General News
1 October, 2025
We’re not alone
ONE of Australia’s quirkiest annual festivals is planning a major celebration in 2026 to mark 60 years since the first UFO sighting was reported in the region by a farmer.
To help with next August’s event, the Australian UFO Festival in Cardwell has landed itself a $7500 council grant (see separate story on the full list of grants in this edition).
The first UFO Festival wasn’t a standalone event, it was part of broader festivities in 2014 to help celebrate 100 years of Cardwell’s settlement.
“About two weeks before that a businessman had seen lights go across the sky, but for decades, people had seen these lights in Cardwell,” UFO Festival founder and manager Thea Ormonde told The Observer.
“And then other people shared stories about what they’d seen, what their father had seen, their grandfather had seen, what their uncle had seen, their mother, all that – and it went on for hours this conversation … that’s how the Cardwell festival was born.”
But the 2026 festival’s theme will travel even further back in time to when, as far as UFO and other unexplained phenomena enthusiasts are concerned, links with UFOs and the like were established in the Far North and beyond.
Next year’s event will pay tribute to the legacy of banana farmer George Pedley, who in 1966 reported spotting a UFO rising from a ‘lagoon’, vanishing in a blue vapor and leaving behind a 9m circular “saucer nest” in the floating reeds.
The incident sparked widespread interest, including in the media, and drew crowds to the area at Euramo, near Tully. It’s also believed to be the event that kicked off the global crop circle phenomenon.
In recent years, the Cardwell festival became the ‘Australian’ UFO Festival – because it’s the only one of its kind in the nation.
“There’s two pillars to the festival,” Ms Ormonde said.
“One is it’s fun and quirky and is all about the community and helping other not-for-profit organisations use the weekend as a fundraiser, that sort of thing, and just having a lot of fun.
“And then we also have the other pillar, (which) is for people to have a genuine interest in the unexplained.”
Ms Ormonde and her co-organisers hope the site of what they call the ‘Tully crop circle and UFO nest’ at Euramo, could be a feature of next year’s event.
“We’re in talks with the landowner about what we can do to highlight that and how we can integrate that into the festival.”
For the first time next year, the festival will run an extra day, from 6-9 August.
Read More: Cardwell