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

IN my study I have a bulging folder labelled "Incomprehensibles” – as the label implies, it contains accounts that are difficult to rationalise and explain.

Some of the stories may simply be the work of practical jokers, but I believe a majority of the reports are genuine – they were taken from people who believed something very strange happened to them; whether it did or not is sometimes hard to prove.

Here’s an example.

About 500 yards north of a spot where the Brimstage Brewery is now located, just off a secluded Brimstage Lane, a bizarre and terrifying incident took place one warm evening in August 1978. The time was just after 10pm.

Terry and John, both aged 16 and from Heswall, were out looking for Bobby, a poodle belonging to Terry’s auntie, who was recovering from an operation in hospital.

The woman had entrusted her nephew with the job of minding the pampered pooch, and Terry had had the bright idea of putting Bobby in the basket of his sister’s bike and pedalling around at night with John, who was on his Chopper bicycle.

The lads had been trying to catch the eyes of two girls who had been cycling about in the area. The poodle had jumped out the bike’s basket at one point on Brimstage Lane and had run into a field.

The animal seemed to have vanished into thin air. John morbidly said a fox had probably killed Bobby by now but Terry thought he had heard the poodle’s distinctive barks somewhere far off.

The lads then spotted something which both enthralled them and frightened them a little: some type of circular domed silvery craft – shaped like a classic flying saucer – was in the middle of a field with rose-coloured light emanating from it.

The poodle’s barks were coming from that craft.

The lads left their bikes hidden in bushes on the perimeter of the fields and gingerly walked towards what seemed to be a landed UFO. John told Terry they should go back and tell someone about the craft, but Terry seemed entranced by the UFO and walked steadily towards it, apparently oblivious to John’s words of caution.

'They’ve got Bobby,' he muttered, and John grabbed his arm to stop him and said, 'Terry, I don’t like the look of that thing; whatever’s in it could take us as well. Let’s go back and tell someone.'

Terry hesitated, looked at the strange unearthly glowing craft, then glanced back at John and slowly nodded.

John then swore, startling his friend. Some glowing entity had come from behind the UFO and was now trotting over the field to a road; it started to pick up speed as it ran towards the frightened teenagers.

The entity looked abnormally tall, perhaps about 10 feet in height.

The boys turned and ran, but then Terry heard a dog barking behind him, so he slowed down as John sped ahead of him, and there was his aunt’s poodle Bobby, running along with a being that looked like some chrome-plated robot with glowing eyes.

It stopped dead and pointed at the little dog, which ran barking to Terry.

Terry picked Bobby up and backed away and yelped as he backed into John, who was scared yet mesmerised by the sight of the unearthly towering silvered humanoid.

The figure turned around and ran off, its metal feet making clanging noises as it moved at about 30 mph.

Terry and John watched the figure go back into the UFO, and then, less than a minute later, the craft steadily rose into the air and moved north, going in the direction of Station Road.

The lights on the craft went out, rendering the UFO invisible. When Terry told his parents what had happened, they didn’t believe him.

‘Someone landed from another planet and kidnapped a poodle?’ his father asked his son with a bemused look.

John backed up Terry’s testimony and a few local people also mentioned that they had seen a glowing rosy-coloured light hovering over Brimstage Lane on the night of the alleged encounter with the silvery giant ‘robot’ but Terry’s father said the whole thing was hogwash.

Terry’s father had assumed, as most would, that the towering robotic visitor was from another planet because of the presence of the UFO, but the entity could in theory have originated from one of the many other dimensions which exist alongside our own dimension, or it might have even been from the future.

Strangely enough, another bizarre incident happened on Brimstage Lane in November 1967, and it took place in broad daylight.

A 20-year-old Bebington motorcyclist named Gary Evans was riding his motorbike up Brimstage Lane on Sunday, November 26, 1967 at 10:30am.

It was a cold but sunny morning and Gary was on his way to a friend’s house on Dawstone Road, Heswall.

UFOs and anything remotely paranormal were the furthest thing from Gary’s mind on this sunny morning, but as he came out of a hairpin bend on Brimstage Lane, he saw a man kneeling in the road in a brownsh one-piece suit, and this man had on what looked like a crash helmet, but as Gary drew nearer to the man he saw that the helmet looked more like a large space helmet of the type the American astronauts wore.

To the left of the helmeted man was a domed metallic craft on four legs, standing in a field. Straight away, Gary got the impression it was a “flying saucer” and that the helmeted man kneeling in the road was its pilot or perhaps one of its passengers, and he slowed the bike to a gentle halt.

The man and the strange craft were about sixty feet away.

The helmet figure was passing a small metallic box over the surface of the road and Gary could see that the box had a screen on it that was showing symbols, possibly numbers.

The helmeted man suddenly turned his head, and through the visior, Gary could see a face with features of that of a far eastern man.

The figure got up and walked casually to the landed UFO, and he got into it from underneath.

The craft rose up and flew into the clear blue sky until it was just a speck. Gary drove to his friend’s house and told him what he had seen.

His friend had never known Gary to lie and believed his strange story. I researched the case and discovered something intriguing.

The week the UFO ‘occupant’ had apparently been either taking samples from the surface of Brimstage Lane or scanning it, local farmers in the area had voiced concerns that Brimstage Lane had been surfaced with material from a quarry at the Welsh border that had been located at the heart of a recent foot and mouth outbreak.

People from the Ministry of Agriculture advised the farmers to disinfect the road and any farm vehicles using the road.

Strange green vapour was also seen to rise from that road. Could the man in the helmet have been investigating the road to see if it was contaminated?

If so, who was he – and where did he come from?

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