How Australia's UFO capital fell to ruin in outback NT

ABC News07-22

Along the 3,000 kilometre highway that connects the northern and southern tip of Australia sits a site once deemed the nation's UFO capital.Now it resembles a ghost town.Welcome to Wycliffe Well, ...

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The abandoned petrol station and caravan park sits on the Stuart Highway, 375 kilometres north of Alice Springs.(ABC News: Hamish Harty)A place out of this worldThe year was 1985 and former sailor with the Royal Australian Navy, Lew Farkas, was looking for a change.At the time the small roadhouse store presented an opportunity for Mr Farkas, his wife and their nine-month-old son.\"There was no other competition for hundreds of kilometres,\" he said. As the caravan park grew, Mr Farkas said strange things started happening and the past owners revealed to him there had been sightings of UFOs. Wycliffe Well took its name from a water well built in 1875.(ABC News: Hamish Harty)He claims the previous owner kept these sightings secret to ensure prospective buyers didn't get spooked.But when a journalist from the Tennant Times newspaper wrote a story about potential sightings in the late 1980s, everything changed.\"That was it. I mean, once that got out in the media, afterwards, I was getting phone calls from all over the world and what not,\" Mr Farkas said.A self-proclaimed sceptic of aliens, Mr Farkas shifted the entire marketing of his business.\"Every aspect of Wycliffe Well had to become alien-orientated or space-orientated,\" he said. A decapitated green alien statue has been left in ruins at Wycliffe Well.(ABC News: Hamish Harty)From murals and souvenirs, to a book ledger of so-called UFO sightings – Mr Farkas even began doing tours at night for alien and UFO enthusiasts.\"There were lights flashing around the sky doing crazy manoeuvres that you just couldn't explain,\" he said.The roadhouse grew and started to call itself the UFO capital of Australia.A change of hands After decades of running Wycliffe Well, Mr Farkas sold his business to Anthony 'Arc' Vanderzalm in 2010.He too enjoyed the eccentricities of running a \"green oasis\" in the outback.\"It was so different to anything that I'd really been experiencing before, being in the middle of the NT and the desert,\" Mr Vanderzalm said.\"It was caravan park, it had motel rooms, it was a pub, that was handy.\" Anthony Vanderzalm estimates the repairs would cost into the millions of dollars.(ABC News: Crystalyn Brown)But after years working long days, he too opted to sell, this time to petrol station franchise United Petroleum.He felt that when United took over control of the business, the appeal of other worldly beings wasn't their focus.\"When they bought it they wanted to know how much fuel I sold, that was it. They didn't really want to know much about anything else,\" Mr Vanderzalm said.\"That makes sense they're a fuel company.\"United Petroleum has been contacted for comment. Most of the site has been ransacked from hotel rooms to the cafe inside the service centre.The final straw for the intergalactic roadhouse came with a major flood event in 2022.The operators had to evacuate from the low-lying petrol station to safety.In the months after, as water receded, the site was left abandoned and fell victim to vandals.Alien statues decapitated, glasses broken and walls stripped. Since its closure Wycliffe Well has become popular among people who enjoy exploring dilapidated locations.(ABC News: Hamish Harty)Tough businessJustin Harris manages Devils Marbles Hotel, where Wycliffe Well's then-owners took refuge.The publican has managed venues for more than a decade across the country and said the difference between failure and success could often be small.\"There's not as much share to go around, so if you can take two to three per cent off the bloke down the road that's a big change,\" Mr Harris said.\"It's a very eerie place now, it's completely abandoned and it's such a shame.\" Justin Harris manages the Devils Marbles Hotel up the road from Wycliffe Well.(ABC News: Hamish Harty)Tourism Central Australia CEO Danial Rochford said he hoped one day the site would be restored.\"The dollars out there for investment are not like they were and so I'd be hopeful but at this stage it is a difficult environment,\" he said.But Mr Vanderzalm doesn't believe there's much chance of it returning to its glory days.\"To have it destroyed is just heartbreaking,\" he said. The accommodation cabins at Wycliffe Well have been vandalised.(ABC News: Hamish Harty)Posted 22m ago22 minutes agoSun 21 Jul 2024 at 8:31pmShareCopy linkFacebookX (formerly Twitter)Related StoriesNASA's report finds no evidence of 'extraterrestrial origin' for UAP sightings China, Russia … or aliens? Unidentified aerial sightings remain a mystery to US intelligenceHundreds meet to share stories of alien encountersMore on:Alice SpringsDarwinHuman InterestTennant CreekTourism and Leisure IndustryWeird and Wonderful","kind":null,"is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":1},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":true,"deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.29.1","shortVersion":"4.29.1","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"ttm","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/2453820875"}