At around 5:00 p.m., four members of the Deverow family were eating at the Little Chef restaurant on the A65 road near Ingleton, North Yorkshire. They had enjoyed a family day out and would be making the journey back home to their moorland farmhouse a couple of miles south of High Bentham on the border between Lancashire and North Yorkshire. The family members were Anne, her daughter Rachel and Rachels two sons Alex, 11 & Benjamin, 9. The family finished their meal and drove north on the A65 towards Ingleton. Rachel was the driver of the car, her eldest son Alex was in the passenger seat and her mother Anne, together with Benjamin sat in the back. At the time, the route they took was hazy but the boys commented on how the row of terraced cottages with chimneys stood out against the sky. The terraced cottages are located on a land off the A65 which leads south to High Bentham, because of this detail it is probably safe to assume that this is the route they took that evening.
As the journey progressed all family members became well aware of a bright white light in the sky to their left. They later described the object as being about the size of a car headlight and being so bright that the moon when compared to it appeared yellow in color. The object then moved across the sky and became visible through the windshield, Anne recalled the object going upwards and then hovering right above the car. At this point the light accelerated downwards at an amazing speed. It was so fast that the family braced for impact but it never occurred. Instead of a crash the object gained altitude and sped away over the Forest of Bowland Hills. While the object was in view nobody in the car spoke, the only time anybody commented on the strange object was after the object had disappeared from view. The next thing they remembered was driving into the village of High Bentham.
The next morning Anne got in touch with BBC Radio Lancashire and described the bizarre event on air. During the morning other witnesses phoned into the radio station and suggested that the object had gone south from High Bentham over the Forest of Bowland towards Clitheroe.
The case came to the attention of Joe McGonagle who passed the information onto LAPIS, Lancashire Anomalous Phenomena Investigation Society, a UFO group based in Blackpool, England. A group which has been operating since 1989. Six days after the event LAPIS got in touch with the Deverows, in the first phone conversation the group conducted, Anne described the object as beautiful and compelling and wanted to find an explanation for the event. Plans were made for LAPIS members to visit the family the following weekend.
A couple of days before the planned visit Anne, Rachel and Alex decided to re-drive the route they took to find the spot where the sighting had occurred. While driving the route the family noticed a couple of discrepancies as they re-drove the route they had took. The first was that the journey only took them 9 minutes whereas on the night of the incident it had taken them much longer, they did not realize this until they re-drove the route. LAPIS believes the family experienced 20 minutes of missing time. The second discrepancy was that the road was wrong. The assumed route had taken them down a winding narrow road surrounded by walls and hedges while they knew the sighting had occurred on a straight wide road that was high up and had a white line down the middle of it.
They were most disturbed by these details and decided to try a totally different route, at this point they were convinced they must have driven home a different way. This new route provided no clues to the location of the event they all decided that this route also could not be the correct one, but as they drove along the road all 3 had what they described as being a horrible sensation. The sensation eventually passed and they decided to turn the car around and drive back and on the same stretch of road. They experienced the same horrible feelings and this time the car went dead. They later independently described a strange silence, a sensation of oddness, being underwater and feeling out of place. This phenomena has been experienced before by other UFO witnesses, and is known as the Oz Factor. The car eventually restarted and Rachel was able to drive it to the nearby garage. She was told that the reason the car came to a sudden stop was that the coil had been burnt out. The mechanic noted that this was strange for the particular make of car Rachel was driving.
The first meeting that LAPIS had with the Deverows took place the following Sunday. LAPIS described the family as welcoming and eager to tell them about the experience. The group kept in touch with the family visiting them several times and speaking with them on the phone on a regular basis. As the case developed it became shockingly clear that the family had encountered over an hour of missing time. Both LAPIS and the Deverow attempted to locate the exact route took that January evening but the route has never been confirmed.
As time progressed they experienced other strange events. Anne began to recall events from her childhood years she remembered walking fully dressed with muddy feet and also seeing a strange triangular shaped craft. Alex and Benjamin were outside in the farmyard one day when they spotted UFOs in the sky overhead. The electricity of the farmhouse began to cause strange problems such as kettles burning out and lights exploding. The family checked with the neighbors and asked them if the previous owners had experienced anything like it, the neighbors said the previous occupants had not.
Around the end of May 2005, Anne and Rachel got in touch with a television production company who at the time were making a documentary for Sky One. The 2 were engaged in discussions with the company and it was decided that the Deverow would be featured in the program they were producing. During this time Rachel also decided to undergo Regression Hypnosis, a technique commonly used in abduction scenarios to regain lost memory. Filming for the documentary took place in June 2005. The day after filming had begun Rachel was hypnotized by Hull based hypnotherapist Steve Burgess. The program entitled The Real 4400s was aired in autumn of 2005 and presented what LAPIS thought to be a reasonably accurate view of the case. During the hypnosis session she described being high up in the light, and being confronted by the light. She also commented on the missing road that LAPIS had been trying to find and under hypnosis she described it as being a stretch of road in the air.