Twenty frightened Townsville residents have reporting seeing unidentified flying objects over the past 20 years.

Evidence collected by UFO Research Queensland details the terrifying encounters.

Researcher Sheryl Gottschall is documenting the history of sightings of UFOs and would like to hear from anyone who may have had a personal UFO sighting, past or current, or know of such reports from their local area.

Ms Gottschall said the database included historical and new sightings.

She said the database was part of an attempt to gather a collection of reports from the public.

“We find that when people report through social media they don’t put much detail into it.

“The idea is for us to have a searchable database so the public, who are looking for similar accounts like their own, can use it.”

If you’ve seen a UFO, call Ms Gottschall on 3376 1780.

“If people have close encounters they can call us and we record their experiences,” she said.

Recorded UFO sightings

Townsville, Wednesday about July 10, 1999, 1.30am

A woman who lives near the Ross River observed a star coming over the top of a nearby mountain.

It vanished, then reappeared and started to get brighter and closer.

It had a spotlight beaming from it to the ground and she had the impression it was spying on the nearby army base.

She heard no noise as the object started bouncing in the sky very fast, then hovering and flying.

She became very frightened, went inside, turned off the lights and locked the door.

She watched it for a couple of hours.

She later rang the army base to see if they had something in the air at the time, which there wasn’t.

Townsville, Sunday May 19, 2002, 12.50am

A woman reported seeing a grey, boomerang-shaped object moving silently and not as fast as a plane.

There were no lights on it and it made no noise.

It was travelling at the speed of an ultralight and in a straight line.

She thought it might have been a hang-glider but it was going too fast.

She said she could see the structure of the object and even the welding.

When asked how she saw this object in the sky at 12.50am, she said it was a very light night.

Townsville, Saturday December 10, 2005, night

Just a few minutes ago I saw something suspicious in the sky.

It probably was a plane, but it was an object in the sky with three lights, normal white lights, moving faster than a plane, and I could see the shape of the object.

It was like a triangle without pointed sides.

They were curved and planes don’t seem to fly the way it was travelling.

My father saw it but he said it was a plane and one of my next door neighbours was outside too.

I don’t know if they looked up at the sky but they were around when I saw it.

Just wondering if what I saw is or was a UFO of some sort?

Townsville, Saturday April 19, 2009, 3.40am

I was outside on my back deck here in Townsville having a cigarette and looking at the stars when I noticed a very huge object that blended in with the colour of the sky, which was dark grey.

This object appeared to be a V shape and was just gliding very slowly, lower than plane height, and it had rows of very dim grey blue-coloured lights around the V shape.

The time was 3.40am. I watched for about 50 seconds before it disappeared behind some trees. It had no noise associated with it.

I waited for about five more minutes but did not see it again, however I did see a small light aircraft coming in low to the airport and could hear that easily.

Townsville, QLD, August 2, 2009, 2am

A family was sitting around a camp fire when directly above the group appeared three disks.

One took off at great speed and two moved in a different direction but stayed in view.

The third went in the opposite direction to the first leaving a white trail.

The witness has had a number of sightings.

The witness was indigenous to Australia and was waiting to be admitted to train in healing work.

Townsville, November 1 2009, 8.50pm

At around 8.50pm I took my daughter into the backyard and while looking up in the sky I saw what at first I thought was just a bright star, but then I saw it was moving.

This object was initially slow and I think it was not a satellite, as most of the satellites I have seen are between 6 and 8pm and are not very bright.

This thing was like a big star. It was travelling from the west towards the east, and then it started moving very fast towards the south.

I would say I saw this thing flying for about four or five minutes.

Townsville, January-February 2012

I quite enjoy investigating strange sightings in my spare time in North Queensland.

Recently I have received reports of a strange flying creature in Townsville. About a month ago two separate people witnessed a flying object in the sky at night.

They described the object to look somewhat like a bat, with batlike wings but the body of a man. The object was very dark.

Without looking into this further, this sighting seems quite similar to the Mothman sightings of West Virginia USA that are now UFO folk law.

Possibly a couple of people with an excessive imagination? Perhaps, however my investigation on this is still ongoing.

Whether it be in the north Queensland area or Australia wide. This is not the first sighting report of a “flying man” received from North Queensland.

Townsville, Friday September 14 2001, 10.15pm

The witness was driving in a car when she observed an orange light travelling very slowly from north to south. It seemed to have two red lights underneath it.

Townsville, February 1 2003, reported December 2008

After sighting a UFO in 2000, a strange orange light following a car I have been actively looking out for UFOs.

In Townsville at roughly 9.15pm after coming back from a jog, I was doing some stretches on my second story unit balcony.

As I was glancing up I sighted three white lights in a triangular formation that looked quite high up.

They were spaced quite far apart, easily far enough to be three separate objects.

They were travelling quite fast — it took roughly seven seconds for them to travel from directly above me to the horizon.

I could tell they were quite high, as they travelled above clouds. They were silent, with no smoke or vapour trail. The lights were about the same size as a satellite, yet they were about two or three times as bright.

Townsville, August 31, 2011

I took three pictures that caught my eye while taking photos of the sun with my iPod 10 minutes ago.

In the top left hand quarter above the sun there is a white thing.

It shouldn’t be there what ever it is.

The first photo I noticed it then the 2nd it had slightly moved then the third it was streaking away. I didn’t move the iPod, I just kept pressing till I got about 10 shots.

I live in Kirwan, a suburb of Townsville, not far from the RAAF base. I am a current serving RAAF airman.

This is the 3rd UFO I’ve seen in my three years in Townsville, but the only one caught on camera.

Townsville, August 14 2010, 11pm

I’d like to report a strange light I witnessed over Townsville in mid-August. I was standing in my backyard in Oonoonba, having a cigarette, at around 11pm.

I glanced up into the sky and noticed an orange fireball about half the size of a full moon, which seemed to be stationary. I speculated that it must have been a military jet with afterburners lit, travelling directly away from me.

However it seemed to stay in the one place far too long. It was hard to gauge at what altitude this “fireball” was, other than to say it was below the upper-level cloud. It remained stationary for approximately 30 seconds, then suddenly seemed to gain height at an extraordinary rate.

Townsville, April 30, 2011, 9pm

I would like to report a sighting that occurred on 30 April 2011 at about 9pm in Townsville. The object was witnessed by my wife and myself.

I am a soldier in the Australian Army.

I saw what I first believed to be a shooting star. I initially noticed it nearly directly above my head and watched it travel in a Westerly direction away from me. I watched it move down towards the horizon for about half a second, at which point it seemed to explode like fireworks. It was very bright, maybe 5-10 times brighter than the brightest star in the sky.

I asked my wife if she had seen the shooting star and I was disappointed that she had not as it was very spectacular. I commented that it was very unusual as I have never seen a shooting star so bright.

I am an infantryman who has served about nine years and have spent many nights in the bush on training and operations. I have seen hundreds of shooting stars, many are picked up with night vision goggles that would not normally be seen by the naked eye, and I have never seen so bright a light. I was also excited as I had never seen a shooting star explode like a firework.

Townsville, April 26 2008, 4.30pm

On the 26th of April 2008 my mother and two brothers saw what they thought to be a man flying in the air, in broad daylight at 4.30pm in the afternoon against a cloudless sky and about 800 — 1000 metres away.

One of my brothers is an ex paratrooper in the Australian Army and he described the flying man as being about six to seven feet in height, and he was floating in a standing upright position. The man seemed to be moving his head and looking around, and when he turned towards Hervey’s Range, you could see his whole anatomy and it was a man.

Townsville, 1999 [reported October 12 2001]

Two years previously a man was travelling in a sleeping cabin on a train when he had a UFO sighting. He saw two objects together near Bowen heading in a straight line.

The two objects joined and there was an explosion like a star burst.

Townsville, 1970s [reported September 2004]

I would like to tell you about something that happened to my family and I back in the late 1970s.

It’s a tale I don’t normally speak about but I decided to take a chance and tell it to you.

My parents and I had a beach house about thirty minutes drive north of Townsville in north Queensland at a place called Toomula, a small beachside community. It was a Friday night and we were going fishing on the Saturday over at an island about thirteen or so miles off the coast called Rattlesnake, an island used for target practice at one time by the RAAF, so we needed to get some bait.

We were down at the mouth of Saltwater Creek, which also gave the small settlement its more commonly used name of Saltwater Beach, and my father was casting for bait when I noticed a bright light up in the sky that was reflecting strongly in the water.

Baffled by the light I drew it to the attention of my parents and grandfather, who was also with us. My father had a large torch with him and he used this to shine up at the light, and he flashed the torch at it several times. To our surprise the light in the sky flashed back at us several times before taking off at a great speed, heading along the coast towards Townsville, and I still believe that I saw the search light from the Townsville Airport shine up at it, which caused it to shoot out to sea for a distance before turning back in our general direction. It was still way out to sea when it passed behind the island I have already mentioned, proving that it was very low down in the sky. Then it started coming directly back towards us.

This light, or whatever it was, made no sound whatsoever and was obviously big, and it covered what must have been at least a hundred miles in a matter of seconds. Coming back towards us it came to a halt further from us than it had been when we first saw it, and hovered in the sky for a short time before it started to move up and down, and then from side to side. Then, to our horror I suppose, it started coming towards us, making a zigzag pattern as it moved towards us, again making no sound.

Townsville, 11 October 11 2008, 9pm

We live in Cranbrook. I just want to know if anyone else saw it, or know of an aircraft that might have five lights visible at once, that the red and green are back to front, and a vertical pale blue glowing light on the tail “fin”.

Maybe there is a reasonable explanation.

My daughter, 9, and I were outside with Ruby (dog) doing what dogs do.

We saw a strange looking plane in the sky. It came from the left, which is a flight path and headed in the right direction. It suddenly became larger quickly and the lights were all wrong. The red lights were on the right, and the green lights were on the left. There were two at the back and two at the front.

You shouldn’t be able to see all four lights at once anyhow when a plane is flying.

I saw an extra blue light there and the sense of a large tailfin that was a very dim glowing electric light blue.

Townsville Strand, August 28 2006, 6.30pm

A witness observed two lights moving about as the stars were coming out, for about 15 minutes. They moved about both slowly and quickly, changing direction. One of the lights disappeared. He took his eyes off the remaining light and when he looked back it was gone.

Ravenswood, 1991 [reported December 2006]

I wish to report a sighting of a Min-Min light between the Burdekin Dam and Ravenswood. It was in May or June 1991. There were five of us in the car. We all worked at the Coutts Burdekin Wilderness Lodge and were on our way to Townsville for a night out. The light followed the car, through the trees for about fifteen minutes.

It looked like a car headlight. At first it was behind us on the left hand-side, then it caught up to us and overtook us, then went across in front of the car and was travelling beside us on the right hand-side. It then seemed to slow and the last we saw it, it was directly behind the car and further back. We were all quite frightened at the time and trying to explain what it could be. What I found most strange is that the incident was never really discussed again between us, even though we lived and worked together. The wilderness lodge closed down at the end of June and we all lost contact. I have thought about the incident many times since and I would be a sceptic if I hadn’t witnessed the phenomena for myself.

Mundingburra, North Queensland, Thursday March 4 2004, 2am

I live at Mundingburra, in Townsville. For the past month between 12.00 midnight and 2.00am my girlfriend and I have seen, a number of times, an object that flashes four distinct colours — red, green, blue and white.

I did manage to take a video of this thing.

There have been no planes or aircraft in area and they would not move as quickly as this object.

Castle Hill, Townsville Wednesday March 31, 2004, 7.15pm

A man was walking his dog, looking west, and observed something that seemed to be a shooting star but changed into a “massive ball”.

It lit up for five seconds or less, was orange and had a small tail. He heard no noise at the time. The object was moving towards Harvey’s Range near the military base.

Independent confirmation of the above sighting was received in December 2004. I also spotted this. I was headed south on Upper Ross River Road at Rassmussen about the same time and saw an identical object, except I recall seeing what looked like sparks emanating from the tail.

North Queensland UFO festival

The only UFO festival in Australia will take place just north of Townsville this year.

The Cardwell UFO Festival is on October 21 and about 2000 UFO enthusiasts are expected to attend.

Cardwell and the region, including Tully which is known for its “Saucer Nest”, is regarded as a hot spot for unusual activity.

Source: Townsville Bulletin