01x03 - The Broad Haven Triangle

[bunniefuu]

Now, what do you make of this next story?

An investigation has begun into a claim

that something strange

came out of the skies

and landed in the Welsh village

of Broad Haven, near Haverfordwest.

Well, I can't remember

who saw it first.

We were in our school playground,

lunchtime break,

just down by this tree over here.

It was '77. February '77.

Yeah, we played here.

Knocking rounders and knocking the ball

into the stream over there.

Whatever it was, was spotted three times

by children from the local school.

I think I remember

somebody saying, "What's that?"

Everybody just ran up.

It was a sprint between all of us

to the end of the field here

and find out exactly

what we were looking at.

Is it all really a case of mass hysteria,

or is there some reality in the unreal?

Yeah, after that, almost straightaway,

other people saw, you know,

some pretty strange things.

There was a lot of activity,

or a lot of sightings, or a lot of

Yeah, a lot of things were happening.

And this is where it landed. Here.

The people who live

around Broad Haven will tell you

that what they have experienced

is real enough.

From the beginning

of recorded time,

men have been seeing

unexplainable things in the sky.

Are we alone in the universe?

Somewhere in the data

will be something worth real inquiry.

We have not been hiding anything.

There are such things

as interplanetary spaceships.

I thought it was an alien,

and he had big eyes.

There's something

profoundly important going on here

that is authentic and real.

So, Kevin

tell me a secret

that you haven't told anyone

about the phenomenon.

Oh, are we filming?

You know, for our whole lives,

and our parents' whole lives,

since the 1940s,

we've been told by authorities

and scientists that this is ridiculous.

That this is nonsense.

And I think that's the main reason

why you don't have many serious,

or until recently, you have had

very few serious scientists studying this.

I would say, there's probably

on the order of 15 experts in the world.

That, to me, is shocking,

and it suggests that there's something

maybe deeper than the stigma,

and all of the obvious things,

that are preventing people

from studying this.

That maybe people don't want to know

what this phenomena is.

Maybe people don't wanna know the truth.

Maybe it scares them a bit, somehow.

It was a lovely little village.

It-It still is.

Very quiet during the winter,

absolutely mad during the summer

with the holidaymakers.

But it was a great place to grow up in.

I wouldn't describe myself

as one of the popular children in school.

I was overweight as a child,

I was a bit of a bookworm,

and I was teased and bullied

because of that.

I probably relate more to cats

than I do to human beings.

It was a horrible day,

uh, drizzling, damp,

and I'd spent most of the day indoors,

so I hadn't actually gone out

with a lot of the others to play.

The other children had been

coming in from playtime.

And

they'd been saying

that they'd seen a flying saucer,

but I just totally regarded the stories

as being nonsense.

To me, flying saucers didn't exist.

They were in bad 1950s sci-fi movies,

or they were in tabloid newspapers,

you know.

But at the end of the day, I thought,

"This is getting ridiculous.

I'm going to have a look for myself."

I left school.

Proceeded all the way up

to the top of the field.

And from behind some trees,

this thing popped up in front of me.

Silver, cigar-shaped,

about 45 feet long.

And there was just this thought

that came into my mind

to say that I had to run away.

I did go home

and tell my mum and dad,

and they weren't judgmental in any way.

They believed me and, uh,

believed that what I saw, I believed.

You know mothers.

They can tell when you're lying.

And she was absolutely convinced

that what I was saying was the truth.

She contacted a gentleman

called Randall Jones Pugh,

a close family friend.

Randall Pugh

is a retired vet

who acts as regional investigator

for the British UFO Research Association.

We have a phenomenon

which I think will be with us

for a very, very long time,

if we ever do, indeed, unravel it at all.

Terry, if you take that sector over there

- This sector on

- That sector there.

And I'll go to, uh, northwest.

He came as quickly as possible,

and he brought with him a local reporter

from the Western Telegraph.

The sighting had happened on the Friday.

By Monday morning, things had gone crazy.

Today, one group of children

showed me the spot where they saw

what they think

was some kind of spaceship.

Suddenly, the silver, cigar-shaped object

seemed to pop up from behind the bushes,

and, uh, trying to take off,

then it disappeared again.

It was nighttime.

I was ten years old.

I switched on the TV,

and on the children's Newsround program

was this amazing story.

The spaceship, it looked

a cigar shape with a dome on it.

When you're about nine, ten years old,

it's sort of, like,

a very formative period.

Your imagination is running wild,

and UFOs was something

that we were all interested in.

We have received many reports

of UFO sightings over Mobile.

Greetings!

We come from France.

- Yes.

- Oh!

1977 was a bumper year for UFOs.

- The numbers of sightings were increasing.

- Well, it was roughly over there.

The press interest

was increasing.

Late last night

While wishing on a star ♪

I was completely obsessed

with UFOs and aliens at the time.

The culmination of a lot of this

was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

And it was trailed incessantly.

And then, the film itself was just like

all the things I'd been reading about.

Down from the sky came a man in a car ♪

And also,

it was a pretty miserable time.

There was fuel shortages.

We were in the middle of the Cold w*r

with the Soviet Union.

Come on, let's go for a ride

Outta sight ♪

I remember distinctly seeing this diagram

in my local newspaper

that had an area showing the blast zone.

And I was working out

whether I'd be vaporized

or whether I'd manage to get home in time.

So, there was all that going on.

So, UFOs and aliens and,

you know, visits from outer space

was like escapism for me at the time.

You know, it was a world

you could sort of escape into.

I saw a flying saucer,

or you might call it a UFO.

It was over in those trees over there.

And this was definitely

the biggest, most bizarre story

to have emerged from the UK.

And it totally absorbed my life.

What I found is

that clearly something happened.

What it was, we don't know.

As soon as we arrived in school

on the Monday morning,

the headmaster separated us.

And we were told to write an account

and draw a picture of what we'd seen.

We drew pictures, and, um,

nobody knew what anybody else was drawing.

We'd seen the same thing,

so the chances were we were gonna,

hopefully, you know,

draw pretty much the same thing.

Now, this wasn't like today.

There was no social media.

There was no mobile phones.

So, there was no opportunity

for us to have got together.

No way we could have collaborated.

The headmaster had us all fresh.

He collected the accounts

and was noticeably shocked

by how similar the accounts

and the descriptions were.

Well, to find out more,

I've just been on the phone

to their headmaster, Mr. Llewellyn.

I know that,

uh, 16 children saw it.

And did they all see

the same thing?

There's a common core of similarity

between all their descriptions.

I-I-I got them to draw

and to write what they saw.

Within the images

that the children have drawn,

there are clearly a lot of similarities.

You've got the shapes in them all.

You've got the fact

that they're all the same color.

They've got the red light

flashing on top of the vehicle as well.

"This is the object I saw

on Friday, February 4th."

"It was dome-shaped."

"It had 10 or 11 windows near the top

and has a door with a runway."

There's no one on planet Earth

who doesn't know

what a flying saucer looks like.

Looking at some of those drawings,

you can see where some of these elements

from pop culture came in.

And I'm thinking of one film in particular

that I know was showing on BBC.

Forbidden Planet.

There's a good chance

that some of the kids had seen that.

Now, that isn't to say that,

"Oh, they saw the film,

so they just imagined it."

But if you're steeped in sort of, like,

the films and pop culture of the time,

all those things that are in your head

become part of it.

People are steeped in this stuff.

They watch

Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

They watch Doctor Who.

They watch The Day the Earth Stood Still.

That kind of thing.

It's there in their heads.

I had always been interested

in UFOs.

I was 12 when Star Wars came out,

now 45 years ago this year.

And so, it was

It was that

that impressionable age, you know.

And it was around that same time

that you had shows on TV

like In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy.

Perhaps it's time to approach

the question of UFOs again,

without bias.

The study of exoplanets basically consists

of the search for and characterization

of planets orbiting other stars.

When the New York Times article came out,

where we learned about the AATIP program

that had been studying UAPs

and that this was a serious problem

UAP reports need to be understood

as a national security matter.

When we spot something we don't understand

or can't identify in our airspace,

it's the job of those we entrust

with our national security

to investigate and to report back.

I thought,

"Scientists need to be studying this."

"This is really something

that should be studied."

So, I I decided to do it.

We're in a difficult state of ignorance.

We don't know what they are.

We don't know what their intentions are.

Intention is everything, right?

And so, we don't really know

what these things are.

And, here, I'm really hypothesizing

that these are non-human entities

in control of these crafts.

So that's already a huge hypothesis

that we don't have a lot of evidence for.

But there are other

possible hypotheses still.

Are you sure

it wasn't a helicopter

or an aircraft

from the airfield near here?

Well, a helicopter could land there,

but it that's private property

over there,

and if they landed there,

they could be prosecuted.

And with an aircraft, the only thing

that could get in there was a Harrier.

Most of us kids, especially the boys,

we were familiar with almost everything

that NATO was flying in the sky

at the time,

because we were so close to RAF Brawdy.

I think people naturally thought

that, "Well, if anything flies,

it must be something to do

with the Royal Air Force."

RAF Brawdy, at that time,

was an area where we could

carry out our flying training,

which involved using, uh, weapons systems.

I had arrived as a flight lieutenant

in my early thirties,

which I wasn't really sure where it was.

But it was as far away

as you could be in Wales,

bordering on the Atlantic Ocean,

next stop, America.

As the community relations officer

and the press officer,

I was the link

between the RAF inside the fence

and the community outside the fence.

I was getting an increasing number

of reports of sightings,

things that couldn't easily be explained.

And I also took the reports

very seriously.

And there was one occasion

where a lady in Haverfordwest,

at one of the local hotels,

Mrs. Granville I think it might have been,

was adamant that she'd seen something land

outside the hotel.

My mother was Rosa,

but was known as Rose Granville.

She'd been born in Barcelona.

Met my dad, I think, when she was 18,

and they married.

And then, of course,

he brought her back to Wales.

This is just after the w*r,

and there was a certain animosity

to foreign people, generally.

They felt a certain uneasiness.

It was like we were something

apart from everyone else.

We bought this place in 1967.

It was an old smuggler's fort,

and we converted it into a hotel.

It mainly meant to be for my daughter.

This is a photograph

of my mother and I.

She's in her white, old kitchen overalls.

I'm in my clothes,

ready to do some hotel work.

A lot of people thought it was haunted.

It was just this legend.

They said that a white lady haunted

It was known as the Havens then.

We never had any experience

with any ghost.

People in the Welsh valleys

were very religious, in a formal sense.

You know, they all went

to church on Sunday.

As well as that,

they had this strong belief

in the supernatural that was older,

that dated back way before Christianity,

and they held onto that.

My career has been mainly

as a writer and a journalist.

And my other interest is folklore,

which is what I did my PhD in.

I wasn't the first.

There was a book

by a French computer scientist

called Jacques Vallee

called Passport to Magonia.

And the subtitle to that was,

"From folklore to flying saucers."

You were the person

that Steven Spielberg modeled

the character of a UFO researcher on

in his classic movie

Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

One of my interests, as you know,

has been to look at ancient sightings,

before World w*r Two, for example,

when there is really no confusion

with modern technology.

If nothing else,

I think this is part of our folklore.

This is something that we should

be studying as part of our folklore.

So that's what really got me into the

the folklore aspect of this

and looking at some

of these old traditions and stories.

And they are particularly rich in Wales.

In Celtic folklore,

fairies were enormously important,

and still are, even to this day.

It was only

in the sort of Victorian period

that people started to get

this romantic idea

that fairies were

little Tinkerbell characters

and that these creatures were

sort of benevolent

and that they were wanting to help humans

with their magic spells

and this kind of thing.

Fairies, in Welsh tradition,

didn't behave anything like

the modern idea.

I mean, we're talking about

a race of creatures who coexisted with us,

and they were never very friendly.

They had all kinds of amazing abilities,

like the ability to travel

at tremendous speed,

to magic people away,

to erase their memory.

So they played tricks on people.

And if you got on the wrong side of them,

really bad things could happen.

Mother was in the third room,

along there.

The second floor.

As soon as I got to bed,

I could see

this huge big light was pulsating.

She looked through the window,

and she saw this thing

sort of hovering.

It was so intensive

that I could hardly open my eyes.

And some These two

Well, I don't know what you'd call them.

figures had come out of it.

They had both very long arms

and very long legs.

But they had no features at all.

They seemed a little unsteady,

from what she said.

She shouted, "What do you want?"

We had some chickens not far from there,

and I think she was worried about

her chickens more than anything else.

And as I did that,

the heat from the saucer hit me.

And this flying saucer

went up in such a speed,

but as if it was just one big dream,

as if I was just imagining, you know?

My father returned

a day or two later.

She told him.

Then my father wrote to tell me about it.

And I thought it was ridiculous.

I said to myself, "They've all gone mad!"

You know, the schoolchildren

and my mother, by the sound of it.

When I came back, my dad said,

"Whatever this thing was,

it has left a mark."

So I said, "Oh, let's go and have a look."

And we walked up the field together,

and there was this mark on the ground.

The grass looked as though it was burnt,

and there was a ridge.

It was the ridge

more than anything else, really,

as though something had been there.

When I started looking into these stories,

I was writing to the Ministry of Defence

and visiting some of these people

and interviewing them.

Then we got Freedom of Information.

We can actually get information

out of the government.

We can get files from 20, 30, 40 years ago

that we've never been able to see.

And the West Wales incidents

were in there.

Rosa Granville writes to her local MP,

Nicholas Edwards.

"This has left me

greatly agitated and disturbed,

and not the least bit desirous

of another encounter."

I love that phrase.

Nicholas Edwards sends this

to the Ministry of Defence,

who contacts RAF Brawdy,

speaks to the community relations officer.

I went there, uh, spoke to the lady.

Unfortunately,

I couldn't find any evidence,

any physical evidence

that anything had landed there.

I then, as I did always,

passed that report

up to the Ministry of Defence.

"I'm unable to offer

any explanation other than above."

"But should a UFO arrive at RAF Brawdy,

we will charge normal landing fees

and inform you immediately."

What came back

was that they knew nothing about it,

and they had asked us

not to talk about it.

They didn't want people frightened by it.

Can you honestly say

that people are not being hoaxed,

are not being spoofed, in this area?

I am absolutely positive

that no human being can simulate

the extreme agitation,

the extreme fright

which some of these people

have undergone and have exhibited.

It was about this time

in the evening when I had my experience.

Nothing has changed since then.

Um, it's virtually exactly how it is now.

Just a little bit further down

is where my experience started.

And, as it happened,

I happened to be down here on my own.

If you look across there now, that

The field in the background

with a big slope,

on the top of that was a glow.

And I noticed that in this glow

was like an upside-down saucer.

And I heard the hedge moving

a little bit further down.

And it was very, very quiet,

and then this thing

stepped out of the hedge.

This is where it came out the hedge,

about here.

And I was up by the gate there.

It was a good seven feet tall.

It had like a silver suit

with like a motorbike visor.

That's all it had for a face.

Very, very dark.

I thought, "Good God, what is that?"

"What is "I thought, "That's not a man."

"No way is that a man."

It started walking up towards me.

I thought, "No, this isn't happening."

I back up onto the laneway there.

As you can imagine, I was quite scared.

So I stood here.

It just kept walking towards me.

So I legged it.

I run up to where that telegraph pole is.

If you can imagine, I'm running now.

As I got to here, something told me,

"Turn around and stop, and have a look."

So I stopped, and I turned around,

and it was standing

where that bare patch is

in the middle of the road, staring.

It was unbelievable.

- And I thought

- "No, I-I'm going."

"I'm not I'm not having this. I'm"

And I just I legged it home.

It really freaked me out.

My dad came down the next day

to have a look,

to see if there was anything else about.

And, at the time

this road here had a lot of soft mud

on the edge of it.

And when my dad came down,

he did notice one one massive footprint,

which was too big

to be an ordinary man's footprint.

He found a footprint about that size.

Yeah, my auntie Pauline

got in touch with me.

And all she said, "Tell me, boy."

She said, "What did you see?"

And I told her exactly

what I'd seen, like.

And she said,

"You're all right though, are you?"

I said, "Yeah." I said, "I'm all right."

And then, it was

I think it was about three

or four weeks after, something like that,

and she seen, virtually,

the same as what I seen.

When you're an ordinary

farming family,

and you're convinced

you've seen spaceships

and creatures from another planet,

how do you persuade friends,

neighbors, and the world in general,

that you've not taken leave

of your senses?

That's the constant problem

that's faced Billy and Pauline Coombs

since they became involved

in one of the country's most celebrated

UFO sightings two years ago.

It started off

with a car drive.

Pauline Coombs was driving back

to the farmhouse.

I think it was with three of the children

in the car.

And the youngest one, Kieron,

saw what looked like

a football-shaped object

that was following them

along this dirt road.

And they got more and more

worked up and frightened.

The car engine stalled.

When it happened to me the first time,

I thought, you know,

"I'm imagining things."

But there's been so much, you know,

happening to this place

that I've gone to believe

it's definitely happening.

Billy Coombs was a herdsman.

He was responsible for,

I think, about 120 dairy cattle.

One night, the gate was tied and bolted.

And he'd just sort of been distracted

by something, gone back.

This must have been

eleven o'clock at night.

Then he got a call

from his neighbor on another farm,

about a mile and a half away, saying,

"Why are all your cows in my yard?"

And he couldn't explain it,

because how could they possibly

have got from one place to another?

- You had 120 cows

- Yes.

teleport from one field

to another?

To another farm.

That is exactly

the sort of tricks

that the Welsh fairies

used to sort of play.

That kind of thing.

And then, after that

came the silver-suited man,

which was the most terrifying experience

of it all.

It was 10:00 on a Thursday.

I went to make a cup of tea

to watch a late-night film.

They were sitting there

watching the television,

and they noticed something silver

by the window.

The biggest thing I ever seen, like.

I got up I couldn't believe my eyes.

So I got up

and went straight to the window

and looked up, and

Well, he was above the window.

It's at least eight feet. At least.

Well, this thing was that tall,

they couldn't see its face.

So, when Pauline went upstairs

to wake the two young daughters,

this thing's head

was just below the bedroom window.

And she could see

that it had no facial features at all.

Exactly what I'd seen.

The police were called out

the night of the incident

at the Coombs's farm.

Sergeant Ernie, of Dyfed Police,

answered the call.

It's probably,

of all the incidents

in my 26 years' service,

that's the most frightened family

I've come across.

Another time,

it was, you know, quite late,

like 2:00 in the morning,

and we heard the doorbell ring.

And we'd not seen anyone

approach the hotel,

come up the drive,

either in a car or, um, on foot.

So I went to the door,

and there were these two guys.

They looked like identical twins.

They had hair that was slicked back,

like, um, patent leather.

But what I found quite remarkable

was their complexion.

Is your mother home?

as if they were made of wax.

They just said to her,

"We'd like to come back

and speak to you at length,

but we have an appointment in Croesgoch."

I got a bit worried about this

because, I mean, they looked so odd!

They walked

towards their vehicle.

Gone.

They just vanished.

Well, at the same time,

they had visited Pauline's farm,

which is really odd.

And she said, basically,

at the same time they were with us,

they were there as well.

The second incident was late afternoon.

My mother and I were sat in the restaurant

when we noticed something in the sky.

It was like a silver disc,

looking at it at first.

And then, it seemed to pulsate light,

an orange light.

Now, this time,

I had to ring up Mrs. Coombs

to prove to me

that I wasn't seeing things.

And she said,

"Yes, we are watching it now."

"My mum, my dad, and all our children,

we're all watching this."

To us, it seemed to go down into the sea.

But the Coombs had seen it,

and they said it had gone

into the Stack Rock, which is an island.

The reason why

the Stack Rocks has taken on this mystique

is because it's equidistant

between all the key places.

And, obviously, they could both see it

from their respective homes,

from a different angle.

She said that, from her direction,

the rock had opened like a door,

and they disappeared.

This isn't anything new.

Ships' logs have information

about UFOs coming out of the water,

hovering next to the ships,

and then taking off,

going back into the 1800s.

Um, this has

This has been going on a long time.

The marine aspect of UAPs,

or UFOs, is really interesting.

That is that they are very often

associated with water.

They're very often seen

coming out of water,

seen going into water,

and sometimes seen underwater.

So we now know

that planets are very common.

In fact, planets in the habitable zone,

which is the region

where you can potentially have

liquid water on the surface,

those planets are relatively common.

About one in five stars has a planet

in the habitable zone,

which is really pretty remarkable

when you think about it.

Oceans are great places to live,

especially if you're going to go

from planet to planet.

Atmospheres are not very stable

with respect to temperature.

So, you go to Venus

and you're looking at

800 degrees Fahrenheit,

and 100 times

the atmospheric pressure on Earth.

However, if you're on Mars,

you're looking at something

like 100 degrees below zero

with one one-hundredth

of the atmospheric pressure on Earth.

Living on surfaces with atmospheres

is really pretty horrible.

If you live in an ocean,

the temperature is always going to be

within the range of having liquid water,

which is not a very large range.

And the only real differences,

going from one ocean on one planet

to another ocean on another planet,

are the trace chemicals that you have

floating around in the ocean.

It would be very easy

to just hang out in our oceans.

It wouldn't be that different

than somebody else's ocean water,

ocean on another planet.

So, there is this idea that if things

are visiting us from somewhere else,

they must have a base somewhere

that is miles away from anywhere,

that we are not familiar with.

So, what's the obvious place?

Under the oceans.

The Stack Rocks seems to fit

into that narrative.

And I think that, again,

goes back into Celtic mythology.

The islands off the coast

were seen as magical islands,

and that's where the fairies would live.

In fact, that's where the Celtic saints

went and lived in isolation

so that they could contact

the supernatural.

Now, you say

you saw a man as well, did you?

And how clearly did you see it?

Well, I I couldn't see its face

'cause it was too far away.

I don't think I was the only one

that said that. I'm not sure.

Somebody walking near it,

to the right-hand side of it.

"I saw a man come out of a door."

"It had pointed ears and a f furry hat."

Ah, and there's one of your faceless men.

I think there were two or three

that claimed they'd seen the occupants.

Now, I never saw these occupants

for myself.

I can't verify that anybody actually did

or whether it was juvenile elaboration,

but it brings a whole new depth into it,

because if they really did

see the occupants,

then something bigger

than we all think happened here that day.

I'd gone home one day,

and I said, "We've moved on a step."

"We've moved from

unidentified flying objects."

"We're now into spacemen."

My wife said,

"Well, what does he look like?"

And I said, "Well, apparently,

he or she, uh, because we don't know,

uh, wears a spacesuit, which is silver."

"A sort of a dark visor,

where you might imagine

the eyes would be."

And she said, "Well, I've seen him."

And I thought, "Well, crikey."

And "No," she said,

"I have, genuinely," she said,

"but it's in a shop window

in Haverfordwest."

And I went down there, had a look,

and it was a a firefighting suit.

Because at Milford Haven,

there's a large oil refinery,

and they had specialist equipment,

which included these suits,

to allow them to fight fires

with very intense heat.

And I believe

that in years after the event,

somebody local admitted to,

uh, being a prankster,

wandering around in one of these suits.

Which, personally,

I find very disappointing,

because it rather muddied the waters.

Calling occupants

Of interplanetary craft ♪

Calling occupants

Of interplanetary craft ♪

The prankster doesn't

account for all of the spaceman sightings

because the pranking

followed the sightings.

And it could well be

that he was encouraged to do that

by some real experiences.

At one point,

he had to dive into some undergrowth

Whoa!

because a lady appeared at the door

aiming what appeared to be a g*n.

Calling occupants of interplanetary ♪

Quite extraordinary craft ♪

The temptation is

to think the Coombs family

must be either daft or mistaken.

Their continuing problem is

that no one's yet been able

to prove or disprove

what must be some of the most remarkable

UFO sightings ever reported.

More and more people are claiming

that they are seeing things

which cannot be scientifically explained.

It wasn't just here.

There's a number of locations

around the county

where the same thing was going on.

The Ministry of Defence,

I think there was something like

450 separate incidents reported to them.

I have tracked down

and interviewed some of the people

who were working there at the time.

I mean, some of them were saying,

"Maybe there was something going on."

"But 450 sightings?"

"You know, we just simply didn't have

people to send out

and look into each one of those."

I just happened to look out,

and I saw something in the sky.

It was a dome-shaped object.

Glowing with a pale cream light.

So, what sort of action

are you looking for?

Well, I'm hoping

that the government will step in,

scientists will step in to help us

to understand what these things are.

The sky watchers

seek one objective.

Yet another flying saucer

to add to the lengthening list

of claimed sightings

over the Pembrokeshire countryside.

There was a lot of pressure

on the Ministry of Defence

building up into 1978.

The number of sightings were increasing.

The press interest was increasing.

Of the incidents

that were reported,

to my knowledge,

none of them could be explained

by activity either at RAF Brawdy,

or within Wales, generally,

by aircraft that were flown

by the military or by civil operators.

Are you all honestly going to say

that you think

that the things you saw were,

shall we say, not of this world?

- Yes.

- Right.

People who said,

"Oh, they made it up."

"They made it up for the publicity."

What publicity do you crave

when you're ten years of age?

But did they really see

an unidentified flying object?

Or was this what caught their eye?

We've been ridiculed by a lot of people,

and when you're growing up,

you don't want people to think

you're some sort of lunatic.

They're not gonna take you seriously

because you've seen little green men.

My mother didn't really want

too many people

to know about what she had seen,

what with the story of the white lady.

It frightened most people, I will say,

the idea that there might be

a ghost there.

A story about anything else

that was paranormal

would only make things worse.

Some people said,

"Oh, you've done it to have business."

But, no, we had not.

A hotel which had opened

near Milford Haven,

they had started having UFO weekends.

They would give people a flask of soup

and some sandwiches

and send them out, you know,

on maybe, gosh, four-mile walks.

I told my teacher, and he said,

"Sure your eyes weren't playing tricks?"

You know, I said, "No."

I said, "My eyes don't play tricks on me.

No, they don't."

And I said, "And I'm not stupid."

I said, "Far from it."

I said, "What I saw, I saw."

This thing got up the hedge,

and it jumped over

jumped over this gate.

And I thought

there was something wrong about it.

Like, no man could

no man could jump that gate.

"Spacemen of the terror triangle."

"A towering eerie figure

in a glowing silver suit

blocked the window

of a lonely farm cottage."

My auntie Pauline, I showed her some

of these cuttings and whatever, and

"Ah, no. Don't bring that up," she said.

"Leave it where it is."

I said, "You've gotta talk

about it sometime, you know."

"No, we don't," she said.

"Me and the girls," she said,

"we don't talk about it at all."

Well, it had the clear

cigar shape with the dome on top of that.

What I didn't enjoy

was the attention that it brought onto me.

My first four years of secondary school,

they were horrendous.

I was getting physically assaulted

on an almost daily basis.

Yes, I did!

Most of the time, they wanted me

to say that I hadn't seen a UFO.

They just wanted me to say

that I was lying.

But I just couldn't do that.

I just couldn't go back on my principles

and say that I was lying when I wasn't.

And we've got

some young people in the studio

who claim to have had encounters

of their very own.

In 1978, I appeared

on a TV program called Magpie.

the gentleman. That's David,

David, Philip, and Shaun down here. Now

If you were to see the film

of me on Magpie and look closely,

you would see that I have a black eye.

We were watching it

for about five or six seconds,

and, um we just ran off.

We were so scared.

That was given to me

for the television, you know.

"Let them try

and cover that up with makeup."

With the bullying and the aggression

that I got because of it,

I just thought, "I have to speak out,

because there's other people

who are going through the same thing

that have done nothing

but report something that they've seen."

It was something I felt had to be done.

I saw, like, a door,

and all of a sudden,

this sort of person

just sort of walked out.

I'm not embarrassed or ashamed to say

that I saw something 45 years ago

that I can't explain.

And to this day, I still can't.

Having done the work I have done,

I can give you every assurance

on one point,

that if the public knew precisely

what the presence of UFOs mean,

they would literally run for their lives.

Randall Pugh had heard

that my mother had had this sighting,

and he came to see us.

And he said

that she should tell people about it.

In a way, to back up

what the children had seen.

Lots of people

were calling them all sorts of names.

Well, now, I had to come forward and say,

"They are definitely genuine."

"What they have seen, I saw myself."

What were the figures like?

Well, they were very tall.

Their arms were exceptionally long.

Their legs were exceptionally long.

And, for all, they looked

as if they had boilersuits on.

Shiny boilersuits.

And they had sort of a pointed head,

you know.

There's something, like, pointed going.

And they definitely didn't have a face.

They were faceless people.

They'd no eyes, no mouth,

not even a hole or buttons or anything.

It's definite. It's here.

It's beyond us to know what it is,

but it is.

Is it all really a case

of mass hysteria,

or is there some reality in the unreal?

The people who live around Broad Haven

will tell you that

what they've experienced is real enough.

What the story is about

is a re-enchantment of the environment.

People used to believe

in all kinds of weird stuff.

In modern times, we don't believe

in those kinds of creatures.

But weird stuff is still here.

Obviously, there's something.

Whether it's inherent in the landscape

or in people's minds,

they're having the same

sort of weird experiences,

but they're expressing them

in the pop culture of the time.

Whether it was supernatural or natural,

something happened

that literally changed people's lives.

And that in itself,

to me, is what's important.

The UFO sighting,

it had a major effect on me.

I've never been prejudiced in any way

regarding race, sexuality, etc.

And this all stems from

from this visitation

that we had here at this school.

Because if you can accept the possibility

that there may be aliens

coming to visit us on this planet,

then you can accept anything.

When I gave my first presentation,

my first scientific presentation on UAPs,

and was discussing

their flight characteristics,

their speeds and accelerations,

one of my colleagues asked me,

"Why would you do this?

Why are you studying this?"

"Why put yourself"

"Why put yourself in this position?"

I was worried about getting into it,

'cause there's a huge stigma around this.

I mean, you mention UFOs

and everybody giggles,

and nobody takes it seriously.

But, well, now here we are,

and we have ourselves completed

the first stages of the exploration

of our solar system.

We visited all the major bodies.

We're now moving

to the outer bodies in the Kuiper Belt,

and we have robots operating

on Mars right now.

We still, even after that, have this idea

that it's impossible

for aliens to come visit us.

It's not impossible at all.

In fact, I think it's rather probable.

That's potentially one of the biggest

discoveries in human history.

How can you walk away from that?

It's almost like being the center

of the universe again.

We have to keep relearning that lesson,

that human beings are not

the center of the universe.

Once we have enough scientific groups

out there collecting data,

theorizing, thinking about this seriously,

I don't think it'll take long.

I think I think it'll get solved,

and I think it'll be solved

pretty quickly.

And I think it'll really only take

a decade to do so.

I think it'll change everything. Yeah.

Calling occupants

Of interplanetary craft ♪

Calling occupants

Of interplanetary craft ♪

Calling occupants of interplanetary ♪

Most extraordinary craft ♪

You've been observing our earth ♪

And we'd like to make

A contact with you ♪