The Welsh Triangle Revisited Read online

  THE WELSH TRIANGLE REVISITED

  By PETER PAGET

  The Welsh Triangle Revisited

  © Peter Paget 2018

  All Rights Reserved

  [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Original version published by, Panther Granada 1979. Twice reprinted, 1980.

  Rewritten and updated 2018

  Also by Peter Paget:

  The Welsh Triangle (Five Editions Granada, Panther, Grafton, 1979-1989)

  UFO UK 1980 New English Library Edition)

  UFO UK Updated (Expected 2018 paperback and eBook editions)

  Secret Life of a Spook (2016 Createspace & eBook editions)

  Contributed to:

  The Ufonauts (1979 Panther),

  Crop Circles Revealed (2001 USA Edition)

  The original book was dedicated to my former wife Jane, without whose endless help and encouragement its production would have been impossible.

  This new version is dedicated to all those noble warriors of the Internet who seek to wake up humanity to the reality, which surrounds them on a daily basis.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. UFOs Galore

  2. The Giants Return

  3. The Great UFO Cover-Up

  4. Booms – Seismic or Supersonic

  5. Caves, Candles and Archives

  6. Big Games and Small People

  7. The Cows Jumped Over the Moon

  8. The Gates of Uforia

  9. Microwave Days, Ultraviolet Nights and Radio Snow

  10. Eyes in the Sky

  11. Clones, Cars and Cosmonauts

  12. Daughters of Heaven

  13. Epilogue, 2018 NEW DATA

  Where to find Peter online

  Acknowledgment

  s

  The presentation of this book would not have been possible without the kind assistance of over 3,000 people, sincere and intelligent citizens, who have written to me during the years of 1977 to 1979 reporting their sightings and experiences. I would like to thank those families in the West Wales area who have given so freely and generously of their time and hospitality in the course of the research that has resulted in this book: in particular, Billy and Pauline Coombs and their family; Rose and Hayden Granville of the Haven Fort Hotel; and the residents of the villages of Little Haven and Broad Haven and the good townspeople of Haverfordwest and Milford Haven.

  I am grateful especially to my friend and colleague (the late) Professor Hans Holzer, of New York, for his ceaseless enthusiasm and his contribution towards our work; and special thanks go to Commander H. Penrose, Mrs D. Mills and my fellow researchers into this, the world’s most baffling mystery. Sincere gratitude, also to Pauline Penn and my former wife Jane for secretarial, editorial and research assistance.

  The new version owes much to the technical support of Paul Georgian and to Tania T for editorial and computing services in which I myself am now a dinosaur, having studied it back only in its beginnings.

  Thanks also go to my wife and family and my colleague Col. John Paul Forrestal, (USAF Retired), plus many others who send me information constantly.

  Introductio

  n

  Sleepy Welsh villages, rolling golden sands set against the stark, jagged Pembrokeshire coastline. A scene of beautiful tranquillity, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and St Brides Bay, littered with rocks and islands; a haven for coastal shipping in times of storm.

  Isolated, unspoilt, untouched and remote. The sort of place where you take your kids on holiday. Hardly the setting for a most startling series of events which, occurred during 1977 and 1978 and, indeed, continue to this day. For here in the quiet Welsh countryside, took place a scenario involving aliens from outer space, the British and American governments, possibly even the Russians.

  For those of us who have studied UFOs, a term that superseded the original ‘Flying Saucers’ of Kenneth Arnold fame in 1947, the UFO trail is a long, arduous and highly frustrating one. What we know has always been dwarfed by the magnitude of the questions left unanswered. It would seem that seventy years or more of research, diligent collating of every known fact and intensive investigation have left us with precious little for our efforts. Everyone is waiting for a breakthrough.

  When I first came to hear of the story that I am about to relate, I was editor of one of the leading UFO magazines. I was familiar with the majority of events, reported daily in different parts of the world, of inexplicable sightings of aerial craft, even landings and reports of strange people seen emerging from them. Information flowed in from press cutting services, from more than fifty specialist magazines published all over the western world and from personal contacts with researchers in other countries. Strangely, it was with almost complete disregard that I first noticed the occasional report coming from the areas of the Welsh coastline: such sightings as, ‘red, green and white lights, reported by coastguards, over the Bristol Channel’. I dismissed them! They were too easy to explain. Every aircraft caries these colours. They were obviously a misidentification.

  However, more reports confronted the British public: ‘Terror Triangle’, heralded The Sun newspaper. ‘Giant Spacemen’, the Western Mail. ‘UFOs Galore’, the Daily Express. This smoke could not possibly be substantiated by anything less than some fire.

  Had the ‘silly season’ broken out in rural Wales? Was Fleet Street hard-pushed for a news story? Obviously not, for reports were coming in from school teachers, indeed whole classes of schoolchildren numbering fourteen or more; doctors, firemen, police - people who are trained observers were seeing the identical phenomena sighted by ordinary people. Something was obviously going on and, amazingly, nobody seemed the slightest bit interested.

  Or were they?

  My first trip to Wales revealed little more than I already knew by reading the newspapers. I spoke to the school children at Broad Haven Primary School, every one of them. Yes, all this was as reported in the Observer Colour Supplement. I saw the pictures the children had drawn independently of each other, showing the same silver, circular landed craft, with two individuals coming from it and examining the local sewerage facility which lay just a field away from the school.

  Could 14 independent minds between the ages of nine and 11 years old, without commercial incentive and uncluttered by the psychological stress common in our society, produce such uniformity of account? Highly unlikely! Could they have seen a helicopter and mistaken it for some spacecraft, for they were certain that this is what it was? Such trivial thoughts were quickly dismissed by a minor argument between two of the children as to whether my car was a Lotus Europa or an Esprit. Having correctly settled between them that it was a Europa, they had succeeded in convincing me that their precision of observation left no room for the possibility of the sighted object having been a helicopter. Indeed, these kids would probably have known the make and country of origin of any aircraft.

  Their teacher, Mrs Morgan, a homely and friendly woman, was a little reluctant at first, but later helpful in her approach to what had happened. I sensed that here lay perhaps a little more than shyness or embarrassment. I was aware that, in the press, only the children had been reported as having seen the object. She led me to one side. “I saw it too, you know,” she said. “It was real!”

  Her eyes questioned my reaction, expecting a rebuff. “Of course it was,” I said reassuringly. She smiled, her anxiety turned into relief. At least somebody believed her. She went on, “You know, when they went, a little whirlwind of dust came across the playground.” She paused. “It was almost as if they were saying goodbye.”

  I felt moved. There was something about the way she related the story, a simple sighting that I had read from many parts of the world many times before. It was very clear to me that her experience had touched her deeply; had given her some kind of profound realization. It was, perhaps, the kind of thing so many of us spend half our lives searching for; the unquestionable certainty that somewhere, we don’t know where, there is somebody else, something else - out there!

  Travelling on and meeting other people with comparable experiences, it was obvious that sighting a UFO affected all of the witnesses differently. It struck in some witnesses a chord, something almost intangible, not easy to relate, something beyond the normal run of human experience. Indeed, the difficulty to relate what had happened was one of the most consistent characteristics one noticed about the reports; that, together with a shy reluctance to admit all that they knew. I sensed that relatives and friends had not been too kind, and the usual jest of having one too many at the local were bandied about freely. It is obviously not easy when people closest to you question your state of mind, or maybe it was just that they did not want to admit that they themselves might have seen something.

  I find that people are always searching for normality – to be included, never excluded, from that which is considered the norm; to be accepted. So how difficult it is for people who have been involved in events that, within any frame of reference, seem totally unacceptable.

  The unacceptability became more intense as I investigated even deep
er: beyond “The Welsh Triangle” - as the press had clichéd it.

  Broad Haven,

  Pembrokeshire

  Peter Paget

  May 1978

  “The only question that remains, is where do they come from?”

  Astronaut Col. Edgar Mitchell, commenting on UFOs

  1. UFOs Galore

  It was Thursday, 11 August 1977. Jane, my wife, hurried into the bedroom.

  “It’s Professor Hans Holzer on the telephone from America.”

  I put aside my notes and walked swiftly down the hall to the small untidy office; that seemed to overflow with books and piles of papers. The walls were covered with charts and pictures showing fuzzy outlines, lights in the sky, dark disc-shaped objects and detailed close-ups of burnt undergrowth and circular depressions. I squeezed behind the desk and lifted the receiver.

  “Hello, Hans! Where are you, New York?”

  Han’s voice came faintly over the line, instantly recognizable by his middle European accent. He sounded frustrated and tired. “I’ve had terrible trouble with the airlines. We can’t get into London, everyone’s on strike. I’ve tried everyone - Lufthansa, British Airways, Pan-Am. We can’t even come in via Paris! I’m in Los Angeles with the film crew. We will just have to come later in the year. Go to Wales and see all the witnesses and explain to them that we do need them, but later on. Explain that it’s completely out of our control. There’s nothing I can do,” Hans ended abruptly.

  “Sure,” I replied. “I’ll have to go down, as everything is arranged. Some of the people aren’t on the phone and there is no way I can cancel the interviews.”

  Hans’s voice came again, “Don’t worry, go down and tell them it’s all right, we will be there later. But there is no way I can get round this problem, Heathrow is in chaos.”

  We chatted on, sorting out a few technicalities. I was disappointed, but all was not lost. Hans had worked so hard to try and produce ‘The Ufonauts’*, a factual documentary on UFOs and everything seemed to have stood in its way. Now of all infuriating things, a strike at London Airport had completely cut off our transportation. All the interviews that we had arranged with the witnesses of the events that had happened in West Wales would have to be rerun. I did not look forward to the job of going down and making our apologies, but it was my responsibility as co-producer.

  *A film based on the book ‘The Ufonauts’, by Hans Holzer, now published in the UK by Panther Books.

  At least it would allow me to familiarize myself with the situation. For twelve months now we had been collecting information for the film from all over the world. Of all the areas that had proved especially intriguing, the reports from the Pembrokeshire coast had been the most detailed.

  I returned to the bedroom, but my mind was too active for sleep. So, picking up the large grey file marked ‘UFOs - unexplained cases’, I settled into bed and thumbed through the voluminous file.

  My interest in the Welsh reports had been aroused in early February, when newspapers told of a sighting by a Mrs Louise Bassett.

  Louise and her husband, both aged thirty- one, run a gourmet restaurant in Carmarthen and have a delightful house set in six wooded acres in Ferryside. David is a crack-shot, a first-class angler and an international powerboat racer. Their credibility was unquestionable and they certainly were not the sort of people to be making flippant or hysterical reports of UFOs, or to carry out any kind of hoax.

  It is a 10-mile journey from their Carmarthen restaurant to their home and Louise was driving back in the early hours through the darkened Welsh countryside. The air was heavy with thunder and low-lying cloud obscured the stars. It was with some degree of alarm that she described her sighting:

  “At Idole I saw in the fields on the far right a brown mass with flat blue lights intermittently flashing. My first reaction was that there had been an accident farther up the road.

  The thing looked as if it was hovering in the air. My car radio went completely on the blink and there was tremendous interference (on the radio).”

  Louise travelled on towards Towy Castle, then, she saw the lights moving towards Trimsaran.

  “When I reached the spot where I thought it had been, there was nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve got 20/20 vision and I was 100 per cent sober. I’ve never believed in this sort of thing before.”

  Completely mystified by her experience, Mrs Bassett made some inquiries but could find no rational explanation.

  “The police told me that no police cars, fire appliances or ambulances had been anywhere near that spot.”

  Apparently neither RAF nor private helicopters were operating.

  The radio interference had been very widespread and at the same time that Louise’s radio blew, people all over the area were making complaints to radio dealers, the BBC and the ITA about signal strength throughout that night. It had fallen off so badly that colour sets reverted to black and white. However, the BBC was certain that there had been no reduction in transmitted signal.

  It was in almost exactly the same location one month later that more Carmarthenshire residents witnessed a similar happening, again in the early hours.

  John Petts is a prominent Welsh artist particularly noted for his designs of stained-glass windows. Like many creative people he often works at unconventional hours to finish a particular commission. One night he was in at his home, which enjoys a magnificent view across the estuary. He described the following strange occurrence:

  “It was just after 1.00 a.m. and I was preparing for bed after drinking some black coffee. I had been working late as I often do and I had switched off the lights in the living room. I drew back the curtains and looked south eastwards across the estuary above and beyond the horizon of hills overlooking Ferryside on the far side of the river.

  “My eye was caught by a horizontal strip of light; a luminous pale gold like the colour of the moon. In fact, I said to myself: That must be part of the moon showing through a gap in the clouds. By now, understandably, I was looking intently indeed. I must add that I have especially good far sight and by profession I am a visually objective observer and recorder.

  “I was amazed to see that the outline shape of light was clear and sharp, far from woolly edged as it would be from a cloud. What I saw clearly was a clean-cut shape of even light, pale gold, the shape of a weaver’s shuttle, sharply pointed at each end, the top and bottom edges straight and parallel.

  “By now I was intent and alert wondering what will this do, for it was poised and immobile. I thought: ‘Will it rise higher or will it move to the right or left?’ In fact, it did not move at all, but suddenly it was switched off, just like switching off a light.”

  Mrs Teasey, a neighbour of Mr Petts, also saw the phenomenon at 1. 10a.m, while another Llanstephan woman, Mrs Michael Lownes, the wife of an agricultural engineer, said: “Mr Petts’s description put into words what I saw around last Christmas. I walked from my sitting room, looked through the window and stopped in my tracks. Above the level of the land was an extraordinary bright light where there was no reason for a light to be. I am not the sort of person who would believe in UFOs. My inclination is to say, ‘Rubbish’, but this I did see.”

  Reports of unidentified flying objects were not uncommon from Wales. Shortly before Louise Bassett sighted her UFO, a fifty-nine-year-old Aberavon man, Mr Arthur Sugg of Sandown Road, a retired steelworks roller-man, had reported the following: “I was out walking on Aberavon seafront with my Airedale, Tuscan. It was shortly before noon and I was at the Briton Ferry end of the promenade. The cloud was very low. It was not raining but it was misty. I was looking out towards Mumbles headland when there was a break in the clouds. It was then that I saw what I can only describe as a dome-shaped object. It was moving in a northerly direction. I watched it for between five and ten seconds until the gap in the clouds closed.”

  In January and February of the same year, John Ridge, a freelance photographer of Carmarthen, had observed low flying lights but with no sounds at all. They were flying northwest over Wauniago, Carmarthen at 9.00 p.m. one evening. Also in January, from Carmarthen, he had witnessed at sunset the passage of an object estimated to be the size of a Boeing 707, which had a glowing head and three divergent trails, unlike either con-trails or a comet.