'People just like you have these encounters': Philip Mantle on close encounters & upcoming book-to-screen deal

Discussions around UFO sightings have been popular once again over the past 12 months; if not the US Congress promising to disclose more information about extra-terrestrials and close encounters, then Steven Spielberg is once again professing his interest in the topic with the release of ‘Disclosure Day.’

For a topic that sometimes provokes ‘odd’ looks from sceptics, though, public interest is at somewhat of a high.

“Not an all-time high,” Philip Mantle, the Pontefract-based UFO researcher, admits, talking to the Yorkshire Evening Post, “but it’s very high.”

“As a result, the media are responding, of course,” he continues. “You’ll get more films, you’ll get more documentaries, more newspaper coverage - and a lot of it will hopefully be sensible coverage as well. That just goes with the territory.”

While recent momentum has been driven largely by US politicians pushing for transparency, Mantle remains pragmatically cautious about expectations of "full disclosure" from world governments.

“You’re assuming - you don’t know - you’re assuming they’ve got something to disclose in the first place, which is a huge assumption,” Philip explains. “What I try to remind people is that we don’t investigate UFOs. We investigate reports of UFOs. So by the time we get there and speak to somebody, whatever happened has been and gone.”

“It is part of our government’s duty to keep secrets. What information they may have gathered could be absolute rubbish - it’s how they’ve gathered it that is the secret.”

From factory work to paranormal investigations

Mantle’s own journey into ufology is rooted firmly in West Yorkshire grit rather than Hollywood glamour.

“I’m just an ordinary lad from West Yorkshire,” Mantle says. “My father worked down the coal mines all his life, I worked in a factory for donkey’s years—and here I am talking to a bona fide filmmaker.”

His interest in the unexplained began as a teenager, but it was a stint working in West Germany in 1979 that truly set his path in motion. Unable to speak the language, he asked his mother to send over a box of reading material.

“A box of books arrived, and hey presto, they were all about UFOs,” he recalls.

Upon returning home to West Yorkshire in May 1979, a small advert in the Yorkshire Evening Post caught his eye, announcing the formation of the Yorkshire UFO Society meeting at Centenary House on North Street in Leeds.

“In those days, on a Sunday, everything was pretty much shut,” Mantle says. “I found the location, followed the signposts stuck on the wall... and that was it, I was hooked. I never looked back.”

That initial meeting launched a career spanning over four decades. Mantle went on to serve with the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) and acted as the UK representative for the international Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

Through his decades of field research across the region - including investigating a flurry of sightings around Skipton and the Yorkshire Dales in the 1980s - Mantle quickly learned that close encounters were far from a uniquely American phenomenon.

“These sightings were nothing new,” he says. “They’d gone back decades. Some of these people had lived there, their parents lived there, their grandparents lived in the same place. We quickly found that there was a rich history to it, not just in that area, but everywhere.”

The conversations and experiences helped form the basis of Philip's latest book, Once Upon a Missing Time.

"They just wanted somebody to listen"

Drawing heavily on real-life UK close encounter cases, the novel explores the human and emotional weight of missing time—focusing on witness isolation and psychological trauma rather than typical science-fiction tropes.

“One of the things that people had told me when I spoke to them was how they were treated if they spoke about it,” Mantle says. “Some were traumatised, and who do you turn to? Family? They didn’t know what to say. The medical profession?

“It was a time when some of them went to the doctors with a complaint, and they’d just get a Valium.”

Mantle recalls a phone call from a local woman who had experienced a close encounter, left completely isolated by the experience.

“She was just grateful that I was able to sit down and listen,” Philip says. “She just wanted somebody to listen. When it first happened, she thought, ‘I must be going nuts.’ She had no interest in the subject, lived with her partner, had a young daughter (...) her family said, ‘What do we do? What can we do?’

“So there is an awful lot of psychological anger and frustration.”

Philip continues: “People like me were the last resort because they’d already tried the other routes.

“Irrespective of your beliefs or your scepticism, say what you want, but there are people just like you who have these encounters, and they don’t know what they are.”

That grounded human focus has already caught the eye of the entertainment industry, with the book officially optioned for a screen adaptation.

“I don’t want to see this as a science fiction film,” Mantle explains. “I want to see this as a real human experience film that has trauma, has a bit of dark humour in it as well, and how we react as a society to people who have trauma.”

“There are no car chases, there’s no guns, there’s no fight scenes - it is exploring the human experience, absolutely.”

Once Upon a Missing Time is published by Flying Disk Press and is available now on Amazon in paperback, hardback, Kindle, and audiobook formats.