by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In 1977, there was a flap in the area of St. Brides Bay in Pembrokeshire, Wales, that involved reported sightings of craft and humanoids. The most well-known incident involved 14 Broad Haven Primary School students running inside to tell their headmaster that they had seen a yellow cigar-shaped craft land in a field. On February 17, three staff members reported they saw the same craft. The story made national news thanks to British UFO Research Association investigator and UFO Investigators Network correspondent Randall Jones Pugh, and a flap began that would result in the area being referred to as “The Welsh Triangle.” A lesser-known case involved an entire family that reported a series of strange events which Pugh covered in articles published in issues of Flying Saucer Review and the BUFORA Journal.
In April, while driving, Pauline Coombes and three (out of four) of her children were reportedly chased by a football shaped UFO. Later that year, in October, Coombes, her four children, and her mother reportedly witnessed a craft and humanoids that behaved in an especially bizarre manner. It came out that all sorts of strange happenings were said to have been occurring on the family homestead called Ripperston Farm. Journalist Clive Harold got close to the family and wrote a book about their experiences titled, “The Uninvited.”
In the Vol. 23, No. 1, June 1977 issue (page 6 of the pdf) of Flying Saucer Review (page 6 of the pdf), Pugh includes Coombes’s report in “West Wales Roundup,” just after his article on Broadhaven. He presents the details from an article (in which he named as a “local UFOlogist”) by Hugh Trumbull that was published in the April 14, 1977, edition (page 15 of the pdf) of the Western Telegraph. According to the article headlined, “Chased by a Flying Football,” Coombes had seen three UFOs that year. In this instance, she was driving near Little Haven with her three children, when her 10-year-old son, Keiron, saw a light coming down towards them. He described it as yellow, about football-sized, with a beam coming out of the bottom.
The object followed along the side of the car, hopping over hedges, for over a mile. When they reached the farm, the car’s engine and lights died. They went to get Coombes’s husband, Bill, but the object was gone by the time he came out.
Pugh wrote an article covering a sighting Coombes and all four of her four children said they’d had, along with her mother, on October 30, 1977. It’s headlined “Stack Rocks Humanoid Display” and was published in the Vol. 23, No. 6, April 1978 issue (page 8 of the pdf) of Flying Saucer Review.
According to Pugh, they were pulling up to the farm in their car when Coombes’s mother drew her attention to something in the sky. Coombes stopped the car and everyone got out to look. They described it as a “round, flat disc, whitish in color” moving towards the sea at what Coombes estimated was at around 200 feet “at the speed of a motor-boat going fast across the bay” or at about 20-30 mph.
It came down to about the height of nearby Stack Rocks, maintained the same speed and then went into the side of the islet and disappeared. Coombes said she and her mother expected an explosion, but there was none, and “both women were quite adamant that ‘it just disappeared into the rock.’”
The entire group crossed two fields to get to the water’s edge. The water between them and the islet at this point was only about 400 feet wide, and as they approached, they saw what they first thought were, in Pugh’s words, “two skin-divers going about their business in the deep waters around the Stacks.” They then realized that the heads of the figures were elongated and much larger than a normal human head. Coombes described them as “rectangular in shape with the corners rounded off.” When asked if she was sure they weren’t divers or fisherman, Coombes said that while “they were human in shape, they were definitely not human beings.”
They watched for about 15 minutes as, in Pugh’s words, “the silver-clad humanoids moved about on the uneven surface of the Stack Rocks.” Pugh points out that the islet rises “abruptly” to a height of about 80-100 feet and that the surface of the rock is such that it would require a good deal of caution in order not to fall off.
Coombes said they saw “a door opening and shutting fairly rapidly on the right-hand side (the Broad Haven side) of the rock face.” The door seemed to be about the same size as a normal household door, had a “shimmering haze” around it, and the space behind it was “quite black.” It opened and closed, in Pugh’s words, “much as would the sliding doors of a serving hatch in a restaurant,” and the group saw a “silvery clad humanoid” repeatedly come into view and leave as if it was walking up and down some steps.
The other figure moved across the rock face as if it was a smooth surface and even seemed to walk on the water. Eventually it went out of view behind the left side of the islet towards the sea. The other figure then vanished “abruptly” along with the door.
According to Pugh, he and BBC news reporter David Allen interviewed Coombes and the children on December 1st. One thing that came out was that Coombes took a different road home that day and “could not fathom why she decided to take that particular route.” Pugh tells the reader that he is convinced that Coombes “has a psychic ability to see things not normally visible to other people” and mentions there being a paranormal aspect to the farm without going into specifics. As for Coombes’s credibility, he reports that she stuck to her story and was prepared to take any test that would prove she wasn’t imagining things.
Pugh ends his article relating a sighting of his own through his bedroom window overlooking St. Brides Bay, Pembrokeshire. According to him, he saw a crescent-shaped object with a tube sticking up about 3 feet and a dome on top sitting in a field. As he pulled aside the curtain exposing the light from his room, the object took off vertically at great speed.
The Coombes family shows up repeatedly in reports published in the BUFORA Journal throughout 1977 into 1978. In the Vol. 6, No. 2, July-August 1977 issue (page 16 of the pdf) Pugh says the family reported seeing a 7-feet-tall silver-clad humanoid looking in at them through their living room window. Coombes can be seen on YouTube describing this to a group of visitors at her farm.
In the Vol. 6, No. 1, January-February 1978 issue (page 17 of the pdf), there is a report by Pugh that on May 17, 1977, Coombes’s twin daughters, Joanne and Layann, saw a silver-suited being walking around on the farm that then went through a hedge and a barb-wire fence and disappeared. He says they also saw “a silver-white ‘platelike object’ with a red light” that landed, put out a stair ramp, and ejected a box down it. The stairs then retracted, the door shut, and the craft took off. The family investigated and found no box but did find large footprints in the area. In the meantime, the twins and Coombes’s eldest daughter Katrina are said to have shouted out to the adults as they had seen a craft similar to the first one fly into the water by the Stack Rocks.
Pugh wrote a book about the flap with Fredrick “Ted” William Holiday titled The Dyfed Enigma that was published in 1979. The Uninvited by Clive Harold published that same year focuses on the events reported at Ripperston Farm which were said to have also included televisions exploding and a herd of cows being mysteriously transported from a locked field to a neighboring farmyard.
Pugh can be seen talking about the events he investigated here.
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