Photo of 'Alien Abductions' Sign Traced Back to Liverpool, Not Sedgley

The sign was originally posted to social media on Sunday, March 8th, 2020. (u/TeddyLann / Reddit) — The sign was originally posted to social media on Sunday, March 8th, 2020. *(u/TeddyLann / Reddit)*

The mystery surrounding a strange sign inscribed with a message entreating the local council to “do something” following three alien abductions in one week has now been partially solved, following discovery of the photo’s origin on social media.

Still remaining is the true identify of the sign’s creator and their motivation for posting it.

Public curiosity regarding the sign began last week, on July 7th, after illustrator Ash Loydon shared a photo of it to Twitter, along with the caption “...Meanwhile in Sedgley...”

Sedgley is a town in the north of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley, in the West Midlands, England.

...Meanwhile in Sedgley..... pic.twitter.com/oLHYn5PebZ
— Ash Loydon (@AshtonLamont) June 7, 2021

Within a few days, Loydon’s tweet had garnered over a million views and started attracting major media attention.

The sign’s online popularity served to highlight the relative frequency of UFO sightings in the West Midlands. According to the West Midlands Police, 12 reports of UFO sightings were received between 2013 and 2016, with 20 emergency calls placed regarding UFO or alien sightings from 2015 to 2017.

Eventually, local authorities were moved to act on the sign and Councillor Karen Shakespeare, Dudley's cabinet member for the public realm, said, “We have been made aware of the sign, which will be removed."

The sign, however, was nowhere to be found.

"We have checked for the sign and are confident it is not in Dudley borough," said Shakespeare.

It turns out, even Loydon didn’t know the origin of the sign and had only come across it while searching for forest reference photos on an image board.

He had chosen to name Sedgley in his tweet “because I thought it was funny and [it kind of] summed up my home town,” he said in a June 14th blog post.

"I reckon it's time to announce that I'm sorry to say it's not real and, as I said, I only picked Sedgley as it's my home town and thought it would give people a giggle, never realized it'd go viral!" said Loydon.

While the name of the person who actually took the photo has not been confirmed, The Singular Fortean Society was able to trace its first appearance online to a March 8th, 2020 post to the subreddit r/CasualUK on social media site Reddit. The poster, operating under the handle u/TeddyLann, said that they’d taken the photo in Liverpool’s Sefton Park.

Liverpool itself is something of a UFO hotspot, with the Mutual UFO Network reporting that they received 17 sightings from the city in 2016 alone.

As for Loydon, he asked only that the media credit him when discussing his post, and to those whose curiosity was piqued by the sign, he said, “don't worry [though,] I'm sure the truth is—still—out there, as is the actual person who took the pic...whom I've been trying to find since in the hope of at least being able to buy them a pint or two!"

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