Below is a typed fascimile of Randal Jones Pugh's 1979 work on the west Wales flap. No copyright infringement is intended - I just found it very difficult to get hold of a reasonbly priced copy as it's been out of print so long. So, when I did finally pick one up, I felt it would be useful for myself and other researchers if it were digitised.
THE DYFED ENIGMA
Unidentified Flying Objects in West Wales
-
RANDALL JONES PUGH
and
F. W. HOLIDAY
First published in 1979 by Faber and Faber Limited
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ETERNAL TIME
For I, who now am old,
Can look back down the years
In wonder and in awe.
Yet, with complacent heart,
Accept the timelessness of Eternity,
And the eternalness of Time.
And, from the dark recesses of the mind,
By searing searches of the soul
Confirm the unrelenting truth -
That life is borne as on a stream
Or raging flood down thro' the aeons
From primeval mists to other births,
And other deaths.
Regret not then the sunny summers
Of lost ecstatic youth.
For they shall return again and again
And again,
In diverse shapes and forms,
In other lands.
At death, though life seem but illusion,
Then death itself is just a dream -
Brief sojourn in the future that was present
In the past,
That yet renews itself in years to come.
But think not that the arrowhead of time
Wreaks havoc with things yet to be,
For in the master-plan of space,
All things are and have been, and will be,
And nothing that is thought, or said, or done,
Can alter one iota of it all.
R. Jones Pugh
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Contents
Introduction and Acknowledgements - page 13
1. The Broad Haven Visitation - 19
2. Figures in the Night - 38
3. Phenomena at Milford Haven - 52
4. A Slight Hint of Menace - 66
5. The Ripperston Farm Affair - 86
6. The Ley Correlation - 104
7. The Enigma Continues - 124
8. Is There a 'Goblin Universe'? - 141
9. Aftermath - 154
10. Conclusion: The Veterinary Aspect - 168
Select Bibliography - 178
Index - 180
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Illustrations
1. St. Brides Bay and Dale Peninsula - 24
2. Broad Haven Primary School and site of UFO landing - 30
3. Haven Fort Hotel and environs - 43
4. Benton Castle and some adjacent UFO sighting locations - 55
5. Layout of Herbrandston Village - 69
6. Location of Mrs Basset's encounter with grounded objects - 74
7. Typical ley-line complex and associated UFO sightings - 105
8. Ley-line distribution in St Brides Bay - 109
9. Broad Haven Primary School with adjacent ley-line - 111
10. Haven Fort Hotel bisected by ley-line - 113
11. Plan of Ripperston Farm and ley-line - 114
12. Map of Puerto Rico showing magnetic anomalies - 122
13. UFO sites south of Carmarthen - 132
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Introduction and Acknowledgements
This book is an account of the 'wave' of flying saucers that occurred in West Wales mainly during the year 1977. Because this subject is so controversial, we decided at the outset that only first-hand experiences from reliable witnesses should be included. We met most of these witnesses personally - sometimes repeatedly - and checked their statements in every way possible. Recordings were taken of conversations so that descriptions could be reproduced verbatim. In nearly all cases we inspected the locations of the sightings.
We would like to express our very real appreciation to those witnesses of the paranormal who have had the moral courage to describe their weird encounters to us, and to have had their stories publicized in both local and national newspapers and other media. We feel that by spurning the very real possibility of ridicule and accusations of mental instability they have contributed appreciably to our understanding of the engimatic riddle which the UFO represents, and it is hoped that other witnesses who have previously been reluctant to come forward with their 'case histories' will now emulate these very co-operative spectators of the bizarre.
Our considered view of the flying saucer is that it has not so far been explained in terms that make sense to the intelligent lay witness. We also think that the prevalence of the phenomenon, whatever causes it, is more widely spread in Wales than is generally supposed. As Vincent Kane - the 'anchorman' of BBC Wales in Cardiff - remarked recently: 'Whatever they are - flying saucers, UFOs - they've been seen in all parts of Wales. A sighting was reported recently in Prestatyn, another off the west coast of Wales, and another was seen in Monmouthshire. Many sightings have been obtained near military establishements such
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as Aberporth. The latest in Wales was at Croespenmaen above an empty advance factory. There had been an earlier sighting at Croespenmaen by a group of local people a few months ago and then a further sighting by Mr Glanmor Bebb.'
On this occasion Mr Bebb had been working in the stables near his home, which is isolated. It was a very clear evening. After setting off for home he paused and sat down on a bank to watch the sunset. It was then that he saw an unidentified flying object hovering above a government advance factory about 400 yards away.
This is how he described it: 'What made it very strange to me was the way it was hovering quietly. It went down and then was rising ... it seemed to be exerting pressure as it was going down and suction as it was rising up. I was watching it for ten minutes just going up and down and then, all at once, it flashed across the sky at a tremendous speed and I counted ... in four seconds it reached the horizon. You couldn't define an actual shape - it was more like a haze. I called the wige, and she described it as a yellow light resembling a saucer.'
In fact anaomalous flying objects have a history of appearing in West Wales. Just after Christmas 1975, two UFOs landed near Haverfordwest. The first one looked like a glowing reddish ball which slowly descended into a wood. There were six or seven witnesses, and next day one of us organized them into a search-party to look for traces, but none were found.
A fortnight later a similar object was seen hovering above the grass in a field a few miles farther north. The Western Telegraph of 23 January 1975 stated: 'Saw red ball and fled. Two youths fled in terror from a field on a Clarbeston Road farm last week when they saw a strange ball of red light shoot off into the night from right in front of them. John Lavis (fifteen) of Moorfield Avenue, Clarbeston Road, and seventeen-year-old David Bevan of Longlands, Walton East, had gone to the field on Knock Farm with a tractor to roundup some cows. "We could see the light shining through the hedge before we got into the field," said John. "It was about twenty yards away then; it rose in front of the tractor and disappeared." John described the light as shaped like a rugby football and about eighteen inches in diameter. It glowed with a fierce red light and hovered about three feet above
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the ground. John and David were so terrified by what they had seen that they left the cows and raced back to the farm. Mr Randall Lavis, John's father, said the cows were at the opposite end of the field to where the light appeared. It was possible they had gone there after being frightened by it. He advised his son not to go near if he sees the light again, but to report it to the police.'
We were particularly interested in the alleged reactions of the cattle to the phenomenon for, if true, it seemed to be an objective effect that could be studied and analysed. Randall Jones Pugh was particularly well equipped to undertake such an analysis. He started his working life as a journalist before graduating, in 1949, as a veterinary surgeon. For a number of years he was in general practice and with the Animal Health Division of the Ministry of Agriculture. After two years with Crookes Laboratories he served for seven years as Director of Veterinary Services for Parke Davis Ltd. When numerous further cases of alleged animal reactions to UFOs were reported in 1977 in Dyfed, the need for an investigation became obvious.
F. W. Holiday spent upwards of twenty-five years writing about angling and allied wildlife subjects during which he took part in an extensive field investigation into another modern anomaly - the mystery of the Loch Ness monster. In collaborating over the enigma of the Dyfed UFOs, therefore, we were able, as joint authors, to present a fairly broad front in terms of experience with animals, and to maintain a reasonable degree of objectivity over the various reports.
In fact we became interested in the UFO problem via similar routes. Pugh was alerted to the subject after he had seen an extraordinary object in the sky over Spain in 1973. Holiday watched a strange oval object through binoculars over Dyfed in 1966. These entirely spontaneous encounters made us suddenly aware that a mystery did indeed exist. Following his retirement from the veterinary profession Pugh became South Wales co-ordinator for the British UFO Research Association.
The flying saucer is an apparently illogical fact of nature with which our current knowledge of the universe makes it almost impossible to deal. Always bearing in mind that appearances can frequently be deceptive, it does begin to look as if many present-
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day assumptions relating to living things are not only incomplete but may be actually erroneous. Clearly the whole is more complex than the parts thereof.
Attempts are made repeatedly to explain flying saucers as ball lightning or some unusual form of atmospheric electricity. Although this seems plausible for some of the aerial aightings it is manifestly absurd in the cases of the landed saucers we investigated - and these are surely the core of the UFO problem. If these things were truly seen then they are beyond current scientific knowledge; and if they were not seen, then we wonder what happened to the respectable and credible witnesses at the time of perception. Does a selective psychosis stalk the earth presenting its victims with an identical fantasy? Or must we admit, as many famous scientists have already done, that this stupendous galaxy, infinite in time, space and the pieces of information it contains, holds deeper mysteries than the human mind has yet grasped?
If the mystery of the flying saucer is a ghost-story, then it must be an ongoing story, a story constantly being updated to suit the civilization of the day. Moses - if we are to believe the Old Testament (Exodus 33 : 9 and 10) - observed similar humanoid forms about 1,400 B.C.
Professor John Taylor, Professor of Mathematics at King's College, London, considers that the Bible contains numerous references to man-like beings that are not of this earth. He writes in his book Black Holes: 'Besides these rather brief records in Genesis [regarding the 'sons of God'] there are other passages in the Bible which are difficult to explain rationally without calling upon some intervention of beings from outer spaces, as has been done by the Soviet ethnologist, M. M. Agrest.' If such intervention includes the loss of radio and television and apparent stoppage of car engines, as it did in Dyfed, we wish British scientists would show as much interest in the matter as the French appear to be doing.
An interesting fact about UFOs is the way a 'wave' seems to develop in one locality and then moves across the country. It is tempting to see in this a relationship with what the Irish used to call 'the wandering sighes' or trooping fairies which were said to shift from place to place. Although the Dyfed 'wave' diminished
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sometime in early 1978, there was a resumption of activity later that year in North Wales. On 3 September 1978, a North Wales police spokesman told the Western Mail that UFO sightings had been reported from Ruabon, Wrexham, Colwyn Bay and Prestatyn. Lights, grounded objects and humanoid figures were seen.
A witness at the village of Llanerchymedd was Mrs Pat Owen and her young daughter. Mrs Owen was looking out of her bedroom window on the Maes Athan estate. She told the Western Mail: 'I happened to look out of the window and saw three men walking across the field. The cows were terrified of them and stampeded away. They were wearing silver-grey suits with a sort of cap on their heads which was attached to the suits. They were all well over six feet tall but I only saw their backs and I was very frightened. I ran to the village square to find my husband.'
This book does not resolve the riddle of the UFO. Nevertheless, we think it indicates, particularly with regard to the animal involvement, that we are dealing with something more specific than a human delusion, a waking dream of a mistaken view of the commonplace. We challenge those who espouse bolides, ball lightning, plasmas and space-junk as an explanation to write and tell us precisely how any of these could have produced the Broad Haven school effects.
There is a time and a place for all things, and the time for human comprehension of the flying saucer has not yet come. Like alchemists, we can only tend the cauldron and note the effects. No gold may result; but in some distant era this humble groundwork may well flower into an edifice every whit as awesome as nuclear fission.
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce short extracts:
William Heinemann Ltd for Sir Cyril Burt in The Scientist Speculates (ed. I. J. Good), 1962; A. & C. Black Ltd for W. R. Corliss's Some Mysteries of the Universe, 1967; Martin Brian & O'Keeffe Ltd for Professor Herbert Dingle's Science at the Crossroads, 1972; Thames & Hudson Ltd for Professor Otto Fisch's The Nature of Matter, 1972; A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd for Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, 1972, and The Case of the Midwife Toad, 1971, published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.
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Chapter One
The Broad Haven Visitation
Thus the physicist was able to discard, one by one, all commonsense ideas of what the world is like - without suffering any traumatic shock. One by one, matter, energy and causality were dethroned; but the physicist was richly compensated by being able to play around with such enticing Gretchens as the neutrino, and with such exhiliarating notions as time flowing backwards, ghost particles of negative mass, and atoms of radium spontaneously emitting beta radiation without physical cause.
Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence (1972)
On Friday, 4 Februay 1977, an event occurred at a rural Country Primary School in West Wales which was so extraordinary in character that it immediately attracted nationwide attention. According to the basic account given by eyewitnesses a flying saucer was seen in a field behind the school where it was watched by relays of youngsters when they emerged from the canteen after lunch. The object was observed to move around on the ground, and at least one child-witness believed he saw a human shaped figure nearby. A small delegation of boys approached the headmaster, Ralph Llewellyn, and asked him to come out and view the object but he declined, possibly suspecting a prank. Eventually the object moved behind some bushes and was lost to view.
Many flying saucer stories are investigated weeks or even months after their occurrence. Fortunately, this was not the case at Broad Haven. At 4.50 p.m. on the day of the sighting Randall Jones Pugh, who is well known locally as a member of BUFORA (British UFO Research Association), received a telephone call
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from a lady who claimed that her ten-year-old-son, David Davies, had - in company with approximately fourteen other children - seen a UFO on the ground adjacent to their school at Broad Haven, which had frightened them considerably.
Pugh immediately drove to the Davies' home at Solbury Hostel, Tiers Cross, and interviewed the boy David, who agreed to go with him to the school and point out the exact spot where the object had been seen. They arrived there about 6 p.m. It was then raining heavily with the light fading rapidly. It became obvious that no attempt could be made to reach the actual location that day since a fence and a rapidly flowing stream separated the school playing-field where they stood from the UFO landing-site. Pugh made what notes he could in the wet dusk and took the boy home.
On Saturday, 5 February, Pugh honed local newspaper reporter Hugh Turnbull and arranged for Turnbull to visit the site along with himself and the witness David Davies. This time they avoided the stream and approached the site by a different route. Carefully and critically they examined the area where David believed he and his friends had watched the object. However, in Pugh's words: 'We found what David thought was the landing-site but, in spite of an extensive and exhausting search for imprints, tread-marks etc. we found nothing. It will be appreciated that the very dense rain might have been sufficiently heavy to have obliterated all traces of an actual landing, but I consider this improbable.'
The headmaster of Broad Haven Primary School quickly realized that the accounts of fourteen boys and one girl regarding the flying saucer they claimed to have seen just beyond the school grounds were unusual enough to warrant further investigation. No doubt the story reached him in dribs and drabs, first from one source and then another. Whether he actually stepped outside that winter afternoon and scanned the marshy little field for himself we don't know. What he certainly did - but not until the Monday after the sighting - was to segregate the self-declared sighters and get them to describe and sketch what they claimed to have seen.
Up to this point the headmaster and the teaching staff seem to have been sceptical about the affair. Unfortunately, by the
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time they realized that the children were in earnest and could stand up to cross-examination, and that their testimonies were too similar to have been contrived or rehearsed, it was already too late. A belated inspection by the school staff found nothing in the field.
As soon as Hugh Turnbull's article appeared in the Western Telegraph and was seen by the Fleet Street news-machine, an enormous amount of interest in the Broad Haven school affair began to develop. At the same time it had to be borne in mind that the children involved were very young - most of them were between nine and eleven years old. Had they suffered some sort of mass-halluncination? Could they have seen an unusual farm vehicle and fantasized the flying saucer from their collective imagination? Or was it all nothing but a hoax?
The London press put these points to Ralph Llewellyn, and he replied: 'Having talked to each of them individually and seen their drawings - and allowing for embellishment - I do not disbelieve they saw something they had never seen before. I do not believe that primary school children are capable of a sustained, sophisticated hoax. The thread which appears to run through their stories is that the object was silvery-yellow, cigar-shaped, with a dome and possibly a light on top.'
For two days the village school at Broad Haven was besieged by London journalists and television teams. Running a school is not the world's easiest job at the best of times and now the situation rapidbly became impossible. Mr Llewellyn wisely declined to give further interviews. Since no more juice could be sucked from that particular orange the stage began to clear and life virtually returned to normal. Thirteen days after the first sighting, however, the UFO appeared on the ground again and in the same place.
This time the witnesses were adults. The first was a teacher at Broad Haven Primary School who happened to be leaving the buildings by a side entrance which faced the now notorious little field. This lady, who wishes to remain anonymous, provided us with a signed statement, as follows: 'On leaving school (side entrance facing east) something shining caught my eye. I stopped and could see a large object, oval-shaped, with a slight dome. Colour: shining metal. I also noted ridges and stepped back
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intending to call someone, and then heard a humming noise and watched the object glide away to the left, in a field amongst trees. I know the area very well as I have frequently walked there. The time was approximately 10.30 a.m. and it was pouring with rain. Distance: about 200 yards.'
This teacher describes the object as silvery, sharply defined and saucer-shaped. It was almost at ground-level when she saw it glide away to her left. The actual sighting lasted between four and five seconds.
Shortly after this incident on the same day, two ladies who work in the school canteen went outside the school and saw an object on the ground where the original sighting had taken place. They saw a figure climb into the machine and watched as the vehicle moved up a slop and disappeared behind trees. It was still raining, and as visibility was poor the canteen workers decided they must have seen a local council truck used for carting sewage. They concluded that this explanation accounted for all the children's sightings - they had not yet heard the teacher's account - and went to inform the headmaster. However, Mr Llewellyn was not convinced and pointed out that the ground was so boggy in the place where they had watched the supposed truck that no vehicle could cross it.
The canteen ladies staunchly maintained their viewpoint and decide to prove it. The following morning, accompanied by their husbands, they reached the marshy little field in much the same manner as had BUFORA investigator Randall Jones Pugh on an earlier occasion. They then found themselves floundering in a foot-deep bog. Pugh, in fact, described the site thus: 'It should be noted that the field has initially a gentle slope which becomes quite steep at the point of landing. Even if a truck was able to get into the field it certainly would never be able to get out because there is a morass of mud at the bottom. The amount of sticky glutinous sludge at this spot accords well with the verbal descriptions given me by David Davies that, when he saw the object behind the trees, it seemed to give a "tugging action" as though it was well and truly "stuck in the mud". I was later informed that no council lorry or workmen engaged in sludge removal had been near the field.'
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The canteen ladies had to admit that the sewage truck notion didn't make sense. One of them told the Western Telegraph: 'When I heard the children's story, quite honestly I didn't believe it. I thought they had seen something but had been mistaken. Now I'm completely confused. We had convinced ourselves that what we saw was a tanker, but the ground was so wet that if anything had been down there we must have seen the tracks.'
Her friend was equally puzzled but remained obdurate. She said: 'I don't know what we saw but I still don't believe in flying saucers.'
These, then, are the bare bones of the Broad Haven school incident. However, as we shall see, this represents no more than the tip of an iceberg whose size is still undetermined.
The village of Broad Haven lies at the southern corner of St Brides Bay in what used to be called Pembrokeshire but is now part of the larger administrative unit of Dyfed (pronounced 'Dove-id'). The bay faces the open Atlantic and a sailor setting out from this shore and steering a straight course could eventually encounter Bermuda without sighting intervening land. The shoreline, which is wide open to the foibles of the ocean, is technically known as a 'storm-beach'. It has the characteristics of such a beach in being wide and sandy with the upper tideline demarcated by a pebble bank.
The whole of this section of the coast forms part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and many people, including the writers, consider it to be scenically the finest coastline in Britain. Development is rigidly controlled and various attempts to convert villages such as Broad Haven into mechanized holiday camps have been frustrated.
To the immediate left of the village the coast runs out in a great ten-mile wall of rock, from Borough Head to the bird sanctuary of Skomer Island with its gannet colonies. This is Dale peninsula. In the westering sun this rock blazes in pastel shades of beige, yellow, pink and scarlet from the lichens which cover the precipice faces. Indeed, it is said that the Pembrokeshire coast can only be fully appreciated when the observer is offshore in a boat.
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Inland from the coast St Brides Bay is served by a labyrinth of narrow, twisting roads which are often wide enough to accommodate only one car. They run between high earthen banks thrown up by the shovel centureies ago, and on which wild flowers grow in profusion to the never-ending delight of visitors. This is due in part to the humidity and mildness of the climate - potatoes, for example, are planted here in late February and harvested in June.
More important from our viewpoint, however, is the fact that his relatively unspoilt landscape has yielded a most remarkable clue to the behaviour of the UFOs we are describing - a clue whose validity we must consider in full at a later point.
Broad Haven Primary School lies at the southern end of the village. It is approached by a short service road called Marine Road and lies with its back against the first gentle undulation of the coastal hills. There is a small sports field immediately adjacent to the tarmacked recreation area surrounded by the school buildings. This field is bounded by a fenced stream on the south and west sides. Beyond the stream on the south side the land forms a fold and is broken up into more small fields. These fields are rough pasture land sprinkled with scrub and small trees. They slope rapidly down from the crest of the fold on their south-west side to the more or less flat land at the bottom which is really little more than a bog, especially in wet weather. It was in the second of these fields beyond the stream - measuring them longitudinally from the school fence - that the UFO appeared.
We have been unable to determine who was the first to see the flying saucer, but the most cogent account came from Michael Webb, aged eleven, and David Davies in an interview with Randall Jones Pugh shortly after the occurrence. Pugh taped their conversation which ran as follows:
'Can you tell me what you were doing when it happened?' began Pugh. David Davies said: 'Well, we'd heard about it before, in the classroom, so I decided to go and look for myself. And we were up there and couldn't see anything, so Philip Reece - one of my friends - decided to find a way over the stream so that if there was anything there we could get a closer look. While he was trying to do this, this silvery object popped up from behind the hedge.'
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'David, can I break in? Who noticed the object first? Can you recall?'
'Yes, I did. It just popped up. That's really all there is, and we ran down then.'
'How big do you think it was? Was it as big as a bus ... a double-decker bus ... or ...?'
'Well, about as long as a coach or maybe a bit longer.'
'Was there any noise?'
'Yes. A humming noise.'
'Like anything you've ever heard before?'
'I don't believe so; no.'
'Was the sound like a generator or a saw cutting wood or ...?'
'No.'
'What did you think of it at the time?'
'Well, I didn't know what it was.'
'Were there any portholes or windows or anything that you could see?'
'I didn't see any. But there was a little sun and it could have been shining on them to match the colour of the ship.'
Pugh now turned to Michael Webb.
'What was your reaction, Michael, when David first spotted this craft and you first saw it?'
'I thought it was a UFO.'
'What made your thoughts run on those lines?'
'Well, a few days ago, up in Yorkshire, there was this sighting of a space-ship. It was exactly the same as we saw and ... well, nothing could have got into that field, man-made.'
'So the craft in the Yorkshire sighting was very similar to the one you saw in the field here and that made you think it was a UFO instead of anything man-made?'
'Yes.'
'Were either of you at all frightened? What reaction did you have?'
'Well, we didn't believe it at first,' Michael said. 'Then we looked again ... One of the other class boys ran down to tell "Sir". He didn't believe us at first but when we went down to tell him again, he started to believe us.'
'Did he come out?'
'No...'
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'Not at that point. But then I gather there was a second occasion when one of the lady teachers went out and saw it,' put in Pugh.
'I believe it was one of the cooks that saw it,' replied David.
'On the same day?'
'No, it was three days later.' [In fact it was on the 17th - thirteen days later.]
'I have a report about that, actually. What did it look like to you? You say it was silver, but say a little more about it. You see, we've never seen it.'
Michael replied: 'When I first looked at it it looked like two ordinary saucers put one against each other, to make a sort of dome. Then you've got a small ashtray, a round ashtray, put on top and that makes another sort of dome on top. And I thought I saw windows - about three or four windows round the edge on top of the dome. And a light flashing on top.'
'Any signs of activity?'
'No.'
'You didn't see any signs of life. How about you David?'
'No, not at all.'
'Although some of the other children thought they saw a man ...' said Pugh.
'There was one boy in the other class who thought he saw a man near the space-ship,' Michael affirmed.
'No markings like you seen on an aircraft, such as a British sign or a star or anything like that?'
'No.'
'Did it resemble any sort of farm implement?'
'The nearest I can think of... is a muck-spreader. That's the only thing I can think of that's near. And it's never that flat.'
'Yes,' agreed Pugh. 'And I examined the area myself for imprints and so on and a vehicle literally could not get into the field. How far away do you think you were when you saw it?'
'About ... four hundred yards,' said Michael. [An over-estimate - it was nearer 200 yards.]
'Did you feel any nervousness?'
'A bit.'
'What did you say to one another - "Come and have a look at this" - or did you all see it at the same time or ...?'
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'We were just standing. We didn't say anything.'
'You were frightened?'
'Yeah!'
'Didn't you feel curious enough to go closer to it?'
'We aren't allowed to go out of the school grounds or we would have gone a lot further.'
'There was one girl, wasn't there? Was she any more frightened than the rest?'
'She came after the rest of us had come up - she came running up.'
'And she saw it?'
'Yeah.'
'Have you any doubts now - that you imagined it? So many people must have asked you about it - are you still as sure as ever?'
'Yes.'
'And you, David?'
'Yes.'
'And then how did it go away when it went away?'
'It didn't. We never saw it go.'
'You just left it there because it was outside the school grounds?'
'When we looked at it we came back again after telling "Sir",' Michael replied. 'It was still there and then it started to shiver sort of thing and then it went behind a bush and we didn't see it after that.'
'So after school I went up there to see for myself,' said David.
'What did your parents say that first night when you went home and told them about it?'
'Well, my father believes there's something out there,' Michael replied.
'And your daddy's in the RAF, isn't he - a Squadron-Leader?'
'Yes. He was away that night - I told him the next day and he took it seriously.'
'How did your parents take it, David?'
'My mother asked me what it was like and things like that and then she immediately phoned you up.'
'Has anybody suggested to you that you were all having a joke - that you all went out one day and decided to pull everybody's leg?'
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'One person did - that was a few days ago. But if we had been doing that we would by now have to have told someone.'
'How did your drawings come about - I've seen them - did your headmaster ...?'
'It was a Friday - we did them on the Monday.'
'By the time you'd told the teacher all about it, what time of day was it then?'
'After we'd watched it for a couple of minutes and ran down and told "Sir",' said Michael. [The Broad Haven School UFO seems to have been visible intermittently between about 12.30 p.m. and 3.45 p.m.]
'He didn't believe you?'
'At first he thought it was a poppycock.'
'When you say "Sir" you mean ...?'
'The headmaster.'
'Did he ever go to look for it himself?'
'No, I don't think so.'
'In any case it was too late...' concluded Pugh.
This was the most lucid of the evidence we could draw from the Broad Haven Primary School pupils but certainly not the whole of it, as we shall see. Some of the children were clearly frightened by the incident and there are signs that a few of them hoped for a reassuring human explanation to the mystery. Some doubt was raised by the fact that of the sighters fourteen were boys and only one a girl. Was male chauvinism raising its ugly head even at this tender age? The doubts were resolved when it was pointed out that all the girls were at a football match!
Young Michael Webb's father is indeed an RAF officer. Squadron-Leader Tim Webb is, in fact, the chief instructor at RAF Brawdy's Tactical Weapons Unit, a NATO airbase used by both British and American fliers, at the northern corner of St Brides Bay. He had no doubts about the validity of his son's experience. 'I believe him implicitly,' he siad - had he supported the boy by taking him to be quizzed about what he had seen at a BBC Wales interview. 'I've yet to see a UFO,' Squadron-Leader Webb told the Observer, 'but I think it has to be something supernatural or paranormal.'
The other witnesses at Broad Haven Primary School presented and illustrated the theme in their own individual ways. Andrew
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Evans and David Ward thought the craft had stood on landing-legs. David R. George aged nine, was the boy who was convinced he had seen a humanoid. He wrote: 'I saw a saucer with a point. It was humming.' He said he also saw 'a silver man with spiked ears', and added that 'children were frightened'.
Jeremy Passmore, aged nine, related: 'I saw the UFO when it was dinner-time. It was a silvery-green and it had a yellow-orange to red docloured light. It was a disc at the bottom and a sort of dome on the top with a light. It was about 300 yards away. It moved a minute and then it disappeared. It did have a
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noise but I did not hear it. We felt very scared. David George wanted someone to go to the toilet with him. Tudor Jones was nearly crying because he was scared that he was going to be disintegrated or something. So we all rushed in. Some of our school did not believe us. We tried to make them believe but they would not.'
Philip James Reece, aged ten, recounted: 'My friends and I asked the headmaster to have a look at the object, but he refused. A couple of my friends saw the movement of a figure, but I did not. I was frightened. Two friends, Tudor and David, were very frightened.' The friends with him were: Jeremy Passmore, Shawn Garrison, David George, Martin Evans, Tudor Jones, David Davies and Michael Webb. Philip Reece added that he watched the object for about half an hour and it was still there when he returned to class at 2.00 p.m.
Tudor Jones said he saw the object at 1.00 p.m. and he knew this because 'my watch was on at the time'. He said the object was on the ground and disappeared behind bushes, adding: 'It made me cry and scared children.' However, firmly dismissing all talk of space-craft, he declared: 'I think it was man-made.'
In a written statement David Davies told us: 'We were standing by a fence watching the bush where it was sighted and Philip was trying to get a closer look when up from the bush popped a cigar-shaped object and then we all ran. The cigar object seemed to be tugging an object which was silver. Time sighted: 3.35 p.m., 4 February 1977.' He added: 'We had just come out of school.'
Several of the boys including Davies, Jones and Webb expressed the belief that the craft was stuck. In fact Tudor Jones wrote: 'Ship seemed to be stuck - tried to take off and then disappeared behind a bush.'
The land-surface certainly lent itself to the idea of a material vehicle sticking in the morass. But subsequent examination of the area failed to yield a particle of evidence that this had ever been the case.
The journalistic hubbub at Broad Haven thoroughly disrupted Mr Llewellyn's work schedules. But it in no way affected the manifestation of flying saucers in the little village, for these continued
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to be seen after the school affair just as they had been seen prior to it. What the publicity did was to sharpen public attention and bring forward witnesses who hitherto had been shy of being associated with such a 'wacky' subject. One of these was Dorothy Ethel Cale, a school meals supervisor, who had been driving a mile or two north of Broad Haven Primary School at 6.45 p.m. on Thursday, 9 December 1976. With her in the car were her son Nicholas, aged ten, and two friends, Mrs Yvonne Andrews and Mrs Anne Berry.
In a written statement, Mrs Cale explained to Randall Jones Pugh what it was that the party saw. 'On the evening of 9 December 1976, I was travelling in a friend's car with my ten-year-old son, from Broad Haven to Milford Haven, with another lady passenger. It was a cold, dry night with no moon. As we drove along the road between Walton West and Rosepool - a long, lonely road - there appeared, very suddenly, a very bright flashing light above the left-hand hedge. It was vaguely dome-shaped and as it flashed there appeared to be a zig-zag nucleus rather like an electric light filament. It gave a yellowish-white light which was so bright that it lit up the whole of the surrounding area and the sky above it. The driver stopped suddenly, thinking we were going to run into something, but after it had flashed four times, it disappeared. During the four seconds in which we observed it I had the impression that what we saw was the top of something which was obscured by the hedge. The size of the flashing object I would estimate to be about five or six feet across and about three feet high. The distance above ground-level was about fifteen to twenty feet - the hedge at this point along the road is quite high.'
There is no conclusive proof that Mrs Cale and her friends encountered a landed UFO hidden by a high hedge about a mile from Broad Haven Primary School some two months before the children had their experience. Even so, a brilliantly lighted flashing object with a dome-shaped upper portion is sufficiently unusual to make the matter a possibility.
Unaccountable lights frequently flew around the Broad Haven night sky during this period. Generally speaking, lights at night need to be treated with great caution by the investigator. The planets, high contrails of aircraft lit by the sun from below the
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horizon and the actual lights of planes, especially helicopters, are all easily mistaken by observers for something other than what they are. At the same time, some of these aerial lights performed antics so curious as to attract attention.
Norman John Davies, a forty-nine-year-old Broad Haven garage proprietor, told us how he and his wife saw something unusual at about 10.45 p.m. on 27 April 1977. He said: 'We - my wife and I - were standing on the slipway at the entrance to the beach. I suddenly noticed this light which was moving in short bursts of speed backwards and forwards. It moved about four times each way and then it made off along the skyline. It went behind a house and did not reappear. I noticed that the light would flash on very briefly and off for a much longer period. It was a bright moonlit night with only a wispy bit of cloud about. My wife also saw it.'
This seemed to us to be what was probably a genuine sighting of something not easily explainable in terms of aircraft. Even so, one felt on safer fround when dealing with objects having an actual profile. Such a sighting was in fact made from Broad Haven beach by a group of people in the early morning of 25 June 1977. We collected two accounts - one from Stephen Richard Bamford, a Ministry of Defense electrician, of 32 Atlantic Drive, Broad Haven, and the other from Robert Best, a local authority technician, of 19 Waterloo Square, Hakin, Milford Haven.
Stephen Bamford explained how he was coming home in a car with friends when they encountered a group of people on Broad Haven seafront watching something out at sea. The time was between 1.30 and 2.00 a.m. Stopping and looking in the same direction Mr Bamford saw a large orange shape in the sky. The object was sharply defined and the witnesses' first reaction was that it must be the dull moon emerging from cloud. They did not know that that night, in fact, the moon had just entered its first quarter. The object resembled a huge orange ball and it was bisected horizontally by two dark lines. Mr Bamford then saw that it was moving slowly from right to left.
To visualize the scene the reader should appreciate that the little group of observers were looking out to sea with the ten-mile rock wall of Dale peninsula on their immediate left. Exactly
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three miles out into the bay and half a mile out from the peninsula is a conspicuous reef called Stack Rock (which will feature significantly in Chapter Nine). The object seemed to emerge or appear from behind the Stack and drift gently left towards the land.
'It seemed to be oscillating or moving within itself.' Stephen Bamford told us. 'It moved across to the left and as it came towards the cliffs it went a darker red. The original colour was a bright orange - almost fluorescent in intensity. As it moved slowly to the left it began to get smaller and went a really dark red. It seemed to shrink up on itself. By then it was hovering over the cliff. We got back in the car and drove round to St Brides on the peninsula to see if we could get a closer look but we saw nothing.'
Robert Best's impression was that he saw a big orange ball divided into three by two black lines. He agreed that, as he watched, the thing diminished in size and ultimately disappeared. He watched it for about ten minutes. It seemed to be huge and he compared it to the size of a house.
Incidents of this sort, no matter how objective and fascinating, still left us hoping for a further demonstration of the phenomenon in a form as categoric as the school incident. Ideally, we would have liked a UFO to appear again on the ground and to be studied by an entirely responsible adult like Ralph Llewellyn. In the event something of this sort did occur and it taught us a little more about how these mysterious objects operate.
One evening Randall Jones Pugh phoned Ted Holiday to say that a lady in the Broad Haven area had recently seen something strange in a nearby cornfield. It was in an area about half a mile south-south-east of Broad Haven Primary School. Grabbing a camera and tape-recorder we hurried to the address Pugh had been given. To reach the place we had to pass the school and drive up a hill into the country beyond. The witness, Miss E. Griffiths, lived at Holme Dene, Walton West, in a modern bungalow in the very heart of the countryside. Her kitchen window provided an extensive view of rolling arable land, most of it under grass and corn. This was where she had watched the object in a tantalizingly short sighting. The recorded interview between Randall Jones Pugh and Miss Griffiths ran as follows:
'Can you tell me the date you saw this thing?'
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'A fortnight last Friday.'
'That would make it Friday, 6 May 1977. What were you doing, may I ask?'
'I was washing up the dinner things.'
'What time would that be?'
'I would say about a quarter past one in the afternoon. And I was washing up the dinner things, as I say, when I looked up and saw what I thought was a car in the field. That's what I thought. The sun was shining on it and I thought "There's no car in the cornfield." And it was all silver! Then I thought of a UFO.'
'What shape was it?'
'The shape of a car. Well, a car I thought it was. And about the same size as a car, looking at that distance. And it was all silver. At first I thought it was a car with the sun shining on it and then I thought, "You don't get a car in the middle of a cornfield." It was all silver - and then I thought of a UFO. And I watched it for a couple of minutes and all of a sudden it disappeared - it went into thin air.'
'While you were watching it, it actually disappeared?'
'It disappeared. I don't know where it went to - it just disappeared - while my eyes were on it. Then I knew it was a UFO. There was no mistake about it.'
'When you say "disappeared" you mean it was just like switching off an electric light - it "went out"?
'Yes. And then it appeared again about twenty yards further over into the field.'
'How long was that after the first view?'
'Oh, about a minute, I should say. And then it appeared again, exactly the same, all silver and the shape of a car, and I watched it ... and I was afraid to go and get my binoculars because I might miss something. And then I saw it moving on for about a couple of yards.'
'Now, when you say "it moved on", did you see it rise in the air?'
'No, it didn't rise. It was on the ground. And all of a sudden it disappeared again into thin air and I never saw no more of it.'
'Did it move along the ground slowly?'
'Yes, slowly. And then it disappeared again and I saw no more of it.'
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'And how long did you watch it after that?'
'I watched for quite a while but I saw no more.'
'What do you think the total time was that you had it under observation?'
'Oh ... a couple of minutes ... five minutes. I should say five minutes - and the gap in between - the total time I should say was five minutes.'
'You heard no noise?'
'No noise or nothing. But there it was - there was no mistake about it - it was one mass of silver.'
'Did you see any lights or figures?'
'No, nothing - only silver.'
'Were you frightened?'
'Not at all. It was such a long way away. It was what I thought was a car - at first.'
'We are now looking at the place where you saw it through your window and I would say it was about 400 yards away at a rough guess. Could you sort of pinpoint its position in the field?'
'Oh, yes. It was halfway up the field and nearly halfway across. And it moved over to the left and it was there a minute or two and it just went - like that - and it never came off the ground.'
Miss Griffiths was firm, calm and quite definite. The field where she watched the appearing/disappearing object was a gentle, rising slope in the middle distance. The field was planted to young corn. Scrutinizing it through binoculars we saw two dark patches in the position the suspected UFO had occupied. Clearly it was essential to have a much closer look.
The owner of the cornfield was a farmer, Miss Griffiths' nephew. After we had put through a phone call his wife and young family immediately drove out and accompanied us up a lane from which we gained access to the field. We then all set out to survey the ground.
It turned out to be a disappointing excursion because we had felt moderately confident that ground-traces of the phenomenon must have survived and would be awaiting discovery. Certainly we found the two patches. But it was impossible to determine whether they had been made by a large object resting on the ground or by a tractor turning when the field was set. In the patches there was no sign that the young corn had been burnt,
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nor did it appear stunted in growth. Playing for caution, we felt we had to assume the patches had been made by the tractor, although they were undoubtedly on the location where Miss Griffiths observed the object. The light, cultivated soil was still friable and would clealy have carried the imprints of a car or truck had one been driven through the field since the crop was set. No such marks were found despite a long search.
What this sighting seemed to demonstrate was that grounded UFOs could appear and disappear in situ. If so, this solved the problem of the school UFO which moved behind bushes and could not be located later. In this case the children had not been wrong and were simply attempting to explain a phenomenon impossible to rationalize by conventional physics.
We felt satisfied at this point that we had demonstrated, at least to ourselves, that both landed and flying UFOs did occur in the Broad Haven area. The flying saucer was an observable fact of nature, no matter how or from where it orgininated. But what lay at the back of these phenomena - did they indeed contain humanoid entities as strange in their physical attributes as the machines they deployed? If such creatures existed, then what possible interest could they have in the human race? The answers to some of these questions became somewhat clearer in the next few weeks.
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CHAPTER TWO - FIGURES IN THE NIGHT
In other words, we should not ask what light really is. Particles and waves are both constructs of the human mind, designed to help us speak about the behaviour of light in different circumstances. With Bohr we give up the naive concept of reality, the idea that the world is made up of things, waiting for us to discover their nature. The world is made up by us, out of our experiences and the concepts we create to link them together.Professor Otto Frisch, The Nature of Matter (1972)
Moving south from Broad Haven the visitor encounters the adjacent village of Little Haven after travelling no more than half a mile along the sinuous, narrow coastal road. The two communities are connected by isolated houses and the occasional hotel. One of these is the Haven Fort Hotel.
The Haven Fort is in fact a converted fortification which was in active use during the seventeenth century although the site, as a strong-point, has a far earlier history. The house stands on a knoll about eighty feet above sea-level. One of the screening-walls of the old fortification is still standing and has been incorporated into the modernized structure.
Rose Granville, her husband and her daughter, Francine, took over the Have Fort Hotel in 1970. One of Mrs Granville's aims, in an effort to extend the activities of the hotel beyond the summer tourist months, was to try and make the property viable in winter with a bar and a supper-club. When she was told by old local inhabitants that the site was haunted by a 'white lady' she ignored the story. It was because she wished to play down such legends that she hesitated so long before telling us about
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her encounter with a UFO and its occupants. Arguing against ghosts while reporting flying saucers is not perhaps the strongest logic. However, events forced Mrs Granville's hand.
She phoned up Randall Jones Pugh and complained that a strange, low-level light had been circling the field by the side of her house. She was not so much nervous as uneasy.
'I went to bed last night at 1 o'clock in the morning. Then I went to the bathroom, next to my bedroom, and had a look through the window. I then saw a flash like a star - like a blowlamp.'
'Was this on the ground or in the air?' Pugh asked.
'This was in the air - it was circling the field. It wasn't in the same place as I saw it before - it was over on this side. I thought at first it was a helicopter but I heard no noise at all.'
'It was a bluish light, you say?' Pugh asked.
'Yes. It's a light you don't usually see with helicopters. Bluey - like a blow-lamp. It was circling all the way, round and round, and then it disappeared. I didn't see any shape at all.'
'How high would it have been from the ground?'
'Much higher than the television aerial but not that high it could have been a shooting star. It was definitely higher than the TV mast. I keep a camera in my bedroom and if it does happen again I want to take pictures. It wasn't an aeroplane - definitely. It was like as if - you know, something like a lighthouse.'
'You mean pulsating?'
'Yes, exactly.'
Mrs Granville went to her bedroom, fetched her camera and then switched off all the hotel lights. For half an hour she waited in total darkness hoping for the light to reappear so that she could get a photograph, but nothing showed up.
Pugh suspected there was more to this than met the eye. People do not usually scan the night sky for strange lights before going to bed. In any case, why all this preparation of cameras - what did Mrs Granville really hope to film? What were the exact details of the experience she mentioned? Eventually Mrs Granville told the full story and here is the account she gave to Randall Jones Pugh:
'What is your full name, please?' asked Pugh.
'Rose Granville, Haven Fort Hotel, Little Haven.'
'And your occupation is...?'
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'Hotelier.'
'Can you describe for me the extraordinary events of Tuesday 19 April 1977?'
'About 2 o'clock I went to bed and I picked up a book to read. Then I realized I was getting a humming noise similar to the one I get from my central heating.'
'This is not normal at this time of the morning?'
'Yes, it is normal if I leave it switched on. Owing to the explosions of gas and what-have-you I have been very cautious and last thing at night I always switch off the central heating and electrical appliances for safety's sake. I thought at that point that I had forgotten to switch off the central heating.'
'So this humming noise resembled the noise from your boiler monitor and so on?'
'Yes. So I was debating for a good ten minutes whether to get up and go down and look.'
'So this noise was present all the time?'
'All the time, yes. Eventually I decided "Well, I'd better" and I got up and decided to go nearer to the boiler to listen if I had actually left it on. So I came out of my bedroom, past the public bathroom, and to the fire-escape door, which is just above the boiler-house. And I realized then that the noise was not exactly like my boiler usually gives. Although it souned the same in the bedroom, on coming nearer to the boiler I realised it was different. I then thought of a ship, because we do get a lot of ships in the bay, and I looked out. When I went to bed it was quite damp and dark - it wasn't a nice night. But now when I looked out I saw it was quite a lit-up, moonlit night.' [In fact moonlight was at minimum - New Moon was on 18 April 1977.]
'So when you drew your curtains apart you saw a light in the field?'
'In the field, yes. I looked and saw this light was like a painter's blow-lamp, you know - and it was a kind of bluey colour - sort of on and off.'
'Pulsating.'
'Yes, so I thought, "Oh, dear, someone is trying to break in here." You see, I've got a cottage out there and some chickens. So I looked again - I'd got my binoculars by then - and I saw two figures. But first of all I saw this object.'
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'It had a shape?'
'Yes, it was a round object.'
'Large?'
'Oh, yes. I would say about two yards in diameter.' It was an ovalish thing, you know, ovalish-round.'
'Like a rugby ball?'
'Not quite. Give me a pen and I'll draw it for you. You see ... this is how it was.'
'I see. So it was resting on the ground?'
'Yes. This part was resting on the ground and this part was upwards. Now in this corner of the field there's a gate and between this object and the gate were two figures.'
'How tall would you say they would be?'
'Oh, six-and-a-half to seven foot. Rather tallish men.'
'What were they dressed in, Mrs Granville?'
'It was a sort of whitish, plasticated ... I don't know what it was. It was definitely not silvery.'
'What did the clothes resemble?'
'Boiler suits.'
'Did they have anything round the waist?'
'No, I can't remember that. It looked like a boiler suit. It was as if it was the same thing from head to toe.'
'Presumably they had arms and legs?'
'This is what I'm trying to tell you. They had rather longish legs.'
'Were they thin or stout?'
'Medium, I would say. They had rather longish arms. I thought they had longish arms because they were stooping and measuring something and climbing up the bank.' [On a later occasion Mrs Granville asked us if we had seen a gibbon ape in the zoo. She likened the creatures' long arms to those of a gibbon.]
'Did you see their features?'
'Yes, they did turn round. They were turning round and observing ... but they had no features at all - it was just a blank face.'
'No eyes, no ...?'
'Nothing! I couldn't even see a spot! They had just a blank face. They were definitely not ghosts.'
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Mrs Granville said that at this point sh
