1960s UFO sighting that gripped a Stoke-on-Trent community inspires new play

An unassuming field next to a housing estate in Stoke-on-Trent is taking centre stage in the latest alien blockbuster – and it’s inspired by true events.

The new stage production, Bright Lights Over Bentilee, focuses on the event in which dozens of people on an estate in the town claimed to have witnessed bright lights in the sky and a UFO landing in the field next to their homes.

Sky News went to meet playwright and former Coronation Street star Deborah McAndrew, to discuss what happened on the 2nd of September 1967 and why she felt compelled to bring the story to life.

“What they saw was a large red saucer-shaped object about the size of a car,” she explained.

On that night, just after 9pm there were eight separate sightings from people claiming to have seen a mysterious “glowing craft” which silently flew over the heads of residents.

Housewives, children, even a police officer said they saw it, that it changed colour and then dropped down into scrubland.

They claimed, as they set about searching through the fields for it, it then “took off and was bright white like a car headlight… and then just disappeared”.

McAndrew found herself delving into what happened after coming across some old news footage of interviews with residents at the time.

Fascinated by how locals seemingly went back to work the next day and carried on as normal, she started doing her own digging which included speaking with one of the young kids who’d chased it.

“When nothing happens it just gradually fades into myth… until some random playwright phones you up 50 years later and says ‘do you want to tell me about that UFO you saw?'” McAndrew explained.

While she admits “there’s no way of knowing now what it was” the writer says “when people tell me they’ve seen things, I believe them”.

While doubters might speculate that, coming at the time of the space race, locals perhaps might have confused a UFO with a satellite, McAndrew points out: “It was a landing, it didn’t just fly in the sky, it came down and then took off again.”

Could TV shows be partly to blame? As sci-fi related culture took off, the MoD saw a gradual increase in reports of UFO sightings.

Actress Polly Lister, who plays a housewife called Beverley in the play, says: “It would be very hard to completely write it off because every single one of those people, I believe, is telling the truth of what they saw.”

Eddy Westbury, who also stars in the drama, says: “You hear a lot of things people have seen in America… this one is particularly interesting purely because of all the accounts… completely different people, in different places… it wasn’t like [they] saw a green man jumping out of a vehicle, literally what they saw, what they experienced, they all seem to line up.”

Did locals see something ‘out of this world?’

No doubt the truth is out there somewhere, but until then, they’ll have to make-do with the dramatised version which follows the community fall-out from that night.

Claybody Theatre’s Bright Lights Over Bentilee runs until 12 October at The Dipping House, Stoke.