensive survey of the country's sighting history including Westall, and for obtaining and publicizing Royal Australian Air Force files on UFO incidents through freedom-of-information requests, arguing that official Australian records showed more sustained interest than the government publicly admitted. His long engagement with the Westall case — interviewing dozens of the original student and teacher witnesses decades later — became central to keeping the incident in public memory and inspired the 2010 documentary Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery. Chalker has remained publicly skeptical of the more sensational alien-abduction and government-conspiracy strands of the field while maintaining that a residue of Australian cases, Westall foremost among them, resists conventional explanation.