TRUDGING across frosty fields to tend to his lambs, Welsh farmer Irwel Evans was stopped in his tracks by lumps of metal strewn as far as the eye could see.
Further investigation showed strange debris was scattered over an area the size of three football pitches on the family farm, outside the sleepy village of Llanillar in Wales, and the tops of trees in a nearby wood had been shorn off by some sort of impact.
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The incident, which took place in January 1983, was dubbed the «Welsh Roswell» – after the infamous UFO crash in New Mexico in 1947.
After his shock find, farmer Evans called cops and a team of RAF men and plain clothes officers – dubbed the ‘Men in Black’ – combed the land and nearby woods, taking away the fragments found.
But there was never any official explanation of what it was and no records were kept of the operation that night – even though the trees in the woods were all chopped down.
Now, 40 years on, scientists have carried out lab tests on the mysterious metallic lumps and found no obvious conclusion about its origin – suggesting it could be alien.
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Ancient Aliens presenter and University of Chester lecturer Mark Olly ordered specialist tests on remnants of the debris for his new book to mark the 40th anniversary of the incident, Europe’s Roswell – and received mysterious results.
And, in a strange twist of fate, samples from the Welsh Roswell are strikingly similar to a piece of material recently recovered from Roswell, New Mexico, where a spacecraft is said to have crashed.
Speaking about the incident Mark, from Warrington, Cheshire, told The Sun: «Nobody saw it, nobody heard it.
«A farmer called Irwel got up the next day and went out to have a look at his sheep and he found debris scattered across four fields.
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«You’re talking about a lot of debris and the nearby woods had had the top of the trees sheared off to a width of about 20-25 feet, so it was obvious something had hit it and scattered debris.
«The thing that really shocked him at the time, and everybody else that was involved in it, is that whatever it was that scattered all this debris then flew off.»
‘Men in Black’
A local UFO investigator named Gary Rowe then went down to the site to recover the debris.
Mark said: «He had a look across the fields but everything had gone, because the night before, Irwin had phoned the police, who in turn had notified the local MoD, which at that point, was an Air Force base. They’d turned out with another agency which looked like ‘Men in Black’ and spent all night clearing the site.
«So by the time Gary had got there there didn’t seem to be anything there.
«But being a bright chap, he thought, I bet you they haven’t managed to clear the woods. So he went and had a look in the woods, and sure enough he got six pieces of metal and two pieces of of a substance looking like foil.»
In a sinister twist, Gary claimed he was later visited by more mysterious ‘Men in Black’ – from an unknown government agency – who asked him to hand over the debris, but he told them he no longer had it.
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Local mystery
The strange incident baffled locals in the area, who are still searching for answers.
Speaking at the time, farmer Evans said: “Whatever tumbled from the sky broke up on impact. It must have been a fair size.
«Wreckage was scattered across four fields. Had it hit a building there’s no doubt the devastation could have been terrific. It must have come down the night before I found it for the area was clear in the afternoon when I checked the flock.
«Yet I heard nothing at all unusual. Although the pieces themselves were extremely light they must have fallen with some force to sever branches off trees. It is all very disturbing.”
Another local, Emyr Hughes, secretary of the Cardiganshire farmers’ union, added: “I’ve asked the Ministry of Defence for an explanation, but so far have had no reply.
«The RAF say they had no aircraft out at the time this debris must have landed, nor were there any manoeuvres. Not only that, their radar scanners picked up nothing unusual.”
Secret location
After keeping his finds hidden for four decades, Gary gave Mark some of the debris to send off for testing, while the rest remains locked up in storage in a secret location.
Mark sent the specimens to labs in Australia and the US and was shocked when the results came through.
«The Australian lab came back and they said, ‘Yes, it’s aluminium, but it’s aluminium foam’,» he said.
«‘We know exactly what this is. It’s got some kind of American military grade glue on it. It’s painted green on one side.’
«However, nobody had aluminium foam in 1983, so they might think they know what it is, but clearly it shouldn’t have existed at that point.
«Then the American analysis comes back and their conclusion just says ‘Unknown’.
«They said they had no idea what the origin of this is but it’s lanthanum, which is an extremely exotic, massively expensive, difficult to find, difficult to produce metal.
«So we’ve got this idea that it’s possibly aluminium foam and it’s lanthanum.
«If you built some kind of flying craft out of lanthanum, it would cost billions of dollars to produce that quantity of metal.»
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Alien origin?
Mark believes the debris could even be alien.
«We thought when the analysis came back, it would put the whole thing to bed but it’s had the opposite effect,» he says.
«Actually, the rabbit hole’s gone deeper and we’re now less able to say what it is because you’ve got two substances now positively identified, that shouldn’t exist at that point in time.
«Is it something that is alien?»
Mark says they have «back engineered» the pieces, a process of figuring out how things work from their component parts.
«My own opinion is that it’s possibly alien technology that’s been back engineered,» he says. «Alien in the sense that it’s not something that any of us are aware of.»
Step towards disclosure
Mark believes the new test results are a step towards disclosure, a term used to describe the government admitting to having knowledge of the existence of extra terrestrial life.
“We’re not kicking the door of disclosure open but we’re certainly scratching at it… we’re saying, hang on a minute, we’ve got physical evidence,» he said.
«This is not blinking lights, and strange eyewitnesses and hypnosis or whatever, this is solid.
«This is physical, hard evidence of something that is either extraordinarily unusual for terrestrial or equally unusual for extraterrestrial.»
Mark’s new book Europe’s Roswell – 40 Years Since Impact, is published by Flying Disk Press and available on Amazon.
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