In the 1970s, a Welsh seaside village found itself at the heart of one of the biggest UFO media “flaps” of all time.
Broad Haven, on the corner of St Bride’s Bay in Pembrokeshire, was the scene of several unexplained sightings of cigar-shaped flying machines. The most widely-reported incident involved 14 children from Broad Haven Primary School, who noticed a space ship parked in a field near their playground. They even sketched the object, as shown in the featured image above.
It was dubbed the Broad Church Triangle, the Welsh Triangle, and the Dyfed Triangle by various members of the press, with the Sun running the headline “Spaceman Mystery of the Terror Triangle.” One witness claimed to see two “humanoids” inside the strange craft.
The mystery has never been convulsively solved, although theories include local pranksters, that the aliens were local oil workers dressed in protective suits, and that the grounded space ship could have been a sewage tank.
Ministry of Defence ‘secret investigation’
The Watchers by Neil Spring is described as “a gripping paranormal and science-fiction mystery that intertwines the imaginative and the suspenseful with historical UFO sightings”, revealed details of a declassified MoD (Ministry of Defence) document which suggests top-ranking officials carried out a covert inquiry into the 1977 sightings in Wales.
At the time, MoD officials expressed no interest in the sightings, saying there was no threat to national security.
However, among the documents was a letter from the head of the MoD’s S4 wing to the Provost & Security Service, the RAF’s internal police force.
The S4 chief wrote “I have not even told the Minister I am consulting you” and called for a “discreet enquiry” after expressing bewilderment at the number of apparently “level-headed” witnesses to the strange activity.
The author of the explosive novel Mr Spring said: “(The new witness’) testimony rocked the very foundations of the British Government. He claimed he had visited Broad Haven a sceptic, and came away convinced that some of the locals knew far more about the mysterious occurrences of 1977 than they are willing to reveal.
The disclosures prompted House of Lords member and Conservative life peer, Lord Black of Brentwood to call for a full explanation from the MoD of what it uncovered.
The Tory peer has been long involved in getting official government files of UFO sightings and inquiries made public.
Lord Black said: “A number of recently released MoD files leave little doubt that a small number of sightings of aerial phenomena – particularly by military personnel, pilots and air traffic controllers – remain unexplained and unidentified.
“There needs to be further examination of these issues in the hope of learning something new.”
Eyewitness statements
For to this day, even as adults, few people who witness strange activities on that day maintain there was only one description of what they’d seen – an Unidentified Flying Object .
Schoolboy David Davies, in the playground on that February Friday afternoon, stood looking at something that would leave him with a lifetime’s fascination and a drive to get to the truth of what that strange object was.
“It was pearlescent silvery-grey,” he says, “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.”
Upset their claims were being ignored, David and his classmates handed in a petition to the police station.
In the end, the headmaster separated the children and asked them to draw what they had seen under exam conditions. He was amazed to find their drawings were almost identical to each other.
Forty years on and the people of Broad Haven are still seeking answers over the mysterious happenings which left experts baffled and sparked a secret military investigation.
featured image via © Western Mail walesonline
