A woman has come forward with startling claims of a late‑night alien encounter.
Brisbane-based researcher Sheryl Gottschall said she had a terrifying close encounter with three ‘grey aliens’ in her bedroom in 1991 while her husband slept beside her.
‘I was asleep in bed and I woke up in the early hours of the morning. It was still dark and, standing beside the bed, were these three small beings,’ she told the Daily Mail.
‘We now refer to them as Greys, or grey aliens, who are typically about three to four feet tall, with inverted pear-shaped heads and large dark wrap‑around eyes.
‘They were just staring at me… and I was completely terrified. I didn’t move.
‘I did a very strange thing. I pulled the sheet over my head and I spontaneously started reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Then, the next thing I know, it’s morning.’
It was only the next day that she recalled the vivid experience and ‘had no clue’ why she had chosen to recite the prayer.
‘I went to Sunday school, but I’m not a religious person,’ she said.
Sheryl Gottschall (pictured) claims she had a terrifying close encounter with three ‘grey aliens’ in her bedroom during 1991 in Brisbane
Decades later, Ms Gottschall is the president of UFO Research Queensland, which is dedicated to recording and researching UFO sightings and close alien encounters.
The 1991 visit was just one of various ‘unexplainable’ experiences she has had.
Ms Gottschall said it is important for Australians to care about UFO sightings to understand that people on Earth are part of a ‘galactic neighbourhood.’
‘One day, we will evolve to the point where we are past having individual contact… to a collective scale where extraterrestrials might show up in droves,’ she said.
‘I think we need to be prepared for that… And if we have open contact, what does it mean? And what are they doing here?
‘It seems that these beings, whoever they are, aren’t intent on making open contact anytime soon. I don’t think they’ve done that throughout history.
‘Many researchers have studied history and… people have painted ETs and sketched them centuries ago in a lot of religious art and in Indigenous art.
‘But they don’t seem to intend to make open contact and that may be because we are being viewed for their own purposes.
Australians have also spotted airborne UAP – or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (pictured, a mystery object flies through the sky in Alexander Heights, WA)
‘We could be a very long-term experiment – and you don’t want to interfere with the experiment… It could be that they are prodding us to evolve in a certain way.’
Beyond ‘close encounters’ with aliens and UFOs, Australians have also spotted airborne UAP – or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
Last year, a mysterious object was found burning in remote Western Australia.
Discovered in October near a mining site outside the town of Newman, the large black object resembled known space re-entry debris, police said.
It was later linked to debris from a Chinese rocket launch.
A month earlier, there were reports of strange lights in the sky near Point Moore in Geraldton, 420km north of Perth.
But, to the frustration of researchers such as Melbourne-based UAP activist Grant Lavac, there appears to be little appetite within the federal government to seriously investigate the issue.
‘I’ve been perplexed as to why our US ally is taking this topic so seriously and being as transparent as they possibly can be, but Australia – as well as other allies, like the UK and New Zealand – are very, very reluctant to even talk about it,’ he said.
UAP activist Grant Lavac (pictured) has questioned why the Australian government has not restarted investigation into unusual aerial sightings across the country
In 1996, the Royal Australian Air Force formally stopped investigating reports of ‘unusual aerial sightings’ as there was ‘no scientific or other compelling reason to continue’.
But Mr Lavac said that, 30 years later, it’s a very different landscape: ‘We thought it was nothing back in 1996 but really, there is something to it.
‘Our US ally is taking this incredibly seriously as a potential national security threat and safety of flight risk.
‘I think the Australian Department of Defence and RAAF are fearful.’
While he is fascinated by UAPs, Mr Lavac remains more cautious than Ms Gottschall regarding what people might be looking at when they see a UAP.
‘People out in the bush, certainly in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, have reported observations of strange, anomalous objects in the sky,’ he said.
‘It’s just such a vast country that’s so uninhabited in some parts that there would be anomalous objects and things happening in the sky now that could include, you know, testing of top-secret, next-generation military technology.
‘So it could well be that UAP activity that is observed in Australian skies is our own human-made technology.
Pictured, a reprinted in Australian Flying Saucer Review from June 1966
‘But then you have reports from credible people who see some incredible things in Australian airspace that just defy our understanding of how things operate.’
Mr Lavac said this was enough of a compelling reason for the RAAF to revisit the topic and take it seriously.
‘If folks are seeing stuff in Australian airspace they cannot readily identify or reconcile, that is a real potential risk to national security,’ he said.
He added the items could be foreign and adversarial – so from a hostile nation – or more broadly ‘things in airspace that defy our current capabilities’.
‘I think it’s foolish for people to discount the idea that UAPs might originate from ETs and say, ‘It’s stupid to entertain the notion that it could be of non-human origin.’
‘Well, rather than explain the uninvestigated, we should be investigating the unexplained.’
