For residents of the Bentilee housing estate in Stoke-on-Trent, once one of the largest in Europe and made up almost entirely of social housing, life had undoubtedly been tough.
But for a brief few moments, during one night more than 50 years ago, local people on the sprawling complex of semi-detached houses and cottage flats were “sprinkled with stardust” when dozens witnessed bright lights in the sky and what they believed to be a UFO landing in a nearby field.
The encounter on 2 September 1967, considered to be one of the UK’s greatest urban mysteries, is now being turned into a stage play by the dramatist and former Coronation Street actor Deborah McAndrew.
“When I first saw the archive news footage about the landing of a spaceship on the far fringe of this vast estate, I thought it was a spoof, but it’s not,” McAndrew said.
The playwright, who runs the company Claybody Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent with her husband, Conrad Nelson, has spoken to several eyewitnesses and former residents.
She said despite Bentilee’s reputation, it had always been a place where people who did not have much “make the best of things”. She said it was “an almost religious myth” that the greatest mysteries were revealed in the poorest places.
“So when I saw that 57 years ago Bentilee was absolutely sprinkled with stardust, I just couldn’t resist,” she said. “I thought: ‘I need to tell this story’. What I didn’t want to do was tell a story of deprivation, but to just tell a story about people who happened to see a UFO.”
Those she spoke to included an amateur astronomer called Tony Pace, who, with a colleague, self-published a report at the time entitled “Flying Saucer Report: UFOs, unidentified, undeniable”.
“In it they had details of 70 sightings, with photographs, maps, illustrations, and the reaction of the public, the police and the Ministry of Defence. Tony Pace is now well in his 80s. I’ve created a character that was inspired by him.”
She also spoke to three eyewitnesses, including Dave, a boy at the time of the encounter. “He was sure what he saw wasn’t human or man-made,” McAndrew said. “These are not fanciful or sensational people; he’s not made anything of it. I tracked him down to Peterborough. He just knows what he saw and described it to me.”
So what did he describe? “He said the object was about the size of a car, and that it was red and coloured, like everyone says, and that there was no sound. Then it disappeared.
“By this point there was a lot of excitement. People had run out of their houses because they’d seen this very bright thing from their windows or from the street. Someone fetched the police, and they walked the fields for ages but couldn’t find the object.
“And then all of a sudden, it lifted out of the field, this time white – Dave said it was the brightest thing he’s ever seen. And then it went out like a lightbulb, and everyone was in darkness.”
Space fever was at its height when the Bentilee encounter is said to have taken place – with dozens of sightings of flying saucers in the skies above North Staffordshire that summer, the Stoke Sentinel reported.
McAndrew said she believed Dave and the others. “I’ve never seen anything like that, but I believe them. Pace said most UFO sightings can be explained, but there’s a significant minority of reports that cannot. I think that’s really tantalising.
“Half a century ago there was so much less junk in the sky, in terms of technology and drones. These things were really anomalous – highly unusual, strange, and people couldn’t explain them.”
In fact, what fascinates her the most about UFO sightings is that witnesses are often “very reluctant to talk about it, or their lives are destroyed because nobody believes them”.
And does the play treat the object as a certified UFO? “For a while, I thought I’d try to sit on the fence and write it so that it was ambiguous,” she said.
“But drama is not very good when it’s ambiguous. You’ve just got to go in with your wellies. And so I’ve run with it. It is a UFO.”
Bright Lights Over Bentilee runs at the Dipping House, Spode Works, Stoke-on-Trent from 27 September to 12 October
