Cairns UFO sightings: The strangest unexplained findings from 2010-2020
Far North Queensland’s reputation as a UFO hot spot is so strong we have our own dedicated festival. Take a look back at some of the region’s most mysterious sightings from the past decade.
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FAR North Queensland boasts a reputation as a UFO hot spot so dedicated we have our own festival.
But the year of bushfires and viral pandemics has not been kind to true believers.
The Cairns Post has put together a list of the region’s reported sightings spanning over the last decade.
While 2019 was a particularly strong year for alien sightings in the Far North with three sightings, the pattern has failed to repeat itself so far in 2020.
Perhaps the aliens are just social distancing?
Cardwell UFO Festival organiser Thea Ormonde said it was hard to pinpoint why the far North was such a UFO hot spot.
“I don’t know why, other than it’s a very nice part of the world,” she said.
“We’re looking at putting together our own compilation of stories for the festival’s C-Files, and it’s interesting to see the overlap in stories...but f you look at it logically, it’s hard to say there’s a pattern.”
The UFO Festival kicks off this Saturday at 10am, with the UFO Forum being held at the Anglican Church Hall, which participants can register for at info@cardwellufofestival.com.au.
The event’s signature Alien Invasion Party will be held at the Marine Hotel instead of the Foreshore on Friday night at 5pm to comply with social distancing requirements.
A family-friendly event will be held at the Cardwell Country Club on Saturday.
There will also be a Come and Try Pickleball event from 12pm at the Cardwell Tennis Courts. and a market day 8am to 1pm along the Cardwell Foreshore on Sunday.
SPOOKY GREEN LIGHT APPEARS IN CAIRNS MAN’S IMAGE
The most recent sighting, and the only one reported so far in 2020, was at Palm Cove in mid-June.
Mt Sheridan resident Dinkrit Singh had been taking photos on his new iPhone when he captured a strange image resembling a flying saucer in the background of a picture of a bonfire.
Mr Singh acknowledged it was most likely the lens on the camera, as it was invisible to the naked eye.
STRANGE ORANGE LIGHT HOVERING OVER TRINITY BEACH
Less explainable was the sighting in July 2019 at Trinity Beach, when Jenny and Ralph Tyler spotted an eerie aircraft of some sort flying north over their property about 11.15pm.
It travelled from horizon to horizon in about five minutes with a constant trajectory and speed, always keeping at an altitude between the clouds and the ground.
“We used to always watch the space station and shooting stars and keep track of the satellites when we were camping, and it wasn’t any of that,” Mrs Tyler said.
“It was sort of a bright orange blob with no sound and it didn’t deviate from its course.”
WOMAN SPOTS BLINDING LIGHT BESIDE MOUNTAIN
Just a few weeks prior, another orb had been spotted flying over Saddle Mountain near Smithfield.
Palm Cove fly-in fly-out worker Toni Porteous spotted a glowing ball of light resembling a massive star travelling a quarter of the way down from the peak of the mountain near Smithfield on the southern side early in the morning.
“It was like a searchlight, but huge,” she said.
“If it was an aeroplane, it would have had to be virtually on top of me facing straight down for its headlights to be that big.”
By the time Ms Porteous had come out of her house to grab a photo, the light had vanished.
LIGHTS RESEMBLING TRAIN IN THE SKY
A UFO described as looking like “a train in the sky” was spotted two nights in a row in Far North Queensland.
In May 2019, dozens of Cairns residents saw the weird line of lights moving through the sky, with reports of a similar phenomenon also coming from Townsville and Cape York.
This phenomenon, which took the region by storm on social media was eventually confirmed to be confirmed to be satellites from Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellite program, which had launched 60 satellites the previous week.
UFO OVER LAKE BARRINE
Cairns woman Jacqueline Raistrick was admiring the clouds during sunset at Lake Barrine in April 2019 when she noticed a strange shape hovering in the sky.
She whipped out her phone and managed to capture roughly four minutes of the vaguely disc-shaped UFO moving through the clouds.
“What is it? It’s weird. It’s moving up. It’s getting longer, look at it,” she said.
About four minutes into the video Ms Raistrick was heard saying the UFO is fading.
Another person in the video was heard saying: “I swear, if it opens and a light comes shooting out I’m running.”
MYSTERIOUS GREEN LIGHTS OVER THE SKY
Cairns woman Justine Edward was enjoying a quiet evening with her daughter when they spotted “what looked like a green shooting star”.
Ms Edward said it had looked like it was falling toward Earth with sparks coming off its back.
However, Cairns astronomer Ian MacLean debunked the claim, stating it was most likely an Aquarian or Capricornian meteor shower.
“What they would have seen is a bolide, also known as a fire ball,” he said.
“The green colour is because of the nickel-iron content of the meteor.”
UFO or not, Mr MacLean acknowledged the sighting of a fire ball meteor was quite rare.
FAMILY’S SIGHTING ABOVE MAREEBA
A Mareeba family photographed a possible UFO flying erratically above the Kennedy Highway on May 2018.
Saphira Mueller first thought the light was a flare or a balloon, but was at a loss to explain its display of hairpin turns and extreme acceleration.
“I have never seen anything like that in my life,” she said.
“It was moving in a really odd direction; up, sideways, the down.
“It was moving so fast … I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.”
UFO OVER TRINITY PARK
Around the same time, Trinity Park geologist Adam Murfet was studying the night sky during a storm when he saw something that shouldn’t have been there after the lightning had subsided: A small, glowing UFO.
“It was at the end of a lightning storm, and I saw this light up in the sky,” he said.
“There as no lightning going on at the time.”
Mr Murfet caught footage of the object moving erratically through the air, before disappearing just before another flash of lightning.
He sent the footage to the American non-profit Mutual UFO Network.
FLYING SAUCER ABOVE THE BARRIER REEF
A Cairns woman photographed a UFO flying off Fitzroy Island on November 2017 on her way back from a Reef trip.
Jenny Morrison was returning from Elford Reef, about 50km east of Cairns, after spending a day at sea with friends, and took a series of photographs of the sunset on her smartphone.
When she later examined the photos, she noticed in several of the images, an inexplicable luminous green dot shrouded in a distinctive flying saucer shape.
“There’s this little light, that looks just like a bit of water on the lens,” she said.
“I haven’t edited the photos, or done anything to them.
MYSTERIOUS UFO SNAPSHOT
Hobby photographer and Trinity Park mother-of-two Charlotte Hellings captured what may have been a UFO hiding in a photo of the Redlynch skyline in September 2014.
“When we got home, I noticed the big mark on one photo and couldn’t work out what it was,” she said.
“Moving along the photos there’s three of them and it gets bigger and bigger then it’s just gone – in the space of two seconds.”
MYSTERIOUS LIGHT OVER SPEEDWAY
A competition at the Cairns International Speedway may have had some extraterrestrials in the audience in August 2014.
Mt Sheridan resident Terry Allen said she and her family all spotted a UFO zooming around the sky above Edmonton late Saturday night.
The object, which resembled a dog-bone, started zigzagging back and forth, then tuned red and hovered for a couple of minutes before turning back to white.
On the same night, the speedway had been holding a Tropical Meltdown burnout comp, though a spokesman claimed the event had wrapped up over an hour before Ms Allen reported her sighting.
MYSTERIOUS RECEIVER-SHAPED LIGHTS
A roundup of strange Far North UFO sightings wouldn’t be complete without a mention of UFO capital Cardwell.
In July 2014, resident Molly Dunn and her husband Archie captured pictures of mysterious lights hovering above the town.
The strange lights took the shape of a telephone receiver.
“It (the light) was still coming. It wasn’t very fast and, as it was coming closer it was getting a little bit higher,’’ Mrs Dunn said.
“We could see that it was a funny shape ... and it came just over next door’s roof and it stopped.
“You could see that it was a funny shape, like a telephone, or like a handle – and it stopped.
“Then it went straight up, and as it went straight up after a little while it went whoosh’ and it disappeared.”
STRANGE OBJECTS FLOATING IN THE SKY
Friends Tracey Schneider and Charlotte Hellings were capturing photos of the sunset above Yorkeys Knob golf course in April 2013 when they spotted a strange cluster of objects.
One photo showed two brown domes above a cluster of about six smaller objects which Ms Schneider said were not in the previous shot, taken 10 seconds earlier.
Ruling out the possibility of birds or a smudge on the lens, the pair took to social media to announce their findings, leading to a spark of UFO fever in Cairns.
Originally published as Cairns UFO sightings: The strangest unexplained findings from 2010-2020