Hanbury area, Staffordshire, England
Incident period: 20 November 1968
A family driving home from a house-hunting trip described rabbits fleeing across a road and an illuminated object hovering above a house, with figures moving inside it. Their investigators recorded the dramatic sighting, then an equally important difficulty: returning with the witnesses did not lead them back to a location everyone recognised.
Three witnesses on a house-hunting journey
The case concerns Milin Milakovic, his wife Doris and their eleven-year-old son Slavic. They lived in Hednesford and had spent the afternoon of 20 November 1968 looking at houses around Rugeley, Abbots Bromley and Hanbury. The contemporary BUFORA investigation describes a large household with eleven children, of whom Slavic was one; it does not say eleven children witnessed the encounter.
The family viewed Hanbury Hall and another old house offered for sale outside the village, then set off for home as daylight faded. The reported encounter time was between 5.30 and 5.45 pm. Their unfamiliar house-hunting route would later become a major issue when investigators attempted to establish precisely where the sighting happened.
The source that gives the clearest account of this follow-up is a four-page report by N. M. H. Turner and W. Daniels in the BUFORA Journal, volume 2, number 7. It combines the family’s descriptions with the authors’ own interviews, journey through the area and enquiries among local people. That fuller account contains much more than the short dome-and-occupants summary repeated in later catalogues.
Rabbits across the road
The family first noticed a rabbit crossing from their left. They joked about catching it, then saw more rabbits emerging through the hedge and running across. Looking towards the adjoining field, they became aware of an intensely illuminated object. In their telling, it seemed to have been dark a moment earlier and had suddenly become conspicuous.
Milin stopped the car. The object rose from the left-hand field, crossed above the vehicle and moved towards an isolated house on the right. The distance to the house was estimated at roughly a hundred yards. The three got out and watched the object remain over it.
Doris thought the object comparable in width to the house. This is the report’s principal size comparison; there is no surveyed craft dimension. The authors describe an overcast sky with rain starting or recently begun. The house itself showed no lights, so the family’s impression of its relationship to the object came from a dusk scene illuminated by the reported phenomenon.
The illuminated upper portion
The family described a dark lower body and a brilliantly lit upper part. In that upper section they could make out silhouettes they considered human in form. Several figures moved back and forth, sometimes bending towards something below the rim. The report puts this part of the observation at about five minutes.
The witnesses did not describe the whole object rotating. Instead, while hovering, it appeared to tremble or wobble. They reported no accompanying sound. Doris also recalled feeling warm when they first left the car and cooler as the object moved farther away.
As the object climbed, its movement became intermittent or jerky and its illumination intensified. Milin complained that the brightness made his eyes feel as if they were burning. Alarmed, he insisted that the family leave. The object was still visible over the fields as they drove away, so this was not an account of watching it disappear completely.
Doris described a mixture of curiosity, excitement and apprehension in herself and Slavic. She explicitly said there had been no trouble with the car. That detail separates Hanbury from British vehicle-stop accounts such as Hook or Sopley, even though later discussions sometimes place all such encounters in the same broad category.
How the investigators reached the family
Turner and Daniels traced the initial publicity to the Wolverhampton Express and Star of Monday 25 November 1968. They contacted Doris the following morning and arranged a Wednesday evening interview. They took a tape recorder, giving their report a stated interview procedure rather than an unspecified retrospective source.
Doris said several other callers had already shown interest, including people in Uttoxeter and London and three students said to live in Lichfield. The students reportedly claimed to have found another possible witness and proposed a photographic visit with the family. Turner and Daniels arranged to join that excursion.
When the investigators arrived for the planned Sunday visit, the family reported an anonymous telephone warning against going near the airfield. The authors thought it probably a hoax call and continued. The students did not appear. Their supposed additional witness never becomes a confirmed independent observer in the published investigation.
The missing house
The party tried to reproduce the family’s original journey. After turning around at Hanbury and passing the final house they had viewed, Milin indicated a place he said was the encounter site. There was a substantial problem: no isolated house stood there for the object to have hovered above.
Doris did not agree with her husband’s choice or with the route being followed. Milin himself was puzzled by the missing house, but remained firm about the place. The investigators spent around half an hour touring the locality before deciding the evening was becoming unproductive and distressing for the family.
Afterwards the two researchers searched again. They found a hangar resembling one Milin had mentioned, but no house satisfying the account. The hangar did not establish the sighting location: on further questioning it emerged that he had noticed it during another part of the journey, rather than seeing it together with the hovering object.
The report does not conclude that a house vanished. Its authors thought confusion over the unfamiliar route was a practical possibility. Doris offered another potential lead: an elderly couple in a white cottage had given them directions when they were lost. The researchers believed they located a possible cottage, although nobody was home when they called.
Enquiries that did not produce corroboration
The investigators made enquiries around Hanbury and with police at Draycott-in-the-Clay and Uttoxeter. They also approached the press in surrounding towns and staff at the airfield. None supplied a further report matching the family’s experience. A light aircraft had apparently landed around the relevant time, but Turner and Daniels did not consider it an explanation of the described object.
Two attempts to arrange another journey with Doris failed: she was unexpectedly away on business on one occasion, and the family was dealing with a serious domestic crisis on the other. The authors explicitly regarded that crisis as unrelated to the UFO account. They suspended the family enquiries while hoping a later visit would become possible.
The report adds that both adults’ watches were said to have run slow afterwards. The writers raised magnetisation as a possibility but had not tested the car for residual magnetism. There is no published instrument result in those pages establishing a magnetic disturbance. The reported clock behaviour should therefore remain a separate detail rather than being turned into a measured physical effect.
The Hanbury case in its fullest form
The original investigation preserves an unusual combination: three related witnesses, a close and prolonged description, a recorded interview and a field investigation that could not resolve the geography. It neither drops the family’s detailed experience nor conceals the unanswered practical questions that followed it.
Later summaries often retain the rabbits, figures and dazzling lights while losing the unsuccessful site visit, the unconfirmed callers and the lack of an independently identified house. Those elements belong together. They explain why the case remains compelling to readers and why its map marker must cover a broad area rather than claim a precisely established encounter field.
Timeline
20 November 1968, approximately 5.30–5.45 pm: Milin, Doris and Slavic report the encounter during their journey home from house-hunting.
25 November 1968: the account appears in the Wolverhampton Express and Star, according to the investigators.
The following Tuesday and Wednesday: Turner and Daniels contact the household and undertake a tape-recorded interview.
Subsequent Sunday visit: the group cannot agree on the location; the described house is not found.
Winter 1968–1969: the BUFORA Journal publishes the investigation, including unsuccessful local enquiries and the suspension of further family visits.
Sources & further reading
Turner and Daniels: the Milakovic investigation, BUFORA Journal 2/7 — Primary investigator account, printed pages 4–7, including the interview and the unresolved return visit.
Hanbury, Staffordshire: Ordnance Survey Open Names location — Broad village coordinates and county identity; this is the Staffordshire Hanbury, not the village of the same name in Worcestershire.
Related case files
Ranton, 1954: Jessie Roestenburg, the hovering disc and its two occupants
Scoriton, 1965: Ernest Bryant, Yamski and the investigation that changed direction
Location note: Broad Hanbury village reference in Staffordshire. The original investigators could not securely relocate the encounter road or the isolated house; this is not an exact sighting point.
UKPX historical case file. Researched and checked 4 November 2026. Explore the UK case map · Links & Sources.