The world-famous UFO sighting by a group of schoolchildren in Pembrokeshire 45 years ago

February 4, 1977, should have been a normal wintery day for pupils at one west Wales school. However, what they experienced that day instead hurled them and their unassuming community into the worldwide limelight, changing many of their lives forever.

It was the day that 14 children – aged just 10-years-old – found themselves at the centre of a UFO sighting case, which remains one of the UK’s most prolific. One of those boys is Dave Davies who, now in his 50s, has spent more than four decades on a quest for answers.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 podcast, Uncanny, too host and journalist Danny Robins, Dave outlined exactly what happened that day. He said: “Throughout the day children had come in from playtime saying they had seen a weird object flying around the perimeter of the school.

“The headmaster thought he was having his leg pulled at the time so he wouldn’t actually go out and have a look. At the end of the day the final bell went and I thought I’d investigate for myself so I went up to the top perimeter of the school and the object popped up from behind some trees. It was about 50 feet long, about the size of a bus with a florescence to it.”

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Dave described the object as having a central dome on top covering the middle third with a red pulsating light on top. Other children reported seeing tall sliver alien-like creatures. Dave said: “I felt this uncontrollable urge to run away from what I was seeing. I took one glance behind as I was running away to see it disappearing down behind the trees.

“There was no fear at all, it was just pure wonder and amazement. It was just something I had always thought of as science fiction fantasy and all of a sudden I am being confronted with it for real.”

Following their bizarre day, Dave and all the other kids went back home to their parents and told them what they had seen. By the following Monday word had got out and the media picked the story up. Dave explained: “So of course as soon as we got into school the headmaster approached us, isolated the children who had seen the object and made us draw pictures of what we saw and also a written account.

“He was very sceptical but the accounts were so similar that there was this resignation that hit him that we had in fact seen something.” Dave said it wasn’t long before the children were in newspapers and on television screens across the world. Although in many ways it was an incredible experience, Dave said “it had its downside”.

He said: “It affected my secondary school for the next five years. I was the kid who had seen the spaceship so it made me the target of bullies. I was systematically bullied for about five years, but I wasn’t going to say I was lying when I was telling the truth.” And to this day, Dave’s story has not changed – he is still sure of what he saw that day.

“I would love it if we were being visited by people from other planets,” he said. “One of the things I’ve always been proud of is that I have no prejudices whatsoever because I accepted, when I was 10-years-old, that it’s a little bit difficult to be prejudicial towards somebody… when we’ve got aliens visiting. If you can accept aliens, you can accept anything.”

Emlyn Williams from Swansea UFO Network, which he runs with colleagues Mike Maunder and Steve Drewson, said there had been several alternative suggestions given for what the boys saw in 1977. However, he said many of them didn’t quite add up.

He said told WalesOnline: “Broad Haven is a very close knit community where most people know each other and many of the children are from farming background – this is important. There was a bit of difference in what the kids drew, but they all described a dome craft with a dome on the top. A couple of boys even saw someone walking about holding some kind of apparatus. It had quite a big effect on some of the kids.

“One explanation put forward is that the object was a sewage tanker truck as it was near a sewage farm. However, if a heavy vehicle like that had driven into that area, it would still be there now as it would have been bogged down straight away in an area like that.

“A couple of the boys saw something rising up – this is unusual. Because of the trees, a helicopter wouldn’t have landed there and it would have been noisy. Some people think it could have been a military jet that landed there, but again that would have been really noisy. Farm machinery was also suggested, but again that’s unlikely because a lot of the boys were from farming backgrounds and were very familiar with that.”

In 2013 a former US Navy sailor came forward to say that the cause of the silver-suited being was in fact a US military personal wearing their standard fireproof uniform and the UFOs were new Harrier jets being flown.

In 2015 a novel claimed to have revealed details of a declassified MoD document suggesting top-ranking officials carried out a covert inquiry into the mysterious activities. The Watchers by Neil Spring is said to be based on “true events” and promised to reveal the truth about what really happened at Broad Haven.

The boys’ experience was part of a series of key incidents during 1977 which led to the area being given the name The Broad Haven Triangle – a term that has remained even decades on from the reported extra-terrestrial experiences.