by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
The reported sighting on February 4, 1977, of a UFO and creature by students at the Broad Haven Primary School in Pembrokeshire, Wales, was the beginning of a flap throughout the county. The area where reports were most concentrated has been dubbed “The Broad Haven Tringle.” Multiple witnesses were willing to go on record, including with the Ministry of Defense, saying they had seen not only strange craft, but silver-suited creatures as well. One dramatic encounter was recalled by a witness for Episode 3 of the 2023 series, Encounters, produced for Netflix by Steven Spielberg’s company. While this is many years later, the story told by the witness is the same as that told by the witness to an investigator who spoke to her and her mother closer to the event just months later.
The investigator was Zimbabwe based Cynthia Hind, who was the principal investigator of the September 16, 1994, Aerial School Incident in that country. This also involved a UFO and creature encounter reported by school children. Hind put out the magazine, UFO Afrinews, and describes the Wales incident in her editorial, (page 3 of the pdf) “Men In Black,” published in the No 19, January 1999 issue. Unfortunately, Hind seems to have been a bit confused about the dates. She says she was on the west coast of Wales “in the early 1980s” and spoke to people at the Broad Haven Primary School about the incident she says took place in July 1979. She describes the period of time between the incident reported by the mother and daughter and meeting with them as “several months later.”
The location of the reported incident is given as the Little Haven Hotel, “up on the hill above Broad Haven.” The witnesses are identified as Rosa Grenville (Granville in records and most other accounts) and her daughter Francine. According to Hind, the hotel was partially occupied by some male guests attending an architects conference. Hind says Rosa saw “a brilliant descending light” through an open upstairs door and “watched in awe as it came down in her backyard.” She is said to have seen a hatch open and two “men” come out of it. Hind says Granville shouted out “who are you?” and that they looked up, but Granville was not able to “make out their features.” She is described as then going to the door of the architects and “pounding” on it to no avail as “they did not seem to hear her.”
According to Hind, Granville and her daughter saw “a large depressed circle in the ground” the next day that was still visible when she visited. She says that “a few days later, around 5 p.m.,” Rosa was preparing vegetables in the hotel pub before opening when she heard the doorbell ring. Francine is said to have answered it and to have found a pair of identical twins with pale, almost “translucent” skin, who “asked to see Mrs. Grenville, the lady who had seen the UFO.” Hind says Rosa “called out” that she was too busy to speak with them and that they said they would come back later as they were from nearby St. David’s.
According to Hind, Francine told her she watched the two walk to their car “with a peculiar gait” and called to her mother to “come quickly” as she didn’t recognize their car and thought there was “something strange about them too.” Hind says Rosa came over and that, as they both looked out the window, ‘They waited… and waited, but the car with the twins never appeared.” Hind says she asked the postmistress at St. David’s “if there were any identical twins in the area” and was told there were not. According to her, the twins “never returned.”
In the September 25, 2015, article by Sion Morgan headlined “Ministry of Defence [sic] officials ‘DID investigate mass UFO sightings in West Wales village’” posted on the Wales Online website, Rosa Granville’s sighting report is said to be included among the documents held at the National Archives in Kew. According to Morgan, Granville described seeing an “upside-down saucer” in the field by the hotel and “two faceless humanoid creatures with pointed heads.” He says she wrote in a letter to her MP, Nicholas Edwards, that the incident left her “agitated and disturbed and not the least bit desirous of another encounter.”
Edwards is said to have contacted the MoD, a flight lieutenant at RAF Brawdy, and then to have paid a visit to the hotel. According to Morgan, Edwards reported that he was “being inundated” with UFO reports from Pembrokeshire at the time.
Morgan reports that while “the MoD officials expressed no interest, saying there was no threat to national security,” there is a letter among the documents from the MoD’s S4 chief to the Provost Security Service in which he called for a “discreet enquiry” after writing “I have not even told the Minister I am consulting you.” Morgan says the chief expressed “bewilderment at the number of apparently ‘level-headed’ witnesses to the strange activity.”
A sighting report similar to Granville’s (though much more up close and personal) is also profiled in the Encounters episode as reported in the September 27, 2023, article by Aled Scourfield and Peter Shuttleworth headlined “Alien and UFO ‘Bermuda Triangle’ explored in Netflix doc” posted on the BBC news website. According to Scourfield and Shuttleworth, “a month or two later,” Mark Morston, while walking alone on the Marloes peninsula, said he saw an “upside-down saucer in a glow” in the reporters’ words, “on a ridge near his house.”
Morston is said to have then described hearing a “rustle in the hedge further down the road” and to have seen a 7-feet-tall, silver-suited being with, in the reporters’ words, “a motorbike visor as a face” walk out of it. According to Morston, as the creature walked towards him, he was convinced it wasn’t human and thought “this is not happening.” He said, “I was quite scared. It kept walking, so I legged it.” He is said to have returned the next day and to have found a footprint in the mud too big to have been from, in his words, “an ordinary man.”
We neglected to thank Brent Raynes for his help in preparing our recent series that began with “Betty Hill: UFO Investigator.” Raynes puts out the monthly online publication AP Magazine.