I left the game roughly 9-12 months ago (estimate). I had about 4 alts in ‘safe logout’ in a wormhole. Now they are all sitting in stations. They were the only way I could keep tabs on where this wormhole would be at any given point in time, so now I can’t get back in.
There is some undocumented maintainance that returns players logged out in space to a station after some period of time. The details of where (home station?) and after how long (maybe 6 months?) haven’t ever been publically confirmed as far as I am aware, but I have had it happen to me and heard it from others.
Perhaps a petition will give you more info, but it is a deliberate action by some maintaince script probably to clean up the database by docking undocked and inactive characters.