UFO Research Queensland
50th Anniversary UFO Conference - 1956-2006
September 20-October 1
Watkins Publishing, 2006

Reviewer: Lee Paqui

Day 1, September 30 2006

Rex Gilroy: The Blue Mountains Triangle

UFO Research Queensland wasn’t the only one celebrating 50 years of UFO research in 2006. So too was Rex Gilroy, of the Blue Mountains UFO Research Group (check name), and he demonstrated his extensive experience in the field in this presentation. Among Australia’s foremost Ufologists, Rex is also known as the founding ‘father’ of Australian cryptozoology, and he owns the largest natural science collection in Australia.

Beginning with a brief recap of his early adventures in Ufology and describing how his interest in the subject was piqued at an early age, Rex introduced us to the Blue Mountains (New South Wales) area, which has seen a host of strange mysteries from the early years of colonisation until today. The Blue Mountains is one of the world’s major UFO hotspots with a multitude of sightings, abductions and mysterious disappearances being reported, with a significant number of these reports coming from the Burragorong and Wollemi areas.

Rex contends – and this is the subject of his recent book ’Blue Mountains Triangle’ – that there is a joint US-Australian underground advanced space travel base in the area, which he has been investigating now for 35 years. He believes the operation involves thousands of personnel maintaining these underground bases, which are entirely self-sufficient, even running on their own economy. It’s a complex topic that Rex explores before moving on to discuss the Blue Mountains Triangle itself, an area of New South Wales that extends from Goulburn in the south to north of the Blue Mountains (Newcastle are), and to Mudgee in the west.

Illustrating his discussion with numerous slides and diagrams of the area in question, Rex also substantiates his claims with some intriguing photographs of enormous lights descending slowly into the Burragorang Valley, along with military helicopters. He also provides as evidence a number of first-hand accounts from the last thirty years from people who have met with objects themselves, along with physical ground traces of possible UFO landings in the valleys. Bushwalkers have clashed unexpectedly with armed soldiers, both American and Australian, and stumbled upon guarded and camouflaged equipment. Even stranger are reports of UFOs with force-fields that lift people off the ground, and campers regularly report the distinctive sounds of machinery moving underground, sounds that have been explained by government officials as the result of a ‘wombat problem.’ There was also an incident where a large unknown craft crashed on the Narrowneck Plateau, and military helicopters were later seen hurriedly removing large fragments of metal from the wide crash dispersal area. But it seems they may have missed something – the next day bushwalkers found and photographed the whitish outlines of three alien-like bodies on a dirt roadway. The bodies seemed to have disintegrated into dust leaving only an outline of where they had been.

Rex posits that this underground complex was initially established during World War Two as a communication base by Australia, but the Cold War saw it develop further with US input, and it remains managed jointly by both forces. This agreement saw the complex extended, with satellite bases and city-sized complexes established to house personnel. Over time this expansion ultimately formed a self-sufficient community up to fifty levels underground and spread over hundreds of kilometres, even including submarine bays in strategic coastal locations. The 1960s saw the focus of the base change, however, to the study of advanced space travel and time-window experiments, technology that was originally obtained from extraterrestrial sources by the US military.

Rex populates his presentation with many stories of both high strangeness and occasionally high humour. One of these stories concerns the account of a Mr Landsing flying his light plane over the Blue Mountains in 1959 at 1.00pm in the afternoon, who saw a silver flash before his aircraft’s engine cut out. Suddenly he found himself inside a massive round craft where he was surrounded by dark human-like forms before another bright flash of light saw his craft returned once more to the sky. Other pilots noted compass misbehaviour in the area, and one reported a ‘great swirling mass of darkness’ after his compass failed. His plane was swept towards the mass, but upon entering it the mass suddenly vanished and the pilot found himself flying in a different direction over a different part of the valley. Even more amazing, other people flying over the area have reported large animals and long-necked dinosaurs in the Wollemi wilderness, and Rex believes it is possible that a time vortex could be at work in the area. [To add my own two cents worth, let us not forget the famed Wollemi Pine, an unknown prehistoric pine-tree discovered only recently in the valley that defied millions of years and all odds of survival, and is now in commercial cultivation.]

Rex asserts that all these events in the Blue Mountains are connected – time windows, UFOs, abductions, military bases and prehistoric creatures. And if all this is true, then perhaps contact has indeed been established between ET and the Burragorang Valley underground community.

A.J. Gevaerd: Update on the Varginha Case and the UFO Disclosure Project in Brazil

Founder and editor of the Brazilian UFO Magazine and a UFO researcher for over 30 years, A.J. is also the founder and director of the Brazilian Centre for Flying Saucer Research, the largest such organisation in South America. He joined us from Brazil to discuss the 1996 Varginha case, quite possibly Brazil’s most important and well-documented ET encounter incident, as well many other intriguing cases from the Amazon.

Over a long period of time the Amazon has produce a number of interesting and unique UFO sighting – lights, objects and unexpected creatures that are regularly reported by the natives living in the area as well as visitors to the region. Such a lengthy period of encounters have not unexpectedly produced a rich folklore that represents how the native inhabitants perceive UFOs and their occupants. Early such visitations have been recorded in cave and rock art that is 14,000 years old, and modern responses to UFOs include a flying saucer landing pad constructed in the middle of dense Amazonian jungle by a hopeful entrepreneur (to date no UFOs have yet taken advantage of this courtesy).

A.J. has discovered many modern UFO encounter cases in the Amazon region by randomly stopping at houses along the great river and asking the right questions – in most cases these random samples produced the most astounding reports of UFOs, and in some cases their occupants, and A.J. provides several examples of these accounts: a bizarre uniformed creature that could walk up the walls of buildings; miraculous healings seemingly cause by UFOs; balls of light and craft that could change size and pass through solid objects; missing time; pursuits and attacks by unknown entities; burns from encounters with objects; chupacabras and other unusual creatures among many others. A.J. was also able to obtain information about military investigations in the area, including photos and diagrams that he produces during his presentation.

But the topic that many attendees had come to see was, of course, the Varginha Case, which occurred in Brazil in January 1996. A.J. has spent some considerable time investigating this case, which was a well-documented event involving an apparent crash of a UFO in an isolated area and from the debris of which an apparently injured occupant (or occupants) emerged.

Before this object came to ground it was tracked across the sky by both NORAD and the Brazilian military, and the object was witnessed falling to Earth. In the days after the event strange biped creatures with large heads were seen by residents of the area, who called the authorities to investigate. One creature was captured by soldiers and the local fire department and quickly secreted away, but as other creatures continued to be reported by residents it was realised that further capture attempts would need to be made. And this is where things get very interesting - three girls returning home from work one afternoon stumbled upon one of the creatures, apparently wounded, in an empty field. The girls fled for help, but by the time they returned the creature had gone.

The neighbouring military base and the police were mobilised to hunt the creature down, and eventually a patrol with two policemen came across a creature on the road. The officer in the passenger seat leapt from the car and grabbed it, taking it back to the car where he sat it on his lap while they drove to a nearby hospital for treatment of the creature’s wounds. Isolated for 24 hours in the hospital, doctors realised that they didn’t know how to deal with the creature, which eventually died in their care and was removed by military representatives and taken to a university for study. A sad postscript to the story is that shortly afterward the young man who captured this creature died an excruciating death from what appeared to be an unknown but massive infection. Despite dying in the cause of his duty, it took twelve months for his superiors to agree to compensation for his young family.

This case is quite detailed and the brief summary above barely does it justice. A.J. delves into great length in his presentation, providing many images to illustrate the case. Over 100 witnesses saw this creature, from the hospital to the university, and A.J. has seemingly spoken to most of them.

A.J.’s delivery was engaging, expansive and detailed, ranging across a spectrum of UFO sightings, native South American folklore, strange creatures and unexpected ET encounters. His investigation and the evidence he has amassed for the Varginha case is astounding, and certainly provides food for thought.

John Auchettl: The UFO Tipping Point

Originally from Papua New Guinea and having served in the aviation industry since 1970, John Auchettl is currently director of Phenomena Research Australia (PRA), which he joined in 1969. He also spent 10 years in the Victorian UFO Research Society and has published numerous articles in books, journals, periodicals and newspapers both here an overseas, and appeared in a number of Australian and International television and radio productions.

Researching the field for 30 years now, John gave us a brief introduction to his entrée into Ufology and the nature of synchronicity. He also talked to us about the health of Ufology, questioning the subjet-matter and making several unique observations.

John’s theme was the currently perceived UFO ‘end time’, as indicated in recent years by the press. According to these sources, interest in UFOs has declined in recent years, as, apparently, has the phenomenon itself. John’s contention is that this perception is false and that the phenomenon is not in decline, despite the fact that UFO research groups have been disappearing at a steady rate.

An increase in UFO images in the last 7-10 years as a direct result of an increase in digital and phone cameras has proved that the UFO phenomenon is not at an end time, and indicates clearly that the phenomenon is not even slowing down. Perversely, image data is increasing even while UFO groups are disappearing, though UFO books and websites have increased in numbers since the late 1990s. Further, video (moving) images have increased, and John provided some interesting video of recent UFOs filmed over parts of Australia.

As the very nature of the UFO phenomenon is hidden and not easily accessible, researchers need to expend more effort to discover it. John explores the nature of evidence for UFOs, categorising these evidences as ‘paper’, ‘camera’ and ‘video’, discussing what sorts of value they provide to the researcher, how these kinds of evidence are received by the non-researcher, and how convincing the different types are. He makes the observation that currently there is too much textual evidence and not enough imagery available, the text consequently engulfing more visual forms of evidence, and he provides substantial detail in regard to the text versus image comparison.

John pointed out that hoaxes do exist and we therefore need to be vigilant. He employs quite technical means, software and algorithms, to study images of UFOs that come through the PRA. Using the Whittlesea image he demonstrated some of the methods he employs to prove or otherwise the validity of UFO images with available technology. He also provided a series of recent Australian UFO photos that have been proven to be authentic, even though the objects in them are completely unidentifiable in traditional UFO/saucer-type terms.

John defines a ‘Tipping Point’ as a ‘dramatic event or events when something unique becomes common.’ A Tipping Point contains a negative and a positive progression – negative implies negative results as a consequence of the Tipping Point being reached, the opposite being a positive outcome when the Point is reached. Despite the constantly and consistently mounting evidence, when Ufology will finally meet its Tipping Point is anybody’s guess.

Glenn Steckling: The Extraterrestrial Reality and how our world benefits

Glenn Steckling’s father, the late Fred Steckling, was a close friend of George Adamski. Due to this association, Glenn and his family have been researching UFOs for over 40 years. Glenn updated and expanded his father’s book ‘We Discovered Alien Bases on the Moon’ in 1997, a work that has been seminal to lunar anomaly investigation. Glenn is also a professional pilot and aviator, and he has participated in lecture tours and television and radio broadcasts worldwide.

It could be surmised that Glenn grew up in a unique environment, and his father actively supported George Adamski throughout the years of his contacts. This provides Glenn with a rich personal history that closely ties him to the early beginnings of the UFO and contactee phenomenon. Throughout his presentation he talks in some detail about Adamski’s travails, his personal history, world tours, and his meeting with the Pope.

Glenn began his presentation with early UFO reports and photographs of UFOs, along with evidence from military and astronaut sources that support ET reality. Sections of the US government are apparently quite au fait with information on UFOs, their origins, occupants, and propulsion systems. It is contended that ET knowledge and technology assisted the US space program, a contention that has been raised in other circles and for which the body of evidence is somewhat compelling. Glenn also discusses research that indicates that the Moon is not quite as we might think it might be, for example, having a gravity that is 64% that of Earth as opposed to the textbook ‘fact’ of 1/6th that of Earth’s, and that it seems to have clouds and water geysers. Many images were displayed to back up these contentions, including an unreleased image from NASAs archives of an astronaut posing on the Moon with an elliptical object hovering in the background, and photographs of ‘channels’ in the lunar surface that indicate water movement, as well as numerous cloud-like objects, and apparently artificial constructions on the surface among many others.

Throughout his presentation, Glenn produces compelling evidence and numerous images for visitations to planet Earth, some of which have not been seen publicly before. Many of these images are historical, culled from the early Adamski years, and show the kinds of craft that Adamski reported sighting as well as images of objects hovering over or on the Moon. Other images are from the space program, showing objects photographed well above the Earth’s atmosphere and that to this day remain unexplainable. All these images are accompanied by an interesting commentary of facts and anecdotes relevant to the time, giving a rich background to the history of both the contactee and early UFO phenomenon.

Touching on the eternal debate over the possible existence of extraterrestrials in the universe, Glenn moved on to humanity’s need to explore and develop our own awareness in order to find and acknowledge our ET relatives and neighbours. He explores the types of interactions between those contactees who met beings who looked similar to us and who wished to actively interact with us. Glenn poses the question ‘Why have they come here and what have we learned?’ since he is interested in the kinds of advancements that may occur if we are able to have meaningful interaction with advanced beings, both sociologically and technologically. How might our thinking and awareness change as a result of meeting new life? Given his background, Glenn feels there is no doubt that we have been visited in both the distant and recent past by such beings, though the subject became increasingly more ‘real’ in the mid 1900s with evidence for such visitations increasing markedly.

Glenn ends his presentation with a message for our time that really needs to be seen to be appreciated. His view is quite different from the mainstream – he sees a world where ET represents our connection with the cosmos and not the fear-mongering abducting ET of recent decades. Because of his history, Glenn expresses the view of a different time, a time when the contact phenomenon was new and fresh and full of hope – hope that we too could maybe, one day, step out and take a fulfilling place in a galactic civilisation.

Day 2, October 1 2006

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