Now a 15-year-old Tinbeerwah school student has snapped a mysterious image that adds further weight to growing speculation we are not alone.

Trying out his new digital camera behind his Sunrise Road home around 3.30pm one recent afternoon, Charles McKenzie took a photo which revealed a small grey object that looks very much like a flying saucer.

The keen photographer said he had no reason to suspect the brand new $600, six-megapixel Canon PowerShot s3IS camera had malfunctioned as none of the other photographs he had taken showed any abnormalities.

“I took another of the sky right before it, but it only appeared in one of the photos,” he said.
“I looked at the lens and there was definitely nothing on it. I just had it set to auto focus and the flash wasn’t on.”

Glennys Mackay – Australian National Director for the Mutual UFO Network and Queensland UFO Network spokesperson – said the image had all the hallmarks of a spacecraft, including a distinct electromagnetic field.

She was doubtful it had been “fudged in” using photographic software or that it was an aeroplane.

“I’m confident it’s genuine,” she said.

“I have had two other people look at it and if you enhance it, it seems to have an energy circle above it ... there’s a slight circle of light which could be radiation around it, but it’s definitely not a plane, it’s impossible that it’s a reflection from a plane because it’s out in the open.”

But Owen Bennedick, from Wappa Falls Observatory, said even without seeing it he was 80% confident the shape was reflected light from a high-flying aircraft – a common cause of UFO sightings.

Other explanations were a satellite or an electromagnetic presence caused by pressurised rock in minor ground tremors. But Charles said he wasn’t so sure.

“I do believe in UFOs but I’m not into big conspiracy theories, I just believe they are up there,” he said.

Black Mountain resident Barry Sheridan said he and his wife had frequently seen mysterious lights from their balcony but he was not convinced extra-terrestrials were to blame. “It really does go back a long time but until I see the window with the arm waving I’m holding out,” he said.