It was once sold as Australia’s most likely place to encounter an alien or UFO but now, the Northern Territory's roadside stop at Wycliffe Well is more of a ghost town. The demise of the unique tourist spot on the Stuart Highway is a grim reality of roadhouses in outback Australia, and the challenges they face to stay open.
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00:00It's obviously very sad and the circumstances behind it is sad as well.
00:11It's a very eerie place now.
00:13It's completely abandoned.
00:14It's just a ghost town.
00:18Welcome to Wycliffe Well, Population Zero, a once thriving roadhouse that claimed to
00:25be the UFO capital of Australia.
00:27It was so different to anything that I'd really been experiencing before, being in the middle
00:34of the NT and a desert.
00:37Its former owner devastated at its current state, deserted and ransacked.
00:43To have it destroyed is just heartbreaking.
00:47The scenes here at Wycliffe Well, for some operators, serve as a cautionary tale about
00:52how a business can go from great to a failure and left in ruin in just a matter of years.
00:59There's not as much share to go around, so if you can take two, three percent off the
01:03boat down the road, that's a big change.
01:06When Wycliffe Well flooded in 2022, its owners, franchisees of United Petroleum, evacuated
01:14to the Devil's Marbles Hotel just up the road.
01:17The damage was so significant, they have since been unable to restore Wycliffe.
01:23It's great for us, but, you know, it's such an asset that the territory is lost.
01:29Tourism Central Australia says it's unlikely the intergalactic roadhouse will regain its
01:35halcyon days any time soon.
01:38The dollars out there for investment are not like they were, and so, you know, I would
01:44be hopeful, but, you know, at this stage, you know, it is a difficult environment.
01:51So for now, it remains a hollowed-out husk in the outback, languishing in disrepair.