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00:01I'm Tim Tate. I've been an investigative journalist for almost half a century.
00:08And what I specialise in is exploring official archives, unearthing dusty old files from government departments, spy agencies, the police.
00:20This strange figure looks very much like an astronaut.
00:23And what I have found in those collections, both in Britain and in the United States, is a truly extraordinary
00:32collection of real-life X-Files.
00:36True cryptids like the Yeti, the Mongolian death worm, death worm, death worm.
00:41And those files disclose investigations by the police, by governments, by spy agencies.
00:48Shortly after that transmission, Captain Shaffner's radio went dark.
00:53To examine and uncover the truth about phenomena which are truly out of this world.
01:01It's a great piece of branding, death ray. Everyone knows where they stand with a death ray. Death ray.
01:15The first X-File we open takes us above the clouds, where an examination of a spate of frighteningly similar
01:23air crashes can't ignore the possibility that their cause has otherworldly origins.
01:29In the wake of World War II, passenger air travel rarely took off due to new technology, the jet engine.
01:36Comet jetliner pioneering the first pure jet commercial airline service.
01:41Britain sought to lead the way with the de Havilland comet, but then a series of crashes saw the project
01:46halted.
01:47What was causing the comets to mysteriously fall out of the sky?
01:51Was there an, as yet, unidentified design flaw?
01:54Or could the answer have an otherworldly explanation?
01:59On Thursday, November the 4th, 1954, one of the strangest exchanges ever recorded in Britain's remarkable collection of X-Files,
02:08occurred at the Institute of Civil Engineers in Westminster, presided over by Sir Lionel Heald.
02:14And Sir Lionel Heald's question in the August Halls of a public inquiry asked whether the plane crashes could have
02:25been caused by contact with a flying saucer.
02:38The de Havilland comet was the first jet passenger airliner.
02:43The world now had its first passenger jet air service.
02:46Prior to the comet, all passenger aircraft were piston-engined aircraft, as used in bombers during the war.
02:54The airliners were noisy, couldn't fly particularly high, so they'd be buffeted in the winds as they flew along.
03:01The comet airliner was able to get up to much higher heights, which was a much more stable journey for
03:09the passengers.
03:10So all in all, the comet was a much, much improved airliner.
03:16In fact, some of the advertising actually showed somebody building a stack of cards on one of the tables.
03:25And here, 40,000 feet over the Alps, en route Rome, first of five stops on the 6,700 mile
03:31flight.
03:32London to Rome, two and a half hours.
03:34On Sunday, January 10th, 1954, at 10.30 a.m., BOAC comet GALYP took off from Rome Airport.
03:44It climbed to 31,000 feet and headed off over the Mediterranean Sea.
03:49But barely 200 miles into its journey, it exploded, killing all on board.
03:54Local fishermen reported seeing a ball of light in the sky and hearing an enormous bang.
04:01The initial mystery that surrounded the comet was the fact that they couldn't find the cause.
04:06They had tested the aircraft considerably prior to its entering of service.
04:11And this was actually the first comet to enter commercial service, so it was a trusted aircraft.
04:17So then the investigators had to look for this deadly problem.
04:23It would take several months to reassemble the parts of the comet to try and determine the cause of the
04:29disaster.
04:30All of the fleet were taken out of service for 10 weeks.
04:33And 60 modifications were made to the aircraft to allow them to fly again.
04:39Once they flew again after the 10 weeks, a further three weeks elapsed and another plane crashed that was on
04:49charter to South African Airways in exactly the same way, oddly enough, in the same area, off Elba.
04:57Following this second comet air crash of April 1954, the fleet was grounded indefinitely.
05:03The fact that this was such a trusted aircraft added to the mystery and the intrigue, as well as the
05:08fact that the crew was so experienced.
05:11These were pilots that had served in the Second World War that had distinguished flying crosses, flying medals.
05:17And so for this aircraft to have such a disaster, it was very unsettling for the aviation industry and particularly
05:24in Britain.
05:25There was a lot of speculation. What was it? Was it sabotage? Was it terrorism? What caused these two aircraft
05:32to explode and all these people to die as a result?
05:36But the investigation into the reassembled comet ruled out both sabotage and the terrorist bomb.
05:42The rational, if excitable, newspaper coverage gave way to more conspiratorial thinking.
05:52And British government files, files maintained by the Air Ministry, began filling up with claims that something supernatural or paranormal
06:05had been involved.
06:07So this was something that was actually amazingly taken seriously by the Board of Inquiry.
06:14So in the National Archives there were files of letters from members of the public saying,
06:19have you looked at the possibility that the comet was struck by a flying saucer over the Mediterranean?
06:24And people saw a big flash and explosion in the sky.
06:27So it was like perhaps quite logical that maybe there was another object involved.
06:32And that goes some way to explaining the extraordinary exchange between Sir Lionel Heald, QC,
06:39and the director of the aircraft establishment during the inquiry into the comet disasters.
06:47From this point on, stories spread that the doomed comets may have been victim of some kind of alien attack.
06:57The higher and faster the jet planes went, the stranger their encounters became, all adding to the UFO myth.
07:05When the report into the comet disasters was finally finished, it was indeed a tale of the unknown.
07:11But this was a case of pushing the envelope beyond the capacity of the plane.
07:15The flight reached operating height, which was round about 35,000 feet.
07:24At that height, the structure of the hull failed, which is likened to being sitting somewhere in a 500-pound
07:35bomb going off.
07:37So it exploded and blew the whole plane apart effectively at that height.
07:47The aircraft in pieces with the passengers all on board, who would have been dead by then, then fell to
07:58the sea off the Isle of Elba.
08:01The real culprit? It wasn't a spacecraft from another planet or little green men.
08:07Thousands of tests revealed a catastrophic weak point in the comet's design.
08:12Tiny flaws in the riveting around the comet's windows.
08:15What they eventually discovered going through all of these tests was that actually 70% of the stress on the
08:22aircraft
08:22that came from the pressurization cycles was actually located at the front.
08:27It was around where the windows were.
08:29The reason why they burst was because the rivets had been punched into the metal, creating the hole by which
08:40the rivet was sealed.
08:41But around it were minute cracks, which elongated over a period of time.
08:47The phenomenon of metal fatigue was not yet fully known in this era.
08:52So as a result, this was a case of trying to over engineer it, but also using metal that was
08:58ultimately far too thin to take these strains.
09:02The comet jetliner pioneering the first pure jet commercial airline service.
09:06In this footage of early jet passengers, you can see that unlike modern jet planes, the windows are not round.
09:13This also played a part in both disasters.
09:15The windows were slightly square.
09:18When you get a window that's round, there's less pressure on all points around the window.
09:26When the window is slightly square, there's more pressure on the corners than there is on any other section of
09:34the window.
09:41Hatfield England, the 72 tonne four jet comet three destined for transatlantic service is unveiled.
09:47This giant is the latest improvement of the original comet airliner.
09:51The comet one was grounded due to a series of accidents.
09:54They uprated the engines to make the more powerful engines, and they also reskinned the plane.
10:00So they put a thicker skin on the aircraft, and they obviously modified the way they made the windows.
10:07But the skin made it more able to withstand any pressure situations.
10:13The comet three will be modified to comply with the inquiry's suggestions.
10:16Both disasters had been caused by metal fatigue, an ill-understood problem at the time, and were definitely not the
10:26result of attacks by spacecraft from Mars.
10:32Nonstop New York to London in six hours, as Britain hopes her commercial jetliners will set a new pace over
10:38the Atlantic.
10:40But while the cause of the crashes appear to have been identified, it couldn't save the makers of the doomed
10:46airliner, de Havilland, or the British aircraft industry.
11:15We often hear eyewitness accounts of strange things at sea, but if we take a closer look, and they become
11:22even stranger,
11:23then they might well make their way into the British X-files.
11:35Paranormal encounters on land or in the sky are difficult enough to understand, but when something strange happens at sea,
11:42the possibilities that lurk in the fathoms below conjure even greater primordial fears in our fragile minds.
11:49The sea is a very alien and dangerous environment for human beings.
11:53It's filled with dangerous animals, things like giant squid, the great white shark, the saltwater crocodile,
12:00an animal that makes the great white shark look like a pussycat.
12:04And it's deep. We can't see beneath the waves. It's a psychological thing. We never know what's lurking there.
12:11There could be anything, something ready to devour us. We could be dragged down by undercurrents. We could be caught
12:17in a storm.
12:18So the turmoil of the depths of the seas and what lurks there is as much psychological as it is
12:25an actual physical thing.
12:27And we populate it with monsters, perhaps with good reason, perhaps because there are monsters.
12:37Sometimes sailors get a glimpse of these monsters, but these are often dismissed because they are so fleeting and vague.
12:44But that is not the case of a sighting made in 1848 by the British frigate HMS Daedalus.
12:52HMS Daedalus was a mid 19th century Navy warship, and it was on a long voyage and it was sort
13:01of had a very experienced captain and a very experienced crew.
13:06The HMS Daedalus had been employed fighting pirates off the coast of Borneo, and she was on the long voyage
13:15back to England.
13:16About halfway there, on August the 6th, 1848, at about 5.30 in the evening,
13:25Captain Peter McQuay and six other people saw what they said was a sea serpent.
13:32It was a long straight-bodied creature, they described, with a head and neck just above the water's surface.
13:43The visible portion that they could see above the waves was approximately 60 feet long,
13:49and its head was held out of the water at around four feet high.
13:56The witnesses thought that there was considerably more of the creature below the water.
14:02And it had a mane resembling seaweed.
14:06They said that it didn't move side to side like a snake or up and down like a marine mammal,
14:12but it just seemed to slide along in the water.
14:16They described the head of the sea serpent and an estimate of what the tail would have been,
14:22and assumed that it was about 60 feet long sea serpent.
14:25Captain Peter McQuay said that if it was on land, and it was a man he'd have known,
14:35he would have been close enough to recognise his face, that's how close it was.
14:39And it was in view for a good 20 minutes, which was a long sighting.
14:44If only one person sees it, then it's only one person's opinion.
14:48But in this case, it was the captain, the lieutenant, a couple of men.
14:51But what's really interesting about this is that he was a really proper captain,
14:56and so he recorded latitude, longitude.
14:59And of course, being an experienced captain, all of this information is very, very accurate.
15:04Whilst the captain's log records all the nautical details, such as position, speed, and weather conditions,
15:11it makes no mention of the sighting.
15:13But there was a very good reason for this.
15:15There was a ship's superstition, dating probably from about that time,
15:23that mentioning the sea serpent in the log would bring a lot of very bad luck.
15:30Tongs wagged. Somehow the story got out, and the media seized on it in a feeding frenzy,
15:36not unlike the tabloids of today.
15:38A letter was published in The Times. There was a much exaggerated account in The Times.
15:46The stories reported in the newspapers might have been exaggerated,
15:49but these were accompanied by illustrations based on drawings made by the ship's first lieutenant, Edgar Drummond.
15:56There were some illustrations produced by the Illustrated London News,
16:00which were very detailed, but of course not necessarily very representative of what was seen.
16:10What was much more representative of what was seen was the diary of Lieutenant Drummond,
16:19which only resurfaced recently.
16:22There's an illustration in the diary which is a lot less elaborate
16:27than the illustrated London News pictures.
16:34Drummond's illustration does not show the typical representation of a sea serpent with a long body and humps,
16:41which might have been expected if he was following nautical tradition.
16:45There have been sightings of sea serpents as far back as ancient Babylon and Mesopotamia.
16:52They're seen all over the world in every sea and ocean, and sightings have continued to the present day.
17:00There seem to be a number of different types, but the two primary ones are an animal with a long
17:06neck and a bulky body,
17:08and an elongate animal that throws its body into a series of loops or humps.
17:14There was a lot of speculation as to, are these things an unrecognized animal?
17:21Not are these things real, but are they an unrecognized animal?
17:25In an attempt to try to explain the sighting, numerous experts came forward offering their own interpretations.
17:31Henry Lee, who was directing the Brighton Aquarium and wrote a book about giant squid possibly being the subject of
17:41sea serpent encounters.
17:43So he thought it was a squid perhaps trailing its tentacles across the surface.
17:49In the meantime, there is the discovery of marine reptiles from the Jurassic on the south coast of England,
17:59which are now being publicized.
18:02And people began to think of the sea serpent not as a mythical Scandinavian tradition,
18:10but more as a plesiosaur with a much longer neck, but a much shorter body.
18:19Even the Natural History Museum in London got involved.
18:23Richard Owen made suggestions that angered the captain and crew of the Daedalus,
18:28and ended in an angry exchange of letters.
18:31Owen suggested that he'd seen an elephant seal, which doesn't grow to nearly that size,
18:37and he's not found in the area.
18:38Then he suggested it was a native canoe that had harpooned a whale,
18:42and it was being dragged along by the whale.
18:44And then he said it was a whale shark, which doesn't remotely resemble what the people saw.
18:52And the captain and his crew argued quite fiercely against that.
18:56Eventually, it was decided that no, that's not what this is.
19:01It's an anomaly. And it stayed an anomaly for a very long time.
19:06I don't think the crew were lying. I think they reported accurately what they saw.
19:10And I'm a believer in sea serpents. I think there are a number of large unknown animals that we call
19:16sea serpents,
19:17living in the seas and oceans right up to the present day, that we have no explanation for.
19:24But in this case, I think that is an explanation.
19:34Recently, because there is so much precise information, someone had a look at this and sort of said,
19:41well, you know, if you look at this and think of it in terms of the animals we do know,
19:45this sighting and the behaviour of the animal is consistent with a rockal whale, a sea whale,
19:51which is a baleen whale who eat plankton, basically.
19:55And in order to do this, they skim along the surface with their mouths open.
19:58And so the top of this animal's jaw would be above the water.
20:03And they would be going along at just about the same speed that the captain suggested.
20:10And indeed, if you see pictures of the same whale sort of going along,
20:15and you kind of don't know that it's a whale, then it does look very mysterious.
20:19It does look very, very strange because you can't see the eyes because of the way it's going.
20:24But it's taken a very long time to really come to an explanation.
20:29And one of the reasons you can come to such a good explanation, which is very rare,
20:33is because it was such interesting and specific information to start with.
20:39But not everyone is convinced that we can explain away the phenomena of sea serpents quite so easily.
20:47These things have been reported since time immemorial.
20:50And we must remember that ancient legends of dragons all over the world,
20:56in ancient cultures like Babylon, Sumeria, China, Japan,
21:01they all associate them with water, the ancient element of water, rather than fire.
21:07And there could be a reason for that.
21:10Just because one sea serpent sighting has an explanation,
21:14it doesn't mean that all of them do.
21:16It's like saying that if one Rembrandt painting turns out to be a hoax,
21:22there's no such thing as Rembrandt.
21:33The End
21:33The End
21:34The End
21:48Logic tells us that you can't kill something that isn't alive.
21:52But if you could, it would change more than just the laws of physics.
21:56It would change the way we think of death itself.
22:04Most ghost stories are told late at night in an eerie atmosphere designed to create fear in the listener.
22:10But one ghost story not only resulted in a very real death,
22:15but also had consequences that were still reverberating 180 years later.
22:19The tale of the Hammersmith ghost, and the murder which resulted from it,
22:25has a unique place in Britain's collection of X-Files.
22:30Because although the arrest, trial and conviction of the ghost's killer
22:35were all wrapped up within a space of just ten days in January 1804,
22:41the case itself would pose substantial legal problems for the next 180 years.
22:57Hammersmith, which was still very much part of the countryside rather than the great metropolis,
23:03became awash with rumours that the ghost of a suicide had left its grave in the churchyard
23:12and was menacing the neighbourhood.
23:24There were several notable sightings of the ghost itself.
23:27One of them was a man by the name of Thomas Groom,
23:29who was the drayman to the local brewer, Mr Burgess.
23:32He was actually walking through the churchyard of Hammersmith one night
23:36when suddenly the ghost came out from behind a tombstone
23:39and grabbed him by the throat.
23:41And he said he struggled with the ghost for a few moments
23:43and then he hit out at it with his fist.
23:45And connecting with something, he said it felt very soft, like a grape coat.
23:49He managed to then wriggle free, but he actually took to his bed.
23:52When he got home, he took to his bed for over a week.
23:54He was that terrified by his experience.
23:56The ghost on one occasion attacked a wagon full of people
24:00travelling by night through Hammersmith.
24:03It also appeared to one woman who was pregnant
24:07and threw her into a terrible state of hysterics
24:11and was blamed for a miscarriage.
24:13One of the appearances that was reported at the time
24:17was a man called Thomas Millwood, who was 22 years old.
24:20He was a bricklayer, some accounts said a plasterer.
24:23He was walking along Hammersmith Terrace one night
24:25when a couple going past and a coach started screaming,
24:29saying, it's a Hammersmith ghost, it's a Hammersmith ghost.
24:31And he became quite irate and told them off,
24:33I'm no more a ghost than you are.
24:36And he thought it was hilarious and he went home and told his mother-in-law.
24:39His mother-in-law said, you know, you really have to be careful
24:43because he was dressed, being a bricklayer,
24:45he was dressed in his regulation outfit or work clothes,
24:50which consisted of white canvas overcoat,
24:53white waistcoat, white trousers hanging over his shoes.
24:56So that's what the people had seen and why they thought he was a ghost.
25:01Whilst the British X-Files don't contain the name of the ghost,
25:05they do tell us why he was attacking people.
25:08As far as we can ascertain,
25:11the actual person who came back from the dead as a revenant
25:16had committed suicide the previous year.
25:20Now, up until 1824,
25:23it was a practice that suicides were buried,
25:27not in churchyards, but at crossroads,
25:30sometimes with a stake through the heart.
25:33The ghost had become so commonplace,
25:36nightly appearances were happening all around Hammersmith,
25:40that in early January 1804,
25:43a clergyman and a gentleman offered a reward of five guineas
25:46to anybody who would go out and capture the ghost.
25:49So in early January 1804,
25:51you get lots of young men going out into the dark of night,
25:54armed with guns and fouling pieces and pistols,
25:58determined to apprehend the ghost.
26:02On December 29th,
26:04a night watchman called William Girdler
26:07stumbled into the tap room of a local pub
26:10and said he had just seen the Hammersmith ghost.
26:15And he regaled the customers in the bar
26:19with the spine-chilling details of the white-clad spectre.
26:28One of those in the bar that night was Francis Smith,
26:31and he resolved that over the next few nights
26:35he would go ghost hunting.
26:37After first fortifying himself with drink,
26:40he went out and sat waiting for the ghost,
26:44having first collected his fouling piece,
26:47basically a gun which was used for shooting ducks and geese.
26:53And he sat there until he saw a white figure
26:57coming up the lane about 10 o'clock in the evening.
27:02He was shocked by the sudden appearance of the ghost.
27:07He was hunting. It rose up in front of him.
27:12And Smith cried out,
27:14Damn you, who are you? Damn you, I'll shoot you.
27:17And when the ghost didn't reply, he fired a single shot.
27:23The shot hit the ghost,
27:27which crumpled to the path in front of him.
27:33And Thomas Millwood was dressed in his work outfit,
27:37his white waistcoat, his white overcoat, his white trousers.
27:40And Francis Smith simply cocked his fouling piece,
27:43demanded who he was.
27:45Millwood made no reply.
27:46So Francis Smith shot him.
27:48And he died instantly.
27:52He was killed instantly by the bullet.
27:53It actually hit him under the chin.
27:55And he died instantly.
27:56Smith very quickly, and to his credit,
27:59realised what he'd done,
28:01that he had shot to death someone posing as a ghost.
28:06And he confessed his crime.
28:15In January 1804,
28:17he appeared at the Central Criminal Court,
28:19or the Old Bailey,
28:20on a charge of willful murder of Thomas Millwood.
28:23Francis Smith's defence was,
28:26that he hadn't intended to shoot Thomas Millwood.
28:29He'd simply gone out and intended to shoot the ghost.
28:31And his defence was,
28:32he bore no malice whatsoever against Thomas Millwood.
28:35So therefore, he hadn't murdered him.
28:38Unfortunately, the court took a different view.
28:41As the law stood at the time,
28:45deaths had to be the fault of somebody.
28:48And this was a case of murder.
28:50As the judge said, the law is the law.
28:52And the law states that if you shoot somebody dead,
28:55and it's not self-defence,
28:57if it's not done under official sanction,
28:59then it's murder.
29:01The jury returned with a verdict.
29:04It convicted Francis Smith of willful murder.
29:07And the judge donned the black cap
29:11and imposed the only sentence allowed by law, death.
29:16Fortunately, a recommendation of mercy was made to the king.
29:23The pleas reached his majesty, King George III,
29:28who granted a royal pardon.
29:31And so the sentence was commuted to one of hard labour for six months.
29:36The pariah of Francis Smith and the tragedy of the shooting dead of Thomas Millwood
29:42did lead to information being given to the local magistrate,
29:46whereby at least one of the perpetrators, who may have been the ghost,
29:49was identified.
29:50And it was a local man by the name of John Graham.
29:53John Graham was very religious.
29:54He attended the local chapel.
29:56He had a family.
29:57In short, he was the last person you'd expect to go out at night, disguised as a ghost.
30:02And the magistrate asked him why he'd done it.
30:04And he said, well, I did it to take revenge on my apprentices,
30:07because they'd been terrifying my children with stories of ghosts.
30:10So, consequently, I decided to get revenge on them.
30:13That's why I went out as a ghost.
30:14But he maintained he'd only ever done it once.
30:17So that meant that the ghost was still out there somewhere.
30:23It might have started out as a prank and ended up in a tragic death,
30:28but the Hammersmith ghost would reverberate across the centuries.
30:32Then in 1949, a leading academic lawyer called Glanville Williams
30:38rediscovered the curious case of the Hammersmith ghost.
30:42Glanville Williams raised the case of the Hammersmith ghost
30:46as part of a wider debate about reforming the law of manslaughter.
30:52This led to the Homicide Act 1957, which introduces the plea of diminished responsibility.
31:01And similarly, the law on mistake developed until finally, in 1984,
31:07it was accepted that an unreasonable mistake might also provide some degree of mitigation
31:15or excuse as much as a reasonable, honest mistake.
31:19And at that point, the case of the Hammersmith ghost
31:24became one of effectively a historical precedent
31:29because that was a real-life case where the situation of a mistake,
31:35an unreasonable one, suddenly came into its own.
31:40But it took 180 years for the law to actually evolve to recognise it.
31:47It was considered a pretty bad organisation,
31:50And it was a pretty bad organisation.
31:58In January 2021, it was failed to get an interesting experience.
32:03So, it wasn't a unsure about it.
32:16Why did you understand the possibility of a victim's shrieked
32:17So when a photograph seems to show something extraordinary, we tend to look for an extraordinary
32:22explanation.
32:23But that isn't always where the truth is to be found.
32:28When we think of photographs of paranormal phenomena, we expect to see dark, blurry,
32:33mysterious images.
32:35What we don't expect is a little girl holding a bunch of flowers.
32:39But that is exactly what we see in one of the most mysterious images ever taken that
32:44has remained an enigma for over 60 years.
32:47Jim Templeton was a firefighter who was based near Carlisle in Cumbria.
32:55And he was also a very keen photographer.
32:57And during the 1960s, he took one of the most bizarre, baffling, iconic mystery photographs
33:05in the history of anomalous photography.
33:07In May 1964, he was out with his wife and daughter.
33:12Not only was he trying out his new camera, but he wanted to take some pictures of his
33:17wife because she'd just bought a new dress.
33:20So it seemed an ideal opportunity for him to play around with his camera and spend some
33:27time with his family.
33:28Jim was there with his wife and his young daughter.
33:31And they were in Solway Firth in Cumbria.
33:35And as far as Jim can remember, there was nobody else around.
33:38They were there by themselves.
33:40So he'd set up his camera and he got his daughter, Elizabeth, to pose.
33:47And a really lovely photo.
33:48His wife was standing behind him and took a series of pictures and didn't see anything unusual.
33:56In the days before mobile phones, pictures taken on a film camera weren't instantly accessible.
34:01You had to take the film to a specialist laboratory and have it developed, which normally took
34:07a week or so before they were sent back to you.
34:10About a week later, he went back to the chemist to collect the pictures.
34:13And he spoke about the photographs and the assistant looked through the photographs with him.
34:20And the assistant pointed out that one of the pictures was ruined by somebody in the background.
34:26And then when Jim looked at the picture, he realised this strange figure looked very much
34:31like an astronaut.
34:34When the assistant handed them back to him, she said, it's just a pity about that one picture,
34:40which was spoiled by the spaceman in the back of the shot.
34:45And he thought, what, as you would.
34:48And looked through the photographs and lo and behold, standing in the background, almost
34:53like floating behind the head of Elizabeth, is this figure that you can only describe as
34:58a spaceman.
34:59It looks very much like a NASA astronaut of that period, wearing a big white space suit,
35:08a helmet with a black visor.
35:11Everyone had been watching it on TV, the astronauts in their space suits.
35:14So everyone knew what an astronaut looked like, silvery white suits and the domed helmets.
35:20And this figure that is standing behind Elizabeth looks like an astronaut that's sort of turned.
35:27You can see the helmet, almost, and you can see the white suit.
35:31And so he was absolutely baffled, what on earth is this figure?
35:35When he wasn't taking photographs, Jim Templeton was a fireman, and he was used to dealing with
35:41the police.
35:42So that was his first port of call.
35:45You know, I've got this weird photograph, you know, with this strange figure on it.
35:49And it was taken overlooking the Solway Firth, where there's these Ministry of Defence establishments.
35:54Could it be something that we need to let the Ministry of Defence know about?
35:57So they looked at it.
35:59They couldn't explain it.
36:01They didn't think it was like a double exposure or anything of that kind.
36:05The head of Carlisle's CID told Templeton that it wasn't a hoax, it was a genuine photograph.
36:12They thought that someone had wandered into the shot and had been caught momentarily by
36:16Jim, and that Jim hadn't seen them when he took the photograph.
36:20Templeton was adamant that that was not the case, and no one could have wandered into the
36:24photograph without him and his wife noticing.
36:29When the story of the Solway Spaceman and the picture that Jim had took appeared in national
36:39and local newspapers, the family became instant media celebrities.
36:46Newspaper reporters, television crews trekked to the Templeton's house to interview Jim and
36:52Alice and Elizabeth.
36:54The photo got into the media, it went all around the world, it had people writing to
36:59him from Australia, from South America.
37:02He was absolutely open about it, he used to, he had a collection of prints of his famous
37:07photo and he was happy to give them to people randomly who was interested in the subject.
37:12Never tried to make any money out of it.
37:14He said if you use the print, if you publish it, make a donation to charity.
37:19So he had no financial sort of interest in making money out of that image, he just wanted
37:26to get to the bottom of it.
37:27Who was that figure in the photograph?
37:30As well as people who believed the face value of the story, there were people who also thought
37:35it was a fake.
37:36Back in those days, you couldn't just take a digital print, you had to have negatives,
37:40there was original material and Jim was unwilling to part with it.
37:45But Kodak could see the prints.
37:47Kodak's technicians came back and said, what we can tell you is that the film hasn't been
37:53altered.
37:54What it shows is what you captured, it's there's been nothing superimposed or modified about
38:02that still frame.
38:04They actually offered a reward of a three years supply of film if somebody come up to explain
38:12how it was faked.
38:14I don't think he was a hoaxer, even though he admitted to me that he liked playing around
38:19with trick photography.
38:20I didn't detect any idea that he deliberately faked that photograph, that is all I can say.
38:28And as someone who's worked as a journalist for decades, I can read people, I can tell when
38:34someone is spinning a yarn and I didn't pick that up from Jim Templeton.
38:38What had started as a day out at a local beauty spot was fast becoming a media sensation.
38:44And it wasn't long before the story found a strange resonance on the other side of the
38:50world.
38:51In Woomera, Australia, they were testing a missile called the Blue Streak and the Blue
38:56Streak had been partially built at Cumbria, so there was this link.
39:00There were two technicians there who said they saw something like the Solway spaceman actually
39:06there.
39:06The mission had to be aborted and the technicians saw on the rocket range two figures that looked
39:14exactly like the figure in Jim Templeton's photograph.
39:18So this got back to Jim in England and he took it on board as being significant.
39:24I mean, he was looking for an answer.
39:25Is this connected to my photograph?
39:30But reports of strange things on in Australia weren't the only incident that made Jim Templeton
39:36wonder how far his story had travelled.
39:38He was about to get some unwanted visitors.
39:41Jim Templeton did say that he was visited by two strange men who wore black suits.
39:47So these two guys dressed all in black, the classic men in black MIB, said, yeah, we're from
39:55the ministry, you're not to talk about this, we're interested in the photograph, can you
39:59take us to where you took the photograph?
40:02When he asked them their names, they refused to give them, they said, we don't use names,
40:09we use numeric designations.
40:12I am number nine, said one of them, and I am number 11, said the other.
40:19So they drove him out to the Solway Firth in this Jaguar car, and one of the guys said
40:24to him, when you saw the spaceman, what did it look like?
40:27What did you see through the camera?
40:29And he says, I didn't see anything.
40:31That's the whole point.
40:32I didn't see anything until we had the photos developed.
40:36And he said, well, at that point, the guy just said, OK, thank you very much.
40:39And they both turned around, trotted off back to the car, leaving him there thinking, hold
40:44on a minute, are you going to give me a lift back to the fire station?
40:46They got him, the Jaguar disappeared, leaving him to walk back to the road about five miles.
40:53This could, of course, have been just a couple of UFO fans who were drilling Jim for extra
41:00information, really.
41:01He was convinced at that time that these were genuine officials from the Ministry of Defence.
41:07He said, no, I'm convinced they were from the MOD and they were looking into how the photograph
41:11was taken and whether there was any significance from an intelligence point of view.
41:22If these really were government officials, then the reason the photograph would have been
41:27of interest could be that it was taken in the vicinity of a nuclear power station.
41:32And that also provides a possible explanation for how a man from outer space has wandered into
41:38the back of Jim's incredible photograph.
41:40Because of the power station nearby, there were inspectors who wore space suit type outfits
41:48to test the radioactive levels in the nearby subway Firth.
41:53One theory is that one of them appeared in the scene just as Jim was taking the photograph.
42:00I think the most logical explanation for it is the one that was suggested by the CID in Carlisle
42:09at the time when they looked at the image.
42:12Because they had access to the stripper negatives, not just the one with the spaceman in inverted
42:19commas on it.
42:20They could see what Jim had photographed before and after.
42:25And I've seen some of the other images and they don't often get published.
42:28And what you see on the other images is Jim's wife kneeling down beside him as they're getting
42:34Elizabeth to pose with the flowers.
42:37And she's got a very distinctive blue and white patterned dress on.
42:43And I think what happened was his wife sort of momentarily walked behind the camera into
42:49the background, turned her back and that's when he took the shot.
42:52And what you're seeing is the light reflecting off her dress as she turns around and walks
42:57back behind the camera.
42:59And if he was concentrating on getting a really good shot of his daughter, he wouldn't necessarily
43:04remember his wife getting into the background of the shot just for a few seconds.
43:09And she might not have even realised that that's what had happened herself.
43:13So that is my best guess.
43:16But apart from that, I haven't a clue.
43:24Next time on Britain's X-Files.
43:27Did an angel rescue British soldiers in World War One?
43:31Can people really foresee terrible tragedies?
43:35Why was a woman charged with witchcraft during World War Two?
43:39And did a reckless climate experiment destroy a Devonshire village?
43:59And did a goodie.
44:06A head of the Sea-O-A-L-P-O-S-S-H-E program.
44:10So, we can get a break, we can get a break.
44:13One of the best though.
44:13You
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