Ripperston Farm sits on the exposed clifftops above St Brides Bay, a few miles south of Broad Haven. In 1977 it was worked by Billie Coombs, who lived in a cottage there with his wife Pauline and their children. Over that spring and summer the family reported a run of events that made them, for a time, the most interviewed household in west Wales.
The first odd thing was the cattle. On 15 April, while Billie and his son Clinton were busy in the milking parlour, sixteen heifers disappeared from a stockyard whose bolts were still tied shut with twine. They were found later at Lower Broadmoor, a neighbouring farm, unsettled and giving little milk. Nine days later, on the evening of 24 April, Pauline saw a figure standing at the window: about seven feet tall, in a silver suit, with no eyes or nose she could make out, and lit by a glow around it. The window rattled though the night was still. She rang the investigator Randall Jones Pugh, and by the time police arrived the figure had gone. In May two of the Coombs girls said they watched a silver, square-headed figure walk slowly across the clifftop fields and pass through a hedge and a barbed wire fence without breaking them.
The family also described their cars and television failing repeatedly, and in late June two men in grey-blue suits and polished shoes turning up in a strange-looking car to ask where Pauline was. Pauline reported her last sight of the silver figure in February 1978, this time without its helmet and with long fair hair. The story is usually read now as a mixture of genuine fear, rumour and pranks: Glyn Edwards of Milford Haven later said he had walked about in a borrowed protective suit that year. Whatever the mix, the Coombs family paid a heavy price in attention for what they said they saw.
Comments