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The Kelly Cahill Abduction

Australia

On October 4, 1993, Kelly Cahill was sitting in the family car as her husband was driving. They were heading to her friend’s home in the mountains to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. It was just after dark, and they were nearing their destination, still about a half-hour drive away.

It was just after 7:00 p.m.

Cahill was busy looking out the window when she peered across a field; as they were driving past it, she noticed a ring of orange lights. According to Cahill, “It was the first time I ever thought I had seen something that wasn’t normal. . . . I was going to shut my mouth. I thought, No, he’s just going to have a go at me. But a couple of minutes up the road I said,

‘I swear I saw a UFO.’”¹

Her husband dismissed that idea immediately, saying, “Don’t be stupid! It was probably a helicopter.”

She retorted, “It wasn’t making any noise. It was just sitting on the ground.”² After a brief exchange, they dropped it, and soon arrived at her friend’s residence.

The party turned out to be a bit of a dud because the daughter had just broken up with her boyfriend and wasn’t in the mood for a celebration. They decided to leave early, retracing the same route they had followed to get there.

As they were driving back down the road in the same stretch where Cahill had witnessed the ring-shaped UFO, both husband and wife saw the ring of lights hovering above the road. It was sitting there, but she could not tell what it was.

They drove closer to it; Cahill could see that it had a circular shape and “what looked like windows and lights around the bottom.”³ As they approached closer and closer to it, they noticed that the object was not making any noise.

At this point, her husband exclaimed, “You’re right! That’s something. That’s very, very strange.”

Cahill saw figures inside the craft, and she told her husband, “I swear there are people in there.” Then the UFO shot off to their left at a very fast rate of speed. “I mean it just disappeared. Within a split second it had gone.”⁴

They continued driving, and after a short distance, less than a mile, they were confronted by a blinding light that forced Cahill to shield her eyes with one hand. She kept looking out the window, yet was unable to see anything due to the light’s intensity.

At that point, she asked her husband, “What are you going to do?”

He responded, “I am going to keep driving.”

It was at that point that something very strange—yet not unknown in the annals of UFO history—occurred to the couple. They lost a segment of time and the experiences that occurred during that missing time frame. As Cahill noted:

From there, that is the last we remembered until . . . I knew I was going to see a UFO, you know, I just knew, because of what we had seen, I’d seen it twice in one night and he had seen it once . . . and the adrenalin is pumping, the heart is thumping, I’m so excited.⁵

But then her anticipation evaporated, and she and her husband found that they were just sitting in the car.

And I’m saying to my husband, “What happened?” And he says to me, “I don’t know. We must have gone around a corner or something.” By the time we got home, he was definite of everything, but at that time he didn’t know what happened either. I said to him, “I swear I’ve had a blackout,” because adrenalin just doesn’t disappear in a split second like that. I mean your heart is going mad! And all of a sudden . . .⁶

As they resumed the drive home, Cahill noticed the pungent odor of vomit, which started a long babbling rant. Before they reach their destination, she observed a tall, odd, dark figure standing on the side of the road. She did not know why, but it caught and held her attention.

Cahill told the investigator Bill Chalker, who wrote an article for the International UFO Reporter, that she had argued with her husband about what happened for part of the drive back home. They agreed that they had seen a UFO but could not agree on her feeling of having experienced a blackout and being amnesiac, or a missing segment of time, or seeing people aboard the UFO. But both agreed they could smell vomit, and both experienced stomach pains that they could not account for.

Cahill experienced the pain as a severe muscle fatigue that radiated from her lower abdomen to her upper shoulders. After they returned home, she experienced menstrual bleeding and soon became ill. Oddly, she had just finished her period only the week before.

Not long after these events, Cahill went into the hospital with a womb infection. After examining her, the doctors concluded that she must have been pregnant; either that or she had had some kind of gynecological operation. But she rejected those conclusions because neither had occurred to her recently. The doctors noted a peculiar triangular mark on her abdomen along with a scar.

She had actually discovered the triangular mark, located below her navel, the night of the incident after returning home.

Cahill described the sequence: “I also started bleeding that night. Three and a half weeks later I ended up in the hospital. . . . [The hospital] actually did a laparoscopy, another laparoscopy. This was not when I first went in. I went back in later, another six weeks after that, because I had a lot of pains in my stomach and just wanted to have it checked to see what it was. And I still had the triangular mark there.”⁷

By the time she had gone to the hospital, she had completely forgotten the UFO encounter. In fact, her memory of the incident was blank, which was revealed by a comment her husband made when a friend expressed his disbelief in UFOs. Her husband cut in, saying, “If you had seen what Kelly and I saw, you might change your mind.”

She jumped in asking, “What are you talking about?”

In fact, ironically, while her husband (the ex-disbeliever) recalled at least seeing the UFO, the experience had somehow been erased from her mind. She struggled with this mystery for days because she knew her husband would not make something like that up.

She said, “He was telling me, ‘Remember, on the way home from [your girlfriend’s], remember, it wasn’t making any noise?’ And I was just sitting there. I couldn’t remember it.”⁸

After a few days of struggling to recall the event, without success, it finally came back in a rush. “All of a sudden I remembered it! It hit me! And . . . then I remembered going into the light, and then I couldn’t remember anything else. A couple of weeks after that, this started to really bug me, because I remembered that light, and I remember arguing with him all the way home, but it was all I did remember.”

Cahill told the investigator, Bill Chalker, that apart from her husband with her in their car, she was aware of another vehicle farther down the hill from their own position. That car contained at least two people, a man and a woman. She paid little heed to them at the time because she and her husband had their attention riveted on a massive UFO that had landed in the field opposite them.

What follows is from the investigator’s report:

Because Kelly lived in Victoria and I live in New South Wales, I passed details of Kelly’s experience on to John Auchetti of Phenomena Research Australia (PRA) and urged Kelly to contact him. PRA got on the case immediately.⁹

By November 17, PRA had located the man and woman Cahill had seen that night. It turned out that the couple also had a friend (a woman) with them. These witnesses took Auchetti to the encounter site, a spot consistent with Cahill’s description. The group’s drawings of the UFO and the entities also closely coincide with Cahill’s.

Here we have a striking situation.

Chalker, the investigator, found that two groups of people unknown to each other had witnessed the same UFO, and they were located by and cooperated with competent investigators. They also experienced missing time. Independent witnesses also provided information that enabled the investigators to cross-check and correlate details, which revealed a remarkable amount of similar information.

The probe widened and was further strengthened by the finding of a range of apparently related physical traces, including ground impressions and a magnetic anomaly, as well as similar psychological effects on some of the witnesses.

Together, the Cahills were able to regain their memories of the events, which they reconstructed as follows:

It was a dark, cloudy night. Evidently, Kelly could see the second car only because it was backlit by the headlights of a third car.

From the trio’s testimony, investigators determined the exact location of this third car. They established that a male was looking at the UFO’s position through a break in the vegetation cover. The trio’s evidence coupled with Kelly’s allowed for triangulation of the encounter site with the UFO. The location was consistent with the anomalies discovered.¹⁰

What follows is a verbatim quote from the investigator’s report:

If the August 8 encounter had revolved only around Kelly, it could be argued that the experience may have been some sort of psychological episode. But the presence of other witnesses—a married couple and their friend, plus a possible other observer in a third car—forcefully argues for a real encounter.

Indeed, the PRA contends that the focus of the incident was not Kelly but the two other women.

As in Kelly’s situation, the females in the other group seemed to play a dominant role. Bill, the male witness in the trio, appears, like Kelly’s husband, to have had only limited involvement. The two women consciously recalled onboard episodes. They remembered the UFO and the tall black beings. Their description did not feature the red eyes Kelly saw.

For the trio the experience apparently started when they approached the site. All three could hear a strange noise and suddenly felt ill. Bill thought he was going to faint. He lost control of the car and ran off the road, striking a pole. After checking for damage, they drove off.

A few minutes later, a speeding car with its high beams on, shot past them. Then another passed. They came to a bridge with a sharp turn following it almost immediately.

Farther along this section, the trio stopped. As all this was going on, Bill’s vision was impaired. Obviously, he had some type of vision as he was driving, but he was unable to remember seeing the UFO. The two women with him recall the UFO clearly, and their descriptions closely match Kelly’s.

In some unexplained manner, Bill was isolated from the central experience. He has conscious recall of smells and sounds and remembers that a lot of activity was going on. He does not recall seeing anything.

He subsequently underwent hypnosis, which expanded his apparent recollections to seeming onboard components, but once again these were through the senses of smell and hearing only.

The two women did not think of theirs as an “abduction” experience. They felt as if they had exercised free will all through it. Yet, the principal element of their onboard experience was a form of examination—not, however, visually remembered. Other parts of their onboard experience exist in visual images and conscious memory. Hypnosis in their cases appears to have only reinforced what they recall already.

The entities did not speak and provided very little information. Neither woman saw the other or any of the others while in the alien environment, presumably aboard the UFO. Curiously, each was still aware of what was happening to her companion, ostensibly through psychic means.

The trio apparently did not have the complex background experiences described by Kelly. Their experience seemed limited only to the August 8 encounter.

There is also some physical evidence. PRA found a possible related ground trace and low-level magnetic anomaly at the encounter site.¹¹

CONCLUSION

The Cahills had a close encounter that was corroborated by other witnesses. Unfortunately, abduction cases are always full of ambiguity and a dreamlike quality. Though they begin with a sense of reportage and realism, when the contact-and-abduction sequence begins, it seems that elements of mind control intervene and affect the abductees.

Memory loss is commonly reported by abductees, as are physical examinations. Nonetheless, Kelly Cahill’s physical symptoms and trips to the hospital were very real.