Haunted Wirral: Close encounters of the scary kind

This week, Tom urges us to 'keep watching the skies ...'

ONLY in recent years have the public been let in on the truth about the UFO phenomenon by the powers that be.

The Pentagon released its long-awaited declassified dossier on UFOs in 2022, admitting they are real and may constitute a threat to the security of nations and a menace to international air travel.

This official acknowledgement of strange objects in our skies was a big step forward in the study of the baffling field of Ufology.

Not so long ago, armchair psychiatrists constantly held the bizarre opinion that every sighting of a UFO could be explained as a mental aberration in the witness, and then we had the likes of Sir Patrick Moore, who was fond of explaining most UFOs as misidentifications of the planet Venus.

On Wirral, there have been some spectacular sightings of unidentified craft which have ranged in size to miles across to the size of a small drone – back when drones were not available to the public (but believe it or not, one of the first drones was a 1935 British radio-controlled model called Queen Bee, which was nicknamed "the drone").

At 11pm, one warm July night in 1972, two drinkers in their forties, Sid Nesmith and Jack Greenwood, left the Cheshire Cheese Inn, Wallasey Village. 

Jack told Sid he wanted to go the long way home on this pleasant moonlit night. He usually walked the 200 yards to his house on St George’s Road, but tonight wanted to go on another route. Sid had the feeling Jack was avoiding someone.

Jack looked at the rowdy gang of youths at the bus stop facing the Cheshire Cheese Inn, and admitted one of the juvenile delinquents over there had threatened him because he’d told him to stop throwing stones at the window of a pensioner named Mrs Rogers. 'You're not scared of a kid are you?' Sid asked, bemused.

Jack said: 'I'd give him a hiding but then I’d get done – I just don’t want any aggro; come on, the walk will do us good.'

And so Sid and Jack went up Church Hill, a narrow, steep, poorly-lit alleyway, and then they had to take a short cut through the graveyard of St Hilary’s Church, and here something very strange took place.

Jack noticed a moonlit inscription on a grave and read it out: 'Sailed from Liverpool to Bombay, 1866 – not been heard of since,' to which Sid said, 'Probably faked his disappearance to get away from a nagging wife.'

'Hey Sid, listen!' said Jack, his eyes darting about. Then Sid heard the sound as well – it sounded like someone striking the gravestones with a metal bar.

Jack looked at something behind Sid, his eyes widened and then he ran off.

Sid turned in dread to see what the thing was that had spooked Jack, and his eyes beheld a very strange and frightening sight: a dark metal sphere, about ten feet in diameter, with long metal rods protruding from it in all directions, giving the object the appearance of a sea mine.

Some of the rods were articulated, and struck the gravestones with a clanging sound.

A small red light shone from the object into Sid's eyes, dazzling him, and he felt one of the rods touch his leg.

Sid was soon overtaking Jack as he ran off like a gazelle. The men slowed down to catch their breath at the junction of Broadway and Claremount Road.

They told no one of their encounter with the spidery "thing", but days later, strange lights were seen over St Hilary’s Tower, and Jack almost spat out his pint at the Cheshire Cheese Inn when a drinker said she had seen a weird thing resembling a huge dandelion made of metal rolling across The Breck at 11pm on the previous night.

The thing had apparently taken off at one point and flown into the night sky.

Just what Sid and Jack encountered in the churchyard remains a mystery.

That same year, 1972, scores of people in Neston saw a classic flying saucer travel silently across the August sky.

Its diameter was estimated to be about 100 feet and most witnesses said that the unknown black shiny craft was being chased by a plane – believed to have been a Phantom jet fighter.

The UFO was travelling towards the east, and later seen over Hooton, where it tilted itself by 90 degrees before taking off vertically into the clear blue sky at a phenomenal speed, instantly putting itself out of the range of the terrestrial jet fighter.

Numerous witnesses to this astonishing sighting told me that the craft had moved too quickly and made such an impossible right-angle manoeuvre, that it had to have been constructed by something that was not of this earth.

There was a surge in UFO sightings across Wirral and the North West in 1974, to such an extent that a number of schools became interested in UFO-spotting.

Pupils of Wirral Grammar School for Boys held a dusk to dawn vigil for the UFOs as part of the National Sky Watch Week in June of that year, and around this time, there were reports of circular unidentified craft diving into the sea off Hoylake. 

On June 23, 1975, there were sightings across Wirral of a large spherical object which crossed the face of the full moon as a silhouette before lighting up as it made a descent.

The object seemed to split into three smaller objects which curved down towards Leasowe, Wallasey and North Birkenhead.

A woman living on Laird Street, Birkenhead looked out of her kitchen window at 10pm that evening and saw a rotating craft with multicoloured lights which resembled a merry-go-round, hovering silently over her back garden.

As the lady shouted to her husband to come and see the craft, all of the clothes hanging on the line in the back garden were sucked up into the UFO, which then slowly took off.

The woman and her husband looked on in awe as the strange gravity-defying craft floated upwards until it was just a point of light.

Now that the world’s governments are admitting that the UFOs seen in our skies are real and a possible risk to security, we might start getting some straight answers about the mysterious visitors. Keep watching the skies ...

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