DYFED ENIGMA

1. Public Record

West Wales, 1977. The flap that the papers called the Welsh Triangle and the investigators called the Dyfed Enigma sat on a short stretch of Pembrokeshire coast: Broad Haven, Little Haven, Ripperston Farm, and the Stack Rocks in St Bride’s Bay.

On 4 February fifteen children at Broad Haven Primary left the canteen at lunch, watched a silver cigar or oval land in the hedge by the playing field, and drew it independently when they came back in. Headmaster David Davies had them sketch before they could confer. That is the cleanest morning in the file.

Through the year Billy and Pauline Coombs and their children at Ripperston Farm reported lights over the fields, a rugby-ball object pacing their car, a tall silver figure at a bedroom window that left a scorched patch of wall paint would not cover, burned-out cars and television sets, and - the detail that turned the bay into folklore - a craft that went into Stack Rocks as if a door had opened in the cliff. A neighbour phoned while it was still happening. Two households watched the same rock from different angles.

We saw the object go straight into the rock, there seemed to be doors that opened and closed, and it went straight inside.

2. Date of Incident

Core year 1977. Broad Haven school: 4 February, lunch hour. Coombs events from mid-January through autumn, with a Stack Rocks sequence in October. Randall Jones Pugh, the local BUFORA investigator, had already told a paper in 1976 that more was coming. That prediction is now part of the contamination argument and also part of why he was standing in the right lane.

3. Location

St Bride’s Bay, Pembrokeshire. Broad Haven school at 51°47 N 005°06 W. Ripperston Farm a few miles west. Stack Rocks in the bay, visible from both the Coombs land and neighbouring windows. Military sites sit inside a twenty-mile radius. That fact has done a lot of work in later theories and almost none in the school drawings.

4. Official Narrative

Dyfed Police took statements, including a night visit to Ripperston. No Ministry of Defence inquiry with a published finding. The official posture was local nuisance, over-excited children, and a farm family who had already seen too much. Hugh Turnbull of the Western Telegraph, who had to put the stories in the paper, later said his private guess was “something military.” That is an editorial hunch, not a document.

5. Witness Layer

The school drawings are why Broad Haven will not compress into a single hoaxer. Fifteen children, one lunch hour, one headmaster who made them draw before they talked. The Coombs material is louder, longer, and easier to attack. Pauline described a featureless head at the window. Clinton Coombs described a figure climbing steps that were not there on the rock, then vanishing into it.

Pugh, a retired vet, became the regional collector and later co-author of The Dyfed Enigma. Once a flap has a collector, later reports arrive pre-shaped. That is not an argument against the February drawings.

Yes, we are watching it now. My mum, my dad, and all our children, we’re all watching this.

He was going up and down these steps all the time… and then he went down and he just disappeared into the rock.

6. Recovery Logistics

No craft. Claimed scorch on the Coombs window wall. Failed repaint. Talk of a radiation reading that does not sit in a public lab book. Burned vehicles are in the family account. Stack Rocks was never cored.

7. Assessment

Two grades of event glued under one tourist name. Grade one: a school-hours mass sighting with contemporaneous drawings. Grade two: a months-long farm siege with entities, electrical deaths, and an island that opens. Grade one survives without grade two. Grade two does not survive without the Coombs family.

Military testing in the corridor is a real background condition. It is not a demonstrated identification of the lunch-hour object.

8. Materials & Remains

School sketches. Police attendance notes. The Uninvited narrative by Clive Harold, which is useful and also already a book. No Ministry file that names a programme.

9. Key Personnel

Broad Haven Primary pupils and David Davies - 4 February drawings.

Billy and Pauline Coombs, children including Clinton - Ripperston and Stack Rocks.

Randall Jones Pugh - BUFORA, local vet, first collector.

Hugh Turnbull - Western Telegraph. The man who had to decide what could be printed.

10. Aftermath

Broad Haven still sells the story. Pugh died in 2003 with almost no notice from the national UFO circuit that had used his flap. The rocks are still rocks. The school still has a lunch hour.

11. Current Archive Status

Status: 1977 Pembrokeshire window. School mass sighting plus a longer farm-and-rock narrative.

Confidence: High that the Broad Haven children watched something land by the field at lunch on 4 February. Moderate that the Coombs family underwent a genuine and sustained series of disturbances. Low that Stack Rocks contains a door. Low that a released military explanation will arrive.

Filing note

Fifteen children at Broad Haven drawing the same craft that landed at lunch, then the Coombs family at Ripperston with a silver figure at the window and an object that went into Stack Rocks as if a door had opened. Keep the drawings on a separate shelf from the bedroom. Different nights, different instruments.

Pugh had spoken of a flap the year before. It is either good fieldwork or a man priming a pump. The drawings still have to be explained either way. A teacher’s prediction does not invent fifteen pencils. It only makes the lunch hour colder.