Australian Kelly Cahill’s UFO Abduction Story Still Stirs Passions
Article by Matt Neal September 26, 2020 (abc.net.au)
• August 7, 1993, Kelly and Andrew Cahill were driving through Narre Warren IN the Gippsland region of South Australia (east of Melbourne, Victoria) to a friend’s house. Along the way, Kelly noticed five or six large orange spheres lined up in a row inside a some kind of horses’ paddock enclosure. When they arrived at their destination, her husband and friends, and eventually even Kelly, laughed it off.
• But driving home on the same road at about midnight, Kelly and Andrew again saw the same lights ‘hanging above the road’. “I could then see that the orange lights were really windows (on a craft that she assumed was a horses’ paddock) . . . I could make out figures standing behind the portals,” writes Kelly. Then the object flew off ‘at incredible speed’, then again, they saw the object with the orange windows sitting to the side of the road. Kelly says that it was then that the couple’s memory went blank. Their car had travelled several hundred meters down the road without them knowing.
• In the days and weeks that followed, Kelly claimed to find strange marks on her body, including a small triangular wound below her bellybutton. She began experiencing stomach pains and night ‘visitations’ from tall black-hooded figures with glowing red eyes.
• Later, through hypnosis, Kelly learned that her husband had pulled the car over to get a better look at the ‘brightly lit object in the paddock’. Further up the road, another car had parked, its occupants standing at the edge of the field. A tall thin figure appeared in front of the (craft) and Kelly heard in her mind the being’s thoughts: ‘‘Let’s kill them’’. More beings appeared, unleashing an energy force that knocked Kelly to the ground as she screamed to her husband: ‘‘They’ve got no souls! They’re evil! They’re going to kill us!’’
• Bill Chalker of the UFO Investigation Centre in Sydney contacted Kelly Cahill. Chalker alerted a Melbourne group of paranormal investigators called Phenomena Research Australia [PRA], led by then-director John Auchettl. Auchettl interviewed Kelly many times and examined the scene of the alleged sighting near Eumemmerring Creek. He placed an ad in local newspapers in an effort to find the occupants of the second car. Remarkably, they got a response. The story from the second car was identical to Kelly’s account, but went even further, detailing experiences inside the mystery craft where they were strapped to a table and examined by the beings. The other woman also had strange marks on their bodies including the same triangular wounds near their navels.
• The PRA discovered that a third car driven by a local lawyer was witness to the ‘Eumemmerring Creek Encounter’, whose story lined up with the other witnesses. The researchers began prepping an exhaustive 300-page report that promised to reveal the truth.
• Eventually, the Australian media got wind of the story. Kelly appeared on current affairs TV show Today Tonight, and her story ran in newspapers and magazines. By 1996, Kelly was a big name on the UFO conference circuit. With every appearance, Kelly unveiled new tidbits from PRA’s forthcoming report. She published a popular book. But by 1998, Kelly had disappeared from the scene. Still, none of the other witnesses –including her now ex-husband Andrew – came out publicly to back her story. And the PRA’s extensive report was nowhere to be found.
• Aside from a brief moment of interest in 2016 when Kelly’s case was mentioned by Fox Mulder on The X-Files reboot, the Eumemmerring Creek encounter was lost to posterity. In 2020 there was still no PRA report. Auchettl hinted that ‘it was possible the PRA’s report might still come out, but not soon’. Auchettl said that “the case was so good”, however, that the report “is worthy of release.” “[But] we won’t release it [now] because once we release our report, then we become the focus of the case,” as they could not locate the witnesses to the encounter. “[S]o if we release anything, all the focus is going to be on us. We’ll get hammered.”
• Auchettl said that when Kelly and her husband began to ask for information to be taken out of the PRA report, and they refused to allow the publication of medical and psychological reports to back up their stories, the original 300-page report was whittled down to an unusable ‘100 pages or so’. Also, when Kelly went to the media and other UFO groups in early 1994, it ‘‘muddied’’ the case.
• The Sydney investigator, Bill Chalker, still believes Kelly’s story but regrets handing the case over to PRA in 1993. “There was a lot of bad blood that’s passed between them and me as a consequence of their role in this case,” said Chalker. “I’ve seen a lot of information that suggests [the investigation] was carried out … but unfortunately they didn’t [want] to share the material.” “This was an extraordinary lost opportunity.” “It was frustrating that such a promising case was caught up in a situation where the group involved (PRA) chose not to make their data available.” Chalker said that UFO enthusiasts had a right to feel disappointed by PRA keeping their research secret. “I can understand the reaction from various members of the UFO research community.”
• As for Kelly Cahill, she dropped off the radar around 1998. In the early 2000s, she called Chalker and sent him ‘three large archival boxes’ of files, and left the country. She is now back in the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland, the same region that her ‘‘encounter’’ happened. She did not respond to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s request for an interview. “She really wanted to …put all this behind her,” says Chalker. When she realized that she was going to be the only one that was going to go public on this, and that the PRA wasn’t backing her up, she felt less confident about being the constant contact point on the case, and backed away from the media spotlight.
• While it’s unclear how Kelly Cahill feels about it all today, for a lot of UFO enthusiasts her case is either the one that got away or, worse, another one that never really was.
If her story is to believed, on August 7, 1993, Gippsland woman Kelly Cahill saw a UFO and beings from another world.
As detailed in her in 1996 book Encounter, Ms Cahill’s case had all the hallmarks of the classic alien abduction story of the era – lost time, strange spaceships, bright lights, inhuman creatures and inexplicable marks on her body.
But her story had something other alien visitations didn’t – independent witnesses who could potentially back up her story.
Along with her then-husband Andrew, who was in the car with her on that fateful night on Melbourne’s south-eastern fringes, there were reportedly four other people in two separate cars who would be able to verify her otherworldly claims.
Because of its multiple witnesses, the incident was hailed as the “holy grail” of alien abduction stories by UFO
researchers and enthusiasts.
It was the one with the potential to provide definitive proof, once and for all, that the truth was out there.
Cult TV show The X-Files even referenced the case in an episode.
But 27 years on, the truth about the so-called Eumemmerring Creek encounter is anything but clear.
A detailed report into the claims was never released, the other witnesses never came forward publicly, and Ms Cahill disappeared from public view.
So was her ‘encounter’ a missed opportunity, or just another UFO hoax?
‘Hooded figures with glowing eyes’
According to Ms Cahill, she and her then-husband Andrew were driving along the Belgrave-Hallam Road in Narre Warren on that fateful winter’s night in 1993.
They were en route to a friend’s house when Ms Cahill saw in a paddock a row of five or six large orange lights on a ‘distinct circular shape . . . like nothing I had ever seen before’, she wrote in her book.
When they arrived at their destination, her husband and friends, and eventually even Ms Cahill, laughed it off.
But about midnight, driving home on the same road, she and Andrew apparently saw what she believed to be the same lights ‘hanging above the road’.
early Kelly Cahill interview
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