42

SUMMER 1967 - PYLE

About 12.15 AM. Very warm, still night, overcast and dark. 35-year-old Clive Menadue, living in Beach Road, Pyle, was putting the cat out. It was a pleasant night and Clive stayed for a look around. His wife, Sylvia was in the kitchenette washing up.

He then noticed, fairly low on the horizon, "something that looked like electric light reflected off telegraph wires. I couldn't quite make it out. Suddenly a red object about the size of a star appeared from the horizon to the left of the thing I was looking at. It was going at a terrific pace blurred for a moment and then stopped a little to the left and below this object.

The red object started to flash red, white, red, white, for some seconds - flashing like the light on top of a police car. I called Sylvia out then and we just stopped and watched. There was nothing else we could do.

There was a kind of bright, white, silent explosion and the sky was lit up with the kind of light you get from magnesium. It was one of the most horrible moments of my life. It sounds ridiculous, but I thought someone had dropped an atom bomb a long way off.

"In the centre of this expanding light there was a cloud outlined.

Then the spreading light started to contract and through-out the sighting it kept up a steady rhythm of expansion and contraction. The light diminished in brilliance so that you could see the ground beneath clearly and the clouds above. In the centre of the light, I clearly saw one huge roundish cloud and a similar one attached to it at the top-right hand corner.

"Now it begins to be really unbelievable....but anyway, both these clouds began to spin in a clockwise direction. The smaller, right-hand one moved away from the large cloud some distance, and they were both gathering speed all the time.

They were spinning like two very thick smoke-rings. The smaller one went back above the dead centre of the other one and became part of it.

Then as the object was spinning, it appeared to take shape very much like someone forming something on a potter's wheel. It became a classic saucer shape.

It became solid to look at. It had an opaque, glassy surface that reflected light, and it was still slightly spinning.

"By this time I was shattered. Sylvia was frightened and trying to pull me indors, so I asked her to go upstairs and give me an old pair of binoculars, because I thought it would give her something to think about and take her mind off things.

Not that the binoculars would have been of much use, anyway. When she was away millions of coloured lights appeared under the rim of the saucer. They were very rich crimson, gold and blue, such as you get from a firework.

"They began dispersing and when Sylvia came back there were just a few sparks underneath the rim of the object. Next a broken red or crimson line appeared on the saucer very close to the rim and began turning with the saucer.

It just hung there in the sky....a perfectly black sky with no moon or stars to distract you. After a few minutes the light which had been expanding and contracting behind the saucer began to get dimmer and dimmer.

It became so dim in the end that you couldn't really make out what was there. Eventually the light disappeared completely, and there was no sign of the saucer at all.

"Then the red, star-like object appeared again near the saucer. It flashed red, white again for some seconds. Then, from a standing start, it just shot back in the direction from which it had come and disappeared over the horizon."

He reckoned the whole episode took seven or eight minutes. Afterwards, they dashed over the road to his in-laws' house, but there was nothing to see by then. They were up until three in the morning, wondering what might happen.

He made it clear that neither he nor his wife had been drinking. It was suggested that the red light was at the steelworks at Margam, but he said it was in the wrong direction and he was familiar with it anyway. He also ruled out the moon behind the clouds as he had seen that hundreds of times, and a helicopter.

Source: Western Mail 1970.