GUARDIAN– UFO enthusiasts called it the “Welsh Roswell” and insisted that one evening in 1974 an alien craft crashed in north Wales and the government secretly removed dead extraterrestrial bodies, the latest files from the National Archives reveal today.
The documents describe how residents of Llandrillo in Merionethshire, near the Berwyn mountains, first reported strange lights streaking across the sky. Then as the night wore on the villagers heard a colossal explosion and felt a tremor ripple through their homes.
Later ufologists claimed roads were sealed off and people kept away from the site after the incident on 23 January 1974. Alien bodies were then taken to Porton Down biological warfare centre for analysis, it was claimed, prompting the comparisons with Roswell, the 1947 incident in which, conspiracy theorists claimed, the US military recovered an alien spacecraft in New Mexico – the story that gave birth to 60 years of ufology, movies and all.
The latest batch of UFO files show how experts at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) initially struggled to explain the Llandrillo incident. A search and rescue team from RAF Valley, on Anglesey, was scrambled in response to the reports of an explosion and a large fire on the mountainside. Some witnesses described seeing a “bright red light, like a coal-fire red. Large perfect circle. Like a big bonfire. Could see lights above and to the right and white lights moving to bottom.”
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© Guardian, 2010
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