S05 Episode 10: In the Shadow of the Mountain (RERUN)

have featured in the show. However, if I was going to take one story and adapt it for TV, I always felt there was something quietly compelling about the following episode that was perfect for television. The other world of Welsh mythology, known as an Oven, is said to be populated with a vast array of creatures, including fairies and serpents. It is also said that there is one place, more than any other where the bridge between our world and

there is at its thinnest. That place is the Berwin Mountains. This is Unexplained, Season five, episode ten, in the Shadow of the Mountain. The Berwin Mountains have always been a liminal place, a place caught between worlds where prehistoric humans once roamed and bizarre tales of high strangeness are woven into the land. Caught between the Welsh wilds of Snowdonia to the west and the border lands of Wales and

England to the east. It is a place where myth and magic simmer beneath the surface, where fact and fiction blur, hinting at something more. All cultures talk of other worlds, places beyond the one we know, and Welsh mythology is no different. Often, such places like Kerr, the Sumerian land of the Dead, or Hades of Greek mythology, are distinctly separate from the realm of the living. These were depictions of the afterlife, lands that only the dead could truly inhabit.

The other world of Welsh mythology, or ar Noon, as it is known, is something quite different, not so much another plain, but another dimension, coexisting with ours and populated with other living creatures existing in their own right. Ar Noon, also called anothern thought to derive from the Welsh word meaning deep in English, features prominently in the four branches of the Mabinogi, a collection of stories in prose dating back to the eleventh century, considered to be the earliest

of its kind in British literature. In the First Branch, ar Noon is depicted as a paradisical land, ruled over by a king named our Own, and located somewhere in the Kingdom of DevD, a former region of what is now southwest Wales. In the ancient poem prethee Anoven the Spoils of anothern thought to have originated sometime around nine hundred see an early iteration of the mythical legend, King

Arthur travels across the sea to this mysterious place. There during his quest in search of a magical cauldron, we learn that Arnoun is also home to a race of fairyfolk, and in the Welsh epic Cadgothi, in which the magician Gwydion does battle with King Arone of Arnoun, the citizens of the mystical land are depicted as something altogether different.

They were wide moored beasts bearing a hundred heads and black groined toads bearing a hundred claws, or in other cases, mottled, ridged serpents with a hun hundred souls trapped inside the folds of their skin. Are Noon is variously depicted as being located on an island or somewhere deep in the earth, with a small number of gateways to this other world said to be scattered across the four corners of the land. Over time, however, it became increasingly associated with the North

of Wales. Writing in Wales and Arthurian Legend, Roger Loomis declares, in Arthur's time and before that, the people of South Wales regarded North Wales as pre eminently the land of the fairy. In the popular imagination, that distant country was the abode of giants, monsters, magicians, and all the creatures of enchantment. Out of it came the fairies on their visits to the sunny lands of the South. And curiously, there is one place more than any other where, it

is said, the bridge between our world and theirs. At its thinnest. That place is the Berwin Mountains. You're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. In the evening of May tenth, nineteen seventy three, a young couple were sitting in a car in Pike Hill, near Oldham, in the northwest of England, when a strange craft came into

view in the sky. The couple described it as being like a helicopter, complete with an exaggerated dome shaped top and beams of red, green and white light shooting out from underneath it. They watched it hover for a moment over the hill before it rotated slowly, shot up to one hundred or so feet and then disappeared. Around fifty similar sightings were seen over the next few months across

central and northwest England. They were always the same, a helicopter seen moving slowly but with purpose, as if it was looking for something. With no official record of anything flying in the areas at the time, local police forces speculated that the mysterious craft was likely part of a criminal enterprise running iliced errands from London. Others suggested the helicopters were in fact delivering undercover CIA operatives drafted in by the UK government to try and destabilize the British

trade union movement. It had been a fraught few years as the government battled with rising inflation and a global oil crisis, in turn bringing them into conflict with the National Union of Miners overstagnating wages in the coal industry. After a series of strikes and stalemates, with coal power accounting for roughly two thirds of the country's electricity. The government made the drastic decision to impose a three day week, restrictly the use of electricity to only three consecutive days

of the working week. It was for many an unsettling and unusual time that seemed to manifest even more unusual events. On January fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, police forces throughout Central and North England were put on alert for a rogue helicopter seen moving about in the area. Three days later, police received a report from an anonymous caller of a single bright light seen moving over the moors to the

south of the peak district, but nothing is found. Perhaps it is only in hindsight that we might determine these sightings to have any significance, when in fact such fleeting accounts were little more than over active imaginations tapping into the nation's troubled psyche at a time of such unsettling uncertainty. But soon upon the slopes of the Berwin Mountain's highest peak, something substantial would take place, a strange and mysterious event

that remains to this day unexplained. In the evening of Wednesday, January twenty third, nineteen seventy four, Anne Williams was settling down to watch TV when she spotted something in the darkness outside her front room window. Williams lived in brough Dinham, situated at the northern edge of the Berwin Mountains, where its rolling foothills could easily be seen from out the back of the house. It was a reasonably clear sky that night, a wash with stars, but only the slightest

hint of the new moon visible. But what Anne had seen was a bright light high up above the hills that was steadily dropping down from out of the sky, a lengthy golden tail shooting out from behind it. She watched, stunned for what seemed like minutes as it fell closer and closer toward the ground, pulsing as it went, until finally it disappeared behind the hills. It was followed by what sounded like an explosion, and then the ground began

to shake. Police Sergeant Gwynn Williams was at home a few miles to the north in the town of Corwen when he heard the explosion. Too. Moments later, he felt the floor shift underneath him and watched with alarm as the walls began to shake. Rattling a large mirror that was threatening to jump off its chain. Seconds later, Williams was out of the house and running into the street,

convinced that a lorry must have crashed near by. Outside, Williams looked in vain for any sign of an accident, but saw only the deathly quiet of the street, then the sound of another front door opening, and then another, as more and more neighbors appeared in their doorways with a mixture of fear and confusion in their faces as they looked out towards the mountains behind him. Following their gaze, Sergeant Williams turned to see a soft yellowish glow cresting

a distant peak. It hung there for a moment before it faded away and the night returned down. At the Gwynedd Police station in Colwyn Bay, six officers and three support staff frantically worked the phones as more and more calls came in. One officer on duty calling avant Landithlo also reported hearing the huge explosion and that lights were flashing on the slopes of Cader Bronwyn, another of the

Berwin's peaks. It was his belief that something had just crashed onto the mountain with police opening a major incident lock. A flurry of calls went out to nearby Raf Valley Airfield and air traffic control towers, while local ambulance services were put on high alert. In Flanderfel village. Just prior to the explosion, Pat Evans was sat in her living room with her daughters Diane and Tina, enjoying the latest episode of alf Garnet sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.

It was just after eight thirty pm when she got up to make a cup of tea in the kitchen and was also startled by the huge bang, with the ground shaking beneath her. A distressed Diane and Tina shouted through from the living room what the hell was that? They asked. Running outside, the three of them looked out across the hills but found only the usual still night air.

But as numerous neighbors began appearing in the street, each sharing their own account of the bizarre event, it was clear to Pat, an experienced nurse, that some kind of aircraft had just crashed. Realizing how long it would take for any help to arrive, Pat jumped onto the phone and spent the next hour trying to get through to the police to offer any help she could. In the meantime, the sightings coming in to Gwyned Police station were beginning

to get a little more unusual. One witness described seeing a bright red light like coal fire emanating from the object, as well as lights above and to the right, but also a light moving to the bottom of it that changed from white to yellow and back again, while another clain to have seen what looked like a large fire

burning on the mountainside. Finally, at roughly nine point thirty pm, Pat was eventually patched through to Colwyn Bay Police station, where she was thanked for her offer of help and invited to drive up to the potential crash site to see what she could do. Pat replaced the receiver and looked across to Diane and Tina, both of whom were also trained in first aid. Right she said, let's get

in the car. As Pat and her daughters made their way up through the narrow, winding country lanes, as the darkling Berwin Mountains loomed up above them to the east, Diane and Tina were suddenly gripped with fear at what they were about to find. A light rain had begun to fall as Pat did her best to reassure them, keeping one eye on the pitch black lane as she feverishly scanned the horizon for any sign of the downed plane.

It was approaching ten PM when the car reared up into the top of the hills and the road began to level out all about them. What in daylight had been a vibrant, snow topped moorland seemed now like a vast ocean of black underneath the star filled sky. There, said one of her daughters, suddenly pointing out the windscreen toward a strange, diffuse light in the distance. It seemed to be emanating from the slopes of Cadder Berwin, the mountain's highest peak, like a giant, hazy ball that was

glowing and pulsating. As Pat recalled later, there were no flame shooting or anything like that. It was very uniform, round in shape, and there were other smaller lights dotted around it too. Pat continued on for a few hundred yards, but was unable to get any closer, and it was much too far away to attempt and approach on foot across the treacherous moorland. Unable to go any further, Pat

parked up the car and together. The three of them sat and watched in amusement as the light continued to pulse, then changed color from white to red, to yellow and back again, knowing only that whatever it was they were looking at, it was no crashed aeroplane. After watching for fifteen minutes, with nothing else to be done, Pat spun

the car around and returned home. Earlier that night, four miles away, on the other side of the peculiar light witnessed by Pat and her daughters, fourteen year old Hugh Lloyd was at home on his parents farm, relaxing in front of the TV with his sisters and neighbor Enoch Davies. Hugh's parents were out for the evening, having heard the explosive noise and felt the earth shaking. Like many others in the vicinity that night, Hugh's first instinct was to

run outside and check on the animals. Relieved to find them surprisingly calm under the circumstances, Hugh stood ponderously for a moment in the cold air, scanning the surrounding hills, before making his way back inside. Thirty minutes later, there was a knock at the door, and anxious Hugh opened it to find what he assumed was a police officer standing ominously silhouetted in the doorway, while another officer sat

in a park police car behind him. The man introduced himself as a police inspector, explaining that he'd driven up from Barmouth to investigate a possible air crash and was looking for a guide and a farm vehicle to help get him close to the site of impact. With a mix of trepidation and excitement, Hugh was more than happy to offer up his parents' landrover. However, since he was too young to drive, neighbor Enoch volunteered to tell them

up to the farm road. It was only later that Hugh and Enoch realized how strange it was that the officer had arrived only thirty minutes after the explosion, having said he'd come up from Barmouth, a town almost two hours drive away. A short time later, Hugh, Enoch and the officers were making their way further up the mountain through the pitch black, straining for any glimpse of something unusual,

toward a destination that none were entirely sure of. It was about twenty past nine when, just as they were approaching the end of the public road, Enoch spotted a car up ahead, locking the gateway to the farm track beyond. After briefly inspecting the vehicle, with no one around to claim it, the group swiftly pushed it to the side of the road and continued on their way, with Hugh

taking over driving duties. The land drover continued up the track, its bright beams flashing across tufts of snow and heather as they bobbled over the rough to rain toward the slopes of Caderbronwyn. Despite claiming to be unfamiliar with the area, the inspector pointed suddenly to a spot up ahead and

told Hugh to pull over. It was just approaching ten p m when the four of them stepped out into the freezing air on the lookout for any sign of the apparent crash sight, and that's when they saw it, a strong white light down on the edge of the valley below, glowing like a halo above a small patch of woodland. The group watched it for a good fifteen seconds before the inspector ordered them back into the car

and ordered Hugh to try and get them closer. They'd barely made a few hundred yards, however, when a sharp hiss came through the inspector radio, followed by a voice instructing him to leave the mountain and return first thing in the morning. It was odd, thought Hugh that they would decide to turn back then, having got so close to what they'd been looking for, but with no desire to argue, he turned the land, drove around and headed back to the farm, passing a police car on the way.

Hugh pulled up and the officers talked for a moment before that car also turned and followed them back to the farm. With Hugh and Enoch returning home, the police headed off back down the mountain. That night. A three man crew was also dispatched from the Arif Valley Mountain Rescue Team, arriving in Flandithlo just after midnight. However, after speaking to local police, the team were asked to stand

down until the following morning. Back at precisely eight thirty eight p m. Just over three hundred miles away in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Global Seismology Unit of the Institute of Geological Sciences picked up an unusual reading a tremour emanating from the region of the Berwin Mountains, registering between three to four

on the Richter scale. The following morning, as news of the strange event began to circulate, a journalist contacted the institute's senior scientific officer, Doctor Roy lilwall asking for his thoughts whether it was a meteor that had crashed into the mountain. Doctor Lilwaugh was taken back in surprise at the suggestion, since any meteor causing that larger tremour would have had to have been several tons in mass, and as such would have left little doubt that it was responsible.

The Raf Valley Rescue team set out at first light the following morning and were joined by a small group of local police officers. With a fresh dusting of snow, the search party made their way toward the spot where Hugh and the inspector had been searching the night before.

Despite the assistance of two aircraft carrying out a photographic survey of the area from above, they find nothing to account for the mysterious events of the night before, and shortly before two point fifteen pm the search was called off. By this point it had also been determined that no aircraft was spotted on radar descending into the region, and none officially at least had been declared missing elsewhere on

the mountain. That morning, doctor Ron Madison and Deniron Evans, scientists from nearby Keele University, encouraged by reports of a possible impact of a celestial object, stumbled across the moor in search of meteor fragments. However, despite uncovering signs recent disturbance on the surface of the soil, with the snow

continuing to fall, their efforts also came to nothing. Later that night, in the village of Gebowen, located just to the east of the Berwin Mountains across the border in England, resident David Upton had just stepped out his back door when he noticed an unusually bright object in the sky. After grabbing some binoculars from inside and yelling for his sister and mother to join him, the three of them took it in turns to keep tabs on the object.

It was only when they raised the binoculars to their eyes that they were able to make out the shape of it, like a disk that appeared to be split into four distinct colors, red, green, yellow, and purple. After ten minutes spent observing it, the object eventually disappeared behind

a cloud. Over the next few days, as confusion reigned amongst local residents as to just what exactly had taken place, six strangers slowly began making their way through the many local villages, keen to get first hand eyewitness accounts of the event. Traveling door to door, the individuals introduced themselves as part of a British geological survey team and spoke to over two hundred locals, asking what exactly they'd seen or heard, and whether they'd been alarmed or frightened by

the experience. Taking together the size of the seismic activity, the sightings of a burning object seen falling from the sky, and the lack of aircraft debris, scientists eventually came to the conclusion that the explosion and resulting tremor had been the result of an earthquake, which, in a feat of extraordinary coincidence, just so happened to occur at precisely the same time that a meteor had fallen from the sky.

Many sightings of peculiar light seen on the mountains that night were later passed off as witnesses confusing the lamps of a group of poachers whose abandoned car had been found by police with something more otherworldly. Before long, however, British eufologists were beginning to question the likelihood of those explanations,

and more strange stories were beginning to crop up. Reports of soldiers entering a local farm yard surely after the explosion was heard requesting to use the phone because their radio receiver had broken, despite the fact that no military personnel was said to have been involved in the search that night, and one man, Ken Houghton of better Surcoid in North Wales, claimed to have watched what he described as a luminous sphere roughly five hundred feet across, traveling

at speed at around fifteen hundred feet, dropped straight down into the sea. It was some months later when prominent UFO researcher Jenny Randalls, who would later become director of the British UFO Research Association or BOUFORA, received a peculiar package in the post, consisting of a typed letter and a cassette tape. It had been sent to her by a mysterious organization calling itself the Aerial Phenomena Inquiry Network

or ARPEN for short. The letter outlined the alarming suggestion that what had crashed in the mountains that night was actually a flying saucer, and both it and its crew, described as tall humanoid aliens, had been extracted from the area by a specialist ARP and team who arrived at

the scene soon after. After loading the tape into her cassette player, Randalls sat and listened to the bizarre contents, beginning with an introduction from a man with an American accent calling himself J. T. Anderson, Supreme Commander of Arpen. It was followed by a series of TV and radio broadcasts about UFOs, spliced in with terrified voices warning about

the dangers of UFOs and their hostile nature. Over the next few years, as the UFO idea gained traction, Randall's interest also grew, so much so that she even moved to the area in the nineteen seventies to find out more for herself. There she encountered locals who claimed, despite written evidence to the contrary, that there actually had been

a military presence on the mountain that night. In the early nineteen nineties, Margaret Frye, working for the bufora magazine, interviewed nurse Pat Evans about that most peculiar of knights, But this time there was a new detail in her story. Shortly after seeing the strange light at the top of the mountain, Pat allegedly now claimed that she and her daughters were confronted by soldiers. Having told her that the road was closed, Pat was ordered to turn round and

leave the area immediately. Shortly after the article was published, a panicking Pat called Margaret, demanding to know why she'd added this extra detail to her story, because she hadn't said anything of the sort to her. Confused, Margaret consulted her notes from the interview and was surprised to find clearly written there Pat's recollection of the soldiers. Worried that she might have got something wrong, she then spoke to

another researcher who'd accompanied her to the interview. She was also convinced that Pat had indeed included this in her story. Could they both have imagined it somehow, some kind of wish fulfillment, perhaps, while, as some have suggested, had Pat felt suddenly compelled and perhaps persuaded to retract this detail. To this day, Pat maintains that it was never part of her story. Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith, all other elements of The podcast,

including the music, are also produced by me Richard mclin smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own

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