The festival was the idea of Thea Ormonde, whose own childhood encounter sparked a lifelong fascination with the unexplained. In 2014, casting around for a way to mark Cardwell's 150th anniversary, she landed on something the district had quietly carried for decades: a reputation. This stretch of coast and hinterland has long been thick with stories of odd lights and odder sightings, and Ormonde turned that local lore into a celebration. What began as a quirky one-off for the town's sesquicentenary grew into a two-day fixture that now draws thousands - sceptics and true believers mingling at the same market day, which is rather the point.

The festival's deepest roots reach back to a January morning in 1966, just up the road near Tully. A 28-year-old banana farmer named George Pedley was driving his tractor across Albert Pennisi's property when, by his account, a large grey saucer-shaped object rose with a hiss from Horseshoe Lagoon, climbed to treetop height, tilted, and shot away to the southwest in a burst of speed. The whole thing lasted seconds. What it left behind became famous: a near-circular depression of flattened, swirled reeds in the lagoon, one of several that came to be called the Tully Saucer Nests. The case made national news and is still a cornerstone of Australian UFO lore - the kind of unresolved story a festival like this exists to keep alive.

At the heart of the weekend is the C-Files, the festival's open forum - a deliberate play on a certain television show, and an invitation for anyone to take the microphone. People come to recount their UFO experiences, but the conversation rarely stops at flying objects. The folklore of the Australian outback is wonderfully broad, and the C-Files makes room for all of it: the Min Min lights that famously hover and recede across the plains, tales of hairy men in the rainforest, large black cats prowling the bush, and other mysteries the region has accumulated over the years. A 2016 forum featured a guest speaker from Queensland UFO Research, lending the proceedings a note of earnest inquiry amid the fun.

There is something fitting about all this happening in Cardwell. The town sits where dense, dripping rainforest meets the reef-fringed sea, a landscape that has always felt a little uncanny - the sort of place where a strange light over the water or a sound in the canes invites a story rather than a shrug. The festival never insists you believe anything. It simply gives the believing and the doubting a shared weekend, a costume party, and a forum, and lets the tropical night do the rest. In a country full of small-town festivals built around pumpkins and prawns, Cardwell chose the wide dark sky - and made it the friendliest mystery in Queensland.