The Uninvited: The Ripperston Farm Invasion

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
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**Forrest Burgess** (0:16)
In the winter of 1977, on the Pembrokeshire Coast in southwest Wales, a dairy farmer's wife was standing at her kitchen sink when she noticed a light over the cliffs.
It hung above the field nearest the sea. A bright ball with a tail of flame, and it was moving, swaying slowly back and forth like a pendulum. A physical trait we've heard of UAP exhibiting before at Astonishing Legends. To Pauline Coombs, whatever this was, looked like it was watching her.
That was the start. Over the next year, the Coombs family farm, Ripperston, alone on the cliffs above St Brides Bay, became the center of one of the longest-running UFO cases in British history. And the location mattered. Within 20 miles, there was an RAF base, a missile range, army tank ranges, and, though nobody knew it at the time, a secret US. Navy station built to track Soviet submarines. What the Coombs went through wasn't one sighting. It was months of them. Their TVs and cars burned out their wiring again and again. Everything but the copper. An electrician found power still draining from the house with the main shutoff. One night, an orange light followed their car down a lane until the engine quit, and they ran the last half mile home.
Then the figures started. Tall, silver, no face, standing at the window with a hand on the glass and gone before the police arrived. The family dog never recovered from it. He became so unhinged, they eventually had to put him down. And they weren't the only ones. A few miles up the coast, on the 4th of February, 14 children at Broad Haven Primary School saw a silver domed craft in the field behind the playground. The headmaster separated them and had each one draw it on their own, and the drawings lined up.
We had an eyewitness to that, David Davis, on episode 115 of Astonishing Legends, back in 2018
After that, sightings were everywhere. The press showed up and started calling the area the Welsh Triangle. A hotel owner, Rosa Granville, reported a saucer and two silver figures near her place. Neighbors saw things in their gardens. The sightings ran into the dozens. The strangest part wasn't in the sky.
Twice, two identical men in dark suits showed up in a big silver car that made no sound on the gravel driveways as they drove up. Their skin looked like wax. They knew the family members by name. They'd appear and disappear, and then get in the car to drive away without passing others who were traveling on the same roads.
And the farm itself seemed to be under some kind of test. A hundred cattle, locked and chained in their paddocks, banished and turned up at a neighbor's farm miles away at only minutes, more than once in the same afternoon, with no tracks in the wet mud.
One night in November, Pauline Coombs said she found herself not in bed, but sitting in a bright domed room with two identical women in front of her. Then she was home again, oddly calm, but with a small puncture mark on her arm. When the family went to the authorities, the Ministry of Defense wrote back that there was no record of anything unusual in the area. That wasn't the whole story. A declassified file definitively shows the MOD had quietly had the RAF police investigate Broad Haven while telling Parliament and the public there was nothing to it. Were there hoaxers? Yes. At least one local later admitted to walking around in a homemade silver suit. But by his own account, that was after the sightings had already made the papers. The pranks came later and they don't explain what people saw in the beginning of this chain of events. The Coombs never took it back. They offered to take lie detector tests. Their account, all dramatized, was written up in Clive Harold's 1979 book, The Uninvited, The True Story of Ripperston Farm. And the crux of their story has outlasted just about every attempt to explain it away. What they came to believe was simple. This was real. And ignoring it, which they did attempt to do a few times, would be a mistake. It's been almost 50 years since these events, and there's still no reasonable explanation as to what happened over St Brides Bay in southwest Wales.

**Scott Philbrook** (5:24)
Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess.

**Forrest Burgess** (5:29)
You will find no explanations for the events reconstructed here, for there are none. Clive Harrold, author of The Uninvited.