Black helicopters circle 'Welsh Roswell'

Ufologists will doubtless be delighted that an eyewitness to the "Welsh Roswell" - the crash and burn of an alien spacecraft in North Wales’s Berwyn Mountains - has spoken out to dismiss the Ministry of Defence's explanation of the incident.

Retired nurse and midwife Pat Evans, now 72, heard a “almighty bang” and saw "this huge ball glowing and pulsating on the mountain" above Llandrillo on 23 January 1974.

Evans drove up the mountain to investigate the object, accompanied by her two teenage daughters. She described it to WalesOnline as "moon like, but without windows or doors", adding: "Some lights seem to be scattered around it and I just wish we’d stayed to see what the end result was - whether it would just disappear or fly away."

She continued: “We’d heard an almighty bang and we live at the foot of the mountain and I thought it might have been a plane crash. Me being a nurse and my girls being in St John [Ambulance] I thought we could help.”

Police and a search and rescue team from RAF Valley on Anglesey were at the scene within an hour, but found nothing.

The MoD subsequently concluded that the spacecraft was in fact a meteor, widely seen across the UK that night, and that the "almighty bang" was an unrelated local tremor.

The Guardian explains that the official file into the matter, declassified earlier this month, says "a private investigation done on behalf of the British Astronomical Society concluded however that the meteor may in fact have disintegrated over Manchester, and that its appearance was preceded at 8.32pm by an earth tremor in the Berwyn mountains with which it had no connection".

An unimpressed Evans said: “It’s rubbish. I know what I’ve seen. I had the meteorite people call here. There’s a smell of sulphur with meteors and there was no smell, just night air."

Evans also dealt a blow to conspiracy theorists who claim the authorities immediately sealed off the mountain while they collected the remains of a crashed spacecraft and its alien occupants. She said: "We didn’t see anybody on the road even though there were various reports that we were told to go away by armed police and military etc, which was all totally untrue."

She provocatively concluded: “I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. I have no idea what it was.” ®

Bootnote

We're obliged to Richard Hodges for the tip-off. Fans of black helicopters should check out the "strange goings-on in the South Wales Valleys" vid in WalesOnline's report. Great stuff.