UFO Attacks Family in Australia 👽 UFO Sightings In Australia

It's a question many of us have asked ourselves: are we alone in the universe?

From flying saucers to balls of light rocketing through the sky, South Australia has had its fair share of reported UFO encounters.

One avid ABC reader has asked us to delve into the history of the state's major cases, as part of our Curious Adelaide campaign.

So we dusted off some of South Australia's oldest X-Files to find answers.

We'll start in the outback, where a traumatised family was allegedly lifted off the ground by aliens.

It was still dark in the early hours of January 20, 1988, when the Knowles family was driving along the remote Nullarbor Plain.

The seemingly mundane trip from Perth to Melbourne quickly turned to terror when they encountered an unidentified flying object that tormented them for 90 minutes.

A large glowing object "like a big ball" chased Faye Knowles and her adult sons Patrick, Wayne and Sean down the highway, before landing on their roof and plucking them into the air.

"It apparently picked the car up off the road, shook it quite violently and forced the car back down on the road with such pressure that one of the tyres was blown," a police spokesman told media at the time.

In a state of shock, Sean Knowles put his foot on the accelerator as his mother screamed but, according to reports, their voices distorted like time was slowing down.