The Berwyn Mountains UFO Incident

The Berwyn Mountains UFO incident is next to Rendlesham Forest the premier UFO incident to have taken place in the United Kingdom to date. The close encounter purportedly took place on Cader (Cadair) Berwyn the highest peak in the Berwyn Mountain Range, Merionethshire, North Wales, on January 23, 1974.

At approximately 8:30 p.m. the residents of Llandrillo and Llanderfel, two nearby villages, were shaken by what seemed to be a large explosion. Unsure of the cause but believing a plane may have crashed in the mountains people ran to their windows or into the streets in an attempt to discover what was happening. Many apparently saw green lights streaking across the sky and lights of differing colors on Cader Berwyn itself.

Fearing the worst villagers flooded emergency services with telephone calls and one nurse headed by car into the mountains to offer help. As rumour has it after turning a corner on the B4391 she braked to a stop astonished by the scene which appeared in front of her. A large sphere pulsating with coloured lights and surrounded by smaller moving “fairy like” white lights lay perched precariously on the mountainside some two miles distant. Frightened by what she saw she turned back and was soon stopped by armed soldiers and police who ordered her to go home telling her the road was closed to un-authorized civilians. Some stories go so far as to claim she saw alien bodies and was ordered to remain silent by the Ministry of Defence.

Many of the locals also allege that mysterious helicopters were observed in the area, others that they were paid visits by strangers which from their description could easily be the infamous “Men in Black” often associated with UFO cases. A soldier wishing to remain anonymous has also allegedly come forward stating that he along with others took boxes containing alien bodies to the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, and that he was told by other military personnel that a large craft had crashed and been salvaged by a specialized unit.

Did an alien spacecraft really crash on Cader Berwyn? Believers say yes, while naysayers along with the authorities say no, maintaining the incident was nothing more than a series of events, some coincidental, that have become blurred into one by the passage of time.

In depth investigation over the years has revealed the following:

A large number of bolide meteors were observed in the sky over England and Wales on the evening of January 23, 1974. [1]

Seismologists stated that an earthquake registering between 3 and 4 on the Richter scale shook North Wales on the evening of January 23, 1974. [2]

Huw Lloyd, a local teenager at the time of the “Incident,” evidently accompanied police who had commandeered the family Land Rover and remembers coming across a known poacher’s car on a deserted mountain track little else of interest catching his attention (apparently neither he nor the police saw anything even remotely resembling a glowing sphere).

The name of the nurse that drove into the mountains to offer help was Pat Evans and she did apparently see a round multicoloured flashing object with smaller lights moving about near it, but unable to reach the area she returned home and stresses to this day that she saw no one on the mountain, no soldiers, no police and no aliens (actually it has been suggested that the so called sphere may have been car lights, the smaller lights the flashlights of either the police or the poachers).

The police apparently contacted the RAF Valley Mountain Rescue Team, a unit of which along with the local constabulary combed the mountain the following day and found nothing unusual.

Huw Lloyd was also on the mountain the following day this time acting as guide to scientist Dr. Ron Madison who was searching for meteor fragments or a possible impact crater. They found nothing and saw no one other than the police and VMRT.

Within a short time a team of British Geological Survey investigators (“Men in Black?”) descended on the area, some of whom went door to door, questioning the locals about what they had seen, heard and felt (the BGS also interviewing one of the poachers and Pat Evans the nurse).

On February 12, 1982, an RAF Harrier crashed on Cader Berwyn and the entire area including the surrounding villages was awash in military personnel, trucks, helicopters and Harriers for several days. A similar crash had also taken place ten years earlier (two years before the alleged UFO Incident) precipitating a similar military response.

[1] Bolides (fireballs) are very bright meteors at times blue and green in color, have long lived trajectories, sometimes explode both noisily and violently and are often responsible for UFO sightings or mistaken for airplanes in distress.

[2] The region in question is centered over a geological fracture in the Earth’s crust known as the Bala Fault, an area where earthquakes are not uncommon.

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