Strange lights are being seen across Liverpool, from Crosby to Kirkby, from Speke to Seaforth, and several readers have even provided me with photographic proof of these mysterious luminous entities.

On Monday 6 August at around 7.30pm, a woman visiting a relative at Broadgreen Hospital was astounded to see a ball of light hovering less than 100 yards from the hospital main entrance.

'I thought it was a flare at first,' says the witness, 'but could plainly see no parachute. I took two pictures of the light with my phone camera, but it only came out on one. I didn't see it move off or vanish, I just looked back and saw it had gone.'

My first thought was that the glowing orb had been 'ball lightning' - a poorly understood meteorological phenomenon in which a luminous sphere of energy manifests itself in mid-air, sometimes during thunderstorms, but also on clear sunny days.

These balls of what seem to be super-heated plasma have drifted into houses through open windows and exploded, and in one local case in the 1970s, a housewife tried to swat a globe of ball lightning away with her hand, and her wedding ring melted instantly and dripped onto her kitchen floor, yet she never sustained a burn.

Instead, the ball exploded and she was left with mild concussion. If the lights being seen across this region are ball lightning, the weather may be to blame, as we have had alternating days of rainy and sunny weather recently, but the reports of the Liverpool Lights seem to defy such a rational explanation.

In West Derby Village on 1st August at 8pm, a small golf-ball-sized light was seen whizzing along Meadow Lane.

The light followed the curvature of the lane, flying about 6 feet from the ground, and flew upwards over Muirhead Avenue East.

A 16-year-old girl named Chloe saw this mini-UFO heading straight towards her as she walked onto Meadow Lane from Parkside Drive, and thought it was a firework rocket coming in her direction.

An identical ball of light was seen on the following night at rooftop level in Bootle, flying over Selwyn Street at 10.20pm, and later that same night, two unidentified lights which left a greenish trail behind them were seen flying over Queens Drive, Walton.

A 53-year-old man named Steven Garrett saw a bright light hovering outside his cousin's window on Park Road, Toxteth, on 5 August, and he initially assumed it was one of Merseyside Police's remote-controlled CCTV helicopter 'spy drones' but when Steven got a close look at the light he could see it not only had nothing attached to it, it was 'silent as the grave' and it suddenly flitted off at an incredible speed towards the Brunswick Dock.