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

JOHN Williamson is 73 now, but clearly remembers one night in October 1970 when he had a close encounter of the terrifying kind.

John was a fresh-faced 20-year-old in 1970 and he and best friend Jim went to have a few pints at the Fox & Hounds pub in Barnston.

Both men were from Prenton but they were dating girls who lived on Barnston Road. On this particular night, John’s girlfriend came down with the flu and so she sent her brother Peter to the pub to tell John she couldn’t make it.

The girlfriend of John’s mate, Jim, made it to the Fox & Hounds but had to leave at 9pm because she had agreed to babysit for her sister (who was going out to celebrate her 21st birthday).

John and Jim still had an enjoyable evening, and John recalls that the licensee of the Fox & Hounds at this time was Eric Pepper, a great charismatic landlord.

The drink flowed and the banter was mostly about sport. By 10:30pm, Jim was quite drunk and so John decided to walk him home and left the pub.

The two young men were very low on funds and couldn’t afford a taxi to take them to Prenton. They embarked on a journey on foot that would take around an hour and a quarter before they reached Jim’s home on Broxton Avenue.

They set off along a poorly-lit Storeton Lane, singing, but half a mile into the homeward journey something very strange took place. John and Jim saw a blue light coming down Storeton Lane and assumed it was a police car, and John grabbed Jim’s arm to stabilise him as he staggered along. ‘Wait till the coppers pass, mate,’ John advised, ‘they might do you for being drunk and disorderly.’

As the blue light came nearer it rose up from the road and the two Prenton men could see the light was shining from a translucent dome set into the underside of a gigantic saucer-shaped craft which must have been about 200 feet in diameter.

It flew silently at treetop level over the heads of the young men and as it passed them, a beam of light, similar to a laser beam, shot out from the craft and swept across the two men.

‘What in God’s name was that?’ asked an astounded Jim, and he and John turned and watched the circular craft fly upwards at 45 degrees – before it slowly turned around and headed back towards the two men.

John and Jim ran off and jumped over a hedge and tried to hide in the pitch-blackness of farmland but the unearthly gravity-defying craft emitted beams of light at them and both men could ‘feel’ some force on their bodies as the circular spots of light shone on them. The two young lads ran off in terror when something astonishing occurred.

A beam of light settled on an old farm tractor in the field, and this vehicle rose up into the air and floated over to the terrified men.

The tractor hung about thirty feet in mid-air above the heads of John and Jim, and they expected the vehicle to drop on them. Jim tried to run across the stygian blackness of the field in blind panic, but slipped and landed in a cowpat.

The tractor moved away and went back to its original position in the field, somehow directed by that beam. The UFO then tilted by about 45 degrees, and as John helped his friend to his feet, they both saw a window light up in the craft, and at this window, the men could clearly see three figures in silhouette, and they looked the size of children with large round heads.

Jim was sure one of the figures waved at the window, and then the craft straightened out and accelerated vertically until it was lost to sight.

The experience sobered up the two men and Jim was relieved to hear from his mother that a neighbour had seen strange lights flying around the skies over Prenton earlier in the evening.

Another intriguing close encounter with a UFO took place further north in April 1974, and this was in the waters off Hilbre Island.

A 45-year-old woman from Hoylake named Jane heard the news that rare Risso’s Dolphins had been seen by the voluntary staff of the Bird Observatory on Hilbre Island, swimming in the waters around the island and so Jane and her sister Rosa went to have a look. Jane brought along a pair of binoculars through which she saw the Risso’s Dolphins, brought to the local waters by the unusually mild weather.

The dolphins were breaching, spy-hopping (vertically poking their heads out of the water) and slapping their tail flukes on the sea surface. But then Jane saw something else through the binoculars that April day – a flying saucer which came down out of the blue sky and hovered about ten feet from the surface of the water. Jane and her sister then heard a whirring sound, and the hovering craft appeared to suck up the sea water so it entered the underside of the UFO in a dozen or so columns.

After about 10 seconds of “hoovering” up the seawater, the craft flew towards the North West, headed for the Irish Sea, and was soon lost to sight in the misty distance.

An elderly man walking past the two women with his Labrador calmly asked the sisters, ‘Did you see that thing drawing up the water?’

The women said they had, and the man told them, ‘It’s been doing that since the 1960s. I don’t know what it is; whether it’s something made on this planet or from up there. I wonder what it does with that water?’

Jane brought a camera loaded with a roll of film to the spot on the following day, hoping to get a snap of the UFO but she never saw it again.

UFOs in other parts of the world have occasionally been seen drawing up water from reservoirs and lakes, but why they do this is unknown. Perhaps they collect water samples just as our probes on other planets take soil samples.

Perhaps someone up there has been monitoring the temperature and pollution levels of our seas for quite some time...

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