Berwyn Mountains UFO the welsh roswell

At 8.38pm on January 23, 1974. Wales (UK)

The Leicester Daily Mercury detailed a ‘mystery’ on Thursday, January 24, 1974 (Picture: Mirrorpix)

Ornaments rattled, walls shook and lights flickered. People spilled onto the streets and looked up at the dark hills, where strange lights darted across the sky.

Police switchboards became clogged as panicked residents called in some sort of ‘explosion’.

In the village of Llandderfel, Pat Evans was jolted to her feet as she watched television. Fearing an aircraft had crashed, the nurse hastily drove up the B4391 as mist rolled over the winding road.

‘We drove a fair way along the mountain road,’ Pat had told the press. ‘To our left we could see a huge orange ball sitting on the mountain. It was glowing.’

Ken Houghton, who lived on Royal Oak Farm in the village of Betws-y-Coed – 25 miles away from Llandderfel – also witnessed a strange occurrence on the hillside. He told reporters he saw ‘sheet lightning behind a cloud’ before ‘a sphere came down’ on the hills.

‘The Welsh Roswell’ - the Berwyn mountain UFO crash, Llandrillo, Wales, January 23, 1974

The Berwyn Mountains

An RAF search and rescue team was scrambled to investigate the incident. But a ground search was called off due to the blanket of darkness that made the terrain difficult to traverse.

Ancient Aliens: UFO Crash Site in Wales (Season 12) | History

Ancient Aliens: UFO Crash Site in Wales (Season 12) | History

In the coming weeks, scientists, police officers and villagers flocked to the Berwyn mountains, a sparsely populated area of moorland popular with walkers.

It was thought a meteor – or perhaps something else entirely – had crashed into the hills.

The official explanation for the commotion in the Berwyn mountains was that an earthquake had struck North Wales just as a meteor shower passed over the region.

This was confirmed by academics at Edinburgh University and Keele University who measured the earth tremors and tracked where the meteor could have been spotted from.

Swansea UFO Network interviewed Scott Felton a North Wales based UFO investigator who with Margaret Fry another investigator took a fresh look at the case.

The witnesses generally reported seeing a bright light in the north-west which seemed to fall towards the horizon.

An expert who carried out independent research into the Berwyn Mountains incident for the British Astronomical Society reported that a “fireball” was visible over most of the UK that night.

It descended from a height of about 120km to about 35km before disintegrating over Manchester, the expert found.

Then-junior RAF minister Brynmor John summed up the official position in a letter to MP Dafydd Elis Thomas in May 1974.

He wrote: “As suggested by the descriptions reported, it seems the phenomena could well have been caused by a meteor descending through the atmosphere burning up and finally disintegrating before it reached the ground. Such a hypothesis would also explain the absence of any signs of impact.

It has also been suggested that at 8.32 pm that evening there was an earth tremor in the Berwyn Mountains which produced a landslide with noises like detonations.”

Coverage of the incident in the Liverpool Echo on Thursday 24 January 1974 (Picture: Mirrorpix)

But the MoD’s conclusions did not convince many of those who witnessed the incident firsthand.

One wrote in a letter preserved in the files: “That ‘something’ came down in the Berwyn Mountains on that night I am certain ...”

UFO researcher Russ Kellett said he has spoken to a fisherman who said he saw flying saucers emerge from the Irish Sea before the incident on the Berwyn Mountains.

Mr. Kellett, 47, from North Yorkshire, said: “There’s no doubt whatsoever that it was more than just an earthquake.

“I’ve got an affidavit from a group of men who were coming home from Bala when they found this flying saucer at the side of the road and the military came and took it away on a flat-back vehicle.”

Journalist and UFO investigator Dr. David Clarke, who is a skeptic on the subject, says the Berwyn Mountains incident is the most intriguing sighting in Wales, and elements of it remain unexplained.

Eyewitness sketches from the National Archives

Eyewitness sketches from the National Archives

Dr. Clarke, 42, who lectures at Sheffield Hallam University, said: “What we know is that on that particular night there was a nurse who heard the explosion and thought something had crashed into the hillside.

A stone circle near Llandrillo, Wales, close to where the 1974 sighting was reported

Geraint Edwards of Llandderfel, Denbighshire, told a Channel Five documentary, how he stood in amazement as a flying saucer hovered for 10 minutes above the mountains.

He said at the time: “It was definitely a flying saucer. It was a pity I didn’t have a camera because it was there for at least 10 minutes, just hovering. We were on the way to play darts when something caught our eye in the south-east.

“It looked like a rugger ball, but the ends were more pointy. When it took off, it just went like lightning.

“I wrote it down in my diary. It was 6.45 pm on the Friday night.

“If we were coming back from the pub, people would be saying, ‘they’ve had one or two [drinks]’ but we were going to the pub.”​

A document from the Maritime and Coastguard Agency revealed a military operation, codenamed Photoflash, was scheduled for that evening. It involved about 10 military aircraft and a series of powerful flashes across the North Wales coast and Liverpool Bay.

The MCA letter said: “During the late afternoon and early evening of 23rd January 1974 there was an exercise from Jerby Range on the Isle of Man. The exercise was called ‘Photoflash’ and coastguards were advised to expect at least 10 aircraft taking part and at least 80 flashes around the Liverpool Bay area and the North Wales coastline.”

There was no more information from official sources on that specific exercise and if it was connected to Berwyn. A spokesman at the RAF Museum Research Department suggested photoflash operations were used for training exercises to illuminate the ground below.

Nick Redfern's Cosmic Crashes has a another take on the alleged crash

The original account mentioned in Nicks book comes from investigator Tony Dodd. 'James Prescott' is a pseudonym; the person using it was not an official in the Welsh Armed Forces.

According to his account, he was stationed in South England before receiving orders to proceed to North Wales who claims he knew about live NHI bodies at the crash site... -

The bodies were about five to six feet tall, humanoid in shape, but so thin they looked almost skeletal with a covering skin.

- Sometime later we joined up with the other elements of our unit, who informed us that they had also transported bodies of alien beings to Porton Down, but said that their cargo was still alive.

Prescott would later state (via Redfern's book) that seeing the alien bodies made him change his whole concept of life. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cosmic-Crashes-Nicholas-Redfern/dp/0684870231

Thank you to @planethunter56 on Twitter 'X' for these details and for the corrections from https://twitter.com/StephenApWales

Details on the earthquake reported https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/1531/1/Bala_paper_Musson.pdf

Were you a witness, get in touch mufog@protonmail.com