The schoolboys who saw a UFO and drew identical pictures to prove it

The rugged coastline of Pembrokeshire is a place that evokes a certain mystery. Myths and legends were spun here and in centuries past smugglers would ply their illicit trade on its sea-lashed, treacherous rocks and coves.

And, back in 1977, another mystery of a different kind altogether came to hover (perhaps quite literally) over this westerly outpost of Wales; or more precisely, over one particular village: Broad Haven (population 856).

The curious events that unfolded in a field abutting the village primary school here, on a cold, wet Friday in February, propelled this tiny seaside bolthole onto the international stage as a hotspot for possible extra-terrestrial activity.

It would be another nine months before Steven Spielberg‘s first science fiction blockbuster — Close Encounters Of The Third Kind — would hit the big screen.

But what happened in Broad Haven that year was a real-life blockbuster, remaining one of the most hotly discussed incidents in British UFO history, and now the subject of a new four-part BBC documentary, Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens.

It all began over the course of a single school day when 15 schoolchildren — 14 boys and one girl — all reported to their teachers seeing a curious silver, cigar-shaped aircraft in fields behind their school. More curious yet, some of the children claimed they had seen a silver man, with pointed ears, emerge from the strange vessel.

It could, so easily, have been put down to the fertile imagination of childhood, were it not for what happened next.

So insistent were the children that they had seen something, that, having returned to their homes that Friday evening, several parents made reports to the local police station.

By the time Monday rolled around, school headmaster Ralph Llewhellin decided he had to tackle the clamour, so sat them all down in exam conditions and asked them to describe and draw what they had seen.

The result was remarkable: the children sketched out pictures that were near identical.

A rational man, even Ralph Llewhellin was astounded. He was clear on two fronts: the children were not capable of maintaining such a sophisticated prank, and they had indeed witnessed something that couldn’t be explained — and still can’t be explained today.

For, as it would transpire, the Broad Haven school ‘incident’ of 1977 would be the start of a bumper season of UFO sightings, strange encounters and happenings, from the terrifyingly plausible to downright comical, that turned this Welsh seaside village into an enduring mecca for conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters.

So just what did happen at Broad Haven Primary that day? This week the Mail spoke to David Davies, who was a ten-year-old bookworm with a passion for Greek and Roman mythology, who still stands by every word of what he saw.

Now a father-of-two and proud grandfather, David’s recollections of that day are as strong now as they were 47 years ago when he sat in his classroom reading while his classmates went out to play.

‘The day itself was absolutely miserable,’ he says. ‘It was dreary, it was drizzly, it was cold, it was horrible. I’ve never been a great lover of getting cold and wet, so I was inside, reading books.’

David, however, kept getting interrupted by children running back into school with excited reports of a strange object, apparently parked on its perimeter.

‘This went on throughout the entire day and was getting to be a bit persistent,’ recalls David, who despite the assumptions one might make looking at his UFO-adorned T-shirt and the Area 51 (a highly classified U.S. Air Force facility associated with conspiracy theories) signs on his office door, calls himself a ‘natural-born sceptic’.

In the 1970s, flying saucers and the like were still the stuff of bad sci-fi movies and David wasn’t into that sort of thing.

But, an inquisitive, bright lad, at the end of the school day, he decided to investigate for himself and set off across the field to see what he could find.

‘I investigated at the top of the playground and there was absolutely nothing, so I thought I’d get a bit more adventurous, step over the perimeter fence, hop over the stream and get a closer look,’ he says.

‘I’ve got one leg over the fence and this thing just came up from behind a group of trees. It was silver, cigar-shaped and about 45ft long. I watched it for what couldn’t have been any longer than about ten seconds before for some reason I got the urge to run away.’

Whatever emotion it was, David insists it wasn’t fear. He didn’t discuss what he’d seen with the other boys on their way home, only blurting out what he had seen to his mother.

To his surprise, far from telling him not to be so silly, his mother made contact with retired veterinarian and representative of the British UFO Research Association, Randall Jones-Pugh, whose subsequent reports would fuel the international mystery that came to be known as The Dyfed Enigma.

David says he will never forget his headmaster’s face when the children handed in their sketches of what they’d seen.

‘His face went white,’ he says. ‘He realised that we had seen something that was totally beyond his comprehension.’

There were, however, no satisfying answers for David or his friends. Just more questions and a barrage of ‘hypotheses’ as to the true identity of what they’d seen — from sewage lorries, an aircraft from nearby RAF Brawdy, and a secret military project — as well as ridicule as the story was picked up by local and national media.

It is noteworthy that one of David’s classmates was the son of a local RAF Squadron Leader who also stood by his son’s account, telling reporters that he believed him ‘implicitly’.

Nor, David insists, was there any possibility of him and his classmates collaborating on their stories over the weekend before they were asked to do their sketches.

‘Bear in mind, this was the 1970s in rural Pembrokeshire,’ he chuckles. ‘We didn’t have iPads or mobile phones. If you were lucky enough to have a home phone, any conversation would be very short, at your parents’ insistence, and they would be listening.’

And while he might have built up quite a collection of alien paraphernalia over the years (gifts from humorous friends and family), he also insists he has never described what he saw as extra-terrestrial, even if, all these years later, that remains a persistent hypothesis.

He saw an object, he insists, an unexplained and strange aircraft. He chuckles again. ‘It would be marvellous to think that aliens had visited Broad Haven, but what they would do there I don’t know.’

Still, he didn’t deviate from his account, even when confronted by secondary school bullies.

‘Even at that age, I had principles and there was no way on earth I was going to say that I lied about the UFO, because I won’t stay quiet in order to keep other people happy,’ he says.

‘It’s certainly had a massive impact because it’s just something that’s never gone away. It’s there in my head and I’ve just never got to the bottom of what it was.’

The incident would have been remarkable enough, but two days later — a day before it all went public — there was another sighting.

On this occasion, it was a mother-of-two, Louise Bassett, who at the time ran a restaurant in Camarthen, with her husband, 40-miles inland from Broad Haven.

She was driving, alone, back to their home in Ferryside when her journey took an unusual turn.

As she tells the Mail: ‘It was late and dark and as I drove along listening to the radio… it was like there was interference. I thought it was bit odd as it had never happened before and I’d done this drive many, many times before.

‘I kept twiddling the knobs and then the radio started jamming permanently.’

Things were to get more unnerving when she saw blue lights, which at first she thought must be an accident — and then she saw a grey, cigar-like shape in the sky.

Such was her concern, she phoned police to ask if there had been any unusual activity that might explain what she had seen. The answer was no.

Then, a further unusual incident occurred. A day or two later an artist neighbour, who lived across the estuary, telephoned. He was in the habit of sketching from the window of his studio and said he had seen an object over Louise’s house and had drawn it.

‘He had drawn what I saw,’ she says.

The slim, softly spoken woman, who now lives in England, is not prone to hyperbole or sensationalism. Indeed, her adult children, who were very young at the time of the sighting, only found out about their mother’s UFO encounter very recently.

What has compelled Louise to talk now is that she still doesn’t know what she saw. ‘There’s never been an explanation,’ she says.

Could that explanation lie outside the world we know?

‘I really don’t know,’ says Louise. ‘I live in a really lovely place now and we’ve got dark skies and sometimes I look up and I wonder . . .’

Not suprisingly, in the months that followed, a strange UFO fever spread through Dyfed, as people started having even closer ‘encounters’.

There was, for instance, local hotelier Rosa Granville, who, in April 1977 — two months after the school incident — described seeing two ‘creatures’ emerge from a spaceship in a field outside the hotel.

Archive voice recordings remain of Rosa, who has since died, talking about what she saw. ‘Monsters,’ she says. ‘They were 7ft, 8ft tall, very long arms, very long legs. They looked as if they had boiler suits on, a silver colour, they just turned around and looked at me and I couldn’t see any features at all. It frightened me so much.’

Whatever she saw — pranksters or aliens — it certainly frightened her, as both the police officer who responded to her call and her daughter, Francine, attest on camera in the BBC series.

Then there were the Coombs — dairyman Billy Coombs, wife Pauline and their five children — who, in subsequent months, made repeated reports of close encounters with UFOs around their farm in the area.

On one occasion Pauline reported driving her car along a country lane and being pursued by a fiery object shaped like a rugby ball. On another occasion, they reported a herd of cows had been inexplicably teleported from behind a locked gate into an adjacent farmyard. Not surprisingly, their accounts have come in for some close scrutiny by sceptics.

Yet the most terrifying incident of all came in the early hours of April 23, as the family were watching a film at home, only to realise they too were being watched: by a 7ft tall figure in a spacesuit, peering through the window.

It doesn’t take a huge stretch of imagination to put this down to the work of a local prankster who’d come up with an amusing pastime to while away the long, dark evenings.

Indeed, several years later, in 1996, a businessman and member of Milford Haven’s Round Table reportedly stepped forward to assert that in 1977, as a prank, he had walked around the area in a silver firefighter’s suit.

To the Coombs family, however, it was very real. In fact, the policeman who responded to their call that night would later report that, in all his 26 years of service, ‘that was the most frightened family I have ever been to see’.

But what was the Government’s response to this flurry of extra-terrestrial activity in South Wales?

In 1977, aliens and UFOs were still taken seriously. The Ministry of Defence had a dedicated UFO sightings unit, as did the American government. Even former U.S. President Jimmy Carter claimed he’d seen a UFO, but the official responses to the Broad Haven incidents were broadly sceptical.

When the then MP for Pembroke, Nicholas Edwards, contacted the Ministry of Defence after being ‘inundated’ with UFO sightings, a discreet investigation did, archived files reveal, take place.

But if the words of the RAF officer who spoke to Rosa Granville following her sighting are anything to go by, the attitude was dismissive.

‘Should a UFO arrive at RAF Brawdy we will charge normal landing fees,’ he quipped.

Academic, journalist and UFO expert Dr David Clarke was a consultant for the National Archives when it released a swathe of previously secret files on UFO sightings back in 2005. He curated a book that included the drawings of the Broad Haven primary schoolchildren and remains open-minded on the subject.

‘I don’t think there is any doubt someone walked around in a firefighting suit, scaring people, but what triggered that idea in the first place?’ he asks.

‘It doesn’t explain it all, you can debunk things, you can look at individual stories and say that must have been caused by X, Y, Z, but there is always an element of mystery left, it’s never possible to completely explain it.’

Two decades later, TV’s The X-Files programme would carry the tagline ‘the truth is out there’.

David Davies, who did become a sci-fi fan, once he became a teenager, remains unsure whether answers are needed.

‘What happened has become one of Pembrokeshire’s folk tales. So there’s part of me which makes me think perhaps it’s better if we don’t find out. Keep the mystery. But then there’s the scientific side of me that really does want to know.’