Welcome to Unexplained Extra, with me, Richard McLean, Smith.

For the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that for one reason or other

didn't make it into the show.

In last week's episode, the final flight, we looked at the tragic story of Australian

training corps pilot, Fred Felentage, and his mysterious disappearance one evening in

October 1978.

Fred had been attempting a solo flight across the Bass Strait just to the south of Melbourne,

Australia, when he vanished without a trace.

In a famous final communication between Fred and Air Traffic Control, it appeared that

Fred was being tracked by a large UFO just prior to his disappearance.

If, as some believe, Fred had in fact fabricated the event.

It has been suggested that the Australian release of Steven Spielberg's close encounters

of the third kind in March of that year may have served as a possible source of inspiration.

Yet only six months previously, something far more fantastical had occurred that would

no doubt have been noted by Fred, a young man with a keen interest in UFOs, and the hunt

for alien life.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is the term given to humanity's

collective attempts to find signs of intelligent life in the universe.

Of course, we may always have looked to the night sky and wondered whether or not we

were alone, but it wasn't until a remarkable discovery confirmed in 1887 that we began

to conceive of a way in which we might actually begin to find out.

In 1864, Scottish physicist James Clark Maxwell proposed his groundbreaking theory that

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