<>#8THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WELSH TRIANGLE@3 The west Wales sightings form one of the most complex and richly documented UFO cases on record. But the facts were often markedly different from those that were reported.@4 THE REPORTS OF UFO activity in Dyfed in 1977 provide a dazzling variety of incidents and a small army of witnesses, as well as phenomena ranging from distant sightings to close encounters, with all manner of picturesque happenings on the side. Small wonder that the media moved into the area in force, and that innumerable newspaper and magazine articles and television programmes should by devoted to the astonishing events in this one small corner of Britain. But in the end it was the sheer scale of this blaze of publicity that revealed the weaknesses of the accounts offered to the public. Had there been but one version, it might have been accepted as gospel, but there was several, and they all differed in detail and contradicted one another in interpretation. No reader with his wits about him can fail to notice the number of discrepancies and, once alerted, he starts to notice other defects - assumptions too easily made, questions not asked, awkward facts lightly passed over. Finally he realises that in some respects the investigation has been woefully incomplete, while in others the facts have been distorted or exaggerated almost beyond recognition. In the light of more objective investigation into the west Wales sightings it is possible to see just how many truth subsists in the accounts given to the public, and to reassess some of the events outlined in preceding articles. The Pembrokeshire UFO 'flap' may be said to have started at Broad Haven primary school, and it is appropriate that reassessment should start with a visit to the site of the alleged sighting. Straight away we are in for a surprise. The reports hardly emphasize how densely the site is covered with bushes and trees, so that any sighting must have been largely screened. It would have been impossible for the children to have seen the UFO in its entirety, so the sketches that they drew the following Monday must be regarded as largely make-believe. Again, we find that the field is in a narrow valley, overlooked by a number of houses. It has always seemed improbable that a UFO should remain in a field in broad daylight for three hours and more - there is no precedent for such a sighting. The proposition becomes even more improbable in the light of the fact that its alleged location was within constant sight of a semi- circle of houses. It should also be recalled that the events all took place on a winter afternoon: 'It was a very dull day, but I did see something,' said one witness, which suggests an uncertain, indistinct sighting that would hardly permit the precise pin-pointing of the landing sight. However, it does not seem justifiable to accuse the children of deliberate hoaxing. The fact that, when their teachers did not believe them, they took the brave step of handing in a @4petition at the police station speaks well for their sincerity. Undoubtedly, they saw something that they could not identify. What that something was we may never know for certain, but it seems probable that the suggestion of the two canteen workers who saw an object at the same spot, that it was a vehicle associated with the sewage works located close by, is the correct one. Why, then, did the children suppose that they were seeing a UFO? Here we move from physical to sociological considerations. Two days before, several schoolboys at Penarth, Cardiff, claimed to have seen a cigar-shaped UFO. The following day - the day before the Broad Haven sighting - the Western Telegraph reported that another cigar-shaped UFO had been seen at nearby Hubberston primary school, for between 10 and 15 minutes, by children playing football. There is no need to suppose that the Broad Haven children were consciously seeking to emulate the others, but it is evident that the idea of UFOs was very much in the air at the time and might have come naturally to the minds of schoolchildren confronted with an unfamiliar object. The boy who was scared that he might be ''disintergrated' by UFO entities - like the other witness who thought he could distinguish 'retro rockets' on the side of a UFO - already had in his mind the raw materials from which an imaginary UFO could be constructed. The Broad Haven story immediately stimulated the public imagination. The next week's Western Telegraph noted: 'Reporters, photographers and television cameramen arrived in a two-day procession to see the @4starstruck youngsters, who were only too willing to repeat their fantastic story.' Even those who did not believe that story were made aware that curious things were going on; while those who were ready to believe drew fresh encouragement from this flare-up of interest. Soon local investigator Randall Jones Pugh was telling reporters, 'The phone hasn't stopped ringing since the Broad Haven sightings. People are beginning to come forward now that they realize nobody is going to take the mickey out of them.' How many of the sightings reported to Pugh and others in this way have any basis in fact it is probably now impossible to ascertain. But as one leafs through the files of the local newspaper, presumably read by a high proportion of the local populance, one is struck by the way in which the subject was kept simmering throughout the spring and summer of 1977. Week after week the correspondence columns included letters presenting views for or against. The reports were both serious and objective, never sensational and at the same time never mocking. This fact in itself would have been sufficient to create a favourable soil in which the false could be nurtured along with the true. With the national media, on the other hand, it was a different matter. Absurb tales, heavy with exaggeration, were concocted by journalists who dropped in for brief visits, then returned to London to write about the terrified locals who dwelt in the 'terror triangle', as the Sun named it. It is in the light of this emotional climate that cases @4such as the following must be evaluated. On 14 April 13-year-old Deborah Swan of Herbrandston was playing with friends in the park at about 6.30 p.m. Since there had been so many reports of weird happenings, they decided to see if they could find this 'outer space thing', but having gone a little way from the park, two of them turned back because 'it began to get scary.' The others went on, under fences, across a potato field, down a bank - and then, as Deborah later reported: There was something in the field opposite out of the ordinary. I have never seen anything like it before in my life....I thought it was my eyes playing a trick - but it wasn't. The most astonishing thing about it was the colour, which was a brilliant gleaming silver. The shape was like a round football, and also the movements....It moved at all angles - backwards, frontwards,left to right....as we moved, it moved as well. We then ran back as fast as we could....We didn't hesitate to look back, but just kept running. What did Deborah and her companions see? Was it really a UFO or just an hallucination? Was it misperception? was it pure imagination or deliberate fiction? One thing is certain: it is altogether without precedent for anyone to go looking for UFOs and to run across one within a few minutes. And yet Deborah's story was accepted literally at the time by all those who were supposed to be conducting an objective investigation into the facts. It was the happenings at Ripperston Farm that were the most widely @4publicised of the west Wales sightings. How do they stand up to objective investigation? Right away, one is struck by the fact that the Coombs family had neighbours who lived not simply nearby but in a cottage that was actually joined to their own. Throughout the period of the alleged incidents Brain and Caroline Klass were living right next door, working alongside Billie Coombs. Yet it is a fact, however hard to believe, that not one single reporter or investigator bothered to ask the Klasses for their view of the matter. On the occasion of the only event in which they were directly involved, the sinister visit of the two 'foreigners', false statements were put into Mrs Klass's mouth to give the incident a totally misleading slant. Invention clearly embroided the matter of the 'miraculously' transported cattle. Both the farm manager and Billie Coombs's fellow worker testify that the Ripperston cattle were continually getting loose and finding their way on to neighbouring farms. Could they get past the cottages without anyone hearing? Certainly, declares Billie Coombs's neighbour. When there was a wind blowing they wouldn't hear a thing, particularly if the television or radio were on. And there are other happenings at Ripperston that, looked at objectively, turn out to be less than inexplicable. There is the mysterous force that allegedly acted on mechanical objects, destroying five cars in the course of a year. Those who knew Mr Coombs have pointed out that a cowman doesn't have the @4resources to buy that many new cars. What he did was to purchase more or less condemned cars from a scrap yard, get them working as best he could and drive them until they finally fell to pieces. A similar explanation accounts for the high accident rate among the families television sets. As for the abnormally high electricity bill, a neighbour alleges that the Coombs family were forever leaving the central heating fully on while doors and windows were open. One of the most sensational incidents was the appearance, on the night of 22 April, of a mysterous entity at the Coombs's sitting room window. On this occasion there is no doubt that something really did happen; the farm manager whom Mr Coombs telephoned in the middle of the night was convinced that he was genuinely frightened. But by what? Some time earlier two local men were passing the Haven Fort Hotel, in whose grounds the proprietor had recently reported seeing a UFO and a couple of entities. On an impulse, they decided to play a trick on her. They proceeded to tramp around the building in a sinister fashion, using a torch to enhance the effect. It seems probable that it was these same jokers who were later responsible for the Coombs 'entity'. Although the identity of the jokers is widely suspected, they have not openly admitted their complicity, so the explanation must remain conjecture only. However, the hoax explanation is generally accepted in the area today. Space does not permit an item-by-item exposure of similar errors and exaggerations, but the sensational @4Stack Rocks sighting must be mentioned. Unfortunately, the discrepancies between the various reported accounts of this incident are even more glaring than usual, so it is impossible to say quite what happened or in what sequence. What is supposed to have occured is roughly as follows. Early one evening in October Pauline Coombs was driving to Ripperston with her mother and some of the children when her mother saw a disc-shapped UFO fly overhead towards Stack Rocks, which stand out at sea some distance from the mainland. The UFO circled the rocks, then dived into them through what appeared to be sliding doors. Alarmed, they continued on their way. Hardly had they arrived home when the telephone rang. Mrs Granville, of the Haven Fort Hotel, had seen a flash in the sky, which had prompted her to fetch her binoculars to examine Stack Rocks (which, incidentally, were her property). She had seen figures climbing about on the rocks, and wondered if Mrs Coombs had seen any such thing? Mrs Coombs immediately set off from the farm towards the cliff, accompanied by some of the children, to obtain a better view. According to the reports, they came back confirming Mrs Granville's sighting. However, closer investigation reveals that what happened was that on their return from the cliffs some of the children ran on ahead of their mother. Caroline Klass, their neighbour, asked the boy Keiron if they had seen anything, to which he replied, no, of course they hadn't. But when Mrs @4Coombs arrived she insisted that they had indeed seen entities clambering about the rocks on what appeared to be stairs. What are we to make of this? Again, a visit to the site certainly helps. The Haven Fort Hotel is some 3 miles (5 kilometers) from Stack Rocks, which makes it improbable that any movement could be seen in detail, particularly as it was evening and the side of the rocks facing the mainland was in shadow. Additionally, the side facing the hotel is at an angle of 90 degrees from Mrs Coombs's viewpoint, so it is unlikely that she would be able to see the same thing. Mrs Granville's explanation for her alarm at the flash and her subsequent inspection of the rocks is not convincing, for the sky above St Bride's Bay is continually flown over by jets from the RAF base at nearby Brawdy, Stack Rocks being a mark in the flight path of aircraft approaching the airfield. Flashes in the sky over Stack Rocks must occur many times every day. One notes, too, that the Coombs's first sighting must have been made from a moving car that was travelling along a bumpy, unsurfaced road, from which the rocks can be glimpsed only intermittently. At that point they must have been about 2 miles (3 kilometers) away. A BBC investigator visited the rocks to see if there was anything that might have given rise to the sighting. He found nothing. It is noteworthy, though, that from the approximate angle at which the Coombs family must have seen the disc dive into the rocks, there are two large rock slabs, separated by a darker area, that could conceivably lend themselves to interpretation as a pair of sliding doors. @4Finally, what value can be placed on Pauline Coombs as a witness? It has been suggested that she might have been a natural psychic, but it is also possible that she was either very suggestible or highly imaginative. Some time after the events of 1977, and shortly after a television programme featuring a notable UFO contactee, Mrs Coombs confided to Caroline Klass that she, too, had been taken for a trip in an alien spaceship. The investigation that has led to the disclosures made here was not with the intention of debunking the reports but simply in order to establish the real facts. The unearthing of such a farrago of exaggeration and omission, of gratuitous distortion and outright falsehood, was as unexpected as it was dismaying. Inevitably, one is forced to ask whether there is any substance whatever in the west Wales flap of 1977. Fortunately, not all the findings were as disillusioning. There seems no reason to doubt that a good many of the witnesses who submitted their experiences to the press or to the British UFO Research Association representative, Randall Jones Pugh, did so in good faith and were reporting events that may well have been genuine UFO sightings. Of all these cases, one must stand for the rest. A little before 8 a.m. on Saturday, 26 March, Josephine Hewison of Lower Broadmoor Farm, whose husband Richard manages the farm that includes Ripperston, was standing at her @4bedroom window. In a field just beyond the drive that circles around the front of the house she saw a massive object some 50 feet (15 meters) wide, large enough to hide, almost completely, a greenhouse that stood behind it. It had a round, three-tiered shape - a broad base, then a rounded ridge with a dome above. The whole thing, in Mrs Hewison's words, was 'rather like a squashed jelly mould'. It was smooth, bulbous, aluminium-coloured. There was no sound, no indication of activity. It was full daylight but overcast, which invalidates the theory that she might have been dazzled by sunlight reflected from the greenhouse. She gazed at it for about two minutes, then realized that she ought to tell somebody else. She went to wake up her children, but when she looked out of the window again, the object had vanished. There is no way to confirm or refute Josephine Hewison's testimony. But a visit to the site makes it clear that there is nothing there that she could have misinterpreted. Either she saw something real or she was hallucinating - and there seems no reason to suppose that she was hallucinating. Today her view of the incident is a measured, objective one. She knows that she saw something that morning, and she continues to think it likely that she saw something 'real'. Though some reporters described her as 'terrified', what she saw didn't frighten her at all. It was simply a curious and an unforgetable experience. The story of the west Wales flap is a sad revelation of human nature. Some @4of those involved emerge as simple- minded, only too ready to believe what they are told without questioning. Others, though claiming to be objective investigators, have shown themselves to be incompetent or prejudiced. Some who have proffered evidence are to be seen as simply unreliable, others may be considered fraudulent. Just a few people, like Josephine Hewison, seem to have had genuinely paranormal experiences. But because of the way in which the affair was treated, the truth has been burried beneath every kind of error and evasion, fiction and fraud. end.