The Broadhaven Triangle and the Welsh UFO Flap of 1977
In 1977, a quiet corner of the Pembrokeshire coast became the centre of one of the strangest and most extraordinary UFO waves in British history.
Schoolchildren reported a mysterious craft beyond their playground. A hotel owner claimed to have seen an upside-down saucer and two faceless humanoid figures. A farming family became caught up in a terrifying series of encounters involving strange lights, mechanical failures, a seven-foot silver-suited figure and even cattle apparently transported from one location to another.
The events became known as the Broad Haven Triangle, the Welsh Triangle or the Dyfed Triangle.
And almost fifty years later, one question remains:
What really happened in Pembrokeshire in 1977?
The Sighting That Started It All
On 4 February 1977, a group of children at Broad Haven Primary School were outside during their lunch break when they saw something strange beyond the school grounds.
Fourteen children reported seeing an unusual silver or yellowish, cigar-shaped object near a field behind the school. Some described a dome and flashing or pulsating lights. Several also claimed to have seen a mysterious silver-suited figure nearby.
When the children initially reported what they had seen, their claims were met with understandable scepticism.
But the story didn’t go away.
On the following Monday, headmaster Ralph Llewellyn interviewed fifteen pupils separately and asked them to draw what they had witnessed.
The drawings were not identical—but many showed striking similarities: a cigar or saucer-shaped object, often with a dome on top.
This became one of the most compelling aspects of the entire case. These were young children, interviewed separately, producing broadly similar representations of something they insisted they had genuinely seen.
And decades later, several of those witnesses have continued to maintain that their experience was real.
The Silver Figure
The craft wasn’t the only strange thing reportedly seen near Broad Haven.
Some of the children described a humanoid figure dressed in silver. Accounts vary, as eyewitness testimony often does, but descriptions included a tall figure wearing what appeared to be a metallic suit.
This image—the silver craft and its equally mysterious occupant—would soon be echoed in other reports from across the Pembrokeshire coast.
And this was where the story became considerably stranger.
The Haven Fort Hotel Encounter
On 19 April 1977, Rose Granville, owner of the Haven Fort Hotel near Little Haven, reported an extraordinary encounter.
Haven Fort Hotel, recently up for sale for £1.3
Awakened by a strange humming noise, she looked outside and claimed to see an object resembling an upside-down saucer in a nearby field.
The object appeared surrounded by brilliant light or flames.
Then she saw the figures.
According to Granville, two extremely tall humanoid beings emerged. They had unusually long limbs, pointed or strangely shaped heads and seemingly featureless faces.
She later claimed that the heat from the phenomenon was so intense that her face felt burned.
When she left to alert others and returned, the mysterious object and its occupants had vanished.
No definitive physical evidence was found that proved an extraordinary craft had landed there.
But Granville was sufficiently disturbed by her experience to write to her Member of Parliament, bringing the strange events to official attention.
The Terror at Ripperston Farm
If the Broad Haven school incident was the most famous episode of the Welsh Triangle, the experiences reported by the Coombs family at Ripperston Farm were perhaps the most disturbing.
Billy and Pauline Coombs and their family claimed to experience a prolonged series of bizarre phenomena throughout 1977.
One of the most chilling involved a figure reportedly standing outside the farmhouse.
The being was described as approximately seven feet tall, dressed in a silver suit and wearing what appeared to be a completely black visor.
It simply stood outside the window.
Watching.
But that was only the beginning.
The Coombs family also reported strange lights and UFOs, unexplained mechanical and electrical failures, and bizarre incidents involving their livestock.
In perhaps the strangest claim of all, cattle were reportedly discovered in places where there appeared to be no obvious way for them to have arrived—as if they had somehow been transported from one location to another.
Were these genuinely paranormal events?
A series of unrelated coincidences?
Exaggerations that grew in the retelling?
Or was something truly extraordinary happening around Ripperston Farm?
What Did the Government Know?
The events inevitably attracted the attention of the authorities.
Documents released years later revealed that military personnel did investigate aspects of the Broad Haven sightings. The Ministry of Defence’s concern was not necessarily extraterrestrial visitors—it was whether unidentified aircraft or other unusual activity could represent a threat to national security.
And the location was significant.
Pembrokeshire was home to sensitive military installations, including RAF Brawdy, which during the Cold War became associated with American naval operations and the monitoring of Soviet submarine activity in the Atlantic.
This raises an intriguing possibility.
Could witnesses have been seeing secret military technology?
Experimental aircraft?
Unusual exercises?
Or perhaps something being tested that the public simply wasn’t supposed to know about?
The military connection doesn’t prove a conventional explanation—but it makes the location of the sightings particularly interesting.
The Conventional Explanations
Several explanations have been proposed over the years.
One suggestion was that the mysterious silver-suited figures could have been people wearing the type of reflective fire-resistant protective clothing used in industrial and military environments.
Another theory involved military aircraft, including the revolutionary Harrier jump jet, whose ability to hover and take off vertically could undoubtedly have appeared extraordinary to an unexpected observer.
The Harrier Jump Jet
Then there is the prank theory.
Years later, businessman Glyn Edwards claimed to have dressed in a silver suit and wandered around the area as a joke. But even if true, this does not necessarily explain the original school sighting or every other report associated with the 1977 wave.
Perhaps the most mundane suggestion was that the Broad Haven children had simply mistaken agricultural machinery or a sewage tanker for a spacecraft.
There’s a problem with that explanation.
Many of these children had grown up in a rural farming community. Tractors, slurry tankers and agricultural equipment were hardly unfamiliar sights.
And nearly fifty years later, the principal witnesses have continued to insist that what they saw was not an ordinary vehicle.
The Problem With the Welsh Triangle
The difficulty with the Broad Haven Triangle is that we’re not dealing with one single event.
We’re dealing with a collection of very different claims.
The schoolchildren’s sighting is fundamentally an eyewitness case involving multiple young witnesses and contemporaneous drawings.
The Haven Fort Hotel encounter is the testimony of a single adult witness reporting an extraordinary craft and humanoid beings.
The Ripperston Farm story goes much further into the realm of high strangeness—with alleged UFOs, mysterious entities, electrical disturbances and apparently impossible movements of livestock.
Should all these events be considered part of the same phenomenon?
Or were completely unrelated incidents gradually woven together into the legend of the Welsh Triangle?
That distinction matters.
Because while some individual cases are genuinely intriguing, the more extraordinary the claim, the stronger the evidence required to support it.
Evidence Rating: 3.5 out of 5 — Intriguing, but inconclusive
The strongest element of the case is undoubtedly the Broad Haven school sighting.
Multiple children reported seeing something unusual, they were interviewed separately, and their drawings showed notable similarities. Several witnesses have maintained their accounts for decades.
That deserves to be taken seriously.
However, there is no definitive photograph, video, recovered material or independently verified physical evidence proving that an extraterrestrial spacecraft landed near the school.
The later encounters are even more extraordinary but rely heavily on eyewitness testimony, making them extremely difficult to verify after almost half a century.
The evidence suggests that something unusual was reported across Pembrokeshire in 1977.
What that something actually was remains another question entirely.
Richard’s Verdict
I believe the children of Broad Haven saw something.
I don’t believe fourteen schoolchildren simply invented the entire experience, and the fact that several of the witnesses have maintained their stories for almost fifty years carries weight with me.
But does that mean they saw an extraterrestrial spacecraft?
Potentially, but there is always the possibility it was something else.
The military presence in the area cannot be ignored, and secret or misunderstood military activity remains a plausible possibility for at least some of the sightings.
What fascinates me most, however, is the sheer diversity of the reports. A strange craft witnessed by schoolchildren. Faceless humanoids. A seven-foot figure outside a farmhouse window. Electrical disturbances. Livestock apparently moved impossibly from one place to another.
Either Pembrokeshire experienced an extraordinary wave of genuinely unexplained phenomena in 1977—or several completely different events, misunderstandings and perhaps pranks became intertwined to create one of Britain’s greatest UFO legends.
My verdict: unexplained—but with significant questions still hanging over the more extraordinary claims.
And after almost fifty years, the children who stood in that Welsh playground still insist that what they saw was real.
Perhaps the greatest mystery isn’t whether they saw something.
It’s what they saw.
Tomorrow on 365 Days of the Paranormal, The Bempton Cliffs Mystery
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