January 4, 2005
The last part of the journey was by a rickety old bus, surrounded by mostly elderly white folk and a few redneck youngsters.
On arrival at the little town, I headed for a bar and soon got talking to some of the locals. Most of them were only too keen to talk about the spooky goings-on of the past few weeks.
Former miner Eli Jenkins, 77, sipped his beer and wheezed occasionally as he talked of his experiences. He and his wife were woken by the strange phenomenon late at night, a few weeks before Christmas.
"My wife woke me up and straight away I heard this awful wailing noise," Mr Jenkins told me. "It went up and down, up and down in pitch. I've never heard anything like it in my life. We looked out of the window, and there were all these blue flashing lights all over the place."
His friend Bob Thomas lives in the same street, and he related a similar tale. 79-year old Mr Thomas was terrified by eerie blue flashes outside his window.
"I was watching telly with the sound up loud, as I'm a bit deaf," Mr Thomas explained. "I didn't hear the noise at first - it was those lights through the window that I noticed first. My wife was frightened out of her wits, and the dog was going crazy. I looked out of the window, and there were all these men in black uniforms coming along the street. I shut the curtains and hid in the middle room - it was like something out of Doctor Who!"
Both men agreed that the lights had headed towards Cwmaman, so I followed their directions and set off in pursuit of the truth.
Many of the villagers mentioned seeing the men in black uniforms shortly after the blue lights first appeared. This seems to be one of several common theme among UFO sightings, and two successful Hollywood films have been made about the supposed adventures of these "Men in Black." Another feature of UFO reports is that of cattle mutilation, but locals laughed off my suggestion that anything like that might have occurred in the wake of these phenomena.
"I don't know anything about mutilated cattle," Mr Davies chuckled. "Although I heard strange rumours about Mike Griffiths and a sheep a few years ago."
The National Assembly for Wales has no information on UFO sightings, and nobody from Rhondda Cynon Taf was available to answer my phone calls (when I eventually found the one spot in the village which has decent mobile reception.) As I walked back down the narrow terraced road the strains of Mr Hollingsworth's banjo seemed to follow me.
A slack-jawed youth asked me for a cigarette as I passed him. Pinch-faced, hollow-eyed and expressionless, he bore a strange resemblance to creatures described by UFO contactees. I couldn't help wondering whether the breeding experiments said to take place between humans and the extra-terrestrials have borne fruit.I was glad to get on the rickety old bus again and head back to civilisation.
(All names have been changed.)
To add to the creepy atmosphere I heard a banjo as I walked along the main road, but was told by one of the residents that it was just a local musician, a Mr Hollingsworth. That didn't make me feel any more comfortable.
Eventually I found myself at Cwmaman Hall, a recently-restored miners' institute which houses a cinema, gym, function rooms and a bar. Once again, the people were eager to speak about their experiences.
The blue lights and weird noises seem to have a regular feature of village life for the past few months. "They start in the early evenings and sometimes go on until the early hours," I was told by Jeff Davies, a 47-year old unemployed carpenter. "We're getting used to them now. In fact, if they don't turn up, we get a bit worried."
Local people have also started going missing in the wake of these strange manifestations. Mr Davies has noticed a common link between the victims of these mysterious abductions.