“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

These are the words of British science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke.

Sheep mutilations in Ceredigion, mysterious lights in the night sky at Clarach Bay and strange shapes on the horizon near Pwllheli are evidence to some that the latter poss­ibility is more likely.

One cold winter morning, lifelong Ciliau Aeron resident Helena Worth arose early to let her puppy out into the garden and noticed something in the sky over the Aeron Valley.

“So, on 11 December 2018, it was six o’clock in the morning and, because it was winter, it was pitch-black outside,” she recalled.

“Then I noticed, at the other side of the valley – which is about ¾ of a mile away – a very bright white, yellow light.

“I knew there were houses there and my initial thought was that there was a house on fire.

“I wondered whether I should drive over and find out what was going on or phone the fire brigade.

“And as I was deciding, the bright light started to move. It was circular, like a sphere, and it was hovering until it started to move to the west very slowly but in a straight-line trajectory.

“Then it stopped above some houses, and it was there for a few seconds. I thought I was seeing things but then it started moving back to the east in the same straight line.

“It was moving at between, I would guess, 20 and 30 miles per hour.

“And as it was moving to the east it started dripping – like molten lava was dripping down from it.

“And just before it went out of sight, the craft turned a bright red colour and disappeared behind the trees.”

Helena, aged 41, is a self-described UFO-ologist and ‘amateur scientist’.

She told the Cambrian News: “There is far, far more evidence of extra-terrestrial life visiting earth than there is of God.

“Do people rubbish those who believe in God? Where is the evidence for God?

“I haven’t really spoken outwardly until now but I’m reaching an age where I don’t really give a crap what people think anymore.”

Helena has spent her entire life looking up at the stars.

As a young girl, she and her childhood friend would lie on a quiet road near her home and stargaze for hours on end.

After leaving Ceredigion to see out her studies in marketing and economics at the University of Reading, she has since returned, got married and given birth to two children – who are now teenagers attending Ysgol Gyfun Aberaeron school.

But despite all the changes in her life, she has never stopped looking at the stars nor imagining what sort of life could exist in the far away galaxies and planets she observes from her telescope – her prized possession.

“I look up more than I look ahead,” she said. “The vast majority of people go about their day looking straight ahead, but I’ll be looking up.

“I’ve been interested in UFO-logy since a very young age. I’m very passionate about it.

“My friend and I got used to seeing shooting stars and satell­ites – and we got to know what was normal and what wasn’t. So, my interest all started from there.

“And then when I got older, I got really interested in astrophysics and astronomy. But I wasn’t clever enough to study those subjects at university.

“But I’d read books by Professor Stephen Hawking and Professor Brian Cox as well as other famous scientists.

“And I just love looking at the stars more than anything.”

Helena, who works for Ceredigion County Council, said she saw another similar orb-like spacecraft – which was bigger than a star but smaller than the moon – as she was driving back home from Aberaeron this year.

She said it got smaller and smaller as it moved west and then blinked out. She said it could not be a satell­ite because it moved freely rather than in one direction, couldn’t have been lightning in fair weather and couldn’t have been a meteor because it didn’t burn up in the atmosphere or descend towards earth.

“So, in my mind I know it was something very, very unusual and if I were to take a guess it would be an extra-terrestrial craft,” she added.

But Helena is far from the only person who has experienced UFO sightings in mid Wales.

Helena made sure to log her sightings with The Swansea UFO Network (SUFON) – an offshoot of US group Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

Within SUFON’s archives are thousands of UFO sightings – and many from residents of Ceredigion.

As the Cambrian News reported last year, Katie Moore took a photograph of the sunset over Llanrhystud while on a walk with her friends – only to notice a strange, saucer-like shape above the horizon in her photo, as seen above.

Perhaps the best remembered tale in Ceredigion became the focus of a documentary by presenter and historian Mark Olly.

It tells the tale of one farmer living in Llanilar who claims to have seen a spacecraft crash-land into trees nearby his land, only to fly off again – leaving shiny metal-like debris on the ground, some of which was recovered before the authorities cleared up all the evidence.

The database includes accounts of a possible abduction in Ciliau Aeron, an encounter with a so-called humanoid in Aberystwyth and a woman being spooked by a strange oval light moving over Clarach.

A report from 1975 tells the story of Trevor P from Machynlleth, a boy at the time, who claims to have seen a large translucent dome containing two moving forms that looked to consist of a jelly-like substance.

He was out on a family walk at the time – and no one believed his story. In the following days he suffered blindness, speech impairment and psychosis – and had to receive psychiatric treatment.

Another entry from Barmouth in 1922 reads: “John Morris, steersman of the local lifeboat, and William James saw an object fall into the sea ‘with extraordinary slowness’, so slowly that it was thought to be a plane. A boat was sent out, but nothing was found. No aircraft was reported missing.”

Another one documents the account of John Greenless from Pwllheli which said: “He went to the window and noticed an orange light in the sky approximately over Barmouth across Cardigan Bay. It remained stationary for about 30 seconds before moving to the right (south).

“He decided to view the object through binoculars and was surprised to find that the light was actually three lights in a triangular formation.

“About two seconds after viewing it, the object suddenly moved away at speed along the coast further to the south in the direction of Aberystwyth.”

It is easy to see why so many people become fascinated by the subject after hearing Helena’s stories and looking through these accounts.

“I believe there must be intelligent life out there,” Helena continued.

“We live in the Milky Way galaxy which contains about 100 billion stars which are similar to our Sun – and each one of those stars will contain planets that orbit them and each one of those will contain a moon or moons that orbit them.

“So, when people think about the possibility of other life in the universe, they think about planets that orbit suns and stars.

“But people forget that there are also natural satellites, moons, which could also contain life. I just think it’s inevitable there is life out there.

“Yes, I know that some of these stars are hundreds or thousands of lightyears away, but intelligent life has found a way of travelling to us – maybe reaching the speed of light. We don’t know if they have developed such technology.

“And even if they haven’t managed to reach the speed of light maybe they’re getting here via wormholes or time warps – something as large and heavy in mass as a black hole for example.

“They warp space time because gravity is so intense, and this has been proven by science – so in certain places in the universe time speeds up and in other places it slows down.

“And also, there’s a possibility of ultra-terrestrials – what we would think of as aliens – living on planet Earth but out of sight.

“The vast majority of UFO-logists believe that aliens are living under our oceans but out of sight.

“And the reason we think this is there have been thousands upon thousands of sightings of crafts emerging from our oceans and the vast majority of these are rising on the east and west coast of the US.”

It was striking how much of the information Helena provided focused on the US – where the UFO movement first originated and where sightings first became the focus of the media.

The apparent US-centrism of discussions about UFOs is often written off as proving only that it is an isolated cultural phenomenon, deriving from the imaginations of its famously conspiratorial, science-fiction obsessed citizens.

Others have put forward the possibility UFOs provided an easy distraction for the cold-war US administrations to test weapons. But Helena says that could work the other way too.

After questioning, she said UFO-logy first emerging in the US means its population learned what to look for to correctly identify an extra-terrestrial and built up a resulting counter-cultural movement which gained popularity – whereas the rest of the world is only catching up.

But she also gave examples – which gained international news coverage – of discoveries that ancient indigenous communities, and even native Americans, had produced cave art which featured alien-like creatures.

She referred to the Hessdalen lights of unknown origin which can be witnessed in the skies over rural central Norway. They too have become an object of fascination for UFO-logists – including many from Scandinavian nations – who say they are caused by extraterrestrial forces.

She said people from around the world go on holiday there to see what they believe are UFOs – and suggested scientists are permanently stationed there to study the lights and determine their origin. Of course, there are plenty of scientific explanations for them beyond the presence of UFOs – but there is no consensus yet.

“If you want to see a UFO, you head there,” she said.

“If you go there on holiday for a couple of weeks, you’re 90 per cent likely to see one.”

She then raised what’s known as ancient alien theory, which claims early human feats of technology and architecture like Stonehenge in the UK and the pyramids in Egypt are constructions far too advanced to have been produced by early civilisations.

“Humans couldn’t have built these things,” she said.

“These stones are too heavy, and we didn’t have the technology to build them – could they have been built by aliens or were humans given the technology by aliens to build these monuments?”

The reason the Cambrian News first spoke with Helena was because she contacted us to say recent sheep ‘mutilations’, covered in our feature on big cats in the Cambrian Mountains, were simply UFO attacks.

“With cattle and sheep mutilations it’s always very precise cut marks or something an animal couldn’t do,” she said.

“And there often aren’t any footprints up to the animal, so there is no evidence humans are responsible so maybe it could have come from above.”

When asked whether aliens attack humans, she said maybe they do. She said people go missing every day and are never found.

She insisted our governments are trying to hide any evidence from us.

“The US government is trying to cover up the fact that UFOs are visiting earth – 100 per cent,” she added.

“There have always been government departments looking at these sightings and scientifically researching all these sightings

“It’s the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in the Pentagon that researches this and if the government doesn’t believe in aliens visiting earth, then why on Earth do they have AATIP researching these things?

“When people say they have seen UFOs they say it was Russia or some weapons being tested and that’s not fair on the people who put these reports in because it makes them feel like they’re stupid or maybe they’re seeing things.

“Because we’re not stupid and we’re not seeing things.”

When asked why governments would hide the existence of aliens from the population, she said: “They don’t want mass hysteria, they’re worried about what certain religious people would think and they don’t want to admit it because they have in their possession crashed crafts which they can perform valuable research on – and create their own weapons by refurbishing them.”

Before our interview ended, Helena returned to the subject of her sighting from her garden in Ciliau Aeron.

“I did try to investigate my own sighting,” she said. “I went to try and find some of the molten lava – which might have ended up as metal – so I went out on my bike to search for it.

“But maybe the Men in Black got their first.”