For a year-long period in 1977, the small west Wales village of Broad Haven became a hotspot for mysterious sightings of UFOs and strange beings. With 450 reported extraterrestrial encounters, the location became one of the UK’s largest mass sightings and is nowknown as the UK’s own “Bermuda Triangle,” and it’s now the center of Netflix’s latest original documentary, Encounters.
The strange series of events in Broad Haven began on February 4, 1977 when 16 schoolchildren at Broad Haven Primary School in Pembrokeshire claimed to have seen a UFO flying in the sky above the school. According to one of the witnesses who spoke to the BBC at the time, the object “looked like a cigar shape with a dome on it with yellowy, orange to red light on the top of it.” The exact identity of the object has been subject to debate and discussion for more than four decades, and now 45 years later, is back in discussion in Encounters.
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“I totally regarded the story as being nonsense as to me flying saucers didn’t exist. They were in bad 1950s sci-fi movies or in tabloid newspapers,” Dave Davies, one of the 10-year-old boys who saw the object, told the BBC. “From behind some trees, this thing popped up in front of me. t was silver, cigar-shaped and about 45ft long and there was just this thought that came into my mind that I had to run away.”
The more than a dozen children who witnessed the UFO soon told their parents, with Davies sharing that, “mothers can tell when you’re lying and [mine] was absolutely convinced what I was saying was the truth.” As word of the sighting got it, the schoolchildren were asked by school headmaster Ralph Llewhellin to draw and write an account of what they saw. The children, who were separated to ensure they did not copy one another, all drew and gave “similar” descriptions.
That February 1977 incident marked the first of what would be hundreds of mysterious sightings in the area. Over the following months, several more locals reported encounters with strange crafts and creatures. Just as she was going to bed, hotel owner Rose Granville “looked through the window and saw this thing sort of hovering,” according to her daughter Francine, who told Encounters, “these two figures came out of it. They looked a little unsteady.” Rose wrote to her local MP on Haven Fort Hotel-headed notepaper that the event “left me greatly agitated and disturbed and not the least bit desirous of another encounter.” Just a few weeks later, Mark Morston claimed he saw an “upside down saucer in a glow” on a ridge near his house. A “7ft tall” being with “a silver suit with a motorbike visor as a face” stepped out of the craft.Another local reported seeing an 80foot-long featureless silver figure outside their isolated farmhouse.
The series of sightings and encounters earned Broad Haven the nickname of the UK’s Bermuda Triangle, with the activity in the area now featured in Netflix’s Encounters, made by Steven Spielberg’s production company. Encounters director Yon Motskin noted that there were “hundreds and hundreds of people that said they witnessed something. That critical mass with 450 people is huge and also entertaining.” Encounters is now streaming on Netflix.
