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

In this latest tale, Tom explores the mystery surrounding the giant UFO over Wirral...

We live in a world of political borders and strict demarcation zones, from the likes of the Israeli West Bank barrier and the Hungarian border barrier to the Ceuta border fence and more controversially, President Trump’s projected wall, which could in theory end up stretching almost 2,000 miles, running from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Berlin Wall have now passed into history to become tourist attractions, but we humans still place imaginary boundaries everywhere; we have territorial waters and we even imagine borders in the sky and call them things like “our airspace” – when in fact we are largely powerless to stop many threats from the depths of space, be they asteroids, meteors, comets – or UFOs.

If Putin pressed the button tomorrow, we might be able to intercept a few hypersonic Russian missiles, but most would get through with consequences too horrific to contemplate – but what about warlike races on any of the countless worlds of space who might be centuries ahead of us technologically?

Well, we’d be sitting ducks if they attacked.

This Earth may have been visited on numerous occasions by various extraterrestrial civilisations on reconnaissance missions, and some of these visitations have been quite local.

On the Sunday morning of 24 February 1979, the night sky over the North West was calm and clear with a wisp of thin, high cloud at 25,000 feet.

At 2.45am an ominous rumbling explosion louder than thunder and lasting for over a minute was heard in the heavens from Southport to Bootle and New Brighton, and many people left their beds and went to their windows to see a giant orange fireball flying slowly from the north-east towards the Wirral Peninsula.

The glowing object eventually faded away to reveal a dark disc, several hundred feet in diameter which allegedly landed in a field near Arrowe Park Golf Course.

This object later took off and headed towards Wales.

Many UFO research groups, including one in Wirral, wrote to the Ministry of Defence to report the UFO and the MOD claimed that a U.S.A.F. exercise had taken place ‘around that time’ – but this official explanation was seen as whitewash.

In the meantime, the UFOs continued to be reported and there was even a conference on the subject at Mersey Grammar School in Bebington in June of that year with many representatives of UFO research groups from across the country attending.

At this conference, a tugman working on the river said he and a ferryman had seen a luminous oval-shaped craft plunge into the Mersey one night and some ferry passengers had also seen green lights moving beneath the river’s murky waters.

The theory of an underwater UFO base in Liverpool Bay was also mooted at the conference.

On the morning of Tuesday 3 May 1977 at around 1am, what must surely rank as the largest UFO ever reported was allegedly seen over Wirral.

A cabby working for CC Taxis was parked up on Wallasey’s Penkett Road, waiting for a woman to pay her fare.

The moon was full and Penkett Road was bathed in its silvery light. A shadow fell across the neighbourhood and the cabby looked up to see an immense black disc-shaped object blotting out the moon as it slowly moved east towards the river.

The woman the cabby had been waiting for came out of her house to pay her fare and also saw the gigantic object overhead.

A man walking his dog on nearby Caithness Drive saw the gigantic UFO and at the exact same time on the other side of Wirral, a young courting couple who had been sitting in a parked car on Caldy Road also witnessed the eclipse of the full moon by the UFO.

As more and more sightings of the giant in the sky came in, it was established that the craft must have been around ten miles in diameter. It was seen by people in Liverpool, Chester, Flint and Ellesmere Port.

Some who saw the gargantuan craft in Birkenhead said it seemed to emit metallic clanking sounds as it passed by overhead.

There were also reports of a sonic boom around the time of the sightings and years later it was claimed that the boom was made by the supersonic Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" spyplane, which had been scrambled to check out the UFO.

The colossal craft slowly ascended into the night sky, eventually allowing the light of the moon to fall upon Wirral again, and the disc shrunk to a point among the stars as it gained altitude.

Six days later, a Bebington housewife saw what she described as “headlights in the sky” – two powerful beams shining down from a cloud onto Raby Mere.

Her report was printed in the local newspapers and others corroborated her sighting.

Let us hope that the giant UFO of 1977 was merely surveying us as an entomologist might look at the variety of insects to be found under an uprooted rock; if they were reconnoitring for some future attack, we’re as good as dead.

Keep watching the skies...

All of Tom Slemen's books are on Amazon.