Meteor? Military exercise? Or was

It a huge Roswell-style cover-up?

FOR nearly four decades it has remained a night of mystery: a night of brilliant lights and a huge bang in the skies over Wales, with the ground shaking below.

Official accounts explained the incident over the Berwyn Mountains, on January 23, 1974, as a meteor burning up on entering Earth’s atmosphere with a simultaneous 3.5 magnitude earthquake.

But for many shaken residents it was unquestionably alien spacecraft, crashing in the moorland near Llandrillo.

Dubbed the Welsh Roswell, they claim it was covered up by the military who captured aliens – with comparisons to events in Roswell, New Mexico, USA, in 1947, where it is claimed a similar crash was concealed.

Ministry of Defence investigators said there was no UFO. A search and rescue team scrambled from RAF Valley on Anglesey found no wreckage on the mountainside.

Yet as we approach its 38th anniversary, the mystery has surfaced again with the publication of a book by a UFO investigator who has spent 25 years researching it.

Alien Invasion Wales: the Berwyn Mountains UFO Cover Up, by Russ Kellett, claims that in a mini-war, some of the craft were sunk by Navy ships, while others were shot down by jumpjets over the mountains.

Mr Kellett, 58, from Filey, North Yorkshire, tells how villagers had been watching Till Death Us Do Part on TV when 100 soldiers arrived on trucks and men in chemical suits got off a helicopter which landed in the school grounds.

Five men coming home from a pub told the author they saw a flying saucer at the side of the road and five captive aliens in silver-grey flight suits being marched off by British soldiers.

Nurse Pat Evans saw “a huge orange red pulsating ball-like object just sitting on the mountain.”

A man parked by a lake says he heard the scream of fighter jets before a third UFO came down and landed in the water.

He said: “The next thing I knew something came out of the lake, some sort of space craft, and shot up into the night sky.”

Mr Kellett believes there was a battle at sea, citing a message sent to coastguards in 1974, preserved in a lifeboat station scrapbook in Anglesey.

This message warns emergency services to ignore a series of blinding flashes in the sky on the night of January 23 because a military training exercise would be taking place.

Mr Kellett said: “The military had been watching certain areas around Liverpool and North Wales, including the Berwyn Mountains, since 1973, and realised something had to be done.”