Elsie Oakensen, Church Stowe car-stop and missing time

Wednesday, 22 November 1978. Elsie Oakensen ran the teachers' resources centre in Daventry, Northamptonshire. At lunch that day a sudden, intense pain gripped her head and she nearly fainted. Jenny Randles later likened it to a severe migraine. A tightening around the head.

At about 17:15 she set off for home. The A45 to Weedon, south on the A5, then the lane into her village, Church Stowe.

Just after she turned onto the A5 at Weedon, she saw two very bright lights over the road. A red one and a green one. She took them for a low aircraft coming down and pressed her face to the windscreen. It was a large grey object shaped like a dumbbell, with a light at each rounded end. Smooth and plastic looking, the colour of old pewter.

No windows. No engines. It hovered without a sound some 100 to 150 feet above the rush-hour traffic. She would not stop on a busy road, so she drove on underneath it. Then the green light started to flash.

At about 17:30 she turned into Church Stowe and changed into third gear. The car, serviced that very day, cut out. The engine went silent while the headlights stayed on, and the car coasted to a halt. She pressed the accelerator. The engine caught for a moment.

Then everything went black. Engine and lights both died. Piercing white circles of light, about a yard across, appeared one after another. Left, front, right, behind. Then they vanished upwards.

As if someone had flicked a switch, natural light returned and she was driving normally. She reached her garage a few hundred yards on, about 15 minutes late. She insisted she had never touched the ignition or the gears.

BUFORA investigated, and Martin Keatman conducted hypnotic regression. Accounts differ on what it produced, but Randles says the August 1979 session brought back the pressure on her head and a beam of white light striking her from above. She got hotter and hotter. Two grey, rather ghostlike shapes appeared, one long and thin, one more rectangular, and she called them people. Later, at Randles' suggestion, she repeated the drive at night and came away believing she had been selected, scanned, promised a return visit, and then rejected as unsuitable.

About 90 minutes later, four women who knew nothing of Oakensen's story were driving from Byfield to a meeting in Northampton. Near Preston Capes, parallel beams shot from a cloud, then red and green lights crossed the road ahead. Their almost new car lost power. As they drove on south the lights paced them, until the car recovered in a village with street lights. The lights merged into one large white light and vanished.

Despite the heavy traffic, no other driver on the A5 ever came forward. Patrick Gross grades the case as possible confusion or a UFO encounter, and notes that the beings emerged only through hypnosis, a method serious ufologists do not regard as valid. There are no photographs, radar data or physical traces, but Oakensen never stopped believing. She became a spiritual healer, treasurer of the Northamptonshire UFO Research Centre and the author of two books. Randles saw striking parallels with the 1980 case of Alan Godfrey at Todmorden: a car losing power, missing time, and what emerged under regression.