State Library of Queensland Collects Its Own X-Files
by Anna Levy February 11, 2018 (smh.com.au)
• In the 1960’s, at the peak of UFO culture in Queensland, Australia, one of the premier UFO magazines in Australia was UFO Encounter. Copies of publications such as these, from as early as 1957, are still held today in the State Library of Queensland. State Library of Queensland library blog post writes that publications like UFO Encounter provide “fascinating insight” into the Australian niche UFO community. “No matter what your views on aliens and flying saucers, these periodicals provide a distinctively Queensland perspective on examining the unexplained”.
• Luke Roberts was born and raised in central Queensland. He says that Queensland is UFO central and a bit “eccentric” in its extraterrestrial leanings. “It’s an unusual place,” says Roberts, “Even my Catholic mother was always fascinated by UFOs.”
• “In the earlier days, it was a very nuts-and-bolts… [we were] focused on the hardware of UFOs, spacecraft shape, what are they made of, how do they work, what are their propulsion systems were like. These days the subject has evolved again, where people are starting to think more about consciousness and… having contact through dreams, through meditation, [or]… an out of body experience.”
• Roberts grew up to create his alter ego, Pope Alice (pictured above), a manifestation of extraterrestrial consciousness who fell to earth thousands of years ago to become an extraterrestrial spiritual leader helping people realize that we’re not alone in the universe and to help humanity to raise its own consciousness. Roberts has traveled the world performing as Pope Alice, and created a new belief system called “Raëlianism”. Raëlians believe life on earth was created by a technologically advanced species of extraterrestrials. The library also collects Pope Alice costumes.
A banana grower drove his tractor along a narrow track at the edge of a sugar cane farm in Tully, north Queensland on January 16, 1966.
The weather was calm, the morning sun high in the sky. The tractor passed over the track with its usual rumble, but beneath it the banana grower detected a faint hiss. He leant forward to investigate, assuming his tyres had a leak, but his eye caught something else instead.
A saucer-shaped object, silver-grey and about 25 feet in diameter, rose before him. The object ascended slowly from the nearby lagoon to the treetops before tilting slightly and speeding away to the south-western horizon.
The man ran through the thick reeds and sword grass surrounding the lagoon, forcing his way through the undergrowth until he could see the water. A large whirlpool had formed, devoid of all plant life. Over the next few hours, the dead reeds below the eddy rose to the surface, forming a “nest” within which there lay a perfect imprint of an inverted saucer.
This was the infamous Tully Saucer Nest, which sparked a national fascination with all things extraterrestrial. It also prompted an independent investigation by a number of UFO organisations, which published their findings in periodicals such as Light and The Australian Flying Saucer Digest. The incident marked a peak in Queensland UFO culture.
The State Library of Queensland has gathered these publications from as early as 1957, when the public was just growing wise to the world of UFOs. These magazines, newsletters and artifacts depicted Australia’s closest alien encounters, as well as the lives and times of UFO enthusiasts in Queensland.
UFO Encounter was one such publication. The newsletter, produced by the second-longest-running UFO group in the world, UFO Research Queensland, featured reports of recent sightings, think-pieces on historical “ufology” and theories about current world governments and their brushes with the supernatural.
Association president Sheryl Gottschall said Queenslanders reported about 100 UFO sightings and encounters each year, with more than half of all sightings coming from the Gold Coast. She said the UFO community’s focus had shifted over the years in response to purported incidents such as the Tully Saucer Nest.
“In the earlier days, it was a very nuts-and-bolts organisation, it was focused on the hardware of UFOs, spacecraft shape, what are they made of, how do they work, what are their propulsion systems like – not a whole lot of thought was going into who was driving the things,” she said.
“These days the subject has evolved again, where people are starting to think more about consciousness and people are reporting having contact through dreams, through meditation, when they’re having an out of body experience.”
Mrs Gottschall said Brisbane was a hotspot for UFO spotters, with more than eighty people turning up to UFO Research Queensland’s January meeting.
“At various stages, we’ve had three UFO groups just in Brisbane,” she said. “People are reporting things from seeing lights in the sky doing strange things that they know planes or helicopters or drones don’t do, to other things like seeing a light go from horizon to horizon in two seconds flat.
“I can’t say for sure that [these things] are not of this world, that they’re extraterrestrials possibly from another planet, but certainly they are not of our ordinary reality.”
State Library of Queensland project coordinator Myles Sinnamon wrote in a library blog post that publications like UFO Encounter provide “fascinating insight” into the niche community.
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