The Lynda Jones Case: A Strange Encounter by the River Mersey

What began as a peaceful evening of flower watching turned into decades of unexplained encounters for one Manchester family.

A Summer Evening Gone Wrong

The evening of 1979 started like any other for Lynda Jones and her family. Living on the Didsbury estate in Manchester, Lynda had spent the day with her two children — five-year-old Christopher and fifteen-year-old Lisa — enjoying the warm summer weather. Her husband Trevor had left for his factory job, leaving Lynda to take the children to the open farmlands west of Liverpool.

After meeting with her friend Pam at Simon’s Bridge around 7:30 PM, Lynda decided to make the most of the remaining daylight. With Trevor not due home until 10:30 PM, she pulled out her pocket Oxford Dictionary of Wild Flowers and began walking slowly along the riverbank with her children, identifying each bloom they encountered.

The peaceful scene held until around 9 PM, when the tranquil evening air suddenly changed. Lisa’s voice cut through the silence: “Mum! The moon is coming at us!”

The Object Appears

Lynda turned to see what had caught her daughter’s attention. Descending from the twilight sky was something that defied explanation. The object appeared to be coming from the direction of a nearby golf course, positioned beyond a stand of trees.

Years later, Lynda would describe the sight: “Looking back at it, the shape was like a rugby ball, only really big and bright orange in color, with a spinning effect. It appeared as if this huge object was traveling towards us, but sideways!”

Instinct took over. Lynda shouted to her children to get down, dropping herself and pulling each child beside her. She braced for impact, wondering if something had fallen from a plane at the nearby airport. But no crash came. When she lifted her head, the object had passed directly overhead and vanished behind a ridgeline.

The atmosphere around them had changed completely. Where moments before there had been the usual sounds of distant traffic and evening life, now only heavy silence remained.

A Closer Look

Taking her children by the hands, Lynda walked toward where the object had disappeared. When they reached the top of the embankment, she saw something that would haunt her memory for decades to come.

“The thing was about 60 feet wide and hovering only two or three feet above the ground,” she later recalled. “It was disappearing and reappearing. It had a light on top of it — a very bright light that seemed to be separate entirely from the object itself!”

The mysterious light seemed to draw her forward. Despite every rational thought telling her to flee, Lynda felt an overwhelming urge to walk toward the hovering craft. As she approached, the light grew brighter, and a glowing orange ball emerged from the object, moving in her direction.

It was Lisa’s desperate plea that broke the spell: “Mum… Come back! Come back!”

The Chase Begins

Snapping back to reality, Lynda grabbed her children and ran. But their ordeal was far from over. As they sprinted back along the riverbank, Lisa suddenly shouted, “It’s here again!”

The object had returned, now flying alongside them as they fled. Lynda screamed at Lisa to keep running while she scooped up Christopher. They crossed into a grassland area, but reality itself seemed to warp around them. The grass suddenly shot up to six feet tall, then began “folding down” as if an invisible force was pressing upon it.

Despite witnessing something that defied all natural law, Lynda pushed through the impossible vegetation. She could see their housing estate ahead. Clutching Christopher and with Lisa close behind, they burst through their front door and slammed every lock they could find.

Missing Time

When they stumbled inside, Lynda was surprised to find Trevor already home. His puzzled expression turned to concern as he asked, “Why are your eyes like that?” Looking in the mirror, Lynda saw that her eyes had become red and scaly.

She quickly explained what had happened while they sketched the object they had seen. Only then did a chilling realization hit her — she was missing about ninety minutes of time.

The entire experience, from first seeing the object to fleeing home, had felt like no more than ten minutes. But when they checked the clock after arriving home, it was 10:50 PM. Somehow, ninety minutes had vanished without explanation.

Seeking Answers

For over a year, Lynda tried to put the incident behind her. But in early winter of 1980, she made a decision that would unlock memories she never knew she had lost. She volunteered for hypnotic regression, hoping to recover those missing ninety minutes.

The sessions were filmed over ten hours of footage, but Lynda found them too disturbing to watch. “I was in tears to see myself hypnotized,” she remembered. “It made me very angry at times when I thought it appeared so. It was just too much!”

Under hypnosis, details emerged that had been completely blocked from her conscious memory. She recalled seeing “several people” running toward the object as she was about to flee with her children. These figures wore “long dark coats and trilby hats” and carried satchel-type bags. A strange mist had materialized that she hadn’t remembered from her conscious recollection.

Inside the Craft

The hypnosis sessions revealed even more disturbing memories. Lynda recalled a “black column of vapor” from which emerged more figures wearing “one-piece jumpsuits” who all “appeared similar.” She remembered the sensation of floating upward.

Her next clear memory was waking up in an unfamiliar room. Strange beings entered around her — figures in formal attire with “long necks” and “Oriental features.” One of them triggered a peculiar sense of recognition, as if she had encountered them before.

She found herself on a table where some kind of examination took place. A cold sensation was applied to her legs, but every time she tried to lift her head to see what was happening, one of the beings would flash a bright light directly into her eyes, forcing her to look away.

The exact nature of the procedures performed remained locked away, inaccessible even through regression. However, Lynda noticed physical changes following the incident. Her menstrual cycle became irregular without any medical explanation, and strange marks would occasionally appear on her arms, only to disappear within hours.

Medical Mysteries

The physical effects of that night became even more puzzling when Lynda visited her doctor years later. After examining her, he told her something that left her speechless — she had recently been pregnant and had suffered a miscarriage. The scarring on her fallopian tubes indicated an ectopic pregnancy.

Lynda was certain this was impossible. “I have never had an ectopic pregnancy; I don’t know how!” she insisted. Ectopic pregnancies are extremely painful and potentially fatal if left untreated — certainly not something a person could forget or fail to notice.

A Pattern Emerges

As Lynda reflected on her life, she began to notice a pattern of strange incidents stretching back years. In 1972, she and Trevor had experienced another period of missing time. While driving home one evening around 9 PM, they planned to stop at their local pub. Trevor noticed bright lights behind them, and the car began spinning inexplicably.

When the spinning stopped, they found themselves at a traffic light with no memory of how they got there. When they reached the pub, it was closed and dark. Checking their watches, they discovered it was 2:30 AM — they had lost five and a half hours.

The Men in Trilby Hats

Throughout her life, Lynda had encounters with mysterious figures she came to call “the men in trilby hats.” These dark-coated figures appeared repeatedly in the background of strange events, always present but never directly confronted.

On one occasion, she called the police after finding one of these men in her backyard. When the officers arrived and searched the area, they returned white-faced and speechless. They confirmed seeing someone, but said the figure had “vanished — completely vanished!”

More Encounters

The strange incidents continued throughout the 1980s. In 1988, while driving home from Nottingham with Trevor, their car’s headlights began dimming and brightening without explanation. When Trevor pulled over, they looked up to see a “bright circular something large” hovering above them. The object moved slowly at first, then shot away at incredible speed.

They followed the taillights of a passing car for several miles before it inexplicably disappeared on a straight road with no turns or exits. Once again, they discovered they had lost three hours of time.

Childhood Memories

As an adult, Lynda began to remember strange incidents from her childhood as well. She recalled playing in a field near her house when her parents began calling for her, claiming she had been missing for hours. From her perspective, she had never left the field, yet her parents and neighbors had supposedly searched the same area multiple times without finding her.

These early experiences suggested a pattern of encounters that had been occurring since childhood, with memories blocked or altered in ways she was only beginning to understand.

Official Interest

The case took an interesting turn when the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) contacted Lynda, asking for a detailed account of her experience. They indicated they had tracked an unknown object on radar and wanted to forward her report to the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

However, when UFO investigators later attempted to verify these reports, the MoD claimed to have no knowledge of any such incident or radar tracking. The official records seemed to have vanished as mysteriously as the objects themselves.

The Broader Pattern

Lynda Jones’s case, documented extensively by respected UFO researcher Philip Mantle in his book “Without Consent,” fits a pattern reported by many other individuals around the world. The elements of missing time, medical procedures, and ongoing contact throughout a person’s lifetime appear in numerous similar accounts.

The medical aspects of her case — particularly the unexplained pregnancy and scarring — mirror reports from other witnesses who describe similar experiences. Some researchers suggest these cases may be connected to a larger phenomenon involving reproductive procedures, though the purpose remains unknown.

Ongoing Mystery

The Lynda Jones case remains one of the most well-documented examples of alleged alien abduction, complete with multiple witnesses, physical evidence, and ongoing contact spanning decades. The consistency of her account, combined with the physical effects and missing time experienced by her entire family, makes it difficult to dismiss.

Whether the experiences represent encounters with unknown beings, some form of psychological phenomenon, or something else entirely, the case continues to puzzle researchers and investigators. The mysterious men in trilby hats, the missing time episodes, and the unexplained medical findings all contribute to a story that defies conventional explanation.

For Lynda Jones and her family, the events that began on a peaceful summer evening by the River Mersey marked the beginning of a lifetime of questions that remain unanswered to this day.

Sources: UFO Insight, Weird Darkness

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is not an AI voice. (AI Policy)