The Winchester Encounters: Joyce Bowles and Ted Pratt

Joyce Bowles was 42. She was an attendant at Winchester Station, known locally as a psychic healer. Her neighbour Ted Pratt was 58. On Sunday 14 November 1976 they set out in her white Mini Clubman for Chilcomb, about 3½ miles away, to collect her son.

It happened between 8.55 and 9.00 p.m., on the eastern edge of Winchester. Bowles saw two lights, one higher than the other. Then the car shuddered and rattled. The steering locked. The Mini seemed to float sideways and settled in the middle of the verge, parallel to the road.

In front of them hovered a cigar-shaped object, like a fat Winston Churchill cigar, about 12 ft long. The vapour beneath it looked like an inverted gas stove jet. Behind three brightly lit windows sat three figures, as though they were sitting in a bus.

One of them got out. He was tall, with a pointed beard and hair down to his shoulders at the back. His suit shimmered as if shaken by a wind, a dull silver like Bacofoil. He walked to the car and bent to look in Bowles's window. His eyes were piercing pink. No pupils. No irises. He passed his eyes over the dashboard. The engine started. The headlights came on. When the pair looked to the front again, the craft and its occupants were gone.

Bowles was terrified and clung to Pratt. Pratt, who had angina, felt calm. He said the being "transmitted some power which calmed me." The next day both told their story on BBC South Today.

On 30 December 1976, near the B3404, the pair saw a big glow in the sky. The car began rocking. Bowles said her mind became a blank. Then they were standing in a room. Three men in silver coveralls, and the being from November, spoke in broken English. "We are not coming to invade you." Bowles replied, "That's what Hitler said." One answered, "You have a very strong tongue." Then everything went hazy. They were back in the car beside a river, on a road they did not know. Bowles now described missing time. Later sources add further meetings in 1977, one with a friend, Ann Strickland.

Bowles suffered blotchy skin on the right side of her face and nausea for nearly a week. A caller claiming to speak for the government warned that the creatures might take her again. In May 1977 the News of the World reported that she had lost her job. British Rail said her post was redundant. She blamed the publicity.

BUFORA and the Bournemouth Unexplained Phenomena Research Group took up the case. Their work filled four articles in Flying Saucer Review and a report in the BUFORA Journal. Steve Gamble tested the site for radiation and pH. Nothing unusual was found. The two witnesses did not agree on everything. Pratt described a bright orange-red object some 40 feet long, and said he had seen only one window. Still, Lionel Beer judged that, accepting their honesty, they "had a genuine and alarming experience." In his words, "the probability of a UFO encounter remains open."

Leslie Harris took another road. Drawing on Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia, he suggested that Bowles's psychic energy produced the event, or let an unknown force become visible. Her history of ghost and poltergeist reports left some researchers doubtful. Yet no source alleges that the pair invented it. Users on Metabunk later floated ideas ranging from a mini-stroke to the 1976 TV series Ark II. These remain speculation. The Winchester close encounter is still debated.