The Night of the Triangles: South Wales, 1983

Wednesday 19 January 1983. A clear winter evening on the South Wales coast. The sun had set at 16:27. It was about 4°C, and a thin crescent moon gave little light.

What followed was reported from Milford Haven to Newport, mostly between Swansea and Cardiff. One account counts as many as 200 witnesses. A Wikipedia list, citing the South Wales Echo, gives the date as Tuesday 18 January instead.

The first reports came around 17:15. Near the BP refinery in Swansea, 14-year-old Leanne Gaskins watched a triangular object with lights hover for 12 to 15 minutes. No sound. In Sketty, Orllwyn Jones was leaving for work. A black triangle, the size of a car, passed with bright lights at its corners.

Two Swansea CID detectives, Mike Troake and Gethin Humphreys, saw a pair of objects. Troake described "a large main cluster of lights at the front, shaped a bit like a Zeppelin, followed by a triangular group of lights." He added: "They were moving gracefully across the sky about 1,000 ft up." At South Dock, June Thomas saw two large triangles and sketched them. "What I saw wasn't a meteor. They were moving slowly and without sound."

Llantwit Major, 18:30. An under-12s football match stopped. The coach, Joe Toland, had spent 15 years as an RAF aircraft engineer. He put the object at 300 ft across, 600 to 1,000 ft up. "The thing I really don't understand is that it made no noise."

By 19:00 it was over Cardiff. Beside the River Taff, Carole Griffiths watched a triangle of white lights. "It looked like Concorde taking off, but it was just hanging there, completely still." In Whitchurch, 22 primary-school pupils saw a massive triangle flying low. Their teacher, Helen Williams, reported near identical drawings.

Most calls reached the police between 18:00 and 19:00. In Kittle and Bishopston, several hundred homes lost power. The electricity company blamed a branch hitting an overhead line. Later, Jonathan Davies, then 15, described a miles-wide wedge-shaped craft. He found himself in a field about 1.5 miles from home, with no memory of getting there.

The coastguard first called it meteors. RAF Brawdy said: "We haven't been flying after 4pm, so the possibility it was one of us is remote." RAF London suggested aircraft flying in formation. The Cardiff Weather Centre had released no weather balloons. A Ministry of Defence report notes that lights had been seen over the lifeboat station at Mumbles Head, and reports went to the Civil Aviation Authority. No official conclusion has been found.

Each proposal met the same objection. Meteors do not hover. Jets and helicopters are loud. Bill Rich of BUFORA rejected air-to-air refuelling. Some linked the sightings to the falling Soviet satellite Kosmos 1402, but it did not re-enter until 23 January. An airship fits the silence and the slow pace. Yet one aviation source noted, "Blimps are rarely flown at night", adding, "I'm sure someone would have come forward by now."

The Swansea UFO Network named the event and built a database of witnesses. Natalie Bowden, 13 at the time, recalled it in 2016 as "like a stadium of light." In 2024 the BBC Three series Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens revisited it beside the 1977 Broad Haven sightings. The Night of the Triangles remains unexplained.