Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: Stalked by a UFO

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

IT was a cloudless, starry night in September 1997 when an 18-year-old Moreton girl named Emma got into the car of her 21-year-old boyfriend Jon.

The time was fast approaching 11pm and Jon drove off as Emma waved goodbye to her mum on Pasture Road.

Ahead of the couple was a twenty minute eight-mile journey to Jon’s home on Downham Road South, Heswall. Jon’s parents and his two elder brothers were on holiday and Jon was minding the house in their absence and had decided he’d like a little company with his new girlfriend Emma.

As the car travelled south down Upton Road, passing Christ Church, Jon noticed something in the rear view mirror – it looked like a bright light, similar to the headlamp of a motorbike on high beam, but hovering high off the ground.

Emma noticed Jon looking at it and she turned and saw the light too.

She had better eyesight and said that the thing the light was shining from was a disc-shaped craft.

Jon pulled over and watched the light come a little nearer on the deserted road, but then it stopped.

'What is it?' Emma asked, and Jon whispered: 'I don’t know – maybe it's a UFO or something.'

Emma recalled the little bird-watching binoculars she’d used to observe the Oystercatchers on the Dee a few weeks back – they were in the glove compartment.

She found them and turned to look at the light with the 30x60 binoculars and the magnified image shocked the teenager; the light was shining from underneath a circular lens-shaped craft – and that craft was moving slowly towards the car.

Emma told Jon what she had seen and handed the binoculars to him and he got out of the car and stood beside the vehicle on Upton Road as he took a look at the unknown craft. 'You’re right,' he told his girlfriend, 'it's heading this way.'

Jon jumped back in the car and stalled the vehicle, then restarted the engine and drove off, and he kept looking in the rear view mirror until the light was no longer visible.

'Could it have been a helicopter?' Emma asked, but Jon shook his head and told her, 'I’ve never seen one shaped like that.'

Emma turned the radio on and listened to some music but the channel went dead, and she and Jon heard a voice that said something that phonetically sounded like 'knee boy tiss' – this sounds like the Russian for ‘Do not be afraid’ – ‘ne boytes’ – but where the voice came from is a mystery.

A Radio One presenter’s voice faded in, speaking about the weather forecast, and then Jon said, ‘Oh my God – it’s following us.’

There was a disc-shaped craft flying above – to the right and about 100 feet from the roadway. Jon estimated that the unknown object was about 200 feet in diameter – and it seemed to be descending slowly.

He stepped on the accelerator and when he reached the junction of Royden Road and Doncaster Drive the craft quickly ascended into the night sky and all of its lights went out except for a tiny pinpoint of red light in its centre.

By now, Emma was hysterical and believed she and Jon would be abducted. Half a mile on, as the car had to stop at the traffic lights where Old Greasby Road crosses Moreton Road, the young couple saw the craft coming towards them at rooftop level, approaching from the direction of Arrowe Park Road.

A hackney cab slowed down as it travelled from Ford Road; the cabby watched the UFO as it gave off an intense light blue glow. Jon jumped the red light and sped under the craft, which now seemed almost close enough to touch, and Emma could see a row of heads and shoulders at windows in the UFO.

The car sped along at eighty until it reached the Upton By-Pass and here the craft seemed to give up the chase again and took off vertically.

‘Slow down, Jon!’ Emma cried, as the car did eighty, and Jon only slowed down to fifty as he passed the Landican Cemetery – and here he received the shock of his life, because the craft shot out from the cemetery with its lights out, so that Jon and Emma saw a large black disc which blocked out the stars.

The radio programme went dead and the couple heard what sounded like jabbering voices speaking in an unknown language on the radio, along with the sounds of something cackling.

The gigantic ship of some sort started to give off light as it travelled above at a speed that matched the couple’s car, and Emma could see six figures at a long window and they seemed to be wearing blue and red uniforms.

These people were bald and male but their faces were in shadow.

The craft followed the couple in the car as they reached the roundabout and Jon turned into Thingwall Road East, but he shocked Emma by slamming on the brakes.

The UFO continued on down the road but Jon reversed his car and went in the other direction. He swerved through the roundabout and took the Barnston Road exit.

He then drove his car into the drive of a semi-detached house and he got out of the vehicle and knocked on the door. Emma left the vehicle and asked Jon what he was doing.

An old man answered the door and eyed Jon and Emma suspiciously. Jon told the man, ‘You are not going to believe this, but we are being chased by a UFO.’

The old man looked over Jon’s shoulder and asked, 'Is that it?'

Through the trees on the opposite side of the road, there was a gigantic circular glowing disc, and its pulsing light was showing through the trunks and branches.

'Yeah – that’s it!' said Jon and the old man stood aside and said to the couple, 'Come on, get in here.'

For about ten minutes, the old man and Jon and Emma stood in the darkened living room with a muted TV set and through the net curtains they watched the craft behind the trees across the road as it hovered in silence.

Eventually the UFO moved away but rose above the treetops and disappeared.

The elderly man said he had seen a row of red lights pulsing on and off as they travelled down Barnston Road a few nights back, and he told the couple that he believed the lights and that UFO which had chased them were from some other planet out there.

He offered to let the couple stay at his home until morning and Jon politely declined and he took a chance and drove Emma to his home on a meandering route to Downham Road South, Heswall.

Jon told his parents about the UFO which had chased his car and they were very sceptical about his story, even though Emma backed up his testimony.

That same night, strange red lights were seen off the coast of Moreton, and they flew off into Liverpool Bay and were seen to dive into the waters.

Are these objects visiting aliens or are they machines from our own future? If they were aliens, why did Jon and Emma hear what appears to have been a Russian phrase – “ne boytes” on the radio? What was the significance of the red and blue uniform of the figures seen at the window of the UFO? We may know more one day. Until then – keep watching the skies...

• Tom Slemen’s latest book, Haunted Liverpool 37 is out on Amazon now, along with many other books and audiobooks.