Posted on August 5th, 2010
The latest batch of “X-files” released by the UK’s Ministry of Defence appears to solve one of Britain’s most notorious UFO legends. On January 23, 1974, just before 10pm, villagers ran from their homes in the Llandrillo area of North Wales after hearing a loud explosion and seeing mysterious lights in the sky.
Police sent a search team of ten officers to scour the Welsh mountains, later joined by an RAF mountain rescue team from Anglesey. They found no trace of an air crash.
It became known as the Berwyn Mountain Incident with similarities to the United States’ famous Roswell Incident. Conspiracy theorists claimed that a flying saucer had crashed in the hills and that alien remains had been discovered in the wreckage.
They claimed the area was cordoned off after the “crash” and local villages visited by mysterious investigators, who they described as the “Men in Black”. But evidence collected by the military now shows that lights seen in the sky at the time of the incident were the fragments of a disintegrating Soviet rocket as it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
During the investigation, it was discovered that, by chance, there had been an earthquake around the time of the reported UFO crash. Experts ruled out an impact as the tremor’s cause, saying there would have been a crater clearly visible. Instead they put it down to a landslide which they suggested coincided with a shower of meteors and lights from poachers’ torches.
Skymania has previously included Berwyn Mountain among Britain’s top five UFO mysteries. Now the MoD has revealed papers about the events in a document released by the National Archives and labelled DEFE 24/2045.
It quotes from the logbook of a merchant ship, the SS Tokyo Bay, which had been sailing of the West African coast at the time. The log, passed on to the UK Met Office, reported that Mr R A Gill, the ship’s Second Officer, observed five objects, “spectacularly incandescent”, traversing the sky in very close formation and in a northerly direction.
The report gives the time of the sighting as 2150 GMT – around the same time as the lights witnessed from Wales. The Met Office gives the date, however, as January 24 though this would have been the date when the night being logged January (23/24) ended.
The MoD concluded that the Welsh UFOs were “probably the decay of the Soviet comunications relay satellite Molniya 2-8′s rocket body which decayed at about this time”.
The UK government has been declassifying and releasing all 160 documents relating to “flying saucers” over the country since 2008. It came after sustained pressure from several investigators who were using the Freedom of Information Act to seek details of individual incidents.
• Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania’s advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. Check out our monthly sky guide too!
