Somewhere in the Skies - When a UFO Lifted Her Car w/ Zelia Edgar

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

In 1976, Joyce Bowles and her friend Ted Pratt witnessed a strange object in the sky when Joyce's car suddenly began shaking, locked up, and was reportedly lifted off the road. It was the start of a series of UFO sightings, humanoid encounters, and paranormal experiences that would follow them for years. We explore the remarkable and often-overlooked case of Joyce Bowles and her lifelong connection to the unexplained. Subscribe to Just Another Tin Foil Hat on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JustAnotherTinFoilHat Join us at ANOMACON on September 12th: http://www.anomacon.com Send us a voicemail: https://www.speakpipe.com/SomewhereSkiesPod Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ Substack: https://ryansprague.substack.com/ All socials and books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Email: [e-mail] Copyright © 2026 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #British #England #CloseEncounter #Paranormal #Supernatural #Unexplained #Alien #Aliens #UAP #UFOs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your pants. Coming to you from Spectrevision Radio. The woman heard a rapping coming from outside of the window. She went over and looked and saw a disembodied hand clad in a silvery gauntlet, tapping on the pain. Welcome to just another tinfoil hat with your hair. your host, Zilia Edgar. Join Zilia as she walks us through some of the most bizarre UFO cases and incidents of high

strangeness. Today, we will be discussing the fascinating case of the Bacofoil men. Now, Bacofoil is a specific brand name for tinfoil. So I guess technically today, I am just another Bacofoil hat. Just kidding. I'm still just another tinfoil hat. Now, this case involves a woman by the name of Joyce Bowles, who is 42 at the time of the instant, and Edwin Ted Pratt, who is 58, and occurred on a road just outside of Winchester,

Hampshire, England. Winchester is a cathedral city, which has been inhabited since prehistoric times. Now, there is a lot to be said about Winchester, but of note is something I had never heard of. Their famous Buttercross. So tiny segue, apparently the Winchester City Cross, also known as the Winchester Buttercross, dates from the 15th century, and it's a huge cross. It's a huge cross, butchester. decorated with figures of saints and historical figures and 12 statues specifically of the Virgin Mary. Now, I had never heard of a Buttercross before. Apparently, they are so named because they mark English market towns where people would trade butter. So the more you know. Genuinely, though, Winchester is a truly amazing city, even having some surviving city walls

from the Roman period and two gates surviving from medieval times. Today, Winchester is home to about 50,000 people, and back in 1967, it was home to a woman named Joyce Bowles. Joyce lived with her husband and four sons on the eastern side of Winchester, and worked as a powder room attendant with the Winchester Railway Station. On the evening of November 14, 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Pratt of nearby Netherwallop were visiting the Bowles family. Mr. Edwin, Ted Pratt was 58 and had retired early due to health complications. At around 845, Joyce and Ted set off to retrieve Joyce's oldest son from his girlfriend's house in the nearby town of Chilkham, about three and a half miles away.

The night was crisp as they set off, driving over a high concrete bridge and up to a big roundabout lit by orange sodium lights. Suddenly, Joyce saw a big red-orange light in the direction of the lane leading to Chilkham. It vanished behind some scrub and then reappeared as they were driving down the road. She said that it was a red-orange color, redder than the sodium lights, and she told Ted to take a look at it and see if he could see it. Ted described it as a red-orange object, about 40 feet long. Joyce continued on her way, turning around the sharp bend in the road, and then, as she was on the straight lane, her car suddenly began rattling and the steering locked. It's worth noting here that it was a pretty new car.

Both she and Ted tried to get the wheel to move, but with no success. Off to their right was this large grass verge that was a typical picnic spot, and Joyce described feeling as though the car was lifted and carried sideways onto the grass. They ended up in the middle of this grassy area sitting parallel to the road, where the car, according to Ted, came back on of its own accord. By this stage, the engine on the car was, as they said, revving, and the headlights were about four times their normal brightness. They actually thought they would burn out because they were so bright.

Ted turned off the ignition, and when the two looked up, they saw a cigar-shaped object caught in the headlights, about 12 feet long and 5 feet tall. Joyce actually described it as looking like a big Winston Churchill cigar. They said that this object was hovering a short way above the ground, about 18 inches, and seemed to have vapor underneath it. Ted claimed to see four jets which were emitting the, this kind of vaporous substance, and Joyce described it as an inverted gas stove jet releasing

this mist or vapor. Ted said that the object was glowing red, orange. Joyce said she wasn't sure if she saw the entirety of the object, as on the right side she described seeing these three brightly lit windows. Ted, however, claimed to see only one window. This is just the one point in their accounting of this encounter, that they kind of differed in opinion. However, both of them said that through the window slash windows, they saw three figures, sitting one behind the other like they were on a bus, with only the shoulders and head visible. Suddenly, one figure came out of the object. They said that this being appeared to pass through the side of the object, and emerged from the darkness beyond the windows luminosity on the right side. Both Joyce and

Ted described this figure as being about six feet tall, wearing a silver boiler suit outfit that Joyce compared to bakefoil or tinfoil. She said that it appeared to have a polo collar, a seam running down its right side, and perhaps most interesting, Joyce said that its clothing shimmered as if being shaken by wind. Now again, we've seen this kind of concept of shimmering, glimmering, or visually fuzzy entities come up time and time again in anomalous encounters. Both witnesses described the being's face as looking more or less normal, with the exception of its eyes, which were a piercing pink with no pupils or irises. The being apparently had blonde hair, which was shorter in the front, longer in the back, so kind of a spacey mullet, I guess, and flipped

up slightly. So again, yeah, I guess sort of a slick, spacey mullet type deal. The being had a dark, pointed beard, and sideburns, yes, sideburns. Now, as this thing ambled towards them, Joyce claimed his hear a whistling noise, which Ted couldn't hear. As the being reached the car, it placed one hand on the roof of the vehicle and bent over looking in the window at them. When it did this, Joyce described how its outfit kind of floated outward like a cape. This is when Joyce got a really good look at the face, including the pink eyes, which she said reminded her of an albino rabbit's eyes. And apparently these eyes were so bright. She said that she could still see the points of light when she turned away and closed her eyes and believed that it had an effect on her eyes as though she looked at sun.

At this stage, Joyce was in a state of panic. She grabbed Ted and she said that she noticed his clothing felt extra warm. Now, meanwhile, oddly, Ted felt extremely calm. Incredited this with the being transmitting some power onto him, which calmed him and in their minds may have made his clothes extra toasty warm. Again, Joyce didn't have this effect and yelled that the being was going around to Ted's side of the car. However, he looked behind the vehicle where she claimed the being was walking and saw nothing. When he looked back to where the object and occupants had been, everything was totally gone. Now, because of Joyce's just absolute panic, Ted offered to finish the drive, but Joyce was

too spooked to even get out of the car and switch places, even with the object and occupants gone. So she just started the car and tried to drive off. Key word here is tried because she said that it felt like the car was hitting an invisible barrier. After the second attempt, they took off with no further problems. They picked up Joyce's son, and on the return to Winchester, they did take the same road. Ted pointed out the tire marks in the grass, where he could make out where the car appeared to kind of jump from the road into the grass. However, when he drove back to the location the next day with his wife, the marks were totally gone. Now, when Joyce and Ted and Joyce's son got back to the Bowles residents, Ted did call the BBC to see if anybody else had reported anything strange in the

area. And three days later, both Ted and Joyce appeared on BBC's nationwide program. Now, the interesting thing is that for days after this incident, Ted was extremely calm. It was like this effect lasted well beyond the encounter, whereas Joyce suffered from a bizarre rash on the right side her face down onto her neck and right shoulder, as well as nausea for a whole week. Two, she had a watch on during this journey, which suddenly just couldn't keep time. It was broken. However, she said that the car was actually running better than it had before the incident. According to the Flying Sasser Review article on this incident by Leslie Harris of the

Bournemouth UFO Group Scan, there were several other reports in the Winchester area on that weekend. One Mr. and Mrs. Haynes saw a silver-suited man about seven miles from the Bulls and Press. And numerous other individuals reported seeing strange things in the sky, described as hovering orange objects, two suns, a large object with kind of this like row of lights and even an orange disc. Interestingly enough, after discussing the incident on TV and radio programs, on Saturday, November 20th, while being visited by investigator Frank Wood, the Bowles household received a phone call from someone claiming to be from Guildford, who said that after reading about her experience in the sun, he was calling to inform her that the government was displeased with her and to expect a visit from somebody official very soon. This caller repeated it numerous times that day, calling back several times, with Joyce telling them that she was going to talk to whoever she wanted about whatever she wanted. Wood advised her to tell the caller that she had reported them to the police. You know, would seem to think that this was a hoax, but again, I considered it worth of mentioning. However, something else happened that weekend, which would felt significantly more by his admission uneasy about.

On that same Saturday, a young man by the name of Richard Lawrence from London visited Mrs. Bolts. claiming to be skeptical but interested in the UFO phenomenon. Now, while he was visiting with her, the phone rang. The caller claimed to be Richard Lawrence from London, to which Joyce responded, you can't be. Richard Lawrence is with me now. This proved to be pure coincidence or synchronicity, and both the visitor and caller were named Richard Lawrence from London.

The other Richard Lawrence came and met the first one, and yeah, they had never met each other before, didn't know of each other, just happened to have the same name and be from the same place, and wanted to talk to the same person on the same day. However, this was not to be the only encounter of the dynamic duo of Bowles and Pratt. On December 30th at about 6.30 in the evening, Joyce decided to go and fill the tank in the car at the local gas station, and lo and behold, Ted accompanied her. The gas station was just off the big roundabout that had previously been used during their first experience,

and the road to the station took them slightly above and to the right of their first encounter. On this expanse of road, which was unlit, Ted stated, oh, look, there's that big glow in the sky again. Joyce couldn't see the glow, but as she continued looking for it, she could see a light darting in and among the clouds. However, she couldn't keep a great eye on it because, you know, she had to keep an eye on, you know, the road, especially because there was a car up ahead. As she passed the vehicle, she became aware of a high-pitched whistling noise, and her vehicle began rocking in all directions. suddenly her mind went blank. When she came to, she realized that she and Ted were no longer sitting in her car, but were standing in a room. Joyce immediately came to believe that they were inside a spacecraft, as well as her car.

The car was also in the room with them. She claimed that in the middle of this room, there was this large bottle-shaped structure, with red, black, and yellow bands or rings on it, with symbols that looked like horoscope symbols. Joyce couldn't quite make out the dimensions of the room, but Ted took steps into the room and believed it was about 20 by 12 feet. In a loop on the wall was a pair of silver gauntlets. Again, they saw three beings, one step towards them, and Joyce felt sure that this was the same being, which had come up and looked in the car in their previous encounter. Another one of the entities was wearing a belt with a huge sparkling jewel on it, which apparently it kept rubbing. And this one turned to the other spacemen and said something that sounded like.

like Milager. Then they continued for a little bit in a language that Joyce and Ted couldn't recognize before speaking to the two in English, saying among other things that they were friendly and meant no harm. Ted was asked to proceed seven steps into the room and when he did, was asked how he felt. He replied that one end of the room was cooler than the other end. Meanwhile, Joyce was kind of hazy on most of the things that Ted and the beings talked about. The entity beside Joyce, the original one with the beard, then pointed over to a wall which was made of transparent material and covered in diagrams of lines, triangles, and other patterns, and explained, these are our fields. Joyce thought of, like, grassy fields and said fields. And the being,

evidently realizing the confusion, said, no, our fields. And then said, we are not coming to invade you, which is, you know, exactly what someone who is going to invade you says. And Joyce replied to this by saying, quote, that's what Hitler said. The being seemed a little angry at this and said, you have a very strong tongue, which made Joyce feel very nervous. And honestly, yeah, I'd probably be a little nervous too. At some point during the encounter, Ted asked the beings, why they picked Joyce, and if it had something to do with her car.

Now, neither Joyce nor Ted could really understand the answer, but they thought that it had something to do with the original entity, putting a hand on the roof of Joyce's car, somehow marking it, although no mark or even radiation which later looked for by various investigators, neither of those were found. Ted then had a conversation with the beings, the details of which neither he nor Joyce remembered, and then everything became hazy. And they were no longer in the strange room. They were sitting in Joyce's car with the headlights on, peering out over a river near a road that neither were able to recognize. They didn't know where they were. They drove around

for about half an hour, finally finding their way about 10 miles south of Winchester, at which point they returned back to the Bull's residence. Neither witness could figure out where they had been. The place where they found themselves was totally unknown to them. Now, interestingly enough, after this incident, the roles were reversed. Ted himself felt very upset and unable to remember the events, and Joyce felt very calm. According to the Beaufort Journal of May, June in 1977, Joyce claimed a third encounter with a strange object. She and a friend, Anne Strickland, were driving to visit the Prats at their home in Netherwallop on March 7, 1977, at around 10 in the morning.

It was Ted's birthday. About a mile away from their destination, the engine began sputtering. They noticed a humming noise accompanying at the sighting of a bright oval object nearby. Joyce and Anne stopped, and a figure, much like the figure from the original encounter, came towards them, took Joyce's hand. and told her something in secret. The being returned to the craft, which then took off into the sky, whistling as it gathered speed. The two women returned to Winchester, deciding just to not continue on to netherwallop that day.

Now, this is a kitten caboodle of a weird case, and it gets even weirder. Prior to the first sighting in November of 1976, Joyce reported seeing a shadowy figure standing at the top of the stairway in her home. It pointed out of a nearby window, which just so happened to be in the direction of Chilkham. Another morning, she heard a wrapping on her bedroom window, and when she checked to see what was causing it, she saw what she described as disembodied silver gauntlets tapping on the pain. This apparently was nearly identical to the gauntlets which Joyce observed inside the craft on the second encounter. However, to make weird matters even weirder, Joyce had reported a haunting in her home on Quarry Road much earlier. even being featured on TV in 1972.

As a matter of fact, a reverend by the super cool name of Ramsdell Wally had performed two exorcisms in the property, which, according to the reporter in the clip, had failed. But according to the reverend, did succeed in driving out something evil, quote, something evil has been done away with. So what were these manifestations? According to Joyce, since her childhood, poltergeist manifestations would follow her from time to time. it kind of ebbed and flowed, not on any particular schedule, just sometimes there was more activity than others. This included objects moving by themselves or flying across space.

One time she even claimed that some bag she had in the car moved from the backseat to the front seat of the vehicle. Now Mrs. Pratt, Ted's wife was present for this account. Two, Joyce claimed to see the figure of a white-garbed woman in her home, which Joyce called the nun. And others had also witnessed this figure in Joyce's presence. The nun had been spotted at Joyce's home, out in her garden, and even where she worked. Interestingly, she said that this activity seemed to cease since the UFO experience. So this is a very intriguing case and extremely multi-layered. Let's start with one of the most prominent aspects of this encounter and honestly of most encounters.

And that is the importance of lights. In this case, light began each of the first two sightings, accompanied by other aspects which seems kind of like a primer, and that is this whistling, humming noise. But not only did light kind of begin and permeate the encounter of the object, the light was also contained within the glowing eyes of the being. These eyes were so bright that Joyce felt they had caused retina fatigue in her eyes and may account for the burning rash that she had on her face, neck and shoulder, as the being had peered into the car from the right side, and it was Joyce's right side which was burnt. Two, this is a great example.

example of a case of vehicle stoppage. Now, in the modern lore of the UFO-Nots, we typically associate vehicle stoppages with vehicular failure, specifically electronic disturbance, though this may not exclusively be the case. Now, failure did happen in this case, of course, the car started sputtering. However, the part that is more interest to me is the witness description when they tried to drive off of hitting an invisible wall. This calls to mind a case referred to as the Lissard spell in Dear Mad McNanus, the Middle Kingdom, the fairy world of Ireland, which I should probably, this particular case I should do a devoted video for. Long story short, a girl wandered onto a famous fairy fort and then couldn't get back. Whenever she tried to leave the fort, she said that

it felt like an invisible barrier was physically preventing her from doing so. The claim that the vehicle went out of control and instead of just veering off into the grass was picked up and set down is nearly identical to an encounter from July of 1977 out of Holbert, Michigan, where a woman driving home saw a strange humanoid on the roadside. As she drove by, she heard the sound of static electricity, and the car slid out of control, and then right as she was about to skid into an embankment, it was lifted into the air and came down in the woods alongside the road. Here, Ted claimed that he could actually see the marks in the grass, which showed where the car was and then abruptly wasn't. Windows seemed to be a very prominent theme in this particular encounter, and the pre-sightings

had by Joyce, the being first appeared standing on the top of her stowaway pointing out the window in the direction of the future encounter. Then the other pre-sighting, she heard a tapping on the window. The entity that approached the car looked in the window. She and Ted first saw the entities through the windows on their craft. Now, like doorways and crossroads, windows represent a traditional liminal or transitional point, symbolizing, among other things, a, well, window between the interior and exterior world. As with the symbolism of eyes so prevalent in paranormal encounters, including this one, to me windows also seem to be kind of a symbol of the duality of observation, the observer being observed. To return quickly to the gauntlet, it's significant, too, that this earlier

citing contained a detail that was later seen inside the so-called craft. But this is also another great example of a disembodied hand in an anomalous encounter. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the hand is one of the most human symbols and so finding it in, you know, an anomalous encounter, a paranormal encounter seems to speak to a certain amount of humanity contained within the other. However, one of the most intriguing aspects of this entire encounter is how Joyce and Ted reawoke, if that's how to phrase it, after the second encounter on the banks of a river on a road that they didn't recognize, to the point that it took them half an hour to find out where they had ended up. And somehow, I mean, they ended up wildly off course. This was a trip to the gas station,

not Mars, I mean, unless. To me, this seems evidential of the fact that the river, the road they reappeared on, may have been every bit as supernatural or paranormal or immaterial or anomalous as the rest of their encounter. Now, to dive in, no pun intended, to the river, waterways, of course, have a strong foothold in the paranormal and folklore. Symbolically speaking, water represents the unconscious mind, and the river often represents the barrier between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead in many world mythologies. I find it very interesting that when these two witnesses effectively come to, after this foray into the interior of the craft, they were seated as they had been at an unfamiliar

river on an unfamiliar road. We really have to wonder, however, you know, the ladies, at the center of this, Joyce Bowles, seemingly had more than her fair share of paranormal occurrences. And I really don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that she seems to have led a pretty haunted life. Looking at these events then as interconnected, we might be tempted to say, hey, maybe Joyce caused on sub-subconscious level, maybe she projected this event into being. You know, the gauntlet, for one thing, the woman in white perhaps transmuting into these shiny, silver-suited beings. However, for as weird and subjective as we may believe these experiences are, we do have the tricky thing that each of the three encounters with the beings and craft were Joyce,

who, yes, had a very paranormal background to say the least, and one other witness. Beyond that, however, in the area at the time, other people saw similar things, humanoid, lights in the sky, the works. So if it was just Joyce's circus and Joyce's silver-suited monkeys, how come other people in the area also experienced very similar things around that time? I mean, how far in this theory does one person's almost psychic reach go? Well, if you enjoyed this episode on the Bakelfoil men, please like. And if you're new to this field of crop circles, go ahead and subscribe to see what weirdness the future may have in store. Till then, you can keep up with me on my free blog at patreon.com slash just another tinfoil hat.

Check that out too for the work cited for this and all my other episodes. And also, please tune in to the podcast somewhere in the sky. not only for the very best in anomalous listening, but also you can catch my audio versions of these episodes on that platform. For today, I am Zilia Edgar, signing off.

This has been just another tinfoil hat with Zelia Edgar. Be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. For full video versions of these episodes, be sure to subscribe to Just Another Tinfoil hat on YouTube. Thank you for listening.