Encounter
Author: Kelly Cahill

Reviewer: Martin Gottschall, PhD

In January of 1994 when Kelly attended one of our Abductee Support Group Meetings, we learnt about her experiences, and have maintained contact with her since then. We have been looking forward to this book for some time. It is published in Australia by Harper Collins, and was released in about early September of this year. Kelly attended and spoke to the National Conference in late August and had copies of her book for sale by special dispensation of her publishers.

Now that I have had time to read the book, having anticipated it for so long, I am glad to be able to review it. I believe that this book will come to be regarded as an important contribution to this subject, and is likely to be published internationally. I base this view on the content of the book, its style, and the related literature by PRA (Phenomena Research Australia), and the other group of witnesses that we are anticipating.

John Auchettl of PRA should be commended for recognizing Kelly's as an encounter to which their limited resources should be fully committed, because, as it turned out, we have here independent witnesses, as well as a body of physical evidence, relating to an encounter with a number of humans and a group of what are clearly "aliens". If any one needs it all served up on a silver platter, this surely is it.

The story, briefly is this: Kelly and her husband Andrew were driving to visit friends for a weekend, and on the way there they saw a UFO. On the way home, they saw a UFO again, then saw an illumined object in a nearby field and stopped to have a look. An encounter took place, which they "forgot" so that they found themselves driving along the road recalling only the sighting of a light in the sky. Some weeks later when they again drove past this place, Kelly remembered the encounter in considerable detail, and was able to relate the entities to an entity which she had seen in her bedroom. Not familiar with the abduction phenomenon, she then tried to involve qualified people, but without success until the Air Force put her in touch with UFO researchers.

As she worked on this encounter, she realised that it related to a series of strange events that took place a few years before, while she was still living in the city (Melbourne). The book was initiated on the advice of John Auchettl, as a means of organising her thinking and "purging" herself of the dysfunctional effects of her experience.

The book is presented as an extended interview with a journalist called Wendy. While it is given from the perspective of about 1996, looking back, the story unfolds as Kelly experienced its unfolding in her life. There are thirteen chapters that have no headings, and there is no index. If you are a researcher, buy two copies, because you are going to have to mark up one copy brutally to make the details readily accessible. I do hope that later editions will have these refinements. An important contribution of the book, apart from the factual details, is Kelly's search for the true nature and reasons for her experience. This is particularly important, coming from an experiencer, because they tend to be silent on this matter, and researchers are typically also very restrained when it comes to interpreting their findings in terms of possible alien motives, needs and objectives.

Prior to her encounter, Kelly was engaged in an intense spiritual pursuit and regarded herself as a Christian. In learning to deal with her encounter, she evolved a broader spiritual basis or belief system. It is probably this commitment to spiritual matters which is responsible for her search for the meaning of her encounter, and the viewpoint which she ultimately adopts. In her interpretation, the aliens involved in her encounter seem to have a deficiency in what we call "soul", and they seem to be trying to fill this deficiency by exploiting humans.

Readers who heard me speak at the recent National Conference, will not be surprised to see me pick up on this theme, because it has seemed to me from a consideration of many abduction accounts, in fact from the very first description of these aliens that I can recall, that they seem to lack "life". By that I mean the stuff that children in particular seem to have so abundantly, and which makes them so robust and beautiful. I feel very strongly, that if this line of thinking is pursued carefully and rigorously, we will make a real breakthrough in our understanding of the motive behind the abduction phenomenon, and of how to effectively deal with the abducting aliens. I hope that Kelly's book will help get the ball rolling in this direction.

I will now take the liberty of doing some speculating about the events of Kelly's life. There are strong hints in Kelly's encounter that she knew the aliens already. We know from many cases that for many or most abductees, their experiences begin in early childhood, so Kelly's reaction is hardly surprising. My speculation is that Kelly's intense interest in spiritual matters and her choice of a church in which "miracles" or the physical display of spiritual power was an integral part, may have been due to an intense search on her part for a way to deal effectively with her abductors, even though she was not consciously aware of them at that time.

I speculate further, that Kelly's efforts in this respect were more effective than she has yet realised, and cite the "bible" episode as an indication of this. My thesis is that if the abducting aliens can cause us to experience fear, horror, hate, resentment etc. and so colour our "life" with these qualities, they can get what they want, but if we manage to maintain positive feelings of fearlessness, love, compassion, and a devotion to things wholesome beautiful and perfect, then they are not able to get what they want from us, or possibly, those qualities are then imposed on them, and they are unable to continue pursuing a more negative objective.

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