This article was published in the daily newspaper Byron Shire Echo, of Byron Bay, Australia, on October 21, 2003.
Sean Thompson had planned a quiet walk along Suffolk Park beach with his girlfriend last Wednesday night at about 9 o'clock but that's not exactly what he got. Lying on the sand and looking up at the sky the couple noticed a bright light which they thought at first to be a plane.
"We were lying there together and witnessed a very strange thing in the sky, it started at the very tip of Broken Head point and had a rotating light disc type thing moving in a sort of irregular pattern," said the non-drinking and drug-free artist. "It was very bizarre, it seemed to move across going easterly along Broken Point and then I noticed another strange object further in front, beneath it moving in the same direction and it stopped and the other one caught up with it and they seemed to communicate with each other."
"The first one came straight across Suffolk Beach, it was so close I could see the disc. We were completely blown out with the thing in the air and when I turned around the second one had landed on the beach about 300 yards away at the southern end of Broken Head, it seemed to be hovering 10 foot above the sand and rotating, it was so bright that it was lighting up the beach and it changed form, started as a cone and as it was turning it would open and let off a golden light."
"At this point my girlfriend was really quite scared and at one point it came towards us and we started to run a little bit away from it. It was really the most unbelievable thing."
Mr Thompson made a point of declaring that he his not a drug user, doesn't drink and is not obsessed with the existence of UFOs, only approaching the press because he what he saw seemed so real. He is hoping others apart from him and his girlfirend may have seen something too but nobody had reported any sightings to the police.
A spokesperson for the Australian Air Force said there were six planes flying from Evans Head back to Amberley in Queensland which would have flown near the area Mr Thompson described at about that time. The spokesperson said the planes do have rotating lights, as do all aircraft but would not have been flying so close to the beach.