Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: Mystery of the giant UFO

UFOs have been in the news again with the passing of the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 (UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).

The Act mandates that government agencies hand over any records on UFOs within 300 days, including any samples or technology that may have been recovered.

The US President is allowed to postpone disclosure of certain records if disclosure poses a national security risk. In addition to the passing of this landmark act, intelligence officials in the US have admitted they have retrieved craft of ‘non human’ origin and also revealed they have special retrieval teams to recover damaged – and even intact – UFOs – there’s a great premise for a Netflix series.

What’s all this got to do with Wirral?

Well, the peninsula has been the scene of some spectacular and intriguing UFO activity over the decades, and now that US legislation has given the “Flying Saucer” phenomenon a stamp of authenticity, people (often mislabelled “experts”) will now have a harder time explaining away the encounters of sightings of strange craft see in our skies and on the ground.

An example that springs to mind would be the light aircraft pilot who was flying his Cessna over West Kirby in June 2016 at a height of about 1,825 feet at a speed of 105 knots when the plane started to shake and the cockpit instruments acted strangely.

The pilot then saw a gigantic circular craft which he estimated to be about 350 feet in diameter, and beneath this gargantuan UFO there was an Airbus 320 with the white an orange livery of what looked like an easyJet passenger plane.

The UFO was about 150 feet above the jet and the pilot noted that the airliner had its wheels down. What did not make sense was the trajectory the plane was on – it was headed south across the River Dee towards Flint at a very steep angle.

The pilot flew his Cessna out of the path of the UFO and the airliner, which, he suspected, the UFO had somehow “captured” – as if by some magnetic force.

The pilot intended to follow the plane and radio his sighting of the strange spectacle to Air Traffic Controllers at John Lennon Airport when something extraordinary happened.

The colossal UFO seemed to contract in size as it turned a ghostly pale colour, and the plane suspended below it did the same.

There was a flash of light and both UFO and plane were gone from the skies.

The instruments in the Cessna cockpit then returned to some normality. The pilot decided not to radio any reports, fearing ridicule and possibly a huge dent in his sterling reputation.

Although the pilot told no one about the encounter – even his wife – he received a telephone call at his home in Heswall on the day after the incident, from a well-spoken man who claimed to be an intelligence officer from MI5.

He gave the name William Valley and warned the pilot that the “large craft” he had seen was a secret project by the Ministry of Defence and it had been carrying out trials to see if it could incapacitate an airliner. ‘How do you know what I saw?’ the pilot asked, ‘I never reported anything; who are you?’

Mr Valley talked over the pilot and warned, ‘If you decide to tell anyone what you witnessed, you will never be seen nor heard from again.’

The pilot was not scared off and made enquiries and told as many people as he could about the close encounter, and he received a call from what he believed to be a spokesman from MI5 who apologised for “Mr Valley’s uncalled for attitude.”

The spokesman then said: ‘The thing you saw was in fact an Airbus 319 doing manoeuvres over Wirral – the pilot was involved in air-training exercises from John Lennon Airport, and I even have a reference to prove it – EZY9090 – so I hope this clears up the matter.

"We’ve had many members of the public calling the airport because they also saw the jets circling over Wirral all day."

"That is utter [expletive deleted]!" the light aircraft pilot told the ‘spokesman’, "I saw something which was not made on this earth, and it was not a passenger jet. Can I have your name and number please?"

The spokesperson’s voice then changed in tone and suddenly had a ring of familiarity to it – it sounded like Mr Valley again. "I have explained what you have seen, now I hope, for your sake, that you will drop this ridiculous claim you are making about a UFO."

"Is that you again, eh? Mr Valley isn’t it? Who the hell are you?" the pilot asked, and the line went dead. The pilot keyed in a code to obtain the caller’s number – but the automated reply told him the number had been withheld by the caller.

The reference the man had given the pilot as checked, and referred to the number of a flight that had taken place a month before the UFO encounter. No more was heard from William Valley – a name that no one could trace when the pilot contacted various departments relating to defence and aviation.

It’s possible that Mr Valley was one of the so-called Men in Black – shady individuals who would turn up at the home of UFO witnesses from the early 1950s onwards and often claim to be government officials.

They always bullied and threatened witnesses to scare them away from reporting their experiences, often impersonating air force and intelligence officials – but no one could ever trace the determined impostors and even the registration plates of cars they were seen getting into were found to be bogus.

Did a UFO abduct a passenger jet?

None were ever reported as missing so it’s possible the abduction took place for a short time and then perhaps, the jet was placed back on course with the minds of the crew and passengers wiped clean so that they would be unaware of what had happened – or perhaps the jet the pilot saw was some advanced craft disguised as one of our airliners – all we can do is speculate.

The light aircraft pilot’s mental health suffered greatly after his strange experience and he became very paranoid and eventually gave up flying altogether.

People said he had been seeing things, but hopefully with the UAP Disclosure Act, we might start learning the truth about the enigmatic UFOs.

• All of Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are on Amazon.