The Night of the Triangles: South Wales, 1983

Wednesday, 19 January 1983. A clear evening on the South Wales coast. About 4 °C, a light westerly breeze, a crescent moon. The sun had set at 16:27.

Around 5.15 pm, the first triangular craft was reported at Llanelli, heading towards Swansea. Over the next two hours, as many as 200 people from Milford Haven to Newport saw something in the sky. The Swansea UFO Network, SUFON, later gave the evening its name. The Night of the Triangles.

In Brynhyfryd Square, two 15-year-olds, Mark and Ian, watched "three white lights low in the sky (very low) moving slowly." The objects drifted west, turned south, "then turned simultaneously and started ascending slowly." At 17:45 a "massive oblong object" with bright white lights moved slowly around the TV mast on Kilvey Hill. At 18:05 a silver, saucer-shaped object hovered over the Port Talbot steelworks. A second joined it.

In Uplands, driving instructor Orllwyn Jones saw a dark triangle about the size of a family car, a foot above the roof of the neighbouring house. A short tube pointed down from each corner, a small bright light at its tip. It moved at a slow walking pace towards Swansea Bay. Then it dropped below the roofline and vanished.

June Thomas was leaving her shift at the Viscose plant on South Dock. "What I saw was two objects, very big objects, moving across the sky slowly and without any noise." Two Swansea CID detectives, Mike Troake and Gethin Humphreys, saw one object "shaped a bit like a Zeppelin" at about 1,000 ft. In Llantwit Major, former RAF engineer Joe Toland stopped an under-12s football match to watch something he put at 300 ft across. By the River Taff in Cardiff, Carole Griffiths said it "looked like Concorde taking off, but it was just hanging there, completely still."

Natalie Bowden was 13. In a 2016 SUFON interview she described something "like a stadium of light" in cream and pink, 30 to 50 ft above her house. It seemed to be "trying to say something to me in my head." The air stopped feeling cold, and everything went silent. Her family and neighbours went back indoors in a "mechanical" way.

The police admitted, "At present we have not got a clue, but inquiries will be made." Several hundred homes in Kittle and Bishopston lost power, and the electricity board blamed a branch hitting an overhead line. In Whitchurch, 22 pupils at Eglwys Wen primary school reported a "massive triangular object." Their teacher, Helen Williams, said their drawings were almost identical. A declassified MOD report records lights over Mumbles Head lifeboat station.

Swansea Coastguard said the lights were meteors. The witnesses would not have it. "What I saw wasn't a meteor," said June Thomas. RAF Brawdy said its search and rescue flight had not flown after 4pm. Cardiff Airport saw nothing unusual.

The Soviet satellite Kosmos 1402 was breaking up in orbit that month, but silent, hovering objects fit it poorly. BUFORA investigator Bill Rich said what he observed matched neither meteors nor air-to-air refuelling. An aviation source thought an airship the most plausible option. Nobody ever claimed the flight.

SUFON has spent years recording the witnesses on camera. In 2024 the BBC Three series Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens, centred on Broad Haven in 1977, turned to the 1983 reports. There, Natalie Bowden described the object as "quite angular, not like a spacecraft you'd imagine." No explanation has ever settled the night.