1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:09,800 Over the last 30 years, there have been thousands of reported sightings of unidentified flying 2 00:00:09,800 --> 00:00:13,800 objects over the British Isles. 3 00:00:13,800 --> 00:00:18,600 You think I'm bloodied up, but this is a UFO. 4 00:00:18,600 --> 00:00:23,400 In the summer of 2008, reports of flying saucers and other crafts were capturing the headlines 5 00:00:23,400 --> 00:00:27,560 again. 6 00:00:27,560 --> 00:00:32,760 Over the years, numerous eyewitnesses, including military personnel, police officers and experienced 7 00:00:32,760 --> 00:00:38,560 airline pilots have testified to seeing strange lights in the sky and other mysterious phenomena. 8 00:00:38,560 --> 00:00:43,560 Oh, my God. Very bright yellow object. 9 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:48,560 It was nothing like an airplane that I'd ever seen before. 10 00:00:48,560 --> 00:00:52,560 It's the brightest light I've ever seen in my life. 11 00:00:52,560 --> 00:00:57,560 Many of these UFO sightings remain unexplained to this day. 12 00:00:57,560 --> 00:01:00,560 But what or who were they? 13 00:01:00,560 --> 00:01:05,560 Could they really be evidence of extraterrestrial life? 14 00:01:05,560 --> 00:01:11,560 It's a strange, small red light. Weird. It's coming this way. 15 00:01:11,560 --> 00:01:13,560 It's definitely coming this way. 16 00:01:13,560 --> 00:01:18,560 It was just something out of science fiction for me. It was totally unbelievable. 17 00:01:18,560 --> 00:01:24,560 Tonight, we hear firsthand from those who witnessed them and examine the truth behind 18 00:01:24,560 --> 00:01:29,560 some of Britain's most celebrated UFO sightings. 19 00:01:49,560 --> 00:01:56,560 In 1977, Broadhaven in West Wales became notorious as a UFO hotspot. 20 00:01:56,560 --> 00:02:01,560 There have been a number of calls to the police station. Every call referred to objects in the sky. 21 00:02:01,560 --> 00:02:06,560 Dozens of witnesses claim to have seen mysterious lights and objects around the village. 22 00:02:06,560 --> 00:02:14,560 There was an orange object, which seemed to be split into five, one or two segments. 23 00:02:14,560 --> 00:02:18,560 The number of sightings left locals shocked. 24 00:02:18,560 --> 00:02:20,560 Experts baffled. 25 00:02:20,560 --> 00:02:22,560 We could offer no explanation. 26 00:02:22,560 --> 00:02:26,560 And even sparked a Ministry of Defence investigation. 27 00:02:26,560 --> 00:02:32,560 The Ministry don't tend to do investigations of UFO sightings. It's extremely unusual. 28 00:02:32,560 --> 00:02:37,560 The phenomenon would become known as the Broadhaven Triangle. 29 00:02:45,560 --> 00:02:51,560 In February 1977, nine-year-old David Davis was playing with his friends 30 00:02:51,560 --> 00:02:56,560 when they noticed something strange in the field behind their school. 31 00:03:00,560 --> 00:03:08,560 A silver cigar-shaped object about the size of a bus popped up from behind some trees 32 00:03:08,560 --> 00:03:10,560 as if it was trying to take off. 33 00:03:10,560 --> 00:03:16,560 I don't know whether it was stuck, but it seemed to pause for about two or three seconds 34 00:03:16,560 --> 00:03:19,560 and then disappear back behind the trees again. 35 00:03:22,560 --> 00:03:26,560 It was only a matter of seconds that I actually saw the object, 36 00:03:26,560 --> 00:03:31,560 but it imprinted itself on my memory forever. 37 00:03:34,560 --> 00:03:37,560 The children ran back inside and alerted their teachers. 38 00:03:38,560 --> 00:03:43,560 Ralph Thuelyn, who was the headmaster of Broadhaven School at the time, 39 00:03:43,560 --> 00:03:50,560 he got us all together and in exam situations he got us to draw what we've seen 40 00:03:50,560 --> 00:03:52,560 and describe it as well. 41 00:03:54,560 --> 00:03:58,560 At the time of the sighting, Hugh Turnbull was chief reporter 42 00:03:58,560 --> 00:04:00,560 for local paper The Western Telegraph. 43 00:04:01,560 --> 00:04:06,560 I had a call to say that the children at Broadhaven School had seen something remarkable. 44 00:04:06,560 --> 00:04:12,560 They didn't actually say they'd seen aliens, they didn't say they'd seen this thing hovering overhead. 45 00:04:12,560 --> 00:04:14,560 They'd seen something inexplicable. 46 00:04:17,560 --> 00:04:20,560 Hugh drove down to the school to interview the group of children 47 00:04:20,560 --> 00:04:23,560 who were aged between nine and eleven years old. 48 00:04:23,560 --> 00:04:26,560 He wasn't anticipating what they were about to tell him. 49 00:04:27,560 --> 00:04:33,560 I spoke to the head teacher Ralph Thuelyn and he showed me some of the drawings that the children had done. 50 00:04:33,560 --> 00:04:37,560 And it was evident that there was some similarity between the drawings. 51 00:04:37,560 --> 00:04:41,560 Some were a bit far out, some showed alien figures, some didn't. 52 00:04:41,560 --> 00:04:46,560 But in general they were showing the same sort of object, the same shape of object. 53 00:04:46,560 --> 00:04:52,560 And having those pictures made it obviously a very much more exciting story. 54 00:04:56,560 --> 00:05:01,560 Initially skeptical about the story, Hugh decided to retrace the children's steps. 55 00:05:01,560 --> 00:05:07,560 He asked one of them, David Davis, to take him back to the place where the object had been seen. 56 00:05:08,560 --> 00:05:14,560 I took a look around the field, we were looking really for any sign that an object had been there, 57 00:05:14,560 --> 00:05:17,560 be it from this planet or another planet. 58 00:05:17,560 --> 00:05:20,560 There were no cut eyes or tracks or anything, 59 00:05:20,560 --> 00:05:27,560 but a telegraph pole cross member had been dislodged and was now sort of sitting at 45 degrees. 60 00:05:30,560 --> 00:05:33,560 Their journey took them past the gates of the local sewage works, 61 00:05:33,560 --> 00:05:37,560 which lay directly behind the field where the sighting had occurred. 62 00:05:40,560 --> 00:05:46,560 Liz Philpot, an administrator at the school at the time, had her own theory as to what the children might have seen. 63 00:05:47,560 --> 00:05:53,560 Later in the afternoon we walked down the lane to the sewage depot, 64 00:05:53,560 --> 00:06:02,560 and there were big wrought iron gates there, so we rattled on those until someone came out and it was the man in charge. 65 00:06:02,560 --> 00:06:13,560 And I asked him, in confidence, to tell me whether or not his men had driven a tanker down into the field. 66 00:06:14,560 --> 00:06:20,560 And he said, absolutely not, no way could we get down there. 67 00:06:22,560 --> 00:06:26,560 I think these children, whatever they saw, it was something unusual, 68 00:06:26,560 --> 00:06:30,560 and a sewage tanker I don't think would have fitted into that category. 69 00:06:30,560 --> 00:06:35,560 Also, it would have been a very difficult place to get a sewage tanker into, because it was steep. 70 00:06:35,560 --> 00:06:39,560 I think the weather had been wet, so there would have been signs of tire tracks. 71 00:06:40,560 --> 00:06:47,560 Many of us came from farming backgrounds, so we knew it wasn't anything agricultural. 72 00:06:50,560 --> 00:06:55,560 Persuaded by the children's testimony, Hugh decided to run the story. 73 00:06:57,560 --> 00:07:04,560 I think I recognized immediately that this was a much bigger story than we had had previously about UFOs. 74 00:07:04,560 --> 00:07:12,560 I don't think I realized how the story would take off, and it would become a major international news event in the way that it did. 75 00:07:25,560 --> 00:07:33,560 In the winter of 1977, a group of children in Wales claimed to have seen a spacecraft hovering behind their school playing field. 76 00:07:34,560 --> 00:07:40,560 When the story hit the newsstands, Broadhaven, a small seaside village with only 600 residents, 77 00:07:40,560 --> 00:07:44,560 suddenly found itself the focus of intense public interest. 78 00:07:52,560 --> 00:07:57,560 An investigation has begun into a claim that something strange came out of the skies 79 00:07:57,560 --> 00:08:01,560 and landed in the Welsh village of Broadhaven, near Haverford West. 80 00:08:01,560 --> 00:08:05,560 Whatever it was, was spotted by children from the local school. 81 00:08:09,560 --> 00:08:17,560 We just couldn't carry on normal lessons. The phone was going off every couple of minutes. 82 00:08:17,560 --> 00:08:24,560 We were even getting researchers and interviewers from as far afield as Australia, New Zealand, America, 83 00:08:24,560 --> 00:08:27,560 all wanting to talk to the people who had seen the flying saucer. 84 00:08:28,560 --> 00:08:35,560 The incident at Broadhaven Primary School appeared to be a baffling one-off event. 85 00:08:41,560 --> 00:08:45,560 Until reports of other strange sightings began to surface. 86 00:08:45,560 --> 00:08:53,560 Five miles from Broadhaven in the village of Herbrandston, Maureen Diter also witnessed something for which she had no rational explanation. 87 00:08:53,560 --> 00:08:58,560 I was out one day during the week having a bit of fresh air at night 88 00:08:58,560 --> 00:09:06,560 and I happened to look up in the sky and I saw this cylindrical object with light on it and it was going very fast. 89 00:09:06,560 --> 00:09:11,560 So it was only a question of really seconds that I actually saw it. 90 00:09:11,560 --> 00:09:15,560 And I thought, what's that? I couldn't believe my eyes. 91 00:09:18,560 --> 00:09:22,560 The village of Littlehaven lies one mile down the coast from Broadhaven. 92 00:09:24,560 --> 00:09:32,560 Local resident Dorothy Cale was setting off from home one evening when she too observed something strange. 93 00:09:32,560 --> 00:09:47,560 We went out from our house which was on the cliff top at Littlehaven and there were some flashes, very, very bright flashes, which lit up the whole village. 94 00:09:48,560 --> 00:09:58,560 All of a sudden there was a very strong light. The driver put her foot hard on the brake quickly. 95 00:10:00,560 --> 00:10:07,560 There was the brightest light I've ever seen in my life and it appeared to be inside a glass dome. 96 00:10:08,560 --> 00:10:15,560 Well, it took our breath away really. We always looked at it. Nobody said a word. This was a strange thing. 97 00:10:16,560 --> 00:10:24,560 None of us said a word and then all of a sudden we didn't see it lift up or go anywhere. It was just gone. It flashed and it was gone. 98 00:10:26,560 --> 00:10:32,560 And our driver said, what on earth was that? 99 00:10:34,560 --> 00:10:38,560 The light resembled nothing Dorothy had ever seen before. 100 00:10:39,560 --> 00:10:44,560 But astronomer Ian Ridpath has been investigating UFO sightings for over 20 years. 101 00:10:44,560 --> 00:10:49,560 He believes there's usually a very straightforward explanation for such strange lights in the sky. 102 00:10:50,560 --> 00:10:58,560 People in general don't know the sky very well, the night sky, and people can very easily be fooled by the sight of a bright star or planet, 103 00:10:58,560 --> 00:11:02,560 particularly when it's low down and particularly when it's twinkling. 104 00:11:02,560 --> 00:11:08,560 And at night there is really no way to estimate the size and distance of an object 105 00:11:08,560 --> 00:11:15,560 and people can think that something is actually much closer to them than really it is. 106 00:11:16,560 --> 00:11:19,560 Whatever the cause, the sightings in the area continued. 107 00:11:21,560 --> 00:11:25,560 Like the incident at the primary school, some involved more than one eyewitness. 108 00:11:25,560 --> 00:11:30,560 Stephen Bamford and Robert Best were returning home to Broad Haven after a night out 109 00:11:30,560 --> 00:11:33,560 when they noticed something unusual out at sea. 110 00:11:33,560 --> 00:11:35,560 We probably saw the people before we saw the object. 111 00:11:35,560 --> 00:11:37,560 Yeah, we wondered what they were all looking at. 112 00:11:39,560 --> 00:11:41,560 We assumed it was probably the cliff was on fire. 113 00:11:41,560 --> 00:11:46,560 It did look like a fire, but it was obviously out to sea and it moved from right to left. 114 00:11:46,560 --> 00:11:52,560 It was an orange object which seemed to be split into several... 115 00:11:52,560 --> 00:11:58,560 One or two segments and then we thought we'd be brave and drive out there 116 00:11:58,560 --> 00:12:02,560 or drive in the general direction to see if we could sort of find whatever it was. 117 00:12:04,560 --> 00:12:08,560 And then as it moved across, or they moved across, did they just trump and disappear? 118 00:12:08,560 --> 00:12:09,560 Diminished on itself. 119 00:12:13,560 --> 00:12:17,560 The men could think of no obvious explanation for what they'd seen. 120 00:12:18,560 --> 00:12:21,560 I thought it might have been a harvest moon or something at first. 121 00:12:21,560 --> 00:12:24,560 You don't get a harvest moon at about one in the morning. 122 00:12:24,560 --> 00:12:26,560 It would have been a ship or something like that. 123 00:12:26,560 --> 00:12:30,560 It couldn't have been in front of the cliffs at one moment and behind the cliffs at the next. 124 00:12:30,560 --> 00:12:36,560 So it was a very strange anomaly and that's why everybody was stood out here watching it. 125 00:12:37,560 --> 00:12:43,560 Psychologist Chris French has made a study of the reliability of such eyewitness testimony. 126 00:12:43,560 --> 00:12:47,560 Now situations where we've actually got evidence from multiple witnesses 127 00:12:47,560 --> 00:12:51,560 and that evidence seems to be selling pretty much the same story. 128 00:12:51,560 --> 00:12:53,560 Everybody is saying the same thing. 129 00:12:53,560 --> 00:13:00,560 Then we're quite likely to give that kind of evidence much more weight than single, uncorroborated testimony. 130 00:13:00,560 --> 00:13:06,560 But one thing we should bear in mind is that when people see something unusual, such as a possible UFO sighting, 131 00:13:06,560 --> 00:13:10,560 then they will actually discuss what they've seen with each other. 132 00:13:10,560 --> 00:13:18,560 And we've got lots of good experimental evidence to show that one person's account of what they've seen can actually influence another. 133 00:13:20,560 --> 00:13:27,560 But with the sightings continuing to flood in, many were convinced that something strange was happening in Broadhaven. 134 00:13:27,560 --> 00:13:30,560 By now the police were being drawn into the mystery. 135 00:13:30,560 --> 00:13:32,560 There have been a number of calls to the police station. 136 00:13:32,560 --> 00:13:38,560 Every call referred to objects in the sky and always some distance away. 137 00:13:38,560 --> 00:13:43,560 They were travelling in a particular direction and then just disappearing into thin air. 138 00:13:44,560 --> 00:13:48,560 People were ringing in and writing letters all the time. 139 00:13:48,560 --> 00:13:53,560 The ones that I was more convinced about were the ones who said, 140 00:13:53,560 --> 00:13:56,560 well I'd rather you didn't use my name but I saw this. 141 00:13:57,560 --> 00:14:01,560 It was really the start of what they call the Broadhaven triangle. 142 00:14:01,560 --> 00:14:17,560 They call it the Broadhaven triangle, an area here in Pembrokeshire where sensible, down-to-earth people are constantly seeing strange objects in the sky, mysterious lights. 143 00:14:17,560 --> 00:14:23,560 It's an area where an entire classroom of school children saw from their playground a UFO. 144 00:14:24,560 --> 00:14:33,560 The triangle encompassed the southeast of St. Brides Bay through Broadhaven, down to Milford Haven and towards Haverford West inland. 145 00:14:34,560 --> 00:14:39,560 It was an area of coastline which changed dramatically from mile to mile. 146 00:14:40,560 --> 00:14:44,560 Could the area's local geography have been a factor in the sightings? 147 00:14:45,560 --> 00:14:49,560 There's a number of all refineries and other industries around Milford Haven. 148 00:14:50,560 --> 00:14:56,560 Flares at night and odd shaped plant but people round here would have been very familiar with that. 149 00:14:56,560 --> 00:15:00,560 Those have been there for many years before anybody started seeing UFOs. 150 00:15:02,560 --> 00:15:10,560 The number of sightings reported in the area meant that what had begun as an intriguing local story was turning into a much bigger phenomenon. 151 00:15:11,560 --> 00:15:15,560 It was what UFO researchers like David Clarke call a flap. 152 00:15:16,560 --> 00:15:24,560 The word flap became associated with periods of intense UFO activity concentrated in certain areas from the mid-50s onwards. 153 00:15:24,560 --> 00:15:29,560 So it's a word that becomes part of ufology from that point onwards. 154 00:15:29,560 --> 00:15:36,560 Now the first real flap that seems to have occurred in the UK was the one at Warminster in the 1960s. 155 00:15:37,560 --> 00:15:43,560 For ten years the town of Warminster in Wiltshire was famous for being a UFO hotspot. 156 00:15:44,560 --> 00:15:52,560 Unlike the Broadhaven sightings, the flap in Warminster began on Christmas day 1964 with a mysterious sound. 157 00:15:58,560 --> 00:16:05,560 People were reporting hammering noises, things shaking the roofs of their houses, machinery. 158 00:16:06,560 --> 00:16:12,560 Type noises going overhead and when they came out and had a looked nothing was wrong. 159 00:16:13,560 --> 00:16:18,560 By May 1965 reports of lights in the sky had begun to surface. 160 00:16:19,560 --> 00:16:26,560 Local journalist Arthur Shuttlewood connected the lights and sounds and the Warminster thing was born. 161 00:16:27,560 --> 00:16:35,560 He was writing for the local newspaper and he got more and more obsessed with this and went out sky watching himself. 162 00:16:35,560 --> 00:16:44,560 The more he wrote about it the more the story became part of the local legend and lots of other people then started saying they'd seen things. 163 00:16:45,560 --> 00:16:50,560 It was the sheer number of sightings that made Warminster unique. 164 00:16:50,560 --> 00:16:54,560 We stood here on Cradle Hill which was the main sky watching location. 165 00:16:55,560 --> 00:17:03,560 And every weekend, every Saturday throughout the 60s and 70s there could be up to 50 or 60 people up here observing and watching for the thing. 166 00:17:06,560 --> 00:17:13,560 Kevin Goodman was one of those who took to the hills travelling to Warminster to investigate the phenomenon. 167 00:17:14,560 --> 00:17:25,560 It was very much a communal thing. It was like-minded individuals, searching, looking for something, wanting to be part of something. 168 00:17:26,560 --> 00:17:30,560 After several months Kevin witnessed something himself. 169 00:17:30,560 --> 00:17:37,560 Over in that direction from over by the golf club came four red lights equally distance spaced apart. 170 00:17:37,560 --> 00:17:43,560 They carried on travelling through, around and over to Battlesbury Hill which is over here. 171 00:17:45,560 --> 00:17:48,560 They stayed in the line for approximately about two or three minutes. 172 00:17:48,560 --> 00:17:58,560 In the lead object then shot upwards at a tremendous rate of speed, performed a flawless 90 degree turn without stopping and shot out of sight. 173 00:17:59,560 --> 00:18:04,560 And about 30 seconds later the following three lights then just shot straight up into the sky. 174 00:18:05,560 --> 00:18:10,560 To this day I can't really rationally explain what I saw. 175 00:18:14,560 --> 00:18:21,560 The sky watchers were identifying hundreds of UFOs in the hills. But how reliable were their reports? 176 00:18:24,560 --> 00:18:31,560 One of the important things about Warminster is that it is surrounded by nervous military bases and camps. 177 00:18:31,560 --> 00:18:39,560 There's an artillery school there. There are various tank training areas around there and around Salisbury Plain. 178 00:18:41,560 --> 00:18:51,560 The area was one used to military activity. Covering 150 square miles, Salisbury Plain was the largest military training area in the UK. 179 00:18:51,560 --> 00:19:00,560 And that wasn't all. 18 miles from Warminster, an experimental establishment conducted trials of prototype military aircraft. 180 00:19:01,560 --> 00:19:11,560 The ufologists would say that the reason that you get so many sightings near military bases is because the extraterrestrials are very interested in what's going on at those bases. 181 00:19:11,560 --> 00:19:18,560 Whereas it seems far more plausible to argue that what's happening is that it's the activity at the bases themselves. 182 00:19:19,560 --> 00:19:33,560 Like Warminster, Broadhaven was also surrounded by military bases. Close to the village was REF Broadie, a base for search and rescue helicopters and a training station for military pilots. 183 00:19:33,560 --> 00:19:39,560 Could it have been that it was simply REF activity that was responsible for the Broadhaven sightings? 184 00:19:39,560 --> 00:19:55,560 Broadie at the time was a very, very busy base. It had aircraft taking off and landing as frequently as he threw airport at sometimes of the day. 185 00:19:55,560 --> 00:19:57,560 So there's an awful lot of activity going on there. 186 00:19:58,560 --> 00:20:15,560 As REF Broadies Community Relations Officer at the time, squadron leader Tony Cowan found himself fielding calls from anxious locals who'd seen things around Broadhaven they couldn't explain. 187 00:20:16,560 --> 00:20:29,560 We had a look at the flying program which was easily accessed and see if we could relate the time of the incident or the reporting to the time of activity that was taking place at our airfield or indeed in our area. 188 00:20:32,560 --> 00:20:34,560 Sometimes the answer was obvious. 189 00:20:35,560 --> 00:20:47,560 Apart from the training of the jet pilots there would have been exercises involving our local search and rescue helicopter unit, the local lifeboat stations and the coast guard as well. 190 00:20:47,560 --> 00:20:57,560 I can remember at least on one occasion it was quite a big exercise involving all those people plus a Nimrod patrol aircraft to carry out a search and it did take place at night. 191 00:20:58,560 --> 00:21:03,560 The Nimrod was dropping flares to illuminate the area so that the lifeboat could spot the target. 192 00:21:07,560 --> 00:21:14,560 But Dorothy Cale, who'd witnessed strange lights near her home in Littlehaven, wasn't convinced this was the explanation. 193 00:21:15,560 --> 00:21:25,560 We could see Broadie airfield quite clearly so we were very well used to seeing all sorts of lights and flares and things like that. 194 00:21:25,560 --> 00:21:33,560 It was nothing like anything we had seen out to see or across the airfield. 195 00:21:34,560 --> 00:21:38,560 And REF flight records didn't always prove conclusive. 196 00:21:39,560 --> 00:21:47,560 On some occasions we were able to explain by relating the time and the date to known air activity. 197 00:21:47,560 --> 00:21:50,560 On other occasions we could offer no explanation. 198 00:21:50,560 --> 00:21:56,560 I think to the people that saw something they will always remain a mystery. 199 00:21:59,560 --> 00:22:03,560 REF engineer Gordon Bowden was stationed at Broadie in the late 1970s. 200 00:22:04,560 --> 00:22:09,560 Years of experience had taught him that military activity could often be misidentified. 201 00:22:09,560 --> 00:22:20,560 Helicopter beams, search light patterns can appear very strange depending on the compass direction that the helicopter is operating from 202 00:22:20,560 --> 00:22:24,560 and the search pattern that the helicopter is conducting. 203 00:22:24,560 --> 00:22:28,560 And to the untrained eye you'll get a visual which will look like a ball of light 204 00:22:28,560 --> 00:22:32,560 and then if it moves a different pattern you'll get the beam. 205 00:22:36,560 --> 00:22:41,560 But not all the UFO sightings around Broadhaven were witnessed by untrained civilians. 206 00:22:41,560 --> 00:22:44,560 Gordon also witnessed them himself. 207 00:22:46,560 --> 00:22:51,560 On two occasions at Broadhaven I did see strange lights out at sea. 208 00:22:52,560 --> 00:22:58,560 These lights that I saw accelerated with such phenomenal speed. 209 00:23:01,560 --> 00:23:10,560 I cannot explain what they were but my military training would have said we had no aircraft at that time that could have travelled that fast 210 00:23:11,560 --> 00:23:16,560 and changed direction so quickly because it would have killed the pilots. 211 00:23:17,560 --> 00:23:25,560 If flight activity at the REF base couldn't explain all the Broadhaven sightings then what could? 212 00:23:25,560 --> 00:23:29,560 Broadie was not the only military establishment in West Wales. 213 00:23:29,560 --> 00:23:36,560 Less than 500 metres away lay a secret facility. It was run by the United States. 214 00:23:37,560 --> 00:23:47,560 US military bases have been connected to some of the most celebrated and well documented UFO incidents in Britain. 215 00:23:48,560 --> 00:23:56,560 The answer is strange. Small red light. Weird. It's coming this way. It's definitely coming this way. 216 00:23:56,560 --> 00:24:02,560 Could these American bases provide any clues to what was being witnessed on British soil? 217 00:24:07,560 --> 00:24:20,560 In 1977 the village of Broadhaven in Wales became infamous for a series of supposed UFO sightings. 218 00:24:21,560 --> 00:24:26,560 Why were so many people reporting mysterious lights and objects in the area? 219 00:24:27,560 --> 00:24:39,560 With the REF and local police unable to explain all the sightings, attention turned to the secret US base that laid 10 miles from the village. 220 00:24:41,560 --> 00:24:47,560 A seemingly innocent research establishment, the base became the focus of local speculation. 221 00:24:48,560 --> 00:24:59,560 It was a top secret establishment and those people that worked within the facility were very strict with their security code. 222 00:24:59,560 --> 00:25:04,560 They were very hush-hush about what was going on there and if you rang them up somebody would say, 223 00:25:04,560 --> 00:25:12,560 US Navy Broadie, this is not a secure line. Why were they worried about secure lines if it was just an oceanographic research establishment? 224 00:25:13,560 --> 00:25:20,560 It wasn't the first time on British soil that there had been strange phenomena sighted around a US military base. 225 00:25:22,560 --> 00:25:28,560 On two occasions US air bases in Suffolk had been at the centre of supposed UFO activity. 226 00:25:30,560 --> 00:25:38,560 The first sighting took place in August 1956 when radar personnel at US Air Force bases Bentwaters and Lakenheath 227 00:25:38,560 --> 00:25:41,560 observed something strange on their screens. 228 00:25:47,560 --> 00:25:52,560 The Lakenheath incident caused all kinds of concern on both sides of the Atlantic. 229 00:25:52,560 --> 00:25:55,560 The Americans alerted the Royal Air Force. 230 00:26:01,560 --> 00:26:06,560 The radar station at REF Neaty said they began tracking these same mysterious objects. 231 00:26:08,560 --> 00:26:16,560 And it led to a very, very bizarre evening in which waves of REF fighters were scrambled to go look at this thing over Lakenheath. 232 00:26:18,560 --> 00:26:23,560 Two aircraft gave chase but failed to intercept or identify the object. 233 00:26:23,560 --> 00:26:28,560 Running low on fuel, they returned to base and the object disappeared from radar screens. 234 00:26:29,560 --> 00:26:35,560 The Lakenheath case had never been fully explained and it was the first of a whole series involving military establishments in the Stanglion region. 235 00:26:44,560 --> 00:26:52,560 Nothing else significant was reported in the area for 25 years until the night of December 26th, 1980. 236 00:26:52,560 --> 00:26:59,560 Local garage owner Jerry Harris lived next to the joint US Air Force bases of Woodbridge and Bentwaters. 237 00:26:59,560 --> 00:27:03,560 He was returning home when he noticed some peculiar lights above him. 238 00:27:13,560 --> 00:27:18,560 The lights were hovering above Rendlesham Forest which lay between the bases. 239 00:27:18,560 --> 00:27:25,560 What no one realised at the time was that this was to become one of the UK's most iconic UFO encounters. 240 00:27:26,560 --> 00:27:32,560 They kept moving about, they went sort of downwards and then disappeared. 241 00:27:33,560 --> 00:27:37,560 All of a sudden this thing came out of the trees. 242 00:27:37,560 --> 00:27:47,560 When it got to the top of the trees it took off and flew up into the sky straight as a narrow and disappeared out of sight and I couldn't see it anymore. 243 00:27:49,560 --> 00:27:52,560 Jerry decided to investigate the mysterious lights. 244 00:27:52,560 --> 00:28:04,560 I went into my van to have a look and I was stopped going into the forest by an English policeman and a military policeman. 245 00:28:04,560 --> 00:28:08,560 They're both together unless I couldn't go through the forest. 246 00:28:09,560 --> 00:28:11,560 So I had to turn around and come back. 247 00:28:12,560 --> 00:28:18,560 Jerry put the sighting out of his mind and the Rendlesham incident seemed forgotten. 248 00:28:19,560 --> 00:28:26,560 Then two years later the story resurfaced after an anonymous tip-off to a national newspaper. 249 00:28:27,560 --> 00:28:32,560 It was in 1983 that the story first broke and became headline news. 250 00:28:32,560 --> 00:28:37,560 The news of the world got hold of this story and put it on the front page. 251 00:28:37,560 --> 00:28:43,560 UFO lands in Suffolk and that's official. This blew the story wide open. 252 00:28:43,560 --> 00:28:51,560 Nick Pope used to run the British government's UFO desk at the Ministry of Defence and has investigated the Rendlesham Forest incident. 253 00:28:53,560 --> 00:29:04,560 With Rendlesham what you had was a report from the deputy base commander of one of NATO's most important military establishments. 254 00:29:04,560 --> 00:29:11,560 And here he was saying not only had some of his personnel witnessed a UFO but he'd seen it too. 255 00:29:11,560 --> 00:29:23,560 Colonel Holt is probably the most senior military officer ever to have gone on the record with a first person written account of a personal UFO sighting. 256 00:29:25,560 --> 00:29:32,560 With the story now out in the open an extraordinary piece of evidence was released by an officer from the Woodbridge base. 257 00:29:32,560 --> 00:29:36,560 A tape recording of Colonel Holt's investigation. 258 00:29:37,560 --> 00:29:46,560 Colonel Holt took a small team of men out into the forest to investigate and he recorded his observations as he went out into the forest. 259 00:30:02,560 --> 00:30:04,560 It is definitely coming this way. 260 00:30:04,560 --> 00:30:06,560 It is definitely coming this way. 261 00:30:06,560 --> 00:30:11,560 This is a little shrieking off. There is no doubt about it. This is weird. 262 00:30:11,560 --> 00:30:21,560 You can hear the tension in Colonel Holt's voice. You can hear the tension actually in all of Holt's team. 263 00:30:21,560 --> 00:30:27,560 Look at that. It looks like an eye winking at you. It has a hollow, dark, dark shadow. 264 00:30:27,560 --> 00:30:32,560 It looks like the people with an eye are looking at you, winking. This is unreal. 265 00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:38,560 We're going around heading back to the base. 266 00:30:39,560 --> 00:30:44,560 These are not people who mistake aircraft lights for something more exotic. 267 00:30:44,560 --> 00:30:56,560 When these people say and go on the record as saying we experienced something above and beyond anything we've ever seen before, you can take that to the bank. 268 00:31:00,560 --> 00:31:07,560 A UFO sighting made by several credible military witnesses made the Rendlesham story unique. 269 00:31:08,560 --> 00:31:16,560 Astronomer Ian Ridpath has investigated a number of UFO cases and was keen to get to the bottom of the airman's sighting. 270 00:31:17,560 --> 00:31:32,560 When the Rendlesham Forest case hit the headlines in 1983, I realised that I actually had to take this case seriously because it had apparently very good evidence. 271 00:31:32,560 --> 00:31:34,560 What's that? 272 00:31:36,560 --> 00:31:42,560 But conversations with locals soon convinced him that the Rendlesham case was not all it at first appeared. 273 00:31:42,560 --> 00:31:55,560 From the position in the forest where they saw their flashing UFO, you can actually see straight to the Orford Nest Lighthouse which appears to hover between the trees, not very far off the ground. 274 00:31:55,560 --> 00:32:10,560 As you move towards it between the trees, the light seems to recede in front of you which is exactly the effect that the airman reported as they moved towards this flashing light but they never actually got to it because it got further and further away. 275 00:32:11,560 --> 00:32:24,560 I've been to Rendlesham Forest at night and anyone who's been to Rendlesham Forest at night and has seen the lighthouse will realise that it's a tiny pinprick of light in the distant horizon. 276 00:32:24,560 --> 00:32:29,560 There's no way that Halstead and his team could have misidentified that for something more spectacular. 277 00:32:32,560 --> 00:32:41,560 Jerry Harris and the US Airman had reported that the lights in the forest had moved in strange directions but this too could have had a rational explanation. 278 00:32:42,560 --> 00:32:56,560 I knew from experience that bright meteors or fireballs which are natural pieces of day-brief and space burning up in the atmosphere can give the impression that something has come down quite nearby. 279 00:32:57,560 --> 00:33:08,560 I was able to find from the British Astronomical Association that indeed a bright fireball had been seen at that same time that the men had seen something apparently descending into the forest. 280 00:33:09,560 --> 00:33:16,560 Ian Ridpath's evidence suggested that the UFO was nothing more than a combination of unusual but naturally occurring phenomena. 281 00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:31,560 It appears to be an absolutely superb, almost inexplicable case but when you look at each of those aspects individually there is a rational explanation for each of them. 282 00:33:32,560 --> 00:33:41,560 But this conclusion didn't satisfy everyone. If the lights did have a rational explanation why were the Americans so reluctant to discuss it? 283 00:33:42,560 --> 00:33:51,560 All the Americans I knew from the base and none of them would talk about it at all. They weren't allowed. They had strict instructions from up above not to talk about it. 284 00:33:52,560 --> 00:33:56,560 So I couldn't find anything from them whatsoever. They would just try to cover it up. 285 00:33:57,560 --> 00:34:07,560 When a wave of UFO sightings had hit Broadhaven in West Wales in 1977 attention had also turned to the US military. 286 00:34:08,560 --> 00:34:20,560 Not far from the village lay a secret US base. When strange lights and objects were reported in the area speculation grew that the Americans were developing secret state-of-the-art military technology. 287 00:34:21,560 --> 00:34:29,560 Nobody really knew what was going on there. So I think it's quite a possibility that all this could be linked to some sort of military activity. 288 00:34:31,560 --> 00:34:38,560 But when the base was deactivated in 1995 the truth about the Americans activities was finally revealed. 289 00:34:39,560 --> 00:34:44,560 It turns out they were listening for Russian submarines at the height of the Cold War. 290 00:34:45,560 --> 00:34:53,560 Far from developing prototype weaponry the mysterious building had housed nothing more than banks of computers and monitoring equipment. 291 00:34:57,560 --> 00:35:03,560 This revelation put paid to the theory that the mysterious lights in Broadhaven had come from the secret US base. 292 00:35:04,560 --> 00:35:11,560 But the sightings were about to take a bizarre new turn with the counts of more than just unexplained lights in the sky. 293 00:35:15,560 --> 00:35:23,560 Two months after the first sightings dozens of eyewitnesses reported seeing strange silver figures around the village. 294 00:35:26,560 --> 00:35:31,560 Police officer Ernest Jones personally investigated one of the sightings. 295 00:35:32,560 --> 00:35:38,560 The call came into the control room there and I happened to be in the station. 296 00:35:39,560 --> 00:35:45,560 A report of sighting of a silvery figure quite close to a dwelling. 297 00:35:47,560 --> 00:35:53,560 The call had come from the Coombs family who lived on Ripiston Farm a few miles from Broadhaven. 298 00:35:54,560 --> 00:35:59,560 Although the Coombs no longer wish to talk about the night's events Ernest Jones remembers them well. 299 00:36:02,560 --> 00:36:12,560 So here I was going to a farm on a dark night in the middle of the night not knowing exactly what to expect. 300 00:36:13,560 --> 00:36:17,560 But expecting to get close to something that nobody knew nothing about. 301 00:36:18,560 --> 00:36:20,560 So a few things were going through my mind. 302 00:36:21,560 --> 00:36:27,560 We were riding in the yard, went to the front door, doors open, we went in. 303 00:36:28,560 --> 00:36:32,560 There was a family there, established her husband and wife. 304 00:36:33,560 --> 00:36:36,560 Spoke with the wife, she was very very frightened. 305 00:36:37,560 --> 00:36:41,560 She saw a silvery figure moving about very close to the window. 306 00:36:42,560 --> 00:36:48,560 Her husband, he turned around and saw this figure very close by the window outside, but he was sitting. 307 00:36:50,560 --> 00:36:51,560 He was really frightened as well. 308 00:36:52,560 --> 00:36:57,560 We're not talking of a softy man working until five in an office. 309 00:36:58,560 --> 00:37:03,560 We're talking of a man who was quite used to going out of the house all times day and night checking on cattle. 310 00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:07,560 No way would he come out of the house with us. 311 00:37:08,560 --> 00:37:09,560 No way. 312 00:37:14,560 --> 00:37:19,560 So we went out, went a little around the house, around the back. 313 00:37:21,560 --> 00:37:23,560 The garden, the fields nearby. 314 00:37:25,560 --> 00:37:27,560 The cattle pens, checked machinery. 315 00:37:32,560 --> 00:37:39,560 With the silver figure nowhere to be seen, P.C. Jones returned to the house and made arrangements to evacuate the family. 316 00:37:40,560 --> 00:37:46,560 From the condition that we're in that night, especially Mrs. Coombs, she didn't feel safe. 317 00:37:46,560 --> 00:37:50,560 She didn't feel the house was safe for the family. 318 00:37:54,560 --> 00:37:58,560 The ripest and farm incident was not an isolated one off. 319 00:37:59,560 --> 00:38:03,560 Reported sightings of strange silver figures were taking place all over the area. 320 00:38:06,560 --> 00:38:10,560 With the mystery deepening, the investigation would now step up to a new level. 321 00:38:16,560 --> 00:38:23,560 The M.O.D. branch, which was responsible for UFOs, they had received quite a few letters from members of the public. 322 00:38:24,560 --> 00:38:28,560 They'd seen all the lurid press coverage of the Welsh Triangle. 323 00:38:29,560 --> 00:38:35,560 There's one particular member from the head of the M.O.D. UFO branch to the RAF police. 324 00:38:36,560 --> 00:38:39,560 There's a lot of concern in West Wales. Some things have obviously been seen. 325 00:38:40,560 --> 00:38:42,560 Some of these witnesses are quite level-edited, reliable people. 326 00:38:42,560 --> 00:38:46,560 Could you make some discreet inquiries into what's been seen there? 327 00:38:47,560 --> 00:38:50,560 The very fact that the military were interested was very, very unusual, 328 00:38:51,560 --> 00:38:56,560 because the ministry don't tend to do field investigations of UFO sightings. It's extremely unusual. 329 00:38:59,560 --> 00:39:03,560 The Broadhaven Triangle was now being taken seriously at the highest level, 330 00:39:04,560 --> 00:39:09,560 and an M.O.D. investigation was underway. Its conclusions would be completely unexpected. 331 00:39:13,560 --> 00:39:15,560 The M.O.D. branch 332 00:39:22,560 --> 00:39:24,560 They call it the Broadhaven Triangle. 333 00:39:25,560 --> 00:39:32,560 In 1977, Broadhaven in West Wales became known as a hotspot of UFO activity. 334 00:39:33,560 --> 00:39:41,560 Claims of lights, strange objects, and even silver figures were being made by dozens of local witnesses. 335 00:39:42,560 --> 00:39:46,560 Six months into the sightings, the M.O.D. decided to launch an investigation. 336 00:39:47,560 --> 00:39:52,560 In itself an unusual occurrence, and something not made public for nearly 30 years. 337 00:39:53,560 --> 00:39:56,560 Before the Freedom of Information Act came into force, 338 00:39:57,560 --> 00:40:00,560 you have to remember that the default position of the Ministry of Defence, 339 00:40:01,560 --> 00:40:04,560 an inherently secretive organisation, was to say nothing. 340 00:40:05,560 --> 00:40:11,560 In 2005, the Ministry of Defence's report on this incident was finally made public. 341 00:40:13,560 --> 00:40:19,560 It does look as if some discrete inquiries, as they described at the time, were made. 342 00:40:20,560 --> 00:40:25,560 And the answer that came back, which is mentioned in a briefing to the Defence Intelligence staff 343 00:40:26,560 --> 00:40:33,560 later in 1977, was that a practical joker was behind some of these more bizarre reports. 344 00:40:35,560 --> 00:40:41,560 The practical joker revealed himself to be Glyn Edwards, a local businessman from Milford Haven. 345 00:40:42,560 --> 00:40:46,560 We had a round table dinner, and the theme was a fancy dress dinner. 346 00:40:47,560 --> 00:40:52,560 So it was topical at the time. I decided to dress up as a spaceman. 347 00:40:53,560 --> 00:40:57,560 So I borrowed an industrial suit from one of our local suppliers. 348 00:40:58,560 --> 00:41:02,560 I went to the dinner, and before the dancing started, I went out to the car to remove it. 349 00:41:02,560 --> 00:41:07,560 But some of my colleagues said, let's go around the village. So we all jumped in the car. 350 00:41:11,560 --> 00:41:17,560 Bumped into a few people, turned a few heads, and after about 10 minutes we decided to go back. 351 00:41:18,560 --> 00:41:21,560 Going back then, we stopped outside the Haven photo tell. 352 00:41:21,560 --> 00:41:28,560 I started walking up the drive in this silver spacesuit, and they had the headlights of the car behind me. 353 00:41:29,560 --> 00:41:34,560 So I was silhouetted going up the drive of the hotel. 354 00:41:36,560 --> 00:41:41,560 All my colleagues were hiding in the bushes at that time, and one of them said, there's somebody in the window. 355 00:41:42,560 --> 00:41:45,560 I went a bit further, and another one shouted, oh, she's got a gun. 356 00:41:45,560 --> 00:41:52,560 And I thought, right, that's it. I dived under a roaded ender and bush and lost my foot in and rolled all the way back down to the road. 357 00:41:53,560 --> 00:41:56,560 One of them said, let's do it again. I said, not so likely, she's got a gun. I'm off. 358 00:41:57,560 --> 00:42:01,560 So then we went back to the hotel, changed out the suit, and we just carried on with the dinner. 359 00:42:03,560 --> 00:42:10,560 With such an obvious explanation for the little Haven sightings, why were so many people willing to believe they'd witnessed something extra true? 360 00:42:10,560 --> 00:42:20,560 We know that eyewitness testimony can be very, very fallible. People genuinely and sincerely believe that they've seen something that day, which defies any conventional explanation. 361 00:42:21,560 --> 00:42:27,560 But the evidence from psychological studies would suggest that we should actually take those accounts with a pinch of salt. 362 00:42:28,560 --> 00:42:31,560 But the hoaxer has always denied responsibility for one sighting. 363 00:42:31,560 --> 00:42:36,560 Adripiston Farm. PC Jones, who investigated the incident, has kept an open mind. 364 00:42:37,560 --> 00:42:45,560 I can't help thinking of the state or in that night. There was something certainly out of the ordinary that frightened that family. 365 00:42:49,560 --> 00:42:56,560 As 1977 drew to a close, the police were also looking for a way to get the evidence out of the house. 366 00:42:57,560 --> 00:43:08,560 As 1977 drew to a close, the number of UFO sightings in the area began to decline and the unusual events were consigned to memory. 367 00:43:09,560 --> 00:43:18,560 Given the large number of people who saw it, the number of pretty intelligent people who came forward and said they'd seen something, I think most people found, I think there must have been something behind it. 368 00:43:19,560 --> 00:43:21,560 Not necessarily flying sources, but something. 369 00:43:22,560 --> 00:43:28,560 Because we didn't know what it was, we just sort of ignored it and decided that we don't know what it was, we can't talk about it. 370 00:43:29,560 --> 00:43:32,560 And it just, you know, that was it, it just went away really. 371 00:43:37,560 --> 00:43:43,560 For many who witnessed the Broadhaven phenomenon, it remains something that they find difficult to explain. 372 00:43:44,560 --> 00:44:05,560 I'm a very rational person and I say I don't believe in UFOs, but having seen something unusual myself, but it seems ridiculous to me really to think there's something from outer space that's come down and settled in the Broadhaven. 373 00:44:06,560 --> 00:44:25,560 There's no physical evidence, there's no photographic evidence and that's a great shame because I think most people have an open mind about the whole business and I think if you look into a night sky, you must believe that there must be something else out there, what it is, I don't know. 374 00:44:25,560 --> 00:44:48,560 I'm absolutely sure of what I saw that day. I saw an object that was large, cigar shaped, silver. After 30 years I know nearer the understanding than I was on the day that I saw it, but I am 100% sure that what I saw that day is as we reported it.