I’m late. The UFO Research meeting started at 1:00p.m. and it’s now ten past. I’d found the group on a meetup page a couple of weeks ago. “This is a group for anyone interested in the UFO subject and other Government cover-ups” it said. Meetings were once a month on the first Saturday: from 1:00p.m. to 5:00p.m. in the afternoon. This week their speaker was someone named Steve Gilmore.
“Steve will speak of a possible Extraterrestrial war being fought for control of our planet,” the site read.
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I was intrigued.
When I step inside the club, the lack of atmosphere on the bottom floor strikes me. It’s quiet, the lights are dull, and TVs with KENO sit in every corner of the room. An elderly man sits in the window reading a newspaper and sipping on a black coffee, and a woman with a cigarette sits on the phone in the smokers. Two employees from the front desk chat obliviously. I assume I’m the first – or maybe only – person here.
“Where’s the UFO event?” I ask.
“Second floor,” she replies. She has done this before.
Like most RSLs, the club floors are carpeted in a rich vermillion, with gold bannisters bending around a staircase up into the other floors and plastic plants garnishing the entrances. As I pass the first floor, the familiar sound of pokies hits, with old women equally dissatisfied and elated sipping on diet cokes.
The staircase to the second floor opens to a quiet room about the size of a basketball court. Another door leads to a smaller room on the left. The lighting is dull and there’s a general silence, except for one voice that slowly drawls over the buzz of the aircon vents. As I meander inside, I’m surprised to see 40 to 50 people sitting in perfectly aligned seats, spread across the space. They face frontwards, towards a slim middle-aged man in a maroon polo shirt: Steve Gilmore. On a whiteboard next to him he’s written the following:
SAT-AN (saturn)
LUC-I-FER (morning star)
NE-FER-TA-RI
CHI-TA-HU-RI
“Someone once told me I was like a butterfly,” he says as I weave through the group, “It’s funny because butterfly is actually the cosmic symbol for teacher.”
Gilmore asks if anyone in the audience has seen into the future. One lady lifts her hand and nods knowingly. When I finally sit somewhere at the edge, he has moved onto the topic of the day: The extraterrestrial wars on earth.
It’s hard to decipher what exactly Steve Gilmore is talking about. Much of the information is lost to me: I hadn’t done any sizeable research. I knew about reptilians (Thanks Men in Black), and UFO sightings in Westall in the 1960s. I had watched a bunch of Alien movies (I’m still haunted by The Fourth Kind) – but my knowledge was nowhere near as extensive as it should have been to understand what was happening.
Gilmore paced the floor, blowing over subjects in such quick succession that I barely had time to scribble down a sentence before he had moved to the next topic. When I look back through my notebook later to see what I’ve written– in almost unintelligible handwriting – there’s sentiments like “Reptilians eat slaves” and “The great honour to be consumed by a Draco” and “Some Reptilians are vegetarian” and, finally, “Hilary Clinton has a reptilian parasite in her throat”.
“Yeah, he’s pretty out there, the speakers are usually a lot more level-headed,” says a man sitting next to me with a prominent goatee. We both sit at the back, pressed up against the wall. He has a small notebook sitting on his lap.
“You don’t look like you fit in here,” he says.
“Yeah, this is my first time,” I say. “I’m just writing a story. It’s interesting though.”
“Oh,” he leans a bit closer, “I’m doing research as well.”
When I ask him what for, he says something about metaphysics. He doesn’t really believe in aliens, at least not to the same level of the people here today. He’s a wanderer of the fringe – an observer of underground meetings like this one: the occult, pagan societies, witches. “All for research,” he says, tapping his notebook, “I can give you some names off the record if you like.”
When we reach intermission, my brain is buzzing. I’ve digested a lot of information in a small amount of time. I wander around the room asking if anyone would be willing to be on camera for an interview. All but one says “no”.
“You can record, but I don’t want to tell you my name, or for anyone to see my face,” he says. It’s telling of the general hesitancy I’m met with that day.
“In 2015, I woke up and there were about seven people in my room and they were around my bed,” he says, his eyes wide, his hands in motion, “It was around 12:30 at night and the light was on and I usually turn it off when I’m sleeping.”
“One alien said ‘He seems okay, he’s waking up now, we’ve got to go’. Then there was a noise like the buzzing of a bee and they just disappeared. They were about 7feet tall. Initially I thought, How did they fit in my room?’”
Two months later he saw a Tic-Tac shaped aircraft near his home. It looked like a short cigar, dull silver.
When Steve Gilmore finally separates himself from the curious crowd that has congregated around him, he takes the floor again.
An energetic discussion surrounding UFO landing bases breaks out amongst him and the group.
“We all know Uluru is a base cover, they land underneath, the pyramids too,” A balding man in his early 60s shouts, “They also use the North Pole.”
“And what about the pyramids in Australia?” says a well-groomed blonde haired woman in her late 30s.
“Well, they haven’t found those yet,” says Gilmore, “But they’re definitely there somewhere.”
When Gilmore scans the crowd, he does so with unwavering eye contact, focusing in on one person at a time to deliver a soliloquy of facts.
“Humans are in the lowest of nine dimensions,” he says, never breaking my gaze, “And the light from the sun is actually black.”
When the talk ends four hours later, I drag Gilmore away from the various people patiently lining up to ask him questions. I want to make sense of what I’d just witnessed. I want to know more about him. I ask when his interest in the topics of the day first arose.
“I didn’t really have an interest, but I became aware probably about 30 years ago,” he says, again staring into my eyes, unblinking, “A lot of people feel that extraterrestrials would be better described as extra dimensionals – they’re more outside of our particular bandwidth and so I can see right up to the very highest layer.”
“I don’t view them in a visual sense, but I’ve probably seen a few dozen different types. I can see them with my third eye.”
“Do you think they ever intervene in human affairs?” I ask.
“Sometimes it’s in their interest to intervene in political affairs.”
“In Australia, for the upcoming election?”
“Yes. At the moment we’re going through a critical time so I think they are.”
I pause, “Do you know who’s going to win?”
He diverts slyly.
“Well, at the moment they are winning because no one has really woken up to do anything about it.”
He leaves with a knowing smile.
As the room scatters, we move to the bottom of the RSL for an after-meeting drink.
There is something refreshing about a group of people meeting in a dark, back-alley room, away from mainstream society, to explore a niche. It seemed like a safe space. A place for discussion. And while their beliefs surrounding UFO’s, extraterrestrials and government cover-ups bypassed anything I could conceive in my imagination, it wasn’t really up to me to decide what was real or what wasn’t.
Although it is hard to ignore a large group of people that tell you they’ve been abducted or seen a real life alien, that’s for sure.
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