HAUNTED WIRRAL: The bizarre case of the borough's UFOs

In this latest tale, Tom explores the bizarre case of Wirral's haunted skies...

We see UFOs almost every day, but of course, it does not mean they are flying saucers or spacecraft from any of the countless planets orbiting those distant suns we know as stars.

The UFO could be a drone or a satellite, the planet Venus, the International Space Station or even a silver-foil party balloon reflecting the rays of the setting sun in a certain way.

A UFO just means it is an Unidentified Flying Object, but there have been some UFOs seen in the skies over Wirral which are very hard to explain.

A case in point is the gargantuan craft that was seen by scores of people picnicking in a field overlooking the Dee at Parkgate in 1959.

I have received so many emails, letters and telephone calls about this incident, and most of the accounts dovetail together to paint an astounding scene which we cannot explain with our current knowledge.

On the August Bank Holiday of 3 August 1959 at around 3pm, around sixty (possibly more) people picnicking in a field just under a mile north of Parkgate began to notice something which caused many of them to doubt their own eyes.

Hanging as a grey silhouette in the low clouds over the Dee was a giant craft of some sort, and a man named John Martin who was a surveyor, estimated that the craft was about two miles across.

A woman taking a photograph of her daughter tried to take snaps of the giant UFO but when the pictures were developed it showed only blurred images because of camera shake.

Other people present saw six small classic flying saucer-type objects come flying at high speed from the direction of Flint in single file towards the massive UFO, and as the crowds watched in awe, these saucers flew straight into it.

The colossal craft looked almost cigar shaped, but it could have been a circular structure seen side-on. It moved off, and distant thunder was heard, and then it was gone.

A wave of ‘oohs’ went up from the crowd at the sudden vanishing act.

A woman named Laura Jones, who was aged 12 at the time, asked her father what the thing was, and he said, "I don’t know, love. I hope they’re friendly."

Other witnesses I interviewed said the titanic ‘spaceship’ had dome-like bulges on it and turrets, and some saw small forks of lightning hit the hull of the UFO.

The usual explanations – mass hysteria – mirages of Wales refracted by layers of warm air – and even unusual cloud formations – have all been offered to explain the baffling behemoth over the Dee, but it remains a true UFO in the true sense of the abbreviated word, and these craft are still visiting our skies in Wirral and elsewhere today.

In fact Wirral is recognised as a hot spot for UFOs – also known as a “window area” in the parlance of the ufologist. But UFOs apart, the region also has its ghost planes – and ghost birds - too.

On the rainy afternoon of Wednesday 18 October, 1972, at around 3.40pm, a plumber named Roy Higgins was walking towards his home on Prenton Dell Road when he noticed a very strange plane flying low in the distance towards the village of Landican.

It looked as if it had four engines and was reminiscent of a Lancaster bomber.

Roy pointed out the odd low-flying plane to two passers-by, and the three men then watched in horror as the plane burst into a fireball and parts of it fell in flames onto farmland.

Roy listened to the news on the radio and watched the news on the TV when he got home but he never heard a single report of the exploding plane over the Landican area of Wirral.

Years later, Roy discovered – to his utter astonishment – that on Wednesday 18 October 1944, a B24 Liberator aircraft flying low over Wirral on its way from Northern Ireland to a base in Norfolk, suddenly exploded for reasons that are still unexplained to this day.

The wreckage and bodies of the twenty four souls on the bomber came down in two fields at Landican on the outskirts of Birkenhead known as The Seven Oaks.

A memorial stone today stands at the site of the air crash with the names of the 24 American servicemen inscribed above it.

Roy Higgins visited the memorial and was perplexed at how he and two other men had witnessed an eerie re-enactment of the crash exactly thirty years after it had taken place, but the more Roy looked into the strange incident, the more the mystery deepened, because he subsequently learned that many other people had seen that doomed Liberator bomber flying over Landican over the years, always in the month of October – the month the tragedy occurred all those years ago.

A former airline pilot once told me how, one December back in the early 1960s, he was flying a Cambrian Airways Vickers Viscount 701 from Cork to Liverpool, and as the plane passed over the north-western tip of Wirral, the pilot and aircrew – as well as a few passengers – saw something flying five-hundred feet below the turboprop plane: it looked like a giant prehistoric bird.

Philip estimated the creature's wingspan was almost equal to that of the Viscount – around 90 feet! Even the Quetzacoatlus – the biggest prehistoric bird – only possessed a wingspan of 36 feet – but the grey bat-like monster flying eastwards over northern Wirral had a wingspan two and a half times that.

Philip lost sight of the backdated reptilian bird as he turned the plane towards Speke.

This has to be Wirral’s oldest ghost!

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