The Emilcin Abduction: Jan Wolski and the Flying Bus

Emilcin is a small village in the Lublin region of eastern Poland. In 1978 Jan Wolski was 71 years old. A farmer. Locals called him a truthful man, someone who didn't drink alcohol and enjoyed an unblemished reputation in the village.

10 May 1978. Before 8 a.m. Wolski was driving his horse-drawn cart home. Two short figures jumped onto the moving cart and sat behind him, legs hanging down. They were about 150 cm tall, with green faces, slanted eyes and prominent cheekbones. They wore black one-piece suits with hoods. Their speech was short and fast, in thin voices.

At a woodland clearing, he saw the craft. Pure white. As long as a bus. It hovered about 5 m above the ground. At each of its four corners, a black drill was rotating around its axis with great speed. It made a rumble. Wolski later rendered it as "...zzzzz...".

A platform came down and brought him to the entrance. Inside was a dark room with black walls like extremely strong glass, and 8 to 10 benches. Several crows lay under the wall, moving their legs and wings but apparently immobilized. The beings signalled him to undress and examined him with a device resembling two dishes. They offered him food resembling an icicle. He declined. As he left, he bowed. They bowed in return. Walking away, he lost sight of the craft behind some bushes.

Wolski's two sons and a neighbour went to the clearing. The grass was trodden down, covered with dew, with paths coming in all directions. No one photographed or cast the marks. Then a second voice. Adam Popiołek, six years old, said he had seen a bus-shaped craft hovering over a barn before ascending into the sky. His account differed in details from Wolski's. After the story spread, more sightings were reported in Przyrownica and Golina.

Amateur ufologist Witold Wawrzonek reached the family first and alerted Zbigniew Blania-Bolnar, a sociologist who became the chief investigator. Blania-Bolnar arranged examinations that found Wolski honest and mentally sound. He did not fabricate the story. On 6 July 1978, Henryk Pomorski and Krystyna Adamczyk recorded a long interview with him. Blania-Bolnar later admitted that some published details, a red circle on the chest and webbed fingers, were planted as a trap for UFO liars. The Citizens' Militia, under Lt Stanisław Plis, reached a simpler verdict. The entire event was a dream.

In 2013 the publicist Bartosz Rdułtowski published *Tajne operacje. PRL i UFO*. His theory: Wawrzonek, hypnotised by Blania-Bolnar without consent, took revenge by hypnotising Wolski and planting the memory. Wawrzonek's widow and son said he had no interest in hypnosis. In 2015 Rdułtowski conceded that "the actual fact of Wolski's hypnosis cannot be directly verified." Krzysztof Drozd, a former militia officer, pointed elsewhere. Helicopter flights from Radawiec and the Dęblin air force school were never checked. Ufologist Mateusz Kijewski noted that the encounter rests on one witness.

In 1978 TVP Łódź made the documentary Odwiedziny, czyli u progu tajemnicy, featuring Wolski. He died in 1990, still convinced the encounter was real. On 15 October 2005, Fundacja Nautilus unveiled a monument at the clearing. A metal cube, balanced on one corner. Its inscription says the truth will astonish us in the future. In 2025 Netflix released Projekt UFO, a fiction inspired by the case. Every 10 May, people still gather at the site of the Polish Roswell.