Taking the mare to the stallion
Emilcin, in the gently rolling farmland west of Lublin, had seventy-four farms in 1978 and, as a later Polish report put it, no school, no club, not even a newsagent, and a single shop. Jan Wolski, born in 1907, farmed there with his wife and sons. He had three years of primary schooling, no television, and a reputation, his neighbors later said, as a man who “didn’t drink and didn’t hit anyone.” Before dawn on Wednesday, May 10, at about half past four by the reckoning of Krzysztof Drozd, then an officer in the criminal department of the Lublin militia, communist Poland’s police, who has investigated the case ever since, Wolski harnessed his cart and drove his four-year-old mare to a neighboring village, where a farmer named Leon Rak kept a stallion. Because the mare was unshod, he came home by the soft forest tracks rather than the road. The Lublin weather station recorded a low, nearly total overcast that morning, a little mist, temperatures of 6 to 7 °C, and light rain toward eight o’clock. About 600 meters from home, coming out from behind a stand of alders, he saw two figures walking toward him on the track.
Sources: UFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwoA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978UFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi EmilcinAbductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin Abduction
Two hitchhikers in black
His first thought was hunters, his second scouts. “Tylko tu często chodzą za bażantami myśliwi, to ja liczyłem, że to myśliwi,” he told the radio reporter Małgorzata Sawicka of Polskie Radio Lublin that year: hunters often go after pheasants here, so I reckoned they were hunters. The two were about 150 centimeters tall, slight and delicate, in close-fitting black or grayish-black one-piece suits that covered their foreheads and came down to their chins and feet; they wore no shoes. Their faces and hands were green. When they saw him they slowed, then stepped apart to either side of the track, let him drive between them, and hopped onto the moving cart behind him, legs dangling, as country people did when they wanted a ride. Wolski did not object; it would have been rude. Up close he noticed slanting eyes, high cheekbones, white teeth, no eyebrows, and a rounded lump at the nape of each neck. By July he was also describing a thin little fin between the fingers, a detail with a story of its own. He had once seen Chinese men in the flesh, and he wondered whether these were Chinese, only smaller. They talked to each other in a quick, chattering patter that he rendered as “a petete petete te.” In a long interview taped that July by two Lublin enthusiasts, Henryk Pomorski and Krystyna Adamczyk, he still would not call them extraterrestrials: they were “similar to us, though tiny, delicate.” To Sawicka he put it more bluntly: “Widzę jakieś twarze zielone, widzę jakieś potworaki”—I see some green faces, I see some little monsters.
Sources: „Widzę jakieś potworaki”. Jak rolnik z Emilcina furmanką wiózł kosmitówAbductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978UFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi Emilcin
A bus hanging over the clearing
A few hundred meters on, the track came out of the trees into a clearing, and the passengers signaled him to stop. When the mare balked, one of them reached past him, took the reins and pulled her up; she was, Wolski thought, afraid of what was in front of them. Above the clearing, four or five meters up, hung a craft “as long as a bus,” white, “transparently white, as polished aluminum,” with no windows, lights or seams that he could see. In the 1978 television film he described it floating up and down by half a meter or so. The Polish investigators’ later report adds that it was like “a short bus, but with a roof like a barn,” and that at each corner a vertical barrel held a black spiral, like a corkscrew or auger, spinning so fast that it hummed like bumblebees, yet it stirred no air. From the doorway hung a small platform on four thin cords, which Wolski likened to the cords of an electric iron: a “windeczka na dwie osoby,” a little lift for two. The beings waved for him to come. He tied the mare to the cart, climbed down, stepped onto the platform with one of them, and was lifted swiftly to the door.
Sources: Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionA Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist RegimeA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978UFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi Emilcin„Widzę jakieś potworaki”. Jak rolnik z Emilcina furmanką wiózł kosmitów
Crows, saucers and icicles
Inside it was dim, black with a grayish tint; the only light came through the doorway, whose door rolled open and shut “like a piece of cloth.” There were two more beings and, along the walls, eight or ten single benches and nothing else. Against the far wall lay about ten black birds, rooks or crows, “takich jak naszych,” like ours, alive but helpless: “they were moving with their wings, legs and heads but weren’t moving around.” By gestures the crew told him to undress. As he unbuttoned his four-button shirt from the top, the being beside him undid the bottom two; then he was told to take off everything. “Jak do wojska szłem, to musiałem się rozbierać, a cóż dopiero przy nich,” he told Sawicka: when I went into the army I had to undress, so why not in front of them. One of them held a device “like two little saucers” joined together and passed it over his chest, turned him by the arm, raised the arm and went over his side, his back and his other side. The crew were fascinated by his leather belt and buckled and unbuckled it. Then they showed him their food: “something shaped like those icicles that hang from roofs,” which they broke into small crumbs without a sound, “like hard dough,” and put in their mouths. They offered him some. “Kiwnąłem głową, że nie,” he said: I shook my head no. They did not insist. When he had dressed he turned at the door, took off his cap and said “Do widzenia,” goodbye, “and all four of them bowed too.” Then he stepped back onto the platform and was down on the grass. He put his time aboard at ten or twelve minutes.
Sources: Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin Abduction45 lat temu w Emilcinie wylądowało UFO. Nawet jak Jankowi nie wierzyli, to się nie śmiali„Widzę jakieś potworaki”. Jak rolnik z Emilcina furmanką wiózł kosmitówUFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi EmilcinNikt nie mówi, że wierzy w UFO. Wracamy do EmilcinaThe UFO Movement in Poland, and Story of a Polish CE-IIIA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978
Ten to eight
The craft was still hanging there when he drove off; he lost sight of it behind bushes about 15 meters on. He reached home, he said, at about ten to eight by his wife’s clock. She asked whether something was wrong with the mare. He told his sons to go to the clearing, where they would see “some car in the air.” Drozd adds that Wolski said “zabierzcie krowy”—take the cows—then fell onto his bed and slept like a stone. His sons fetched neighbors, among them a cousin, and ran to the field, but the sky was empty: only dew-soaked grass trodden down, Wolski said later, with paths running off “in all directions,” and footprints, one of which a son compared with his own foot. The investigators described the prints as trapezoidal, almost rectangular, sunk two or three centimeters into the ground, and reported torn twigs and black feathers, all, the Wrocław report noted, of exactly the same length. Some time between eight and nine, on the Popiołek farm about 800 meters west of the clearing, six-year-old Adam and his four-year-old sister Agnieszka were playing in the sand by the barn, and their mother was frying pancakes when she heard what she called a terrible bang, like thunder that seemed to come out of the ground. Adaś, as the family called him, ran in shouting that there was a machine in the air and it might smash their house. As a child he described something like a bus with a single window and a pilot in an earflap cap, with black rods sticking out “like a snail’s feelers,” flying low over the barn and then climbing straight up. Two other villagers said they heard the noise.
Sources: Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionUFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwoNikt nie mówi, że wierzy w UFO. Wracamy do EmilcinaTajemnica zdarzenia w Emilcinie. Czy w lubelskiej wsi rzeczywiście wylądowało UFO?A Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978Odwiedziny, czyli u progu tajemnicy
“Grandpa fell asleep”
The story was round the district within days. Children asked at school whether Martians could land on Earth, and some stayed home for fear of them. The headmaster, a physics teacher, gave a talk on the structure of the universe and the history of space research “with special emphasis on the achievements of the Soviet Union,” as the weekly Panorama reported, and explained that no sign of life in space had been found. On May 12, when that did not work, he asked the Citizens’ Militia station in Opole Lubelskie to put the rumors to rest. Lieutenant Stanisław Plis, the station commander, sent a sergeant, whose finding was reported in 1978: “Dziadek zasnął i wszystko mu się śniło”—Grandpa fell asleep and dreamed it all. The cart tracks turned sharply left, the sergeant said, and the grass had been grazed for about twenty meters, which would have taken the mare at least an hour while Wolski slept on the cart. Plis had consulted “serious people,” most of whom thought the farmer had imagined something, and he wondered: “Maybe it’s because of films on television?” Everyone in Emilcin knew Wolski had no television. “There were lots of traces,” Wolski said. “The militia should have secured them, but they just laughed at me: that I fell asleep, that I got drunk, that this, that that.”
Sources: UFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi EmilcinUFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwoA Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist Regime
Poland gets its own UFO
The ufologists came next. On May 26 Witold Wawrzonek, a Lublin enthusiast, recorded Wolski’s account on a tape recorder and alerted Zbigniew Blania-Bolnar of Łódź, a sociologist and the best-known UFO researcher in the country, who published abroad as Zbigniew Bolnar. Blania arrived with a child psychologist for Adaś and the psychologist Dr. Ryszard Kietliński for Wolski, and put the farmer through what amounted to a small clinic: thematic apperception and intelligence tests, color-blindness plates, a psychogalvanometer, neurological, eye and ear examinations. Kietliński found no sign of mental illness and judged it unlikely that anyone had coached Wolski into false testimony: “Jest po prostu bardzo odporny na tego typu sugestie”—he is simply very resistant to suggestions of that kind. Wolski “probably saw something out of the ordinary, something very interesting,” the psychologist said on camera. “What it could have been, I don’t know.” Blania added that the old man’s memory was too weak to repeat even a simple story read to him, which made an invented adventure hard to credit. By June 6 he was telling the daily Kurier Polski that the witness could not have invented such details. National television and the press took up the story, and, as Blania remembered it, people talked about flying saucers that summer in the streets, cafés and buses, and children wrote “UFO” on walls and cars. Before two witnesses Wolski signed an oath: “Przysięgam uroczyście na Boga, że moja relacja o spotkaniu z kosmitami w dniu 10 maja 1978 r. jest absolutnie prawdziwa. Bóg świadkiem, że mówię prawdę”—I solemnly swear by God that my account of the encounter with the aliens on May 10, 1978, is absolutely true. God is my witness that I am telling the truth. A 1980 summary of the Łódź report says a priest prepared it; Antonio Huneeus wrote that it convinced the village’s nearly hundred-year-old priest. Then the visitors came. “Sometimes fourteen coaches at once,” Wolski complained. “They kept me from working and trampled my meadow.”
Sources: A Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978UFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwoTajemnica zdarzenia w Emilcinie. Czy w lubelskiej wsi rzeczywiście wylądowało UFO?Report from PolandNikt nie mówi, że wierzy w UFO. Wracamy do EmilcinaA Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist RegimeThe UFO Movement in Poland, and Story of a Polish CE-IIIUFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi EmilcinPoland’s First Abduction Case Is Monumental
The trap for liars
Not every detail of the beings that reached the public was Wolski’s. In his 1996 book Zdarzenie w Emilcinie, Blania revealed that he and Kietliński had devised a “pułapka na ufo-kłamców,” a trap for UFO liars. With Blania’s encouragement, Wolski gave visitors false features, chief among them a bright circular badge on the beings’ chests, red in one account and yellow with a red dot in others; some retellings add the webbed fingers to the planted details. Any later witness who described the same green men with the same badge, the reasoning went, had borrowed from the newspapers; one who matched the true description without it would be powerful evidence. This may be why the fins turn up in the July interview and in the Western press, and why later books still draw the Emilcin beings with webbed hands. The trap seemed to spring that autumn. On September 27, 1978, four days after the documentary about Emilcin aired, eight schoolchildren at Przyrownica near Łódź reported a green-faced being in a black suit with a bright round badge on its chest; Blania judged it a hoax after interviewing them. The next day, at Golina near Konin, Henryk Marciniak told of small beings who took a close interest in his WSK motorcycle, and Blania treated him as a second genuine witness. Decades later Bartosz Rdułtowski, a writer on wartime mysteries who would build his own theory of the case, tracked Marciniak down. He wrote back: “Proszę się ze mną nie kontaktować nigdy. To nieprawda”—please never contact me. It isn’t true.
Sources: Emilcin: hipnoza i fałszywi kosmici. Czy w „polskim Roswell” doszło do oszustwa?Tajemnica zdarzenia w Emilcinie. Czy w lubelskiej wsi rzeczywiście wylądowało UFO?Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionBUFORA Journal vol. 8, no. 3Przyrownica i Golina: czyżby błędy autora książki „Zdarzenie w Emilcinie”?Z polskimi ufologami w kwestii Emilcina wiele mnie dzieli: wywiad z Bartoszem Rdułtowskim
The devil’s stone and the son in the forest
The meadow already had a story before 1978. In one version Wolski’s father hauled a large stone from it to use as a foundation for his barn; afterward hail struck only the family orchard, the cows died and the barn burned, until a recurring dream told him to put the stone back, and he did. In Drozd’s version it was Jan Wolski himself who took the stone home and dreamed of a voice calling “odwieź mnie z powrotem,” take me back. Neighbors called it the devil’s stone. According to Drozd, Wolski and his sister told Sawicka in 1978 that their father had once seen a vision on that meadow, a brightness and a cloud opening, “as if a fluttering of little angels.” Wawrzonek reported an old cult stone carved with signs, buried some seventy meters east of the site. It was carted off to Warsaw, where, the legend goes, a professor at the agricultural university tested it and a farm worker, several cows and a hutch of rabbits died. Drozd, who checked, found ordinary accidents and bad husbandry, and says the stone now lies on a heap of rubble near Konstancin, outside Warsaw. The darkest strand is real. On February 4, 1981, Wolski’s son Edward was found nearly naked and dead in the forest near the clearing. Drozd, as a militia officer, supervised the inquiry: after a day’s threshing and drinking, Edward had sat down on a stone, fallen asleep and died of cold, with about two parts per thousand of alcohol in his blood. That same year, according to the Polish researcher Kazimierz Bzowski, a television crew at the clearing watched a pendulum, string and all, vanish from the middle of a circle of more than ten people.
Sources: 45 lat temu w Emilcinie wylądowało UFO. Nawet jak Jankowi nie wierzyli, to się nie śmialiNikt nie mówi, że wierzy w UFO. Wracamy do EmilcinaUFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwoEmilcin: hipnoza i fałszywi kosmici. Czy w „polskim Roswell” doszło do oszustwa?A Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978Cmentarz parafialny w Opolu Lubelskim: wyszukiwarka grobówAbductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin Abduction
Westward, with the date wrong
The West heard about Emilcin quickly but imperfectly. The International UFO Reporter of July 1978, working from Kurier Polski, dated it to May 17, described an examining apparatus “likened to an X-ray machine,” and noted that later articles in the same paper said the farmer had probably seen a helicopter and its crew. British ufologists had it from Marek Iwaniec in Skywatch, and the BUFORA Journal of June 1979 also gave May 17. Blania’s own article in the International UFO Reporter in 1983 gave May 19, and that date traveled through Jenny Randles’s Abduction in 1988, where Wolski became the rare abductee who remembered everything without hypnosis. Brad Steiger retold it the same year as “Examined by ‘Little Green Men’ in Poland,” and Janet and Colin Bord offered Wolski as one of many witnesses who saw little green men. The fullest Western report, by a Wrocław UFO club, appeared in the French magazine Lumières dans la Nuit in 1989 and in Flying Saucer Review in 1991, with weather records, sketches and every disagreement between the investigators laid out. Timothy Good, in Alien Base in 1998, wrote of the craft: “Insofar as I am aware, the shape of that object was like none ever reported.” The Field Guide to UFOs in 2000 filed the case with the verdict “Skeptic’s solution: none.”
Sources: Foreign ForumUFOs in PolandBUFORA Journal vol. 8, no. 3The UFO Movement in Poland, and Story of a Polish CE-IIIAlien Abductions: The Mystery SolvedThe UFO AbductorsModern Mysteries of the WorldA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978Rencontre rapprochée du 3e type en Pologne: Emilcin, 10 mai 1978Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters with ExtraterrestrialsThe Field Guide to UFOs
A cube on a stone
Wolski spoke at the third Ufological Congress in Lublin in September 1985 and never changed his story. He died in January 1990 and was buried in the parish cemetery at Opole Lubelskie. Blania died in 2003. On October 15, 2005, the Warsaw-based Nautilus Foundation unveiled a monument in the village: a rough granite block bearing a polished dark plaque, with a metal cube balanced on one corner above it, designed by the painter Andrzej Fogtt with a nod to the monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It stands on a neighbor’s field in the village rather than on the meadow, because Wolski’s daughter-in-law would not have it there. The inscription reads: “10 maja 1978 roku w EMILCINIE wylądował obiekt UFO. Prawda nas jeszcze zadziwi…”—On May 10, 1978, a UFO object landed in Emilcin. The truth will yet astonish us… Since then the village has held UFO picnics; a plan for a museum foundered when the heirs would not sell Wolski’s house; a time capsule went into the ground in 2011 with orders to open it in 3011; and a webcam now watches the cube around the clock. In April 2025 Netflix’s Projekt UFO turned the affair into a drama set in a fictional village, with Wolski reimagined as a beekeeper.
Sources: UFO lądowało w Polsce? Prawda wyszła na jaw po 35 latachCmentarz parafialny w Opolu Lubelskim: wyszukiwarka grobówEmilcin AbductionPoland’s First Abduction Case Is MonumentalPomnik UFO, Andrzej FogttUFO w EmilcinieNikt nie mówi, że wierzy w UFO. Wracamy do EmilcinaEmilcin UFO MemorialMuzeum UFO ma powstać w EmilcinieIle prawdy w nowym serialu Netflixa o UFO? Fakty o EmilcinieA Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist Regime
What survives
No photograph of the craft or the beings exists, and the prints in the clearing were trampled by villagers and militiamen; the trees and grass around the site were not examined until three weeks after the event. What survives is testimony, unusually well recorded. The interview Henryk Pomorski and Krystyna Adamczyk taped on July 6, 1978, was kept by Pomorski’s family until his granddaughter gave it to the Polish group NPN, which released the audio and an English translation in 2008. Małgorzata Sawicka’s radio feature for Polskie Radio Lublin, the television documentary Odwiedziny, czyli u progu tajemnicy (A Visit, or On the Threshold of a Mystery), aired on September 23, 1978, with Wolski, his son, the Popiołeks and Kietliński on camera, and the militia’s findings as reported in the weekly Panorama all date from that year. Blania published his investigation in books in 1988 and 1996; the Łódź team’s 85-page report was summarized in the weekly Kultura in 1980. In 2013 Bartosz Rdułtowski published a book, Tajne operacje. PRL i UFO, built on the letters and tapes of Blania and Wawrzonek that he had bought from their families, and in 2019 Krzysztof Drozd, the former militiaman, published Emilcin 1978: W poszukiwaniu prawdy (In Search of the Truth) after four decades on the case.
Sources: Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionRelacja Jana Wolskiego (Emilcin, 1978)Łąka na skraju wszechświataOdwiedziny, czyli u progu tajemnicyPrzyrownica i Golina: czyżby błędy autora książki „Zdarzenie w Emilcinie”?UFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi EmilcinReport from PolandA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978UFO lądowało w Polsce? Prawda wyszła na jaw po 35 latachA Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist RegimeUFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwo
The contradictions
Abroad, the date itself drifted to May 17 and May 19; every Polish record and the July tape say May 10. Wolski set out at 4:30 or just before five. One recent retelling puts the encounter at about five; the Wrocław investigators, working back from his return at about 7:50, put its start nearer seven. Bzowski, and Wolski himself in 1981, had him home only at 10:30. The mare’s grazing was read as ten minutes’ work, an hour’s, or two hours’. The examining device was an X-ray machine in 1978 summaries and two saucer-like plates on the tape; the food was an icicle, a transparent substance, or honey-like. Wolski never saw the craft go; if the Popiołeks’ bang between eight and nine was its departure, it outlasted his visit by the better part of an hour. Bzowski’s version adds that the beings looked into Wolski’s mouth and gives Adaś a glimpse not of a pilot in an earflap cap but of a brownish face with slanting eyes. According to Rdułtowski, who listened to Blania’s tapes, Adaś’s mother said her son spoke up only after the village was buzzing; as a man he denied the sighting, and he has since moved to England. His sister Agnieszka, who was four, told a reporter who visited with Drozd in 2019: “To była piękna historia, ale myślę, że to jednak bajka”—it was a beautiful story, but I think it’s a fairy tale. One 1987 account puts the examining team at Lublin rather than Łódź; some sources name the psychologist Ryszard Krasilewicz rather than Kietliński; the comic-strip version by Henryk Kurta and Grzegorz Rosiński is dated to 1980 or 1982; Wolski was 70 on the day by the birth date the investigators recorded, though he gave his age as 71 that July; and his death is put in 1990 or 1991.
Sources: Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionForeign ForumBUFORA Journal vol. 8, no. 3The UFO Movement in Poland, and Story of a Polish CE-IIIUFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwo45 lat temu w Emilcinie wylądowało UFO. Nawet jak Jankowi nie wierzyli, to się nie śmialiA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978A Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist RegimeUFO lądowało w Polsce? Prawda wyszła na jaw po 35 latachUFO Newsclipping Service no. 218UFO w EmilcinieUFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi Emilcin
Explanations and objections
The militia’s answer was a dream on the cart, and Kurier Polski’s later in 1978 was a helicopter and its crew. Drozd, who came to doubt the case around 2013, still finds it improbable that “this simple man could invent and fill a story with such detail,” and suggests that the Popiołek children may have seen a helicopter from the air-ambulance field at nearby Radawiec, where a Mi-2 pilot nicknamed “Ufo” was said to startle villagers by landing in odd places. The trail went cold. The most elaborate theory is Rdułtowski’s. He argues that in April 1978 Blania had the stage hypnotist Lech Emfazy Stefański put Wawrzonek under for a television experiment on implanting false UFO memories, which Wawrzonek had agreed to only because he was sure it would fail (some accounts say it was done against his will), and that it worked. Wawrzonek, humiliated, took his revenge, Rdułtowski says, by hypnotizing Wolski and handing the story to Blania, who made it famous before the trick could be revealed. Rdułtowski also argues that Blania quoted the psychological results selectively and that Wolski was in fact suggestible. He concedes the central step cannot be proved: “To moja hipoteza”—it is my hypothesis. Wawrzonek’s son and widow deny that he ever practiced hypnosis, though the widow had first confirmed it, and a young villager told OKO.press that hypnotizing a farmer in the middle of the woods at eight in the morning sounds as fantastic as the UFO. On the believers’ side, Kietliński and Blania rated hoax, dream, hallucination, suggestion and helicopter at one or two percent each, and an objectively real event at ninety percent (Kietliński) and ninety-eight (Blania). The argument that Wolski could not have absorbed the imagery has a weak spot of its own: Blania had published three long UFO series in Polish weeklies in 1977 and 1978, and while neighbors said Wolski never read a paper, Huneeus reported that his sons brought newspapers home.
Sources: Foreign ForumUFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwoEmilcin: hipnoza i fałszywi kosmici. Czy w „polskim Roswell” doszło do oszustwa?UFO lądowało w Polsce? Prawda wyszła na jaw po 35 latachTajemnica zdarzenia w Emilcinie. Czy w lubelskiej wsi rzeczywiście wylądowało UFO?A Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist RegimeZ polskimi ufologami w kwestii Emilcina wiele mnie dzieli: wywiad z Bartoszem RdułtowskimNikt nie mówi, że wierzy w UFO. Wracamy do EmilcinaPoland’s First Abduction Case Is MonumentalThe UFO Movement in Poland, and Story of a Polish CE-IIIUFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi Emilcin
Classification and evidence note
This archive files Emilcin as a close encounter and, for Wolski’s account of being led aboard, undressed and examined, as a reported abduction. The case rests on the testimony of one elderly witness, recorded early and often, with partial support from a small boy and the noise his mother heard, and with physical traces that were described but never documented. Some published details of the beings were deliberately planted by the investigators, and the strongest skeptical theory has no direct evidence for its central step.
Sources: Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978Emilcin: hipnoza i fałszywi kosmici. Czy w „polskim Roswell” doszło do oszustwa?UFO lądowało w Polsce? Prawda wyszła na jaw po 35 latach
- 29 MAY 1907
Jan Wolski is born; he will farm at Emilcin, near Opole Lubelskie.
- 18 APR 1978
According to Bartosz Rdułtowski, Zbigniew Blania-Bolnar has Witold Wawrzonek hypnotized for a television experiment on implanting false UFO memories.
- 10 MAY 1978 · C. 4:30 AM
Wolski drives his mare to a stallion in a neighboring village.
- 10 MAY 1978 · MORNING
Two small green-faced figures ride on his cart to a clearing where a white craft hovers; he is taken aboard, examined and offered food.
- 10 MAY 1978 · C. 7:50 AM
Wolski is home; his sons run to the clearing and find only trodden grass and footprints.
- 10 MAY 1978 · 8–9 AM
At the Popiołek farm, 800 meters west of the clearing, a bang like thunder is heard and a six-year-old boy reports a machine like a bus climbing straight up.
- 12 MAY 1978
The school headmaster asks the militia to dispel the rumors; a sergeant concludes that “Grandpa fell asleep.”
- 26 MAY 1978
Witold Wawrzonek records Wolski’s account and alerts Blania, who arrives with psychologists.
- 6 JUN 1978
Kurier Polski quotes Blania calling the account authentic; the story goes national.
- 6 JUL 1978
Henryk Pomorski and Krystyna Adamczyk tape their interview with Wolski.
- JUL 1978
The International UFO Reporter carries the first known English-language summary.
- 23 SEP 1978
Polish television airs the documentary Odwiedziny, czyli u progu tajemnicy.
- 27–28 SEP 1978
Schoolchildren at Przyrownica report a green-faced being with a badge on its chest, which Blania calls a hoax; at Golina, Henryk Marciniak reports small beings by his motorcycle.
- 5 NOV 1980
Kultura summarizes the Łódź team’s 85-page report on Wolski’s tests.
- 4 FEB 1981
Wolski’s son Edward is found dead of cold in the forest near the clearing.
- SEP 1985
Wolski speaks at the third Ufological Congress in Lublin.
- JAN 1990
Jan Wolski dies.
- MAR 1991
Flying Saucer Review prints the Wrocław UFO club’s full case report.
- 1996
Blania’s book Zdarzenie w Emilcinie reveals the planted “trap for UFO liars.”
- 15 OCT 2005
The Nautilus Foundation unveils the UFO monument in Emilcin.
- 2013
Rdułtowski publishes Tajne operacje. PRL i UFO, with his hypnosis-revenge hypothesis.
- 2019
Krzysztof Drozd publishes Emilcin 1978: W poszukiwaniu prawdy.
- APR 2025
Netflix’s Projekt UFO fictionalizes the affair.
Sources & interviews
Abductee Jan Wolski Interviewed: 30th Anniversary of Emilcin AbductionUFO Casebook, May 2008, from Projekt NPN · English translation of the interview recorded by Henryk Pomorski and Krystyna Adamczyk in Emilcin on July 6, 1978 · Wayback MachineRelacja Jana Wolskiego (Emilcin, 1978)Projekt NPN · YouTube · audio of the July 6, 1978, interviewOdwiedziny, czyli u progu tajemnicyTelewizja Polska documentary, 1978 · with Jan Wolski, his son, the Popiołek family and Dr. Ryszard Kietliński · YouTubeŁąka na skraju wszechświataMałgorzata Sawicka · Polskie Radio Lublin radio feature, 1978, republished April 29, 2025„Widzę jakieś potworaki”. Jak rolnik z Emilcina furmanką wiózł kosmitówPolskie Radio 24 · with excerpts from Małgorzata Sawicka’s 1978 recordings of Jan WolskiA Close Encounter with “Greenish-Faced” Creatures in Poland in 1978Wrocław Club for the Popularization and Exploration of UFOs (WCPE-UFO), edited by Gordon Creighton · Flying Saucer Review vol. 36, no. 1, March 1991 · Internet ArchiveRencontre rapprochée du 3e type en Pologne: Emilcin, 10 mai 1978WCPE-UFO · Lumières dans la Nuit no. 299, September–October 1989 · Internet ArchiveForeign ForumInternational UFO Reporter vol. 3, no. 7, July 1978 · from Kurier Polski, via John Brent Musgrave and Jo Ann Silvis · Internet ArchiveThe UFO Movement in Poland, and Story of a Polish CE-IIIZbigniew Bolnar · International UFO Reporter vol. 8, no. 6, November–December 1983 · Internet ArchiveUFOs in PolandMarek S. Iwaniec · Skywatch no. 30, Manchester Aerial Phenomena Investigation Team, late 1978 · Internet ArchiveBUFORA Journal vol. 8, no. 3British UFO Research Association, June 1979 · with the Emilcin and Przyrownica reports · Internet ArchiveReport from PolandMarek S. Iwaniec · Journal UFO vol. 2, no. 3, U.P. Investigations Research, Mississauga, Ontario, 1980 · summarizing the Łódź report printed in Kultura, November 5, 1980 · Internet ArchiveUFO Newsclipping Service no. 218September 1987 · reprinting J. Antonio Huneeus in the New York City Tribune, April 23, 1987 · Internet ArchivePoland’s First Abduction Case Is MonumentalAntonio Huneeus · Open Minds · January 11, 2010Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters with ExtraterrestrialsTimothy Good · Century, London, 1998 · chapter 18, “Beyond Belief” · Internet ArchiveThe Field Guide to UFOsDennis Stacy and Patrick Huyghe · Quill, New York, 2000, pp. 100–101 · Internet ArchiveAlien Abductions: The Mystery SolvedJenny Randles · Inner Light, 1988 (UK edition Abduction, Robert Hale), p. 172 · Internet ArchiveA Tale Out of This World: Alien Abduction & the Communist RegimeMarek Kępa · Culture.pl, Adam Mickiewicz Institute · July 2017UFO w Polsce wylądowało we wsi EmilcinCezary Polak · Fakt · September 29, 2015 · quoting the weekly Panorama of 1978 · Wayback MachineUFO w Emilcinie. Były milicjant z wydziału kryminalnego od 41 lat prowadzi śledztwoDaniel Gnap · Wirtualna Polska · October 6, 2019 · with Krzysztof DrozdUFO lądowało w Polsce? Prawda wyszła na jaw po 35 latachOnet · 2015 · interview with Bartosz RdułtowskiZ polskimi ufologami w kwestii Emilcina wiele mnie dzieli: wywiad z Bartoszem RdułtowskimParadoks · 2024Emilcin: hipnoza i fałszywi kosmici. Czy w „polskim Roswell” doszło do oszustwa?Ciekawostki Historyczne · May 13, 2021 · with Blania-Bolnar’s account of the “trap for UFO liars” and readers’ comments by Krzysztof DrozdNikt nie mówi, że wierzy w UFO. Wracamy do EmilcinaMilena Kuchnia · OKO.press · 2023 · quoting the 1978 documentary and today’s villagersTajemnica zdarzenia w Emilcinie. Czy w lubelskiej wsi rzeczywiście wylądowało UFO?Gazeta.pl · 201845 lat temu w Emilcinie wylądowało UFO. Nawet jak Jankowi nie wierzyli, to się nie śmialiDziennik Wschodni, Lublin · May 2023Muzeum UFO ma powstać w EmilcinieDziennik Wschodni, Lublin · 2008 · Wayback MachinePrzyrownica i Golina: czyżby błędy autora książki „Zdarzenie w Emilcinie”?Fundacja NautilusPomnik UFO, Andrzej FogttSztuka Publiczna · on the 2005 monument in EmilcinEmilcin UFO MemorialAtlas Obscura · Wayback MachineIle prawdy w nowym serialu Netflixa o UFO? Fakty o EmilcinieNational Geographic Polska · 2025The UFO AbductorsBrad Steiger · Berkley, New York, 1988, pp. 50–52 · Internet ArchiveModern Mysteries of the WorldJanet and Colin Bord · Grafton, London, 1989 · Internet ArchiveCmentarz parafialny w Opolu Lubelskim: wyszukiwarka grobówParish cemetery register, Opole Lubelskie · entries for Jan Wolski (1907–1990-01-07) and Edward Wolski (1941–1981-02-04)UFO w EmilcinieWikipedia, wolna encyklopediaEmilcin AbductionWikipediaSpotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.
Connected files
Two Lost Hours on Route 3The American abduction that set the template, though the Hills’ story came out under hypnosis and Wolski’s, by most accounts, did not.The Tape Behind the DoorAnother examination aboard a craft, also preserved on an early tape of the witnesses talking.The Night the Sky Waved BackIn Papua, figures on a hovering craft returned a missionary’s wave; in Emilcin, they returned a farmer’s bow.The Three-Eyed Giants of VoronezhEleven years later in the Soviet Union, children in a park described beings from a landed craft, and the state press ran with it.The Landing at Trans-en-ProvenceThree years later in Provence, a retired mason watched a craft set down on his terrace, and investigators went looking for traces in the soil.Discuss this case
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