The Broad Haven school kids who spotted a UFO

In 1977, aliens touched down in the seaside resort of Broad Haven, Wales, for a nose around. It led to the area being dubbed the Broad Haven Triangle. The most famous was a sighting by 14 schoolchildren…

It was a cold day in February when the children of Broad Haven Primary School saw a UFO land in the playing field next to their school during lunchtime. It was torpedo-shaped, shiny grey, and had an upper dome with a blinking red light. Some of the kids saw a silver-clad spaceman emerge from the craft.

Convinced they were telling porkies, headmaster Ralph Llewellyn asked the 14 children to draw what they’d seen under exam conditions so there could be no conferring. He was astonished by how similar their drawings were.

The children proceeded to sign a petition demanding a police investigation into what they saw.

The children, now in their 50s, have not wavered from their original accounts in all the years since. One of the kids, David Davies, aged 10 at the time, said a few years ago:

“The object was pearlescent silvery-grey, approximately 40ft long, torpedo/cigar-shaped with an upper domed section that covered the central third of the vehicle and which was topped with a red pulsating light. It popped up and then went back behind a tree. The sighting, despite only lasting a few seconds, is burned on my memory like a photograph. I’ve spent my entire life and countless thousands of pounds trying to find answers about what we saw.”

A spate of further local sightings followed. A few days later, a teacher and three dinner ladies saw the same UFO. One of them reported seeing a “creature” making its way into the craft.

Two months later, Rosa Granville, owner of the Haven Fort Hotel, was woken at 2.30am by a series of strange noises and lights. She reportedly saw an “upside-down saucer” next to the hotel, surrounded by multicoloured flames, and two “faceless humanoid” creatures with pointed heads emerging from the flames.

Alright, so Granville’s account sounds far-fetched, and the sightings at the school had already been in every newspaper by then, so perhaps she was just jumping on the UFO bandwagon.

But then there were the strange happenings at Ripperston Farm. Pauline and Billy Coombs reported a series of bizarre events that they said were scaring their cattle. Pauline also said that when she was driving her children to school, her car was pursued by something resembling “a rugby ball that was on fire”. Then one night both Pauline and Billy phoned 999 when a 7ft-tall figure in “a spacesuit” appeared suddenly at their living room window.

The constable who attended their farmhouse said that in his 26 years as a police officer the Coombs were “the most frightened family I have ever been to see”.

So what on earth was going on in Broad Haven in 1977?

Terrestrial or extra-terrestrial?

Alien hunters and conspiracy junkies would probably say that the 1977 sightings were the result of extra-terrestrial visitation. The same aliens who are observing us, abducting us, covertly interfering in our politics. The ones responsible for all the other UFO and abduction cases around the world, and all the government cover-ups connected with them.

Of course, not a single case concerning aliens has been proven. Not Roswell. Not Rendlesham Forest. Not Betty and Barney Hill. They’re all still confined, officially at least, to the realm of science fiction, conspiracy theory, and psychopathology.

What if something more earthly was going on in 1977? Headmaster Ralph Llewellyn said he was certain the Broad Haven schoolchildren “saw something they hadn’t seen before”, but said nothing about aliens. And interestingly, David Davies said that he had “never suggested that what we saw was of extra-terrestrial origin.”

So what could it have been?

Broad Haven Primary School was close to RAF Brawdy, which housed a tactical weapons unit and a US navy “underwater research station”, which — it’s now known — actually tracked the movements of Soviet submarines. Also nearby, in the seaside village of Aberporth, was a top-secret rocket testing station. It would appear that this quiet corner of South-West Wales was home to more than a few military secrets, if not alien ones.

A few years ago, a former US Navy sailor argued that the figure in the silver suit was in fact a US military officer in their standard fireproof uniform, and that the UFOs were new Harrier jets. Meanwhile others have argued that the schoolchildren saw an agricultural vehicle of some kind.

But David Davies strenuously denies these speculations. He says:

“Many suggestions have been made that what we saw was either an agricultural vehicle or an aircraft from nearby RAF Brawdy. I’d like to state categorically that this is not the case as the majority of the children at the school, myself included, came from farming backgrounds and would have been able to identify any agricultural vehicle and because of Brawdy’s proximity we were also familiar with almost every RAF aircraft in the skies.”

So where does that leave us? Flight Lieutenant Cowan of RAF Brawdy looked into the UFO claims at the time and agreed that the descriptions of aliens “fitted exactly the type of protection suit that would have been issued in the event of a fire at one of the local oil refineries”. He mentioned the possibility that a “local prankster was at work”.

But that really doesn’t explain the 40ft, cigar-shaped, dome-topped flying object the children saw. Perhaps Cowan was just trying to divert our attention?

I suspect this object wasn’t an alien spaceship. It wasn’t an agricultural vehicle, or a Harrier jet, or any other known aircraft.

It was one of two things. A secret, highly advanced craft or machine being tested by a clandestine branch of the military. Or a time machine from a post-apocalyptic future and its occupants were in spacesuits because the Earth they’d come from no longer had any breathable air.

Sorry, just went all Doctor Who on you. But hey, you know I’ve got a hard-on for time travel ;-)

Next week: the question on everyone’s lips — did Donald Trump fire James Comey to cover something up?