Paranormal - The Village That Saw Aliens

A new BBC TV series, four half-hour episodes about an event in Wales in 1977.

"An investigation has begun into a claim that something strange came out of the skies and landed in the Welsh village of Broad Haven, near Haverfordwest."


Paranormal - The Village That Saw Aliens: Episode 1

It’s 1977, and 14 schoolboys from a village in west Wales make headlines around the world after they claim to see a UFO in the playground. The media frenzy is fuelled by the fact the boys had been placed under exam conditions and asked to draw what they saw. All depict a large silver craft with eery similarities. But their 'close encounter' is only the start. It triggers a wave of unexplained phenomena along the coastline.

Digging out reports about the schoolboys, natural sceptic and Radio 1 presenter Sian Eleri feels compelled to find out what really happened. She heads to the seaside village of Broad Haven, where it all began; her first mission is to track down the boys. She’s soon in deep, managing to trace the original drawings and chasing leads on the lads. But will any of them speak to her after all this time?

There’s a breakthrough when Sian tracks down the case files of original investigator, Randall Jones Pugh. They’ve been locked away for more than 30 years – until now. She’s struck by first-hand accounts of how petrified the boys were. And the case files themselves come with a caution. Randall dropped the case when something spooked him.

Sian tests other theories - did the boys see a military craft? Was it a playground joke that went too far? But things take a chilling turn when Sian meets a woman who was at the school at the time and is still haunted by it all. She’s clear it wasn’t just the children who saw something… And Sian’s about to find a tape of a new witness who takes the extraterrestrial encounters to another level.

There's a certain amount of artistic licence and loose use of language - for example the schoolboys were asked to each separately draw what they saw - from which the investigator starts using the phrase "exam conditions". Similarly the description above says the files "have been locked away for more than 30 years" - perhaps suggesting official secrets or some government policy, but the programme itself just shows them stored in someone's house.

I've not yet watched all four programmes (available online now in the UK).

February 2017
Broad Haven UFO sightings marked 40 years on

The top quote is about another sighting nearby two months later.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-...s-38723643

Then-MP for Pembroke, Nicholas Edwards contacted the Ministry of Defence after being "inundated" with UFO sightings.
Flt Lt Cowan, an officer from RAF Brawdy, visited Ms Granville's hotel and examined the site, but could find no evidence of a landing.
He joked: "Should a UFO arrive at RAF Brawdy we will charge normal landing fees."
In his report, he mentioned the possibility that a "local prankster was at work" and the description of aliens "fitted exactly the type of protection suit that would have been issued in the event of a fire at one of the local oil refineries".
This fits in with the account of businessman Glyn Edwards, who in 1996 revealed he wandered around the area in a silver suit in 1977 as a prank.

Attending alongside Mr Davies is Neil Spring, who wrote a book based on the Broad Haven sightings.
"The moment I heard of this small village plagued by UFO sightings, I was inspired to understand what really happened," he said.
His research uncovered a secret investigation by the military police.
"Whilst the government was telling the public they had no records of any unusual activity in the area, privately, officials were so concerned about the UFO sightings in Broad Haven that they asked the military police to conduct a 'discreet' investigation," he said.
Mr Spring believes local pranksters were behind some of the sightings, but said "people emulate what's happening around them" and the pranks were inspired by events which had been "sincerely reported".
"My research showed that there were strange occurrences in Broad Haven long before the incident at the school and for a long times afterwards.
"So you can take the children out of the story and you'll still have the story."

I am not actually impressed with the similarity of the drawings because if I was a child and was asked to draw a UFO without having seen one, I would have drawn exactly the same kind of thing and besides:

https://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/artic...ound-kind/

Their drawings are often described as remarkably similar but although made independently they were not produced until three days after the sighting, so the children had the entire weekend to discuss what they had seen.

...but, unless the teacher put them up to it, which is stretching credibility way too far, a whole group of schoolchildren engaged in a hoax and not one of them has ever denounced what they wrote and drew???  The drawings were taken seriously enough to be sent to the MoD.  I think they witnessed something strange but embellished their accounts creatively, as children do to add excitement.  What exactly they saw though remains a mystery.

I can't help but think of the 1951 film
"The Day the Earth Stood Still"
   

It was the famous sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 that popularized the flying saucer as the typical depiction of a UFO, at least in the Western world. It would have been more compelling if drawings of similar objects from an even older age were discovered.

It was the famous sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 that popularized the flying saucer as the typical depiction of a UFO, at least in the Western world. It would have been more compelling if drawings of similar objects from an even older age were discovered.

I'll have to go back and check but there are at least UFO/UAP type reports going far back before 1947.

Whether they were disc shaped...I've seen a few claims pointing at objects [in] paintings but not sure there was a really good, definitive case of flying discs.

[Laird]

I've seen a few claims pointing at objects [in] paintings but not sure there was a really good, definitive case of flying discs.

I'm not sure either, but the UFO's in Art segment of the Ancient Aliens Debunked movie does a good job of falsifying plenty of the claims.

I'll have to go back and check but there are at least UFO/UAP type reports going far back before 1947.

If I remember rightly, the term "flying saucer" was originally taken from Kenneth Arnold's description of what he saw.  Previously they tended to take on a variety of shapes.

If I remember rightly, the term "flying saucer" was originally taken from Kenneth Arnold's description of what he saw.  Previously they tended to take on a variety of shapes.

Yeah, including actual flying sea ships I believe.

It's a very old phenomena, one of the reasons I think ETH supporters are wrong. 

I would be less confident in claiming ETH is wrong if the attempts to show the world these physical craft + corpses wasn't underneath riches of embarrassment that people like Grusch have provided.