All language subtitles for Britains.X.Files.S01E05.1080p.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...

And those files disclose
investigations by the police,

by governments, by spy agencies.

Shortly after that transmission,
Captain Schaffner'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 the death ray...

What if everything we have
learned from science is wrong?

If our governments
had proof of this,

do you think they would let us know,

even if our survival as a species
depended on it?

In these days of changing climate
and rising sea levels,

floods are one of
our greatest fears.

But what if the water keeps rising?
Are we prepared?

And what would we choose to save?

In the spring of 2025,

a rash of excitable
newspaper headlines

splashed an astonishing story

that declassified previously secret

US Government X-Files

revealed that the CIA,
the Central Intelligence Agency,

had searched for,

identified and located Noah's Ark.

The story of Noah's Ark is told

in the Old Testament book
of Genesis.

In it, God sends a catastrophic
flood to destroy all life on Earth.

The only person God warns is Noah,
who builds an ark to save his family

and two of every creature on Earth.

In the biblical account, the Ark

lands upon the mountains of Ararat.

This is probably a reference

to the ancient kingdom of Urartu,

which flourished from around
the 9th century BCE

till about the 6th century BCE.

So these are mountain tops
in the north of Mesopotamia.

So if you're living in Mesopotamia
or in the ancient Near East,

these mountains would have been
the tallest mountains

that would have been known about.

The story of Noah's Ark

has become one of
the most popular Bible stories

and is often told to children,

but it also speaks
to our darkest fears.

The Ark story
has a great attraction

because it is in many ways the...

I suppose
it's the original survival story.

It's the story of how
against all odds

a catastrophic event happens
and one family survives.

Those stories
still attract us today.

They tend to reflect deep anxieties
about events beyond human control,

whether that is an asteroid
hitting the Earth,

whether that is the catastrophic
effects of climate change,

whether that's a volcano.

It tells us really
about ancient fears,

the possibility
that the whole of civilisation

can be lost
through a catastrophic flood.

And this is a story that belongs
very much in Ancient Mesopotamia,

in the area of the world
that we now call Iraq,

because that is a part of the world
that is very vulnerable to flooding.

Whilst the story
of Noah's Ark might serve a cultural

or even psychological function,

is this ancient tale taken seriously
by modern scientists?

There are advantages
in using folklore

to inform on a more...
traditional archaeological approach.

For example, in Britain,

there are lots of stories
about ancient sites

like Stonehenge
that ascribe them to the work

of giants or the wizard Merlin.

Mythic stories about how
these places came to be.

And in some of those locations,
there may be a grain of truth.

There may be some elements that are
preserved as part of that narrative,

which might be interesting
to explore in itself.

We can still see Stonehenge

because it has survived
down the ages.

But could evidence of a boat
made of wood 4,000 years ago

still really exist?

The idea that the Ark might
still survive is a very old idea.

It's already mentioned by the
early Jewish historian Josephus

in the first century AD.

It's not something he's seen.

He's telling how others have
reported that they have seen wood

or that the...
the Ark can still be seen

and still preserved
on a mountain in Armenia.

According to interpretations
of the Bible,

the Ark was deposited
on a mountainside after the flood.

And according to
certain biblical scholars,

there's a particular location
in contemporary Turkey

called Mount Ararat, which is
supposedly the location of the ark.

The area has
always been the site of political

and sometimes military conflict,

which makes it difficult for
archaeologists to work there.

However, the political upheaval

meant that it was also
of interest to the CIA,

and in the '60s and '70s,

they were keeping a close eye on the
area with U-2 planes and satellites.

There was an interest
in the period

in around the 1960s and '70s,

about whether satellite imagery
or airborne imagery

could be used to locate the site...

the site where the Ark
is meant to have landed.

A series of requests within

the CIA administrative system

asked whether they knew -

the CIA as an organisation knew
whether this was Noah's Ark.

And lots of these communiques
were entitled "re Noah's Ark,"

which presupposes the CIA

had identified this site
positively as Noah's Ark.

As far as we know,
they've never done that,

but by naming something,
you make it so.

Certain individuals
were very interested in the fact

that the CIA probably had
photographic imagery of Mount Ararat

and that this might provide evidence
for the preservation of Noah's Ark.

But even as recently as the 1960s,

not everyone believed the science.

Some saw scientific claims as going
against the teachings of the Bible

and the Word of God.

One of those was Henry Morris,

who is sometimes known
as the father of creationism.

Henry Morris wrote
what could be regarded

as the... founding document

for modern creationism,
a book called the Genesis Flood,

which he wrote in the 1960s with
somebody called John Whitcomb.

and that argues
that the geological evidence

for the age of the earth

can actually be understood
not as signs

that the earth has existed for
millions and billions of years,

but are actually sign
of a catastrophic worldwide flood.

And so finding evidence for the Ark

would be also to find evidence

that the world had been created

in six days by God,

and evidence that, in fact,

evolution as we know it
was fundamentally mistaken.

CIA denials
that they had any photographs

that proved the location
of Noah's Ark were met

with claims of a cover-up.

This is a normal pattern in the
birth of a conspiracy theory,

but in this case,

there was more than a grain of truth
in these claims.

Those photographs had indeed
been taken by the U-2 spy plane

and by satellites,
and the CIA held them,

but absolutely refused
to release them.

It said, "We can't release these.

We can't disclose these
for national security reasons."

Once the photographs were released,

they would surely solve the mystery.

Did they show evidence that
Noah's Ark had indeed landed

on top of Mount Ararat?

These photographs show what
more traditional archaeologists

would suggest to be
geological features

and what more creationist
archaeologists suggest

are the remains of Noah's Ark.

The local names for this location

broadly translate
as Noah's Mountain.

So there's a kind of
folkloric source there,

but there's also these
aerial photographs

that have the form
of a kind of ship in plan.

So two curvy, linear positive lines,

which are ridges
on the top of this mountain.

But these days,
it's not just the CIA photographs

that can be used as evidence.

Archaeologists have now started
digging at the site on Mount Ararat.

Since 2021, researchers
from two Turkish universities,

in conjunction with
one American university,

have been examining a boat-shaped
mound near Mount Ararat.

And carbon dating samples

from that mound indicates

that it dates to the time

when Noah is,

according to the Bible,
supposed to have built,

sailed, and eventually beached
his ark on Mount Ararat.

The big point of contention
is how you interpret

those positive features.

Whether...
as some people have suggested,

these are the remains of Noah's Ark,

or whether as more traditional

archaeological scholars
have interpreted,

these are actually
geological features.

How the features are interpreted

can sometimes depend less
on what is found at the site

and more on what
the searchers bring with them.

Some of the problems with that
archaeological work are also that

they are undertaken by people

who have a very literal
interpretation of the Bible.

And there's a fabulous quote by
another archaeologist who says

that no expedition that has ever
gone looking for Noah's Ark

has failed to find it.

Have those scientists
found the location

of the remains of Noah's Ark?

If so, that's a genuine historical
revelation and indeed sensation,

though those tests
and researches are still ongoing.

What none of that proves

is that the CIA got there first,

that it located Noah's Ark,

and that it covered up
the existence of its knowledge.

The idea of spirits coming
back from the dead to haunt us

is frightening enough.

But a ghostly apparition
without a head

would surely be enough to scare
even the sturdiest of souls.

The one thing we have
never been short of in Britain

are ghosts.

Every village
seems to have a haunted graveyard

and a manor house
would seem incomplete

without the chain-rattling spirit
of an ancestor.

Very few of these stories
have ever found their way

into the august pages of the Times,

the journal of record
for the British establishment.

And only one can claim
to have been investigated

by a prominent
former Home Office official

and Justice of the Peace.

And that story is the
Headless Woman of St James's Park.

The story of the Headless Woman
of St James's Park

actually begins,
as far as we can tell,

in early 1804,
when soldiers on guard duty

began to speak of this headless
woman who was appearing to them

between the hours of one o'clock
and two o'clock in the morning.

And in fact, several soldiers
were so startled by it,

they ended up in hospital
for several days.

We do have a record from one of the
soldiers who saw the Headless Woman.

A man by the name of George Jones,
who said that he was on guard duty

between one o'clock and two o'clock
in the morning,

when suddenly
from the ground in front of him

there appeared the form of a woman.

Jones was confronted
by a terrifying vision.

The spectral image of a woman

rose up in front of him, no more
than four feet away from him.

And the thing that struck him
most about her, he said,

was that she didn't have a head.
She was without a head.

He could see the collar
around her neck,

and that was blood-stained.

But the woman had no head.

And then very quickly...

...she vanished.

And it absolutely terrified him.

And he went right racing off
to try and report it,

found another soldier,
told him what he'd seen,

and as far as we can tell,
that's the first major sighting

of the Headless Woman
of St James's Park.

Just a few days later,
the Headless Woman appeared again.

This time, she had appeared
to another young soldier

who was occupying the same sentry
box that Jones had been standing in.

And this young soldier
was found in a dead faint.

Within a week, the spectral image
of a headless woman

appeared to a third soldier.

At that point,
the stories did become public,

and they made their way into
the pages of the Times newspaper,

and it caused a sensation.

This enthralled... and horrified...

the Times readership.

That publicity led to an official
inquiry by Sir Richard Ford,

a former MP,

a former Home Office official,

and who was then
the Chief Magistrate for the area.

He held hearings

and in those hearings Jones
adamantly stuck to his story.

He insisted,
he said he would swear it under oath

that he had seen this
woman rise up in front of him

and that she had..a bloodied collar

and just the stump... of a neck.

We have to keep in mind
that this story

is very early 1800s of a
headless woman in St James's Park.

This is the early days
of spiritualism.

There was certainly
a lot of writing of that time

in many books and newspapers
about spiritual experiences,

people seeing ghosts,
haunted locations.

So already,
the 1800s was priming itself

to become really interested
in ghosts and spirits

and life after death.

And so newspaper accounts
were starting to fuel that fire.

Sir Richard Ford,
the man heading the inquiry,

was hardly a conspiracy theorist
or a ghost hunter.

He was, in fact, a fairly mundane
establishment civil servant,

and he was baffled.

He tried to think of any
possible rational explanation.

And as he cast his mind back,

he recalled an incident
20 years earlier.

It was a murder case.

A case involving a sergeant
in the Coldstream Guards

who had killed his wife,

decapitated her

and dumped her body in the canal

running through St James's Park.

That seemed
the most likely explanation.

That this new appearance

of the headless woman
in St James's Park

was a manifestation of the ghost
of that unfortunate army wife.

But the Times had other ideas.

Its reporter claimed to have
solved the mystery

and to have come up with
a very different explanation.

According to the report
in its august pages,

the Times said it had discovered
the so-called ghost

was in fact no more than a prank.

It said it had discovered

that two Westminster scholars,
as it called them,

had been experimenting
with Phantasmagoria.

Now Phantasmagoria
was then very popular.

It was an early form of magic
lantern shows in which images

were projected onto a screen
to widespread amazement.

The Times didn't identify these two
mysterious Westminster scholars,

nor did it quite explain how...

they could have projected
the image of the headless woman

onto the night air.

Because there was no
back sheet in the area.

No projection reception device

which could... have been used.

But nonetheless,
this was now the explanation.

It had all been a prank.

The explanations
of Sir Richard Ford and the Times

don't seem to have completely
exorcised the phantom.

Across the years, users of the park

still record supernatural encounters
with a headless woman.

The sightings of the Headless
Woman in St James's Park

continued over many years,
but they were very intermittent.

But another significant one
was in 1972,

when a driver says that they saw

and nearly hit the apparition
of the Headless Woman.

A taxi driver was driving through
the park, and was terrified...

...when the apparition
of the Headless Woman

appeared suddenly in front of him.

Some reports saying
they crashed into a lamppost.

So distinct for him was the
apparition in trying to avoid it.

When the police came, he said that
he'd actually been driving along

and suddenly a lady in a red dress
had appeared before him

and he'd swerved to avoid her.

Try as you might,
you will not trace

any official records
to support this account.

Which, despite the lack of
foundation, is repeated now

time and time and time again,

in cheap books or internet threads,

as proof of a ghostly haunting.

The Headless Woman's
reputation may have been sullied,

but perhaps her power
to frighten persists.

Would you be willing to take
a stroll around the lake

in St James's Park at midnight?

There's a bridge
that crosses the lake

in St James's Park now.

It's a beautiful spot.
You can stand there.

If you look to one side,
you can see Buckingham Palace.

Look to the other side, you see the
government buildings of Whitehall.

But go there at night
when it's pitch black

and you've just got
the moon overhead.

Stand on that bridge,
and if you're on your own,

it is absolutely terrifying.

Nobody knows
why we seem to be so fascinated

by stories of the paranormal.

But one thing is certain -
they captivate us

just like a moth drawn to a flame.

The word monster
comes from the Latin monstrum,

meaning a divine portent
or a warning.

Those who are brave enough
to study monsters

will tell you that they come
in two main types.

One are true Cryptids.

Flesh and blood animals like the
Yeti, the Mongolian death worm,

animals thought to have
died out years ago,

but are still around
like the Tasmanian wolf.

But then there's this other group

that are much stranger.

And these seem to be
genuinely paranormal.

So these aren't flesh and blood
animals as we think of them,

and the way that you and I
are flesh and blood animals.

These are some kind of very ancient,

very terrifying,
paranormal phenomenon.

Late on the night
of November the 15th, 1966,

two young couples
were parked up in a car

on the site of a
decommissioned munitions dump

when they encountered
a terrifying sight.

They saw two lights in the darkness

and they realised that these lights
were huge, glowing orb-like eyes

and the owner of the light
shuffled forward.

And they saw
this mysterious creature,

which was winged,

almost like a dark angel.

Covered with
a brownish-greyish hair.

It had a 10-foot wingspan.

They were terrified and drove off.

This terrifying creature
then pursued them

as they sped away back to town,

and the creature emitted
eerie screeching noises

as it flew behind them.

And it pursued them
at 100 miles an hour.

And they felt sort of...
almost attacked the car.

They certainly felt they heard
some noise on the roof of the car.

And it only veered away
when they approached the town.

The town was
Point Pleasant, West Virginia,

in the Appalachian region
of the southeastern United States.

Well, the police looked into this,

and they looked into
a number of sightings...

...including... a guy whose dog Bandit

tackled some creature with large
glowing eyes and then vanished.

And then the dog's carcass
was seen at the side of the road

by another witness.

It appears in a local paper.

A larger paper,
usually a national paper,

is looking for interesting stories.

They find this one. They publish it
and it starts to spread.

The frightened citizens
of Point Pleasant, West Virginia,

tried to explain away the horror
of the Mothman sightings

with rational explanations.

Some of them tried to explain it
away as a very large heron,

which doesn't fit the picture.

A local wildlife biologist
said that it was a sandhill crane.

Again, doesn't fit the picture.
These are tall, spindly, thin birds.

Whatever Mothman was,
it was a bulky...

It had a bulky, heavy body
with these great glowing eyes.

The sceptic, Joe Nickell,

came up with a very lame
explanation that this was an owl.

There are no owls anywhere in
the world that are seven feet tall

and can chase cars
at 100 miles an hour.

With no viable explanation,

the Mothman story
might well have ended there.

Had it not been
for a terrifying accident

at the Silver Bridge
near Point Pleasant,

13 months after
the Mothman's first appearance.

On December the 15th, 1967,

the Silver Bridge collapsed.

47 people were killed
in the disaster.

Two bodies were never found.
They were presumed to have been

washed away
by the Ohio River's strong flow.

Locals saw
the appearance of the Mothman

as a portent of the disaster, and
the story really began to take hold.

You get two paranormal specialists
who wrote books about it,

and one of them is called
the Mothman Prophecies.

And, of course, that was when it
got its name, and the name stuck.

It's a lovely, you know, it's a
lovely, easy to remember name,

and it conjures up
something rather strange.

The sightings didn't stop

after the collapse
of the Silver Bridge.

But they were not always quite
what they might have seemed.

There were hoaxes.

Apparently some
construction workers

put the red car reflectors...

onto balloons
and sent them up in the air.

Some of the hoaxes were
more imaginative reworking.

The one I'm particularly
thinking of is this little film

which is supposedly found footage

of people going off into the woods
and looking for the Mothman.

I mean,
this kind of found footage film

achieved a great deal of popularity.

And I think it wasn't so much
trying to deceive and frighten

as playing along with...
with this phenomenon.

- There she is!
- Richard!

Then in 2002,
Hollywood got in on the act.

A Los Angeles studio
bought the rights

to the Mothman Prophecies book

and set about scripting
a supernatural horror movie.

It would star Richard Gere
and Laura Linney,

top-drawer name actors.

Unfortunately, the producers created
an entirely fictional lead character

played by Richard Gere, who was
a reporter on the Washington Post,

who had an encounter, a near-death
encounter with "the Mothman"

and then went on to investigate

and narrowly escaped death in
the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

Only through his intrepid journalism
in this movie

were the two events
finally able... to be associated.

Because he... he doesn't...

The invention
of a fictional character

in a Hollywood movie
inevitably muddied the water

between fact and fable yet further.

All the more so when it was revealed
that the Silver Bridge collapse

was caused by the failure
of the suspension mechanism

rather than anything supernatural
or paranormal.

Mothman is, I think...

almost unique in the way
that the town has adopted it.

So, what is a horror figure

has become, I think,

mascot would not be the wrong word.

The town has really now
used Mothman as its identity.

There is now a little
Mothman Museum.

There is a Mothman Festival
in September every year,

and they would dress as the Mothman.

There's a statue, a very elaborate
statue that was commissioned,

that's in the middle of the town.

So, the town has kind of created the
sense that we are the Mothman town.

Which is very interesting because
it's made it a very positive image.

So it's managed to reverse this
into something which is,

"Let's be scared,
but not too scared."

But not everyone
buys into the idea

that the Mothman
has been domesticated.

And while they may not think
it to be a real creature,

they believe there is an even
more frightening explanation.

I don't think
that Mothman was a cryptid.

A cryptid is an animal
that's unknown to science,

or maybe one that's thought to be
extinct but might still be around,

such as the Tasmanian wolf.

Mothman, I think,
was a paranormal manifestation.

And why I say that is because
of the intense fear it engendered.

This raises the question,

where does
the Mothman's power come from?

How was it able to conjure up
such primordial fear in us?

I think one kind of has
to go back and think,

"Where did it come from?"

And you get a lot
of supernatural monsters,

particularly associated
with forests.

I mean, this rural area
is quite a forested area,

and they seem to be this kind
of semi-demonic sort of character.

You might very well, at some point,
have gone into the woods

and seen witches and devils
and various things.

Well, this has kind of defanged
that kind of religious overtone

by simply making them
sort of horror monsters.

And in this case, you know, it's
gone from being whatever it was,

the monster
that you met in the woods

at the time when you really believed
that the devil haunted the woods,

to a horror monster, to our monster.

You know, he may be a monster,
but he is ours,

and we, you know, we like him.

With the Mothman change,
you might imagine

that we have seen the last of him,
but that is not the case.

There has been a recent sighting.

I think it was 2016,

and it was a picture was transmitted
on a local TV station.

So people are seeing these animals.

They're seeing kind of
ambiguous information,

taking pictures, and it's a theme.

The idea that there is these
crypto-zoological things out there

that we don't know everything.

That there are mysteries,
is tremendously appealing.

And in the case of the Mothman, too,

you also have the possibility
that it's precognitive,

that it either prefigures or causes
some kind of big disaster.

So I can see how it would
just be perfect legend material.

I think the legend of the Mothman
persists for a number of reasons.

One, it's been linked,
I think, erroneously,

with the tragedy of the collapse
of the Silver Bridge.

That's just a piece
of modern day folklore.

But it's the creepiness of it.

It's the idea
of the small town monster.

This thing that's lurking
on the edge of civilisation

and seems to occasionally...
come into our habitat,

chasing cars,
looming out of the darkness

and then vanishing again
like some sort of phantom.

The camera doesn't lie.

So when a photograph seems to show
something extraordinary,

we tend to look for
an extraordinary explanation,

but that isn't always where
we will find the truth.

When an aeroplane crashes,

there is usually loss of life

and an immediate search
for the cause of disaster.

Mechanical failure, human error,

striking another object,
running out of fuel,

all manner of things
can be to blame.

But in modern warfare,

a reliable machine
is a matter of life and death,

and finding the cause
for aircraft failures

can be the difference
between winning and losing.

In April 1942,
as the Allies suffered

a devastating series of setbacks

against German forces,

the Royal Air Force
published an article

in its official journal,

entitled The Gremlin Question.

Every pilot, every navigator seems,

"to be on nodding terms"
with gremlins.

Swarms of mischievous creatures

who caused havoc with the aircraft.

They caused havoc with bombs,
with navigation,

with every part
of the aircraft equipment.

The one thing lacking
in the RAF document

is a description of what a gremlin
looks like or where they're from.

It's important to remember that

until the early years
of the 20th century,

no one had any idea what existed

above the Earth's atmosphere.

There was no concept of what
might be in this stratosphere

and that provided fertile ground
for novelists and storytellers

to come up with their own ideas

and to weave them
into speculative fiction.

There's a very famous story

that was written by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1913

called the Horror of the Heights

that was published
in Strand Magazine.

And it's all about a flyer around
the sort of pre-war period

who... goes up way beyond

where pilots of that era could go.

And he finds that the upper parts of
the air around sort of 24,000 feet,

way beyond where any aircraft
could go at that time,

was populated by creatures.

Weird creatures,
the sort of creatures that you

would perhaps find at the bottom
of the sea who lived in the sky.

And his aircraft is attacked
by these creatures

who are sort of fighting
amongst themselves.

And this is a human being
who's gone up in a piece of metal.

So they descend on his aircraft
and pull it to pieces

and he crashes to Earth.

And all that's left of him
is the wreckage and a note

that basically says,
"Beware the horror of the heights."

Now the frantic race
of inventing, improvising, adapting

and refining
aircraft equipment began.

Throughout the first World War

that fictional story gained currency

and it gained currency
within the pilots and officers

of the Royal Flying Corps.

Now they were trying to
manipulate cumbersome biplanes,

primitive planes,
and also fight battles.

The first sightings
would have been when

aviation started,
and there were lots

of unexplained things

happening in aircraft

that people had
no clear explanation for.

If you became a pilot,

particularly a military pilot
at that time,

your chances of survival were slim.

Particularly if you were a fighter
pilot over the Western Front.

I mean, they... they... they...

they were lucky to survive
two or three days

when they were deployed
to a fighter squadron.

So a lot of what happened
when they were going into the sky

was all about luck.

A tradition arose that if something
went wrong on your aircraft,

fuel gauge, propellers...

something that hadn't been
properly serviced,

and you didn't want
to blame it on humans,

you blamed it on goblins.

And the RAF version of this
was "the gremlin".

By the time the
Second World War came around,

the belief in gremlins,

stratospheric gremlins
who interfered with aircraft...

...gained currency.

It gained so much currency
that anywhere on any base,

"gremlin" became a byword,

a shorthand for anything
which went wrong with a plane

which didn't have an immediate
and obvious cause.

But it wasn't just pilots
who told tales of gremlins.

The United States Air Force

published an illustrated guide
to gremlins,

that it distributed all across
its bases in Europe.

The guide contains
illustrations of cartoon characters.

Who are given names
like Bubbles, Nitrogen,

and a list of the effects
the gas can have.

But it doesn't take itself
too seriously.

The guide is humorous.
It's... It's tongue in cheek.

But it is actually serving
a serious purpose,

because those conditions that it
described are very real problems

which affect aviators
flying at high altitude.

There was a US Air Force B-17

stratosphere operated
flight test station

which experienced a number
of very unexplained events,

such as oil leaks and lack of oxygen

when they were flying
at over 40,000 feet

and that's where they explained them
by saying it was the gremlins.

The hallucinatory effects and
the physiological effects on pilots

flying at high altitude
in the early days of aviation

without the same equipment
that they have now,

I think could have been
quite a contributory factor

to people beginning to see things
that maybe weren't there.

Uh-oh. Here it comes. The message.

As we go rolling...

Hi, Mac.

♪ Rolling home ♪

Name is Grogan.
Technical gremlin, first class.

And then the British Government
got on board.

It began issuing posters
which were tacked up

on air bases all across the country

warning pilots about gremlins.

These posters are extraordinary.

They carry a very real
safety message.

"Don't do this.
Always wear your goggles.

Don't do that."

And attributed the reason
for that to the dangers of gremlins.

Then in 1943,
a young RAF officer

on secondment in Washington, DC

took the gremlin story even higher
into the stratosphere.

Roald Dahl, who became
one of the most celebrated novelists

of that period
through to the '60s and 1970s,

wrote a short story
Children's Story, the Gremlins.

And he described Gremlins
as mischievous creatures.

He said they were six inches tall

and they plagued air crews
all over the world.

It was a lovely children's story

and it explained that Gremlins

were so antagonised by air crew

that they decided to create havoc,

to cause mischief on planes.

I was very lucky because I...I...

My first little book I wrote
was called the Gremlins,

which was
bought by Walt Disney.

Walt Disney seized on this
and he published a syndicated column

illustrated with
pictures of Gremlins

to strengthen the message
about Gremlins

and the risks they posed to fliers.

He said,
"If you doubt that they exist,

that's because you haven't flown
a Spitfire in a dogfight

or been in a bomber over Germany."

The combination
of Roald Dahl and Walt Disney

quickly got the attention
of the British Government,

who saw it as a neat way
to issue warnings to pilots

about the dangers
of flying at high altitude

with Gremlins
as the convenient scapegoats.

They got on board
with Disney's projected film.

He said, "I'm going to turn Roald
Dahl's novel into a feature movie."

And the British government said,
"That sounds like a good idea."

In the end, that movie never
happened because, true to form,

the British Government,
stiff and censorious,

wanted control over every
last aspect of the production

and indeed the finances.

Wait! That's different.

Are you kidding?

Why, the minute
they start talking to you,

you'll go all soft and...

But the end of the film
wasn't the end for the Gremlins,

as their empire spread
from aviation into other spheres.

I think Gremlins were adopted as
a fiction for many other situations,

such as driving, marine, etc.

Where anything went wrong

that really could not be
easily explained.

There's not
so much reporting of them now.

I think probably because the word
Gremlin has been

taken over in other situations
such as the movies

that have got that same title.

The Gremlins had gone
from being an in-joke among pilots

to conquering Hollywood and become
a term we use in everyday speech.

But only when something goes wrong.

It was those official USAF

and RAF inputs,

which gave the Gremlin's story legs,
an entirely fictional story,

but one which became
a pervasive myth...

...for flyers during World War II.

Look, friend, I don't know
what all this sarcasm is about,

but I'm getting out
of this man's air force.

Capital O, capital U, capital T.
OUT.

Next time on Britain's X-Files...

How did an experienced pilot

disappear from the cockpit
of his plane?

Does Russian film
show a woman moving objects

with the power of her mind?

Did the Nazis discover
the Holy Grail?

And what was the thing

that terrorised a peaceful
Wiltshire village?

Subtitles by Sky Access Services