by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
In last week’s blog, we looked at a case involving two friends, 42-year-old Joyce Bowles and 58-year-old Ted Pratt, who reported an encounter on November 14, 1976, in Winchester, England. They claimed they saw a cigar-shaped craft hovering 18 inches above the ground with three humanoids, sitting lined up as if they were on a bus, visible behind a window or windows. One creature was said to have left the craft, possibly by passing through it, and then to have walked towards Bowles and Pratt, who were sitting in Bowles’s Cooper Mini Clubman. The creature was described as human-looking, with long hair that curled up in the back and sideburns that went down to a pointed beard, but its eyes were said to be “piercing pink” with no pupils or irises. Bowles said when she looked away from them, she saw spots as if she had been looking at the sun. The case got the interest of many researchers, mostly from the British UFO Research Association. There is one article (page 12 of the pdf) covering it in the March/April 1977 BURORA Journal, and four in the Volume 22, Number 5, 1976 Flying Saucer Review, published in February 1977. What makes this case unique is that it involves two witnesses who described two encounters. This week we’re looking at the second encounter described.
According to Geoffrey Doel in his portion of the article headlined, “The Winchester Encounters,” in the BUFORA Journal (the first encounter was covered by Lionel Beer), on Thursday evening, December 30, 1976, Bowles was on her way to a gas station with Pratt along for the ride. Their route on B3404 took them close to the site of their previous encounter, which was in a valley to their left as they traveled west. According to Doel, Pratt said, “Oh, look, there’s that big glow in the sky again.”
Bowles wasn’t able to see it at first but caught sight of it a few yards on. She looked away as she passed an oncoming car and then spotted it again. At this point she became aware of, in Doel’s words, “a high-pitched whistling sound.” The car began rocking back to front and side to side, and they then found themselves standing next to the car in a room inside what they assumed was a spaceship.
Three “men” were looking at them, and one came towards them and stood closely next to Bowles. Bowles recognized a fourth creature as being the same one that had approached the car during the previous encounter.
A creature rubbing a “large scintillating jewel” on its belt said to another, “Millager,” or “Millageer,” in what seemed to be a foreign language. The creature then spoke to Bowles and Pratt in broken English. According to Doel, they seemed “well-educated,” and they told them they were friendly and meant no harm.
One of them told Pratt to go up seven steps that led to a “room.” He complied and was asked, “What do you feel?” He answered saying that it was cooler at one end. According to Doel, Bowles couldn’t remember which end that was and “says there is much she is hazy about now and cannot remember all the conversation.” Doel comments “Did anything happen a la the Hills?”
According to Doel, the creature next to Bowles “pointed over to the wall where there were several diagrams on transparent material” that she couldn’t make sense of. The creature said, “Those are our fields.” Pratt, thinking of fields as in “fields of grass” said “Fields,” to which the creature replied, “OUR fields.”
The creature explained to Bowles that they weren’t there to invade, and Bowles replied, “That’s what Hitler said.” This prompted the creature to exclaim, “You have a very strong tongue.” According to Doel, this made Bowles feel “very nervous.”
Bowles described their clothes as being the same silver coveralls looking like “boiler suits” that they wore in the first encounter. She added that they wore silver boots and that she saw a pair of silver gauntlets hanging on the wall. She said that during this encounter, their eyes, as opposed to being “piecing pink,” appeared normal “but glittered remarkably.”
According to Doel, Pratt asked: “Why pick Joyce? Is it anything to do with the car?” The creatures replied in a foreign language and made gestures that Pratt and Bowles found difficult to understand, but they gathered that it had something to do with the creature putting its hand on the roof of the car during the first encounter. They also gathered that the creatures indicated they would be back but didn’t say when.
Doel quotes Bowles saying, “There was, in the middle of the room or spacecraft or whatever it was, a large bottle-like structure rising up from the floor, wide at the bottom and tapering upwards.” She described red, black, and yellow rings around it that had what reminded her of horoscope symbols. According to Doel, “Mr. Pratt was held in conversation” and Bowles didn’t remember much of it and didn’t think Pratt did either. He reports that at this point “everything went hazy,” and Bowles and Pratt found themselves in the car by a river next to a road in an unfamiliar area. They drove around for about half an hour and managed to find their way to Chilworth, which is ten miles south of Winchester and was familiar to them. They managed make it home by 8:15 p.m.
After the first encounter, Bowles reported that she was afraid and Pratt was calm. She reported that after this encounter, she was calm and Pratt was upset.
Doel then brings up two other incidents reported by Bowles. She said that in November, before the first encounter, she saw a “shadowy figure which she now thinks was like one of the ‘spacemen’” sitting at the top of her stairs “in the half-light” pointing through a window in the direction of Chilcomb. She also reported that one morning (Doel doesn’t specify when in relation to the encounters) she heard a tapping on her window and saw it was a silver gauntlet with “no one attached to it … this glove apparently being of the same pattern as the gauntlets she saw in the ‘spacecraft.’”
Bowles had reported paranormal encounters before. At the end of Lionel Beer’s section describing the first encounter, he mentions that he learned from a reporter in Winchester “that Mrs. Bowles had come into the public eye in recent years as a result of poltergeist activity in her house.” He adds that an exorcism had been performed at her house by a local rector and that “she is known locally as a ‘psychic healer’ and ‘natural medium.’” According to Beer, “When I heard this, I hesitated before investigating further but realized that impartial investigation normally precedes value judgements.” Beer offers the opinion in his conclusion that, taking the honesty of Bowles and Pratt into account, they had had “a genuine and alarming experience.”
Doel offers no opinion at the end of his section and the article ends with a section titled “Traces Report” by BUFORA’s “new traces coordinator,” Steve Gamble, where he describes that nothing unusual was found at the site.
There are more details about the case, Bowles’s paranormal encounters, her healing and psychic abilities, and incidents in the aftermath of the encounters in the FSR articles that we’ll look into next week.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download