It takes a bit of courage to do what 22-year-old Lea Kapiteli did on Saturday night. Far easier to stay at home.

She went public for the first time. The venue was the Ryde Eastwood Leagues Club. The organisers: UFO Research NSW.

Ms Kapiteli told the group that it has been happening since she was five. She sees things.

She says she has interacted with extraterrestrials on numerous occasions. She describes them, knows their names, culture and history. She creates captivating illustrations of what she has seen. There are even drawings of herself in what she describes as her astral body.

Then she goes further. She calls herself a Starseed, Homo Novis or “new human”, said to be highly intuitive and possessing multidimensional abilities beyond the five senses.

“A new human is a hybrid of extraterrestrial and human, the type of person who has had a lot of ET or non-human experiences and who feels like they are not really from this place,” she said.

“I have been having contact for about 15 years. It can range from physical encounters to psychic encounters and receiving information seemingly from nowhere.”

The first experience she says was at home in Melbourne. She woke up and said she knew it was time to leave. She saw a bright light through the window.

“We tend to stop when there is a physical object in front of us, but I didn’t have any of that instinct. I just kept walking right through the window. I was in a bright bluish place and saw a woman at the end of a path. She was short, bald and with golden skin. She had a red robe and she was beckoning me to come.

“We ended up in what seemed like a classroom with all sorts of people there. Human children, extraterrestrial children of different races and with different skin colours, some had blue or green skin. There were human children just like me. Some of them were wearing pyjamas still. I wasn’t afraid because this was like Sunday school.”

She says she also regularly has experiences of astral travel, where the body is temporarily left behind, giving freedom to explore the solar system or different worlds. She said on one occasion she was grabbed around the leg and woke up to see a red imprint around her leg.

Of her decision to give her first public talk, she said: “I feel this is a very important topic to talk about. Very few people are exploring it. I’m not the only one who is experiencing this. There are people all around the planet who are having these encounters and not enough people are saying what is really going on.

“There’s every help group out there for every topic you could possibly imagine except this one.”

Her mother, Sanja Korlaet, said that in the beginning she was confused and worried there could be something wrong with her daughter.

“One day at the age of eight she came to me and said: ‘Mum, I am not who you think I am. I am not just your daughter,’ which scared me. I believe what she is experiencing is a real thing. The drawings are of strange-looking people. She tells me: ‘These are my friends, mum. You haven’t met them yet.’ She is still young and I am not sure she is ready to handle this situation, but she wants to help other Starseeds.”

UFO Research NSW president Mariana Flynn said she became aware of Ms Kapiteli through Mary Rodwell, the Queensland-based head of the Australian Close Encounter Research Network, who she said works with a lot of Starseeds and Star Children.

“I met Lea and asked her to talk to our group. I am always wanting to stretch minds and wake people up. I think the group will be fine when they see her energy, personality and [the] authenticity of her story. I had someone ask me if she’s had medical tests to prove she has got extraterrestrial DNA. No. The tests are very expensive.

“We have to take her on trust, and if people can’t handle her story that’s fine. We are just giving them an experience of a unique young person telling her story and who believes she’s telling the truth.”