WELCOME to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world-famous psychic researcher, Tom Slemen for the Globe.

This week, a date ends with a close encounter for Mandy and Roger.

On the sunny Saturday evening of July 22, 1972, a pretty blonde 18-year-old Gayton girl named Mandy went on her first real date with a 22-year-old Heswall man named Roger.

She'd met the insurance clerk the week before in the Wheatsheaf Inn when Mandy went with her parents to the pub after a visit to her auntie’s, and Roger had been ringing her every day since.

Today they were off to the Shrewsbury Arms Hotel (now known as the Hinderton Arms) on Chester High Road in Roger’s Jensen Interceptor.

Mandy was a very sensitive girl who scared easily and even the mildest ghost story would leave her a nervous wreck.

Roger soon found out how nervous Mandy was when he told her about the bogeyman-like figure reported in the newspapers who was going around attacking children in the Breezehill Ponds area of Neston.

Roger said the weird man approached the kids under the pretence of wanting to take their pictures with his camera, but when he got near enough he would threaten them with a knife and gag his victims with sticking plaster that had been soaked in some form of anaesthetic.

The attacker then had the uncanny talent of making himself scarce, and police were baffled as to how the criminal was going to ground so quickly.

I researched this case some years ago, and as far as I know, the weird assailant was never caught.

Roger apologised when Mandy started to tremble before asking: "You don't think he's round here do you? The man with the anaesthetic?"

Roger quickly changed the subject to football, but then something very strange took place.

He looked in his rear view mirror and saw what looked like a plane coming to land on the deserted stretch of Chester Road behind him.

He slowed the Interceptor out of curiosity and told Mandy about the plane landing around 400 feet behind them. The girl turned in her seat, looked at the plane and said: "Oh no! It's them! That isn't a plane, Roger, it's a UFO – and it's after me."

"What are you talking about?" asked Roger, perplexed by the girl’s strange outburst – but then he saw that the "plane" was in fact a silvery circular object. It was approaching steadily at treetop level.

Roger floored the accelerator and got to the Shrewsbury Arms in record time, and thankfully the sinister disc-shaped gave up the chase.

At the Shrewsbury Arms, Roger asked Mandy what she had meant when she said the UFO was after her. The girl blushed and told him that she seemed to be a "UFO magnet" – wherever she went, be it with friends or family, she would often see strange objects in the sky, and she intimated that “something up there” seemed to be fixated on her.

Mandy then said: "I wouldn't blame you if you said you didn’t want to see me again after me telling you that – but it's the truth."

Roger really liked Mandy and he held her hand and reassured her he was going nowhere. "If you're not having me on, I wonder why they are taking an interest in you?"

"I'm not having you on, Roger, honest," Mandy replied, and squeezed his hand: "and you can ask my family if you think I’m imagining it all."

On the following day – which was a Sunday - in the afternoon – Roger called at Mandy's home and took her for a spin.

As the couple was travelling down a very quiet Barnston Road, Roger looked in his rear view mirror and gasped: "Mandy - you're right - they are following you; that thing's back again!"

Mandy turned in her seat and she saw the metallic disc-shaped craft heading her way down Barnston Road.

The UFO was so low, it was touching the tops of trees and Roger said the thing had severed a telephone cable.

The unearthly craft followed the car for almost two miles, and upon reaching the stretch of Arrowe Park Road that passes Landican Cemetery, the UFO flew off vertically until it was just a black speck in the clear blue summer sky.

Not long after this, Roger read of a massive UFO flap across Wirral and Cheshire in the newspapers. The article said the strange disc-shaped craft had even been seen over Jodrell Bank – and yet the giant radio dish there had not detected a thing, and a spokesman for Jodrell Bank told local journalists: "I don't think the UFOs are anything astronomical, but I can’t throw any light on them."

Roger stuck by Mandy's side, even though she did seem to attract the enigmatic craft. On one occasion in August 1972, the couple had a picnic on Thurstaston Common, when once again, a bi-convex-shaped craft came down out of the blue sky and circled the area.

Roger had a pair of binoculars which he had been using to observe the summer migrant birds of the Dee. 

He took a look at the UFO through them, and for a moment, he thought he saw a face looking out through a window in the UFO – and that face was female, and it bore a striking resemblance to Mandy.

Within seconds the mysterious craft was gone, and that craft was also mentioned in the local press, but after that close encounter, the UFOs seem to lose interest in Mandy.

Roger certainly didn't lose interest in the Gayton girl, for he later married her.

The worn-out hackneyed way of explaining away the UFOs as misidentifications of Venus, weather balloons and terrestrial aircraft does not apply to this case, and of course, in June 2021, the Pentagon itself declared that strange craft are indeed visiting us and have been doing so for decades.

Are the UFOs from other planets – or could they even be from our own future?

This latter possibility could explain why the UFO occupant seen by Roger resembled Mandy; perhaps it was the girl’s great-great grand-daughter visiting 1972 to get a good look at her ancestor...

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