Bonsall Village In Derbyshire

In the summer of 2023, fuelled by the release of yet more top secret UFO files, I realised that you don’t really see much of UFO sightings in the news these days. I wasn’t sure whether this was because it wasn’t happening, or it just wasn’t in the newspapers that I was reading. When I was a child, the tabloids had daily stories about alien abductions and visitors from outer space. Then again, they also had stories about people marrying ghosts and possessed wardrobes.

Bonsall village in Derbyshire came up as one of the top ten hotspots to see UFOs in the UK, so I decided I would pay it a visit.

There are lots of quirks about Bonsall. Not only do they have the World Hen Racing Championships, and naked racing at the first snowfall, (I kid you not – and it’s only the men who participate), it’s also where some very famous UFO footage was shot.

Many of the villagers who I spoke to had tales of strange craft appearing out of nowhere and hovering silently overhead, before zooming off into the night. They were described as being possible helicopter search lights, except there was no sound, and they shot off far too quickly. There were so many of these sightings that there is even a UFO spotting tour.

But in 2001, local Sharon Rowlands saw something more than just a ball of light, hovering above the next field near her home. The huge circular disc wasn’t far away so she clearly saw it flip over a couple of times and pulsate with lights as she watched. She had been given a video camera days before, and had the sense to get it and film the exhibition.

The footage was deemed so spectacular, that it was allegedly locked in a vault in a bank and sold to the USA for £20,000. This was a fair sum in 2001, and it was sold to a production company who used it in their ‘Can It Be True’ series. They also showed it to NASA who have been said to have seen similar UFOs in other parts of the world, which made them particularly interested.

You can view the footage on YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkYGJ4Rm2fU&t=2s

Obviously, it’s been on television now, so it’s not so secretive. And it is a fascinating watch, if you have the time to look. (Ignore the music)

The Broadhaven Primary School UFO

It was over twenty years earlier than this, in 1977, that Wales was a UFO hotspot, with sightings clustered around Broadhaven, in Pembrokeshire.

There was also the famous incident where the children of Broadhaven Primary School are alleged to have collectively seen a UFO in the field next to their school at lunch time, and again later on as school finished.

When the children were asked to draw what they had seen, they all drew a similar spaceship – your typical flying saucer shape, some with legs, some with lights.

Teachers had stated that they had kept the children apart before they asked them to draw the pictures, so they could not discuss it and make sure they all drew the same thing. So when the pictures came out so similar, everyone was convinced they had seen the same UFO.

Taking a look at the pictures they drew in the photo above, it’s clear that they’re not all the same at all. But what they are, is reminiscent of spaceships from comic books and television programs of the 70s and 80s, and it’s highly likely that the children were just drawing their version of this. When we see something in a book or on tv, we’re very likely to see this in our minds eye when asked to describe an encounter – our brains are programmed in such a way as to find human like or familiar features in shadows and clouds, or even in rock formations on Mars. It’s the same way we see shadow people.

It has also been said, that the UFO was seen by two canteen workers, who said it looked like a vehicle from the local sewage works.

The Uninvited

The case that really sticks in my mind from this time, is the case of the Coombs family and Ripperstone Farm, which is told in the book The Uninvited.

Pauline Coombs and her husband Billy lived at Ripperstone Farm with their children, the eldest of whom worked the farm with his father.

Their alien encounters began in January 1977 when Pauline saw a huge ball of light hanging motionless in the sky above a field near the cliffs adjacent to their farm. It wasn’t unusual for them to see strange lights in the sky near their house, considering the proximity to an RAF base, but the lights usually came with aircraft noise. This light made no noise at all. And how was it just sitting in the sky and not moving? At some point, it started swinging from side to side, like a pendulum.

Billy went out into the field and towards the cliffs nearby to see what it was, but the light vanished, and all he saw was strange goings on by fifty or so frogmen and “unmarked army trucks and soldiers in camouflage.”

Not long after this, Pauline was driving home one night with her youngest children and a similar ball of light seemed to chase them down the country roads, frightening the life out of them as it switched from one side of the car to the other, keeping pace with them until they got within sight of the farmhouse. Then the electrics cut out on the car, bringing it to a halt and leaving them in the dark. Pauline and the children had to run, screaming, to their front door. The light disappeared, but the family were left fearful for their lives.

A Silver Suited Spaceman

On another night, as Pauline and Billy had settled down to watch television, they were disturbed by a light shining through their living room window, which they thought were car headlights. When they both went to look, they saw a man in a silver suit with a blacked out visor standing looking in. He was alleged to be 7 feet tall and glowing all over.

Pauline Coombs, in an interview, said that the most frightening part of the whole experience was “The silver suited man. He was about seven feet tall and the width of the window which is three feet wide. And he was there for about two hours.”

The silver suited man had also raised a hand to the window, which they report as starting to vibrate where he touched it.

Billy had called on a neighbour to come over and help him get rid of the man because he was too scared to go out by himself, but the man disappeared when his neighbour turned up. He also called the Police but in the book it says that even the Police were too scared to go and investigate in the dark.

The next morning, Pauline said that there were huge footprints under the window and the rose bush beside it was burned.

Strange Goings On

Various things happened to the Coombs family during their ordeal.

One of the daughters woke during the night to a disembodied hand reaching out towards her from the end of the bed. It vanished into thin air once her parents arrived in the bedroom and turned on the light, and never came back again.

The electrics in the house would burn out on a regular basis, killing all their appliances. No matter how many times they got it fixed, it would happen again and again, until they just gave up. No electrician who came to look at the problem could find any reason why it kept happening. The wiring was all perfectly fine.

Pauline Coombs, after following the light one day, saw two of the same men in silver suits with blacked out faces down on the rocks beneath the cliffs, stating that a ‘door’ opened in one of the Stacks – a rock formation on the coast – and they went into it. She also said that a UFO, a silver cigar shaped craft, flew down into the ocean beneath the rocks. I’m not sure I believe that these rock formations opened up for anyone.

A friend of Pauline’s reported seeing the same thing, through binoculars from the hotel where she worked, a little way inland.

Other villagers said that two men with black suits and wax like identical faces called at their door asking where the farm was, standing stock still and unblinking as they were told, and then vanishing into thin air, along with their car. The same two men had appeared at another house at exactly the same time, asking exactly the same question.

The sightings continued on to December of 1977, before the alien activity at Ripperstone Farm ceased.

The Welsh Triangle

The hundreds of UFO and paranormal events at Broadhaven and beyond in the 1970s earned it the name of The Welsh Triangle and they are all well documented in author Peter Paget’s book of the same name.

People all over the area reported numerous UFOs, strange alien men, electrical disturbances in cars and in the home, and many other strange goings on.

A disturbance that happened to many and that was attributed to aliens was car radios losing the station and playing static, mostly when in the middle of nowhere and when there was a storm afoot.

There is also a report of a field full of cows being left in one field and ending up in another in the morning, having ‘teleported’ in some unexplained way. Or perhaps someone, the same someone playing the pranks in the silver suit, let the cows into the next field.

The silver suited men were prevalent in the area and appearing to many different people at different times, always described the same – ‘a huge silver suited figure, at least 6 foot tall, and completely enclosed in an aluminium-like suit, which seemed to be slightly inflated.’ As told to Peter Paget.

The boy describing the man said that the figure ‘climbed easily over a big gate and when I started walking backwards it came towards me.’

There is some idea that the silver suited man, or men, floated or hovered when it appeared to all these people, but they describe him or it as jumping or climbing over fences and taking great strides – contradicting themselves in the space of a sentence.

They also describe the silver suited man as wearing a square shaped helmet with a black visor and black boots and gloves.

Peter Paget says later on that ‘the UFOs and their occupants were taking an unnatural interest in Ripperstone Farm and in the fields on the coastal side of it.’

So Why Did Aliens Choose Ripperstone Farm For Their Visits?

I have to admit, when reading all the stories of alien visits and UFOs to Wales, and Broadhaven in particular, it all seems to have a rational explanation.

We’d have to be ignorant to think that in this vast universe, we are the only people in it. We can’t possibly be. But does that mean this little place in Wales was the place to be for aliens in 1977?

As far as the radio interference and static goes, as I said above, I would say this was all down to environmental interference. Old FM radios on cars would frequently lose signal as you drove along, even more so in thunder storms and deep in the countryside. I can’t say this was aliens.

The silver suited man sounds like someone playing a prank, especially when it started appearing more frequently after the Coombs family said what they had seen. The suit also seems like it could have been borrowed from the sewage works purely for that very purpose. There is talk of people mentioning that the Coombs were prone to exaggeration and that a man confessed to being in the suit and terrorising the valley one drunken night down the pub. So there’s that, as well.

Balls of light chasing cars down country roads are more difficult to explain, as are the cigar shaped UFOs appearing all over the valley. If it were happening today, I would say it was some kind of drone being controlled by someone with the object of frightening someone who had said they’d seen a UFO, but it’s not, so I can’t. Unless the endless reports of new aircraft being developed by the government are to be believed and these were exactly that, coming from the air base nearby? Who can say?

In the years before the internet and smart phones, there were all sorts of stories doing the rounds, and the only way of getting them out there was in newspapers and magazines. It was also a time of sensationalism and selling more newspapers than the rival. If we wanted to know what was going on in the world we bought a newspaper or we watched the news. Now we have the news in our pockets in an instant, and it is governed to tell the truth, with huge fines issued for those who break the rules. But when it was all about selling papers, the more ridiculous headlines, the better.

As a youngster in a working class household, these headlines were all I saw in the newspapers that graced our home.

There was also a tendency for Chinese Whispers. ‘My friend’s friend’s aunty’s dog saw a ghost in the old house down the road’ would gain momentum and backstory every time it was told to another person until it was known by everybody in the area and cemented in its history forever.

Could this be what happened in Broadhaven?

If aliens were visiting our planet, and have been for many years, why would they choose this particular area and this particular family above all others? There is no reasoning to it at all.

Some would argue that this is why it’s called unexplained and paranormal. But to me, there is no definitive proof, other than word of mouth, that any of this actually happened.

I would absolutely love to see a UFO, but I don’t think it would happen, seeing as though I don’t think I live anywhere that would make an alien want to visit.