All language subtitles for Britains.X-Files.S01E03.1080p.NOW.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-RAWR_track3_[eng]

I'm Tim Tate. I've been
an investigative journalist

for almost half a century.

And what I specialise in
is exploring official archives,

unearthing dusty old files

from government departments,

spy agencies, the police.

The strange figure looked
very much like an astronaut.

And what I have found
in those collections,

both in Britain
and in the United States,

is a truly extraordinary
collection of real life X-Files.

True Cryptids, like the
Yeti and the Mongolian Death Worm...

Death Worm, Death Worm...

And those files
disclose investigations

by the police, by governments,

by spy agencies.

Shortly after
that transmission,

Captain Schaffer's radio went dark.

To examine and uncover the truth

about phenomena
which are truly out of this world.

It's a great piece of branding,
the death ray.

Everyone knows where
they stand with a death ray.

Our first entry takes us
back to a simpler time.

A time when it was still possible
to believe in magic.

Do you believe in fairies?

If not, is that because
you have never seen them?

But would you believe in fairies
if you saw them with your own eyes?

The story begins
in the summer of 1917.

Two young cousins,

Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith,

were staying at Elsie's
family home in Cottingley,

which was then a little village

on the outskirts of Bradford
in West Yorkshire.

Elsie was 16, Francis was 9,

and both liked to play
in Cottingley Beck,

a little stream
which ran through the wooded valley

and right beside the end of
the Wright family garden.

But Elsie's mother, Polly,

didn't like Francis
playing in the beck.

Frances' daughter, Christine,

tells of the extraordinary
events that followed.

And her mother
used to come home tired,

and got angry with her,

for always continually getting

her shoes and stockings wet.

And so then one day, she said,

"Why do you go down to the beck?
What takes you down there?"

And she said, without thinking,
"I go to see the fairies."

Suspecting the comment
was a child's made-up excuse,

Polly told Frances
that she couldn't tell tales.

At which point, Elsie told her
mother she's not making it up.

"I see them too."

Evidently, this remark was greeted

with some scepticism
by Elsie's mother

because the girls then decided

that they would take photographs
of fairies down by the beck.

Elsie borrowed
her father's camera,

and she and Frances
went back down to the beck.

And when they came back,
they said

they had photographed the fairies.

When the negatives
and the prints came back...

...they appeared to bear out

Elsie and Francis's story.

One of the images
showed Francis lying on the ground,

surrounded by
little dancing fairies,

figures in diaphanous clothing

who were dancing
around a young girl.

Two weeks later,

Elsie borrowed
her dad's camera again

and went back down to the beck

and, this time,
Francis snapped Elsie

sitting on the ground

with a little gnome
dancing beside her head.

Arthur Wright, Elsie's father,

thought it very suspicious

but couldn't work out
how the images had been made.

But Elsie's mother
was more receptive.

She was a member of the
Theosophy or Spiritualist Society.

And she took the photographs
to a meeting.

The meeting to which
Polly took the photographs...

...had a subject for the night

and that subject was "Fairy Life".

Victorians really loved

the idea of fairies
in the countryside.

And one of the reasons for that,

and perhaps this is particularly
relevant to Bradford,

was the increasing,
the growing sense that

the countryside
was disappearing into industry.

Fairy lore was just huge
in this period.

It's not that long since
the play "Peter Pan" first opened,

with Tinker Bell, the fairy.

Pantomimes with fairies
were kind of an annual event.

Well, Polly's photographs
caused a stir.

And soon they were
brought to the attention of

the Theosophical Society's
president.

Edward Gardner was
a prolific writer on the subject

and travelled internationally

to give lectures
about the society,

about its beliefs,
about its theories.

Gardner was so
excited by the photographs

that he took them to the best known
supporter of spiritualism

in the world at that time,
Arthur Conan Doyle,

the author of Sherlock Holmes.

Don't you, for one moment,

suppose that
I am taking it upon myself

to say that
I am the inventor of spiritualism

or that I am even
the principal exponent of it.

There are many great mediums,

many great psychical researchers,

investigators of all sorts.

All that I can do is to be a
gramophone on the subject.

Conan Doyle's son, Kingsley,

had very sadly died

just towards
the end of the Great War

and so, you know,

he was already interested
in spiritualism.

When he heard
about these photos,

it's possible that
he also kind of wanted to

lean into the idea
that fairies were real.

Arthur Conan Doyle
was commissioned to write

um, articles on fairies

for the Christmas edition
of the Strand magazine.

I take it the new issue
of The Strand magazine is out,

containing another of
your slightly lurid tales.

- It is indeed.
- And what do you call this one?

I call it "A Scandal in Bohemia".

It's not a bad title, eh?

Although he gave
false names for the girls,

inevitably they were
tracked down.

And so suddenly,
she had people following her,

trying to get a photograph,
trying to talk to her,

and she had to slip out of
the house, back of the house,

go on the back streets
to get to school and avoid them.

The attention of the media

focused the spotlight of scepticism
on the charming story.

How could these photographs
of fairies be real?

So they were
sent to Kodak for analysis.

Well, what the experts were
looking for was a double exposure.

They were looking for the idea

that the plate had been
first exposed

as a photograph
of one of the girls

and then exposed
as a photograph of fairies.

That was the kind of faking
that they were thinking with.

And of course
they were able to rule that out.

But despite the doubts,

Conan Doyle's backing ensured

the status of the photographs
in the public mind.

His fame essentially sealed it.

These two photographs...

...because Conan Doyle
had endorsed them,

were in homes
up and down the land,

believed as absolute
cast-iron proof...

...that fairies had been
photographed.

What happens next

is what always happens
in these stories.

Interest died down.

The girls grew up, got married

and got on with their lives.

But the Cottingley fairies
didn't just disappear.

People were still intrigued
by what had happened.

And in the 1960s,

interest in the story piqued enough

for journalists to trace
Elsie and Frances

and ask them if they really
took the photographs of fairies.

The first time
journalists did this,

both Elsie and Frances said,

"Nope, the photos were real.

We really saw fairies.

We didn't fake anything."

The first crack
in the girls' bond of silence

came when Elsie suggested

that the fairies might be
photographs of her imagination.

But then Joseph Cooper,

an academic
who was interested in the story,

befriended Frances.

Joe Cooper came down,
spent the weekend with her,

and she said, Joe, "I've written
a secret part of my story".

So he didn't say anything.
That was okay. Um...

They went to bed as usual at
10 o'clock at night.

And next thing
she heard a sound downstairs.

And so she called down,
"Joe, what's wrong?"

And he called back up, "Francis,
very often I stay up at night.

I can't sleep too well.
Do you mind if I stay downstairs?"

She said,
"No, no, that's fine, that's fine."

Totally unsuspecting.

But he knew
where she kept her documents.

And she was totally trusting him,

not believing anything
would happen.

And two weeks later,

the Unexplained Magazine
had the whole story of the fix.

So what fiendishly clever trickery

did these two young girls
use to fool the world,

and no less a figure
than Arthur Conan Doyle

into believing that
there really were fairies

at the bottom of the garden.

They went about this
really systematically.

They created tracings from a book.

It was actually called
"Princess Mary's Gift Book."

She was very clever,
very artistic,

and she drew them,
cut them out beautifully,

tinted them,
and then when it was all ready,

they asked the father
to borrow the camera,

and then she artistically arranged
the fairies in front of her,

sticking the hat pins
on the back of the figures,

putting them into the grass

and very artistically arranged
in front of Francis,

so Francis was standing
like this on the bank,

looking at the camera,

and the first photograph was taken.

I don't think that
there are any bad actors here.

I think, in effect,
everybody played their part in this.

You have Francis,
who is the fairy experiencer.

You have Elsie,
who enjoyed the limelight

and enjoyed the attention
that these photos were garnering

and, you know, but we have
Elsie's glamour, in effect,

to thank for the reason why we're
talking about these photos now,

because Elsie was the one
with the creative talent,

the artistic talent,
enabling her to create these fairies

and produce the photos.

But there is one photograph

that is different from
all the others, both in style

and for the fact that
it features neither of the girls.

Totally different.

The others are solid paper.
You can see the paper,

you know, when you really look,
because it's solid.

But that last photograph,

the grasses are there,

and you can see
transparent figures.

You can see the grass is behind,
the grass is in front.

You can see one
beginning to appear.

See a tiny little face
on the right hand side,

that's peeping out of the grasses.

And my mother said,
"That's genuine.

That is real.
Those are the fairies I saw."

I really believe that
Frances did see fairies.

She gives a wonderful
description in her memoir.

She reports that, at that time,

she saw a leaf twirling,
without a breeze,

and later on
she sees a little man

that is twirling that leaf.

She also talks about little men
trooping over the branch,

over the beck on a willow branch

and this place, she comes
to take it for granted

that she goes there
and she sees these beings.

Today, the pictures
are categorised as a hoax

in the pages of the British X-Files.

But although there
may not have been any fairies,

is that really fair
on Frances and Elsie?

I don't think it was a hoax.

I think it was, and the girls
themselves said it: mischief.

And now mischief is
a very fairy quality.

I personally love the idea

that these two innocent girls

completely tricked Conan Doyle,

who clearly believed that
his own powers of reason

were magically akin to those of
his creation, Sherlock Holmes.

What a mind!

Sharp enough and brilliant enough

to outwit the great
Sherlock Holmes himself!

Our next file
takes us to the high seas,

where a cursed ship
roams the great oceans.

Its cargo? Nothing but bad luck.

The 17th century was the golden age

of the Dutch East India Company.

Sailing ships from the Netherlands

sailed the globe in search of trade.

Their determination
to make their fortune

meant taking risks
on the high seas,

and this inevitably led them
into danger.

But sailors are superstitious

and knew that
if they weren't careful,

they might anger
the gods of the sea

and summon up a deadly curse.

The Flying Dutchman is
a ship under a curse.

It's a curse brought on it

by the captain of the ship

who is, typically,
trying to round a point,

trying to make his way
through a storm

and makes a rash vow.

He swears that
he's going to round this point,

even if he has to keep trying
for the whole of eternity.

He swears that he's not going to
give in to the storm.

He says, "No, I'm going to make it.
I'm going to make it."

And, as a result of that curse,

he's doomed to keep trying
for ever and ever.

The earliest sightings
of the Flying Dutchman

were in travellogues,

and people were basically repeating

what they'd heard
sailors talking about

on board ship.

And yet this evolved,
in the 19th century,

with more of a backstory.

So that actually has a figure,

a character who becomes
Captain Vanderdecken,

and he's this damned sailor
of this sinful crew

who are forced to sail
around the world until doomsday.

Sightings of the ship,

vainly battling against the sea
in order to make port,

became common amongst sailors.

But the curse wasn't confined to

the captain and crew
of the Flying Dutchman.

Any living crew
on a genuine, real-life ship

who spotted the ghost ship

would become struck down,

would be killed or
condemned to devastation,

doom and destruction.

It's linked to the
disappearance of a ship

around the Cape of Good Hope.

And the story
elaborated from there,

it sort of existed in folklore

until the sort of late 18th century,

and then it started
to get picked up in literature.

Throughout the
18th and 19th centuries,

this myth grew and grew and grew.

It formed the basis
for supernatural tales

by novelists and poets,

and the German composer
Richard Wagner

composed an entire opera
based on the story.

The original story
was set in the 17th century

around the Cape of Good Hope,

a notoriously stormy area

in the southern tip
of South Africa.

However, since then,

sightings of the Flying Dutchman
have spread around the world

and into more modern times.

One of the examples I've found

was reported in the
New York newspaper in 1920s

and it referred to a sighting
by a British Navy,

Royal Navy convoy
during the First World War

and the mysterious appearance

of an additional ship
in that convoy.

What happened was
the convoy was then attacked

by German submarines

and again,
the person who had sighted it

on board his particular ship,

that was the only ship
that was destroyed.

And then after the conflict,

that ghost ship disappeared.

NARRATOR In 1886,

John Dalton contributed a story
to a book called

"The Cruise of Her Majesty's
Ship Bacchante."

In it, he described an encounter
with the Flying Dutchman.

But more extraordinary still

was the identity of one
of the witnesses.

One of the people who spotted
that infamous ghost ship

went on to become King George V.

According to Dalton's account,

the crew, and there were
a lot of them,

spotted the ship
off the coast of Australia,

and they saw it as a sort of
phosphorescent glow.

"July the 11th.

At 4am the Dutchman
crossed our bows.

A strange red light,

as of a phantom ship all aglow,

in the midst of which light,
the mast spars

and sails of a brig
200 yards distant

stood out in strong relief

as she came up on the port bow,

where also the
Officer of the Watch

from the bridge clearly saw her,

as did the quarterdeck midshipman

who was sent forward at once
to the forecastle.

But, on arriving,
there was no vestige

nor any sign whatever of
any material ship.

At 10:45 am...

...the ordinary seaman
who had this morning

reported the Flying Dutchman

fell from the foremast crosstrees

onto the topgallant forecastle

and was smashed to atoms."

This account was written
by John Dalton,

who was the prince's tutor.

Given its paranormal nature,

we might expect Buckingham Palace
to have objected

or even censored the story,

if they felt it was inaccurate

or damaging to
the future king's reputation.

But that didn't happen.

So was it true?

Did King George V
really see the Flying Dutchman?

On closer inspection,

the ship's log contains
no reference to the sighting.

However,
that logbook does record

the death of the crewman

who fell from the topmast,

to the deck, to his death.

So are there
any rational explanations

that might account for all the
sightings of the Flying Dutchman?

There's a range of theories
that have been suggested.

There's those kind of
rational scientific theories

that, essentially,
this is misperception.

The watery environment
of the, of the sea,

you've got mist,
you've got mirages,

you've got the sort of
play of sun and water

can easily distort
what people are seeing.

You've then also got the fact that

there are quite a lot of
derelict and abandoned ships

that can drift
into the shipping lanes.

And so people just see at a distance

these eerily empty ships

that have been sort of
exposed to the elements.

They have this kind of
haunting quality to them.

Virtually all sailors,

even as late as
the Prince of Wales account,

suffered to some extent with scurvy,

and that can affect
both eyesight and the mind.

It's not that uncommon

for scurvy to induce hallucinations

and altered states of consciousness.

And one of the
altered states of consciousness

that it tends to induce is anxiety,
fear and paranoia.

If visions of the Flying Dutchman

were caused by scurvy,

that might explain why
the sightings have now stopped.

However, do we really want
a rational explanation?

Isn't there something in the story
of Captain Dedecker

and his crew
sailing the oceans for eternity

that speaks not only to
frightened sailors, but to us all?

I think we just find
the idea of someone

who's both immortal
and deeply unhappy,

a fascinating tale.

The idea of somebody
who lives forever

but doesn't gain
any benefit from it,

who, indeed, wants to
escape from life into death,

is always a very powerful tale

that reassures the rest of us

about the fact that,
actually, immortality

might be a blessing
and not a curse.

The arms race produces

ever more powerful weapons,

but what if there was a device

that could destroy the missiles

that threatened
to destroy the world?

Death rays are
the stuff of science fiction,

comic books and
B movies of the 40s and 50s,

or even earlier works by H.G. Wells,

depict Martians laying waste to
whole cities with one lethal burst.

What general wouldn't
want to get his hands

on such a deadly weapon?

In the years
following World War I,

governments across the world

took the idea of a death ray

very, very seriously indeed.

And a dusty file,

held at the British
National Archives at Kew,

contains an astonishing story

that a self-proclaimed inventor
could make them.

A death ray, which would help
vanquish their enemies

in all future conflicts.

The nature of warfare
changed in World War I.

It was now industrialised
and mechanised.

Governments realised that
the next war could be won

by the side
with the best technology.

Everybody thinks that
the coming war

is going to be dominated
by aerial warfare,

in particular,
and that the, you know,

that the nation
that commands the air

is going to win the war.

The government of the day
was desperate to find

something that would
bring down enemy aircraft quickly,

conveniently and cheaply.

Step forward,
Harry Grindell Matthews.

Born in Gloucester in 1880,

he trained as an electrical engineer

and went on to become an inventor

specialising in the relatively new

and exciting field of electronics.

Harry Grindell Matthews
was one of the greats.

In fact, I'd almost say
the greatest forgotten inventor

of the first half of the
20th century.

He made his name
as a maverick, as an outsider.

He kind of styled himself as

Gloucester’s answer to
Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison.

Someone who was just
bursting with ideas

and knew how to make them happen.

He was someone who saw himself

as someone who could see
a new world that was coming.

The files in the
National Archives record

that he had staged
a demonstration

for Britain's military chiefs.

In which, for the first time,

his radio telegraphy
was able to put the ground

in contact with a pilot in a plane

600 feet up in the sky,
and two miles away.

Now, that had never been done before

and was a positive advance.

He also invented, or at least
claimed to have invented,

the first talking pictures.

He produced a film featuring

an interview with Ernest Shackleton

before Shackleton set off
on his expedition.

And Matthews' technology
didn't really catch on.

But it wasn't these inventions

that would earn Harry
Grindell Matthews his reputation.

In 1923,
newspapers across Europe

began reporting
experiments in Germany

and the scientists there
had allegedly been

conducting experiments
using a death ray.

And that death ray was able,

apparently,
to bring down aircraft in flight

and had done so, allegedly,

to French planes
flying over German territory.

The military potential was obvious.

Unfortunately,
there was not a shred of truth...

...in these extravagant claims

for the German "death ray".

Within months
of the German claims,

Grindell Matthews
announced to the press

that he had been working on
a similar experiment

and made the bold claim

that he had made a death ray
that really worked.

At the time it was
received kind of rapturously.

It received so much
press attention.

I mean, it's a great
piece of branding: the death ray.

Everyone knows
where you stand with a death ray.

This was exactly
what the British government

needed to blast their military
into the future.

Under a certain amount of pressure
from the government,

who were at least potentially
interested in a death ray,

he invited government scientists
to his laboratory.

So there was
Grindell Matthews

and three representatives
from the War Office,

two of them scientifically based;

one was an engineer,
the other one was a physicist.

The test itself was in two parts.

In the first part...

Matthews fired his ray
at a light bulb

some distance away;

a light bulb that was not connected
to any form of electricity

or any other wiring.

And Matthews’ ray
lit up the light bulb.

Having shown that he could

turn on
a disconnected light bulb,

they then moved on to
the second part of the test.

The test was supposed to show

how the Death Ray could
take out enemy aircraft

by turning off their engines
from the ground.

Basically,
if you fire it at the aircraft.

It shorts out
the Magneto in its engine,

then it comes to the ground.

The Death Ray looked like
a big spotlight

with three smaller spotlights
sort of around its rim.

Turned it on,

it shot, apparently,
a jet of blue light

across the room.

And turned off a single-stroke
motorcycle engine,

which had been running on a table.
- On the surface, then,

it looked like the death ray
was potentially viable.

What were the problems?

Well, the first was that

the experiment with the light bulb

was hardly innovative science.

It was actually
a standard attraction

at Fairgrounds at the time;

and as for the motorcycle test,

well, the military chiefs noticed

something a little bit
strange about that,

because throughout the experiment,

and particularly at the crucial time

when Grindell Mathews
pressed the button...

...he had one of his assistants

standing conveniently
beside the motorbike.

Government officials
themselves were...

...dubious, to say the least.

They strongly suspected that
they were being fed a line

and that the Death Ray
didn't really do

what Matthew claimed it could do.

They suspected that
they weren't being allowed

to properly inspect
the apparatus...

...simply because it wasn't
what Matthews said it was.

Undeterred by the demonstration,

Grindle Matthews decided to use

his considerable skills
as a showman

to make a film showing

what his powerful
death ray could do.

Matthews, looking visionary,

looking scientific,

white-coated in his laboratory,

then switches to a scene
of the death ray itself.

This huge futuristic-looking cannon,

smoke reeling all over it,

and then an image
of a city in flames.

It didn't escape attention,

certainly on the part
of government scientists,

that the death ray, as portrayed in
the Pathe newsreel...

bore very, very little resemblance

to the apparatus that
they'd seen in the laboratory.

A very different kind of thing.

The film, which has been
very, very carefully edited,

doesn't actually show
the death ray in action.

The most it shows is
Grindell Matthews

standing beside the machines,

the machines
having been switched on,

and something in the distance
lighting up.

As evidence of a lethal death ray,

it's worthless.

Matthews claimed that
if the British weren't interested,

then he had backers in France.

But the truth was
they didn't really exist.

Pursued by angry shareholders,

Grindell Matthews bounced back
with a new invention,

a sky projector that could
throw images onto clouds.

And in 1937,

he got real interest in
his invention from Germany.

He was summoned to Berlin

to talk about the sky projector,

where he met Hermann Goring

and he met Goebbels, as well,
to talk about it.

Apparently,
they wanted his invention

to beam Hitler's face
onto the underside of clouds

while at huge Nazi rallies.

He didn't, in the end,
end up licencing it to the Nazis.

After a period in America,

he once again found himself
in financial trouble

and settled down
on top of a mountain in Wales.

There is a story of
Grindell Matthews

having a little box

with sort of knobs and dials
on the side,

and him lying on the grass bank
by a road,

watching cars going up and down,

fiddling with the dials on his box

and watching the cars
stop of their own accord.

Did Harry Grindle Matthews

perfect his death ray

at his secret laboratory
on top of a mountain in Wales?

Or was this story perhaps
like the death ray itself,

all a hoax?

I think you would
probably be overstating it

to say there was
a straightforward hoax.

It seems pretty clear to me,
at any rate,

that the death ray...

...didn't do what
Matthews said it could do.

In the end, it simply
wasn't suited for the battlefield.

Apart from anything else,

if a plane is flying
about 200 miles an hour,

how are you going to be able
to train a laser on it

from about 5,000 feet away?

He had an idea.

He thought he could make it work,

but to get it to work
he needed funding,

he needed money...

...and he never got that money,

so the death ray
never developed, really,

beyond the pipe dream that it was.

Our next story
comes from Britain's darkest hour.

In times of danger,
our senses are often heightened.

But does that also apply to
our extra-sensory powers?

Suddenly,
all of London seemed to be aflame.

Hermann Goring's arrogant Luftwaffe
had struck from the air.

Millions of tonnes of incendiaries
and high explosives

rained down from the skies.

Over 40,000 civilians killed.

Over 130,000 injured.

Two million houses
damaged or destroyed.

This was the was the Blitz.

It lasted nearly two years

and marked Britain's darkest period
in World War II.

And one of the greatest dangers
was to the air raid wardens

and the emergency services,

because it was they
who had to dig out the dead

and barely living,
once the damage was done,

not knowing whether
more attacks were coming

or whether they would stumble
over unexploded ordnance

which could blow them sky high.

This led to one of
the strangest episodes

in Britain's X-Files,
and that was

the dowsing detectives
of World War II.

It all seemed to
sort of be kicked off

by an incident in 1941,
in Warwickshire,

near a small town
called Leamington Spa.

The Luftwaffe were targeting
various cities,

Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry,

and, on some occasions,

aircraft would have
gone off course

or they would have
dropped the bombs

and they didn't hit the target,

and maybe they had a load

and they just wanted to
get rid of the bombs on board

before they flew back to Germany.

In this case,
the aircraft were over

this rural part of Warwickshire

and just dropped a load of bombs
in the middle of a field.

By unlucky chance,

two local factory workers,

Harry Marston and James Hyatt,

were walking along the path

and were caught in
the appalling explosion.

And of course, the local police

were immediately brought in,
trying to find the bodies.

They'd obviously been killed,
these two guys,

but they needed to locate
the remains.

There was one particular constable
called Philip Terry

and he was someone

who was able to divine,

using twigs or metal rods,

where buried objects were

and, in this case,
he used a hazel rod.

And then he came up with
an additional suggestion.

He said, "If I had an article
of the men's clothing

and I wrapped that round
my divining rod.

I don't know,
but maybe that would help

direct the search."

So Marston's cloth cap
was somehow obtained.

And he wrapped it
around the hazel rod

and started walking around

over these mounds of earth

and straight away,
he got this sort of feeling that,

you know, he could feel the rod
moving in his hand.

And said, "That's where they are."

And he could pinpoint exactly.

And straight away, they dug down
and found the bodies.

As the country was at war,

there were strict instructions
to report

any unusual events like this
to the war office.

These bomb sites
must be reported.

The report landed on
the desk of a Ministry scientist,

Professor William Curtis,

and he was both curious

and slightly sceptical,

and he resolved
to see for himself...

...where this apparently miraculous
divination had taken place

and to test, with some
degree of scientific rigour,

whether it had actually occurred.

And so Curtis went to the bombsite

and he got PC Philip Terry
to meet him there

and as they wandered
over the craters

left by the German bombs,

Professor Curtis
spotted the obvious.

The two craters, basically,

where these bombs had dropped

and there was a path
going between them,

and this is where
the two guys had walked,

and the body was found
near the lip of the crater.

So he was quite sceptical.
He was saying,

you don't need
this special dowsing ability

to work out how, perhaps,

Philip Terry guessed
that that's where they were.

Because if they were by this,
walking along this path

and you've got the crater there,

it's likely that it's here and
they've been buried

immediately to
the side of the crater.

He then wrote up a report
in which he said,

this can't be taken as

a particularly convincing
case of divination.

But a short while later,
Philip Terry struck again.

This time he used dousing

to find the location of a man
who had drowned

and had been washed up
on the bank of a river.

The actual rod in his hand,

it was twisting round.

There's no doubt about this.
It was actually moving.

He could feel the hazel rod.

And so it's all pointing
at that tree by the riverbank.

Of course, they went there.

The body of the
drowned man was there.

So again, a copy of this report
was sent to London

and, of course,
this is a bit perplexing for them.

NARRATOR Once again,

Professor Curtis
visited the location.

And once again
came to the conclusion that

the place where
the body was found

was the most logical location
for it to wash up.

There were others in the war office
who were still convinced

that divination might be useful
on the battlefield,

and, in one instance,

an officer was tasked
with using dowsing

to find the location of gas pipes
at an army base,

but the experiment
was a complete failure.

And a note in the Ministry's files

pointed out there were better
uses of resources

than pursuing the belief
in a folk myth.

This man is a douser,

and he works with a dowsing
or divining rod

to find radiation that is
undetectable to normal instruments.

And some dowsers
don't even need tools.

They just use their hands.

But regardless of how it's done,

the purpose of dowsing is simple.

To find radiations
or mysterious powers

emanating from the earth.

Now, is this real
or just an elaborate act?

Amongst the believers
in dowsing and divination,

however, were senior
members of the establishment,

including former Prime Minister
David Lloyd George.

Mrs. Wylie will show you

how she discovered this well.

She walked about here for some time,
the rod in her hand.

There was no movement.

She came along there,

then, suddenly,
you found the rod going up.

In times when, perhaps,
water was short

and they needed someone
to locate a water course,

and they went to a certain person

who had a reputation,

you know, the cunning folk,
they were known as,

and these were maybe people

who employed
other magical practises

to find lost treasure, lost objects

and if you gave them a coin

or, you know, there'd be
some sort of financial transaction

they would employ
whatever arcane methods

that they had at their disposal
to find these things.

So it's a genuine folk tradition.

Rescue squads
laboured night and day.

Hey Warden, I've found her!

Desperate times
lead to desperate measures.

And Philip Terry's success,

backed up by a long
folk tradition of dowsing,

led a desperate government

to seriously investigate his claims.

This is not surprising,

the fact that a dowsing detective

or people with
alleged psychic ability

have been in some way tested,

because during this hour

any possibility have been
in some way tried.

However, psychic detectives
have never been officially tested

or officially involved
by the government.

Only some people within the army

tried to use those
and tried to test them

because they have the belief,
personal belief,

that this power actually existed.

But any of those tests proved

that this ability didn't exist

and were completely useless.

There was to be
no more official interest

in divination as a useful tool...

...for more than 20 years.

Then at the height of the Cold War,

the military, the British army,

once again
picked up the idea

as something
which could prove useful

should the army have to
deal with buried bombs.

They'd heard these stories that

dowsers had the ability
to find buried mines.

It was obviously
something that took root

in the intelligence arm
of the war office,

that certain people
had this ability.

Blue is for water,

red is for diagonal
positive streaks,

green is for growth,

yellow is for the global net,
and white marks

the medial eloquent lines
for the power point.

Now, don't look for this
in any scientific textbook.

Dowsing isn't accepted
by the scientific community.

All the tests that have been
done around the world

on dousing detectives

under controlled conditions,

from searching for water,

from searching for
a specific target,

have been
completely unsuccessful.

So it has been always proved

that all these alleged power
do not work.

So what is really happening

when someone is dowsing?

Why does the rod
or the pendulum move?

What is happening is that

just thinking about a possible
movement of the object

that the person is touching
or holding is creating

very tiny movement
between the finger,

for example, of the person,

and these movements
are increased and emphasised

by the shape of the object.

Dowsing may have
a long folk tradition,

but when it comes to
the harsh realities of warfare,

if it doesn't work
on the battlefield,

then it will be cast aside.

And that is what happened to the
dowsing detectives of World War II.

Despite PC Terry's conviction

that he was able to use

traditional divination rods
to find bodies,

despite all the other
experiments and tests,

it was abandoned as a technique

in the late 1960s.

The only thing
we can say with absolute certainty

is that those experiments took place

and that they eventually
formed their own little corner

of Britain's extraordinary X-Files.

Next time on Britain's X-Files,

do big cats really stalk
Bodmin Moor?

What do the files tell us about

planes and ships
that vanished near Bermuda?

What explanation do they give

for a sad painting
that would not burn.

And what were the strange lights

that terrorised
the north of England?

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