Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: New Brighton's UFO portal

ON the morning of Tuesday, July 10, 1979, a 58-year-old man named William York awoke in excruciating pain from a slipped disc at his flat at The Channel on Harrison Drive, Wallasey.

William happened to glance out of his bedroom window and saw strange, unexplained lights in the sky.

He later told journalists about the widely reported UFOs: "I saw one light in the distance to the south; I would say it was flying east, but then it quickly turned north.

"Suddenly I saw four large lights, two at each end of a horizontal line. Then they turned east and all the lights turned into a red cloud and disappeared."

A milkman on his rounds that morning saw the same four UFOs only he had a better view of them than Mr York. He saw that they were cylindrical with rounded ends and they flew to a point just past New Brighton Lighthouse where they vanished.

This spot where the unearthly craft seemed to dematerialise is known as a portal to many ufologists – it seems to be an opening near Perch Rock – an opening to where though?

Physicists call such openings wormholes, the mouths of mind-boggling tunnels through the very fabric of the space-time continuum that could provide the human race with an instantaneous way of travelling to another star system, or even to far end of the universe.

What's fascinating about the 1979 sighting at Wallasey is that the same pill-shaped UFOs are being seen know – cylindrical with rounded ends – known today as the tic-tac UFOs – the very same ones that made a mockery out of the US Navy on manoeuvres in 2004 and 2015.

The tic tac UFOs flew alongside strike fighter planes then left them standing.

The surfaces of the UFOs, which were filmed in both visible and infrared light, showed that they had a smooth hull with no discernible ailerons or exhausts to explain their propulsion.

The videos of the UFOs leaked out and resulted in the Pentagon declassifying a lot of its footage of UFOs and admitting they were real and apparently piloted by ‘non-humans’.

In 2001, a Bebington man called me on air at Radio Merseyside on the Billy Butler Show and described a brilliant white UFO he and his wife had seen flying under the Runcorn Bridge and on towards Wirral as being shaped like a tic tac.

This comparison to the breath mint evoked a few laughs but it is an accurate description of the phenomenal craft – the mathematical term for such a shape is a spherinder.

The one in 2001 flew along the eastern coast of Wirral and again, it vanished once it flew past New Brighton Lighthouse in broad daylight.

The most spectacular sighting of a tic tac UFO was during the Great Storm of 1987 when a violent cyclone with hurricane-force gales struck the country on October 15-16.

Just before the apocalyptic storm battered the UK, the BBC weatherman Michael Fish famously told viewers before his forecast, "Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way; well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't."

Then the storm made landfall in Cornwall. It caused £2 billion damage and resulted in 18 deaths. Gusts of over 100 mph battered Wirral.

Police closed part of Liverpool Road, Neston, after it flooded to a depth of three feet under a railway bridge, and vehicles had to be abandoned in a Biblical flood which swamped Eastham Rake, but up in the north-east corner of the Wirral peninsula, the raging seas looked as if they were going to engulf New Brighton lighthouse, and a woman in her sixties named Elaine screamed because she was sure her dog had been swept out to sea.

Her car had been blown off the road and she’d hit a bollard. Getting out to assess the damage, the lady’s poodle slipped out and seemed to vanish.

Thinking the worst, Elaine was leaning into the maelstrom of the screaming winds at almost a 45 degree angle as she tried to look for her beloved pooch – when she saw something very strange: a gigantic craft hovering stock still behind the lighthouse.

Elaine later described it as resembling a giant white pill.

The waves were almost as high as the 95 feet tall lighthouse and the winds were in excess of 100 mph – and yet that craft was not moving an inch.

After watching the UFO for about twenty seconds, Elaine was startled by the craft’s sudden departure. It was there one moment and then it was a spot of light heading north across Liverpool Bay.

In tears, Elaine turned around and was blown back to her car. She got into the vehicle to find the poodle curled up in a ball on the passenger seat, its ears flat against its head as it was spooked by the howling banshee winds outside the vehicle.

Elaine cried tears of laughter and drove home. The next day she heard a news report about a pill-shaped UFO that had been seen flying towards the north as if passed over the Isle of Man.

The pill shape Elaine describes tallies well with our tic tac UFOs.

In much calmer weather, numerous people have seen some strange things come through the New Brighton portal.

In August 2022, a couple stood on Wallasey’s King’s Parade, looking out to sea.

It was a calm warm night and as the couple looked at the moonlight twinkling on the waves, they became aware of an oval black shape which appeared about sixty feet above the water.

Out of this 'hole' in the night air came a line of six red glowing globes which flew inland in complete silence and passed perilously close to two blocks of flats near Wellington Road.

The couple looked back at the ‘hole’ above the waters and saw it was rapidly shrinking in size and within a minute it was gone. In March 2023, a woman jogging along King’s Parade saw what seems to have been the same mysterious dark aperture about 600 yards out to sea.

The woman thought her eyes were playing tricks on her at first, but then she saw two red orbs of light emerge from the hole, which then closed up.

The lights flew towards the east and faded away. If someone could only send a drone with a camera into that hole, should it open again, I wonder what we would see...

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