"I went downstairs asking my husband to check that light and he asked about any tower in that place. He's a skeptic and treats my interest in UFO and paranormal phenomena as a harmless oddity. Anyway, he approached the window and peered by it claiming that it looks like a light on a certain building. I asked if he see any in the area. As I mentioned, the night was very bright and there were no construction under the light. I grasped my binoculars and when I began observing the object, I saw a huge ball of light. I passed the binoculars to my husband and went to take a photo. Unfortunately, we had only an analogue camera and I'm afraid that nothing would be visible on the photo."

The witness feels pity that she tried to take a snap of the object. When she returned her husband dressed up and went outside with binoculars. She went along with him. Both of them noticed that the mysterious light began moving in southern direction from Dlugoleka. "As the object was moving left [looking from our perspective], the light became less intense and finally only 3 lights [positioned in a row] left. They were twinkling as those of a plane. The outer ones were white and the central one green [...]. Anyway, we were observing the ball of intense light for 3 minutes that was standing motionless and after that time it began to move."

Mrs. Ewa isn't able to determine the altitude the object was while her husband admitted that it was positioned about 0.5 - 1 km over the ground.

"Most of the calls came from Forster, with people saying their windows and doors were rattling," the police spokesman said. "A few residents were concerned people were breaking into their homes. But it's a fair dinkum mystery what happened."

The "tremor" lasted anything from a few seconds to up to two minutes, according to reports.

Taree radio station 2RE announcer Jeremy Miller said he started taking calls about 9.25pm (AEDT) from people wondering what was happening.

"It was felt around Forster, Nabiac, and then up as far as Taree, Wingham.

"The Taree Aquatic Club told me they felt the windows rattle for a couple of minutes."

One caller to 2RE, reported on Macquarie Radio, said: "There was all this shaking; my windows were just shaking."

Another caller said: "Both my doors, back and front, rattled at the same time, it sounded like there was thunder but it wasn't thunder. It was definitely coming from under the ground."

They had been monitoring her since she had revealed the sinking of a British battleship earlier in the war - even though the government had suppressed the news to maintain morale at home.

It took a jury just 30 minutes to find her guilty and she became the last person to be convicted of witchcraft in Britain.

As she was led away to start her nine-month sentence in London's Holloway Prison, the housewife cried out in her broad Scottish accent: "I never heard so many lies in all my life!"

Helen's "gift" had long put her on a collision course with the authorities and led to one of the most bizarre chapters in British judicial history.

Today, exactly 50 years after her death, campaigners hope to persuade Home Secretary John Reid to overturn the verdict. "Helen Duncan was one of the world's top mediums, a woman who gave hope and comfort to many," says Ray Taylor, editor of Psychic World.

"It was her gift that caused the government to hound her under an archaic law which eventually led to her death.

"It's a scandal and it is time that her name was cleared."

Helen Macfarlane was born into a poor family in Perthshire, central Scotland, in 1897. Growing up in Callander, Stirlingshire, she earned her nickname due to her tomboyish behaviour. Even as a teenager, she appeared to have a sixth sense, predicting the length of the First World War and invention of the tank.

When the unmarried Helen became pregnant in 1918, she fled the village and settled in Dundee. There, she married an invalid soldier, Henry Duncan, and had five more children.

During that period, Britain was still reeling from the devastating losses sustained in the First World War and many grieving families sought spiritual comfort.

Seances quickly sprang up, conducted by people claiming to be in touch with the dead.

Helen was among them and, by the 1930s, she was travelling the country, summoning up spirits before incredulous audiences.

But while the seances were making her a celebrity, scientists were already questioning her abilities and, in 1931, she was invited with Henry to London to have her skills tested by psychic researcher Harry Price.

He recalls: "She was placed in the curtained recess. In a few seconds, the medium was in a trance. The curtains parted and we beheld her covered from head to foot with cheese-cloth!

"Some of it was trailing on the floor, one end was poked up her nostril, a piece was issuing from her mouth. I must say that I was deeply impressed - with the brazen effrontery that prompted the Duncans to come to my lab, with the amazing credulity of the spiritualists who had sat with the Duncans and with the fact that they had advertised her 'phenomena' as genuine."

In a bid to reveal the contents of Helen's stomach, Price asked if she would undergo an X-ray.

"She refused. Her husband advised her to submit. But that seemed to infuriate her and she became hysterical. She jumped up and dealt him a blow on the face.

"Suddenly, she jumped up, unfastened the door and dashed into the street - where she had another attack of alleged hysterics and commenced tearing her sŽance garment to pieces.

"Her husband dashed after her and she was found clutching the railings, screaming." Yet the researchers did not bring about Helen's downfall. Instead, the seeds were sown in the Mediterranean, on November 25, 1941.

HMS Barham, a 29,000-tonne battleship, was attacking Italian convoys when it was hit by three German torpedoes.

The ship went down within minutes, with the loss of 861 lives. Already reeling from the Blitz, the British government decided to keep the news quiet, even forging Christmas cards from the dead to their families.

But they never reckoned on Helen's psychic powers...

Days after the attack, she held another seance and claimed that a sailor with the words HMS Barham on his hatband appeared and said: "My ship is sunk."

News of the apparition swiftly reached the Admiralty, which finally chose to act two years later, in January 1944, amid fears that Helen would somehow reveal plans for the D-Day landings five months later.

When Helen was arrested, everyone expected a swift release. But such was the paranoia of the authorities, she was refused bail and told that she would stand trial at the Old Bailey.

It was alleged she had pretended "to exercise or use human conjuration that through the agency of Helen Duncan spirits of deceased dead persons should appear to be present".

News of the case infuriated PM Winston Churchill. In a note to his Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, he wrote: "Give me a report. What was the cost of a trial in which the Recorder was kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of the necessary work in the courts?"

The trial lasted seven days. Mediums had rallied to her cause and their defence fund allowed her barrister to call 44 witnesses to testify she wasn't a fraud.

Yet it was to no avail. Helen served her sentence and emerged from prison that September a changed woman.

AT first, she vowed never to hold another meeting but eventually relented â€" a fateful decision.

The end came in 1956, when she agreed to give a seance in Nottingham. Though the Witchcraft Act had been repealed five years earlier and spiritualism was recognised as a bonafide religion, Helen was arrested and subjected to a strip search.

She never got over the shock and, after being rushed to hospital, remained there for the next five weeks and died on December 6.

Whether a gifted psychic or a charlatan who exploited people's griefs, the strange tale of Helen Duncan - the unfortunate victim of Britain's last witchhunt - continues to attract controversy.

CASTING A SPELL THROUGH THE AGES

PENDLE WITCHES

IN 1612, at Lancaster prison, 10 men and women were hanged for witchcraft. They were believed to have been responsible for the murder by witchcraft of 17 people in and around the Forest of Pendle.

NORTH BERWICK WITCHES

A GROUP of men and women were tortured, condemned and burnt in Scotland in the late 16th century, for "crimes" including creating a storm to drown King James I.

MOTHER SHIPTON

A 15TH century Yorkshire witch, said to have powers of healing and spellcasting. "England's Nostradamus" predicted the invention of planes and cars, and had accurate visions of wars.

MARY BUTTERS

KNOWN as the Carnmoney Witch, Butters narrowly escaped trial in the 19th century for the killing of a cow and three people. At the inquest, she claimed that she had been knocked unconscious, causing her witch's spell to become toxic.

SALEM WITCHES

IN 1692, six men and 14 women were hanged or crushed to death in Salem, Massachusetts. The witch hysteria began when four girls in the town dabbled in fortune-telling games.

On recent episodes of the live show, the nine contestants aspiring to succeed Geller read the minds of audience members and made them imagine different tastes in their mouths on command. One contestant stopped his heartbeat for several seconds, leading an unfortunate 10-year-old in northern Israel to try the same trick at school - and pass out briefly.

Geller, who gained fame bending spoons using what he says are psychic powers, also performs on every show. In one episode, he drew a copy of a picture that had just been drawn by a pilot flying an El Al jet 30,000 feet above the Sinai desert. (It was a fish.)

In an interview with The Associated Press, Geller attributed the show's success to Israel's Jewish mystical traditions. "People here have roots in positive mysticism carried through the centuries by the Kabbalah," he said, referring to the ancient mystical work that has won non-Jewish enthusiasts, most famously Madonna.

While the show's content - illusion, sleight of hand and the supernatural - might stretch a picky viewer's definition of a reality program, its format sticks close to the staples of the genre: judges, manufactured drama, celebrity cameos and viewer participation. Contestants show off their powers over 10 episodes, and the winner gets fame and fortune as Geller's anointed successor, along with a secret prize, though one can assume the contestants have guessed what it is.

For Geller, his new success in his homeland brings him full circle.

Before Geller became perhaps the world's best known psychic entertainer and an intimate of Salvador Dali's and
Michael Jackson's, he was an unknown Israeli from Tel Aviv. His biography - in his telling, at least - reads like the plot of a spy novel.

At 10, his parents divorced and he left Tel Aviv for Cyprus, where his stepfather ran a hotel that was a front for Israel's Mossad spy agency, and he ran errands for agents.

He served in the Israeli paratroops, was wounded in 1967's Six-Day War, became a male model, began to showcase his psychic powers at parties, was accused of being a fraud, and went to the U.S. There, he was humiliated by a dubious Johnny Carson when his powers failed him, so he moved to Britain, where he spoon-bent his way to international stardom.

Geller has always been popular both among the credulous, who fill his shows and made him a multimillionaire, and the skeptical, who have made him a top target for debunking.

But none doubt his supernatural powers of self-promotion. Beginning with little but his trademark trick, Geller turned himself into a major entertainment enterprise, becoming a self-help guru, a TV personality, a sought-after motivational speaker and the author of 16 books. Today he lives in a mansion outside London.

Geller immediately shook things up when he arrived in Israel several weeks ago and pronounced himself able to wake up Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister who has been in a coma since January. He hasn't done so, he said, because Sharon's sons told him they weren't interested. When a serial rapist escaped police custody in Tel Aviv, throwing the country into a panic, Geller again appeared, offering to use his powers to get the man to turn himself in.

Geller's return has sparked something of a paranormal revival. A popular political talk show briefly abandoned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to devote an episode to the supernatural. Another channel now has a show featuring a young entertainer who claims an abnormally developed sixth sense and who has mastered a smoldering and distinctly Gelleresque gaze.

The success of Geller's show might be due to the country's current atmosphere of disillusionment following the costly and inconclusive Lebanon war this summer, said Tom Segev, a prominent historian and journalist. "This atmosphere leads people to look for escape in things that can't be explained and to turn to people like Geller," Segev said.

Geller put it differently: "There is a tension in the psychic atmosphere here."

Yossi Elias, the show's chief editor, had a more prosaic explanation: It's entertaining.

"It's fun sometimes not to be able to explain everything," Elias said. "Uri is very charismatic, and it's fun for Israelis to get their rich and successful uncle back from abroad. The combination makes for good television."