The Pembrokeshire UFO wave

EPISODES: INTRODUCTION | The Egryn Lights | The Welsh Roswell | The Pembrokeshire Wave

Episode 3 of UFOs, Aliens and the Fairy Kingdom by Nigel Graddon. Note: Faces of child witnesses are redacted.

We move forward two years after the Berwyn events to the beautiful county of Pembrokeshire, the county that has played host to the greater part of the Welsh Triangle’s approximately 85 NHE occurrences, counting forward from the Barmouth earthlights wave of 20 events in 1904-05. All parts of the Dyfed region witnessed aspects of the UFO phenomena, especially over St. Bride’s Bay and Stack Rock. Craft were seen at Brawdy, Clarbeston Road, east of Nolton, Haverfordwest, Llangwm, Lawrenny, Benton Castle, Pembroke Dock, Milford Haven, Herbrandston, Ripperston Farm, Roch, Camrose, Johnston, Broad Haven, Little Haven, and near Martletwy

In his classic work[1] on Welsh fairies Wirt Sikes, U.S. Consul in Cardiff from 1876 until his death in 1883, described Pembrokeshire as “that isolated cape… looked upon as a land of mystery by the rest of Wales… A secret veil cover(ed) this sea-girt promontory… and out of its misty darkness came fables of wondrous sort, and accounts of miracles marvellous beyond belief.”

The shadows cast by coming events in this “isolated cape” were observed forty years earlier in 1935. Young Warren Davies was living with his grandmother in Freystrop, five miles east of the 1977 wave’s epicentre in the coastal village of Broad Haven. One late afternoon as Warren and his sister were walking through a wood to return home from school, they saw a bright yellow object floating in the trees. The children thought at first it was a balloon. In the same way as identical objects would behave in 1977, it swung back and forth in short 6-foot arcs like a pendulum. It was roughly the size of a bicycle wheel. Frightened, the children ran home.

Seventeen years passed before the next event. It happened in 1952 in Castlemartin, a coastal village blessed with a spectacular coastline of limestone cliffs, large sea caves, natural arches and tall rock stacks. At the time of the sighting, most of the limestone downland had been cleared for use as an artillery range. During one lunchtime, date not recorded, a Mr Thomas was walking along the sand dunes when he found a partially concealed metallic object. As he approached, he saw two men standing by it. One whom Thomas judged to be the leader warned him not to get any closer or powerful rays would hurt him because he was not wearing protective clothing. The men also told Thomas that they had been visiting the Earth for hundreds of years and were concerned that it was on a path to self-destruction. Thomas said that they told him the name of their planet but he had forgotten it.

Twenty-five years passed and then, once again, Pembrokeshire bore witness to high strangeness. What became a series of events that occurred during the winter of 1976-1977 and continued until early summer began on 9th December.

On that evening school meals supervisor Dorothy Cale, her 10-year-old son Daniel, and two friends Yvonne Andrews and Anne Berry were in a car travelling a long and lonely road between the village of Broad Haven and Milford Haven, one of the largest oil ports in Europe. Mrs Cale described how they saw a very bright, vaguely dome-shaped flashing light above the nearside high hedge. In the centre of the dome, they discerned a zigzag arrangement like that in an electric bulb filament. It emitted a yellowish-white light so bright that it illuminated the whole of the surrounding area and the sky above it. The driver stopped the car, thinking they were about to collide with something. The light flashed four times then disappeared. During the few seconds that the light was visible Mrs Cale got the impression they were seeing the top of something whose lower part was hidden by the hedge. They guessed the size of the flashing object as 5-6 feet across and 3 feet high, the distance above ground level being 15-20 feet.

Eight weeks later the weird stuff ramped up several notches. On Friday 4 February 1977 at 4:50 p.m. a humming UFO was seen in a boggy field 400 yards from Broad Haven Primary School by 14 boys and 1 girl aged between 9-11 years. Broad Haven village sits in the southern corner of St Brides Bay. It forms part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, an area of outstanding natural beauty.

The craft’s appearance was witnessed at first by relays of pupils as they emerged after lunch into the school grounds and adjacent fields from the school canteen, and then later by two lads after school had finished for the day. One young witness, Michael Pugh, said that he assumed that what he saw was a UFO because a few days earlier he had noted the national reports of a spaceship sighting in Yorkshire whose description matched that of the Broad Haven craft.

Pugh likened the UFO’s shape to two small saucers joined together to make a sort of dome, on top of which was another smaller dome that resembled an ashtray. He thought that he saw windows, three or four of them round the edge of the dome and a flashing light on top. When asked if the machine resembled any kind of farm implement, Pugh said the nearest he could think of was a muck-spreader but that they were never that flat in appearance.

Two children were reported as seeing a moving figure. David George, 9, said he saw a ‘silver man with spiked ears.’ The children’s overall description was that the UFO was a silvery yellow-green cigar-shaped object with a dome and a red-orange light on top.

The witnesses went to tell “Sir”—headmaster Ralph Llewellyn—about the sighting but his first response was to dismiss the claims as “poppycock” and made no attempt to see for himself. This was unfortunate because some of the children were very scared and wanted grown-up reassurance that there was a rational explanation for the bizarre sighting.

The children continued observing the ship until 2:00 p.m. when they had to return to class. When school finished at 3:30 p.m. David Davies said that he set out to look for the vehicle because ‘we’d heard about it before, in the classroom, so I decided to go look for myself.’ Accompanied by classmates, Davies went to the boggy field but saw nothing. However, while his friend Philip Reece was trying to find a way to navigate a stream to get a better look Davies saw a silvery cigar-shaped object pop up from behind a hedge, time of sighting 3:35 p.m. Davies later described it as being a bit longer than a coach. He saw no visible windows or portholes but being an intelligent lad, he made the astute remark to Randall Pugh that the winter sun that day could have been shining on them to match the colour of the ship.

Intriguingly, Davies said the object seemed to be tugging at a silver object. Several boys felt that the ship was stuck and was labouring to free itself, a task in which it appeared to succeed partially. Witness Tudor Jones wrote: ‘ship seemed to be stuck—tried to take off and then disappeared behind a bush.’ Near the school is a sewage-processing plant where recycled effluent water is put back into the water supply. The visitors seemed interested in it.

Upset that their claims were being ignored, Davies and his classmates handed in a petition to the police station. Now under pressure to act, headmaster Llewellyn 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, with minor variations. Andrew Evans and David Ward, for example, thought they had seen landing legs beneath the craft.

bh school — Broadhaven Primary School children displaying remarkably similar drawings of flying saucers and their occupants

Broad Haven School drawings — Broadhaven Primary School children displaying remarkably similar drawings of flying saucers and their occupants

Witness Michael Webb’s father, Tim, was at the time a serving Squadron Leader at RAF Brawdy’s Tactical Weapons Unit. He said he believed his son’s account absolutely. Very curiously, he said that he felt the encounter was something “supernatural or paranormal.” Would a serviceman have used this kind of subjective terminology in the nineteen-seventies? It sounds suspiciously like the RAF was aware of unusual activity in the area and suspected a paranormal basis for it. Also curiously, Webb said that the UFO’s matt silver finish was a logical choice to enable an unobserved departure. Why might he say that? Was it possible that he was trying to say, within the bounds of what was deemed permissible, that the RAF knew much more about these affairs than they could disclose officially?

Two months later a “spare military fuel tank,” 25 feet tall, was delivered to the school playground one morning. No one knew where it came from or who had had it delivered. The school converted it into a fun “space rocket” and exhibited it at the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.

Thirteen days later the UFO reappeared, witnessed on this occasion by adults: teacher Mrs Morgan who saw a large, shining metal oval-shaped, ridged object, and, a short time later, two school canteen ladies who saw an object on the ground and a figure climb into it. The two women then saw the vehicle move up a slope and disappear behind trees. As it was raining, they interpreted what they saw as a local council tanker used for carting sewage. They went to the headmaster to report what they thought they had seen. Once bitten twice shy, having the previous sighting and its evident authenticity in mind, Llewellyn was not prepared to accept the women’s mundane explanation, pointing out that because the ground was so boggy no vehicle could cross it.

Another young neighbour who did not want to be named also said that around this time he saw a huge silver-suited figure one night after leaving the local pub. It was without helmet and had large, slightly protruding eyes. It was terrifying. He believed he had come face to face with the devil.

Steve Tyler, in 1977 a 17-year-old lad who lived with his parents in the village of Llethr in St Brides Bay, was walking home at 9:00 p.m., Sunday 13 March, from his girlfriend’s house. He looked up and saw a glowing orange disc at a location called Hendre Bridge. He called into some friends to tell them of his sighting but they merely laughed at him. At 9:30 p.m. while walking along a remote lane with high hedges, Tyler looked into a field to see why the customarily bright lights from the nearby Brawdy NATO base were not visible. He saw that a very large dome-shaped object about the size of a house was sitting in the field and blocking the light. There was a faint light glowing around the edge of the object.

Tyler was suddenly alert to movement to his extreme right. He turned to see a tall, skinny man approaching. He was about six feet in height, hairless, had high cheekbones (like an old man’s, was how Tyler put it), and large fish-like, glazed eyes twice the size of a man. The figure was wearing a one-piece, zipped transparent suit and had a box-like device where its mouth would be and a thick, dark tube that led from this over its shoulder. It came right up to Tyler. Alarmed, Tyler took a swing at it but he said his fist hit nothing. Tyler took to his heels and did not stop running until he reached home three miles away. When Tyler got home the family Pomeranian cross terrier that usually greeted him with a tail wag growled and barked as if he were a stranger.

Folklore indicates that long before Brawdy became home to mechanical craft it gave shelter to an unusual flying creature. Tales tell of a winged serpent that lived in Grinston Well in Brawdy Parish. Winged serpents and worms are common synonyms for UFO activity that occurred in times when terrified witnesses, confronted by mysterious lights, flying objects and silver suited visitors, could only describe them as fiery dragons.

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UFOs,aliens and the Fairy Kingdom

In April 1977 high strangeness in the Welsh Triangle recurred, this time at Ripperston Farm four miles from Broad Haven. It is one of the most westerly farms in Wales, lying along the cliffs running out to Wooltack Point. Since 1974 it had been the home of Pauline Coombs and dairyman husband Billie, sons Clinton and Kieran, and daughters Tina and twins Joann and Layann. Here the family reared cattle-herds of between 120-150 animals.

Before getting into the remarkable detail, we should understand that Roman Catholic Pauline Coombs was by all accounts a gifted psychic, an incipient medium as one researcher described her. In her early years of married life, she and Billie lived in a farm trailerpark in Pembroke Dock. It was in the caravan that Pauline experienced a distinctly religious phenomenon. Pauline did not state the actual year it took place but in her interview with researchers Pugh and Holiday she mentioned that it was during the time of the British Teddy Boy movement, which had its heyday in the skiffle era of the 1950s. The image Pauline saw took shape upon the caravan’s windowpane, just as a silver suited giant would do many years later at Ripperston farmhouse. Pauline described seeing a life-size figure holding an infant materialise inside the caravan window glass. It appeared to be “floating” in mid-air. Because of her Catholic belief Pauline interpreted the figure’s likeness to be a representation of the Virgin Mary. The figure was robed in a white dress that came down to its toes and wore a veil like a nun’s, with a cowl. The infant was swaddled in white. Around the figure’s waist was a rosary.

While Pauline and Billie looked on, the materialisation transformed into the figure of Christ with outstretched hands. There was no sign of a cross in the vision. The Christ-figure had long hair and was dressed in pure white. It wore what Pauline described as a robe like a woman’s long dress, with a low neckline, long flowing sleeves and sashed around the waist. The image persisted for about thirty minutes. Thereafter, the “Christ” appearance recurred every night around 10:30.

Word of it quickly got round with the result that hundreds of people from the local church community flocked to the caravan to see the phenomenon for themselves. Pembroke’s Roman Catholic vicar was one of the percipients. He came with the entire Sunday School group and proclaimed the vision as beautiful. Pauline claimed that the event garnered significant attention and coverage, including local press stories and an interview with BBC Radio Wales.

In answer to interviewers’ questions about any accompanying psychic phenomena in the caravan, Pauline said the only effect was that the wardrobe latch would lift and the doors would swing open. Surprisingly, although the vicar had earlier expressed delight at the “beautiful” image of Jesus in the caravan window, he told Pauline that he wanted to conduct an exorcism. Pauline refused, saying she had no wish to be exorcised. Afterwards, Pauline went into hospital to have a baby. While she was there the farmer burned the caravan and provided the Coombs with a new one. He said he was fed up with people coming and gawking at it.

Fast forward twenty years or so to Ripperston Farm when in early 1977 Pauline saw a bright ball of light hovering in the sky. The object floated back and forth and then sped off. She thought it might be a flare, so woke Billie who went to look for it. He found nothing.

One evening a short time after this episode Pauline and her children experienced a terrifying event. Pauline was driving home from St Ishmaels, three miles from Ripperston Farm. Joann and Layann were beside her in the passenger seat and Kieron was in the back. Suddenly, Keiron shouted out, ‘Look at that light in the sky, it’s coming towards us.’ Pauline looked and saw a luminous rugby-ball shape, yellowish in colour with a hazy greyish light underneath like a torch shining downward. Pauline had reached the point in the journey where she now had to turn off the main Dale road into a narrow side lane. Keiron called out that the UFO had performed a U-turn and was following them. The girls began crying and Pauline, very jittery, drove faster and faster. As she tried to put distance between the car and the object, she saw to her left that it was keeping pace. Although throughout the journey the car’s headlamps had been switched to main beam, Keiron told his mother to turn them on. In fact, they had suddenly dimmed. All at once the engine died just as they were approaching the farmhouse and the car had to coast the last stretch. Pauline dashed in to tell Billie. Billie and sixteen-year-old Clinton ran outside in time to see the UFO heading out to sea. Billie turned the key in the car, which started straightaway.

A few nights later Pauline saw the UFO from her kitchen window. On this occasion the circular object was much bigger than a rugby ball and had a reddish-orange tail that glowed. Soon it disappeared into some nearby clifftop fields known as Mount Vanor. ‘It seemed to come straight in and go into a hole waiting for it,’ Pauline told investigators.

Drama for the Coombs would reach Shakepearean proportions in late April but not before neighbouring townsfolk and villagers witnessed their share of weirdness.

Lower Broadmoor, a stone’s throw from Ripperston Farm, was home to Roland and Josephine Hewison and their children. Neither husband nor wife would have been expected to make up fantastical tales, being professional farm managers (managing both Ripperston and Broadmoor farms at this time) and each holding agricultural degrees. On Saturday morning, 26 March, Mrs Hewison, enjoying a brief lie-in, saw through her bedroom window a three-tiered round object sitting on the grass in a field in front of their large greenhouse. It was fully daylight. Mrs Hewison stared at the object for a couple of minutes before it dawned on her that what she was looking at was not an item of farm machinery but something extraordinary. She said that it resembled a squashed Rowntree’s jelly-mould. It was a smooth aluminium coloured, bulbous round shape, and approximately 15-feet high by 35-40 feet wide. It made no sound and she observed no activity around it. Mrs Hewison could not be sure but she felt that it was a lightweight object because of its aluminium-like appearance. She thought that she should find somebody else to verify what she was seeing and so went to wake her three boys. When she returned less than a minute later, this time with the intention of getting a better look at the object from around her bed, it had gone.

On inspection, the area in front of the greenhouse bore no signs of an object having been parked there. The one unusual event that appeared to have been associated with the phenomenon was that the family pony was not to be seen standing at its usual feeding place by the field-gate but instead was later found four-hundred yards away.

Interestingly, Mrs Hewison told investigators that to her knowledge none of the eight families that had lived at Broadmoor Farm within living memory stayed as tenants longer than 5-6 years, a puzzling fact because the land around the farm was of very fertile Grade 2 agricultural standard. The Hewisons had joked about this among themselves, saying that the farm must have a resident ghost.

Milford Haven citizen, 64-year-old retired house decorator Cyril John, was all set to drive a group of Senior Citizens to London on 7 April. He woke at 4:45 a.m., an hour earlier than he had planned. He saw that what had woken him was an orange light pulsing off his bedroom walls. It was coming from outside. He peered out of the window and saw two silvery-coloured objects in the night sky’s bright orange light. One was like a giant Easter egg about four feet in diameter. It was swinging pendulum-like in an arc of roughly fifty to sixty feet in length above neighbouring chimneys. John then saw that the second object was a very large figure dressed in what appeard to be a silvery boiler suit. The figure was hanging motionless about forty feet above the window between the house and the “egg.” Its arms and legs were outstretched parachutist-style. He saw no facial features but the size and shape of the head seemed normal. The figure and “egg’ remained in place for about twenty-five minutes. The “egg” then moved up and away over the roofs of the houses, as did the silvery-suited figure.

On Easter Monday, 11 April, 12-year-old Mark Marsden, son of Pauline Coombs’ brother, Terry, said that while looking for birds’ eggs with four friends at dusk in the fields near his home in Herbrandston village (near Milford Haven and four miles from the Coombs’ Ripperston Farm), he was chased by ‘a man from outer space.’ It happened on rubbish-strewn rough ground known locally as “the beach,” which contains an enclosed sewage plant. Mark’s friends had gone to a nearby haystack to search for eggs while he checked a nest that he knew was on the beach. He told investigators that while making his way down the slope to the beach he had seen a red glow on one of the grassy banks that surrounded the nearby fields.

Mark heard a rustling sound behind him and then something jumped out of the bushes. He heard very deep heavy breathing and saw a huge figure in a silvery, aluminium-like suit that seemed to be a little inflated. Terrified, Mark began walking backwards as fast as he could and then went off at a run. The figure ran after him with a stiff-legged gait. It halted its advance under a streetlight, allowing Mark a good look at his pursuer. It was a massively proportioned figure with broad shoulders and a stocky appearance. It wore ‘funny black boots’ with no heels that came halfway up its legs, gloves and a helmet that encased its head, which was square-shaped, featureless and totally black. It had an aerial 6-8 inches high sticking up from one shoulder. The 12-inch long bootprints it left behind had no tread.

While it stood still feet slightly apart under the lamp, the figure kept its face fixed on the boy and wriggled its fingers in gesturing movements. It kept this up for a short while before turning away and running in its awkward gait around a corner and back into the sewers.

The very light indentations in the cow slurry over which the figure moved indicated that it was extremely light or that its weight had either been mechanically supported or had some kind of anti-gravity assistance. Mark also saw a red glow in the field behind the figure and the vague shape of an “upside-down saucer.”

Also on that day, a nearby neighbour’s 13-year-old daughter Debbie Swan said she saw a UFO the size of a football hovering near a hedgerow. She also saw a silver-coloured red glow in the vicinity.

Four days later, the 19th, Mrs Rose Granville, the Spanish owner of the Haven Fort Hotel in Broad Haven’s neighbouring village of Little Haven, witnessed a strange light in the sky. Formerly a seventeenth century fortification, the Haven Fort Hotel sits on a high knoll overlooking the sea. On this night there was very little moonlight.

Mrs Granville retired at 2:00 a.m. The previous night was a New Moon and so there was very little light in the sky. As was her custom, Mrs Granville read a book while listening to Spanish music on the radio. Sudenly, the mains power to the radio failed and she heard a humming noise. At first, Mrs Granville thought it might be the central heating system she had forgotten to switch off. Eventually, she decided to get out of bed and check the boiler. During her passage to the boilerhouse Mrs Granville thought that the sound was actually more like a ship passing by in the bay.

She looked out of the bathroom window over the adjacent field and saw that the night sky now appeared to be brightly lit with moonlight. Circling the field was a shapeless, “bluey” flash of light she later described as like that from a painter’s blowlamp. At first, she thought it might be a helicopter. It circled round and round for a while then vanished. She said it pulsated like a lighthouse. Mrs Granville feared that someone was trying to break into the outbuildings, which comprised a small cottage and some chicken coops.

Fetching her binoculars, Mrs Granville was then able to get a good look at the scene in the field about 120 yards distant. She saw that the object emitting the light was an oval shape about two yards in diameter. It was resting on the ground in a corner of the field. Between the object and the fieldgate stood two figures that appeared to be men standing six and a half to seven feet tall. They were dressed head to toe in whitish, plastic clothing like a boilersuit. She noted that their arms seemed to be overly long for their bodies: gibbon-like, she described them. They were stooping down and measuring something, then one of them climbed up the grassy bank that borders the field on all sides. She described the head of the latter figure as coming to a point like the cowl of a monk’s habit.

At one point they turned round and she saw that their faces were totally blank and featureless. At the same time, she knew the figures were corporeal forms and that she was not seeing ghosts.

Mrs Granville tried yelling for her husband but found she was speechless. By now extremely frightened, she feared for the security of the house and went round it to switch on all the lights. When she returned to resume her vigil the object and visitors had gone. The night was once again pitch dark. Later that morning Mrs Granville went into the field and saw crescent-shaped indentations in the grass.

In an adjacent field was a locked concrete nuclear shelter used by the Royal Observer Corps. It has been speculated that the silvery-suited figures were intent on examining this facility. Mrs Granville contacted her local Member of Parliament Nicholas Edwards about her experience and he, in turn, contacted nearby RAF Brawdy. Squadron-Leader Cowan came out to see Mrs. Granville and told her there was nothing going on at Brawdy that could account for the strange craft. He suggested she might have seen workers from one of the local oil refineries, wearing protective suits. However, he asked her not to tell anyone about the event as it could cause alarm amongst the public.

On 24April events at Ripperston Farm became very decidedly weird. While watching TV with Billie, Pauline Coombs investigated a noise at the window and saw staring in at them a 7-foot-tall figure in a silver suit. Pauline reported that, ‘it didn’t have no eyes, nose or nothing.’ From the lower central point of its helmet was a thick, dark coloured pipe that went back over its left shoulder. The figure was surrounded by a luminous glow. It stood there for the longest time, seemingly fascinated by the images zigzagging across the Coombs’ television set. All the while that the figure was present, the window was banging repeatedly as if rattled by a strong wind but there was no wind that night and the window was, in any case, securely fastened. Later on, hearing this statement, Josephine Hewison said that exactly the same thing had happened with her window.

Pauline grabbed the phone and made calls, firstly to the Hewisons at Broadmoor, then to investigator Randall Jones Pugh. She told Pugh that the thing was still standing outside the window. He advised her to ring the police, which she did straightaway.

Billie waited for these calls to finish and then called his cross-Labrador dog Blackie to join him outside while he checked the yard. Blackie, frantic, did not want to leave the house and stayed inside running round and round in circles. Billie ushered Blackie outside and together they searched the yard. The figure had gone. Pauline Coombs was convinced that the figure had simply dissolved in place just as farm manager Mr Hewison and the police arrived ten minutes after the calls were made. They, too, saw nothing on investigation.

On another occasion, one of the Coombs girls who was one night sleeping in the mother’s bed because of her fear of the visitors claims she saw a hand come through the window and float towards Pauline, which then touched her on the arm. The next morning Pauline’s arm had swollen and she could barely move it. Her eyes were also swollen and irritated much like an allergic reaction.

Keiran and Layanne also described seeing three UFOs near the cliffs. One was just 50 feet above them. It lowered a metal ladder from which descended a silver-clad figure. The UFO dropped a bright red fluorescent box into the long grass but afterwards the children searched but could not find it.

An interesting manifestation attributed to the accumulated visitations at Ripperston Farm was the effect on the family’s garden rosebush. Two of them grew side by side close to the window where the silver figure had stood and peered in. One bush remained untouched but the other fared differently. Although its buds were seemingly healthy, they had not opened like its neighbour’s, while the rest of the bush had assumed an unhealthy, desiccated appearance. Billie remarked that it looked as if ‘someone had gone over the rose-tree with a blowlamp.’

Astonishingly, the Coombs claimed that on at least half a dozen occasions their cattle were “teleported” from the farm’s bolted stockyard to a field at Lower Broadmoor a half-mile distant. The number of cattle kept on the farm varied between 120 and 150. The yard was ringed with steel piping and its gates were secured with industrial bolts designed to cope with day-to-day heavy agricultural use. Billie Coombs had adopted the practice of nightly strapping the bolts in the locked position in case a cow managed to move the bolt with its nose. He did this by winding several layers of strong twine around the handle of the bolt. Despite these precautions the Coombs’s herd would inexplicably vanish en masse.

On one truly bizarre occasion, 15 April, Billie and son Clinton were standing just 10 paces away in the milking parlour when sixteen in-calf heifers vanished from the yard. This had taken place during a period of four minutes while father and son were in the parlour switching on six milking machines. On coming out to check that the milk was coming through, not a single cow was in sight. The pair insisted that during those four minutes they heard and saw nothing.

After each episode of disappearance Billie checked the stockyard and, sure enough, the bolts were still in place and the winding twine intact. Billie would spend at least an hour fetching the cows back to his farm, while enduring tickings-off from his managers, the Hewisons, that he was being careless with his work and inattentive to his animals’ welfare and security. On each occasion the cows were very restless and milk yields very poor. Significantly, each time the cows performed their vanishing act Blackie seemingly heard nothing: very much a telltale case of the dog not barking in the night. What mystified the family was that if the cows had somehow travelled, invisibly, on foot on their nocturnal journey (there being no evidence of any kind as to how they did actually make the trip) they chose not to make the straightforward walk down the lane outside the farm to the main road but make a left turn and head specifically for Broadmoor Farm. The Coombs family never got to the bottom of the mystery of the “Silver Giant,” as the alien figure came to be called, nor of the vanishing cattle.

Consider the baffling affair of the Coombs’s cattle alongside this story from Welsh fairlore. Llyn Barfog, the “Bearded Lake” near the seaside town of Aberdovey, is the scene of the famous descent to earth of a cow that belonged to Gwragedd Annwn—the elfin wives of the lower world. It was their habit to make their appearance at dusk clad all in green, accompanied by their milk-white hounds. Besides their love of hounds, the green ladies of Llyn Barfog were exceedingly proud of their herds of beautiful milk-white kine, the “Gwartheg y Llyn.” One day an old farmer caught an Otherworldly cow named “Fuwch Gyfeiliorn,” which had fallen in love with the cattle of his herd. From that day the farmer’s fortune was made. Such calves, milk, butter and cheese had never before been seen in Wales. Some years later the unthinking farmer took it into his head that the green ladies’ cow was getting old, and that he should therefore fatten her for the market.

The day came for slaughter. Fuwch Gyfeiliorn was tethered. Regardless of her mournful lowing and her pleading eyes, the butcher raised his arm and brought it down hard. Immediately, shrieks filled the air and the butcher’s cudgel passed clean through the fairy cow’s head as if it were composed of mist, and knocked over nine men standing nearby. All those present then lifted their astonished gaze to behold the appearance of a green lady of the Gwragedd Annwn on a crag above the lake. She called out her spell: ‘Come yellow Anvil, stray horns, speckled one of the lake. And of the hornless Dodlin, arise, come home.’ Whereupon, not only did the elfin cow rise above the gathered assembly but it was joined in her ascent by all her progeny up to the fourth generation. Together, the great herd rose high in the air and disappeared over the hilltops, never to return. Only one cow among the farmer’s herds remained, and she had turned from milky white to raven black. Distraught, the farmer drowned himself in the lake of the Gwragedd Annwn. The story goes that the black cow became the progenitor of today’s race of Welsh black cattle.

The Pembrokeshire wave of 1977 still had plenty of surprises in store. Three notable events occurred in mid-May. On Sunday, the 15th, Layann and Joann Coombs were walking with the dogs to the clifftop fields to play a game of roly-poly. During the game Layann saw what she described as a silver human being with a square head and no face about fifty yards away, walking up to a hedge. Its silver suit had no buttons, zip or fastenings. It walked in a slow, ponderous fashion with its long straight arms at its side. Hairs prickling, the dogs barked and growled. The figure then walked through the hawthorn hedge and passed through a waist-high barbed wire fence without breaking it.

At around the same date, a 17-year-old Milford Town resident who wished to remain anonymous at the time woke at 3:00 a.m. to see a small humanoid standing on her bedroom windowsill. It remained motionless, staring in at the frightened teenager. Hovering just above it was a space ship emitting a green beam. The long haired-figure was about three-feet tall and wearing a silvery high-necked collared suit and mitten-like gloves. It had normal eyes, slanted eyebrows and, like a good old-fashioned fairytale, had a nose like Mr Punch. After a few moments the teenager got up, closed the curtains and went back to bed.

This is the kind of incongruous action that one would expect of someone who is experiencing a vivid or waking dream. However, the girl told investigators that a few days later at 5:00 a.m. she saw another, smaller green-beamed UFO from her window. It had a round bottom and what appeared to be a glass compartment over it with portholes. It had positioned itself by her father’s car and then moved upwards to hover at roof level near her sister’s bedroom. A by now familiar figure emerged from the craft and performed its mid-air walking trick. It had an oval face, long wavy brownish hair, slanted eyebrows, normal eyes and the same Mr Punch nose. It walked forward and backward several times then returned to the ship, which disappeared.

Compare this teenager’s experiences with Breton legend. Breton folk believed that “corrigans” (faries) can assume any animal form and are able to travel from one end of the world to another in the blink of an eye. They are tiny, no more than two feet tall, with bodies as aerial and translucent as wasps. They are given to abducting human children. Bretons lived in terror of them.

Considering that UFO percipients often experience more than one sighting, it is perhaps not surprising that Warren Davies’ sister (later becoming Mrs Miller) had, in May 1977, a second close encounter, 42 years after she and her brother saw a bright yellow “balloon” while walking from school in Freystrup. Mrs. Miller was woken at 3:30 a.m. at her home in Houghton village by an extremely loud whistling-sucking noise, like that of a giant vacuum that was reverberating all round the house. The following morning, she saw that the gravel in the road outside her house had been formed into a cone as if by design. All at once, Mrs Miller’s two dogs began acting up hysterically. While she was trying to calm them, Mrs Miller saw over the house a silver upside down saucer with an orange light. An instant later it vanished. She had the impression that the object had come from a nearby mountain and had deliberately stopped over her house in order to suck it up inside. These thoughts scared Mrs. Miller out of her wits.

A few weeks later, 26 June, between 1:30 a.m. and 2:00 a.m., locals in the St. Brides Bay area saw an object out at sea. It was a sharply defined large orange ball moving left to right slowly in the sky. Two dark lines bisected it horizontally. It emerged from behind Stack Rock, a tiny reef in St. Brides Bay that rises 90 feet above the sea and accommodates a nineteenth century gun fort, now a scheduled monument. The ball drifted left towards the land, all the while oscillating and moving within itself. As it moved, it got smaller and smaller and then disappeared.

At around the same time as this sighting two “Men in Black” visited Pauline Coombs’s neighbour, Caroline Klass. Dressed in grey-blue, two-piece suits and highly polished shoes, the pair arrived in a large futuristic looking sports car. Unusually for MIBs, which are often reported to be of fairly dimunitive stature, each of these visitors was exceptionally tall. Class first saw them when they were about a hundred yards away from her property but, inexplicably, a moment later one was standing by her front door while his companion remained in the car outside. The MIB at the door had a highly domed forehead and his hair was swept back over his head. The pair resembled identical twins.

The one at the door spoke in accented English, asking Class the whereabouts of Pauline Coombs. She told him Mrs Coombs was away from home. He produced a detailed map of the area and asked Class where he was. He also asked her about any UFO sightings in the area. Class told him of the Broad Haven School event. He expressed an urgency to visit Croesgoch, a small village directly across St. Brides Bay opposite Stack Rock. He then went back to the car, which moved off up the lane.

Moments later Pauline Coombs returned home, expecting to be greeted by her eldest son, Clinton. In fact, he was hiding upstairs because he had been frightened by the appearance of two strange men at the door. Gradually, Pauline coaxed Clinton downstairs and he told her what had taken place. He was certain that his mother must have seen the two men because they had driven off only moments earlier. There is only one road leading from the farm and, moreover, it has no passing places along its half-mile length. But Pauline had seen no one; the MIB’s car had simply vanished. The car re-appeared a short time later at The Haven Fort Hotel and the occupants asked if Mrs Granville was in. Her daughter said she’d be back later but they went off, saying they would return.

The Coombs family was fortunate that the visit from the MIB ended without serious mishap. In Our Haunted Planet[2] the late UFO researcher John Keel set out his findings about the sinister visitors of Oriental appearance. Often arriving in threes, they drive around in black automobiles, usually Cadillacs in the U.S., some with purplish interior glows. They engage in mischievous behaviour and scare tactics, bullying UFO witnesses and investigators into silence about what they have seen or discovered. Remarkably, Keel stated that his investigations had brought him to the conclusion that MIBs are parahumans, which are able to make egress into this world via portals in the Earth’s etheric field and can vanish at will. Some witnesses have spoken of being seized and bundled aboard the black autos, afterwards describing strange psychodelic lights on the dashboards that induce in them a trance state. Some report seeing insignia printed on the car doors: a triangle with a bolt of lightning passing through it; while others describe an eye within a triangle, a common symbol found in many ancient cultures from Egypt to Micronesia. Indeed, MIBs have actually identified themselves as “agents for the Nation of the Third Eye.”

Albert K. Bender wrote[3] of three dark-skinned gentlemen with glowing eyes who materialised in his apartment. Dressed in black clothes and Homburg style hats like clergymen, the trio floated a foot above the ground while conversing with the astonished Bender. Coming, they said, from a secret UFO base in Antarctica, their purpose was to collect a rare element from the earth’s oceans. They told him that after the completion of the project in the early 1960s both themselves and the UFOs would disappear from the earth, and he would be allowed to write about the story. Before dematerialising they left Bender with a shining disc with which to contact them. He claimed that the MIB subsequently took him to an underground base where, he was told, aliens were extracting chemicals from seawater for use on their own planet. His disc subsequently disappeared and he told his story to the world in his book. Perhaps not coincidentally to his bizarre story, Bender was a student of black magic. He suffered from the presence of sulphurous odours in his apartment, strange poltergeist happenings, and was plagued by chronic headaches and memory lapses, all common symptoms of alien contactee syndrome.

MIBs often turn up as doppelgangers of the men they are imitating. After the JFK assassination, there were sightings of doppelgangers of Lee Harvey Oswald. One of these made a visit to a public rifle range prior to the assassination, made a big nuisance of himself and surprised people by using a strange gun that spat out balls of fire. The real Oswald could not drive and it is known that he was nowhere near the rifle range on that particular day!

On 27 August 1977 truck driver Francis Lloyd and his passenger, sixteen-year-old John Dwyer, were heading for Crosshands in Carmarthenshire on the A48. They were loaded up for a long haul to Continental Europe. As the truck began to ascend Nantycaws Hill, a location 40 miles east of Broad Haven, the vehicle’s eight forward headlights illuminated two huge figures about 7-feet tall standing on the right-hand grassy verge. They were reddish-orange in colour and seemed to be wearing single-piece celluloid suits. Their heads were elongated as if they were wearing tall helmets. The pair was standing, slightly turned to each other. They appeared to be holding between them an instrument of some kind. They stood motionless as the truck trundled slowly up the steep incline of Nantycaws Hill.

As they passed by the bizarre figures, Francis Lloyd felt a cold tingling over his body and experienced a distinctly weird feeling. He described the figures as having arms but neither he nor Dwyer saw any legs. They had faces but to the witnesses it seemed as if they looked straight through them. Lloyd saw a kind of flap on the shoulders.

The “monsters,” as the witnesses described them, had their arms raised holding what might have been radios and another object that could not be identified. They also had a sort of aerial coming out of the left side of their chests that reached up to head height. These glittered in the headlights, casting a silvery chrome colour. Dwyer also glimpsed a smaller aerial coming from the side of one figure’s head. The witnesses held the pair in sight for five to six seconds while the truck negotiated its steep climb up Nantycaws Hill.

Three months later Nantycaws Hill was the scene of a grim postscript to this sighting. In the afternoon of 23 November, a gas tanker en route from Carmarthen to Swansea reached the bottom of the hill and jack-knifed across the three-lane highway, causing the tanker to overturn. A BMW carrying four men to a Welsh Counties rugby cup-match smashed into the tanker and was literally torn in two. The four rugby supporters and the tanker driver died instantly. Had tanker driver Roger Goodreid seen a reappearance of the 7-foot monsters and, frightened, lost control of his vehicle? Might the August visitors have left something behind on Nantycaws Hill that caused the devestating accident? UFO investigators have linked the two episodes but the truth remains unknown.

In October 1977 the embattled Coombs once again found themselves occupying centre stage with UFO goings-on. On the 30th Pauline Coombs, her mother and children Tina, Layann and Joann were returning from the local shop. She stopped the car at Broadmoor to enjoy the sea view. As they went on they saw a small silvery disc flash across the sky. It headed for Stack Rock. Pauline stopped the car to get a better look. To their amazement, the rock appeared to open. At great speed the UFO dove inside and vanished from sight. The rock face “door’ abruptly closed. The onlookers couldn’t believe that the UFO hadn’t collided with the rocks and broken apart. Pauline then saw what by now were two familiar 7-foot figures walking on the rocks. Not wanting to stick around, Pauline and the girls drove back to Ripperston to tell Billie what had happened. They had barely walked into the front door when Rose Granville phoned to ask if the Coombs had a line of sight on Stack Rock because two humanoids were walking around the reef.

With the twin girls, and sons Clinton and Keiron, Pauline went into the Cliffside fields and stopped at a west-facing slope to see what was happening on Stack Rock. The two humanoids were still walking around. They were wearing whitish-silver outfits that reminded the Coombs of frogmen’s wetsuits. Pauline described them on this occasion as having orange heads. The heads (or helmets) were extremely large and rectangular in shape and rounded at the corners with no observable features.

One of the humanoids, described by Keiron as being the colour of fire, looked like it was climbing up steps out of the rock, while the other was bending by the water as if looking for something. A “door” then appeared on the right-hand face of the rocks, sliding alternately open and shut like the door of a dumbwaiter. One of the figures entered this doorway and appeared to descend a stairway. It disappeared into the darkened interior and then reappeared. The stairway was not visible to the viewers. On this final vanishing act, the door closed and disappeared from view. To the left side of the rocks, the second figure appeared to “walk” out over the water’s surface. Suddenly, the rock at the water’s edge seemed to lift up and the figure stepped forward and disappeared.

The display had lasted for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, the Granvilles were witnessing the same train of events. Billie Coombs later told investigators that, on reflection, he believed that the silver-suited humanoids had the ability to blend their craft with natural features such as Stack Rock. A few days later Clinton said he saw windows in Stack Rock while watching it alone. He described the windows as square, roughly the size of television screens. The windows were to the right of the door in the rock. one of a fairy house depiction with fairy silvery-suited inhabitants.

The entire coastline of St. Brides Bay is riddled with sea caves, some hundreds of yards long. Along the coast are Celtic raths, forts, earthworks, mottes, burial chambers and standing stones dating from the era of the Windmill Hill and the Beaker peoples of prehistoric Britain. It is noteworthy that Stack Rock is adjacent to a ley-line that connects a burial chamber on Kilpaison Burrows, Broadmoor Farm, St Nonn’s Well at St. David’s Cathedral, and terminates at a burial chamber at St. David’s Head. Note that St. Nonn was traditionally known as the “King of the Fairies.” Incidentally, a ley-line runs adjacent to Broad Haven Primary School. The Haven Fort Hotel is also bisected by a ley-line, and yet another runs through Ripperstone Farm.

Pauline Coombs reported that on one occasion she saw the sea shake, the vibrations radiating out from a point in St. Brides Bay similar to what might be caused by an underwater explosion or by seismic activity. Consider this with “the riddle of the bumps,” a series of regular and violent rumblings, vibrations and sounds of explosions that shook the West Country, especially around the Bristol Channel during the latter part of 1976 and throughout 1977. Windows rattled and cracks appeared in plaster. On several occasions an orange glow was afterwards seen in the sky, one time in the form of a fireball that sped at high speed across the sky.

Unsurprisingly, the Stack Rock event has its parallels in Welsh folklore. Sailors once spoke of green meadows of enchantment that lie in the sea off the Pembrokeshire coast. For the most part they are invisible to human sight but occasionally they appear for a brief period, then suddenly vanish. Some even claimed to have ventured ashore on these magical isles, not knowing them to be such until they returned to their boat and were astonished to see the isle vanish in an instant. The folk of Milford Haven claimed to be able to see the isles distinctly, a short distance away. They knew them to be filled with fairy folk that travelled to the shore through a subterranean gallery under the bottom of the sea.

The old tales also tell of a magical lake in which the Gwragedd Annwn lived in a sunken city. Every year on the morning of New Year’s Eve an open door was to be seen in a rock by the lake. Those who had the courage to enter this door were led by a secret passage to a small island in the middle of the lake. Here they found the enchanting garden of the Gwragedd Annwn. Noted for their courtesy and kindness, the elfin wives gathered fruit and flowers for each of their guests, entertained them with the most exquisite music, disclosed secrets of the future, and invited them to stay for as long as they desired.

Hugh Turnbull, journalist for local weekly, the Western Telegraph, evidently did not go along with local fairy tales and held that “something military” lay behind the Stack Rock sightings. Other parties favoured a more sensationalist theory, namely that aliens had established an underground base beneath Stack Rock where UFOs had been seen to hover and disappear. Such speculation was founded on the fact that within a 20-mile radius of Broad Haven there was a welter of military establishments. To the north at Aberporth was the top-secret rocket testing station, while the NATO base at RAF Brawdy, near St. David’s, served as a pilots training centre on advanced aircraft and weaponry, and as a base for both a Tactical Weapons Unit and a US Navy underwater research station that tracked Soviet submarines. Former Navy pilots have remarked that it was very strange to have a training facility at Brawdy because of the area’s atrocious weather. After the very low-profile arrival of a large U.S. contingent, locals spoke of odd goings-on, particularly at the U.S. extensive deep underground facility built on a part of the base that was exclusive American property to which even the RAF had no access.

According to local gossip this facility, officially an oceanographic research station staffed by 600 U.S. personnel, was built to sustain a direct nuclear strike. It was known that the tiniest infringement of camp rules, even receiving a parking ticket offbase was enough to trigger immediate repatriation of the offender. For an establishment that claimed to be purely interested in oceanographic research, the UFOs seemed to take an inordinate interest in its activities.

It seems clear that Brawdy was under close observation. Russian trawlers were seen observing its installations. On the air traffic control map of southern Britain, a specific area incorporating St Brides Bay was designated EGD111, marked “Danger, Restricted or Warning Area.” 75% of all Welsh Triangle UFO sightings occurred within the EGD111 region, which includes Stack Rock, Ripperston Farm, Broad Haven School and Herbrandston.

The last time that Pauline Coombs saw the “Silver Giant” was in February 1978. It was standing by her garden, this time without helmet visor. She described seeing long flowing, fair-coloured shoulder-length hair. In the same month a fall of quartz-like crystals landed on St. Brides Bay. They were reddish-brown in colour and changed colour when picked up.

Intriguingly, the sightings in Pembrokeshire took place over clean or dirty water or by effluence centres: the sewage works both near Broad Haven School and at the grubby “beach” area of Herbrandston village; an underground water system and natural spring on Ripperston Farm; the nuclear shelter in the grounds of the Haven House Hotel over a tunnel linking the hotel cellars with the beach hundreds of yards away; and the chimneys of the Milford Haven oil complex.

That year Pembrokeshire’s silver giants explored further afield. In September 1978 Pat Owen and her daughter were walking across a field in the village of Llanerchymedd on the island of Anglesey when they saw three men, 6-feet tall, wearing silver grey suits and a sort of head cap attached to the suits. The cows in the field were terrified. In the same period, a grounded object and humanoid figures were seen in Ruabon, Wrexham, Colwyn Bay and Prestatyn, all in north Wales.

Some that encountered the Dyfed visitors suffered dermatological problems. In medieaval times these kinds of effects were associated with coming into contact with fairies. The phenomenon was called “elf-burn” or “elf-disease.” It took the form of a hardening of the epidermis called “elf-cake”. The symptoms have been likened to radiation burns.

To all appearances, the “Silver Giant” phenomenon smacks of a typical UFO story. Bright lights, spaceships, tall silver-suited occupants that vanish before one’s eyes, attempts at seizure, teleported cattle, spooky Men in Black figures, are archetypal components of NHE events that have been related routinely the world over in our modern times. But pause to look further back in human history and we see that these events, bizarre though they may seem, may be simply characteristic of old tales wearing new clothes.

Welsh folklore has much to say about Otherworldy visitors who seem intent on trying to find something that is evidently very important to them. Take, for example, the “Plant Rhys Dwfen,” a colony of fairies reputed to dwell on an invisible island in Cardiganshire, roughly fifteen miles northeast of Stack Rock. Dwfen is the root word for Annwfn, a variation on the name Annwn, the Otherworld. Annwfn is associated with hills and islands. In the tale of Pwyll in the Mabinogion Ayou don’nnfwn is a parallel world, very much like our earth but populated with dangerous and magical beings. In the poem Prieddu Annwn, Annfwn is a group of islands on which Arthur and his company search for a magical cauldron, a synonym for the Grail. Envisage a brave Knight of Camelot in his silver suit of armour. He is striding purposefully across a tiny island in a Welsh bay in search of his prize, his long fair hair flowing in the breeze. He and his fellows are seeking the magical cup. Were Pauline Coombs, her family and neighbours granted the privilege of seeing through a special window, scenes being enacted in a mystical world beyond human sentience, knowledge and sight of which is denied us?

An account extracted under torture from the Knights Templars after their enforced dissolution in the first years of the 1300s was a revelation about Camelot. The Templars claimed that Camelot was not a recognisable geographical place that could be reached by foot but was a separate region, a training dimension not bound by the laws of time and space, accessible only by those embarking on a pathway to initiation into the Ancient Wisdom. Tales about Camelot were spoken of by initiates who had “pierced the veil” (the root phrase expressed in the name Perceval), but who subsequently broke a bond of silence about the nature of their adventures. Consequently, a belief grew over the centuries that Arthur’s Court was to be found in such and such physical place, be it Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, Scotland or any other that lay claim to its location. Perhaps for a brief few months in 1977 a select group of percipients tapped into that “Other Country.” As if seen through gauze, a bold and handsome Knight appears to adopt a stiff-legged gait and his noble actions resemble quirky, random movements.

The Templeton family’s account and its Ripperston-like appearance of a bizarre central character, the “Solway Firth Spaceman,” are mindful of the Coombs’s experience. On 23 May 1964, Jim Templeton, a firefighter from Carlisle, took three photographs of his five-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, while on a day trip to Burgh Marsh. Templeton said the only other people on the marshes that day were two elderly women who were sitting in a car at the far end of the marsh.

In a letter to the Daily Mail in 2002, Templeton stated, ‘I took three pictures of my daughter Elizabeth in a similar pose and was shocked when the middle picture came back from Kodak displaying what looks like a spaceman in the background.’ Templeton insists that he did not see the figure until after his photographs were developed. Analysts at Kodak confirmed that the photograph was genuine.

Templeton said, ‘I took the picture to the police in Carlisle who, after many doubts, examined it and stated there was nothing suspicious about it. The local newspaper, the Cumberland News, picked up the story and within hours it was all over the world. The picture is certainly not a fake, and I am as bemused as anyone else as to how this figure appeared in the background. Over the four decades the photo has been in the public domain, I have had thousands of letters from all over the world with various ideas or possibilities, most of which make little sense to me.’

It has been suggested that the figure behind Elizabeth is actually her mother, Annie. In another photo taken by Jim that day, Annie, wearing a light blue dress, can be seen leaning out of the frame beside Elizabeth. Jim insisted that Annie was standing behind him when he took the photo.

Templeton said that after the photograph was published, two men who said they were from the government, but refused to show their identification, visited him. According to Jim the men were very tall, wore dark suits and bowler hats, and appeared at his fire station in a large black limousine. He described them as being ‘stand-offish and snooty.’ They referred to each other as Number 9 and Number 11. After taking the men to the site where the photos were taken, Templeton said that when he explained he had not seen the figure at the time of taking the snap, the men became angry and drove away, leaving him to walk home. Templeton dismissed the two men as frauds, saying: ‘It all looks like a leg pull to me. I'm sure the men were not security agents.’ Ufologists, of course, would describe figures such as these as “Men in Black.”

Curiously, in a BBC Look North interview and a corresponding letter to the Daily Mail, Templeton also said that a Blue Streak missile launch at the Woomera Test Range in South Australia had been aborted because figures of two large men were seen on the firing range. He alleged that technicians later saw his photograph in an Australian newspaper and found the figures to be exactly the same.

In 1996, Templeton and his now adult daughter Elizabeth Dobson were interviewed by a reporter from the Scottish newspaper Dumfries Courier, with Elizabeth commenting: ‘We got a lot of hassle from people like you, but I was really young and can't remember much. I think it was somebody from another planet. It is pretty selfish of us to think that we are the only intelligent form of life.’