UFO. United Kingdom

In 1977, schoolkids saw a UFO in a nearby field - their teacher didn't believe them but it was the beginning of a series of events that remain unexplained to this day

Most visitors to the small Pembrokeshire village of Broad Haven, in South West Wales, enjoy the lovely sandy beach or pass through on the Puffin Shuttle bus.

To all outward appearances it’s just a traditional Welsh seaside resort.

But delve below the surface and – just like in the classic TV sci-fi series The X Files – there’s uncertainty, confusion and many, many questions.

And this week at the village hall, locals gathered to finally try and find the answers which have eluded them for exactly 40 years.

If this was a Mulder and Scully episode, the screen would wibble and wobble, and we’d flashback those four decades to the day in 1977 when something made the children at the local school suddenly all come running, their hearts pounding with fear, into their classroom.

Outside a strange silver object like nothing they’d ever seen before, hovered over a field, just beyond their playground.

Headmaster Ralph Llewellyn dismissed the distraught pupils’ claims, without going outside to look. It was a decision he would regret forever.

For to this day, even as adults, they maintain there was only one description of what they’d seen – an Unidentified Flying Object .

Schoolboy David Davies, in the playground on that February Friday afternoon, stood looking at something that would leave him with a lifetime’s fascination and a drive to get to the truth of what that strange object was.

“It was pearlescent silvery-grey,” he says, “approximately 40ft long, torpedo, cigar-shaped, with an upper domed section that covered the central third of the vehicle and which was topped with a red pulsating light.”

Upset their claims were being ignored, David and his classmates handed in a petition to the police station.

In the end, the headmaster separated the children and asked them to draw what they had seen under exam conditions. He was amazed to find their drawings were almost identical to each other.
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It was February 1977 and the students of a small primary school in the town of Broad Haven, Wales, were playing in the schoolyard during recess.

One of the boys, named David Davies, decided not to go out onto the playground, but instead sat in the classroom and read a book, he liked such a quiet pastime.

Suddenly, several of his classmates ran into the classroom and began vying with each other to talk about what a large UFO was flying over the trees near the playground. Davis thought, “This is some kind of nonsense,” and was about to take it for a prank, but he went outside anyway.

“I saw this silver, cigar-shaped thing, about 45 feet (14 meters) long, appear from behind the trees in front of me. And all I could think of was to run away,” says David Davies, now 57 years old.

He ran home and told his mother everything, and she immediately believed: “You know how mothers are – they always know when you’re lying. And then she was absolutely convinced that I was telling the truth.”

David Davies has said UFOs has been a subject which has gone on to “dominate” his life. Credit: BBC

Sean Garrison, another student from the same school, also witnessed a UFO that day. Now he is also over fifty. And his parents also immediately believed his words.

“I went home and told my mom and dad, and they didn’t judge me at all. They believed me right away.” Some students saw not only the UFO, but also its pilot in the cockpit. They say that he was wearing a silver suit and that there was someone else to his right.

In general, an entire group of Broad Haven schoolchildren saw something that was difficult to explain with anything logical. The children were also asked to draw what they saw and they drew typical “flying saucers”.

Initially, most adults simply dismissed the children’s words, believing that they were simply conspiring to play a prank or that they were having something like a “mass incident of imagination”, but in the following weeks adults began to see UFOs and humanoids.

Broad Haven’s headteacher said he was surprised that the drawings from his pupils were so similiar

A few months after the school yard sighting, hotel owner Rose Granville – who lived a few hundred yards down the coast – reported seeing a spacecraft just as she was going to bed.

“She looked through the window and saw this thing sort of hovering,” her daughter Francine recalled to Encounters.

“These two figures came out of it. They looked a little unsteady.”

Rose reported them having “very long arms and legs” with no facial features. The Granvilles said the spaceship had left a scorch mark and a ridge on the ground where it had landed.

X-Files from the government later showed Rose had written to her local MP on Haven Fort Hotel-headed notepaper, explaining that the event “left me greatly agitated and disturbed and not the least bit desirous of another encounter”.

A month or two later, and a few miles around the Marloes peninsula, Mark Morston claimed he saw not only a spaceship while walking alone – but also said he came face-to-face with a figure.

Claiming he saw an “upside down saucer in a glow” on a ridge near his house, he then described hearing a rustle in the hedge further down the road.

“This thing stepped out of the hedge,” said Mark. “It was a good 7ft tall, it had a silver suit with a motorbike visor as a face.

“I thought ‘that’s not a man, no way is that a man’. It started walking towards me and I thought ‘this is not happening’.

“I was quite scared. It kept walking, so I legged it.”

The next day Mark returned to the scene with his dad where he said they found a huge footprint in the mud “too big to be an ordinary man”.

Mark’s uncle and aunt later told a TV reporter they saw an 8ft (2.4m) featureless silver figure outside their isolated farmhouse.

The police were called to that incident, and the officer who took the call from the family later stated “in all of my 26 years service, that’s the most frightened family I’ve come across”.

Also, local farmers began to notice mysterious moving lights in the fields one after another, and then they saw a giant faceless figure in a silver suit.

And one farmer told an absolutely incredible thing: he allegedly saw a herd of his cows teleport to another farm.

A few months after the events at Broad Haven, Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, and Spielberg recently visited Broad Haven for the Netflix UFO documentary series Encounters.