Real Alien Encounters: 3 Cases Nobody Could Explain

Three real alien encounters that investigators, police and medical professionals all looked at — and none of them could explain away.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction: 3 Unexplained Cases
1:26 The Aveley Abduction, Essex 1974
3:26 Three Hours Missing
6:36 Hypnosis and What It Revealed
10:31 Zanfretta: The Italian Security Guard
14:55 Hypnosis and 11 Encounters
21:33 The Kelly Farmhouse Siege
25:40 Police Investigate Kelly
28:57 What the Investigators Found

Written and narrated by Theo Penrose.
#RealAlienEncounters #AlienAbduction #UFOStories

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Tonight we have three cases that quietly stayed with me long after I first read them. A family who lost three hours on a country road, a man visited again and again near the Italian coast, and a farmhouse where something came that the police simply could not explain. It is ten at night, the family is nearly home, and the road ahead has just disappeared. A dense green mist, eight or nine feet high, lies across the road in front of the car.

The engine has gone quiet. The tyres have gone quiet. Only the radio is left, and it is beginning to crackle. John grips the wheel. In the back, his son Kevin is still awake. The car rolls forward in silence. Andrew Collins, the investigator who later took up this case, called it probably the most important British case ever.

He described the family as very normal, simple and warm. John had left school at fifteen and worked mostly in carpentry and construction, with evenings as a radio disc jockey. Elaine had left school at sixteen to become an accountant, then married John and became a full-time housewife and mother. So what happened to them on that road?

It was the 27th of October 1974, a little after ten at night. The family were driving along a road just outside Aveley, Essex. In the back, Karen, eleven, and Stuart, seven, were asleep. Only Kevin, ten, was awake, watching the dark through the window. And it was Kevin who saw it first.

An oval light, pale blue and iridescent, hung about twenty five to thirty degrees above the eastern horizon. It seemed to travel in the same direction as the car, stopping and starting, as if it were keeping pace with them. The family judged it to be no more than five hundred yards away. Kevin pointed it out, and soon both his parents were watching it too.

At first the couple wondered if it was a helicopter. It was not behaving like one. It held its place beside them, moved on, then held again. Before long, John and Elaine were both calling it what it seemed to be: a UFO. Nobody in the car could say what it wanted, or why it seemed to be following them home.

The road curved on ahead, into the dark. They were doing about thirty miles an hour, going into a bend beside a block of four terraced houses on the right, when the engine and tyre noise went silent. Only the radio could still be heard. And no more than thirty yards ahead, a dense green mist lay across the road, eight or nine feet high.

Then the radio began to crackle, and then it began to smoke. John reached down and pulled out the wires. At that moment the headlights went out. In the dark, with no engine sound at all, the car slid towards the green mist, which had been no more than thirty yards ahead. Elaine would remember the car jerking violently as it went in.

Inside, it was very cold, even though the windows were wound up. They felt a tingling, and the silence was total: no engine, no tyres, no radio now. It seemed to last a second or two. Then a jolt, Collins wrote, like a car going over a hump back bridge. And then the mist was behind them, and the road was clear.

It felt as if nothing had happened at all. But they were about half a mile further up the road than they should have been. When they reached home, Elaine looked at the clock. It said about one in the morning. They had expected to be home at around twenty past ten. Collins later drove the same nine miles himself, from Harold Hill to Aveley.

It took him exactly twenty two minutes. So where had the other three hours gone? Before Christmas 1974, John suffered a nervous breakdown. Collins noted there was no apparent cause for it. John stopped working entirely and remained out of work until September 1975. He had smoked sixty to seventy cigarettes a day before October 1974.

By Christmas he had stopped completely, Collins recorded, and found he could not stand the smell of them afterwards. Two changes. No explanation offered. Collins simply wrote down what he found. And the changes went on. John, Elaine, Kevin and Karen all stopped eating meat and could no longer stand the smell of it, and John and Elaine found that eating fish or meat made them ill.

From November 1974, John began writing poems on the spur of the moment. John and Elaine, who had once enjoyed a good drink, largely gave up alcohol. Kevin, who had struggled with reading, was suddenly far ahead of his reading age. Collins listed each change as it was reported to him.

Then came the strange things. Soon after that night, John and Elaine noticed three cars that seemed to be following them: a small red sports-looking car, a blue Jaguar and a large white car, all with darkened windows. In and around the house there were humming and clicking sounds, and something like Morse code. And Kevin said a strange man dressed in white had stood beside his bed.

He looked, Kevin said, like a clown. Andrew Collins, of the UFO Investigators' Network, heard about the family in August 1977 and began his investigation on the fifteenth. Before any hypnosis, John already had dream-like memories of small, ugly beings, like gnomes, carrying out tests on him. Elaine remembered lying on a flat, wide table, unable to move or speak, with a small being in a white coat beside her.

Collins arranged for a dental surgeon, Dr Leonard Wilder, to hypnotise them. The first session was set for the twenty-fifth of September 1977. What John and Elaine said under hypnosis became the heart of Collins' report, compiled in January 1978 and published in Flying Saucer Review. And the strange things at home did not stop.

On the thirteenth of December 1977, at around seven in the evening, the family said a large portable radio rose about three inches from the top of the television set and dropped back down. That same evening, the handle of the hall door turned slowly, then shot back. The abduction account did not emerge on the night of the incident. It came out under hypnosis, three years later.

John already carried dream-like memories of a physical examination before any session began. Critics argue those earlier images may have shaped what he then recalled. Hypnotic regression can introduce suggestion, or quietly reinforce what is already there. That is the case the sceptics make, and it is a fair one.

There is more the sceptics can point to. No independent witness to the light or the green mist appears in any of the sources. Dr Wilder was a dental surgeon, not a psychologist. The strange events at the house rest only on the family's word. And the account was given in a decade already full of abduction stories, so the details may have had a ready template waiting for them.

And yet some parts of this story came before any of that. The clock that said one in the morning was seen that same night, not recalled years later under hypnosis. John's breakdown came before Christmas 1974, nearly three years before Collins arrived. His poems began that November.

None of that proves what happened inside the mist. But it is why this case has never been quietly closed. Collins' report, published in Flying Saucer Review in 1978, remains the main record of this case. In it, the family appear only by their first names. No police or government inquiry into that night appears in the sources.

But everything we know still comes back to one family's account, and one investigator's notes. That road outside Aveley is still there. The mist is not. Neither is the explanation. John drove into something on an October night, and three hours were gone before he reached home. Collins recorded what John reported.

No one has explained it away entirely. John went back to work in September 1975, working with mentally handicapped people, and later worked for himself, making things. The case stayed in the pages of Flying Saucer Review and the notes of private investigators, with no official inquiry on record. Decades on, nothing has closed it.

A family from Essex drove into a green mist one October night in 1974, and the clock at home said three hours had gone. That question is still open. The radio operator heard a voice come through at 12:15 in the morning. It was broken, excited, repeating the same words. Then it said, in Italian, no, they are not men.

Then the line went dead. The voice belonged to Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, a 26-year-old security guard calling from a darkened garden above Genoa. He had been sent to check an empty country mansion. The incident had begun around 11:30 that night, in December 1978. When colleagues reached him at 1:15 in the morning, Zanfretta was lying in front of the mansion.

Gianfranco Tutti, director of the Institute of Vigilance Val Bisagno, would later say he believed Zanfretta was an honest man. Something had happened in that garden. The question was what. Three weeks later, after a second incident on another cold night, officers would once again be standing over Zanfretta and reaching for answers that the record did not supply.

It was the night of 6 December 1978, at around half past eleven. The mansion was called Casa Nostra. It stood in the small hamlet of Marzano, in the municipality of Torriglia, in the Province of Genoa, and no one lived there. No car should have been in its drive, and no light should have been moving in its garden.

For a night guard, it should have been a two minute check. It was not. According to journalist Rino Di Stefano, as Zanfretta approached the mansion his Fiat 126 stopped dead. Engine, lights, radio: all failed at once. He stepped out onto the cold road. In the garden of the uninhabited house he could see four unusual lights moving.

The property belonged to a local dentist, Dr. Ettore Righi. It was not supposed to be occupied. Nothing in the garden was supposed to be moving. Yet there the lights were. Zanfretta drew his gun and flashlight and entered through the open gate, believing thieves were on the property.

Then, Di Stefano reported, a large flat triangular form, blinding in its brilliance, ascended from behind the house with a hissing sound. Zanfretta reported feeling intense heat. What happened in the moments that followed he could not account for in his waking state. Under hypnosis he would later describe being lifted from the garden and taken up into the craft.

But that account would only emerge weeks later. In his own account, Zanfretta said he saw a red, oval object inside the property, more than ten metres across. Then something came at him from behind. Di Stefano recorded his words: an enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin, no less than ten feet tall.

Weeks later, under hypnosis, he would describe the beings in more detail: mottled green skin, yellow triangular eyes, pointed ears, clawed hands and feet, and a face covered in deep wrinkles. That call was received by Carlo Toccalino, the radio operator on duty that night at the Genoa operations centre. His testimony filled in what the broken transmission contained. Di Stefano reported that Toccalino recalled Zanfretta's voice as excited and disconnected, repeatedly saying 'My God, are they ugly.

' Then came the words now on record: 'No, non sono uomini, non sono uomini. ' No, they are not men, they are not men. That was the last transmission. After that the line went dead and contact was lost entirely. Toccalino alerted Lt. Giovanni Cassiba, chief of the security service.

Colleagues Walter Lauria and Raimondo Mascia drove out to Marzano. At 1:15 in the morning they found Zanfretta lying in front of the mansion. When they reached him, he jumped up with his gun and flashlight ready, and did not appear to recognise them. It had been an hour since the last words on the radio.

The gate through which Zanfretta had entered was found closed as usual when his colleagues arrived. When he calmed down he could not account for the missing time. He remembered the garden, the lights, and then nothing. That gap, closed gate, missing hour, would become one of the most discussed aspects of the entire case.

Di Stefano noted it carefully. So did Brigadier Nucchi, once the Carabinieri took the file the following day. The event was reported to the Carabinieri around noon the following day by the owner of the security company. Brigadier Antonio Nucchi of the Torriglia station led the inquiry.

He collected accounts from 52 people across the municipalities of Torriglia and Propata who reported seeing a large bright object in the sky that same night. Nucchi said publicly he had every confidence in Zanfretta's testimony, adding that only something exceptional could have frightened a man he had known for years. It was journalist Rino Di Stefano who proposed hypnosis to help Zanfretta recover the missing memory. On 23 December 1978, just seventeen days after the incident, the first session was conducted by Mauro Moretti, a psychotherapist and member of the Italian Association of Medical Hypnosis, in the presence of journalists and ufologists.

Under hypnosis Zanfretta described being taken inside a craft and subjected to painful experiments. In that same 23 December session, he also described the beings themselves in terms that were specific enough to be written down and quoted directly. Under hypnosis Zanfretta described the beings in precise terms. Green, with triangular yellow eyes, big thorns, mouths that looked made of iron, red veins on their heads, and arms with fingernails, with round things.

He said they used a luminous device to translate what they were saying, because they did not speak Italian. He said, according to Di Stefano, that they would return in larger numbers. The session was recorded and the transcript was kept as part of the official documentation of the case. Less than four weeks after the original incident, on the night of 27 December 1978, Zanfretta vanished again.

A frantic radio call reported that his car had stopped. He was found just over an hour later near a mountain road, in a state of deep shock. Officers who reached him testified that his clothes were dry and his body was particularly warm, despite rain and low temperatures, the same warmth that had been remarked upon after the first incident. What appeared to be large footprints were noticed near the spot where he lay.

Following the second incident a neurologist examined Zanfretta. On 31 January 1979 that doctor issued a certificate stating no alterations in his thinking, no psychosensory disturbances, and no treatment was required. The security company responded in a more practical way. They moved Zanfretta to a different area of the province and replaced his patrol car with a Vespa scooter.

Some critics later noted that relocating a witness rather than suspending him raised questions of its own. Within weeks, the story had left the hills above Genoa. By early January 1979, Zanfretta had appeared on Portobello, a national television programme watched across Italy. And it did not end there.

On 30 July 1979 he reported a third incident: he was found about two kilometres from his motorcycle, running disoriented through the darkness. A fourth followed on 2 December 1979. Four separate nights, now on the record, and each one harder to explain away. Zanfretta later said he had been taken eleven times between 1978 and 1981.

In the early 1980s, the Genoa police commissioner revoked his gun licence because of the strange events. Without it he could not work as a security guard, and he lost his job. The guard whose word a Carabinieri brigadier had trusted could no longer do the work he had been trusted with. Eleven reported incidents, a career ended, and still no answer.

The alien name used in later hypnosis sessions, 'Dargos', closely resembles 'Hydargos', the antagonist of Grendizer, a Japanese animated series hugely popular on Italian television in 1978. The physical descriptions Zanfretta gave under hypnosis recalled creatures from the comic book series Zagor, widely read across Italy at the time. Sceptics also found that the circle of crushed grass corresponded to where the mansion owners kept their horse tied up, and that Zanfretta's warm clothing was compatible with remaining in the car. Those were the sceptics' arguments.

But the hypnosis sessions themselves came under scrutiny of a different kind. The hypnosis sessions themselves were questioned. Critics noted that questions were discussed with Zanfretta while he was already in a hypnotic state, and that the use of Pentothal during sessions was disputed. Moretti stated the subject had no familiarity with science fiction, but sceptics countered that science fiction filled Italian television screens and advertising throughout the late 1970s.

The large impressions found after the second incident were said to be consistent with puddles. Nothing was settled. After the four incidents on the record, the Carabinieri of Torriglia reached no official conclusion and left the file without a definitive finding. Di Stefano, who had followed the case from the first night, published a full account that treated Zanfretta as a credible witness, while admitting the case was unresolved.

CUN, the Italian National UFO Centre, also took an interest. Not one of them could close it. Go back to that first call, at a quarter past twelve. A 26 year old guard, alone in a dark garden above Genoa, with his gun in one hand and his torch in the other, telling the man on the radio: no, they are not men.

Decades later, no one has settled what he saw that night: something in the sky, something in his mind, or something else entirely. So what do you think happened to him? Billy Ray Taylor steps out under the little roof at the back of the farmhouse. It is dark, and the house is full of frightened people.

Then something reaches down from the edge of that roof. A hand, with claws, coming for his hair. The others grab him and drag him back inside. Out in the Kentucky night there is a glow moving between the trees. And this house has no telephone. The farmhouse stood at Kelly, a scatter of farms about eight miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

It was rented, three small rooms, unpainted, with no running water, no radio and no television. Glennie Lankford, a widow of fifty, lived there with her three youngest children, Lonnie, Charlton and Mary. That Sunday evening the house was full. Her grown sons, Lucky and J.C. Sutton, were there with their wives, Vera and Alene.

So was Alene's brother, O. P. Baker. And there were two visitors from Pennsylvania: Billy Ray Taylor, twenty one, and his young wife, June. Billy Ray and Lucky had worked the carnivals together. It was August 1955, deep in the Kentucky countryside. At about seven o'clock, Billy Ray went out to the well in the back yard for water.

He came back in with a story. A silvery object, he said, real bright, with an exhaust all the colours of the rainbow. It came over without a sound, passed over the house, and dropped down into a gully not far away. The family laughed at him. Nobody went out to look. About an hour later, the family dog started barking.

Then it stopped. It crawled under the house with its tail between its legs, and it stayed there until the next day. Lucky and Billy Ray went to the back door to see what had frightened it. Out across the fields, there was a glow. And it was coming towards the house. Inside the glow was a figure about three and a half feet tall.

Its head was huge and nearly round. Its arms hung almost to the ground and ended in talons. Its eyes were far bigger than a man's and shone yellow, and its whole body looked like silver metal, giving off its own light. Its hands were raised. And it was walking, slowly, towards the back door.

When it was about twenty feet from the house, the two men fired. Lucky had a twenty gauge shotgun. Billy Ray had a twenty two rifle. The thing went over backwards. It did a flip, the family said, got back up, and scurried away into the dark. For a moment there was nothing out there at all.

It did not stay gone. Later, the same kind of figure was at a side window, looking in. The men fired straight through the metal screen. Again it flipped over and vanished. The children were sent to hide. Glennie would describe it afterwards in plain farm words. It looked, she said, like a five gallon gasoline can, with a head on top and small legs.

That was when Billy Ray stepped under the roof at the back, and the hand came down for him. Once they had pulled him in, Lucky went out and fired up at the roof. Another of the figures was sitting in a tree. When it was hit, it fell from the branch. Then it got up, and it ran for the woods.

The family said these things did not move like anything they knew. Their legs seemed not to bend the right way. They seemed to float, from the trees to the roof and back down. When the bullets hit them, it sounded like bullets striking a metal bucket. And every time the guns drove them off, they came back.

Up on the roof, the family could hear scratching. For hours it went on like that. Gunfire, then silence. A glow at a window. Scratching overhead. There was no telephone to call anyone, and the nearest help was eight miles away in town. By about eleven o'clock, nobody in that house could take any more.

They ran for their two cars, crammed themselves in, and drove south to the police station in Hopkinsville. The police chief, Russell Greenwell, looked at the people who came through his door. These aren't the kind of people, he said, who normally run to the police for help. One of the men was so frightened that his pulse was measured at one hundred and forty beats a minute.

Greenwell called for help, and the family were taken back out to the farm. Four city police officers. Five state troopers. Three deputy sheriffs. Four military police from Fort Campbell, the Army base nearby. A photographer from the local paper. They searched the house and the yard while the family waited outside.

In the dark, somebody trod on a cat, and it screamed. You never saw so many pistols unholstered so fast in your life, Greenwell said. They found shotgun shells. They found broken windows and holes in the screens, one of them small and square. Along the fence, where the men said they had shot one of the figures, there was a patch of grass glowing faintly in the dark.

They found no creature, and no craft. Glennie told them liquor was not allowed in her house, and the officials agreed nobody had been drinking. At around two in the morning, the police left. The family went back inside the farmhouse. There was still no telephone. Town was still eight miles away.

Glennie lay down in her bedroom. In the small hours, she saw a glow at the window beside her bed. One of the figures was right outside, with its clawed hand resting on the window screen. They had come back. The visits went on through the rest of the night, until just before dawn.

Then they stopped. And they never came back to that farm again. The next day, officers searched for a landing place, for footprints, for blood. They found nothing. A man from a local radio station, Bud Ledwith, sat with the adults and drew the creatures as they described them. Then the story reached the radio and the newspapers, and from there the national press.

The local paper raised the number of creatures to twelve or fifteen, though the family never saw more than two at once. Nobody in the house had ever said they were green. That colour was added later, by the press. Hundreds of strangers drove out to Kelly to stare and to laugh. The family put up No Trespassing signs, and the crowds ignored them.

So they began charging fifty cents to come onto the land. Neighbours said that before long, the family packed up and left the farm. In town, people mocked them, and some called them fortune seekers. The next year, an investigator named Isabel Davis came to Hopkinsville. It took a great deal of coaxing before Glennie would speak to her.

Davis noticed that Lucky and Billy Ray had spent the day after the siege apart, and still their descriptions matched. With Ted Bloecher, she wrote a report of nearly two hundred pages, and found no sign of a hoax, a publicity stunt or a shared hallucination. The Air Force's Project Blue Book filed the case as a hoax, with no further comment. Sceptics have another answer.

Joe Nickell and Brian Dunning point to great horned owls. They hunt at night, fly almost silently, have big yellow eyes, stand about two feet tall, and attack anything near their nests. A meteor was seen that evening, which could explain Billy Ray's light. And the glowing grass fits foxfire, a fungus that shines in the dark.

There are other doubts too. Some neighbours heard only a few shots that night, and some heard none at all. Two psychologists have suggested drink might have played a part, even though the officers saw no sign of it. Moonlight on feathers can look like silver. These are fair questions.

In more than seventy years, none of them has been settled. Kelly holds a festival every year now, called Little Green Men Days. But there was nothing funny about that night for the people inside that farmhouse. The police found shells, broken screens and grass that glowed. They never found what the family had been shooting at.

A man stood under a roof in the dark, and something reached down for his hair. What do you think was really waiting on that roof?