DYFED ENIGMA

Opening

In 1977 a small stretch of the Pembrokeshire coast in West Wales, in what was then the county of Dyfed, produced one of the strangest UFO flaps in British history. It began in February with schoolchildren at Broad Haven drawing a silver craft in the trees beyond their field. By spring, a hotel owner had seen figures in boiler suits measuring a field, a farming family were reporting a seven-foot figure in a spacesuit at their window, and the Ministry of Defence had quietly asked the RAF Police to look into it.

The tabloids called it the Welsh Triangle. The local investigator who promoted it called his book The Dyfed Enigma. Nineteen years later a local businessman confessed that he and a friend had walked the lanes in silver suits as a joke. That explains some of it. It does not explain all of it.

Timeline

1976Randall Jones Pugh, a retired vet and local investigator for the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), predicts a wave of sightings in West Wales, based on reports from that year.

4 February 1977Pupils at Broad Haven Primary School report a silver craft beyond their playing field, and later draw it separately for their headmaster. That sighting has its own report: Broad Haven.

17 February 1977Teachers and dinner ladies at the same school report their own sighting.

Spring 1977Pugh brings the story to the national press. At Ripperston Farm, dairy farmer Billy Coombs, his wife Pauline and their five children report repeated encounters: cars and television sets burning out, electricity bills that make no sense, and their herd of cows found moved from a locked field.

19 April 1977Rosa Granville, owner of the Haven Fort Hotel in Little Haven, is woken by a buzzing noise and sees an oval, brightly lit object and two human-like figures in boiler suits who seem to be measuring something in a field near the hotel, a field overlooking a bunker used by the Royal Observer Corps. She later reports flattened grass at the spot.

23 April 1977, early hoursThe Coombs family, watching television, see a figure about seven feet tall in what looks like a spacesuit with a blank face at their sitting-room window. The police officer who answers the call later says it was the most frightened family he saw in twenty-six years of service.

Soon afterAfter Granville contacts her MP, a squadron leader from RAF Brawdy visits the hotel, tells the Granvilles there was "absolutely nothing at RAF Brawdy" that could explain it, and, by her account, asks her not to talk about it so as not to alarm the public.

14 June 1977James Peduzie, head of the Ministry of Defence's UFO desk, S4(Air), asks the RAF Police's Provost and Security Service for a "discreet enquiry" into the Welsh events, noting in writing that he had "not even told the Minister".

December 1977An internal MoD briefing notes that the RAF Police inquiries suggested the sightings "could have been the work of a practical joker".

1979Two books appear: Peter Paget's The Welsh Triangle, and Pugh's The Dyfed Enigma, written with Ted Holliday.

1996Broadcaster Ray Gosling, making a Radio 4 documentary, finds one of the pranksters. Glyn Edwards, a member of the Milford Haven Round Table, tells the Western Mail that he and another member borrowed silver-lined asbestos suits worn by local oil refinery workers, originally for a fancy-dress event, and walked around the area in them for fun after the schoolchildren's sighting had made the news. At one point, he says, he dived into a hedge when a homeowner appeared to aim a gun at him.

2006The National Archives releases the MoD's file on the events, confirming the RAF Police involvement and the suspicion recorded at the time.

Key figures

Randall Jones Pugh was the flap's driving force, a BUFORA investigator whose prediction of a coming wave gave him an early stake in it. He later left ufology, having decided the phenomena he had studied were not spacecraft at all but demonic.

Rosa Granville and the Coombs family were the most dramatic witnesses after the schoolchildren. The responding officer's account of the Coombs family's terror is treated by later investigators as the strongest sign that something genuinely frightened them, whatever it was.

Glyn Edwards is the named, confessed hoaxer, though his confession covers the costumed "spaceman" sightings, not the school field. James Peduzie ran the MoD's low-key inquiry. David Clarke, the academic who has written most fully on the MoD's UFO files, is the flap's most careful chronicler, and keeps the school sighting separate from the hoax.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the schoolchildren's drawings; local and national press from 1977; the witness accounts from the hotel and the farm; the three books; Edwards's on-record confession; and the MoD file released in 2006, which shows a small, quiet inquiry and an internal suspicion of a prankster. No final report from the RAF Police enquiry survives in the released papers.

What is missing: any photograph of a craft or figure, any physical evidence beyond the flattened grass, and any evidence for the "underground base" that local speculation placed beneath Stack Rocks in St Bride's Bay. Clarke treats that idea as riding on the area's real concentration of military sites (the rocket range at Aberporth, RAF Brawdy and a US Navy facility) rather than on anything found.

Things you might not know

• A tabloid gave it the name. Paget's The Welsh Triangle took its title partly from a Sun headline, "Spaceman Mystery of the Terror Triangle".
• The farm got its own book. The journalist Clive Harold wrote about the Coombs family's experiences in The Uninvited.
• Pugh tied it to fairy lore. The Dyfed Enigma linked the sightings to Welsh fairy folklore and ley lines.
• The spacesuits were asbestos. Edwards's "spaceman" outfits were refinery workers' heat-protection suits.
• The MoD kept it from the minister. The head of the UFO desk wrote that he had not even told the Minister he was asking the RAF Police.
• The final report is gone. No conclusion from the RAF Police enquiry survives in the released file.

Competing explanations

A prank, at least in part. Edwards's confession is named and specific, and it fits the later "spaceman" sightings near the hotel and the farm in time and place. The MoD suspected a joker in 1977.

Fear and contagion. Once the story was in the papers, ordinary lights and noises were read as part of it, and a frightened family's experiences grew in the telling.

Military activity. The area held real military sites, which made secret testing a natural suspicion. The RAF denied any link, and the MoD's own uncertain handling of the case argues against a known military cause.

Something unexplained. The view of many witnesses: that the prank accounts for some figures in the lanes, but not for what the schoolchildren drew, or for everything the Coombs family described.

Later life of the case

The Welsh Triangle has been revisited in a 2021 BBC podcast, a BBC Three documentary series and a 2023 Netflix Encounters segment, each returning to the same witnesses and the same unanswered school sighting. For that sighting, see Broad Haven.

Finding

Part of the 1977 Dyfed flap is explained: a named prankster confessed to walking the lanes in a silver suit, and the MoD suspected a joker at the time. The rest, the schoolchildren's drawings and the most frightening of the farm encounters, has never been accounted for by the prank or by anything else.

What still will not resolve: how much of the flap the pranksters caused, since only one of them has spoken and the RAF Police enquiry's conclusion has not survived.