The Berwyn Mountain UFO Incident | Ep. 122

In January of 1974, a small town in northern Wales claimed to experience a massive UFO crash land and hover in the Berwyn Mountains.

The UFO encounter involved a major earthquake, military involvement, and a potential major cover-up. Listen now!

The Berwyn Mountain UFO Incident

What would you do if you felt Earth tremors so strong that it shook your house?

What would you do if you came out of your house and saw strange lights hovering in the sky?

What would you do if multiple people saw this, but skeptics and TV shows tried to make you look like a fool?

What’s up, Bizarros? This week we dive into the Berwyn Mountain UFO Incident.

At the center of this story is a woman named Margaret Fry.  Her belief in UFOs began at a young age. This incident changed her so much that she had dedicated her life to proving the existence of UFOs.

Let’s learn more about Margaret Fry.

Pulled from TrulyAdventure.us

Margaret Fry’s UFO Experience

Margaret Fry was one of the most prestigious UFOlogists in the UK for decades. 

It all goes back to her very first encounter with a UFO in 1955, when she was in her late 20s.

She was in Bexleyheath, which is a suburb of London. She was driving along a road, and out of nowhere, her car started sputtering.

Then it died.

Almost immediately, what looked like a flying saucer flew down on the intersection in front of her, actually blocking her path.

It was the shape of a cloche hat, but the color was pewter grey, and it was roughly 35 feet across.

She said it had a dome top, a platform around the base, and what appeared to be ball-bearings for wheels.

She said the craft sat still for about 3 to 5 minutes or so, then it began violently trembling.

It tilted forward and swayed back and forth and started rising. Once it was above her and Margaret could see underneath the craft, she noticed a single porthole opened.

But then, almost immediately, the craft shot up in the air and disappeared.

Horror movie dad was taking a break from being skeptical of ghosts and stepped in here, as Margaret’s father insisted that it wasn’t a UFO. He actually scoffed at the idea.

He was involved in Britain’s science program, so he thought all that sci-fi was silly-nilly.

This pissed Margaret off. To try and help her daughter, Margaret’s mother went to gather local newspapers to see if anyone else reported seeing the UFO.

Her mother came back with the Erith Observer, which had a story about a police officer that claimed to have seen the spacecraft that day, too.

From that moment on, Margaret lived her day-to-day life differently. With an understanding that while she may never fully know the scope of extraterrestrial life, it was the belief of ufologists that there was more than life on Earth.

A year later, her mother got her a book on alien spacecraft titled Flying Saucers Have Landed, and in that book, she saw a ship eerily similar to the one she had seen the year before.

Now, it wasn’t just knowing there was more out there. It became her quest to prove it.

Shortly, she became a researcher with the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA).

So, this is all background – leading us to the main story.

Where our main story begins, she was actually retired and in her 60s. As a premier British UFO researcher, she moved to the Wales village, Llangernyw.

The January 23, 1974, UFO Incident 

It was a chilly and moonless night in Llandrillo, a small village built around a broad stream at the base of the Berwyn Mountains in North Wales.

The village postmaster was watching television with his wife when it felt like his house was about to give way.

The ground all around the house began vibrating and trembling. It struck terror in the entire village.

Was there an intense Earthquake happening? There was also supposed to be a meteorite shower. Could it be bright meteors or a meteor impact?

The man ran outside and turned to check on his post office, but his eyes were drawn elsewhere.

He saw a fireball in the sky. Immediately he thought – had a plane crashed? Was it an aircraft crash?

Neighbors from all around stood and gazed towards the sky.

Police were already there with a land rover investing the brilliant lights.

A hunting party set up the mountain near where the fireball had flown by. They climbed the grassy hill. They could just barely make out the Berwyn Mountains forms in the darkness.

The officers scoured the ground for clues of anything landing or trying to comprehend what had happened. What they saw in the sky. What caused the Earth to shake?

One man cried out, “That’s it”

Something flashed in the sky, but it seemed to dissipate as quickly as it came.

Eventually, the folks decided they weren’t going to find anything, and they left baffled.

No one in Llandrillo found anything on the mountain that night. In the following days, search efforts intensified.

Royal Air Force personnel, scientists, journalists, and UFO enthusiasts combed the surrounding land and interviewed locals at length but came up with nothing.

No signs of impact. No alien crash. No signs of anything.

The string of strange events was officially recorded as a coincidence of natural phenomena: an earthquake measuring between 3 and 4 on the Richter scale, which, if you’re in California, that is nothing – that’s just a random Thursday afternoon.

But, in the UK, it’s definitely strange.

The town started getting media attention as word and gossip got around about what it could be. Some thought alien. Others just natural phenomenon.

For 48 hours, Llandrillo felt like the center of the universe.

Fast forward about 20 years.

The Investigation Of The UFO Incident- 1991

In July 1991, a friend of Margaret’s had passed an intriguing UFO lead her way.

A nurse called Pat Evans had seen something strange up on the Berwyn Mountains in 1974, on the night of an earthquake and meteor shower.

Margaret was familiar with reports of UFOs and earthquakes coinciding and actually had a theory that UFO-nauts, pilots of UFO space crafts, were able to know somehow about earthquakes ahead of time and came down because of them.

This tip sparked Margaret’s interest, and considering she was retired, she didn’t have much else going on, so she made her way to the village with two ufologist colleagues to chat with the nurse, Pat Evans in Llandderfel.

Pat opened the door and graciously invited the UFO investigators in. She was now in her 50s, but despite it being 20 years since the Berwyn UFO incident, her memory was sharp as ever, and she had no problem detailing the events to Margaret and her colleagues.

As it’s stated:

At 8:38 on 23 January 1974, she was in the kitchen, where the Rayburn range stove was gurgling on full blast. “One of these days, it’s going to explode,” Pat’s husband often said of the irascible appliance. So when she heard a loud concussion, she leaped off her feet: “Oh my God, it’s happened!”

But the Rayburn was undamaged, and the house looked intact.

“What was that?” shouted her teenage daughters, Diane and Tina, in a state of agitation. Pat couldn’t say, but she thought the explosion had emanated from the Berwyn Mountains.

She tried, unsuccessfully, to contact the village policeman but eventually got through to someone at the district headquarters in Colwyn Bay, a seaside town 40 miles north.

“Yes, we’ve had reports of an explosion of sorts, and we’re not sure what’s happened,” the officer on duty said.

“Could it be an aircraft?” Pat asked.

“It could be anything really, we don’t know.”

Pat and her daughters, who were also trained in first aid, drove to the mountain to see if they could help.

The girls became afraid. What if there were bodies, blood?

At the wheel, Pat remained stoic until she got her first clear look at the mountaintops.

Then she stopped the car in disbelief. Sitting on the shoulder of the closest peak, Cadair Berwyn, was a round, brilliantly illuminated reddish-orange ball.

They sat watching it, awestruck.

At one point, Pat opened the car’s window, but there was no sound.

The object had no perceivable windows or doors; it was just a well-defined and uniformly colored reddish-orange circle that sat on the mountainside and glowed like a huge, spherical ember.

Then, Pat noticed smaller white lights around it, vehicle lights, perhaps.

The large circle changed color several times before their eyes, from red to yellow to white, then back to red.

They watched it for what felt like ten or fifteen minutes before Pat decided to drive home.

It was clearly not a plane crash, and it appeared that other people were already at the scene. They drove home mystified, unable to get the object out of their minds.”

As you can imagine, this was a pretty significant story Margaret was just told. Immediately, she was eager to get her feet on the ground and investigate.

She asked the nurse to take them up the mountain.

It was a cloudy day, and dusk was approaching, so any type of evidence, even after 20 years, that she was looking for – she’d have to find it fast.

At the top of the hill, Pat pointed out the spot on the mountain where the UFO had been.

Margaret began jotting notes about how long the journey had taken and making a sketch map of the area, delighting in the excitement of being back on a case.

She didn’t find anything at that moment, but she was excited about the case and was determined to keep digging.

The Article About The Bright Lights Of Berwyn

Back home in Llangernyw, Margaret called her boss, Jenny Randles, the Director of Investigations at BUFORA, and told her about Pat’s story.

To Margaret’s surprise, this wasn’t the first time her boss Jenny had heard about this potential UFO incident.

Months after it happened, Jenny had received a typed letter in the post from the Aerial Phenomena Enquiry Network (APEN), a shadowy group that provided no return address.

It said tall, humanoid aliens traveling in a flying saucer had landed in North Wales on 23 January, it claimed, and APEN was preparing to share their case report.

A cassette tape accompanied the letter, which played a bizarre medley of Nazi marching tunes, excerpts from news broadcasts about UFOs, drunk-sounding Welshmen, and an American voice who claimed to be the Supreme Commander of APEN.

In the words of the article: “Whoever was behind it styled themselves as a group of top-secret neo-Nazi alien-human emissaries, and it was simply too bizarre for the UFO community to swallow. When APEN started making personal threats against Randles and other ufologists, she wrote them off as callous crackpots and dismissed their reports as nonsense. Alarmingly, Pat’s testimony gave APEN’s claim that aliens had landed that January night new significance.”

With Margaret’s blessing, Jenny ended up writing an article about Pat’s encounter for BUFORA’s magazine.

Not that every reader would know, but Pat’s word held weight.

She was a formidable community member, as both a genuine person and a nurse. So if what was written was truly what Pat said, it was just about as good as truth to the village.

Beyond that, the story had meat. Pat had seen something. And not just her but her two daughters.

And there was even a police cover-up. Pat said on the way down the mountain that night, she and her daughters were stopped by soldiers who told them to evacuate immediately.

Jenny’s article about Pat’s UFO encounter was widely shared among Ufologists and enthusiasts across the country.

It lit a fire under new theories and conspiracies as to what may have happened and what the government knew.

To keep her in the loop, Margaret sent the article to Pat, who was actually very frustrated with the article.

Also, some of the details came into question. Pat insisted that she never mentioned that officers stopped her and her daughters on the way down. That it was a complete fabrication.

This was kind of a gut check for Margaret. Internally, she could feel older age creeping up, and although she was almost positive, Pat mentioned that it had been something she misheard or made up.

Doubt started creeping up, so she reached out to her two colleagues that went with her to interview Pat.

To Margaret’s relief, one was adamant that the nurse said she had seen soldiers.

So, then a new thought crept into her mind – could the police or Ministry of Defence have reached out and told Pat to keep quiet? Could the cover-up still be ongoing?

Margaret knew ever since the 1940s, ufologists always believed that secret political powers would do anything necessary to conceal the truth.

Reports of “men in black” went back almost as far as the flying saucer story itself, and Margaret had reason to believe that these hidden powers had spent decades silencing witnesses of UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.

To keep the momentum going, Margaret was in a shop using a copy machine to duplicate an artist’s impression of the UFO Pat described.

During the process, she noticed the woman behind the counter seemed hyper-focused on it.

The woman apologized for prying and explained that she had also gone to the Berwyn Mountains that night and had seen the exact same reddish, well-defined object sitting on the mountainside.

Not only that, but she claimed that her car had been turned back by a police roadblock.

This was encouraging to Margaret, and she decided to reserve a community hall in town and post up a bunch of notices and posters on telephone poles asking people:

“What happened on that night in 1974?”

This was actually an area Margaret felt comfortable in, and she had ran multiple UFO public speaking events in the past.

When the time came, Margaret went up on stage and addressed the room of locals.

She spoke of the significance of the case and encouraged people to tell her what they saw that January night 20 years earlier.

The room suddenly got very loud and hectic as people in the audience shot up, raises their hands, and just started spilling stories and details – all at once.

People mentioned catching a glimpse of the UFO, strange red lights, and military convoys.

One man, an amateur astrologist, had written a detailed description of a reddish-orange orb in his diary at the time.

One lady that worked at a local hotel said that glasses had flown off the shelves, breaking on the floor, and the next day, strange men in black suits came to inspect the area for the entire week.

She said they spent the majority of their time up on the mountain top.

Feeling more than a little overwhelmed and struggling a little bit with the strong Welsh accents, Margaret asked people to write their contact details so she could conduct proper interviews.

In the next few weeks, almost every day the mail carrier would deliver a handwritten letter from someone who’d been at the meeting or heard about “the UFO lady.”

Whether fear of judgment, going public, or pressure from the government, unfortunately, many people kept their written accounts anonymous.

With the majority being anonymous and with Pat retracting her story and claiming there was no police or military operation that night, Margaret started fearing a bit for her credibility.

She was on a mission trying to get people to believe an otherwise pretty unbelievable event occurred, so any and every roadblock like vague witnesses or people claiming something she reported was false took a hit.

How would you feel in this instance? Would you care? It’s kind of her ultimate goal to get others to believe – but would you be frustrated?

Anyway, what Margaret felt she needed now was another reliable, independent witness to what Pat had seen.

From there, she could build her case to convince both the cynics and believers.

She approached police and military sources about the Berwyn incident and acquired a copy of the police report from the night, but it revealed little significance, which didn’t shock Margaret.

The Debunkers

So, while all of this is happening and while Margaret is trying her damndest to get evidence, there were a number of cynics — or debunkers as Margaret and the media started calling them— had been attracted to the case and wanted to dispel all claims of paranormal activity.

The mainstream media repeatedly showcased these cynics’ opinions while excluding researchers like Margaret from the debate.

One particularly popular debunker was named Andy Roberts, who actually wrote a book years later with one of Margaret’s old friends titled UFOs that Never Were.

Andy was a researcher who spent years trying to disprove UFO stories. Now, his sights were set on the Berwyn UFO incident.

Needless to say, this guy was a thorn in Margaret’s side and especially for the duration of this UFO investigation.

He believed the incident to be a purely human misinterpretation. It was simply an unlikely coincidence of celestial and terrestrial events that were perceived by fear and curiosity.

Right when Andy started diving into the Berwyn UFO incident, a huge opportunity crossed Margaret’s desk in 1996 – a source Margaret trusted sent her info from a high-ranking military officer using a fake name. It was a retired man with the pseudonym James Prescott.

The officer, Margaret’s source claimed, had been deployed to Llandderfel, Pat’s village in North Wales.

Soon after the explosion, he and a small team had driven up and collected a number of coffin-like boxes before driving them to Porton Down, which some consider the UK government’s most secretive science park.

There, scientists had opened the boxes.

Inside, Prescott had seen two dead aliens who conformed to the description of those seen at Roswell in New Mexico: small, thin humanoid beings with skin covering skeletal frames.

Typically known as greys.

Margaret was equally excited and skeptical about this new information. The details were amazing and would benefit her case so much, but the officer not providing his real name made her nervous.

She pushed passed her skepticism, and she and her husband, Ron, set off for West Wales, a 300-mile round trip, to interview a young soldier who claimed to know the real James Prescott, an officer killed in the Falklands.

Unfortunately, nothing came from this. Another seemingly dead end. In November of 1996, Margaret received a call from a man named Mike Saville, who was from the South of England.

Mike claimed that he and his wife had been living in a farmhouse on the edge of Llandderfel in the 70s, and they heard the rumbling.

When they went outside, they watched as a bright, clearly defined orange circle came down on the mountainside about 3 miles or so from their house.

I hovered in the area for about half an hour on the horizon and then dropped from their view due to the mountains.

They hadn’t seen the white lights like Pat nor any military involvement, but it was a solid lead still.

Adding to the testimonies, a local man visited Margaret with a pile of notes and an old, worn-out map. He claimed the documents had been given to him by old retired folks.

The folks said they witnessed the alien spaceship crash land that night. In their words, the Royal Navy had engaged with two separate UFOs that night, both of which had risen out of the Irish Sea.

One simply flew away into the sky. The other UFO apparently zapped a Navy ship and killed a few of its crew members.

Then, it took off towards North Wales. They said fighter jets chased after it, and it flew over the island of Anglesey and the university city of Bangor before turning south towards Snowdonia National Park.

Finally, amongst the snowy peaks, a fighter pilot had hit his target, and the UFO started to descend, zig-zagging wildly, before crashing on the western slopes of Berwyn.

Then, the men claimed to see grays in jumpsuits emerge from the ship and surrender to the military officials.

Hearing the details and knowing it was a second-hand story made Margaret skeptical.

Still, she wanted to follow up with an investigation of her own, but her husband, aka her driver, was in a wheelchair, and she was tortured with the idea of landing at a dead end or worse, false claims again.

Around this time, a newcomer to UFO Investigation, Scott Felton, reached out to Margaret about her work.

He was pushed to reach out to Margaret due to Andy, the debunker’s harshness and arrogance when it came to doubting alien activity.

Margaret invited Scott to visit her home to discuss her research notes. Scott was about thirty years younger than Margaret and, despite being less involved in the ufology community, a pretty firm believer in aliens.

After a few discussions, Margaret believed he was dedicated and genuine enough to be brought on the Berwyn UFO case.

Sitting on her couch, Scott told Margaret that he had seen a UFO back in the eighties.

It was dawn, he said, and he was overlooking the Mersey estuary in Liverpool, where he regularly went duck-shooting.

As he approached the ducks’ feeding spot, he called his gun dog, Lucy, to heel — but she ignored him. He called again. Lucy was pointing at something, front paw raised, tail rigid, eyes unblinking.

Suddenly, in the direction of Lucy’s inquisitive nose, a light snapped on.

It was no more than 10 feet from them, and it hovered above the ground, illuminating the shingle below it. Lucy stood transfixed. Eventually, the object moved away to the water’s edge, where a flock of birds erupted in a cloud of flapping wings and alarm calls.

For Scott, the object was unidentified, and it was flying, so, therefore, it was a bonafide UFO.

Ever since he had become interested in the Berwyn area, Scott had wondered whether government intelligence agents were watching him.

He had recently been arrested for shooting and dismembering a cow — a crime he did not commit and was able to produce an alibi for.

This made him feel in his gut that it was a political attempt to get him off the UFO case.

Margaret agreed that this was possible.

She made him a cup of tea and a few biscuits and then produced a mountain of documents for him to browse through: folders, scribbled-on paper scraps, and notebooks, all full of info relating to the Berwyn case.

Scott was new to ufology but felt convinced that what they needed was not more information but actually less — they needed to sift out and discard everything questionable, including all anonymous testimonies, and focus on facts.

Focus on the details and information that the public would easily be able to accept and get behind.

Scott drove up the mountain to retrace the nurse’s steps for himself.

He stayed up there for about 2 hours and discredited all of the scientific theories he could base on timing, perspective, and terrain.

Then he realized all of the research and information to date had focused on Cadair Bronwen, the mountain closest to the village of Llandrillo, but the nurse had clearly been looking at Cadair Berwyn, which no one could have seen from the village.

This detail had just come to him, and the more he thought about it, the more it was clear that it was just a bunch of lazy takes the debunkers came up with.

This lit a fire in Scott to keep investigating more.

He returned every few weeks to the Berwyn Mountains to continue what he had started.

He hiked up the passes that had been inaccessible to Margaret and searched for signs of disturbed earth, finding nothing.

He even traversed to the spot that Pat had been looking at and moved around with a headlamp powered by a car battery until it was dark, while a friend videoed his experiment from where Pat had been standing.

The headlamp was just a speck on the horizon and could never, no matter what the weather conditions, be described as a huge pulsating orb.

When rival Andy Roberts published his version of events in a book, The UFOs That Never Were, Scott was pissed.

Roberts wrote that, on the evidence available, “it is certain that the nurse saw the poachers with their lamping lights at the point they met and talked to the police.” But the hunting party — or “poachers” — weren’t even on the mountain then! Scott wanted to scream.

Roberts’ book was a hard and heavy blow.

All of a sudden, it felt like even Pat’s testimony, the most incontrovertible account of a UFO, was being disregarded as fake. Made up. Debunked.

If Margaret and Scott couldn’t find another witness willing to put their name on their story, they would be just about toast.

Scott felt certain that nothing had crashed on the mountain — there was simply no evidence for it. But, nor was there much evidence for anything else.

The absence of official documents relating to the incident was remarkable and, Scott felt, a reason to suspect a cover-up.

Scott wrote multiple times to the British Geological Survey requesting information on the incident but was told they had nothing.

He wrote to the police and Royal Air Force, too.

The police told him that they had destroyed their records of the night, in line with policy, and the Royal Air Force claimed to have no reports of UFOs that night.

He was livid when he found out that Andy had acquired a copy of the police log.

He filed a freedom of information request immediately but received a response saying the documents didn’t exist.

This set in stone that the government and police officials were treating it as a cover-up.

In what originally felt like good news, a television producer contacted Scott to say she was filming a series about a paranormal activity called Britain’s Closest Encounters, and that one episode focused on the Berwyn incident.

She wanted to interview him.

Instinct told him not to get involved, but it was his opportunity to tell the truth to the masses and set the record straight.

In his mind, too often, the mainstream media made heroes of the debunkers and made the believers look like nut jobs.

The producer was persistent, and eventually, Scott gave in and did the interview.

He explained that the UFO had been on an entirely different mountain to the one everyone had searched.

He said the nurse couldn’t possibly have been looking at the hunting party or the policemen, as Andy Roberts claimed, and shared his own theory.

“It wasn’t a crash,” he told the researcher. “It was a landing.” Something came down onto the mountain that night, he said.

The day the documentary was due to air, Scott received a phone call from the director.

“The good news is that the program is on tonight. The bad news is that you’re not in it.”

Scott watched the film with rising anger.

Somehow, someway it was all about Andy Roberts. Andy was the star of the show.

He explained how a meteor shower and an earthquake had morphed over the years into an alien craft crash-landing on the mountain. “Fantastic stories, wonderful mythology, but there’s no evidence,” Roberts said.

Soon after this, Margaret suffered a painful defeat.

A different television producer was interested in her work, and she shared what she knew about the five “professionals” who claimed to have seen aliens landing.

This television producer was able to verify they had invented the story as a joke over a few drinks.

It was all fake. A setup. For amusement.

It was difficult for Margaret to face the fact that she had spent years as the butt of a mean-spirited prank.

Margaret was in her late-eighties by now, exhausted and whatever the step beyond retired was, but she still took time every now and then to visit the Berwyn Mountains and test out new witnesses or theories if possible.

Unfortunately, Scott did not have that same peaceful acceptance. He continued fighting for the truth while always feeling like Andy Roberts was right on his heels, or worse, one step ahead.

Taking one last pass through Margaret’s notes, he spotted a record of a phone call with Mike Saville back in 1996, shortly after Margaret had interviewed the nurse.

Margaret remembered the interview and the fact that Saville had been living in the South of England at the time.

Could this one interview be the legitimate witness they needed?

In the summer of 2014, Margaret and Scott met Saville at the farm where he’d been living back in 1974, and he told the story in person.

Saville and his wife were reading when the house had started to tremble and shake.

Saville stepped out of the front door, where he spotted a bright, circular light in front of him.

It was orange and had a defined edge.

The couple, whose baby was asleep upstairs, were terrified.

They bundled the baby into a carrier and rushed to their neighbor’s farm, which had a telephone line, to hear reports of mayhem in the village.

They then walked back up to Saville’s house, and, at 9:10 pm, they stood gazing at this curious ball of light as it hung on the horizon.

The thing had been so huge they thought the world was coming to an end.

At 9.20 pm, the object sunk down below the horizon and disappeared.

Hearing Saville describe this for the first time, Scott could scarcely believe his ears and hurriedly unfolded his maps of the area.

He bracketed Saville’s and Pat’s possible sight-lines on the map and then checked the elevation of the hills where they intersected.

Sure enough, in between Saville and Berwyn, there was a smaller hill. The mountainside behind it would have been visible to Pat but not to Saville.

He could therefore say with decent certainty that the object must have dipped down out of Saville’s view, but remained on the mountainside at least until 10 pm when Pat saw it.

The timelines actually matched perfectly.

They drove to the spot where the nurse and her daughters had stopped, a spot Scott now knew well.

It was overcast, but the peaks were clearly visible. Scott peered through the telescopic sights of his rifle, then studied his map again.

He still was unable to find anything on the ground or in the grass that proved a UFO had landed so many years before, but he felt this was a breakthrough moment and revelation.

Unfortunately, due to so many of the original witnesses passing or moving on, Margaret’s old age, the government cover-up, and lack of physical evidence, Margaret and Scott were never able to 100% prove the UFO’s existence.

However, through years and years of research and dedication and the final revelation, they feel maybe they don’t have to prove it to the world, them believing it wholeheartedly is enough.

The Berwyn Mountain UFO 

What do you think, Bizarros? Was there really a UFO on the mountain that night, or was it a meteor shower/astrological event?

Would you be able to spend your entire life fighting to prove the existence of the paranormal, only to be pranked and be the butt of jokes?

Let us know in the comments!