The St Helens Car-Stop and Electric Shock Encounter, Tasmania 1974

For the investigators of TUFOIC, 1974 was "one non-stop action, with almost 200 reports to investigate, leaving a residue of over 50 unexplained sightings." It was also, by their account, the first year in Tasmania that "motor vehicles were reportedly stopped by the presence of unidentified objects, causing terror and nervous reactions in witnesses."

The Richards family's night on Ansons Bay Road is one of those cases.

Monday 16 September 1974. About 9:15 pm. Mrs A. Richards, a housewife of about 34, was driving a 1968 Toyota Crown along Ansons Bay Road, four to five miles north of St Helens. Her daughter Janine, 8, sat with her. Kathleen, 5, was asleep. One account says light rain was falling on a dark night.

The radio went to static. Then the sky lit up. "The sky lighted brightly in an area roughly marked out by one's direct vision, i.e. sky ahead was bright." No craft was described. Only light. The car was crossing a bridge over the George River, on a gentle incline, when it lost power and stopped dead. Headlights, wireless, heater, dashboard. Everything went out.

Mrs Richards tried to restart it. "After 10 secs, a deafening, vibrating noise enveloped the car 'like 30-40 large jets'." She later said: "I felt my head was splitting open, and thought the world was coming to an end." The noise lasted about a minute. Then came "quite painful electric shocks", "far worse than shock." And a smell. The car "was filled by an invisible, choking smell", "a penetrating gas, far stranger than commercial bottled gas."

Mrs Richards and Janine jumped out for air. "They dragged Kathleen, who was dazed, half awake from the car, and fled down the road." At about 9:45 pm they reached a house roughly 2 miles away. The owner, Harvey Chappel, "was alarmed by Mrs Richards' uncontrolled state."

The next day her arms and fingers were badly swollen and she had trouble walking. She was left with a "numb right side face and a red mark (2 cent piece size) above her right eyebrow." Garage owner Graham Stone checked the car in St Helens. Nothing was wrong. It started faultlessly.

Around 18 September, Mr Richards was driving when a light in the sky "paced his car" and "seemed attracted by the headlights." "When he slowed and drove with only the parking lights, the object fell behind." At the farm, his son Ricky saw it too. "An inverted banana, vibrant yellow." Keith Basterfield's version calls it "crescent shaped", hovering about 80 feet above trees roughly 100 yards from the house. It was watched for about five minutes. When the house lights went off, it "faded out."

On 21 September 1974, TUFOIC investigator Roger Brooks, senior English master at St Marys District School, visited the family's remote farm. His verdict: "Mrs Richards is badly shaken by the occurrence ... she has been genuinely frightened by something and as she said 'I'm hardly likely to make up a story like this! Why should I?' ... I believe her story." The Hobart Mercury covered the case that same day. TUFOIC's 1975 newsletter filed it under "Auto-Stop".

Basterfield visited the site in 1975 and photographed the bridge. In 2014 he published the full report, supplied by TUFOIC director Keith Roberts, and asked readers for ideas. In 2016, Janine Richards answered. Her memory was still "as vivid as yesterday." And the place, she wrote, was "approximately another further 2 kms north on the Ansons Road."

No hoax claim has surfaced. No conventional explanation has been published. TUFOIC's own newsletter put Mrs Richards' swelling and numb face down to "severe emotional reaction". The noise, the shocks and the smell have never been analysed in print.

It remains a thinly sourced but vivid Tasmanian car-stop. Six days later, near Tayene, a woman known only as "Mrs W." reported a domed, brilliant orange-yellow disc. Two stories from the same restless spring.