The rugged coastline of Pembrokeshire is a place that evokes a certain mystery. Myths and legends were spun here and in centuries past smugglers would ply their illicit trade on its sea-lashed, treacherous rocks and coves.
And, back in 1977, another mystery of a different kind altogether came to hover (perhaps quite literally) over this westerly outpost of Wales; or more precisely, over one particular village: Broad Haven (population 856).
The curious events that unfolded in a field abutting the village primary school here, on a cold, wet Friday in February, propelled this tiny seaside bolthole onto the international stage as a hotspot for possible extra-terrestrial activity.
It would be another nine months before Steven Spielberg’s first science fiction blockbuster — Close Encounters Of The Third Kind — would hit the big screen.
Eerie drawings of UFOs created in 1977 by pupils from Broad Haven Primary in Wales
But what happened in Broad Haven that year was a real-life blockbuster, remaining one of the most hotly discussed incidents in British UFO history, and now the subject of a new four-part BBC documentary, Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens.
It all began over the course of a single school day when 15 schoolchildren — 14 boys and one girl — all reported to their teachers seeing a curious silver, cigar-shaped aircraft in fields behind their school. More curious yet, some of the children claimed they had seen a silver man, with pointed ears, emerge from the strange vessel.
It could, so easily, have been put down to the fertile imagination of childhood, were it not for what happened next.
So insistent were the children that they had seen something, that, having returned to their homes that Friday evening, several parents made reports to the local police station.
By the time Monday rolled around, school headmaster Ralph Llewhellin decided he had to tackle the clamour, so sat them all down in exam conditions and asked them to describe and draw what they had seen.
Fifteen children all reported sightings to their teachers of a cigar-shaped aircraft in fields behind their school
A rational man, even Ralph Llewhellin was astounded. He was clear on two fronts: the children were not capable of maintaining such a sophisticated prank, and they had indeed witnessed something that couldn’t be explained — and still can’t be explained today.
For, as it would transpire, the Broad Haven school ‘incident’ of 1977 would be the start of a bumper season of UFO sightings, strange encounters and happenings, from the terrifyingly plausible to downright comical, that turned this Welsh seaside village into an enduring mecca for conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters.
So just what did happen at Broad Haven Primary that day? This week the Mail spoke to David Davies, who was a ten-year-old bookworm with a passion for Greek and Roman mythology, who still stands by every word of what he saw.
Now a father-of-two and proud grandfather, David’s recollections of that day are as strong now as they were 47 years ago when he sat in his classroom reading while his classmates went out to play.
‘The day itself was absolutely miserable,’ he says. ‘It was dreary, it was drizzly, it was cold, it was horrible. I’ve never been a great lover of getting cold and wet, so I was inside, reading books.’
David, however, kept getting interrupted by children running back into school with excited reports of a strange object, apparently parked on its perimeter.
‘This went on throughout the entire day and was getting to be a bit persistent,’ recalls David, who despite the assumptions one might make looking at his UFO-adorned T-shirt and the Area 51 (a highly classified U.S. Air Force facility associated with conspiracy theories) signs on his office door, calls himself a ‘natural-born sceptic’.