Roo Lewis spent two years in Port Talbot, the Welsh town that the actor Michael Sheen has described as having an ‘extremely high number of UFO sightings’. The book that came out of that time takes the sightings as a premise rather than a puzzle. Lewis is not chasing lights in the sky. He is asking what a place does with a story, and who keeps it going.

His method was participatory. He put up posters around town looking for people who had seen something. He chartered a small plane to photograph the town from above. He commissioned models based on witness descriptions. And he spent time as a guest in the homes of residents, which is how the book arrives at figures such as Meyrick Sheen, Michael’s father, who had a career as a Jack Nicholson lookalike, and Captain Beany, alongside a Miss Wales. Portraits, urban infrastructure and the surrounding landscape interrupted by man-made structures sit together across the sequence, each image carrying its own local story.

The subject, finally, is Port Talbot itself: its folklore, its people and the way an unlikely claim can organise a community’s sense of itself. Published by GOST Books in 2023 as a 136-page hardback, the book treats belief and anecdote as legitimate material rather than curiosities to be debunked.

The story behind each photograph is unique. Lewis works at the scale of a town and lets the premise shape the encounters, so the photographs read as a sustained portrait rather than a novelty.