Encounters (2023) s01e03 Episode Script

1
Now, what do you make of this next story?
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.
Well, I can't remember
who saw it first.
We were in our school playground,
lunchtime break,
just down by this tree over here.
It was '77. February '77.
Yeah, we played here.
Knocking rounders and knocking the ball
into the stream over there.
Whatever it was, was spotted three times
by children from the local school.
I think I remember
somebody saying, "What's that?"
Everybody just ran up.
It was a sprint between all of us
to the end of the field here
and find out exactly
what we were looking at.
Is it all really a case of mass hysteria,
or is there some reality in the unreal?
Yeah, after that, almost straightaway,
other people saw, you know,
some pretty strange things.
There was a lot of activity,
or a lot of sightings, or a lot of
Yeah, a lot of things were happening.
And this is where it landed. Here.
The people who live
around Broad Haven will tell you
that what they have experienced
is real enough.
From the beginning
of recorded time,
men have been seeing
unexplainable things in the sky.
Are we alone in the universe?
Somewhere in the data
will be something worth real inquiry.
We have not been hiding anything.
There are such things
as interplanetary spaceships.
I thought it was an alien,
and he had big eyes.
There's something
profoundly important going on here
that is authentic and real.
So, Kevin
tell me a secret
that you haven't told anyone
about the phenomenon.
Oh, are we filming?
You know, for our whole lives,
and our parents' whole lives,
since the 1940s,
we've been told by authorities
and scientists that this is ridiculous.
That this is nonsense.
And I think that's the main reason
why you don't have many serious,
or until recently, you have had
very few serious scientists studying this.
I would say, there's probably
on the order of 15 experts in the world.
That, to me, is shocking,
and it suggests that there's something
maybe deeper than the stigma,
and all of the obvious things,
that are preventing people
from studying this.
That maybe people don't want to know
what this phenomena is.
Maybe people don't wanna know the truth.
Maybe it scares them a bit, somehow.
It was a lovely little village.
It-It still is.
Very quiet during the winter,
absolutely mad during the summer
with the holidaymakers.
But it was a great place to grow up in.
I wouldn't describe myself
as one of the popular children in school.
I was overweight as a child,
I was a bit of a bookworm,
and I was teased and bullied
because of that.
I probably relate more to cats
than I do to human beings.
It was a horrible day,
uh, drizzling, damp,
and I'd spent most of the day indoors,
so I hadn't actually gone out
with a lot of the others to play.
The other children had been
coming in from playtime.
And
they'd been saying
that they'd seen a flying saucer,
but I just totally regarded the stories
as being nonsense.
To me, flying saucers didn't exist.
They were in bad 1950s sci-fi movies,
or they were in tabloid newspapers,
you know.
But at the end of the day, I thought,
"This is getting ridiculous.
I'm going to have a look for myself."
I left school.
Proceeded all the way up
to the top of the field.
And from behind some trees,
this thing popped up in front of me.
Silver, cigar-shaped,
about 45 feet long.
And there was just this thought
that came into my mind
to say that I had to run away.
I did go home
and tell my mum and dad,
and they weren't judgmental in any way.
They believed me and, uh,
believed that what I saw, I believed.
You know mothers.
They can tell when you're lying.
And she was absolutely convinced
that what I was saying was the truth.
She contacted a gentleman
called Randall Jones Pugh,
a close family friend.
Randall Pugh
is a retired vet
who acts as regional investigator
for the British UFO Research Association.
We have a phenomenon
which I think will be with us
for a very, very long time,
if we ever do, indeed, unravel it at all.
Terry, if you take that sector over there
- This sector on
- That sector there.
And I'll go to, uh, northwest.
He came as quickly as possible,
and he brought with him a local reporter
from the Western Telegraph.
The sighting had happened on the Friday.
By Monday morning, things had gone crazy.
Today, one group of children
showed me the spot where they saw
what they think
was some kind of spaceship.
Suddenly, the silver, cigar-shaped object
seemed to pop up from behind the bushes,
and, uh, trying to take off,
then it disappeared again.
It was nighttime.
I was ten years old.
I switched on the TV,
and on the children's Newsround program
was this amazing story.
The spaceship, it looked
a cigar shape with a dome on it.
When you're about nine, ten years old,
it's sort of, like,
a very formative period.
Your imagination is running wild,
and UFOs was something
that we were all interested in.
We have received many reports
of UFO sightings over Mobile.
Greetings!
We come from France.
- Yes.
- Oh!
1977 was a bumper year for UFOs.
- The numbers of sightings were increasing.
- Well, it was roughly over there.
The press interest
was increasing.
Late last night
While wishing on a star ♪
I was completely obsessed
with UFOs and aliens at the time.
The culmination of a lot of this
was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And it was trailed incessantly.
And then, the film itself was just like
all the things I'd been reading about.
Down from the sky came a man in a car ♪
And also,
it was a pretty miserable time.
There was fuel shortages.
We were in the middle of the Cold War
with the Soviet Union.
Come on, let's go for a ride
Outta sight ♪
I remember distinctly seeing this diagram
in my local newspaper
that had an area showing the blast zone.
And I was working out
whether I'd be vaporized
or whether I'd manage to get home in time.
So, there was all that going on.
So, UFOs and aliens and,
you know, visits from outer space
was like escapism for me at the time.
You know, it was a world
you could sort of escape into.
I saw a flying saucer,
or you might call it a UFO.
It was over in those trees over there.
And this was definitely
the biggest, most bizarre story
to have emerged from the UK.
And it totally absorbed my life.
What I found is
that clearly something happened.
What it was, we don't know.
As soon as we arrived in school
on the Monday morning,
the headmaster separated us.
And we were told to write an account
and draw a picture of what we'd seen.
We drew pictures, and, um,
nobody knew what anybody else was drawing.
We'd seen the same thing,
so the chances were we were gonna,
hopefully, you know,
draw pretty much the same thing.
Now, this wasn't like today.
There was no social media.
There was no mobile phones.
So, there was no opportunity
for us to have got together.
No way we could have collaborated.
The headmaster had us all fresh.
He collected the accounts
and was noticeably shocked
by how similar the accounts
and the descriptions were.
Well, to find out more,
I've just been on the phone
to their headmaster, Mr. Llewellyn.
I know that,
uh, 16 children saw it.
And did they all see
the same thing?
There's a common core of similarity
between all their descriptions.
I-I-I got them to draw
and to write what they saw.
Within the images
that the children have drawn,
there are clearly a lot of similarities.
You've got the shapes in them all.
You've got the fact
that they're all the same color.
They've got the red light
flashing on top of the vehicle as well.
"This is the object I saw
on Friday, February 4th."
"It was dome-shaped."
"It had 10 or 11 windows near the top
and has a door with a runway."
There's no one on planet Earth
who doesn't know
what a flying saucer looks like.
Looking at some of those drawings,
you can see where some of these elements
from pop culture came in.
And I'm thinking of one film in particular
that I know was showing on BBC.
Forbidden Planet.
There's a good chance
that some of the kids had seen that.
Now, that isn't to say that,
"Oh, they saw the film,
so they just imagined it."
But if you're steeped in sort of, like,
the films and pop culture of the time,
all those things that are in your head
become part of it.
People are steeped in this stuff.
They watch
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
They watch Doctor Who.
They watch The Day the Earth Stood Still.
That kind of thing.
It's there in their heads.
I had always been interested
in UFOs.
I was 12 when Star Wars came out,
now 45 years ago this year.
And so, it was
It was that
that impressionable age, you know.
And it was around that same time
that you had shows on TV
like In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy.
Perhaps it's time to approach
the question of UFOs again,
without bias.
The study of exoplanets basically consists
of the search for and characterization
of planets orbiting other stars.
When the New York Times article came out,
where we learned about the AATIP program
that had been studying UAPs
and that this was a serious problem
UAP reports need to be understood
as a national security matter.
When we spot something we don't understand
or can't identify in our airspace,
it's the job of those we entrust
with our national security
to investigate and to report back.
I thought,
"Scientists need to be studying this."
"This is really something
that should be studied."
So, I I decided to do it.
We're in a difficult state of ignorance.
We don't know what they are.
We don't know what their intentions are.
Intention is everything, right?
And so, we don't really know
what these things are.
And, here, I'm really hypothesizing
that these are non-human entities
in control of these crafts.
So that's already a huge hypothesis
that we don't have a lot of evidence for.
But there are other
possible hypotheses still.
Are you sure
it wasn't a helicopter
or an aircraft
from the airfield near here?
Well, a helicopter could land there,
but it that's private property
over there,
and if they landed there,
they could be prosecuted.
And with an aircraft, the only thing
that could get in there was a Harrier.
Most of us kids, especially the boys,
we were familiar with almost everything
that NATO was flying in the sky
at the time,
because we were so close to RAF Brawdy.
I think people naturally thought
that, "Well, if anything flies,
it must be something to do
with the Royal Air Force."
RAF Brawdy, at that time,
was an area where we could
carry out our flying training,
which involved using, uh, weapons systems.
I had arrived as a flight lieutenant
in my early thirties,
which I wasn't really sure where it was.
But it was as far away
as you could be in Wales,
bordering on the Atlantic Ocean,
next stop, America.
As the community relations officer
and the press officer,
I was the link
between the RAF inside the fence
and the community outside the fence.
I was getting an increasing number
of reports of sightings,
things that couldn't easily be explained.
And I also took the reports
very seriously.
And there was one occasion
where a lady in Haverfordwest,
at one of the local hotels,
Mrs. Granville I think it might have been,
was adamant that she'd seen something land
outside the hotel.
My mother was Rosa,
but was known as Rose Granville.
She'd been born in Barcelona.
Met my dad, I think, when she was 18,
and they married.
And then, of course,
he brought her back to Wales.
This is just after the war,
and there was a certain animosity
to foreign people, generally.
They felt a certain uneasiness.
It was like we were something
apart from everyone else.
We bought this place in 1967.
It was an old smuggler's fort,
and we converted it into a hotel.
It mainly meant to be for my daughter.
This is a photograph
of my mother and I.
She's in her white, old kitchen overalls.
I'm in my clothes,
ready to do some hotel work.
A lot of people thought it was haunted.
It was just this legend.
They said that a white lady haunted
It was known as the Havens then.
We never had any experience
with any ghost.
People in the Welsh valleys
were very religious, in a formal sense.
You know, they all went
to church on Sunday.
As well as that,
they had this strong belief
in the supernatural that was older,
that dated back way before Christianity,
and they held onto that.
My career has been mainly
as a writer and a journalist.
And my other interest is folklore,
which is what I did my PhD in.
I wasn't the first.
There was a book
by a French computer scientist
called Jacques Vallee
called Passport to Magonia.
And the subtitle to that was,
"From folklore to flying saucers."
You were the person
that Steven Spielberg modeled
the character of a UFO researcher on
in his classic movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
One of my interests, as you know,
has been to look at ancient sightings,
before World War Two, for example,
when there is really no confusion
with modern technology.
If nothing else,
I think this is part of our folklore.
This is something that we should
be studying as part of our folklore.
So that's what really got me into the
the folklore aspect of this
and looking at some
of these old traditions and stories.
And they are particularly rich in Wales.
In Celtic folklore,
fairies were enormously important,
and still are, even to this day.
It was only
in the sort of Victorian period
that people started to get
this romantic idea
that fairies were
little Tinkerbell characters
and that these creatures were
sort of benevolent
and that they were wanting to help humans
with their magic spells
and this kind of thing.
Fairies, in Welsh tradition,
didn't behave anything like
the modern idea.
I mean, we're talking about
a race of creatures who coexisted with us,
and they were never very friendly.
They had all kinds of amazing abilities,
like the ability to travel
at tremendous speed,
to magic people away,
to erase their memory.
So they played tricks on people.
And if you got on the wrong side of them,
really bad things could happen.
Mother was in the third room,
along there.
The second floor.
As soon as I got to bed,
I could see
this huge big light was pulsating.
She looked through the window,
and she saw this thing
sort of hovering.
It was so intensive
that I could hardly open my eyes.
And some These two
Well, I don't know what you'd call them.
figures had come out of it.
They had both very long arms
and very long legs.
But they had no features at all.
They seemed a little unsteady,
from what she said.
She shouted, "What do you want?"
We had some chickens not far from there,
and I think she was worried about
her chickens more than anything else.
And as I did that,
the heat from the saucer hit me.
And this flying saucer
went up in such a speed,
but as if it was just one big dream,
as if I was just imagining, you know?
My father returned
a day or two later.
She told him.
Then my father wrote to tell me about it.
And I thought it was ridiculous.
I said to myself, "They've all gone mad!"
You know, the schoolchildren
and my mother, by the sound of it.
When I came back, my dad said,
"Whatever this thing was,
it has left a mark."
So I said, "Oh, let's go and have a look."
And we walked up the field together,
and there was this mark on the ground.
The grass looked as though it was burnt,
and there was a ridge.
It was the ridge
more than anything else, really,
as though something had been there.
When I started looking into these stories,
I was writing to the Ministry of Defence
and visiting some of these people
and interviewing them.
Then we got Freedom of Information.
We can actually get information
out of the government.
We can get files from 20, 30, 40 years ago
that we've never been able to see.
And the West Wales incidents
were in there.
Rosa Granville writes to her local MP,
Nicholas Edwards.
"This has left me
greatly agitated and disturbed,
and not the least bit desirous
of another encounter."
I love that phrase.
Nicholas Edwards sends this
to the Ministry of Defence,
who contacts RAF Brawdy,
speaks to the community relations officer.
I went there, uh, spoke to the lady.
Unfortunately,
I couldn't find any evidence,
any physical evidence
that anything had landed there.
I then, as I did always,
passed that report
up to the Ministry of Defence.
"I'm unable to offer
any explanation other than above."
"But should a UFO arrive at RAF Brawdy,
we will charge normal landing fees
and inform you immediately."
What came back
was that they knew nothing about it,
and they had asked us
not to talk about it.
They didn't want people frightened by it.
Can you honestly say
that people are not being hoaxed,
are not being spoofed, in this area?
I am absolutely positive
that no human being can simulate
the extreme agitation,
the extreme fright
which some of these people
have undergone and have exhibited.
It was about this time
in the evening when I had my experience.
Nothing has changed since then.
Um, it's virtually exactly how it is now.
Just a little bit further down
is where my experience started.
And, as it happened,
I happened to be down here on my own.
If you look across there now, that
The field in the background
with a big slope,
on the top of that was a glow.
And I noticed that in this glow
was like an upside-down saucer.
And I heard the hedge moving
a little bit further down.
And it was very, very quiet,
and then this thing
stepped out of the hedge.
This is where it came out the hedge,
about here.
And I was up by the gate there.
It was a good seven feet tall.
It had like a silver suit
with like a motorbike visor.
That's all it had for a face.
Very, very dark.
I thought, "Good God, what is that?"
"What is "I thought, "That's not a man."
"No way is that a man."
It started walking up towards me.
I thought, "No, this isn't happening."
I back up onto the laneway there.
As you can imagine, I was quite scared.
So I stood here.
It just kept walking towards me.
So I legged it.
I run up to where that telegraph pole is.
If you can imagine, I'm running now.
As I got to here, something told me,
"Turn around and stop, and have a look."
So I stopped, and I turned around,
and it was standing
where that bare patch is
in the middle of the road, staring.
It was unbelievable.
- And I thought
- "No, I-I'm going."
"I'm not I'm not having this. I'm"
And I just I legged it home.
It really freaked me out.
My dad came down the next day
to have a look,
to see if there was anything else about.
And, at the time
this road here had a lot of soft mud
on the edge of it.
And when my dad came down,
he did notice one one massive footprint,
which was too big
to be an ordinary man's footprint.
He found a footprint about that size.
Yeah, my auntie Pauline
got in touch with me.
And all she said, "Tell me, boy."
She said, "What did you see?"
And I told her exactly
what I'd seen, like.
And she said,
"You're all right though, are you?"
I said, "Yeah." I said, "I'm all right."
And then, it was
I think it was about three
or four weeks after, something like that,
and she seen, virtually,
the same as what I seen.
When you're an ordinary
farming family,
and you're convinced
you've seen spaceships
and creatures from another planet,
how do you persuade friends,
neighbors, and the world in general,
that you've not taken leave
of your senses?
That's the constant problem
that's faced Billy and Pauline Coombs
since they became involved
in one of the country's most celebrated
UFO sightings two years ago.
It started off
with a car drive.
Pauline Coombs was driving back
to the farmhouse.
I think it was with three of the children
in the car.
And the youngest one, Kieron,
saw what looked like
a football-shaped object
that was following them
along this dirt road.
And they got more and more
worked up and frightened.
The car engine stalled.
When it happened to me the first time,
I thought, you know,
"I'm imagining things."
But there's been so much, you know,
happening to this place
that I've gone to believe
it's definitely happening.
Billy Coombs was a herdsman.
He was responsible for,
I think, about 120 dairy cattle.
One night, the gate was tied and bolted.
And he'd just sort of been distracted
by something, gone back.
This must have been
eleven o'clock at night.
Then he got a call
from his neighbor on another farm,
about a mile and a half away, saying,
"Why are all your cows in my yard?"
And he couldn't explain it,
because how could they possibly
have got from one place to another?
- You had 120 cows
- Yes.
teleport from one field
to another?
To another farm.
That is exactly
the sort of tricks
that the Welsh fairies
used to sort of play.
That kind of thing.
And then, after that
came the silver-suited man,
which was the most terrifying experience
of it all.
It was 10:00 on a Thursday.
I went to make a cup of tea
to watch a late-night film.
They were sitting there
watching the television,
and they noticed something silver
by the window.
The biggest thing I ever seen, like.
I got up I couldn't believe my eyes.
So I got up
and went straight to the window
and looked up, and
Well, he was above the window.
It's at least eight feet. At least.
Well, this thing was that tall,
they couldn't see its face.
So, when Pauline went upstairs
to wake the two young daughters,
this thing's head
was just below the bedroom window.
And she could see
that it had no facial features at all.
Exactly what I'd seen.
The police were called out
the night of the incident
at the Coombs's farm.
Sergeant Ernie, of Dyfed Police,
answered the call.
It's probably,
of all the incidents
in my 26 years' service,
that's the most frightened family
I've come across.
Another time,
it was, you know, quite late,
like 2:00 in the morning,
and we heard the doorbell ring.
And we'd not seen anyone
approach the hotel,
come up the drive,
either in a car or, um, on foot.
So I went to the door,
and there were these two guys.
They looked like identical twins.
They had hair that was slicked back,
like, um, patent leather.
But what I found quite remarkable
was their complexion.
Is your mother home?
as if they were made of wax.
They just said to her,
"We'd like to come back
and speak to you at length,
but we have an appointment in Croesgoch."
I got a bit worried about this
because, I mean, they looked so odd!
They walked
towards their vehicle.
Gone.
They just vanished.
Well, at the same time,
they had visited Pauline's farm,
which is really odd.
And she said, basically,
at the same time they were with us,
they were there as well.
The second incident was late afternoon.
My mother and I were sat in the restaurant
when we noticed something in the sky.
It was like a silver disc,
looking at it at first.
And then, it seemed to pulsate light,
an orange light.
Now, this time,
I had to ring up Mrs. Coombs
to prove to me
that I wasn't seeing things.
And she said,
"Yes, we are watching it now."
"My mum, my dad, and all our children,
we're all watching this."
To us, it seemed to go down into the sea.
But the Coombs had seen it,
and they said it had gone
into the Stack Rock, which is an island.
The reason why
the Stack Rocks has taken on this mystique
is because it's equidistant
between all the key places.
And, obviously, they could both see it
from their respective homes,
from a different angle.
She said that, from her direction,
the rock had opened like a door,
and they disappeared.
This isn't anything new.
Ships' logs have information
about UFOs coming out of the water,
hovering next to the ships,
and then taking off,
going back into the 1800s.
Um, this has
This has been going on a long time.
The marine aspect of UAPs,
or UFOs, is really interesting.
That is that they are very often
associated with water.
They're very often seen
coming out of water,
seen going into water,
and sometimes seen underwater.
So we now know
that planets are very common.
In fact, planets in the habitable zone,
which is the region
where you can potentially have
liquid water on the surface,
those planets are relatively common.
About one in five stars has a planet
in the habitable zone,
which is really pretty remarkable
when you think about it.
Oceans are great places to live,
especially if you're going to go
from planet to planet.
Atmospheres are not very stable
with respect to temperature.
So, you go to Venus
and you're looking at
800 degrees Fahrenheit,
and 100 times
the atmospheric pressure on Earth.
However, if you're on Mars,
you're looking at something
like 100 degrees below zero
with one one-hundredth
of the atmospheric pressure on Earth.
Living on surfaces with atmospheres
is really pretty horrible.
If you live in an ocean,
the temperature is always going to be
within the range of having liquid water,
which is not a very large range.
And the only real differences,
going from one ocean on one planet
to another ocean on another planet,
are the trace chemicals that you have
floating around in the ocean.
It would be very easy
to just hang out in our oceans.
It wouldn't be that different
than somebody else's ocean water,
ocean on another planet.
So, there is this idea that if things
are visiting us from somewhere else,
they must have a base somewhere
that is miles away from anywhere,
that we are not familiar with.
So, what's the obvious place?
Under the oceans.
The Stack Rocks seems to fit
into that narrative.
And I think that, again,
goes back into Celtic mythology.
The islands off the coast
were seen as magical islands,
and that's where the fairies would live.
In fact, that's where the Celtic saints
went and lived in isolation
so that they could contact
the supernatural.
Now, you say
you saw a man as well, did you?
And how clearly did you see it?
Well, I I couldn't see its face
'cause it was too far away.
I don't think I was the only one
that said that. I'm not sure.
Somebody walking near it,
to the right-hand side of it.
"I saw a man come out of a door."
"It had pointed ears and a f furry hat."
Ah, and there's one of your faceless men.
I think there were two or three
that claimed they'd seen the occupants.
Now, I never saw these occupants
for myself.
I can't verify that anybody actually did
or whether it was juvenile elaboration,
but it brings a whole new depth into it,
because if they really did
see the occupants,
then something bigger
than we all think happened here that day.
I'd gone home one day,
and I said, "We've moved on a step."
"We've moved from
unidentified flying objects."
"We're now into spacemen."
My wife said,
"Well, what does he look like?"
And I said, "Well, apparently,
he or she, uh, because we don't know,
uh, wears a spacesuit, which is silver."
"A sort of a dark visor,
where you might imagine
the eyes would be."
And she said, "Well, I've seen him."
And I thought, "Well, crikey."
And "No," she said,
"I have, genuinely," she said,
"but it's in a shop window
in Haverfordwest."
And I went down there, had a look,
and it was a a firefighting suit.
Because at Milford Haven,
there's a large oil refinery,
and they had specialist equipment,
which included these suits,
to allow them to fight fires
with very intense heat.
And I believe
that in years after the event,
somebody local admitted to,
uh, being a prankster,
wandering around in one of these suits.
Which, personally,
I find very disappointing,
because it rather muddied the waters.
Calling occupants
Of interplanetary craft ♪
Calling occupants
Of interplanetary craft ♪
The prankster doesn't
account for all of the spaceman sightings
because the pranking
followed the sightings.
And it could well be
that he was encouraged to do that
by some real experiences.
At one point,
he had to dive into some undergrowth
Whoa!
because a lady appeared at the door
aiming what appeared to be a gun.
Calling occupants of interplanetary ♪
Quite extraordinary craft ♪
The temptation is
to think the Coombs family
must be either daft or mistaken.
Their continuing problem is
that no one's yet been able
to prove or disprove
what must be some of the most remarkable
UFO sightings ever reported.
More and more people are claiming
that they are seeing things
which cannot be scientifically explained.
It wasn't just here.
There's a number of locations
around the county
where the same thing was going on.
The Ministry of Defence,
I think there was something like
450 separate incidents reported to them.
I have tracked down
and interviewed some of the people
who were working there at the time.
I mean, some of them were saying,
"Maybe there was something going on."
"But 450 sightings?"
"You know, we just simply didn't have
people to send out
and look into each one of those."
I just happened to look out,
and I saw something in the sky.
It was a dome-shaped object.
Glowing with a pale cream light.
So, what sort of action
are you looking for?
Well, I'm hoping
that the government will step in,
scientists will step in to help us
to understand what these things are.
The sky watchers
seek one objective.
Yet another flying saucer
to add to the lengthening list
of claimed sightings
over the Pembrokeshire countryside.
There was a lot of pressure
on the Ministry of Defence
building up into 1978.
The number of sightings were increasing.
The press interest was increasing.
Of the incidents
that were reported,
to my knowledge,
none of them could be explained
by activity either at RAF Brawdy,
or within Wales, generally,
by aircraft that were flown
by the military or by civil operators.
Are you all honestly going to say
that you think
that the things you saw were,
shall we say, not of this world?
- Yes.
- Right.
People who said,
"Oh, they made it up."
"They made it up for the publicity."
What publicity do you crave
when you're ten years of age?
But did they really see
an unidentified flying object?
Or was this what caught their eye?
We've been ridiculed by a lot of people,
and when you're growing up,
you don't want people to think
you're some sort of lunatic.
They're not gonna take you seriously
because you've seen little green men.
My mother didn't really want
too many people
to know about what she had seen,
what with the story of the white lady.
It frightened most people, I will say,
the idea that there might be
a ghost there.
A story about anything else
that was paranormal
would only make things worse.
Some people said,
"Oh, you've done it to have business."
But, no, we had not.
A hotel which had opened
near Milford Haven,
they had started having UFO weekends.
They would give people a flask of soup
and some sandwiches
and send them out, you know,
on maybe, gosh, four-mile walks.
I told my teacher, and he said,
"Sure your eyes weren't playing tricks?"
You know, I said, "No."
I said, "My eyes don't play tricks on me.
No, they don't."
And I said, "And I'm not stupid."
I said, "Far from it."
I said, "What I saw, I saw."
This thing got up the hedge,
and it jumped over
jumped over this gate.
And I thought
there was something wrong about it.
Like, no man could
no man could jump that gate.
"Spacemen of the terror triangle."
"A towering eerie figure
in a glowing silver suit
blocked the window
of a lonely farm cottage."
My auntie Pauline, I showed her some
of these cuttings and whatever, and
"Ah, no. Don't bring that up," she said.
"Leave it where it is."
I said, "You've gotta talk
about it sometime, you know."
"No, we don't," she said.
"Me and the girls," she said,
"we don't talk about it at all."
Well, it had the clear
cigar shape with the dome on top of that.
What I didn't enjoy
was the attention that it brought onto me.
My first four years of secondary school,
they were horrendous.
I was getting physically assaulted
on an almost daily basis.
Yes, I did!
Most of the time, they wanted me
to say that I hadn't seen a UFO.
They just wanted me to say
that I was lying.
But I just couldn't do that.
I just couldn't go back on my principles
and say that I was lying when I wasn't.
And we've got
some young people in the studio
who claim to have had encounters
of their very own.
In 1978, I appeared
on a TV program called Magpie.
the gentleman. That's David,
David, Philip, and Shaun down here. Now
If you were to see the film
of me on Magpie and look closely,
you would see that I have a black eye.
We were watching it
for about five or six seconds,
and, um we just ran off.
We were so scared.
That was given to me
for the television, you know.
"Let them try
and cover that up with makeup."
With the bullying and the aggression
that I got because of it,
I just thought, "I have to speak out,
because there's other people
who are going through the same thing
that have done nothing
but report something that they've seen."
It was something I felt had to be done.
I saw, like, a door,
and all of a sudden,
this sort of person
just sort of walked out.
I'm not embarrassed or ashamed to say
that I saw something 45 years ago
that I can't explain.
And to this day, I still can't.
Having done the work I have done,
I can give you every assurance
on one point,
that if the public knew precisely
what the presence of UFOs mean,
they would literally run for their lives.
Randall Pugh had heard
that my mother had had this sighting,
and he came to see us.
And he said
that she should tell people about it.
In a way, to back up
what the children had seen.
Lots of people
were calling them all sorts of names.
Well, now, I had to come forward and say,
"They are definitely genuine."
"What they have seen, I saw myself."
What were the figures like?
Well, they were very tall.
Their arms were exceptionally long.
Their legs were exceptionally long.
And, for all, they looked
as if they had boilersuits on.
Shiny boilersuits.
And they had sort of a pointed head,
you know.
There's something, like, pointed going.
And they definitely didn't have a face.
They were faceless people.
They'd no eyes, no mouth,
not even a hole or buttons or anything.
It's definite. It's here.
It's beyond us to know what it is,
but it is.
Is it all really a case
of mass hysteria,
or is there some reality in the unreal?
The people who live around Broad Haven
will tell you that
what they've experienced is real enough.
What the story is about
is a re-enchantment of the environment.
People used to believe
in all kinds of weird stuff.
In modern times, we don't believe
in those kinds of creatures.
But weird stuff is still here.
Obviously, there's something.
Whether it's inherent in the landscape
or in people's minds,
they're having the same
sort of weird experiences,
but they're expressing them
in the pop culture of the time.
Whether it was supernatural or natural,
something happened
that literally changed people's lives.
And that in itself,
to me, is what's important.
The UFO sighting,
it had a major effect on me.
I've never been prejudiced in any way
regarding race, sexuality, etc.
And this all stems from
from this visitation
that we had here at this school.
Because if you can accept the possibility
that there may be aliens
coming to visit us on this planet,
then you can accept anything.
When I gave my first presentation,
my first scientific presentation on UAPs,
and was discussing
their flight characteristics,
their speeds and accelerations,
one of my colleagues asked me,
"Why would you do this?
Why are you studying this?"
"Why put yourself"
"Why put yourself in this position?"
I was worried about getting into it,
'cause there's a huge stigma around this.
I mean, you mention UFOs
and everybody giggles,
and nobody takes it seriously.
But, well, now here we are,
and we have ourselves completed
the first stages of the exploration
of our solar system.
We visited all the major bodies.
We're now moving
to the outer bodies in the Kuiper Belt,
and we have robots operating
on Mars right now.
We still, even after that, have this idea
that it's impossible
for aliens to come visit us.
It's not impossible at all.
In fact, I think it's rather probable.
That's potentially one of the biggest
discoveries in human history.
How can you walk away from that?
It's almost like being the center
of the universe again.
We have to keep relearning that lesson,
that human beings are not
the center of the universe.
Once we have enough scientific groups
out there collecting data,
theorizing, thinking about this seriously,
I don't think it'll take long.
I think I think it'll get solved,
and I think it'll be solved
pretty quickly.
And I think it'll really only take
a decade to do so.
I think it'll change everything. Yeah.
Calling occupants
Of interplanetary craft ♪
Calling occupants
Of interplanetary craft ♪
Calling occupants of interplanetary ♪
Most extraordinary craft ♪
You've been observing our earth ♪
And we'd like to make
A contact with you ♪