On the morning of January 19, 1966, banana farmer George Pedley was driving a tractor across his neighbour George's swamp-edge paddock at Euramo near Tully in far north Queensland when he heard a loud hissing sound and saw a blue-grey 'saucer-shaped object' rise vertically out of the swamp reeds about 25 metres away. The object — approximately 25 feet wide and nine feet deep — climbed to around 60 feet altitude, rotated once, and shot upward at tremendous speed, disappearing into the clouds within seconds. Pedley drove to the edge of the swamp and found a 32-foot-diameter flattened and counter-clockwise-swirled circle of reeds — the 'nest' where the object had rested. The reeds beneath the flattening were dead, and the surrounding swamp water had been pushed outward in a visible ring.
Pedley, a sober and respected farmer not previously given to fanciful claims, reported the incident to Tully police, who examined the site and photographed the flattened circle; the police file noted that the swamp water had been notably darkened and that the roots of the reeds had been 'torn from below rather than pressed from above.' The RAAF was notified and a formal investigation launched. Over the following three weeks, seven additional similar circles were found in neighbouring paddocks at Horseshoe Lagoon and Trinity Inlet. The RAAF's final report, released in 1967, listed the case as 'unknown' — one of only a handful of Australian Department of Air UFO investigations to receive that classification.
The Tully Saucer Nest is considered the foundational modern Australian UFO case. It pre-dated the 'crop-circle' phenomenon by more than a decade, was witnessed in isolation rather than as a hoax candidate, and produced physical evidence that was documented by state police and the federal military. Pedley himself never sought publicity and refused financial offers for book rights. The original site, now part of a sugarcane property, is still visited by Australian UFO researchers, and Horseshoe Lagoon remains a working reference in RAAF archives.