Roy Teague, 51, grew up on the Ashmore Park estate in Wolverhampton, served six years in the British Army with tours in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, and has spent more than 20 years with West Midlands Police. He’s an authorised firearms officer and tactical firearms commander who has protected royals and senior politicians and holds bravery commendations.

He’s also spent several years interviewing more than 250 serving and retired police officers who say they’ve seen UFOs or other unexplained things. The result is Close Encounters of the Police Kind, published by Mirror Books on World UFO Day, July 2, 2026, with about 75 of the accounts. In July, the Express & Star began a series on the book.

Teague says he treats the accounts like any police investigation. He interviews witnesses face-to-face where possible and checks their stories against flight-tracking data, weather records and astronomy apps. He says he rejected stories that leaned on AI-generated images and even caught people falsely claiming to have been police officers. He has never seen a UFO himself.

The accounts include silent black triangles over Wolverhampton and unexplained craft over Birmingham Airport, and the book goes as far as missing-time and abduction stories. Teague says the work turned him from a skeptic into a believer that intelligent life has visited Earth, and that some colleagues, senior ones included, now take him less seriously. Many officers, he says, stayed silent for decades for fear of ridicule.