June 21, 1954 -- Ridgeway, Ontario: A couple spotted a UFO while driving near Lake Erie. The UFO was metallic, shaped like a flattened sphere and the witnesses chased it in their car. When the car crossed the UFO's path, the car stalled. The UFO landed in the woods nearby and the car could only be restarted after pushing it some distance away.

May 1967 -- Vauxhall, Alta.: A couple saw a lit object in the sky. During the sighting, the headlights of their car flickered. Another motorist's engine failed during the sighting.

Winter 1995 -- Winnipeg, Manitoba: A car driving northbound to Selkirk stopped dead on the highway. The ignition failed repeatedly. A disc-shaped UFO hovered over the car for 15 seconds, then disappeared. After the departure of the object, the car functioned again.

Tales of cars and their drivers encountering UFOs form a part of our modern popular culture. But are motorists really being afflicted with automotive malfunctions caused by unidentified flying objects or, worse, being abducted from their vehicles on lonely back roads by aliens from another realm?

Your answer may say more about you and your preconceptions than about the actual phenomena being reported, says Bufo Calvin, education director for the Organization for Paranormal Understanding and Support (OPUS) with headquarters in California. The problem with reports of strange encounters is that they're often imbued with meaning by our own cultural references.

"Before a series of UFO reports in France in 1954, we rarely received reports of sightings from people driving along in cars -- it was from people flying in airplanes," he says. "Most of the significant reports of UFO encounters of the 1940s involved pilots. After the huge wave of sightings in France, the idea of car stops entered the public consciousness."

In essence, once the idea of UFOs being linked with car malfunctions becomes common knowledge, reports of similar encounters become less reliable. The original report may either inspire intentional copycats or unintentionally provide others with a new framework to re-interpret previous experiences. A series of widely reported car malfunction cases in Levelland, Texas, in 1957 essentially tainted the pool of virgin North American witnesses for good.

A 1965 abduction incident involving UFOs reported by Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire was widely repeated in newspapers, a subsequent book, Interrupted Journey, and a 1975 TV movie, The UFO Incident. Tales of similar encounters became more common in the 1980s, with people reporting the now-familiar phenomena of having their cars stop and later awakening in their vehicles with no knowledge of what happened during the intervening hours.

"If people see something they can't explain, they try to fit it into existing patterns, even something reported by others," says Calvin.

"They don't have the mental discipline to look at something and not commit to what it is."

Can mysterious flying objects really cause car engines to falter and electrical systems to fail?

"The basic belief behind a car stop is that an electromagnetic (EM) field dampens the car's electrical system and the engine effectively stops," says Calvin. "When reports began to come in about these encounters, we find that people driving cars with diesel engines didn't report car stoppages, while people with regular car engines did. That supports the idea that something is happening, because people just making up stories wouldn't originally make a distinction between diesel and non-diesel engines."

A 1981 study of more than 400 cases of car stoppage due to electromagnetic failure by Mark Rodeghier for the Center for UFO Studies says that something significant is occurring -- but what? Rodeghier concludes that "some EM events occur in the presence of unknown metallic, noisy, disc-shaped objects . . ." Interesting, but no slam dunk for aliens.

In fact, the large number of reported car/UFO encounters on desolate roads may be just a function of our own driving habits and not a particular attraction between cars, their drivers and UFOs. "Regardless of what people are seeing that triggers UFO reports, about 90 per cent of them involve nocturnal lights," says Calvin. "Where else might you be when you can clearly see nocturnal lights? Certainly not in the city where there's too much ambient light. You'd likely be driving on a country road."

Bigfoot sightings follow a similar pattern.

"The most common reports of Bigfoot are from people who claim to have seen one from their cars," says Calvin. "It doesn't mean that Bigfoot is an automobile aficionado -- it just means that most people who encounter anything in the woods are driving through the woods."