Haunted Wirral: Flying saucers over Telegraph Road

IN recent years there has been a spate of UFO sightings along Telegraph Road in Heswall and they all seem to be of a certain type of craft.

A 70-year-old Wirral Globe reader named Jack recently told me how, one fine summer’s day in early August 2009, he enjoyed a Sunday roast at the Cottage Loaf pub, then decided, after a few drinks, to embark on a long walk – just under a mile – to his home on Caldy Road.

This was a rarity for Jack, since he was a grandfather and usually went to the pub with his sons, daughters and grandchildren, but they were all away on holiday and so he had dined alone, and enjoyed every minute of it.

As Jack was walking along Telegraph Road, he reached a point about 500 yards from the Cottage Loaf, when he saw a tractor trundling down the road towards him.

From the trees on the right side of the road, there emerged a circular craft, shaped like a lens viewed edge-on, and it had a dome on top.

It floated off the ground at a height of about fifteen feet and Jack estimated the diameter of the ‘flying saucer’ was about 30 feet.

It had a circular opening on its underside and through this aperture shone a bright light which cast a spotlight on the road. The driver of the farm tractor slowed and then stopped his vehicle, naturally cautious about the nature of the hovering craft.

Jack delved into the inside jacket of his coat to get his iPhone with the intention of taking a photograph of the UFO but as he was cussing because he had to key in the pass code to the phone, the craft flew off vertically and vanished from sight.

The driver of the tractor then drove on and Jack flagged him down and before he could even speak, the driver said, 'I've seen them many times around here.'

'What the bloody hell was it?' Jack asked, and the tractor driver smiled and shrugged and then he beckoned Jack to climb up into the cab and told him to sit in the pillion seat.

Jack said he was on his way home but the driver said he just wanted to show him where one of the UFOs had landed, and he took Jack to a field where he saw a "corn circle" - a spiralling pattern in a field of wheat.

The tractor driver said the craft appeared out of nowhere and then sometimes flew over Caldy Golf Course on their way out to the Dee.

Other people saw the saucer-shaped UFO over Telegraph Road that Sunday, including a couple in their twenties cycling along the road near Thurstaston Hill, and they believe they saw two human-looking smiling faces (possibly of children) peering through windows in the dome atop of the craft as it hovered low down close to Thurstaston Common car park.

As the cyclists came within fifty feet of the craft it shot upwards in total silence and vanished into the blue summer sky.

That same Sunday, George and Kate, a couple in their seventies, were standing at the bus stop on Irby Road, close to the entrance to Heswall Cemetery, waiting for their son to pick them up in his car when they also saw the same craft flying towards the west – in the direction of Telegraph Road, and Kate noticed something I found quite intriguing – she saw the alphanumeric characters “WI90” emblazoned on the lower part of the craft’s hull.

If Kate was not misinterpreting these letters and numbers then it suggests that the UFO might not be extra-terrestrial in origin at all but possibly manufactured on earth – but by whom?

The military are known to have advanced fighter craft; the development and existence of the radar-invisible Stealth Bomber, for example, officially known as the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, was kept secret for many years before its public unveiling and was responsible for quite a few UFO sightings before it was declassified.

In 2016, a scruffily-dressed gentleman in his fifties known only as Vic entered the Jug and Bottle pub in Heswall one rainy night and got talking with a couple of the regulars about his reasons for being in the area – he was watching UFOs.

Vic told the initially bemused drinkers that he was working on a device that could track the UFOs based on a system of coils, magnets and a minicomputer.

No one took him seriously, but on the following evening two women came into the pub and said they had seen two flying saucers travelling at treetop level over the "Puddydale" playground off Telegraph Road.

'Oh, here’s your man, girls!' shouted one of the sceptical drinkers, almost pushing the two ladies towards Vic, who was standing at the bar.

Vic asked the women to describe the UFOs, what way they were travelling and the exact time they had seen them and so on, while most of the drinkers smirked. But then Vic got out what looked like a brass compass in a box and set it in the middle of a table, and the needle of the “compass” started to move about.

Vic said to the two ladies, ‘They deflect the earth’s magnetic field, and this thing points to them. It’s like a primitive tracker.’

Vic then left the pub in an excited state, saying he was going to see if he could trace the 'craft' – and was never heard from again.

Whether he gave up his saucer-chasing and moved from the area is unknown; perhaps, as some of the drinkers joked, Vic was abducted.

In September 2018, a man in his forties was awakened at around 4am by a loud whooshing sound at his home on leafy Quarry Road East, Heswall.

The man went to the window and established that the noise was coming from above.

It started to sound like a whirlwind and the man thought a storm was coming and dreaded its arrival as memories of the local destruction Storm Doris had wreaked the year before were still fresh in his mind.

He looked up and saw an enormous disc-shaped craft about 100 feet in diameter which was so low, it was touching the upper reaches of the tree in his garden.

Here is the curious part; there were letters and numbers visible on the underside of the unknown craft – WI89.

This is highly intriguing as, you may remember, the numbers seen on the UFO flying west over Irby Road in 2009 were WI90.

Within seconds, the huge circular craft rose upwards into the night sky and vanished.

I believe the UFOs detailed in this column are not from other planets but either experimental military constructs or possibly interplanetary ships from our own future.

Perhaps the "WI" part of the inscriptions adorning the hulls of the enigmatic vehicles stands for Wirral. Time will tell.

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