The Aveley Encounter

The family were driving home to Aveley, in Essex about fifteen miles east of London, on the night of 27 October 1974. The archive's telling records the father as John Day; in the published investigation the family appear under the pseudonym Avis, and Day is an earlier alias for the same people. According to the account the archive holds, the car went into a green mist. The radio crackled. When they arrived, a stretch of time was unaccounted for, given in the archive's telling as about two hours and in the published account as nearer three.

What followed came later and came differently. The family afterwards reported dreams, and became vegetarian and environmentally minded. Under hypnosis an account emerged of an onboard experience with a psychic and astral-projection character to it, involving genetic experimentation and imagery of a dying planet.

What is on the record

Three claimants are resolved: the father, his wife and their three children, who are counted as one group. They are a single household, which matters when weighing independence. A family in one car is one vantage point, and their accounts cannot corroborate each other the way strangers at separate locations can.

The provenance of the detail deserves stating plainly, because the two halves of this case are not the same kind of evidence. The mist, the radio and the missing time were reported directly. The onboard narrative was recovered under hypnosis, and hypnotically retrieved material is not a reliable record of events. The archive's own study of recall method found no evidence that hypnosis inflates these accounts relative to conscious recall, a narrower finding than it may appear: it says the method does not systematically embellish, not that what emerges is accurate.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3, the archive's tier for multiple independent claimants describing one connected event. One family and no documents is the ceiling here. What happened in those hours is not resolved here.