Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens explores the Broad Haven UFO sightings, blending atmospheric filming, personal interviews, and AI recreations to engage both newcomers and seasoned ufology enthusiasts, writes NEIL NIXON
Review of Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens
Sian Eleri’s highest profile work has seen her presenting chill songs and emerging artists on Radio One.
The station is a shadow of its former self in terms of cultural power, but Eleri, with her lilting Welsh accent and ability to make every listener feel she is talking directly to them, has been a latter-day star presenter, gathering a following.
Probably, leading to her BBC employers’ keen interest in finding a vehicle to harness those abilities. A previous series examining hauntings in Wales allowed her to meet up with old mates, speak fluent Welsh, and – just about – test claims of the paranormal to destruction.
The recent second series takes her to Broad Haven, the Pembrokeshire village that – almost half a century ago – hosted one of the most furious UFO flaps these isles have ever seen. As the blurb for episode one (of four) says: “Sian Eleri delves into reports of the biggest mass UFO sighting in Britain,” the first task being “to track down the schoolboys whose ‘alien’ encounter in west Wales triggered it all.”
Your reaction to this series is likely to revolve around two key points. If you’ve read the key books on the case, particularly Randall Jones Pugh’s The Dyfed Enigma (1980), then despite the decades that have passed, The Village that Saw Aliens hasn’t added too much to the story. Secondly, if you saw the recent Netflix series on UFOs, a lot of the interviews and discussions here cover the same ground in less time and largely lack the expert voices dropping in with contextual points.
If you’re a newbie to the case, Eleri’s mission is likely to drag you in. There’s much talking to the producer off camera, poring over documents gathered from Randall Jones Pugh’s daughter, and apparently putting herself in scary situations (notably when exploring a disused bunker on farmland) that makes this feel as if you’re there and unpicking the details with her.
The notable USPs here include the slightly spooky AI recreation of Jones Pugh’s voice, allowing him to speak details previously only written into the tonnage of documents unearthed in a suitcase.
There’s also the involvement of Jones Pugh’s daughter, her discussion of the way the case took over her father’s life, and the way he eventually came to believe the implications to be so scary they changed his view of life. The series also does wander further from Broad Haven than some previous investigations and considers sightings several miles away.
The producers probably chose deliberately to film away from summertime and compound that with a fondness for shooting as darkness fell, so it’s atmospheric with grey skies, permanently threatening rain, and Eleri wafting about in a long coat to cut into the gloom. Low budget genius, frankly, so too Eleri’s effortless ability to engage the few surviving players she manages to meet and narrate the investigation to the point every new event, just about, promises excitement.
For the serious student of ufology, the four-part series is crying out for a little more context, notably – for example – a short consideration of the way so-called ufofocals can arise when a single investigator acts as a charismatic organiser. At no point in this series is Jones Pugh compared to Arthur Shuttlewood in Warminster or Billy Buchanan in Bonnybridge, but they are comparisons you’ll find elsewhere, and they matter.
So, the second series of Paranormal is watchable, there and gone inside two hours and – for anyone unfamiliar with the case – it’s an insightful introduction to a series of claims that haven’t been fully explained. Those who were there are few and far between now, but the witnesses Eleri meets are articulate, and if their testimony makes one point very strongly, it’s that whatever happened in a rural corner of Wales decades ago had a major impact on the people and the place, that will be remembered for as long as any of these people are alive.
You can watch Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens on BBC iPlayer
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