Broad Haven UFO sightings

Broad Haven UFO sightings

Type	Case (sighting wave)
Also known as	Welsh Triangle, Broad Haven Triangle, Dyfed Triangle
Date	1977 (school sighting 4 February 1977)
Place	Broad Haven, Little Haven and St Brides Bay, Pembrokeshire, Wales
Witnesses	14 pupils of Broad Haven Primary School; Rosa Granville; the Coombs family
Promoter	Randall Jones Pugh (BUFORA)

The Broad Haven UFO sightings were a wave of UFO reports in 1977 around Broad Haven, Little Haven and St Brides Bay in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. The area was nicknamed the Welsh Triangle, the Broad Haven Triangle or the Dyfed Triangle, after the Bermuda Triangle. The best-known event was a sighting on 4 February 1977 by 14 children at Broad Haven Primary School, who said they saw a silver cigar-shaped craft and a silver figure in a field behind the school; later reports told of glowing craft and tall figures in spacesuits around a hotel and a farm.^[1][2]

The UFO historian David Clarke ranks the "West Wales flap" as second only to the Warminster "Thing" in British UFO history. A Ministry of Defence inquiry found no evidence of a landing and suspected a practical joker, and two local men later admitted dressing up as "spacemen" — but the former schoolchildren have stuck to their story.^[1][2]

Setting

Broad Haven (Welsh: Aberllydan) is a village and seaside resort in the south-east corner of St Brides Bay, at the western end of the B4341 road, inside the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. With neighbouring Little Haven it forms the community of The Havens, which had 1,328 people in 2001. The "triangle" was never precisely defined, but took in most of the south-east corner of St Brides Bay, including Milford Haven and Haverfordwest.^[1][2]

Within 20 miles of Broad Haven lay several military sites: the secret rocket-testing station at Aberporth to the north, and RAF Brawdy near St Davids, which trained pilots on Hawker Hunters, housed a Tactical Weapons Unit and hosted a U.S. Navy station that tracked Soviet submarines with a network of underwater microphones.^[2]

Randall Jones Pugh

The wave's chief promoter was Randall Jones Pugh, a retired veterinary surgeon who lived nearby and investigated UFOs for the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA). Early in 1977, in an interview with a local paper about sightings in 1976, he predicted that there would soon be a spate of similar events in west Wales. When they came, he brought the stories to the media's attention.^[2]

The school sighting

During the lunch break on Friday 4 February 1977, 14 children aged nine to eleven at Broad Haven Primary School said they had seen a strange silver, cigar-shaped object in the fields behind the school; some accounts describe it as yellow. Some of them said a silver man with pointed ears came out of it. The staff dismissed their stories as fantasy, but the children were so insistent that they handed in a petition at the police station.^[1][2]

When they returned to school on Monday 7 February, the head teacher, Ralph Llewellyn, asked the children — fifteen of them, by some accounts — to draw what they had seen, and he was struck by how similar their pictures were. On 17 February teachers at the school and other witnesses said they had seen the same craft.^[1][2][3]

The story became an overnight sensation. Journalists and television crews converged on the Welsh coast from all over the UK, and flying saucers became the main topic of conversation in Wales. A similar sighting was reported elsewhere in Wales a few days later: on 16 February 1977 nine girls playing netball with their teacher at Rhosybol on Anglesey said they saw a mysterious object and made similar drawings.^[2][3]

Later reports

By May, simple lights in the sky had given way to stories of giant humanoid figures in spacesuits, like those of astronauts, prowling the remote countryside at night.^[2]

The Haven Fort Hotel

Rosa Granville ran the Haven Fort Hotel at Little Haven, which stands in a dramatic spot overlooking St Brides Bay. In the early hours of 19 April 1977 — two months after the school sighting — she was woken by a strange buzzing and looked out to see what she described as an oval, brightly lit object, like an upside-down saucer, in a neighbouring field, with two human-like figures in boiler suits who seemed to be measuring something. The next day she said she found a flattened patch of grass; it emerged that the spot overlooked a field containing a Royal Observer Corps bunker.^[1][2]

She asked her MP, Nicholas Edwards — later Welsh Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet — to demand answers from the Ministry of Defence. Within days a squadron leader from RAF Brawdy visited the hotel. According to the Granvilles, he told them there was absolutely nothing at Brawdy that could account for the object, and asked Mrs Granville not to talk about it so as not to alarm the public.^[2]

Ripperston Farm

A whole range of strange events seemed to cluster around the Coombs family at Ripperston Farm. The dairyman Billy Coombs, his wife Pauline and their five children told of repeated close encounters with UFOs and their occupants, which they said left a trail of burned-out cars and television sets and soaring electricity bills. Pauline reported a sighting almost every month; once, she said, a fiery object shaped like a rugby ball chased the car in which she was driving her children down a country lane, and the couple later claimed a herd of cows had been mysteriously moved from a locked field into a neighbouring farmyard.^[2]

The most frightening incident came in the early hours of 23 April 1977, as the couple watched a late film: a figure about seven feet tall in a spacesuit, its face blank, appeared at their sitting-room window. Later investigators doubted some of the family's more sensational claims, but others were impressed by their obvious terror; the policeman who answered their 999 call said in 1996 that in 26 years of service it was the most frightened family he had ever seen.^[2]

Books and theories

The events were chronicled in three books. One, Peter Paget's The Welsh Triangle, was partly inspired by a headline in The Sun: "Spaceman Mystery of the Terror Triangle". Paget favoured the idea that aliens had built an underground base beneath the Stack Rocks in St Brides Bay, where UFOs had been seen to hover and vanish — a notion shared by some local people and fuelled by the nearby military bases. The last book, The Dyfed Enigma (1979), was written by Pugh with the cryptozoologist Ted Holliday and linked the UFO stories with Welsh fairy folklore and ley lines. Pugh withdrew from ufology in the early 1980s, having concluded that UFOs were not spacecraft but demonic visions sent by the Devil; he died in 2003.^[2]

The local journalist Hugh Turnbull, who covered the events for the weekly Western Telegraph, told Clarke his own theory was that "something military" lay behind the sightings.^[2]

The Ministry of Defence inquiry

Publicly, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence, James Wellbeloved, replied to the MP that apart from Mrs Granville's report the ministry had no record of unusual activity in the area. Behind the scenes, however, on 14 June 1977 the head of S4 (Air), the Ministry of Defence branch that dealt with UFOs, took the unusual step of asking the RAF Police's Provost and Security Services (P&SS) to make a "discreet enquiry" into events in Wales. James Peduzie, head of the UFO desk, wrote that P&SS had never been asked to help with UFOs before, asked them to judge the level of local interest or alarm and whether there was a rational explanation or grounds for a more serious inquiry, and stressed that he had not even told the minister he was consulting them.^[2]

The P&SS had moved early in 1977 to RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire, which the UFO authors Tim Good and Nick Redfern have claimed was the real headquarters of the British government's UFO work. No final report of the inquiry survives, but in a secret briefing in December 1977 Peduzie wrote that there had been some concern in Wales that summer, though the RAF Police thought it could have been the work of a practical joker. A Ministry of Defence investigator found no evidence of any landing. The ministry's file on the sightings was released by the National Archives in 2006.^[1][2]

The "spacemen" confessions

The RAF Police's suspicion of a hoaxer matches a local rumour that persists to this day. The researcher Hilary Evans, who debunked some of the more exaggerated stories in a 1982 article, heard that two members of a local Round Table club were behind the sightings of "spacemen" at the Haven Fort Hotel and Ripperston Farm. They had got the idea after borrowing silver-coated asbestos suits worn by local oil refinery workers for a fancy-dress evening in Broad Haven, shortly after the children's sighting.^[2]

In 1996 the BBC presenter Ray Gosling tracked down one of the jokers for a Radio 4 documentary about the West Wales flap, and soon afterwards Glyn Edwards, a member of Milford Haven's Round Table, admitted his part to the Western Mail. He said the suit had a solid built-in helmet that made him look about seven feet tall, and that he had strolled around for fun because alien sightings were all the rage — and that in one garden he had to dive into a hedge when the woman of the house seemed to aim a rifle or shotgun at him.^[2]

The children's story today

Despite Gosling's efforts, the former Broad Haven pupils, by then middle-aged, stuck to their story. One of them, David Davies, said he had seen something unexplained that day and would hold to that for the rest of his life. He later told the Daily Mail that he had never described what he saw as extraterrestrial, only as a strange, unexplained aircraft, and that part of him felt it was better not to find out and to keep the mystery, which had become one of Pembrokeshire's folk tales. Clarke questions even the word "aircraft", since the object was only ever seen on or near the ground and never seen landing or taking off.^[2]

Later attention

The case returned from obscurity in the 2020s. In 2021 it was the subject of "The UFO in the Playground", an episode of the first series of Danny Robins's podcast Uncanny. In 2023 it featured in the first season of the Netflix series Encounters, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin, in which David Clarke was one of the narrators. In 2024 Sian Eleri investigated it in a four-part series of Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens for BBC Three and BBC Cymru Wales. Clarke criticised the BBC programme for hinting at a secret government investigation that had in fact been documented since 2006, for skirting Pugh's later belief that UFOs were demonic, and for wrongly placing Mrs Granville's sighting before the school incident.^[1][2]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Broad Haven”, “UFO sightings in the United Kingdom”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.