Case description
Around 21:50 on 4 February 1973, motorists on Route 1 between Iron Knob and Kimba, South Australia, noticed an orange-red display in a scrub clearing beside the road. Brian Hunt was driving with Sharon Finckler; Max Inglis travelled in another car and Allan Degnor followed in a semi-trailer. Keith Basterfield's retrospective preserves their differing observations rather than treating all four as identical corroboration.
Hunt described a sharply defined rectangle roughly 3 metres wide and 1.5 metres high, with a white, ordinarily human-shaped suited figure apparently suspended about a metre above the ground. His view lasted only a few seconds. Sharon, looking later, saw an orange rectangle and white blob, followed by a glow across the road behind them. Inglis saw the rectangular light but no figure. Degnor likened it to an illuminated caravan doorway with a white outlined form, while specifically failing to see any surrounding sides, roof or base. A complete spacecraft was therefore never resolved.
Hunt's father contacted police. Constable Peter Summerton found the young man visibly shaken and returned to the area around 23:10 without locating the display. Basterfield and colleagues investigated on 3 March, after intervening rain, and found no decisive traces or instrument anomalies. Their later visit could not reconstruct the original conditions.
The RAAF replied on 2 May that the cause could not be determined conclusively, suggesting marsh-gas light as a possibility. Basterfield questioned that suggestion because the site was dry scrubland without a swamp. The proposed explanation was not a demonstrated solution. The plate labels its combined vehicle viewpoints and the witnesses' disagreement, retaining an illuminated rectangle without inventing a surrounding hull.
