The Kelly Cahill Abduction: The Eumemmering Creek Encounter

Kelly Cahill was a 27-year-old housewife and mother of three. At about 11:45 pm on 7 August 1993, she, her husband Andrew and their three children left a friend's house. Their road was Belgrave-Hallam Road, Narre Warren North, in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, beside Eumemmerring Creek. The press spelling would give the case its name: the Eumemmering Creek encounter.

On the way out, Kelly saw "a ring of orange lights" in a field. "It was the first time I ever thought I had seen something that wasn't normal." Andrew suggested a helicopter. There was no sound.

After midnight, on the return trip, something hovered above the road in front of them. It was "a round shape with some sort of glass around, or what looked like windows and lights around the bottom." The orange lights, she said, "were really windows." She could make out figures standing behind the portals. It "shot off to the left as fast as it could go" and vanished within a split second.

Kelly described what came next as "like a cut to scene in a film." The car had moved several hundred metres on, and further along the object sat at or near ground level in a gully paddock, "the size of a house." Kelly got out of the car. In front of the craft stood a tall, thin figure, "about seven foot tall." It was "not a black color but black as if all matter was removed where its presence was." Its eyes were "burning red, like fluorescent stop lights."

"All of a sudden there were heaps of them in the field." They came on, gliding off the ground, faster than a man could run. Kelly sensed a telepathic message, "Let's kill them," and a wave of energy through her body. She cried out: "They've got no souls! They're evil! They're going to kill us!" After a bright light, she was back in the car with about an hour of missing time.

That night Kelly found a triangular mark just below her navel. She also reported unexpected bleeding and stomach pain. About 3.5 weeks later she was admitted to hospital with a womb infection.

On 4 October 1993 Kelly contacted Sydney investigator Bill Chalker. He passed the case to Phenomena Research Australia (PRA) in Melbourne, directed by John Auchettl. Through a local newspaper ad, PRA traced a second car about 150 m down the road. Its occupants, known only as Bill, Jan and Glenda, gave accounts that reportedly matched Kelly's and went further, including being strapped to a table and examined. Chalker wrote that "PRA found a possible related ground trace and low-level magnetic anomaly at the encounter site."

PRA's report ran to about 300 pages. It has never been released. "The case is so good," Auchettl told ABC in 2020. But "we won't release it [now] because once we release our report, then we become the focus of the case." Chalker called it "an extraordinary lost opportunity."

No investigation has published a finding. In 2011 the blog eye of the cyclone argued the case was a hoax, pointing to the unreleased report and a husband who never spoke publicly. Suggestions of sleep paralysis, fatigue, or generator or car lights seen through fog remain unattributed speculation.

Kelly told her story in the book Encounter. The case aired on Today Tonight, and in 2016 an episode of The X-Files referenced it. Kelly withdrew from public life around 1998. She now lives in the Latrobe Valley, Gippsland.