‘This thing just popped up in front of me – silver, cigar-shaped, about 45ft long’: Meet the locals…

The ‘visitors’ first appeared in a field behind the local primary school. It was a drizzly Friday in February 1977, but most of the children in the small Welsh seaside village of Broad Haven were still enjoying their lunchtime break outdoors.

David Davies, a ten-year-old bookworm, was reading inside the classroom when the other children came in talking breathlessly about seeing a flying saucer moving in the trees beyond their playground.

Of course, David knew that was all Hollywood B-movie nonsense – but he couldn’t resist going to have a look for himself when school finished.

‘From behind some trees this thing popped up in front of me – silver, cigar-shaped, about 45ft long,’ the 57-year-old recalls today.

‘This thought just came into my mind that I had to run away.’

He sprinted home and told his mother. ‘You know what mothers are like – they can tell when you’re lying. And she was absolutely convinced that what I was saying was the truth,’ he says.

Another former pupil now in his 50s, Shaun Garrison, can also remember that day vividly. ‘I did go home and tell my mum and dad and they weren’t judgmental in any way. They believed me and believed that what I saw, I believed.’

A handful of the interviewees said they also saw a silver-suited occupant of the craft. ‘Somebody walking near it, to the right-hand side of it,’ says one, David George, today.

Though many dismissed the accounts as the product of children’s lively imaginations, this was only the beginning of a plethora of strange sightings and terrifying encounters that would make Broad Haven internationally famous and the epicentre of the largest mass UFO sighting in British history.

The following month, the owner of a local hotel insisted she’d seen an ‘upside-down saucer’ hovering in a nearby field and two long-limbed but featureless humanoid creatures briefly emerging from it. Local farmers described similarly inexplicable phenomena, including mysterious moving lights, a giant silver-suited figure with no face and a herd of cows seemingly teleported into another farm.

This village on the Pembrokeshire coast has been revisited, not by aliens but by Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg for a TV documentary series.

The so-called ‘Broad Haven Triangle’ is one of four alleged UFO mass sightings investigated in the Netflix series, Encounters, which have puzzled experts, infuriated sceptics and stiffened the resolve of those who believe in extraterrestrial visitations.

Spielberg, whose spectacular UFO feature film, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, came out just a few months after the Broad Haven sightings, co-produced the series through his TV arm, Amblin Television.

The other cases investigated in the series include 1994 claims by some 62 pupils at a private school in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, that they saw a spaceship and strange humanoid figures; reports by 300 people of fast-moving lights and objects in the sky above the Texas town of Stephenville in 2008; and similar sights reportedly witnessed by hundreds of Japanese people in the days leading up to and after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear-plant disaster.

Like these other cases, the Broad Haven episode wasn’t attested to by just one or two witnesses. In fact, 450 people in the area reported seeing UFOs in the weeks and months that followed.

Of course, Spielberg made two other feature films about visiting aliens: 1982’s ET and War Of The Worlds in 2005. He has previously revealed that he not only believes aliens exist – describing it as ‘mathematically impossible that we are the only intelligent species in the cosmos’ – but also believes the US government is hiding information from us all about them.

And there are plenty of people who agree with him – including in Congress and even the US military. Indeed, the new documentary series couldn’t be better timed for inviting sceptical viewers to reconsider the divisive issue of extraterrestrial visitors.

After decades in which Washington – like other Western governments – has airily dismissed reports of UFO sightings and alien encounters, a string of US government officials and whistleblowers have recently claimed that evidence to the contrary is being hidden.

The CIA claimed it stopped investigating UFOs in 1952, a lie that wasn’t exposed until 1979.

Congress is now pressing the Biden administration to reveal everything it knows on the matter. And polls show more than half of British people also believe the UK government is withholding intelligence about the existence of UFOs and aliens.

Six years ago, it was revealed that former US senator Harry Reid had obtained $22million in defence funding to investigate UFOs. And in 2020, the Pentagon confirmed that three declassified videos of US Navy fighter pilots encountering what would appear to be extraordinarily fast and manoeuvrable UFOs on training missions over the Pacific were legitimate and depicted ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ (UAPs).

If, as experts believe, these mysterious objects are beyond the technological ability of China, Russia or indeed the US, where do they come from? And how long have we been ignoring other UAPs?

‘We’re in a difficult state of ignorance,’ Dr Kevin Knuth, an astrophysicist and former Nasa research scientist, tells Encounters. ‘We don’t know what they are, we don’t know what their intentions are.’

While he admits there could be explanations other than extraterrestrial life, Knuth says that official quashing of UFO claims since the 1940s has unhelpfully discouraged serious research.

Certainly, the UK government didn’t spend much time investigating what happened at Broad Haven. An RAF officer was sent to talk to alleged witnesses and uncover whether they had instead mistaken aircraft from nearby RAF Brawdy, a theory that was later disproved. He then facetiously reported back to the Ministry of Defence that, should an alien craft indeed arrive at the airbase, ‘we will charge normal landing fees and inform you immediately’.

Public and media opinion tended to be equally sceptical and Broad Haven’s UFO-spotters were variously dismissed as shameless attention-seekers, hoaxers or deluded victims of mass hysteria.

However, the ‘witnesses’ have stuck defiantly to what they said they saw.

Francine Granville tells the documentary how a few weeks after the school incident, her mother Rose claimed she’d seen two featureless figures with pointed heads emerge from a flying saucer in a field outside the hotel they owned in Broad Haven. Worried they were after her chickens kept in a shed nearby, she shouted ‘What do you want?’. She describes feeling the heat blast from the ship as it took off hastily after her intervention.

Granville claims that she and her mother had a second sighting one afternoon soon afterwards when they noticed a silver disc in the sky that seemed to pulsate orange light before appearing to sink into the sea. But neighbours who said they saw the same thing insisted it sank into a small island off shore.

Those neighbours were local farmers called Billy and Pauline Coombs, and they had their own astonishing stories to tell about the area’s ‘visitors’.

Their nephew Mark Marston, a child at the time, recalls seeing a glowing ‘upside-down saucer’ on a nearby hill at dusk. He even shows the hedge, still there, from which a terrifying creature – 7ft tall and wearing a silver suit topped with what looked like a motorbike visor – emerged and started walking towards him. When his father investigated the spot the following day, Marston says, he found a single ‘massive footprint’ in the mud, too big to belong to a human.

One evening a few weeks later, the Coombs claimed they saw the same sort of figure looming outside their front windows as they watched TV one evening. A police officer who responded to their call would later tell the BBC he’d never come across such a frightened family.

On another occasion, Mrs Coombs reported that a glowing football-shaped object followed her car down a rural road, somehow stalling her engine.

Her husband, meanwhile, told police that after locking up his 120 dairy cattle one night, he was called soon afterwards by a neighbouring farmer asking why the herd had suddenly turned up in his yard.

UFO researcher David Clarke, who investigated Broad Haven at the time and notes that Wales is a land with a strong tradition of folk tales about mischievous fairies, observes that teleporting a herd of cattle ‘is exactly the sort of trick the Welsh faeries used to play’.

It’s also the sort of trick hoaxers might play. And in fact, the silver-suited figure, at least, may well have been local businessman Glyn Edwards who in 1996 claimed he had bought a silver firefighters suit (which were used at the nearby oil refinery at Milford Haven) and walked around the area in 1977 as a prank. But, as investigators note, the silver suit appearances came after a lot of the UFO sightings.

Meanwhile, ex-Nasa scientist Knuth isn’t surprised to hear the UFO may have disappeared into the sea. He tells the programme that UFOs are frequently spotted flying over water, going into it or coming out of it.

And if they really do come from a far-off planet, this would make sense, he says. For while that planet might be far hotter than Earth, the temperature underwater would be far more constant. So aliens could be going from an ocean on one planet to an ocean on another. ‘It would be very easy to just hang out in our oceans,’ he says.

Contrary to the popular perception that ‘witnesses’ say they’ve seen a UFO to get attention, those who made those claims at Broad Haven insist the episode has amounted to a huge burden on their lives. The Coombs farming family stopped talking about it completely, even among themselves, says their nephew.

Dave Davies, whose eloquence made him a popular choice for TV crews seeking an interview with one of the ten-year-olds, says he was bullied horrendously when he went to secondary school by boys demanding he admit he’d lied. Indeed, when he appeared on the ITV children’s programme Magpie (to once more discuss what he saw) in 1978, he was nursing a visible black eye that classmates had spitefully given him when they knew he was going in front of the cameras.

‘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,’ says David George, one of the Broad Haven school pupils who still insists he saw a UFO. ‘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.’

His latest foray in front of the cameras doesn’t answer that question either – there’s still nothing like definitive evidence of alien visitors. But the old certainties that anyone who claims to have seen a UFO must either be deranged or lying are waning. Just ask a US congressman.