[static crackles]
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.
[tense pulsating music playing]
[man] Well, I can't remember who saw it first.
[gate squeaks]
We were in our school playground,
lunchtime break, just down by this tree over here.
[man] 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.
[children chatter]
[man] 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.
[man] 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.
[music fades out]
[mysterious music playing]
[man 1] From the beginning of recorded time,
men have been seeing unexplainable things in the sky.
[woman] Are we alone in the universe?
[man 2] 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.
[man 3] There's something profoundly important going on here
that is authentic and real.
[music fades out]
[interviewer] So, Kevin…
tell me a secret that you haven't told anyone
about the phenomenon.
Oh, are we filming?
[sighs]
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.
[gentle music playing]
[man] 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… [chuckles] …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.
[children chattering excitedly]
[Dave] 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.
[tense ambient music playing]
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.
-[music intensifies] -[young Dave panting]
[man] 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.
[Dave] 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.
[broadcaster] 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.
[Dave] 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.
[reporter] 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.
[man] 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.
-[Beldar] Yes. -Oh!
[David Clarke] 1977 was a bumper year for UFOs.
-The numbers of sightings were increasing. -Well, it was roughly over there.
[David Clarke] The press interest was increasing.
♪ Late last night While wishing on a star ♪
[David Clarke] 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 ♪
[David Clarke] And also, it was a pretty miserable time.
There was fuel shortages.
We were in the middle of the Cold War 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. [laughs]
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.
[children chatter indistinctly]
[David Clarke] 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.
[intriguing ambient music playing]
[Dave] 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.
[man] We drew pictures, and, um, nobody knew what anybody else was drawing.
[Shaun] We'd seen the same thing, so the chances were we were gonna,
hopefully, you know, draw pretty much the same thing.
[Dave] 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.
[Mr. Llewellyn] I know that, uh, 16 children saw it.
[newscaster] And did they all see the same thing?
[Mr. Llewellyn] 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.
[flying saucer droning]
There's a good chance that some of the kids had seen that.
[flying saucer whirring]
[rumbling]
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.
[eerie music playing]
[Kevin] 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.
[reporter] 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.
-[distant aircraft whooshes] -[slow drum cadence playing]
[man] 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.
[typewriter clacking]
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.
[telephone ringing]
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.
-[gulls calling] -[waves lapping]
[intriguing ambient music playing]
[woman] 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 war,
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.
[Rosa, on recording] 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.
[Francine] 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.
[chuckles]
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.
[David Clarke] 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 War 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.
[tense pulsating music plays]
And if you got on the wrong side of them, really bad things could happen.
[Francine] Mother was in the third room, along there.
The second floor.
[unsettling ambient music plays]
[wind whistling]
[Rosa, on recording] 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.
[Rosa, on recording] It was so intensive
that I could hardly open my eyes.
[Francine] And some… These two…
Well, I don't know what you'd call them.
…figures had come out of it.
[Rosa, on recording] 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.
[Rosa, on recording] 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?
[breathing heavily]
[unsettling music intensifies, fades out]
[breathing heavily]
[gulls calling]
[Francine] 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!"
[chuckles] 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.
[typewriter clacking, zips]
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.
[reporter] 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.
[captivating ambient music playing]
[man] 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.
[sheep bleating]
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.
[unsettling ambient music playing]
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.
[tense ambient music playing]
It was unbelievable.
And I thought… [scoffs] …"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… [clears throat]
…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.
[reporter] 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.
[David Clarke] 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.
[David Clarke] Billy Coombs was a herdsman.
He was responsible for, I think, about 120 dairy cattle.
[cattle lowing softly]
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.
[telephone ringing]
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?
[mysterious music playing]
-[reporter] You had 120 cows-- -[Billy] Yes.
[reporter] …teleport from one field to another?
[Billy] To another farm.
[David Clarke] That is exactly the sort of tricks
that the Welsh fairies used to sort of play.
That kind of thing.
[chain rattles]
And then, after that came the silver-suited man,
which was the most terrifying experience of it all.
-[somber music plays] -[chatter on TV]
[Pauline] It was 10:00 on a Thursday.
I went to make a cup of tea to watch a late-night film.
[unsettling ambient music playing]
[David Clarke] 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.
[Mark] 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.
[tense pulsating music playing]
And she could see that it had no facial features at all.
Exactly what I'd seen.
[music intensifying]
[music fades out]
[reporter] The police were called out the night of the incident
at the Coombs's farm.
Sergeant Ernie, of Dyfed Police, answered the call.
[Sergeant Ernie] It's probably, of all the incidents
in my 26 years' service,
that's the most frightened family I've come across.
[static crackling]
[somber ambient music playing]
[Francine] 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.
[wind chimes tinkling]
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.
[door lock clacks]
[together] 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."
[Rosa, on recording] I got a bit worried about this
because, I mean, they looked so odd!
[Francine] 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.
[faucet dripping]
[Rosa, on recording] Now, this time, I had to ring up Mrs. Coombs
to prove to me that I wasn't seeing things.
[telephone rings]
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.
[gulls calling]
[David Clarke] 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.
[Rosa, on recording] She said that, from her direction,
the rock had opened like a door,
and they disappeared.
[Kevin] 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.
-[intriguing ambient music playing] -[inaudible chatter]
[reporter] 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.
[Gareth] "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.
[unsettling ambient music plays]
[music fades out]
[Tony] 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" playing]
♪ Calling occupants Of interplanetary craft ♪
[David Clarke] 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…
[prankster] Whoa! [grunts]
…because a lady appeared at the door aiming what appeared to be a gun.
[gun cocks]
♪ Calling occupants of interplanetary ♪
♪ Quite extraordinary craft ♪
[reporter] 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.
[Dave] 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.
[woman] It was a dome-shaped object.
Glowing with a pale cream light.
[reporter] 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.
[broadcaster] 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.
[Tony] 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?
-[all] Yes. -Right.
[David George] 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.
[Francine] 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.
[Mark] 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.
[papers shuffling]
[Mark] "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."
[young Dave] Well, it had the clear cigar shape with the dome on top of that.
[Dave] 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.
[young Dave] Yes, I did!
[Dave] 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.
[Dave] In 1978, I appeared on a TV program called Magpie.
[presenter] …the gentleman. That's David, David, Philip, and Shaun down here. Now…
[Dave] 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.
[Dave] 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.
[Francine] 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.
[Rosa, on recording] 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."
[reporter] 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.
[reporter] 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.
[eerie ambient music playing]
[music fading out]
[David Clarke] 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.
[Dave] 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.
[mysterious ambient music playing]
[music fades out]
[inquisitive electronic music playing]
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…" [chuckles] "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.
[intriguing ambient music plays]
[music fading out]
♪ 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 ♪
[music fading out]
[eerie ambient music playing]
[music fading out]