The Archive Incident Report #0305250432
Type: Incursion (suspected)
Category: BR 3351.3 (unknown incursion, suspected incursion, abduction, memory tampering)
Subject: AC-1981-NA-108, “Bus Number Seven”
Location: [REDACTED]
Reporting Archivist: B1 “Bosco”

In 1981, a maintenance mechanic at the school bus depot for a large rural school district noticed that Bus No. 7 had failed to return to the garage following its route on a Friday afternoon. Bus No. 7, an International Harvester S Series 3800 “Schoolmaster” with a Wayne Wayne Lifeguard type C body and coachwork, had been purchased in 1980 along with six other busses; it had a capacity of 60 students and one driver. Chalking the bus’s absence up to a simple oversight, the mechanic locked the garage and left.

When Bus No. 7 failed to appear, the mechanic contacted the local sheriff’s department, which was quickly able to determine that the bus had been loaded with 12 students and one driver and had been assigned to the most rural and remote route in service. Despite some ambiguous tire tracks found in some muddy areas on unpaved back roads, no trace of the bus was ever found, but the task of identifying the students inside was complicated by the fact that none of the seven families involved ever reported any missing children. The driver, too, proved difficult to pin down, as they had been a substitute whom none of the bus monitors on duty that day recognized.

Around this point, after Archivist Bosco had been summoned, records for the nine bus passengers that could conclusively be identified as missing began to disappear. Their parents and families denied their existence, and could not provide photographs or other evidence. School records, including student photographs and yearbooks, showed evidence of having been tampered with; county records similarly vanished or were edited. In time, the mechanic and sheriff’s department seemed to suffer a similar fate, as they eventually insisted that the case had never existed and denied having been involved with it or summoning assistance from the Archive. Only Archivist Bosco’s Viridian anatomy and physiology seem to have shielded him from the effects and allowed a full and unbiased report to be compiled.

Note From Head Archivist:
Some time later, circa 1995, it emerged that a number of individuals seemed to be using the identities of the disappeared passengers, a detail that was not recognized until the system began to be computerized. The Archive, and Archivist Bosco in particular, was interested in approaching these individuals in order to ascertain what connection, if any, they possessed to the missing persons. However, they fled at the approach of Bosco or any other Archivist, refused to speak when cornered, and were generally elusive and evasive. None were ultimately able to be apprehended and interviewed, but interestingly all of them seemed to work in–or be training to work in–defense fields relating to radar, radiography, remote sensing, and telecommunications.