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JUNE 2002 – WINCHWEN, SWANSEA

Late afternoon on a week day in June 2002. Weather hot. Rob Gaynor (26) and a friend, Jason Osbourne (28) were standing near the Halfway Inn in Winchwen, having stopped at a lay by to make a phone call. A huge thunderstorm came over from the south-east, and they looked up to watch it.

There was a lot of thunder, and floating underneath the storm clouds and moving along with it towards the north west was a very strange object. It was at an altitude of about 2000 feet but low enough to see clearly.

Rob said the only way to describe it was a mass of aerials and scaffolding connected by ladders – a bit like the International Space Station, but much more intricate and more slender, and without any solid mass of a body or fuselage. His first thought was ‘how in the hell can a shape like that be able to float?’

It seemed to have more aerial shapes on one side than the other, some protruding out further than others, but on the whole it was cubic in shape, with longest bits on top and bottom, although these were fewer than those around the sides. They could see through it as it slowly tumbled gently on its way.

Rob explained: “It tumbled ever so slowly, which made me think at first it must have been some kind of inflatable sucked up into the air with the storm....but as it was overhead we could see it was definitely metallic due to the light reflecting off it. It was larger than a house....and didn’t change direction. It travelled the same speed as the storm.”

It passed by quite slowly without any sound and emitted no light that they could see, and the two friends watched it in bafflement. It headed towards the Black Mountain in the northwest and they watched it for about 5 minutes until it became too small to observe.

UK’s weather in June 2002 was indeed hot and interspersed with summer thunder storms, so Rob’s memory is correct in this respect.

Source: SUFON Files: Rob Gaynor correspondence with Emlyn Williams March 2016.