WELSH TRIANGLE REDUX?
A series of strange events in Pembrokeshire – but were they connected?
Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire seemed to be the focus of … well, something, in late January and early February. It kicked off with an unnamed 93-year-old woman reporting a UFO sighting. She said she was walking along Robert Street in Milford Haven at 11am on 31 January and saw something in the sky. “When I realised what it was, I said ‘Crikey! That’s a UFO.’ I love this sort of thing so I knew what it was immediately.” She described what she saw as round, huge and shimmering, and that it dipped in and out of the water just off Milford Haven, adding, “A cloudlike smoke came out of the left side of it, then out of the right. Then it came out of both sides, going about two feet high. Then it just shot off into the sky”.
Next, sometime between the end of January and 8 February (the Western Telegraph report of 8 January only gives the date as “a few days ago”), Isabella Cooper, out for an evening walk with her father Justin, took a photograph of the Valero Pembroke oil refinery from the Milford Haven side of the Cleddau Estuary. In the photo she captured a blue object in the sky above the refinery which she believes is a UFO. Then, on 4 February, a short distance away, between Tenby and Saundersfoot, there was a mass die-off of starfish washed up on the beaches. Local nature photographer Giles Davies said: “I have never seen something like this before. It’s really sad to just see that in nature, because you’re looking at deaths in the thousands of one species.”
Finally, on 10 February, drivers
travelling between Waterston and Hazelbeach, near Milford Haven, came across at least 200 dead starlings lying in the road. Ian McCaffrey said: “When I left work last night I heard a bang and then a load of birds landed on my car,” going on to differentiate the noise he heard from that of a crow-scarer, saying: “Every now and again you will hear a bang that is coming from a crow-scarer that farmers use. However, this was more like an electrical bang – not quite as loud as lightning, but similar.” He added: “It’s like there were hundreds of birds in the sky and all of a sudden they just died and fell to the ground.” Local resident Claire Eaton said she thought that the birds had “died on impact” with the road, and found one that was only stunned, which she took home to nurse back to health. “About an hour before I was at Neyland Marina walking my dog and I saw a big flash and I didn’t think anything of it,” she said. “Maybe something spooked them and they flew into the pylons.” Pembrokeshire Herald editor Tom Sinclair later visited the site of the incident and said: “In the first wave, people told me the council collected 10 bin bags, and I was there later on so I think quite a few hundred, if not 1,000, have died.” He arrived at the site after the council had cleared most of the birds from the road, but said: “I was there at around 11.30pm, they were still falling from the sky. It was as if they were dead before they hit the ground… I got the impression they were falling from a height.” It was suggested that something at the local natural gas plant, Dragon LNG, could have been responsible, but a spokesperson said: “It’s in the vicinity, but it’s normal operations at Dragon LNG. There was nothing different at the plant.” An RSPCA spokesperson suggested the usual explanation for such events, that a flock of starlings had been scared by a bird of prey and crashed into the road in panic – but that doesn’t account for the continuing fall of birds. The council concluded: “There is no clear indication as to the cause of these deaths. We have reported the incident to the Animal and Plant Health Agency.”
In 1977, the Milford Haven and the surrounding area was the focus of what has become known the “Welsh Triangle” or “Broad Haven Triangle” due to a wave of UFO sightings there. These included 20 school children and an adult having an extended sighting of a cigarshaped object hovering over their playground and a number of sightings of tall silver-suited humanoids. Interestingly, in the light of the first of the recent incidents, there were numerous sightings of UFOs diving into or emerging from the sea, giving rise to speculation that there might be an undersea UFO base off the Pembrokeshire coast. walesonline.co.uk 4 Jan, 11+13 Feb; pembrokeshire-herald.com, westerntelegraph.co.uk, 8 Feb; BBC News, 12 Feb 2022.