A recent Jot about Alec Maclellan’s The Lost World of Agharti focussed on the links that one reader made between this work and the series of Seth books. But another reader, a certain J.S.A Lewis of Romsey, Hants, whose letter dated April 1986 can be found in the Haining archive, also tried to persuade Maclellan to consult a particular book. This was Ghosts of Wales by Peter Underwood, which he said confirmed Maclellan’s theory that UFOs came from his lost underground world rather than outer space.
Underwood’s story recounts ‘frightening and inexplicable ‘sightings in May and June 1977 and March 1978 of UFOs and alien figures at and near Ripperston Farm, west Pembrokeshire, the home of the Coombs family. Apparently, Mrs Coombs was driving home with three of her children when a bright light in the sky approached them with terrific speed and then, having shot over the car stopped, turned back and then followed alongside the vehicle. Mrs Coombs described the object to a reporter from Woman’s World:
‘ It was the same size and shape as a rugger ball but the colour was yellowish on top and silvery underneath, and beaming a sort of torch-like beam of light underneath it.’
The object kept pace with the car until it reached the lane up to the farm, when it rose and appeared to hover over the passengers. It was then that the car began to misbehave:
First the headlamps began to flicker and then they went out completely. The engine stopped, leaving the terrified occupants sitting in an immobile vehicle with the alien object hovering over them. The family managed to escape to their home where they found that the eldest boy who had been left there had also seen the strange object, which had sped towards the coast.
Three weeks later Mr and Mrs Coombs saw the figure. They were indoors early in the morning when they saw looking through their window a figure ‘at least eight feet tall…wearing a silver-coloured, one- piece outfit. Where the face should have been was a shining black void…’. Light seemed to radiate from this creature, which placed a hand on the window glass, rattling it with considerable force. The figure then moved away from the window towards the yard. Later they discovered that the only evidence that something extraordinary had happened was that the television had acquired a massive power overload, which had burnt out all its wiring. A rose bush outside had also been singed.
Over the next few weeks there were several more sightings of silver discs in the sky, two of which dived beneath the water of St Bride’s Bay. Then on June 6th 1977, the horror escalated. While the eldest Coombs boy was at home alone he was visited by two unusually tall ‘ people ‘ with bulging foreheads and large penetrating blue eyes who had arrived in a ‘ huge silver car ‘. Terrified, he had locked the door, so the aliens had left and called at a nearby cottage, where they had asked for Mrs Coombs. The neighbour refused to let them in and the car moved off, never to be seen again.
The Coombs feel they know where the alien creatures came from. The Stack Rocks stand proud from St Bride’s Bay, about half a mile out. According to them, the rocks would be an ideal vantage point from which to study scientific developments and military installations at the U.S. Underwater Radar Research Station up the coast, or monitor the Brawdy Air Base , 8 miles NE of the rocks. And they have evidence to support their theory. In March 1978 Mrs Coombs was driving home with her children when they saw another silver disc speeding towards the Stack Rocks. Instead of crashing the disc disappeared into the rock through two sliding doors! When the family found a better viewing point they saw the doors again and also two silver-coloured figures standing on a ridge.
On arriving home, there was a telephone call from a neighbour who owned a hotel on the other side of the bay. She had seen a ‘ flying saucer’ land behind her hotel and had watched ‘ strange creatures ‘ get out, get back in again and then fly off to Stack Rocks, where through binoculars she had witnessed exactly what Mrs Coombs and her family had seen.
Questions were asked in the community and local MPs were urged to investigate similar sightings in what Ufologists have called ‘The Welsh Triangle ‘. Then a few years later, some practical jokers confessed to having dressed up in spacemen costumes obtained from a nearby oil refinery to visit the Coombs and their neighbours. This, of course would explain why ‘ aliens ‘asked in English where Mrs Coombs was. However, it doesn’t get any closer to explaining the power surges, the singed rose bush, the speeding and hovering silver discs, the aliens entering the flying saucer,the sliding doors in the Stack Rocks and the silver figures standing next to them. [R.M.Healey]