"As soon as I arrived I realised that we were in the paddock adjacent to, not on, the correct site," said Mr Mulckey, who did not have council approval to investigate the adjoining property. Late access to the eyewitness and misreading of aerial surveys were blamed for the venture's failure. It included aerial photographic surveys retrieved from the archives for the years before and after the alleged burial, which indicated substantial digging. However, this was enough to prompt Bungunya farmer and pilot David Mulckey to launch an excavation in 2001. The contractors claimed a quarter of a century later to have buried the aircraft but could not be contacted for this story. He did not see aircraft going into the ground, but he saw contractors digging a trench, and a large crate in it.
"I do not believe there are any hidden aircraft and various 'sightings' over the years were probably parts or partial aircraft pilfered or purchased as scrap," he said.īut a lifetime Oakey resident, who did not wish to be named, claims to be a reliable witness to the burial site of five aircraft in what may have been a trial disposal near the old Federal Mine. Toowoomba resident Laurie Wenham, who was employed in breaking down the aircraft prior to melting in 1948, is sceptical there are any planes.
If hidden aircraft do exist, there are three main possibilities: they are buried stored in a hidden underground hangar or secreted in a coalmine. Opinions vary on the mystery and stories range from a high-level defence conspiracy among RAAF officers to a single leading aircraftman who hid or buried aircraft because he couldn't bear to see the magnificent machines destroyed. That should have been the ignominious end of arguably the greatest single-place fighter ever built, certainly the most legendary and romanticised. RAAF records show that 544 aircraft - 232 of them Spitfires - were flown to Oakey to be sold to a scrap metal dealer. They are the remnants of 656 Mark V and Mark VIII Spitfires that were delivered to the RAAF during the war. Many have searched for the legendary British fighters, reportedly still in their crates and hidden since the end of the World War II around the Queensland town of Oakey, but so far nobody has been able to lay claim to what would be a multi-million-dollar find.
IT'S the Lasseter's Reef of warbirds - a rumoured stash of mint-condition Spitfires hidden underground in rural Queensland. Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods: the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s the 2 Tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock forming ska-punk and third wave ska, which involved bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.Fact or fable: hunt is on for buried Spitfires Later it became popular with many skinheads. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat.
It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae.