Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens – an entertaining account of close encounters of the Welsh kind

New York, Los Angeles and Washington in Independence Day. Washington and Las Vegas in Mars Attacks!, San Francisco in the superior 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

There are some exceptions. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial are both set in the suburban landscape of Steven Spielberg’s childhood, while M Night Shyamalan’s Signs takes place in rural Pennsylvania.

British alien movies tend to be more cosy. The classic Village of the Damned, based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, and the well-regarded B-movie The Earth Dies Screaming are both set in the stereotypical sleepy, leafy English countryside.

If aliens really did decide to pay Britain a visit, would it be a surprise if they avoided London (all that traffic!) and picked somewhere like, say, a village on the west coast of Wales?

In the second season of Paranormal (BBC3, Thursday & Friday, June 20 & 21), subtitled The Village That Saw Aliens, BBC Radio presenter and journalist Sian Eleri digs into what became Britain’s biggest ever mass sighting of UFOs.

It all began in 1977, when 14 boys from the local primary school in the village of Broad Haven reported seeing a UFO in the school grounds. The natural assumption — that it was a mischievous prank or a case of mass hysteria — was undermined when the boys were separated and asked to draw a picture of what they’d seen.

All the drawings depicted the same thing: a cigar-shaped object with a dome and a red light on top. On top of that, there was the fact that the boys seemed to be genuinely terrified by the experience.

The story made headlines around the world. Kids of that age have vivid imaginations, yet they’re usually terrible actors and struggle to maintain a lie for any length of time. Notably, none of them ever recanted the story.

Eleri is a committed non-believer. “It has to be a load of rubbish,” she confidently declares before heading off to Broad Haven, a popular holiday spot whose lovely beaches make it a magnet for surfers. By the end of four entertaining half-hour episodes, however, her scepticism is a little less solid.

One person who believed the boys from the start was Randall Jones Pugh, a local veterinarian and UFO investigator. He died more than 20 years ago, but his daughter Helen has held onto his files on the case.

It’s a huge collection, comprising box after box of notes and newspaper clippings, cans of film and a projector, and a VHS recording of Jones Pugh being interviewed on TV.

He tells the interviewer: “I can give you every assurance that if the public knew precisely what the presence of UFOs means, they would literally run for their lives.”

Ufology took over Jones Pugh’s life. He became obsessed, to the point of contacting the Pentagon

Ufology took over Jones Pugh’s life. He became obsessed, to the point of contacting the Pentagon. At some point, though, he seems to have been spooked into abandoning his work. Helen has a feeling he received a visit from someone in authority that was enough to scare him off investigating further.

“He did start to pull back from it all,” she says. “He decided this wasn’t what he wanted to get involved in.”

Many of the boys who claim to have seen the UFO are still living in or near Broad Haven. One of them, Phil Rhys, who’s happy to talk to Eleri yet doesn’t want to appear on screen, tells her he now believes the UFO may have been an aircraft, possibly top-secret, from one of the many military bases studded along the Welsh coast.

He points her in the direction of another of the boys, David Davies. Now living in Swansea, he insists what they saw wasn’t any kind of military craft. Davies has clearly suffered trauma from it all. He says he was horribly bullied, including physically, in secondary school. He wouldn’t give in and change his story, though.

Where the series gets really interesting when Eleri, digging into declassified Ministry of Defence files, learns that hundreds of adults, a few of whom she tracks down here, also reported seeing strange craft and fast-moving orbs of light along the Welsh coast from the mid-70s to the early-80s.

Whether you believe in UFOs or think it’s all hooey, this is a thoroughly enjoyable little series.