Leominster car-stall and paralysis encounter (William and Joan Wallace)

A snowstorm had just passed through Leominster, in Worcester County, Massachusetts. William Wallace and his wife Joan had driven out to see the woods under fresh snow. It was the night of March 7 into March 8, 1967. On the way back into town, thick fog forced them to slow down. It seemed localized, gathered over one place. St. Leo's Cemetery.

At 1:05 a.m. they saw a large, bright light in the fog above the cemetery. William turned the car around to take another look, and what they found was hovering low to the ground. Accounts describe it as dome-shaped, a flattened egg or a luminous oval, bright and bluish-white. Its rim glowed as bright as an acetylene torch. One catalogue puts it at 120 to 150 metres above the graves, moving with a rocking, pendulum motion in heavy fog or mist.

William got out and lifted his arm to point it out to Joan, and several events then occurred simultaneously. The headlights went out, the radio died and the engine stopped. He felt tingling electric shocks and went numb. His raised arm fell back violently against the roof of the car. One translated account says it struck with such force that it was imprinted in the glass. He could not move, but his mind was not affected and he could hear perfectly.

Joan pulled at his jacket but felt no shock, and she heard a noise she could not explain. For 30 to 40 seconds, her husband stood frozen beside the car. Then the object wobbled, rose rapidly and disappeared with a humming sound. The radio and lights came back, and William started the car again. The whole sighting was later reported as lasting about four minutes.

For about 20 minutes afterwards, William's reactions were slow and sluggish. The couple got home around 1:30 AM. Joan rang her mother straight away.

Leominster police responded. Officers who knew Wallace believed he was telling the truth. NICAP listed the case in its 1967 chronology and in its catalogue of electromagnetic effects cases, as a "Luminous oval hovering, rocking; witness felt shock, paralysis." NICAP is reported to have carried out follow-up interviews. Raymond Fowler, who chaired NICAP's Massachusetts Subcommittee, is reported to cover the case in his 1974 book UFOs: Interplanetary Visitors.

According to UFO Insight, drawing on Kevin Randle's The UFO Dossier, Project Blue Book investigators came and the case sits in the Blue Book files. Its verdict has not surfaced. Leominster does not appear on Patrick Gross's list of Blue Book "Unidentified" cases for 1967.

No hoax allegation has ever been made against the Wallaces. No published explanation has been offered either. A sceptic might point to ground fog lit by some light source, and to a stalled engine and a moment of fright that froze a startled man in place. The witnesses' account stands against part of that. The lights and the radio came back on their own, at the moment the object left.

The Wallace encounter belongs to a family of car-stall cases that includes Levelland, Texas, in 1957. It came during a late-1960s wave of sightings across Central Massachusetts. And it remains a vivid example of something the field returns to again and again. A witness close to a light in the sky, held still but fully aware and unable to move.