United Kingdom · 23 January 1974

Cader Bronwen, 1974

Reported

Three independent arms of the British state - police, MoD and the national geological survey - generated records for the same minute of the same night, and the seismograph trace is a hard dated instrumented datum.

Where
Cader Bronwen, Berwyn Mountains, near Llandrillo, North Wales
When
23 January 1974
Who reported it
Mass witnesses across northern Wales and north-west England; a nurse who drove up the mountain; North Wales Police search parties
Entities described
UNKNOWN
Described as
NONE. No official document records any description of a body or being.
Handled as
INVESTIGATED / EXPLAINED
Evidence class
GOV-1

What the record resolves

Nothing on record

The official file contains no description. What circulates comes from somewhere else.

No official document records any description of a body or being.

The record

An official file preserves that a report was made and examined. It does not, by itself, establish what was seen.

UNKNOWN

Part of the chain is attached. The rest is still being retrieved.

What is not settled

The official explanation is coherent and well evidenced: a magnitude 3.5 earthquake coinciding with a bright meteor, with possible earthquake lights; the quake was far too small to leave a crash crater. The recovered-bodies strand is entirely unsourced in official records and should be treated as folklore attached to a real geophysical event.

All cases Browse the forms