When it comes to ghosts and UFOs, there's little middle ground.

If you're not a believer, chances are you consider the whole thing a load of poppycock.

Sceptics may be swayed by a new book -- published this week -- which examines a host of strange sightings and encounters in the so-called Pennine window.

Keighley is no stranger to odd objects flying across its skies and, indeed, over the years has gained a growing reputation as a UFO hotspot.

No oddity then that the town has its own three pages in the book.

One of the tales recounted by author Jenny Randles -- a professional researcher in the field of strange phenomena -- is of a woman who was trying to sell her house near Ingrow, back in November, 1980.

She was standing in her garden talking to a couple of prospective buyers when a huge object hovered in the sky above them. It moved very slowly at first, before accelerating away rapidly and vanishing from sight.

The shocked couple fled, never to be heard from again.

Another case occurred just a few miles away at Glusburn, in September, 1989, when a mother and her son and daughter were returning from a football match in which the boy had been playing. Suddenly they noticed a yellow glow over a nearby mill. The light rose and split into two, and as the family looked upwards a large mass -- with lots of bright disco-style coloured lights beneath it -- was overhead. It made a slight humming noise. Within minutes, the object had disappeared.

It later transpired that someone else, half a mile away, had spotted the same thing that evening. The object was seen to flip on its side before speeding silently away northwards.

The third, and perhaps most intriguing, Keighley case featured is considered one of Britain's best-evidenced instances of an alleged past life.

It centres on Nicola Peart, who was born in Keighley in the late 1970s.

In early childhood she began to make reference to a previous life as a boy and described to her baffled parents how her mother was a Mrs Benson and they had lived in an old stone house at Haworth.

She recounted how her father had worked on the railway and how she (or he) had died as a child after being struck by a steam train.

Nicola's parents unsurprisingly dismissed her story as pure imagination, until one day the family visited Haworth and Nicola led her parents straight to an old house which she said was her last home.

Checks revealed that a family called Benson had lived there, the father was a railwayman and they had a son -- born in 1875 -- who had died as a child.

The book -- "Supernatural Pennines" -- also contains accounts of bizarre happenings on Ilkley Moor, a hotbed of alien activity.

* "Supernatural Pennines" is published by Robert Hale and retails at £11.99.