Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: Strange craft in the sky

THE trouble with us human beings is that we are caught up in the triviality of everydayness – we are habitually preoccupied with our own small corner of the universe and we think of little else, while all around us some very strange things are going on.

We think of the world that we see around us as the only one there is when in fact there are worlds within worlds.

There is the world of the sub-microscopic scale, where creatures too small for us to see without an electron microscope go about their business – forms such as nanobes - the smallest lifelike entities known; they are only 20 to 150 nanometres in length, which means they are tiny even compared to a bacterium (which is 1,000-10,000 nanometres long), and then at the other end of the scale we have the largest living organisms on earth; I would have thought it was the blue whale but no, the world’s most massive single organism is the Pando – a colony of cloned trees.

The Pando is not a single tree but a whole colony of them - genetically identical trees that have spread vegetatively from a single root system and they cover hundreds of acres.

When we go to more extremities of scale, it becomes apparent that the universe we live in is a very strange place.

Below the scale of atoms, nature behaves in a mind-boggling way, and this is the world of quantum physics, where, for example particles are also waves, particles can exist in many places at the same time (superimposition), and if two particles become entangled then split up, the state of one affects the state of the other instantaneously – even if it is light years away – which defies the laws of physics – and Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance". Some particles can even just appear out of nowhere or vanish into nothing.

At the other end of the size spectrum we have the most powerful things in the universe – stars 150 times the size of our sun which go supernova and explode with the power of 10 trillion trillion billion megaton bombs – and the horrific gamma ray blast sterilizes any life within many life years.

Against this backdrop of exceedingly small and incredibly gargantuan goings-on, the human race lives its day to day existence mostly oblivious of its place in the scheme of things, and when we encounter something outside of our everyday experience we either disbelieve it, mock it, troll it, ignore it or marvel at it with a sense of wonder and curiosity, often attempting to understand and rationalize it within the limits of our knowledge and imagination.

Take the following incident for example. In February 1973 a spate of burglaries in Heswall naturally caused a great deal of concern for residents in the area, and the newspapers made much of the fact that Heswall police station was not manned 24 hours a day.

Extra police were drafted in to catch the burglars and one young policeman – we shall call him John to protect his identity – was put on a beat that took him along Telegraph Road at 1am.

As John was passing the Heswall Methodist Church he was dazzled by a huge glowing structure that appeared in mid air about thirty yards from the church, and it hovered over the road, emitting every colour of the rainbow.

From the way John later described the object, it was a polyhedron, a complex geometric construction made up of triangles and other shapes and it had colourful translucent panels all around it. John stood there absolutely mesmerised by the sight of the object, which he estimated to be about 50 feet in height.

A beam of laser-like light shone out of the structure and the next thing John knew, he was standing inside of a brightly-lit globe, and there were about seven or eight people, male and female, dressed in white and yellow one-piece uniforms standing around, some of them were apparently defying gravity by standing at almost 45 degrees with their feet on the curved walls of the globe.

A man with platinum-coloured hair was standing in front of John and he was holding a small geometrical metal container which John later recognised as a dodecahedron – a twelve-sided object – and there were blue light beams shining from holes in the facets of this object.

In a really strange speeded-up way of speaking the man with the dodecahedron said: 'We had to reel you in 'cause your life was on the line out there.

'One of our own slipped loose, causing major ripples. Gonna sling you back, no need for freak-outs. Bye-bye.' 

A second later John found himself back on Telegraph Road and felt as if he had gone about five minutes back in time, because he was nowhere near the Methodist church yet.

Mindful of what he would see if he walked on, the policeman stopped dead.

A few minutes later he saw the glowing spectrum of colours further down Telegraph Road, and then they quickly faded.

John did not tell his colleagues about the experience because he knew they’d think he’d taken drugs or had been seeing things, but the policeman, who was still living at home, told his mother what had happened, and she believed him. Her son was clean-living and didn’t even drink or smoke - never mind dabble with pills.

About a month after this, John was paired with another policeman who was a few years older than him, and one night on their beat, the older colleague said to John, ‘I saw a UFO on Telegraph Road last night,’ and then he described exactly the same thing John had seen – the geometrical shapes, the translucent panels on the craft, but he did not find himself in the structure.

It hovered about twenty feet above the road, gave off glinting flashes of purple, red, green and blue light, and then it was gone. John then told the older copper about his experience.

Decades later, John contacted me as I was on air on a local radio programme talking about strange phenomena, and he mentioned his encounter with the weird craft and the man with his peculiar lingo who held the dodecahedron, and a gentleman named Anthony called the station and said his father had seen the same craft – during WWII.

At the time, the Hoylake shore was out of bounds to the public and was cordoned off with barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles and big guns had been set up on the promenade.

Anthony’s father was in the Pioneer Corps and he was stationed in Hoylake, and one night, his father and two other members of the Pioneers saw the very same object the policeman described – a geometric construction 50 feet in diameter, made up of triangles and various shapes and flashing through the colours of the rainbow.

It floated about 20 feet above the shore, and then it turned and at the same time it contracted and vanished in a flash of light. The military men thought the thing was some futuristic Nazi weapon up to that point.

When John mentioned how the man in the unknown craft had held a dodecahedron, I immediately thought of the small metallic dodecahedrons Archaeologists had found – the so-called "Roman dodecahedrons" - primarily in the territories of the Roman Empire, especially in Europe, including France, Germany, and Switzerland.

No written records from the Roman era definitively describe their use, adding to the mystery.

I don't think the beings seen in that thing over Telegraph Road and Hoylake are from outer space – I feel they are from our future or even some next door parallel world.

Perhaps the time has come for them to tell us who they are, and I have a feeling they will at some point, perhaps when we become a little more civilized.

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