It must be remembered that there is "The Gubberment" and then there are individual public servants who work for the government. Unfortunately, one or even many individuals of a certain belief or persuasion have very little hope of actually implementing any significant changes at a policy-making level. Course, sometimes that works out for the best, and other times, not so well.
Many Parks and Wildlife officers, Rangers, foresters etc are in the know. Many people working in close liason with Aboriginal communities in more out of the way places, especially up the Cape have picked up the odd grain of wisdom (and probably a large grain of salt also!) in their travels. Some military people have their reports, and so on.
Of course, for every individual that has some belief, or some experience, there are others that do not believe, or put it all down to rather more mundane causes. It is also regrettably true that simply being employed by an upstanding, well regarded organisation does not guarantee that a person is immune from spinning yarns, decorating the truth or what have you. My old man often shakes his head listening to some of the pure A grade fiction cooked up by returned serviceman... all he can say is "eh... I must have been to a different war? Don't remember any of that!"
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I have often observed helicopters flying around some hairy spots of Southern Queensland, without running lights, between 11pm and 3am. These are often focused on mountainous terrain, are most commonly sighted (or heard) on fairly still nights with moderate cloud cover. I have spotted their outline and feint reflection off glass etc on clear nights with a good moon. They approach an area on a beeline at significant altitude, only to drop to around 600m as the land rises and proceed to fly a fairly fixed "spoked wheel search" pattern. From sounds, and brief glimpses they are something akin to a fairly standard BellRanger.
These are not search and rescue craft, nor are they paramadics (apart from knowing how the local rescue choppers sound just from repeat exposure, any of the above
always have their running lights up). There is a large helicopter training centre at a military base some distance away..actually, two of em... but both have ready access to very similar country much closer to their home turf.
These choppers at times seem to be using "silent running" techniques - you may see a glint off a reflective surface , at a range of around 2km, while being unable to hear the rotors, or as they go past it sounds like a standard chopper but with your fingers in your ears - and often, after working a set search pattern for some time, seem to go a bit freestyle and alternate between cruising along rideglines and saddles, and then dropping further into valleys and flats.
A few occasions have seen this type of activity very close to my own home (Kilcoy region)and repeated patterns at that. I have also been flown over at VERY low altitude by what I believe to be the new "eurocopter", though that was during the day in very good visibility and they simply went straight over the house, to come back about half an hour later. Looked quite different to other platforms I have seen, and it suited the eurocopter Wiki very closely. I do not believe that one off sighting has anything to do with the other, more mysterious craft... more likely a simple training or testing run between bases/training grounds, taking a somewhat indirect route by simply following the ring of the ranges across, down and then back around.
Note - the odd ones are
not cropspotters, those have a mode of operation all their own and the abovementioned more mysterious craft have been observed in seasons definitely outside of the cropspotting window. They pay more attention to southern and western sides of hilly country than they do to the sunnier aspect (OS readers, remember in Australia, it's all upside down... sun to the north) and besides that, have been spotted working over the same well defined areas on a number of occasions, rather than single fly-overs every so often.
I have also observed small fixed wing craft flying with one white light, no port or starboard lights, executing the odd loop around mountaintops and down between them.
Also, and this is the odd part...many occasions of seeing very new model, well equipped and maintained four wheel drives full of large, humourless looking blokes wearing nondescript dark blue/grey "workwear" style clothing.King Gees with class. These vehicles have almost always been spotted in groups of 3 or 4, are festooned with radio and satellite gear, appear very well maintained and display no markings, insignia, "max loading" or the like. They barrel into the scrub and reserves at odd hours, typically returning two or three hours later and leaving as quietly as they came. I am familiar with wildlife survey teams, and they simply do not have the same vibe about them.
They are always very, very clean and would seem to have sublegal or very nearly sublegal tint on the windows. All externally mounted gear seems to be of a similar age, that is, fitted at roughly the same time rather than civilian fourbies where you can see they added this CB mast a while ago, that satnav stalk a while later, and so on.
They do not slow along the way, they never stop at the usual "wow, look at that view!" spots that most weekend warriors seem to stop at and they have little in common with more typical official vehicles that you see doing the rounds, such as rangers, energex or telco workers, police or any other govt. entity of which I am aware.
As a reformed govt employee, I am pretty well able to spot govt vehicles and methods of approach and these guys are definitely either govt or VERY well organised and financed private sector.
Interestingly, both my fiance and myself have noticed our mobile phones have a strange habit of turning themselves on and off around the same time as these vehicles or aircraft are sighted. I have wireless broadband, and often find that my dual band capacity is slashed right back, at times even failing entirely and defaulting to GSM, when they are in the vicinity and it's not uncommon to have more dropouts in the next two hours than we would experience in the rest of the week.
These choppers take a distinctly different route and operate very differently to the typical 'hawks etc that I see heading between shoalwater and amberley, oakey and the coastal regions. I have spotted a couple during the day, and just at sunset, with no running lights, no discernible markings. No, they weren't Black Helicopters
I'd say "navy issue grey" helicopters.
I have yet to reach anything like a definite conclusion about these events but I am sure you can come to your own suspicions. These incidents have happened roughly every 6 weeks for the last 12 months, or thereabouts. The fleet of suspect fourbies almost always has appeared in the area within 48 hours of the last fly-by.
No way of knowing what they are looking for, of course, but they are very definitely looking for SOMETHING... and looking very, very hard at that.
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This was so funny; now there is a German doctor out there telling everybody that we have huge forest beasts in Canada that beat their now extinct Neanderthal in size and savagery! Well, this is exactly true actually... Anyway, I returned there last summer and looked for the sign; it was gone! A sasquatch probably took it down. 
What Team in sport. "Yall" say "rooting for" we say barracking. we leave "rooting " for a few undesirable young ladies to look after with part or all a team. And it is considered procreative as well. 