Fourteen children ran in from playtime to say a silver cigar-shaped object was sitting in the field beside the school, and several described a figure in a silver suit. After the weekend their head teacher had them draw it separately — the drawings were much alike, with small variations — and they went to the Ministry of Defence. It opened a wave of further reports down the West Wales coast through 1977.
The British cousin of Westall and Ariel School, held together at the same age of witness.
About fourteen schoolchildren, aged roughly nine to ten
Evidence
Children's drawings, collected the following Monday; an MoD file; no instrument, no photograph
Agency
Ministry of Defence, with RAF Police inquiries; file released 2006
Assessment
B · many witnesses, no hard evidence
The full file
At lunchtime on Friday 4 February 1977, a group of pupils at Broad Haven Primary School, in a coastal village in Pembrokeshire, said they had seen a long silver object on the ground in the fields behind the school. It was raining, and most of them were boys of about ten playing football. Their account opened what the press called the Dyfed or Welsh Triangle, a run of reports along that stretch of the West Wales coast through 1977.
What was reported
Accounts give the number of children as fourteen or fifteen. The historian David Clarke, who has worked from the school's own records, gives fifteen, aged mainly about ten; other accounts give fourteen, aged nine to eleven. According to Clarke, the object was partly hidden by trees and shrubs. Two of the group described a silver dome with a flashing light on top, and six said a tall figure in a silver suit stood beside it. Some later accounts add that the figure had pointed ears.
The children ran back to school and were not believed. After lessons, groups went back to look, and later, with their parents' support, went to the local police station. One pupil, David Davies, then ten, has said he went out to prove his classmates wrong and saw the object himself. He told BBC Wales in 2017 that "my sighting only lasted a couple of seconds"; in a 2024 account he put it at about ten seconds and described a craft the size of a bus with a red, pulsing glow on top.
What evidence exists
The evidence is the children's drawings, their statements and the press record. There is no photograph, no physical trace and no instrument reading. The drawings were sent to the Ministry of Defence, and the originals are kept in a scrapbook at the school, which also holds an entry from the school diary written by the head teacher, Ralph Llewellyn. That entry records that he interviewed fifteen children separately on Monday 7 February and examined their drawings and notes. The drawings were therefore made three days after the sighting, not on the day, and the children had a weekend in which to talk it over.
There is also an official paper trail. The local MP, Nicholas Edwards, passed constituents' reports to the Ministry of Defence, and the ministry's file on the West Wales sightings was released by The National Archives in 2006. According to Clarke, it shows that the RAF Police looked into the sightings but gave it little priority, and no final report survives.
What investigators concluded
Staff at first dismissed the children's story. After the Monday interviews Llewellyn concluded, in the diary's words, that he was "loathe to believe that the children are capable of a sustained sophisticated hoax", while allowing for variations and embellishments and keeping an open mind. The Ministry of Defence's branch for UFO reports, S4, noted "general speculation in the neighbourhood that a practical joker may be at work", and a later ministry briefing said the RAF Police thought the same. Investigators from RAF Brawdy, a few miles away, examined a later landing site at Little Haven and found nothing. In 1996 the BBC presenter Ray Gosling tried to get the former pupils to retract their story for a Radio 4 documentary. They did not, and Davies has said he will stand by it for the rest of his life.
The leading conventional explanation
No single explanation has been accepted. The one most often given is an ordinary object misread by children, with the story then growing under adult and press attention. Candidates named over the years include a sewage tanker and, from a former US Navy serviceman decades later, Harrier jets and American personnel in fireproof suits from RAF Brawdy. A separate hoax is documented: in 1996 the businessman Glyn Edwards told the Western Mail he had walked around the area in a silver protective suit as a joke. The neurologist Steven Novella, writing in 2024, treats the suit as the probable trigger, and he argues that the drawings resemble one another only as much as any children's flying saucers do.
The strength of this reading is that it fits the pattern. Children at three Welsh primary schools reported UFOs that February, and the media coverage of Broad Haven came before most of the later reports. The weaknesses are specific. According to Clarke, the silver-suit pranks came after the school sighting, so they cannot explain it. The sewage-tanker idea has been questioned because many of the children came from farms and would have known the vehicle. And the Harrier claim rests on one late witness.
What remains disputed
What the boys saw behind the school has never been identified. How much the drawings agree is still argued: the BBC has described them as basically the same with slight variations, while Novella says the similarity is only the common shape of a flying saucer. Because the drawings were made after a weekend, they cannot settle whether the boys' accounts were independent. Even the number of witnesses differs from source to source. The Ministry of Defence file holds no final conclusion, and the former pupils, now in their late fifties, have kept to their story.
Did the village see aliens?(archived) — David Clarke, 2024. Fourteen children aged nine to eleven, the 2006 file release and RAF Police inquiry, the timing of the suit pranks, Gosling's 1996 documentary.
BBC gets into UFOs(archived) — Steven Novella, NeuroLogica Blog, 2024. The sceptical reading: the suit as trigger, Harriers, the drawings as cultural imagery.
Corrected The full file: The number of child witnesses was given as fourteen, fifteen or sixteen; no cited source gives sixteen, so the text now says fourteen or fifteen.
Corrected The full file: The text said the head teacher first suspected a prank and told Newsround the descriptions were similar; neither could be confirmed, and it now says, as David Clarke reports, that staff at first dismissed the children's story.
Corrected The drawings were collected after the weekend, not the same day, and were much alike with small variations; the file previously said they agreed only on a cigar shape.
Corrected There is an official file: the drawings went to the Ministry of Defence, the RAF Police made inquiries, and the file was released in 2006. The file previously said no official body was involved.
Added The full file, a long-form write-up with its sources, added.
INDEPENDENT FIELD ARCHIVE
