The Welsh Triangle Revisited

About the Author

Peter Paget describes himself as a former intelligence officer. This site's research on him has not been able to confirm that background from any independent source, and the description on his key-figures card here reflects that: he is a self-described former intelligence officer, and the qualifier is doing real work.

His involvement with the Pembrokeshire wave is documented and not in question. He and his wife Jane interviewed witnesses across the county during and after 1977, and the resulting book was one of three published on the wave in 1979 — alongside Randall Jones Pugh and F. W. Holiday's investigative The Dyfed Enigma and Clive Harold's narrative account of the Coombs family.

Of those three, Paget's was the most speculative. It popularised the proposition that a submerged extraterrestrial base lay beneath the Stack Rocks in St Bride's Bay, a claim resting on nothing beyond the geographic distribution of sightings and the presence of a military installation nearby. That framing is what gave the wave its 'Welsh Triangle' identity in the popular press.

The 2018 book escalates rather than moderates. Where a forty-year retrospective by an investigator might be expected to narrow the claims — conceding what did not hold up, incorporating the 1996 prank admission that partly resolved the school sighting, engaging with the oil-refinery protective-suit rumour — this one adds two categories of claim that are, by construction, unverifiable: secret tasking and personal contact.

That direction of travel is the most important thing to say about the author. A researcher whose claims grow more extraordinary and less checkable over forty years, in a self-published volume with no editorial layer, is exhibiting a pattern this library has now documented several times, and it should govern how the book's new material is weighted.

Historical Context & Origins

The 1977 Pembrokeshire wave began on February 4 with schoolchildren at Broad Haven reporting a landed object near their playing field — covered in this site's case file — and continued through the year with reports from the surrounding area, most extensively from the Coombs family at Ripperston Farm.

RAF Brawdy is the geographic fact the whole 'triangle' framing rests on, and it is genuinely significant. The Pembrokeshire airfield was in this period a facility of real strategic importance, and American involvement there was substantial — the site hosted a US Naval Facility operating as part of the Atlantic submarine-surveillance network. A pattern of sightings clustering near it is not a trivial observation.

But the inference from that to a submerged alien base is entirely unsupported, and it is worth being precise about why the argument feels stronger than it is. Sightings cluster near populated coastal areas with military installations because that is where people, roads, night lighting, aircraft, ships and unusual activity all are. Proximity to a base predicts reports without any exotic mechanism.

Two of the wave's principal elements have since acquired conventional explanations. A 1996 admission partly resolved the school sighting as a prank; and the researcher Hilary Evans reported in 1982 an unconfirmed account that two members of a local social club had borrowed oil-refinery protective suits, which would account for the seven-foot silver figures reported at Ripperston.

The Milford Haven industrial complex is the other under-weighted local factor. Refineries, flare stacks, tanker traffic and associated protective equipment sat within a few miles of every location in the story, and they supply candidate origins for both the lights and the suits without requiring anything further.

The 2018 publication context matters too. The book appeared into the post-2017 environment, when official acknowledgement of unexplained aerial phenomena had made the subject newly respectable and a large market had opened for revisited older cases. A forty-year retrospective with new revelations is a recognisable product of that moment.

Finally, the personal-contact claim places the book in a tradition it does not acknowledge. An investigator who begins as an outside researcher and ends by reporting his own contact with non-human intelligences is following the contactee arc almost exactly, and this library has documented the same trajectory in Don Elkins and others.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The 1977 wave was real, sustained and multi-witness, and that much stands. The book's foundation and the part that does not depend on Paget. Numerous people across Pembrokeshire reported unusual things over the course of a year; the reports were investigated at the time by three separate authors; and the underlying reporting record is not in dispute even where the explanations are.

The geographic clustering around RAF Brawdy is a genuine feature of the data. The strongest analytical observation in either of Paget's books. Sightings did cluster in a region containing a strategically significant installation with substantial American involvement, and asking why is legitimate. The mundane answer — that bases, coasts and populated areas generate reports for ordinary reasons — is available and the book does not seriously engage it.

Witnesses withheld material at the time and some has since emerged. A plausible claim in principle: people in a small community under national press attention in 1977 had good reasons not to say everything, and forty years is long enough for reticence to lapse. Whether any of the specific new material in this book is of that kind cannot be established from the book.

The intelligence-tasking claim is asserted and unsupported. Paget's statement that he was called on by intelligence services to investigate is the book's most consequential addition and there is nothing behind it. No document, no named contact, no corroborating account, and no independent confirmation even that he held the background he describes. It should be treated as an unevidenced assertion.

The personal-contact claim removes the author from the evidential frame entirely. An investigator reporting his own contact with extraterrestrials is no longer a witness to other people's reports; he is a claimant. That does not make the 1977 testimony he collected worthless, but it does mean everything mediated through him after that point requires a different and much lower level of confidence.

The submerged base hypothesis is unchanged and remains unsupported. Forty years produced no seabed survey, no sonar contact, no anomalous acoustic record and no physical evidence of any kind bearing on the Stack Rocks claim — and the area is adjacent to some of the most heavily instrumented water in the North Atlantic. The absence is informative.

The book's most serious omission is what it does not revisit. A retrospective that adds two unverifiable claims while declining to engage the 1996 prank admission and the protective-suit rumour has revisited the case selectively, and selective revisitation is the opposite of what a forty-year reassessment is for.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

The Broad Haven school sighting, February 4, 1977. The children's report that opened the wave, covered in this site's case file and partly resolved by a 1996 prank admission that this book does not engage.

The Coombs family at Ripperston Farm. The year-long sequence of lights, a seven-foot silver-suited figure, electronic failures and displaced cattle, documented at length in Clive Harold's book and examined in this site's case file.

RAF Brawdy and the American presence. The Pembrokeshire installation at the centre of the geographic argument, its Cold War role and the US Naval Facility operating there — the one genuinely substantive element of Paget's 'triangle' framing.

The Stack Rocks submerged base hypothesis. The claim, introduced in the 1979 book and maintained here, that an extraterrestrial installation lies beneath St Bride's Bay. Unsupported by any survey, sonar record or physical evidence in forty-seven years.

The silver-suited figures. Reported across multiple witnesses and locations during the wave, and the element for which the unconfirmed 1982 oil-refinery protective-suit rumour offers the most economical explanation.

The claimed intelligence tasking. Paget's assertion that he was called on by intelligence services to investigate the sightings — new to this edition, central to its marketing, and supported by nothing.

The claimed personal extraterrestrial contact. The author's statement that he has gained knowledge through his own contact with non-human intelligences. Unfalsifiable in principle and the point at which the book leaves investigative territory.

The wider Pembrokeshire reports. The other witnesses across the county interviewed by Paget and his wife Jane during and after 1977, which constitute the book's genuine documentary content.

Critical Reception & Controversies

The book is self-published through a print-on-demand platform, has no reviews of record anywhere, and exists on reader platforms with a very small number of ratings. It has had no critical reception in any meaningful sense and was not published into a context where it could.

Its standing within the field is inherited from the 1979 book, and that standing was never high. Paget's original was the sensational one of the three 1979 volumes; researchers working on the Welsh wave have consistently preferred Pugh and Holiday's The Dyfed Enigma, and the position has not changed.

The decisive criticism is the direction of the additions. A forty-year retrospective is an opportunity to test earlier claims against what has since emerged, and two things had emerged that bear directly on this case: the 1996 prank admission and the 1982 protective-suit rumour. A book that adds secret intelligence tasking and personal alien contact while not engaging either of those has not revisited the case; it has extended it.

The intelligence-background claim deserves separate attention because it predates this book and has never been substantiated. Paget has described himself as a former intelligence officer since 1979, and this site's own research could not verify it. An unverified credential that is then used to support an unverified claim of official tasking is a structure with nothing at the bottom of it.

There is a fairer point to make about the RAF Brawdy material. The base was strategically significant, the American presence there was real, and a cluster of sightings around a facility of that kind is a reasonable thing for an investigator to notice. Paget noticed it in 1979 and was ahead of most of his contemporaries in doing so. What he built on it was not warranted, but the observation was sound.

The witness material is also worth separating from the author's own claims. Paget and his wife interviewed people across Pembrokeshire in and after 1977, and those interviews are a real body of testimony from a period when the events were fresh. That material would be more usable in someone else's book.

The fair placement is as a supplementary document, valuable for the interview record it carries and unreliable for everything the author says about himself. A reader who wants the Welsh wave should start with The Dyfed Enigma, use Harold for the Coombs material, and treat both Paget volumes as evidence about how a case is embellished over time.

Influence & Legacy

The 2018 volume has had almost no influence, which is the usual fate of a self-published retrospective. Its predecessor had a great deal: the 'Welsh Triangle' label, the submerged-base speculation and the RAF Brawdy framing all entered the popular version of the case through Paget's 1979 book and are still attached to it.

Read as a pair, the two volumes are a useful specimen of case inflation over time. The same author, the same events, forty years apart, moving from sensational interpretation of other people's testimony to first-person contact claims and secret official tasking — with no new evidence introduced at any point to justify the escalation.

The book also illustrates what the post-2017 disclosure environment has done to the older case literature. Renewed official interest created a market for revisited cases, and a substantial amount of what has been published into that market consists of forty- and fifty-year-old material re-presented with new claims and no new evidence. This is a clean example of the type.

Its cautionary legacy concerns the retrospective as a form. A researcher returning to a case decades later has one genuinely valuable thing to offer — the chance to say what did not survive — and it is the thing least often delivered. A retrospective that only adds is not a reassessment, and the absence of any concession is the most reliable single indicator that a reader is holding advocacy rather than investigation.

There is one genuinely useful thing a reader can take from the pairing, and it is not about Wales. Where a case has been written up by three authors in the same year, the version that survives in popular circulation forty years later is reliably the least rigorous of the three — because it is the one that gets reprinted, quoted and repackaged. The investigation goes out of print; the speculation acquires a sequel. Anyone assessing an old case should therefore start by asking which contemporaneous account they are actually reading, and whether a better one exists that nobody has bothered to keep in circulation.

The Book

As an Amazon Associate, OverClassified may earn from qualifying purchases made through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Related Cases & Theories