Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: More timeslips on Landican Lane

I've had quite a response from Wirral Globe readers who read last week’s column about the Landican timewarp accounts.

The column touched on the timeslip hot-spot that seems to exist in the field adjacent to Landican Lane in Little Storeton, where a public footpath runs from the lane, all the way over to Thingwall, crossing the M53 via a bridge at one point.

In July 1984, two painters, Jimmy and Bob, were travelling home to Upton from a completed job in Bebington.

During the homeward journey, Jimmy and Bob had to call on a farmer about a possible fence painting job, but the van they were travelling in broke down on Landican Lane. Bob lifted the bonnet and had a look at the engine and Jimmy, the older of the painters, rolled a cigarette and went to look in the nearby field.

The last time the Transit van had broken down had been in pouring rain in February but at least the summer sun was out today and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Bob was tinkering with the engine when Jimmy shouted something to him. Bob complained that he was trying to fix the van but Jimmy said: 'Never [expletive deleted] mind that, look at this!'

Bob walked towards his friend and was amused at the way the latter was crouching and hiding behind a huge sign.

But then Bob saw something in the field to his left which left him speechless for a moment.

A huge unknown craft hundreds of feet in length was sitting there in the field about two hundred yards away.

It was all white and had windows and panels and two wing-like protrusions that jutted out on either side of a massive fuselage of some sort. On top of this strange gigantic craft were two domed structures.

As Bob surveyed the inexplicable craft, Jimmy pointed to the sign he was crouched behind; upon that sign were the words HESWALL SPACEPORT – and to the right of the sign was a long royal blue rectangular metal sign with an emblem that Bob mistook for the logo of the Midland Bank.

It was a red lion surrounded by a circle of 12 white stars and quite similar to the "Listening Bank's" logo of the griffin surrounded by a circle of gold coins.

Then Bob read the words "Republic of Britain" next to this symbol. The painter then looked back at the craft and he muttered to Jimmy, 'Spaceport? When did they build that? Is that thing a plane or a spaceship?'

'I haven’t the foggiest mate,' said Jimmy, 'but I think we should get away from here. I think there might be a top secret military exercise going on here. I don’t think any of this is for our eyes, like.'

'We can't just leave the van here,' Bob was saying when the craft emitted a wailing siren.

Red lights flashed from the two domes atop of the structure and then the whole thing took off slowly with the nose of the ship leading the way.

A low rumbling shook the ground and the two painters watched in awe as the unearthly craft climbed into the skies. Bob had better eyesight than Jimmy and he could see that symbol again - the circle of stars surrounding a red lion – only instead of being on a blue background they were on a black square on the hull of the ship.

Within a minute the craft was a white speck in the sky. Bob then noticed another, similar ship much further away in the field, but it remained stationary.

'Let’s get out of here, Bob', said Jimmy, and he groaned as he straightened up from his crouching position.

Bob again said he was not leaving the van behind and went back to the vehicle and somehow he got it going.

The men were so spooked by the encounter with the gargantuan ship they did not call on the farmer for the job evaluation – they went straight to their homes in Upton.

Of course, no one believed the men, and they almost had a falling out over the incident because Jimmy had told Bob not to mention the "spaceship" and the spaceport sign to anyone because they’d be classed as nutters, but Bob told his wife and brother-in-law and the strange story soon got out and the painters were the butt of many jokes about the alleged encounter.

Bob and Jimmy returned to Landican Lane to look for the spaceport sign and saw nothing.

When I mentioned the case many years later on the radio we had quite a few people who called in to say that they had seen numerous UFOs over the field near that stretch of the M53 close to the Storeton and Brimstage areas.

I have a feeling the men did not see any UFO (in the sense of it being a craft from another world) but a future commercial spaceship made on earth that may one day travel from a spaceport in Wirral to the Moon, Mars and beyond, perhaps using a propulsion system based on the latest breakthroughs into fusion power.

Already the UK has not only formulated spaceflight laws (in the form of the Space Industry Act 2018) it also has a number of areas that are being developed as spaceports.

The nearest one to Wirral is Spaceport Snowdonia at Llanbedr, Gwynedd, Wales.

This possibility, of the UFOs seen around Storeton, Brimstage and parts of Thornton Hough being glimpses of our own future interplanetary cargo ships seems strengthened by the following account.

One foggy afternoon in November 1960, two Neston schoolboys, both aged 13, named Eddy and Michael, approached a neighbour they knew named Billy Hill on Talbot Avenue and excitedly told him they had just seen a silvery flying saucer that had landed on farmland.

The boys described how they had sneaked up on the spaceship in the fog and seen two men come out of the craft, but they were not like the archetypal Martians or Venusians that were being talked about in some of the more outlandish newspaper reports of the flying saucers allegedly being seen across the world – the two men Eddy and Michael saw had been speaking in a Scottish accent.

Mr Hill thought the lads were pulling his leg but then a local postman turned up on his bicycle and claimed he had just seen a flying saucer land in a field next to a farm just a quarter of a mile away, and the two men who had come out of it had used long rods to open a panel in the underside of the craft and they had shouted to one another – as if they were arguing – in what sounded like Scottish accents.

Both of the men had worn something similar to dark blue boiler suits with a white diamond-shaped insignia on their arms.

After a few minutes the mysterious duo had climbed back into the "flying saucer" and it had silently lifted up into the sky and vanished into a fog.

Perhaps this was another craft from somewhere in the not-too-distant future when space travel becomes as commonplace as air travel.

Perhaps the phenomenal relativistic speeds the ships of the future travel at with their powerful propulsion systems are occasionally responsible for the inadvertent journeys of the spacecraft into the past. I have a feeling we may know more one day.

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