Roger Stankovic
Roger Stankovic is an Australian UFO researcher, academic, and Australia–New Zealand National Director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). He holds a Bachelor of Science in biological sciences from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in neuroscience through the University of Sydney's Department of Medicine, where his doctoral thesis concerned motor neurone disease and he managed a neurology laboratory for fifteen years. He subsequently became a teacher and lecturer at Ultimo TAFE, where he teaches statistics, biology, and microscopy.
Biography
MUFON directorship
Stankovic has served as MUFON's Australia–New Zealand National Director for approximately six years as of the time of the interview, having joined as a field investigator motivated by a personal UFO sighting during his teenage years on his family's 25-acre farm west of Sydney. MUFON, founded in 1969 in the wake of the closure of the United States Air Force's Project Blue Book and the debunking by the Condon Committee, operates a case management system through which civilian and military sighting reports are submitted online, assigned to national directors, and distributed to field investigators who follow up with witnesses and arrive at classifications of unknown, identified, hoax, or natural phenomenon. As of the interview, approximately one thousand Australian cases had been logged in the MUFON database.
Research and public activities
Animal mutilations
Animal mutilation cases investigated in New South Wales and Victoria, including a decapitated prize ram near Bendigo, Victoria, and historical cattle mutilation cases in Casino, New South Wales, dating to the 1970s — in connection with which he conducted a multi-hour interview with a veterinarian who examined some of the carcasses. Animal mutilation is a genuine phenomenon associated with UFO activity, citing consistent physical features — precision cutting, complete blood drainage, removal of organs with no surrounding evidence of a wound, absence of footprints or signs of struggle, and bones broken in patterns consistent with the carcass having been dropped from altitude — that he considers inexplicable by predation, cult activity, or government monitoring programs. The worldwide distribution of the phenomenon — including confirmed Australian cases in Victoria, New South Wales, and Mackay — as evidence against any single government program being responsible. The first confirmed case is dated to 1967 with the mutilation of a female Appaloosa mare named Lady (press-nicknamed "Snippy") in Colorado.
Human cases
The case of Todd Sees, a Pennsylvania man who disappeared while riding a quad bike on his property and whose body was later found emaciated in dense undergrowth that witnesses reported could not have been penetrated on foot — with two independent witnesses having reportedly observed a UFO in the area and a person being lifted into it at approximately the time of Sees' disappearance. MUFON has also investigated at least one human death in New Zealand which Stankovic declines to discuss publicly but for which he has published an account in the MUFON newsletter.
Aerial UAP
Among active Australian cases, analysis of orb-type objects includes — small daytime dots of light maneuvering at hypersonic velocities and punching holes through clouds — captured on dashcam and video by a witness who has recorded them on multiple occasions; expert analysts in the United States have examined the video metadata and are unable to classify the objects as known aerial phenomena.