Original subtitles

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 .

And those files disclose investigations by the police,

by governments, by spy agencies.

Shortly after that transmission, Captain Schaefer'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.

When someone goes missing,

we all know there must be a rational explanation.

But in our first X-File,

the only logical interpretation seems to come from another planet.

Captain William Schaffner

was a 28 year old U.S. air force pilot,

and in September 1970, he was on attachment to the RAF.

And at that time, we're involved in this standoff with the Russians.

Still the Cold War, a lot of tension.

And every now and again,

the Russians would send aircraft over the Arctic

probing NATO defences.

Radar stations have picked up a wave of high-flying supersonic

bombers heading for targets all over Western Europe.

And we had a whole series of air bases

where aircraft will be at standby, known as QRA,

which stands for Quick Reaction Alert.

So these are cockpit-ready pilots who were there 24 hours a day

waiting for the order to come from the RAF

to scramble into the air over the North Sea,

to go and fend off whatever is waiting for them.

In the modern world, the emphasis is on speed.

The Lightning is said to be the fastest aircraft in the world

on active service.

William Schaffner was an experienced pilot.

He'd flown in the US Air Force during the Vietnam War.

The RAF listed him formally as combat ready.

Scramble. Scramble.

At 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September the 9th, 1970,

Schaffner was scrambled to intercept an intruder.

Something unusual had been seen on radar

coming over the North Sea towards Flamborough Head

in Yorkshire,

it had gone much further than what they would have expected

a Russian intruder aircraft,

so they needed to get into the air quickly.

Bill Schaffner leapt into his Lightning,

so he went up and got he an RAF pilot behind him,

his wingman, and they were being directed by

the radar ground controller RAF Staxton Wold.

And he reported back when he spotted the interloper.

He wasn't able at that distance

to determine what type of aircraft it was,

but he was able to calculate its speed,

160 knots or thereabouts,

well below the speeds at which his Lightning was capable of flying.

And Lightning is an apt description of its ferocity

and speed,

twice the speed of sound, 1,320 miles an hour.

That's the incredible ability that's part of Britain's defence.

He was talking to the ground control and he said, I can see-

I can see some lights in the distance.

I'm going in for the interception. And he was told, be careful.

You know, you need to sort of slow down.

So he was moving towards it to intercept it.

As he got closer,

he realised that there were some strange blue lights,

that there was kind of conical shape,

and also seeing this sort of football shape as well.

Schaffner did relay the fact that this was an unusual sight,

or rather, he did say about how it's turning around,

it's coming straight towards me,

and that he was going to take evasive manoeuvres.

Shortly after that transmission, Captain Schaffner's radio went dark.

That night in September would be the last time

anyone ever saw or heard from Captain William Schaffner.

Pilots had only a very limited survival time

in the cold September North Sea,

so the RAF quickly mounted a full air-sea rescue operation

to try and find Captain Schaffner and his missing Lightning.

Code named Foxtrot 94.

The pilots had, they had an ejection mechanism.

So if you're in trouble, you could hit a button,

it blew off the cockpit

and you'd be propelled out of the aircraft

and you would have an inflatable dinghy

that would open up and give you some time

before you were spotted by the air sea rescue.

But no sign of the pilot, no sign of the aircraft.

It had vanished.

Royal Navy divers located the Lightning plane

five weeks later on the seabed.

The bizarre thing was that when they recovered the aircraft

and looked in the cockpit,

there was no pilot and the cockpit was shut.

William Schaffner was married with two sons,

but all the RAF could tell them was that he had died

in an unfortunate accident whilst on active service

and his body had not been recovered.

The ensuing official inquiry was conducted,

as with everything else related to the fate of Foxtrot 94

under conditions of complete secrecy.

What changed that was a phone call made to the offices

of the Grimsby Evening News in 1992.

The caller, when he was put through to the newsroom

and spoke to a journalist, refused to identify himself.

But what he said was that he had been a member of the RAF team

which examined the remains.

He said that on the night that Foxtrot 94 had been lost,

number five squadron and Captain Schaffner had been on

a unique top secret mission.

And that top secret mission was to intercept UFOs.

Even more astonishingly, the anonymous caller provided

a transcript of the radio chatter between Captain Schaffner

and his ground control.

That transcript appeared to record Schaffner describing

the object he encountered.

He said, in this transcript,

it emitted a blinding, bluish light...

...and was flying far faster than any other aircraft.

And then the transcript recorded him saying,

wait, it's turning towards me.

I'm gonna have to take evasive action.

After that, the radio went dead.

When the newspaper published the story,

the silence surrounding Captain William Shafner's disappearance

mutated from being an unexplained accident

into a full-blown conspiracy theory involving a cover-up,

UFOs, and alien abduction.

The family of Bill Schaffner,

by that point his sons were in their 20s,

they looked on the internet and they saw all this stuff

about their dad dying as a result of an alien abduction.

So you can imagine how they felt,

because they felt, oh my God, you know,

we've never found the truth about what happened to our dad.

And now we're reading all this stuff on the internet.

In 2002, Schaffner's sons asked the British government

to release any information they had

relating to the disappearance of their father.

But it took a further six years

before the contents of their investigation

was finally released in 2008.

The main problem that was found was the fact that Schaffner,

despite being an experienced fighter pilot,

hadn't really received the proper training for this,

for low-level flying at night.

Another factor is the fact that Schaffner was impatient

to get back into the skies when he had scrambled.

Initially, he was meant to make sure that the Lightning

was properly serviced,

but he'd actually left without it being fully completed.

Unused to flying the Lightning at low speeds,

Schaffner stalled the aeroplane.

Having stalled at low altitude,

the plane hit the water and skidded on the surface

before starting to sink.

Schaffner had only seconds to activate his ejector seat.

The cockpit wouldn't blow when he hit the button

that should have blown it off.

So what did he do next? I'd have to manually do it.

And he's motoring this cockpit open and trying to think,

have I got all my life saving gear with him?

And he hadn't. It had become detached.

So he gets out of the cockpit, he's in the water,

and the cockpit's closing like that

before he could retrieve anything from the cockpit,

the aircraft sinking, and he drowned.

This seems to account for the order of events

that left Captain Schaffner stranded as his Lightning sinks,

but it doesn't explain the object that Schaffner reported seeing.

The RAF knew all along what it was, this object.

It was a Shackleton.

A Shackleton was a British aircraft

and the descendant of the Lancaster bomber.

It was used primarily by the RAF against Russian submarines.

In September 1970,

it was on exercise playing the part of a Russian intruder.

The crew of the Shackleton were interviewed and they said,

yeah, you know, we were there. We knew it was an exercise.

We knew that Lightnings would be coming in and shadowing us.

And we saw this aircraft pass by.

We saw its lights and then it just vanished and we assumed

it had hit the water. Which was exactly what it had done.

But none of this takes into account the testimony

of the anonymous whistleblower,

who knew it was a secret mission to intercept a UFO,

and who provided transcripts in which Captain William Schaffner

reported seeing lights in the sky shortly before he vanished.

When the transcripts of Captain Schaffner's communications

were finally released in the official inquiry,

it deviated significantly from the whistleblower's report

to the Grimsby Telegraph.

There is no mention of taking evasive action,

and the alleged flashing blue light is not referenced.

So how did Captain William Schaffner become the poster boy

for British UFO conspiracy theories?

At the time, very little was revealed from the incident.

Some of this, of course, was just the normal protocol

of dealing with aircraft crashes and disappearances.

But I do think there was a bit of an official cover-up in terms of

just what had happened to Schaffner,

because there were a certain amount of failings in this

that would have been very incriminating for the MOD

and for the RAF.

This is why no one trusts what the government says,

because there's so many examples of this kind of thing,

unnecessary secrecy,

things where they did know the answer to a mystery,

but deliberately keep it under wraps for decades.

And that allows conspiracies to develop.

And a lot of it is well over the top, unnecessary secrecy.

There's no reason why Bill Schaffner's family

couldn't have been told at the time what had happened,

but for some reason they weren't.

There is, though, one small coda to this story.

When the file was released,

it turned out to have been stored in a collection held by the RAF

and the government.

And that designation was:

Inquiries into Unexplained Aerial Phenomena,

UFOs.

Would the world be a better place

if paranormal abilities really existed?

But what if those who had those incredible powers,

fell into the hands of our enemies?

In the 1960's, remarkable claims emerged from Soviet Russia

that they had found someone with the ability to move objects

using only the power of their mind.

What's more, they could prove those claims.

There was moving footage of telekinetic experiments,

and those films featured

an otherwise unremarkable Russian woman

called Nina Kulagina.

The incredible footage shows Kulagina sat at a table

surrounded by scientists and journalists

as she apparently moves objects with her mind.

This rare talent for moving objects by force of will alone

has been termed psychokinesis or PK.

Nina Kulagina is a Russian housewife who has this ability.

She was born in Leningrad in 1926,

and her birth name was Ninel Mikhailova.

So usually in the West, we call her Nina Kolagina,

but she was actually called Ninel, which is N-I-N-E-L,

or Lenin backwards, which was a popular name at the time.

She was born two years after Lenin's death.

Her adolescence was very traumatic. It coincides with World War II.

At the age of 14, with the Second World War raging,

she joined a tank regiment

and she was assigned to the defence of Leningrad

in the lengthy and bloody, terrible Siege of her city by German forces.

She was badly wounded during the fighting.

In the early 1960s,

it seems that she had some kind of breakdown

linked to her injuries in World War II.

And so the first time that she showed

her psychic abilities was in hospital.

There was a radio report about a woman who was said to be able

to see colour with her fingers, and Ninel had the same ability.

Apparently, she could pick out threads from a box of threads

and pick the right colour without being able to see them.

She simultaneously discovered that these powers were not always benign.

Kulagina described events in which,

during times when she got angry,

objects, vases, China pottery would fly across the room

and smash themselves

and she attributed this to her telekinetic powers.

Kulagina and her husband set out

to record her telekinetic powers.

And they made short films in which she is seated at a table,

with an everyday household object in a glass case in front of her.

And by sitting and staring at the object,

she is able, as these films show, to make it move.

These early home movies soon came to the attention

of the Russian authorities,

who signed Nina up to a scientific programme

which could test whether her abilities were real or fake.

And once again, it was all captured on film.

Kulagina was studied intensively for more than 10 years

by Professor Sergeiev of Leningrad University,

and the films of her demonstrations became the subject

of unending controversy.

Did she have genuine paranormal powers or was she a charlatan?

She's putting a lot of force and effort into what she's doing.

She's waving her hands over certain items,

she's wearing a short-sleeved top and short-sleeved skirt,

so we can see nothing like a watch or anything else is on her arms.

And so you can see all these different compelling items

being moved, groups of matches sliding together,

a cigarette upended,

just moving across the table without falling over and rolling.

In 1968, Russia mounted the first parapsychology symposium

in Moscow. Expert observers from the West were invited.

And were amazed at the footage of Kulagina's telekinetic powers.

They were also allowed to watch Nina perform,

and the reports they sent back were nothing short of startling.

They described witnessing Kulagina seated six feet away

from a case which held an egg...

...and seeing Kulagina's mind, apparently,

separating the yolk from the albumen of this egg

without her ever touching it.

Kulagina was involved in an experiment

which involved a heart being suspended in a solution

that kept it artificially beating.

That was wired up to electrodes and the heart rate was monitored

and what they found was that the heart could be sped up,

slowed down, and eventually stopped by Kulagina.

One of the Westerners who was present at that demonstration

took secret footage, and that made its way to the West.

And from that moment, the, what we might call the paranormal

community in the West, and also Western scientists,

became fascinated by Kulagina's powers.

But on seeing the films of Kulagina's psychokinesis or PK,

there were others in the West who recognised that the Russians

now had control of a power with a much darker potential.

The Soviets claimed they've already devised machines,

that create magnetic and other kinds of artificial fields

that increase psychic powers, particularly telepathy and PK.

To suddenly have papers coming out saying that they've got

just one subject alone and perhaps many others.

With their mind manipulating things and can affect biological systems,

can think of someone at a distance and stop their heart,

for warfare that is extremely advanced

and a very powerful weapon to have and harness.

The United States commissions a report from military intelligence

that looks at all aspects of Soviet psychic research,

and it concludes that the Soviet Union has

at least 20 different institutes that were involved in research

at a cost of 21 million dollars per year.

The CIA was then about to begin its own experiments

in parapsychology,

convinced that Moscow would produce a weapon

against which the United States would be powerless.

As a result of the Cold War,

the United States was spending billions of dollars

on conventional and nuclear warfare.

Now they would need to pump even more time and money

into psychic research if they were going to catch up with the Russians.

But the big question that hung over Nina Kulagina was,

how did she do it?

There were many sources that claimed that

basically Kulagina's abilities were fraudulent,

that she was faking it,

basically that she was using either hidden wires or hidden cords,

or magnets in order to conduct her experiments.

In the 1980s, there was a magazine article that claimed this,

and Kulagina sued the author of the article,

and she actually won the case.

The judge said there's no evidence that Kulagina was faking it,

and a lot of the claims in the article were fake.

The films of Kulagina do contain an explanation

of what powers she was tapping into to achieve her psychokinesis or PK.

According to Dr Rabbitts in the 1951 Yale Journal

of Biology and Medicine,

the action of the sun and moon also affects the body's force field.

Dr Sergiev agrees, the most favourable time for PK

is during magnetic disturbances of the earth

caused by sunspot activity.

According to the Soviet view,

PK is not accomplished by mind over matter,

but rather by mind over force field.

However she was doing it,

the film seemed to show that the tests had a genuine physical effect

on Kulagina.

The films claim that these effects were backed up

by scientific evidence.

She loses up to three pounds

after a demonstration of psychokinesis.

For days after doing the tests, her arms and legs hurt.

Kolagina was also wired up and her heart rate was monitored

and they found that her heart rate increased to around

240 beats per minute.

And many sources suggest that in other tests,

she suffered terrible problems,

ranging from a loss of sight, pain in her spine,

the opening up of the wound that she had from World War II

and eventually a heart attack.

When Nina Kologina died of a heart attack in 1990,

many believed it was due to the strain on her body

caused by the forces she wielded

in the many scientific experiments she performed.

Ever since, debate has raged.

Was she a real life x-woman,

someone who could move objects

just using the power of her mind?

Or was she a talented trickster

supported by Soviet scientists

who were serving a much deeper and more sinister purpose,

for the Kremlin.

It's an amazing story and the footage is fascinating.

And the idea that both the Soviet Union and the United States

are involved in this campaign of psychic research

is something that we don't usually associate with the Cold War.

So this is kind of esoteric, psychic Cold War,

what we might call a psychic arms race, is absolutely fascinating.

Some objects are the stuff of legend.

They are so revered that the thought that they might

actually exist seems impossible.

That is unless your mind is bent on world domination.

A few Christian relics have generated

as much academic interest,

scientific controversy,

and wild conspiracy theories

as the Holy Grail.

Early medieval poems,

a 19th century opera

and Hollywood movies

have cemented the Grail's place

in the mythology of supernatural objects,

objects which have some mystical, paranormal power.

But what is the otherworldly source

of the Grail's power?

It was known as the drinking vessel

that was used during the Last Supper.

And so it was associated with the blood of Christ.

And was therefore a particularly precious and holy object.

It's believed by some that if you have the cup of Christ,

you have access to some form of eternal power or invincibility.

It's a highly venerated, highly symbolic object

that is invested with supernatural religious power

that is connected to Jesus Christ.

It has been reported to be in a cathedral in Spain

or a French chateau?

Is it a cup in Wales

or could it even be in the Metropolitan Museum in New York?

All we know is that some wanted it for its religious significance,

while others had far more sinister intentions.

1920, Hitler began.

He was considered just a joke then, a raving crackpot.

What Nazism was trying to do was to fuse all forms

of belief systems

such as Christianity, occult, superstition, astrology,

you name it, and blend them

to form this new super religion that's gonna last a thousand years.

The Nazis are interested in creating a mythology

for the concept of Aryanism.

And as a part of this,

they're trying to create a mythical pedigree for the Aryan race.

You know, that doesn't exist, so what do you do?

You go into actual history that exists,

and then you try to use that for it.

They wanted to connect the Aryan race

with the life of Jesus Christ.

Now, of course, Jesus Christ was Jewish.

He was a Jew growing up in The Middle East

thousands of years ago.

For the Nazis,

it was a very uncomfortable fact that he was a Jew.

What the Nazis wanted to do is to portray Christ as an Aryan.

Essentially a white man.

A strong believer in all things occult,

the man who took on the task of creating this new association

between the fictional Aryan race and Christianity

was Heinrich Himmler.

Heinrich Himmler, grim and bloody name in Nazidom,

the hangman of freedom.

0 Heinrich Himmler was the Reichsfuhrer-SS,

or the guy who led the SS for quite some time,

and he very particularly is interested in creating

this Aryan mythos.

So he spends a lot of time trying to create

a theoretical ancestral heritage for Aryanism.

Then in 1934,

Otto Rahn, an otherwise obscure German academic historian,

published a book which would fuel Himmler's obsession

with the Grail

and with its place and importance to...

...his Brotherhood of Aryan Teutonic Knights.

He's written a book that's called the Crusade Against the Holy Grail.

And he's convinced that a group of heretics

who lived in southern France,

who were sometimes called the Cathars,

had hold of the Holy Grail.

And he writes a whole book about this.

That becomes really popular with Himmler,

who is really the big one pushing forward this idea

of an Aryan mythology.

And so you get these ideas kind of roped together,

and basically it's a way of justifying Nazism.

Himmler had formed an organisation

which was part of the SS,

a kind of think tank called the Ahnenerbe,

which means ancestral heritage.

And it was quite a large organisation

that looked at different aspects of Aryan history

in order to link them to the new Germany

that was being created by the Nazis.

So he invited Rahn to join the Ahnenerbe,

and gave him opportunities to go and seek out the Holy Grail.

Rahn, however, was eccentric.

He had a drink problem, he was gay, he didn't fit into the SS ethos.

Nevertheless, Himmler continued to support him.

If he did anything wrong, if he was caught... misbehaving,

Himmler would punish him by giving him guard duty

at Dachau concentration camp.

And we know that Rahn was deeply disturbed by what he saw there.

The Ahnenerbe took these very amounted,

these very, very long and costly trips all over the world,

to places like Tibet,

you name it, all over the world, to try and find evidence

that kind of linked the modern Nazi state

to the cradle of humankind.

Now, it is possible that during some of those expeditions

that actually the Nazis were looking for objects like the Holy Grail.

But you better believe that if they found some little cup

on route and thought that was the Grail,

they would have brought it back to Berlin.

But how were Himmler and Rahn going to find the Holy Grail?

It could be anywhere in the world.

Himmler found the answer in an opera by Richard Wagner.

The inspiration of Richard Wagner's grandiose operas

was shrewdly utilised by Hitler

to glamorise his nation's age-old pattern of treachery and violence.

Parsifal took the original mediaeval tale of Percival

and placed it at the centre of an occultic tale

of magical forces and redemption.

And the opera suggested that the Grail's resting place

was in the Pyrenees Mountains

on the border between France and Spain.

Himmler is particularly interested in the Grail

to the point that he actually goes looking for it.

And he ends up over in Catalonia at a place called Montserrat,

which is kind of like Monsalvat,

which is a reference to the Holy Grail,

very specifically from a Wagner opera.

He doesn't find it, surprise,

because the Holy Grail is probably not real.

But what he does find is a lot of tunnels

that are underneath monasteries and castles,

which is completely normal, just absolutely ordinary.

That's how you would kind of get things in and out

if you're under siege.

But he kind of takes this as some kind of proof

that there was the Holy Grail

and it's being squirrelled around varying places.

But he obviously believes enough in it to go looking for it.

And interestingly, also, he doesn't believe enough in it to fake it.

You know, you would think that a Nazi like this might just be like,

oh yeah, look, we found the Holy Grail.

He doesn't do that. He says that it's an inconclusive search.

The Nazis didn't really hide their belief in the Holy Grail,

as it was part of The Aryan myth.

And so it came to the attention of the Allies.

The British were very much aware of the fact that there was a lot

of Nazi interest in the occult.

They were very much aware that there might have been propaganda

value in this.

So I think the British and the Allies were very wary

of what the Nazis were doing. Did they take it seriously? No.

What would have happened if the Nazis claimed

that they had found the Holy Grail.

How would they have used its occult power?

Himmler took possession of Wewelsburg Castle

as the headquarters of his mystical Aryan Brotherhood

of SS Knights.

He had a crypt constructed

around which 12 SS leaders

would conduct occult ceremonies in front of an occult symbol.

And that number 12 was not coincidental

because that was exactly the number of knights

around King Arthur's fabled round table.

Himmler conflated the two myths.

I think that people are obsessed with the idea that the Nazis

were searching for the Holy Grail

because the Nazis were so horrible and terrifying

that we want an occult explanation for their behaviours.

It's difficult for us to say this is just a group

of really terrible people

who wanted to exterminate whole other groups of people.

So we want there to be a magic that describes

what it is that they're doing.

It's easier than just accepting that sometimes human beings

are really awful.

I think we have to be a little bit careful with this obsession

with things like the Holy Grail and the occult activities of the Nazis.

It's in danger of clouding the fact

that what the Nazis did was to transform Europe

in the most diabolical way.

What if something was so strange that it seemed impossible

to give it a name? How would we refer to such a thing?

Warminster, where strange sights and sounds at night

have been reported.

Warminster is a quiet market town in Wiltshire,

where things like this just don't happen.

Well, I've lived in Warminster for 11 years,

and in the whole time, the Warminster thing

has been discussed.

Sometimes you hear it two or three times a week,

sometimes you don't hear it for weeks on end,

but you are Just aware, I think, that it's always there.

There was enough interest to pack a public meeting

in the town hall last Friday night.

More than 300 people turned up to hear the local council chairman,

Mr Emlin Reece, open the meeting.

The most disturbing factor

is that many of our townspeople have been frightened by unusual sounds.

The Warminster Thing began on Christmas Day in 1964

with a lady who was walking very early in the morning to church

and heard a noise in the sky

and lots of vibrations and stuff like that.

At 6:30 that morning,

a local woman walking to her church

along a country lane near Warminster heard a sound behind her.

It was, she thought, the sound of a gritting lorry,

but it was accompanied by a very loud humming noise.

But when she turned round...

...there was nothing there, and the noise suddenly seemed to go

from behind her and vanish off up into the skies above her.

Many, many different sightings over quite a long period of time

by many different people in the community at different places,

but all within Warminster.

And I suspect because there is, at this stage,

no clear explanation

of what those phenomena are

or represent, whether they're connected or not connected,

it's been given this rather... loose generic term

the Warminster Thing.

It was the Thing and it's earned itself that title

if you like, the Thing,

because people didn't have a clue what it was.

Then in June 1965,

came the first "sighting"

of what was causing this fury,

the first sighting of the Warminster Thing

and it was reported in the local paper,

that what was causing all of this concern,

all of this upheaval, all of this panic,

was a flying saucer.

The early 1960s saw a wave of UFO reports in Britain,

but the epicentre seemed to be around Warminster in Wiltshire,

where stories of alien invasions struck fear into the hearts

of the locals.

They were worried, because it is something completely out of context.

It's not what normally happens in society.

Yes, so that was why they had the meeting and had to turn away

two or three hundred people outside the town hall in Warminster.

The meeting was thrown open to the people of Warminster.

How many people here tonight are afraid of the thing?

How many of you?

At quarter to four in the morning,

I was wakened by this dreadful droning sound.

And I went to the bedroom window

and I saw this brilliant object.

It was quite low in the sky,

and I live up Beacon View that way,

I just couldn't move, and it was going on for half an hour.

But it wasn't just the locals who wanted to know

what was going on.

The meeting also attracted a gaggle of ufologists.

Also in attendance, but trying not to make their presence known,

were men in dark suits from the Air Ministry.

The military were there, but they weren't in uniform

and there were plenty, as I say, a lot of people attended

and clearly it was causing concern,

you know, because no answers could be found.

The meeting didn't really help because, try as they might,

the official explanations didn't convince the citizens of Warminster.

The reason that the rational explanations didn't work

was that the strange events kept being reported.

All of these stories found there way onto the desk of

the Warminster Gazette's chief reporter, Arthur Shuttlewood.

He had a number of sightings which brought to his attention,

that galvanised his interest.

And that's-

The newspapers picked up on it,

especially the Gordon Faulkner famous photo.

65, that created wonderful newspaper reports of the Thing,

the Thing, the invasion of Warminster.

The photograph, this groundbreaking picture

of the Warminster Thing,

had been captured by chance by Gordon Faulkner.

He'd been out and happened to have his camera handy

when the Thing streaked across the sky.

Ufologists flocked to the town.

So too, according to local press reports,

did television's favourite astronomer, Patrick Moore,

hopefully to catch a glimpse of the Warminster Thing.

In the early 60s, the flying saucer place was Warminster,

Cradle Hill. I went there to do a programme

and talked to all kinds of people, including various journalists.

When one person sees a flying saucer, others will too.

Someone who joined the throng of new witnesses

was Arthur Shuttlewood.

The previously sceptical journalist reported his own close encounter

with the Thing.

He recounted his terrifying experience of seeing

the Thing through a bedroom window

and of grabbing his cine camera and pointing it at the object

as it flew across the sky, only to find

that the camera twitched in his hands

and then flew out of his grasp.

Some reports described a fiery, cigar-shaped object

hovering in the sky,

but most Warminster folk have seen nothing out of the ordinary

and strongly resent newspaper stories about a town

living in terror.

The presence of the Thing divided opinion

among the people of Warminster.

I've talked to people who say, that's just a load of rubbish.

People really believe that,

and people who say that that's got to be a thing.

It's got to be a thing because so, so many people over the years

have produced consistent evidence that there is a Thing

and something's going on.

Whilst opinion was split,

there was one group of people who were delighted at the arrival

of little green men in Warminster

because it attracted hordes of ufologists and tourists.

Warminster started in around about 1964-65

and went through till about 1978-80

and then it petered out to about 150-200 sightings.

These things, they're real, they're genuine,

and but it's a matter of sorting the wheat out from the chaff.

And that's not crop circles, is it? Or is it? I don't know.

Recently, I was very privileged,

as mayor and chairman of the council,

to cut the ribbon to unveil the newly painted mural

to celebrate 60 years of the Warminster Thing.

But the key to a rational explanation for the Thing

might be closer to home.

The army is much in evidence in these parts,

and sceptics say that if odd things are being seen,

they're most likely rockets, flares, balloons, or aircraft,

which the army's not talking about for security reasons.

There were secret aircraft going around,

and of course some of those were responsible for saucer sightings,

that was the case in Warminster, certainly.

Lots of extraordinary things have happened to me

since I've been in Warminster.

But one of those things has not been the Warminster Thing.

Historic reports, including the Warminster Thing,

showed that at the time, and ever since,

the Ministry of Defence has taken the idea of UFOs in general

and the Warminster Thing in particular,

very seriously, as a potential issue of national security.

Next time on Britain's X Files.

What happened when Uri Geller's powers were tested by the CIA?

What was the real origin

of a mysterious crater in a farmer's potato field?

Why did the Nazis want the Spear of Destiny?

And we reveal the meaning of a mysterious message

sent over 50 years ago.

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