Rhosybol School Netball Lesson Sighting, Anglesey (1977)

February 1977. Wales was in the middle of a flap. Twelve days earlier, on 4 February, children at Broad Haven Primary School in Pembrokeshire had reported a cigar-shaped craft near their school, a run of reports ufologists would come to call the Welsh Triangle. Far to the north lies Rhosybol, a village on the Isle of Anglesey, about 2.5 miles south of Amlwch.

Wednesday, 16 February 1977. An afternoon netball lesson in the yard of Rhosybol School. Mrs Mair Williams was showing her pupils how to throw the ball into the net.

Gwawr Jones was ten. She looked up. "I shouted at the others and they looked up and saw it," she later wrote. "It had a black dome on top and a silver cigar-shaped base. It was travelling smoothly across the sky in a northerly direction." It made no sound. Mrs Williams saw it too. "It was a really bright afternoon and the object was flying very high towards Bull Bay," she told the Western Mail.

For about three minutes it held their gaze. Then it went behind the only cloud in the sky. It reappeared again for about one minute. Then it disappeared.

Mrs Williams did something careful. She took the children back into school and separated them. Then she told them to draw what they had seen. "It was really astonishing," she said, adding that "their drawings were all similar. I never believed in these things until I saw this!" Ten witnesses in all. Nine pupils aged 8 to 11, and their teacher.

Gwawr wrote to the Commanding Officer at RAF Valley, the RAF station on the same island, in what David Clarke would later call "immaculate handwriting". Her teacher endorsed the letter, and the drawings went with it. RAF Valley passed the report to the Ministry of Defence UFO desk, S4 (Air), with a covering note saying it "can offer no positive explanation or identification." No further investigation is on record. The file now sits among the released MoD UFO papers at The National Archives.

No one has accused the children or their teacher of inventing the story, and the decision to separate the pupils before they drew is the point most often raised in their favour. Later local coverage noted that some think it was "an experimental man-made top secret military aircraft, possibly a prototype Stealth bomber." No evidence has been offered for that idea, and no balloon, airliner or other specific identification has been put forward.

In 2009 the S4C series Lle Aeth Pawb? returned to the story. Gwawr, now Gwawr Bell and aged 42, traced her teacher and seven of her classmates. Together they recreated a 1977 local press photograph of the pupils posing with a model of the UFO they had built.

In 2017 Dr David Clarke wrote up the case in "Close Encounters of the Playground Kind", drawing on the MoD files. He noted that stories like this one were among dozens that reached S4 (Air) in 1977. Beside Broad Haven, Rhosybol remains one of the playground sightings of that strange Welsh winter. Still unexplained.