ID 107870643 | Dyfed Wales © Nicola Pulham | Dreamstime.com
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This book was top of my list when I decided to review older UFO/Paranormal studies. It’s taken me a while to get back to it because, truthfully, it’s got some of the strangest stories I’ve ever read. It creeps me out just like Mothman Prophecies did when I was in Middle School, so I had to get my brain ready for it.
It was originally published in 1979 by Faber & Faber. A reprint was prepared and released in 2016 by Saucerian Press and it appears to be still available. I highly recommend it.
The book is a report of a UFO flap which occurred in a region of South Wales from approximately 1975 through 1977 Dyfed is pronounced Dove-id and the name is holdover from the early medieval period when the area was ruled by a Welsh ruler who held power very briefly.
Dyfed became the name of a county but was absorbed into the larger administrative unit of Co Pembrokeshire in 1996, so the region as Holiday and Pugh recount it no longer exists as such, although apparently the name Dyfed persists locally through local families who can trace ancestral claim to it.
Accounts of strange humanoid encounters, electromagnetic effects, unknown flying objects and lights and other very odd occurrences were collected and meticulously investigated by RJ Pugh and FW Holiday, both of whom were well known and respected UFO investigators during that period.
FW Holiday was a well known wildlife and nature writer who had studied and written speculatively about the Loch Ness monster. He also had a background in electronics and recording.
RJ Pugh also had a scientific background which included a career as a vet, working both privately and for government concerns. Pugh’s experience would prove to be especially useful in the Dyfed cases because many of them included animal effects, both physical and psychological.
Holiday and Pugh had both a material and social interest in UFO/paranormal accounts and, for this report, spent a great deal of time on field work, talking directly to witnesses (sometimes several times), looking into the history of the region, surveying report sites, taking measurements, photos and even samples in a few cases.
They also provide some very handy maps so that individuals unfamiliar with the landmarks, road systems and larger geography of the Dyfed region can get a sense of where, what, when, and often how, the events they are describing took place.
I’ll refer to some of these maps below and you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t pronounce some of the Welsh place names very well in the audio recording. Welsh is not one of my languages.
As Pugh and Holiday tell the story, there were so many accounts that they decided to describe in detail those which could stand as representing the most complete, and in some cases, most bizarre testimonies. The sum total is a report that relies almost entirely on first hand witnessing, many of which are corroborated by others or additional evidence.
And I will tell you, some of these stories rank right up there with anything reported at the so-called SkinWalker Ranch and John Keel’s reports coming out of West Virginia and Ohio during the reign of Mothman. It is the steady hand of reporting, the stiff upper lip style of Pugh and Holiday that literally kept me from throwing the book across the room due to the unnerving subject matter.
The best known and most widely reported incident occurred on a Friday, February 4, 1977 at a primary school in Broad Haven, one of the towns in this region of West Wales. A number of school children and, it turned out, some adults, all witnessed a very strange craft first hovering, then attempting to land, before it took off again from a muddy field just about 200 yards behind the school.
This happened in broad daylight at around 10:30a, during a pouring rain storm, so the appearance of the object, which was described as a dark silvery saucer or oblong shaped object, was very striking.
Some witnesses reported a humming sound that accompanied the sighting, at least one young child insisted that he saw a small humanoid figure.
In all, the sighting seemed to last no more than 4-10 seconds, depending on who one asked, although many agreed that it seemed to be trying to find a place to land in the muddy field and when it took off, it appeared to struggle a bit due to a sucking action of the mud (this is an interesting and homey detail).
Later in the day, two women who worked in the school canteen, went outside and saw what they described as a strange object or “machine” in the identical spot. They saw a figure on the ground that climbed up into the object which then slowly made its way up a slope at the end of the field and disappeared into the trees.
They concluded that the children had been incorrect about what they had seen (it had already spread around school), that they had mistaken a local counsel truck used for carting sewage for something remarkable. They insisted on that explanation until the following day.
In the meantime, the UFO investigator, who at that time was associated with BUFORA–sort of a UK version of MUFON–RJ Pugh had been called at 4:30p, the day of the sightings and he showed up the next day to interview people and investigate the field where the sightings had occurred.
What he and the good curious people of Broad Haven discovered was that the ground in that field was so muddy and cloying that no regular vehicle could have driven into it and gotten out again without becoming hopelessly mired.
They walked onto the field and had trouble walking out, so it could not have been a counsel truck—and the conditions of the field seemed to accord with what some witnesses described–a saucer almost getting stuck.
The two canteen women were completely taken aback by this discovery with one declaring that, despite this news, she refused to believe she’d seen a UFO.
The sighting made the local papers and eventually was picked up by some national news outlets in the UK. But as Holiday and Pugh discovered, it was only the “tip of the iceberg.”
The Dyfed Enigma is so full of fascinating, unnerving and just plain weird stories that there is no way to do all of them justice. So, I’ll relate one of the most interesting cases, reading bits and pieces of the testimony the authors provide.
But first, a general summary of effects is in order. Overall, taken as a whole, the reports are both strange and unique. They include multiple sightings of and experiences with humanoid figures, but these are not the common figures that are reported now.
Rather, the majority of the figures are described as being roughly humanoid in form, but often much taller and either wearing some kind of helmet or mask, or not having facial features at all.
Many times the figures appear to be engaged in some kind of activity, seemingly oblivious to the witnesses, and in one striking case, seemingly violating the laws of gravity. There are many instances of multiple witnesses to these figures, and a number of daylight sightings.
In most cases the figures are quite tall. This is significant because when news of the sightings got out, a rumor began to spread that a young man of means who lived in the area had admitted to donning a mock spacesuit so he could go out and scare the locals.
When this rumor was investigated, it was found that his ruse might explain a few of the sightings, but certainly not those in which the figures were determined to be measurably 9 feet tall or even taller in one instance, nor the maddening tendency of those that literally disappeared in front of witnesses or appeared to be walking in thin air.
However, there are no little grays, no cryptids, and no abductions or obvious “contacts” reported in connection to these figures. They completely unnerve the witnesses, but do not harm them.
The only tragedy that might have been connected to these figures involved a pair of truckers who witnessed two massive beings standing by the side of a highway that led into a major town in the region. One trucker was so rattled by his experience that he refused to talk about it again after their initial report.
Mere weeks after that incident, at the same location where the two figures had been seen, a petrol tanker jackknifed violently, killing the driver. As the location was quite deserted and dark, a BMW, carrying a crew of celebrating rugby players failed to see the wreck in time, crashed into it killing 4 of them.
Why the driver had jackknifed, since it was an area with no curves–no reason for the kind of stop that would cause this kind of accident–has never been determined.
The authors can only speculate, but as the area had become known as a place where strange things had been seen–the possibility suggests itself that the petrol truck driver may have witnessed something strange which caused him to brake suddenly, thus wrecking his vehicle.
Two other items of note occurred frequently with the Dyfed cases. Holiday and Pugh found a distinctive correlations between archaeological features (mounds, stone circles, even churches built on such sites), ley-lines that often link these, and UFO/humanoid or other paranormal reports.
The reported correlation was well over 80% of the experiences occurred alongside an established ley-line, or, in the case of flying objects/lights, terminated after so traveling, near one of the above mentioned sites.
The second item of note concerns the effects of these experiences on animals, especially dogs. In fact, in all of my reading, I have never encountered as many reports of animal disturbance as Pugh and Holiday describe in this book.
It could be that Pugh was particularly sensitive to this aspect of the accounts because of his veterinarian background. Certainly, he was able to assess the animal reactions more effectively than many other investigators.
Cows, horses, goats, cats and dogs were all reported as being affected by being in the proximity, or in many cases as direct witnesses of, either the humanoids, unknown craft, lights or all of the above.
Of all these, dogs appeared to be the most affected, with at least three instances where the animals suffered severe and permanent psychological and physical impairments leading to startling behavioral changes in terms of eating, sleeping and their relationships with human caretakers. In these three cases, the animals began to refuse to go outside even for calls of nature unless a human was present and ceased to play or be sociable in any way.
In the most severe case, Blackie, the work dog at the Ripperston Farm, a case I will relay in detail below, evinced so much psychological damage and clear suffering from anxiety, that he was unable to be useful to the family in his previous position and they sadly euthanized him.
Cows, horses and goats displayed clear signs of anxiety and even depression when exposed to the phenomenon, although most recovered once the flap died down.
Cows in particular seemed to be a special target of the phenomenon with several instances, including at the Ripperston Farm, of “cow displacement” such as has been reported at places like Skinwalker Ranch.
Several of these “displacements” occurred under the space of a few minutes, were often witnessed by multiple people, and even happened in broad daylight.
Yet, there are no cattle or animal mutilations or particularly unusual deaths which occurred among these cattle/horses during this time period–an interesting detail since this is the same period when cattle mutilations were ramping up into their first major wave through Montana in the United States [see Mystery Stalks the Prairie]
One of the most interesting cases that Holiday and Pugh investigated concerned the Ripperston Farm, a dairy concern that became a foci location for many aspects of the Dyfed phenomena.
Ripperston is actually a small village and district within Dyfed, so the investigators don’t identify which farm was most affected. The given name of the involved family was Billie and Pauline Coombes who, with their 5 children, took over the work of the dairy for the owner in 1974.
Holiday and Pugh discovered that the farm already had a reputation when the Coombes moved in–i.e. that odd things seemed to happen there from time to time and as a result, no resident family stayed for very long.
Coombes, who really needed the job, given his growing family, proved to be made of more stubborn stuff and by the time the investigators began their work, he and his family had become somewhat accustomed to at least some of the strange things that happened around and to them.
According to Coombes, there had always been small odd occurrences, items/tools would go missing and show up again in very strange places, the sounds of footsteps and occasional disembodied voices both in and out of the house and in outbuildings.
Once Pauline and a friend saw a strange man hanging around one of the gateways when she returned home late with a friend. An investigation showed no evidence that anyone had been where she and her friend had seen the figure. But there didn’t seem to be anything overly sinister about these events and no one was harmed.
That would begin to change in March 1977 when one of their neighbors, a Mrs. Hewison, on a nearby farm, Lower Broadmoor, (another farm with a history of strange occurrences) witnessed a large strange object sitting/hovering in an adjacent field. She said it most resembled a kind of Jelly fruit candy.
Her husband and the help were milking cows in a barn close by and the milking machines made quite a racket, so she was unsure if the object itself was producing any sound.
It was a large “craft”--whatever it was–almost 3 stories tall and she watched it for 2-3 minutes (this was at 730a) before realizing she should probably get other witnesses. So, she ran to wake her sons, and you guessed it–by the time everyone was looking, it was gone.
A horse that was present in an adjacent field during the Lower Broadmoor sighting was found at the far end of the track, trembling and uncharacteristically very anxious. The animal did recover, but balked whenever the owners tried to get it back into that specific field.
That sighting seemed to open up the floodgates of odd – and soon the Coombes were experiencing many things.
The Coombes experienced luminous lights that seemed to chase them, objects that flew at high speed into the ocean and reappeared, odd electromagnetic effects that caused machinery, and their car, to lose power or regain it again.
And then, there were the cattle displacements:
[Listen to full account at 33:07]
One of the most dramatic and traumatic events was that of the Silver Giant–and it also bears reading the full account.
[Listen to full account at 40:05]
Blackie, the dog who features in this story, never recovered from his fright that night and was the aforementioned canine who had to be euthanized due to the psychological suffering he incurred as a result of his encounter with the Silver Giant.
Each of the Coombes children also had their own experiences, some along with their parents, and a couple of them had individual encounters/sightings with extremely bizarre humanoid figures that they encountered while walking or at play.
Holiday and Pugh also discovered that Pauline Coombes had a history of strange visitations: earlier in her life she had had a vision of a figure that she interpreted as being the Virgin Mary. In fact, Billie and a local vicar had seen elements of this manifestation as well–this apparition appeared a number of times.
So, here we have a case of a woman who has had visions before seemingly being a possible nexus for further manifestations of a different kind–yet her husband and children can also see the strange humanoids, the neighbors are seeing their own things, and something definitely moved the cattle and scared Blackie so much he never recovered.
In addition to investigating the relationship between these events of high strangeness with ley-lines and megalithic/archaeological sites, Pugh and Holiday find numerous parallels between Celtic/Welsh folklore and legends and the Dyfed reports–however, there is no easy explanation for why this specific flap takes place where/when/how it did.
Of course, they reference Vallee and Keel numerous times throughout their speculations, as well as summoning traditions of the fae–since anyone with knowledge of those stories realizes that virtually everything being reported in Dyfed resembles things that have happened before, except now they might appear as giants sporting spacesuits and spaceships resembling Rowntree jellies.
And that’s where Holiday and Pugh leave it–weird stuff, lots of witnesses, lots of data, no explanation that really covers it, unless you actually believe all those old stories.
*Additional information about the Ripperston Farm case can be found in The Uninvited: The Ripperston Farm Story by Clive Harold (2019). Apparently the information is good, but the editing is horrific. I have not read the book.
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