All language subtitles for Britains.X-Files.S01E04.1080p.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.

This 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 Schafer'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 to stand in
the death ray. Death ray.

We pride ourselves on
having conquered every corner

of the globe.

But even in Britain, there are still
remote areas where monsters

can lurk and our imaginations
can be unleashed.

Bodmin Moor in Cornwall is 80 square
miles of beautiful countryside.

With its rocky outcrops and stone
circles, it has been home to

myths and legends that go back
thousands of years.

However, in more recent times, its
bleak remote-ness has made it

a perfect habitat for a more
fascinating creature.

Between the 1980s and 1990s,

Bodmin Moor was also home

to one of the largest outpourings of
alleged sightings

of exotic large cats,

leopards, pumas,
panthers,

who had apparently been roaming the
moor,

savaging
farmers' sheep and terrifying

the people who lived in the
villages around them.

Whilst cynics and
scientists dismissed the

sightings of the Beast of Bodmin as
delusional, those who have

seen it with their own eyes are
convinced that it is real.

There is no doubt that exotic big
cats roam the British countryside.

A few years ago I was travelling
from Exeter to Bristol to see

some friends in broad
daylight on a coach.

I looked over into a
field and I saw a puma.

There is absolutely no doubt
that this was a puma.

It wasn't a dog or a fox
or anything else.

I used to be a zookeeper.

I worked with all sorts of
animals including cats.

And I know what I was looking at.

There have been lots and lots
of sightings of a strange

creature, a black panther-like
creature on Bodmin Moor.

And the sightings have sort of
given rise to this notion of a

Beast of Bodmin.

But it wasn't just
sightings that made people

believe that there were big cats
roaming around Bodmin.

The Moor yielded physical evidence
of dangerous felines prowling

the Moor.

You also began to get farmers sort
of saying,

'well, my sheep was killed.

And the bite marks are not the bite
marks you would expect if it

were a dog or a fox that killed it.'

This is quite different from
the attacks of dogs.

Dogs kill by biting at the flank
and side of the animal.

There is a lot of fleece
and fur everywhere.

It's a messy kill.

And as well as eating the internal
organs, dogs will crunch up

the bones.
But big cats won't.

They'll rasp the bones clean with
their tongues and eat the

soft tissue, but not
crunch the bones.

I've seen a kill made like this in
North Devon, transparently

from a big cat.

On nearby Exmoor, the
situation became so bad that

the government decided to
take drastic action.

The government had sent out,
believe it or not, the SAS.

And they spent several months with
night sights and high-powered

rifles trying to shoot
the Beast of Exmoor and it

ran rings around them.

They saw it several times, but they
could never get a clear shot at it.

And in the end, they had to give up.

If there are big cats
roaming our Countryside, then

the government may well be to blame.

In 1976, The Dangerous Wild
Animal Act was introduced to

regulate the growing trend for
keeping exotic animals.

Well, believe it or not, up until
around the mid 70s,

anybody could keep any kind of
pet they wanted.

The superstore Harrods in London,
their pet department, sold

lions and tigers and even gorillas.

All this changed in 1976

when a man
was walking his pet lion down

the street in Birmingham.

It sounds insane now, but it
actually happened and the

lion savaged a kid.

The government began to
intervene on keeping wild animals

without a licence.

So you get the
Dangerous Wild Animals Act in 1976.

You had to make sure you could
keep these animals securely

and safely, and also you had to
pay a very big licence fee.

This gives a reason as to why
there might be

these animals out there.

People were saying, oh well, the
owners of these wild animals simply

released them into the wild because
they didn't want to pay the tax.

Whilst the Exmoor Big Cat
evaded the SAS, on Bodmin, sightings

reached plague-like proportions,
with a count reaching 60.

This caught the attention
of the press, who

descended on Bodmin looking for
eyewitnesses, and they had no

trouble finding them.

Rosemary Rhodes farmed
on Bodmin Moor.

She had a sheep herd, and she
claimed

that she had witnessed the beast,
that it had savaged at least

10 of her sheep.

Farmer Rosemary Rhodes is
out beast hunting.

She's certain there's a family of
big cat-like creatures

stalking Bodmin Moor.

We're surrounded by moorland and
there areas of coniferous forest,

vast areas of coniferous forest
above us, and we've seen them.

We've seen the results of
their handiwork.

When they end their kills.

What's more, she said,
I'm convinced it's a puma.

And I say this because when I was
standing at my kitchen

window, I heard the beast's cry.

It was like an appalling
woman's scream.

Such was the level of
public concern, the Ministry

of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
announced that it would hold

a formal investigation into the
presence or otherwise of the

Beast of Bodmin.

In 1995,

the Agricultural
Development Advisory Service,

what a mouthful that is, sent out a
zoologist called Charles Wilson.

Initially, Wilson was
given one month to

investigate, but the number of
sightings meant that he

stayed in the area for six months.

The bulk of the evidence was verbal,
but more importantly, he was

also given photographs and video
recordings to examine.

Determined to get to the truth,
Wilson decided to take a

forensic approach.

He isolated and examined the
backgrounds of the

photographs, in particular, the
walls that could be identified.

He then went out and measured the
heights of those walls.

And when he had that, he had a
scale against which he could

compare the mysterious black

feline captured in front of them.

And when he checked the ratio of
the actual height of the wall

against the image of the feline,
he was able to show that none of

these supposed big cats captured on
these videotapes or in these

still images were any bigger
than 12 inches tall.

They were, in fact, domestic cats.

The junior minister for
agriculture said that this

whole thing is a fantasy and the
livestock are being attacked

by dogs and foxes and stuff.

So the farmers got very
angry about this.

Today it was announced that after
a six-month inquiry, costing

more than 8,000 pounds,
the scientists had found no

evidence of a Beast of Bodmin.

I am satisfied from the
investigation we've carried out

that there is no threat to livestock
in that area from a big cat.

Others, however, are still
convinced that there are wild

cats living on the moor.

A local animal expert who keeps
pumas is among those angered

by the inquiry's findings.

Well it's a government cover-up.

It's just to appease people,
that's my personal opinion.

Now, I have seen Puma, my friends
have seen Puma, my neighbours

have seen Puma.

Throughout the county, the
Southwest, we've seen Puma.

We know they're here.

Rosemary Rhodes, the eyewitness
whose reports had been

amongst the earliest to be
published in newspapers and on

television, denounced the report.

She said she knew that the
cat, the beast, existed.

And she sold up her remaining flock
and muttered darkly about a

British government cover-up.

Why do people have this
need to believe that big cats

prowl the remote fields and
hedgerows of our countryside,

despite the forensic
evidence to the contrary?

I think big cats are a very
interesting phenomenon.

I don't think they roam the
countryside, but what I think

they are are a modern
rationalisation of what used

to be seen as the kind of
supernatural black dogs.

So they're an otherness, they're an
alien, and occasionally you

have people suggest that they are
alien, but for the most part

they're thought of as escapees who
are living wild and breeding wild.

So I think it's a kind of modern
rationalisation of something

which would have been seen
as supernatural.

And I think you can begin to
understand how big cats sit

in this kind of popular folklore,
which is spreading and

beautifully fun to follow.

Ultimately,

the truth about the
Beast of Bodmin and its ilk

apparently at large

across the
British Isles is that these stories

are nothing more than catnip.

Catnip which

commercially minded
newspaper and television executives

cannot resist because they know

that readers want to read
and watch them.

Unexplained disappearances
often lead to paranormal

explanations, but one place that
appears time and again in the

British X-Files can claim the
title of the capital of the

paranormal world.

The Bermuda Triangle is this
mysterious zone known for the

disappearance of ships and aircraft.

And it's
basically, sort of its points

are Florida, Puerto Rico
and Bermuda.

If you kind of make a line from
the bottom tip of Florida,

upwards, downwards and
back, you kind of hit

Florida, Bermuda, Puerto Rico
and back.

It's not a definite area, but it's
an area where there has been

a lot of sort of speculation on lost
ships,

lost people, lost airplanes.

Some of the disappearances
have achieved legendary

status amongst the
paranormal community.

One of them is the loss of Flight
19, which was a group of five

American planes in 1945 that
disappeared.

Before they lost contact, the
main pilot sort of said,

'everything is gone,
nothing is right.

I can't see the sea'.
And that was it.

So you get this kind of dramatic,
rather mysterious end.

Wreckage wasn't found, and all
the flights were lost.

So you have the loss of planes, and
more to the point, you have

the loss of personnel.

The area has certainly attracted
serious attention from the

US Coast Guard.

They are very kind of diligent in
about collecting data, often to try

to offset the sort of sensational
reputation that the area has.

So a lot of their data indicates
yes planes and ships do go

missing in this area but nothing
that really indicates any

more than anywhere else
in the world.

It's known for cyclones, it's known
for hurricanes, it's also

known for particularly
dangerous waters.

There is supposed to be some kind of
magnetic interference with

compasses so there's those kind of
interpretations given that

it's just is kind of a
dangerous but natural place.

The other explanations are,
shall we say, more creative.

I think the most creative one is
that the triangle is actually

over Atlantis, and there has always
been this speculation that

the Atlanteans had weird technology,
ray guns and various things.

They say, oh, well, you know, maybe
the ancient technology kind

of comes up and pulls
the ships down.

The other suggestion is that it's a
UFO portal, and they get sucked down

because the flying planes can go
down safely, but human things can't.

It has been suggested that it
could be a meeting point or a

breach between this dimension and
another one, and that ships

and planes have been kind of drawn
through into this other dimension.

The Bermuda Triangle was
first described in an article

in the early 1950s, which described
how planes and boats had

vanished in mysterious
circumstances.

But it wasn't until the 1960s that
the story really took off.

It was not until 1964 that
the true father of the

Bermuda Triangle theory emerged,

and he was a none-too-scrupulous

American journalist
called Vincent Gaddis.

In February 1964, Gaddis
published an article, 'The

Deadly Bermuda Triangle',
in a pulp magazine.

And Gaddis followed up this
article with a best-selling book

later that year.

To support his theory,
Gaddis retrospectively

claimed disappearances from as far
back as 1840, but his most

important source came from an
investigation

that appeared in the
British X-Files.

Tucked into the dusty pages

of Britain's extraordinary
collection of X-Files

are two formal,
dry reports, official

reports, which have given fuel to
the belief in the Bermuda Triangle.

Within the space of 12 months in
1948 and 1949,

two identical passenger aircraft

disappeared while
flying over the Bermuda Triangle.

The Star Tiger took off from Santa
Maria, an island in the Azores.

It was bound for Bermuda.

On board were 23 passengers
and six crew.

At 3 am on January the 30th,

the radio operator on Star Tiger
sent a

message to the operator on the
ground in Bermuda.

That message was the last time

anyone ever heard from Star Tiger.

The British government
ordered an inquiry, but there was

no trace of the aircraft, no debris
recovered, no flight recorder.

We will never know what
happened to the Star Tiger.

Within a year, the mystery
deepened when the Star Ariel, the

sister aircraft of the Star Tiger,
also vanished in the

Caribbean Bermuda Triangle.

Once again, the British government
ordered an inquiry, but once

again they struggled with a
complete lack of evidence.

Those twin disappearances formed
the foundation stones for

Vincent Gaddis' belief

and publishing theory that the

planes had been swallowed by
The Bermuda Triangle.

Now, as with everything that Gaddis
wrote, there was precious

little evidence for it,
but that didn't stop him.

He wove one phrase

into a tapestry of a theory

of paranormal explanations.

That phrase said that perhaps,
perhaps,

Star Tiger had been lost because of
some quotes

'external cause'.

To Gaddis, external cause

equalled paranormal force.

Almost invariably, when you get
someone sort of saying, ah,

here is this mysterious
disappearance, you also get

sort of a counter-narrative, sort of
pointing out that very often

these descriptions aren't
particularly accurate.

That they get the time wrong, they
don't say that there is bad

weather, in fact sometimes they say
the weather

is absolutely clear
when in fact it isn't.

There's one example where in fact
the plane landed perfectly

safely, but it wasn't reported.

More and more stories
appeared, telling ever more

fantastical tales, accompanied by
ever more outlandish explanations.

The hunger for stories of planes and
ships vanishing meant that

over the years, the size of the
triangle grew and grew.

But what about the story from the
British X-Files it was all based on?

Was there ever a rational
explanation as to what

happened to the Star Tiger
and the Star Ariel?

When you look more closely at the
evidence,

it becomes rather more clear

that what underpinned
their disappearances was the

mundane, prosaic, albeit tragic,

realities of a not very good

aircraft company flying not
terribly good aircraft.

The Tudor IV series to which both
Star Tiger and Star Ariel

belonged was notorious
amongst pilots.

It was notorious for poor engine
quality,

for bad radio communications,

and the most
likely explanation for the

disappearances of these two large
passenger planes is that they

simply malfunctioned and
crashed into the Atlantic.

But if that were the case,
people would have expected to

at least have seen the wreckage of
these aircraft and official

inquiries with clearer conclusions.

But airplanes that crashed due to
no mechanical fault or human

error would not have created the
legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

I think the Bermuda Triangle
captured the people's imagination

because in a world where we seem to
have the answers to everything in

terms of scientific understanding,
it's fascinating to think that

perhaps there is still a part of the
world that doesn't obey the rules.

It, you know, is a place where the
supernatural, the paranormal

can take place.

We love mysteries and the Bermuda
Triangle, although it's not a

mystery, is very easy to
present as a mystery.

Now, cynics would also point out
that these things sell.

They sell much better than the book
which says the mystery of the

Bermuda Triangle has been solved
and it isn't a mystery.

Fire is one of our biggest
fears, so being resistant to

the searing heat of flames
should be a blessing.

But in our next X file, it
became the sign of a curse.

In September of 1985, a fire in the
kitchen of Ron and May Hall

in Rotherham got out of control.

The result was that their little
house was burnt to the ground.

The only thing that survived amongst
the smouldering ashes was a curse.

Ron and May's house had been
destroyed almost entirely in

the blaze, a fire which had started
when a chip pan caught afire

and rapidly consumed the
rest of their home.

A local reporter started talking
to a fire officer on the

scene who said that the only object
that was left unscathed by

the fire was a copy of the mass
produced print

The Crying Boy.

The Crying Boy was an
extremely popular print in

the 1960s, having sold in
its thousands.

It hung on the walls of many
working-class homes,

particularly in the north
of England.

In those days, back in the 1980s,
the working class were not

afraid of sentiment.

In fact, they courted it in a way
that posh reviewers would not.

So the Crying Boy is a very good
example of the sorts of

things that you would find in
working-class homes.

Raking through the ashes
of Ron and May Hall's home,

it became clear that their house was
not the only one which had

suffered this terrible fate.

They had a relative in the fire
service who then said, oh

well, yes, it's well known at the
station that there are many

incidents of this sort, fires in
homes where the print has survived.

The common feature in all of
these stories was of that,

The Crying Boy print,

had not been damaged in the
slightest by any of the flames.

On a slow news day, the
little house fire in Rotherham,

with its remarkable survivor, got
picked up by a national newspaper.

It was picked up by the Sun, and
they ran a story with a very

sensationalist headline, 'Blazing
Curse of the Crying Boy Picture'

with a sub-headline, 'picture is a
fire jinx',

with the text, tears for fears,

the portrait that
firemen claim is cursed.

Sun at that time, which had
nearly, they nearly sold 4 million

copies every day, was run by an
editor called Kelvin MacKenzie,

who was notorious for running rather
lurid inventions in the paper.

And having a very detached
relationship to the truth.

MacKenzie was...

a bare-knuckled
bruiser of a hack.

He's most infamous for showbiz
stories which had very

little, if any, foundation in fact.

Most famously, Freddie Starr Ate
My Hamster, utterly untrue.

To Mackenzie, the curse of the
Crying Boy was a story which

would drag in readers and would
cause a sensation.

This became a very popular
story for the Sun.

There was again another house
fire, perfectly understandable

reason, an electric fire was
too close to a bed.

But there was one of these
mawkish crying boy pictures.

So every time this happened, the
Sun kept running the story.

As they ran this story again and
again, sentiments about the

crying boy started to turn in a
darker direction as people

started to think, well, what is it
about all these various

prints that might cause this curse?

Was it the case that the subject of
the original painting was

actually abused in a more serious
way than we might have

imagined, is crying about
something really tragic?

And thus, you know, all of
these prints are cursed.

Are the fires the child's
revenge in some ways?

The public reacted with kind
of mass panic and fear.

Lots of readers wanted to get rid
of their cursed paintings,

fearing that also they would be
subject to some curse, that

they would come to some harm.

Newspaper readers were
terrified because they had

The Crying Boy painting hanging in
their living rooms, and they

phoned the newspaper and they phoned
fire services worried that it

would bring doom and destruction
down around their heads.

At a time when the sun was
involved in a brutal war for

readers with his competitors, it
just couldn't resist taking

advantage of the story.

In a kind of attempt to keep the
story going, Kelvin MacKenzie

offered to dispose of people's
crying boy pictures on their behalf.

Well over 2,000 prints showed up,
and they didn't really know

what to do with them. They were
flooding out the offices and so on.

So they staged this huge bonfire on
a pyre quite near Reading, brought

along a reporter and some page three
girls, one of whom lit the match.

They did burn these things.

And then the story was reported in
the paper on Halloween.

What the Sun had
forgotten was that The Crying Boy,

if it is notorious for anything,
then it is its

remarkable ability to survive
attempts to burn it.

Although the Sun stopped
publishing stories about

The Crying Boy, now,

countless cheap Jack books or cheap

television documentaries repeat the
story and they've embroidered it.

Some have concentrated on
the identity of the artist

who signed himself as G Bragolin,

only to find that
no such painter exists.

Others have concentrated on the
subject of the painting.

Who is the mysterious boy
and why is he crying?

So maybe there's a spirit of a boy
is trapped in the print and

causes fires in order to
destroy the print and

free his spirit.

Perhaps the best invention is that
the original painter who took

as his subject this crying boy,

the boy was a Spanish urchin
called El Diablo,

the devil, whose parents had died

in a house fire and
who then either set fires himself

or had the power to mystically
attract them and start them off.

As the story got more and
more elaborate, more bizarre

elements were added, it became
harder and harder to see the

original story.

To find out if there was a basis, in
fact, maybe if we go back to

the burnt out kitchen of Ron and
May Hall, we might find some

truth amongst the ashes.

It's worth remembering that the
station officer who first

said that he had seen loads of
these paintings at fires didn't

think there was anything
supernatural.

There have been tests done to test
whether or not these things

are particularly flammable.
They're not.

They're very printed on high density
fibre board and the string that held

the picture up tended to go in a
fire but the painting itself didn't.

So you could quite easily imagine
how a perfectly normal fire

would burn the string, the painting
would fall down, would fall

forward and then it would just seem
creepy in amongst everything

else being damaged.

One other possible
explanation was the varnish

that covered it, which just
happened to be fire retardant.

So is there something about this
tragic portrait that is

particularly powerful?

This is a really good example of
what we call the phenomenon

of mass hysteria.

So mass hysteria largely works
through the orchestration of

emotion.

So it works very much through
the power of suggestion.

So you can look at all the kinds of
headlines that the Sun used.

The mass production of fear,
of panic, of anxiety.

If you think about conspiracy
theories, they often

unsettled distinctions between
fact and fiction, between the

rational and the irrational between
the natural and the supernatural.

And people often believe them even
if they're debunked or even

if there's an explanation offered
that could be plausible.

So they show how people can invest
and believe in things that

probably aren't true, that carry
people's fears, their anxieties.

There were many people who hung on
to those prints or tried to

give them to other people.

In fact, one of the firemen involved
in the story was handed one

at his retirement party.

He, I think, very rationally
decided not to accept it.

It's a reverse placebo in effect.

Even if you don't rationally believe
that this thing is cursed,

having it in your home seems to
be courting bad luck.

A cheap and cynical
publicity stunt exploited for

commercial gain.

A scientific anomaly or something
altogether more sinister?

You decide.

The British X-Files are full of the
stories of ghosts from the

distant past, but a whirling sound
in the dead of night in the

Peak District heralded a completely
different kind of phantom.

Earlier today, Mr Burnaby Drayson,
Conservative MP for Skipton,

was going through his morning mail
at his Hamstead home when he

became suspicious about an envelope.

I had opened two or three
letters, three letters, and then I

came to this one.

I looked at it, and immediately I
felt it, I felt suspicious about it.

And I said, I think we've
got a letter bomb.

In 1973, Britain was
reeling from a succession of

IRA bomb attacks.

The technology was a step up
from the crude devices

they had previously used.

Was this a sign that
they were becoming more ambitious?

If they continued this escalation,
people wondered what form

their next attack might take.

A security guard on duty

at a high explosives store in a
quarry

in the Derbyshire Peak District
reported seeing a mystery

helicopter, a phantom helicopter,
which had been hovering very

low over the ammunition dump.

The security guard went to
investigate this light over

the quarry, and when he drove
towards the quarry, he saw

shining lights beaming
down onto the ground.

And he could also hear the
sound of um rotors.

These lights just lifted out of
the Quarry and drifted off

into the distance.

It was like, what that, what
on Earth was that?

But he reported that to the
police, and that got to

Special Branch, who had also
received a whole bunch of

sightings, not only from civilians,
but from a police patrol.

Who'd actually seen very clearly
what they described as a

helicopter practising landings and
take-offs somewhere in the

same area of the Peak District
around the same time.

Police inquiries revealed
that the description matched

that of a Bell Jet Ranger, but only
37 companies or individuals

owned this type of helicopter
in the United Kingdom.

An investigation showed that none of
them had anything to do with

the sighting.

Whoever was flying this phantom
helicopter was taking an

enormous risk.

Flying at such low level at night
over terrain which was dotted

with electricity pylons meant either

that the pilot was phenomenally
experienced,

probably ex-military or
that he was a reckless terrorist.

In recent months, the
IRA had used a helicopter.

It had stolen one from the
Irish Republic, flown it across the

border to Northern Ireland, and
used it in a terrorist attack.

That suggested it had the capability
and indeed the intention of

using helicopters in
terrorist attacks.

The Metropolitan police
became convinced that this

machine was real and it was being
operated by Irish terrorists

because the police had been given
information by an IRA

terrorist who was in custody that
the IRA were practising some

kind of an attack on the British
state using a helicopter.

West Yorkshire police told MI5

that it had received further

information that the IRA was going
to fly a helicopter into a

prison where IRA prisoners were
being held, lift them up and

take them away to freedom.

This became like a huge thing.

I mean, most of the regional and
national press every day for

a period from about mid-January
1974 through to the end of

February, it was headline news.

It was like phantom helicopter

Seen Again, you know, Metropolitan
Police Helping Derbyshire and

Cheshire Police Try and
Find This Pilot.

There's a big media frenzy
around all these sightings.

And the idea that it was the IRA

was just one idea amongst many.

Some people felt it was a homemade
helicopter and somebody was

trying it out.

Another explanation was it was
a devil maker pilot

operating illegally at night.

There was all sorts of rumours
that were reported about who

might be flying it.

The most bizarre one of all, I think
it was in the Daily Telegraph,

suggested that this was a modern
wealthy lover who was having

an affair with someone and he was
using this helicopter to

visit his mistress in the
middle of the night.

In the hands of Fleet Street's
finest, the phantom helicopter

story became a cause celebre.

The Daily Mirror flammed up its
account by comparing the

pilot to James Bond.

This somehow became a
secret agent story.

With the press in hot
pursuit and the public being

whipped up into a frenzy, the
Home Office called a conference to

investigate the phenomena of
phantom helicopters.

They had representatives from all
the different police forces

involved, MI5, Ministry of Defence,
and they were trying to get

to the bottom of was there something
they needed to worry about?

Was this a real machine?

Was it being prepared for some kind
of terrorist attack from the

sky on London?

The Home Office inquiry had access
to all the radar data, for

the period for the area.

On only
three occasions did that data

indicate that a helicopter had
been

in the rough area

at approximately the time
that a report was cited.

Despite the confusing
evidence, the possibility

that the IRA were using helicopters
in the north of England was

something that the government
had to take seriously.

We all know now, looking back on
the 9/11 attacks, on all the

other things that have happened,
that this is not a fanciful idea.

We know from 9/11 that terrorists
use aircraft when they crash

them into the Twin Towers, etc, etc.

So this is 1974. This was
actually quite a novel idea.

But the fact that police officers
had seen this aircraft, that

the police had had intelligence from
a convicted IRA prisoner that

they were using this helicopter, so
they had to take it seriously.

So the home office came up with a
request to the Ministry of

Defence, and it asked the Army
and the Air Force what its

technology and resources could
bring to bear on the mystery.

And that involved using the Air
Force's own Fleet of helicopters.

Or, in an extreme case, chasing
down the phantom helicopter in

Harrier jump jets.

Well, the Ministry of Defence quite
reasonably responded that any

of these courses of actions were
incredibly dangerous.

Quietly, the plan was
shelved, but the following

year there was another spate of
phantom helicopter sightings.

This resulted in the strangest
explanation of all, as this

time the phantom helicopters were
linked with a Black Panther.

There was a weird story that made
it into the headlines about linking

the phantom helicopter with a serial
killer called Donald Neilson.

Two schoolboys at Kidsgrove have
found a tape with a message 'drop

suitcase in hole in the wasteland
at Kidsgrove, Staffordshire'.

Nicknamed the
Black Panther by the press, Nielsen

had murdered four people in post
office robberies and had now

kidnapped the wealthy heiress,
Lesley Whittle.

While he searched for the
kidnapper,

Mr Whittle said he was scared to
death.

So eventually, when he'd been
captured by the police and he

was on trial, this came up.

His barrister at his trial in
1976, asked if anyone had

seen a helicopter on the night he
kidnapped Lesley Whittle.

Charged with the murder of
Lesley Whittle four days ago,

Donald Neilson today faced
eight further charges.

The idea that there was some
kind of link with the

phantom helicopter was actually used
by his defence barrister to

try and suggest that someone else
was responsible for the

kidnapping, that the police
had got the wrong man.

And that there was all these
sightings of these strange

helicopters, and maybe it was the
pilot who was involved in the

kidnapping.

Unsurprisingly, this
defence didn't work, and

Nielsen was sentenced to
life imprisonment.

Phantom helicopters were the
talking point of the moment.

People said they'd seen one,
somebody else said they'd

seen one, somebody else told
somebody else that somebody

they knew had seen them, and that
had been reported to the police.

And the reports which had
accumulated in police inboxes

had merely been reports of reports
which eventually could be

reduced down to three genuine
sightings at most.

The files do indicate that a chief
constable did write a report

about these sightings and he didn't
seem to think it was a real

helicopter because there's no patent
of his activity, he seemed to

become sceptical of the whole thing
being a real helicopter or

the IRA was involved.

The file just ends in October
1974.

They didn't follow it up.

The sightings petered out and the
result is the helicopter and

its pilot were never identified.

So it remains a complete
unexplained mystery.

For aficionados of
conspiracy theories and UFO rumours,

there remains one delicious irony in
the story of phantom helicopters.

For decades, the British
government and the British

military has dismissed UFO reports

as merely mistaken sightings

of normal and perfectly innocent
helicopters.

In the case of the phantom
helicopters,

the situation was reversed.

The phantom helicopter was no more
than a helicopter, but it was

perceived as phantom because
people were ufologists.

In the end, it's a story that tells
us both about the fear of the

times and the culture of
irresponsible sensational

reporting by Fleet Street
newspapers.

Next time on
Britain's X-Files, could evidence

really survive from a 2,000
year old global catastrophe?

Did a headless ghost
stalk London Park?

Was a moth-like creature
a portent for doom?

And are creatures in the atmosphere
the cause of plane crashes?

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