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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,
00:13unearthing dusty old files from government departments, spy agencies, the police.
00:20And what I have found in those collections, both in Britain and in the United States,
00:30is a truly extraordinary collection of real-life X-Files.
00:36True cryptids are 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.
00:53Two, examine and uncover the truth about phenomena which are truly out of this world.
01:01It's a great piece of branding, the death ray. Everyone knows what it's standing on the death ray. Death ray.
01:18The End
01:19Our first entry takes us back to a simpler time. A time when it was still possible to believe in
01:25magic.
01:34Do you believe in fairies?
01:40If not, is that because you have never seen them?
01:45But would you believe in fairies if you saw them with your own eyes?
01:48The story begins in the summer of 1917.
01:53Two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Francis Griffin,
01:59were staying at Elsie's family home in Cottingly,
02:05which was then a little village on the outskirts of Bradford in West Yorkshire.
02:10Elsie was 16, Francis was 9, and both liked to play in Cottingly Beck,
02:18a little stream which ran through the wooded valley and right beside the end of the Wright family garden.
02:25But Elsie's mother, Polly, didn't like Francis playing in the Beck.
02:29Francis's daughter, Christine, tells of the extraordinary event that followed.
02:34And her mother used to come home tired and angry and got angry with her
02:38for always continually getting her shoes and stockings wet.
02:42And so then one day, she said,
02:44why do you go down to the Beck? What takes you down there?
02:47And she said, without thinking, I go to see the fairies.
02:51Suspecting the comment was a child's made-up excuse.
02:54Polly told Francis that she couldn't tell tales,
02:57at which point Elsie told her mother she's not making it up.
03:01I see them too.
03:02Evidently, this remark was greeted with some scepticism by Elsie's mother
03:07because the girls then decided that they would take photographs of fairies down by the Beck.
03:14Elsie borrowed her father's camera and she and Francis went back down to the Beck.
03:21And when they came back, they said they had photographed the fairies.
03:24When the negatives and the prints came back, they appeared to bear out Elsie and Francis's story.
03:37One of the images showed Francis lying on the ground surrounded by little dancing fairies,
03:44figures in diaphanous clothing who were dancing around a young girl.
03:49Two weeks later, Elsie borrowed her dad's camera again and went back down to the Beck.
03:56And this time, Francis snapped Elsie sitting on the ground with a little gnome dancing beside her head.
04:08Arthur Wright, Elsie's father thought it very suspicious, but couldn't work out how the images had been made.
04:16But Elsie's mother was more receptive.
04:18She was a member of the Theosophy or Spiritualist Society and she took the photographs to a meeting.
04:24The meeting, to which Polly took the photographs, had a subject for the night.
04:33And that subject was fairy life.
04:46Victorians really loved the idea of fairies in the countryside.
04:50And one of the reasons for that, and perhaps this is particularly relevant to Bradford,
04:56was the increasing, the growing sense that the countryside was disappearing into industry.
05:02Fairy lore was just huge in this period.
05:05It's not that long since the play Peter Pan first opened with Tinkerbell the fairy.
05:10Pantomimes with fairies were kind of an annual event.
05:13Well, Polly's photographs caused a stir and soon they were brought to the attention
05:17of the Theosophical Society's president.
05:22Edward Gardiner was a prolific writer on the subject
05:26and travelled internationally to give lectures about the society,
05:31about its beliefs, about its theories.
05:36Gardiner was so excited by the photographs
05:38that he took them to the best known supporter of spiritualism in the world at that time,
05:43Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes.
05:47Don't, for one moment, suppose that I am taking it for myself
05:51to say that I am the inventor of spiritualism,
05:54or that I am even the principal exponent of it.
05:58There are many great mediums, many great psychical researchers,
06:02investigators of all sorts.
06:04All that I can do is to be a gramophone on the subject.
06:09Conan Doyle's son, Kingsley, had very sadly died just towards the end of the Great War.
06:17And so, you know, he was already interested in spiritualism.
06:20When he heard about these photos, it's possible that he also kind of wanted to lean into the idea that
06:25fairies were real.
06:26Arthur Conan Doyle was commissioned to write articles of fairies for the Christmas edition of the Strand magazine.
06:37I take it the new issue of the Strand magazine is out, containing another of your slightly lurid tales.
06:42It is indeed.
06:43And what do you call this one?
06:45I call it, A Scandal in Bohemia. Not a bad title, eh?
06:49As though he gave false names for the girls, inevitably, they were tracked down.
06:53And so suddenly, she had people following her, trying to get a photograph, trying to talk to her.
06:59And she had to slip out of the house, back of the house, go to the back streets to get
07:03to school and avoid them.
07:05The attention of the media focused the spotlight of scepticism on the charming story.
07:10How could these photographs of fairies be real?
07:13So they were sent to Kodak for analysis.
07:17And what the experts were looking for was a double exposure.
07:20They were looking for the idea that the plate had been first exposed as a photograph of one of the
07:25girls,
07:25and then exposed as a photograph of fairies.
07:28That was the kind of faking that they were thinking with.
07:31And, of course, they were able to rule that out.
07:34But despite the doubts, Conan Doyle's backing ensured the status of the photographs in the public mind.
07:42His fame essentially sealed it.
07:46These two photographs, because Conan Doyle had endorsed them,
07:51were in homes up and down the land, believed as absolute cast-iron proof that fairies had been photographed.
08:05What happened next is what always happens in these stories.
08:09Interest died down.
08:11The girls grew up, got married, and got on with their lives.
08:15But the Cottingly fairies didn't just disappear.
08:18People were still intrigued by what had happened.
08:21And in the 1960s, interest in the story peaked enough for journalists to trace Elsie and Frances
08:27and ask them if they really took the photographs of fairies.
08:31The first time journalists did this, both Elsie and Frances said,
08:35no, the photos were real.
08:37We really saw fairies.
08:38We didn't fake anything.
08:40The first crack in the girls' bond of silence came when Elsie suggested
08:44that the fairies might be photographs of her imagination.
08:48But then Joseph Cooper, an academic who was interested in the story, befriended Frances.
08:55Joe Cooper came down, spent the weekend with her.
08:58And she said, Joe, I'd written a secret past my story.
09:01So he didn't say anything.
09:02That was okay.
09:05They went to bed, as usual, at 10 o'clock at night.
09:08And next thing she heard sound downstairs.
09:11And so she called down, Joe, what's wrong?
09:14And he called back up.
09:15She says, very often I stay up at night.
09:17I can't sleep to do work.
09:18Do you mind if I stay downstairs?
09:20I said, no, no, that's fine.
09:21That's fine.
09:22Totally unsuspecting.
09:24But he knew where she kept her documents.
09:27And she was totally trusting him, not believing anything would happen.
09:33And two weeks later, the Unexplained magazine had the whole story of the fix.
09:41So what fiendishly clever trickery did these two young girls use to fool the world?
09:46And no less a figure than Arthur Conan Doyle,
09:49into believing that there really were fairies at the bottom of the garden.
09:53They went about this really systematically.
09:55They created tracings from a book.
09:59It was actually called Princess Mary's Gift Book.
10:02And she was very clever.
10:03She was very artistic.
10:03And she drew them, cut them out beautifully, tinted them.
10:08And then when it was all ready, they asked the father to follow the camera.
10:14And they artistically arranged the fairies in front of her,
10:18taking the hat pins on the back of the figures, put them into the grass,
10:21and they artistically arranged in front of Frances.
10:24So Frances was standing like this on the bank, looking at the camera,
10:28and the first photograph was taken.
10:31I don't think there are any bad actors here.
10:34I think, in effect, everybody played their part in this.
10:37You have Frances, who is the fairy experiencer.
10:39You have Elsie, who enjoyed the limelight
10:43and enjoyed the attention that these photos were garnering.
10:46And, you know, but we have Elsie's glamour, in effect,
10:50to thank for the reason why we're talking about these photos now.
10:55Because Elsie was the one with the creative talent, the artistic talent,
11:01enabling her to create these fairies and produce the photos.
11:06But there is one photograph that is different from all the others,
11:10both in style and for the fact that it features neither of the girls.
11:15Totally different. The others are solid paper.
11:17You can see the paper, you know, when you really know, because it's solid.
11:20But that last photograph, the grasses are there,
11:24and you can see transparent figures.
11:27You can see the grasses behind, grasses in front.
11:29You can see one beginning to appear.
11:31You see a tiny little face on the right-hand side.
11:34There's people here on the grasses.
11:35And my mother said, that's genuine. That is real.
11:39Those are fairies I saw.
11:40I really believe that Frances did see fairies.
11:44She gives a wonderful description in her memoir.
11:47She reports that at that time, she saw a leaf twirling without a breeze.
11:54And later on, she sees a little man that is twirling that leaf.
11:57She also talks about little men trooping over the branch, over the beck, on a willow branch.
12:04And this place, she comes to take it for granted that she goes there and she sees these beings.
12:10Today, the pictures are categorised as a hoax in the pages of the British X-Files.
12:14But although they may not have been any fairies, is that really fair on Frances and Elsie?
12:20I don't think it was a hoax.
12:22I think it was, and the girls themselves said it, mischief.
12:27And now mischief is a very fairy quality.
12:29I personally love the idea that these two innocent girls completely tricked Conan Doyle,
12:35who clearly believed that his own powers of reason were magically akin to those of his creation, Sherlock Holmes.
12:42What a mind. Sharp enough and brilliant enough to outwit the great Sherlock Holmes himself.
13:15Our next file takes us to the high seas, where a cursed ship roams the great oceans.
13:22Its cargo? Nothing but bad luck.
13:34The 17th century was the golden age of the Dutch East India Company.
13:38Sailing ships from the Netherlands sailed the globe in search of trade.
13:43Their determination to make their fortune meant taking risks on the high seas,
13:48and this inevitably led them into danger.
13:50But sailors are superstitious and knew that if they weren't careful,
13:54they might anger the gods of the sea and summon up a deadly curse.
13:59The Flying Dutchman is a ship under a curse.
14:03It's a curse brought on it by the captain of the ship,
14:07who is typically trying to round a point, trying to make his way through a storm,
14:12and makes a rash vow.
14:14He swears that he's going to round this point,
14:17even if he has to keep trying for the whole of eternity.
14:20He swears that he's not going to give in to the storm.
14:24He says, no, I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it.
14:27And as a result of that curse, he's doomed to keep trying forever and ever.
14:35The earliest sightings of the Flying Dutchman were in travel logs,
14:38and people were basically repeating what they'd heard sailors talking about on board ship.
14:44And yet this evolved in the 19th century with more of a sort of a backstory.
14:49So it actually has a figure, a character, who becomes Captain Van Der Decken.
14:54And he's this damned sailor of this sinful crew
14:58who are forced to sail around the world until doomsday.
15:02Sightings of the ship vainly battling against the sea in order to make port
15:06became common amongst sailors.
15:08But the curse wasn't confined to the captain and crew of the Flying Dutchman.
15:14Any living crew on a genuine, real-life ship who spotted the ghost ship
15:23would become struck down, would be killed or condemned
15:29to devastation, doom and destruction.
15:32It's linked to the disappearance of a ship around the Cape of Good Hope,
15:36and the story elaborated from there.
15:38It sort of existed in folklore until the sort of late 18th century,
15:43and then it started to get picked up in literature.
15:46Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this myth grew and grew and grew.
15:55It formed the basis for supernatural tales by novelists and poets,
16:00and the German composer Richard Wagner composed an entire opera based on the story.
16:09The original story was set in the 17th century around the Cape of Good Hope
16:14and a touristy stormy area in the southern tip of South Africa.
16:19However, since then, sightings of the Flying Dutchman have spread around the world
16:23and into more modern times.
16:25One of the examples I found was reported in the New York newspaper in the 1920s,
16:31and it referred to sighting by a British Navy or Royal Navy convoy during the First World War,
16:39and the mysterious appearance of an additional ship in that convoy.
16:43What happened was the convoy was then attacked by German submarines,
16:47and, again, the person who had sighted it on board his particular ship.
16:52That was the only ship that was destroyed.
16:54And then, after the conflict, that ghost ship disappeared.
16:59In 1886, John Dalton contributed a story to a book called
17:03The Cruise of Her Majesty's Ship, the Kante.
17:07In it he described an encounter with the Flying Dutchman,
17:10but more extraordinary still was the identity of one of the witnesses.
17:13One of the people who spotted that infamous ghost ship went on to become King George V.
17:23According to Dalton's account, the crew, and there were a lot of them,
17:29spotted the ship off the coast of Australia,
17:32and they saw it as a sort of phosphorescent glow.
17:37July 11th. At 4am, the Dutchman crossed our bows.
17:42A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow,
17:47in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant
17:53stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow,
17:58where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her,
18:02as did the quarter-deck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the fo'c'sle.
18:08But on arriving, there was no vestige, nor any sign whatever, of any material ship.
18:13At 10.45am, the ordinary seamen, who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman,
18:21fell from the four-mast cross-trees onto the top-gallant fo'c'sle,
18:26and was smashed to atoms.
18:30This account was written by John Dalton, who was the prince's tutor.
18:34Given its paranormal nature, we might expect Buckingham Palace to have objected,
18:40or even censor the story, if they felt it was inaccurate or damaging to the future king's reputation.
18:45But that didn't happen.
18:48So was it true? Did King George V really see the Flying Dutchman?
18:53On closer inspection, the ship's log contains no reference to the sighting.
18:58However, that logbook does record the death of the crewman,
19:04who fell from the top-mast to the deck to his death.
19:11So are there any rational explanations that might account for all the sightings of the Flying Dutchman?
19:17There's a range of theories that have been suggested.
19:20There's this kind of sort of rational scientific theories that essentially this is misperception.
19:23The watery environment of the sea, you've got mists, you've got mirages,
19:29you've got the sort of play of sun and water, can easily distort what people are seeing.
19:34You've then also got the fact that there are quite a lot of derelict and abandoned ships
19:38that can drift into the shipping lanes.
19:40And so people just see at a distance these eerily empty ships that have been exposed to the elements.
19:47They have this kind of haunting quality to them.
19:51Virtually all sailors, even as late as the Prince of Wales account,
19:55suffered to some extent with scurvy.
19:57And that can affect both eyesight and the mind.
20:01It's not that uncommon for scurvy to induce hallucinations and altered states of consciousness.
20:07And one of the altered states of consciousness that it tends to induce is anxiety, fear and paranoia.
20:14If visions of the Flying Dutchman were caused by scurvy,
20:17that might explain why the sightings have now stopped.
20:20However, do we really want a rational explanation?
20:24Isn't there something in the story of Captain Dodeca and his crew sailing the oceans for eternity
20:29that speaks not only to frightened sailors, but to us all?
20:34I think we just find the idea of someone who's both immortal and deeply unhappy a fascinating tale.
20:41The idea of somebody who lives forever but doesn't gain any benefit from it,
20:45who indeed wants to escape from life into death,
20:49is always a very powerful tale that reassures the rest of us
20:54about the fact that actually mortality might be a blessing and not a curse.
21:29The arms race produces ever more powerful weapons.
21:33But what if there was a device that could destroy the missiles that threaten to destroy the world?
21:48Death rays are the stuff of science fiction.
21:51Comic books and B-movies of the 40s and 50s, or even earlier works by H.G. Wells,
21:57depict Martians laying waste to whole cities with one lethal burst.
22:01What general wouldn't want to get his hands on such a deadly weapon?
22:04In the years following World War I, governments across the world took the idea of a death ray very, very
22:15seriously indeed.
22:17And a dusty file held at the British National Archives at Kew contains an astonishing story that a self-proclaimed
22:28inventor could make them a death ray,
22:32which would help vanquish their enemies in all future conflicts.
22:40The nature of warfare changed in World War I. It was now industrialised and mechanised.
22:46Governments realised that the next war could be won by the side with the best technology.
22:51Everybody thinks that the cunning war is going to be dominated by aerial warfare in particular.
22:58And that the nation that commands the air is going to win the war.
23:05The government of the day was desperate to find something that would bring down enemy aircraft quickly, conveniently and cheaply.
23:16Step forward Harry Grindle Matthews.
23:18Born in Gloucester in 1880, he trained as an electrical engineer and went on to become an inventor,
23:24specialising in the relatively new and exciting field of electronics.
23:29Harry Grindle Matthews was one of the great, in fact I'd almost say the greatest, forgotten inventors of the first
23:40half of the 20th century.
23:42He made his name as a maverick, as an outsider.
23:45He kind of styled himself as Gloucester's answer to Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison.
23:51Someone who was just bursting with ideas and knew how to make them happen.
23:55He was someone who saw himself as someone who could see a new world that was coming.
24:03The files in the National Archives record that he had staged a demonstration for Britain's military chiefs,
24:14in which for the first time his radio telegraphy was able to put the ground in contact with a pilot
24:25in a plane 600 feet up in the sky and two miles away.
24:30Now that had never been done before and was a positive advance.
24:34He also invented, or at least claimed to have invented, the first talking pictures.
24:40He produced a film featuring an interview with Ernest Shackleton before Shackleton set off on his expedition.
24:47And Matthews' technology didn't really catch on.
24:50But it wasn't these inventions that would earn Harry Grindle Matthews his reputation.
24:54In 1923, newspapers across Europe began reporting experiments in Germany,
25:01and the scientists there had allegedly been conducting experiments using a death ray.
25:08And that death ray was able, apparently, to bring down aircraft in flight,
25:16and had done so, allegedly, to French planes flying over German territory.
25:23The military potential was obvious.
25:28Unfortunately, there was not a shred of truth in these extravagant claims for the German death ray.
25:43Within months of the German claims, Grindle Matthews announced to the press
25:47that he had been working on a similar experiment,
25:50and made the bold claim that he had made a death ray that really worked.
25:55At the time, it was received kind of rapturously.
25:57It received so much press attention.
26:00I mean, it's a great piece of branding, the death ray.
26:03Everyone knows where to stand with a death ray.
26:05This was exactly what the British government needed to blast their military into the future.
26:11Under a certain amount of pressure from the government,
26:14who were at least potentially interested in a death ray,
26:17he invited government scientists to his laboratory.
26:20So there was Grindle Matthews and three representatives from the war office,
26:25two of them scientifically based.
26:27One was an engineer, the other one was a physicist.
26:30The test itself was in two parts.
26:32In the first part, Matthews fired his ray at a light bulb some distance away.
26:40A light bulb that was not connected to any form of electricity or any other wiring.
26:47And Matthews's ray lit up the light bulb.
26:52Having shown that he could turn on a disconnected light bulb,
26:55they then moved on to the second part of the test.
26:58The test was supposed to show how the death ray could take out enemy aircraft
27:06by turning off their engines from the ground.
27:10Basically, you fire it at the aircraft.
27:13It shorts out the magneto in its engine and then it plummets to the ground.
27:22The death ray looked like a big spotlight with three smaller spotlights sort of around its rim.
27:29Turned it on, it shot apparently a jet of blue light across the room.
27:35And turned off a single stroke motorcycle engine which had been running on the table.
27:39On the surface then, it looked like the death ray was potentially viable.
27:45What were the problems?
27:47Well, the first was that the experiment with the light bulb was hardly innovative science.
27:54It was actually a standard attraction at fairgrounds at the time.
28:00And as for the motorcycle test,
28:03well, the military chiefs noticed something a little bit strange about that.
28:07Because throughout the experiment,
28:10and particularly at the crucial time when Grindle Matthews pressed the button,
28:17he had one of his assistants standing conveniently beside the motorbike.
28:24Government officials themselves were dubious, to say the least.
28:30They strongly suspected that they were being fed a line
28:33and that the death ray didn't really do what Matthew claimed it could do.
28:40They suspected that they weren't being allowed to properly inspect the apparatus,
28:45simply because it wasn't what Matthews said it was.
28:50Undeterred by the demonstration, Grindle Matthews decided to use his considerable skills as a showman
28:56to make a film showing what his powerful death ray could do.
29:00Matthews, looking visionary, looking scientific, white-coated in his laboratory,
29:06then switches to a scene of the death ray itself.
29:10This huge futuristic looking cannon, smoke reeling all over it,
29:16and then an image of a city in flames.
29:19It didn't escape attention, certainly on the part of government scientists,
29:24that the death ray, as portrayed in the Pathé newsreel,
29:29bore very, very little resemblance to the apparatus of the they'd seen in the laboratories,
29:35a very different kind of thing.
29:37The film, which has been very, very carefully edited,
29:42doesn't actually show the death ray in action.
29:45The most it shows is Grindle Matthews standing beside the machines,
29:50the machines having been switched on,
29:53and something in the distance lighting up.
29:56As evidence of a lethal death ray, it's worthless.
30:01Matthews claimed that if the British weren't interested,
30:04then he had backers in France.
30:07But the truth was, they didn't really exist.
30:10Pursued by angry shareholders,
30:12Grindle Matthews bounced back with a new invention,
30:15a sky projector that could throw images onto clouds.
30:19And in 1937, he got real interest in his invention from Germany.
30:26He was summoned to Berlin to talk about the sky projector,
30:31where he met Hermann Goering,
30:33and he met Goebbels as well to talk about it.
30:36Apparently, they wanted his invention to beam Hitler's face
30:41onto the underside of clouds while at huge Nazi rallies.
30:45They didn't, in the end, end up licensing it to the Nazis.
30:49After a period in America,
30:51he once again found himself in financial trouble,
30:54and settled down on top of a mountain in Wales.
30:58There is a story of Grindle Matthews having a little box
31:02with sort of knobs and dials on the side,
31:05and him lying on a grass bank by a road,
31:09watching cars going up and down,
31:11fiddling with the dials on his box
31:13and watching the cars stop of their own accord.
31:17Did Harry Grindle Matthews perfect his death ray
31:21at his secret laboratory on top of a mountain in Wales?
31:24Or was this story, perhaps like the death ray itself,
31:27all a hoax?
31:29I think it would probably be overstating it
31:33to say there was a straightforward hoax.
31:36It seems pretty clear to me, at any rate,
31:39that the death ray didn't do what Matthews said it could do.
31:45In the end, it simply wasn't suited for the battlefield.
31:48But apart from anything else,
31:50if a plane is flying about 200 miles an hour,
31:52how are you going to be able to train a laser on it
31:54from about 5,000 feet away?
31:56He had an idea, he thought he could make it work,
32:00but to get it to work, he needed funding,
32:03he needed money.
32:06And he never got that money,
32:07so, you know, the death ray never developed really
32:10beyond, you know, beyond the pipe dream that it was.
32:32The End
32:44Our next story comes from Britain's darkest hour.
32:47In times of danger, our senses are often heightened.
32:51But does that also apply to our extrasensory powers?
32:57Suddenly, all of London seemed to be aflame.
33:00Herman Goering's arrogant ruffalo had struck from the air.
33:03Millions of tons of incendiaries and high explosives
33:06rained down from the sky.
33:08Over 40,000 civilians killed.
33:11Over 130,000 injured.
33:14Two million houses damaged or destroyed.
33:16This was the Blitz.
33:18It lasted nearly two years
33:20and marked Britain's darkest period in World War II.
33:25And one of the greatest dangers was to the air raid wardens
33:28and the emergency services,
33:30because it was they who had to dig out the dead
33:33and barely living once the damage was done,
33:36not knowing whether more attacks were coming
33:38or whether they would stumble over unexploded ordnates
33:41which could blow them sky high.
33:43This led to one of the strangest episodes in Britain's X-Files.
33:51And that was the dowsing detectives of World War II.
33:59It all seemed to sort of be kicked off by an incident in 1941 in Warwickshire
34:06near a small town called Leamington Spa.
34:10The Luftwaffe were targeting various cities,
34:13Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry.
34:16And on some occasions, aircraft would have gone off course
34:20or they would have dropped the bombs
34:22and they didn't hit the target
34:24and maybe they had a load
34:26and they just wanted to get rid of the bombs on board
34:29before they flew back to Germany.
34:31In this case, the aircraft were over this rural part of Warwickshire
34:35and just dropped a load of bombs in the middle of the field.
34:38By unlucky chance, two local factory workers,
34:43Harry Marston and James Hyatt, were walking along the path
34:47and were caught in the appalling explosion.
34:54And, of course, the local police immediately brought in,
34:58trying to find the bodies.
34:59They'd obviously been killed, these two guys,
35:01but they needed to locate the remains.
35:03There was one particular constable called Philip Terry,
35:08and he was someone who was able to divine,
35:14using twigs or metal rods, where buried objects were.
35:20And in this case, he used a hazel rod.
35:23And then he came up with an additional suggestion.
35:25He said, if I had an article of the men's clothing
35:31and I wrapped that round my divining rod,
35:34I don't know, but maybe that would help direct the search.
35:40So, Marston's cloth cap was somehow obtained.
35:43And he wrapped it around the hazel rod
35:46and started walking around over these mounds of earth.
35:49And straight away, he got this sort of feeling that,
35:52you know, he could feel the rod moving in his hand
35:55and said, that's where they are.
35:57And he could pinpoint exactly.
35:59And straight away, they dug down and found the bodies.
36:01As the country was at war, there were strict instructions
36:05to report any unusual events like this to the War Office.
36:08These bomb sites must be reported.
36:12The report landed on the desk of a ministry scientist,
36:16Professor William Curtis.
36:18And he was both curious and slightly sceptical.
36:22And he resolved to see for himself
36:26where this apparently miraculous divination had taken place
36:31and to test, with some degree of scientific rigour,
36:36whether it had actually occurred.
36:39And so Curtis went to the bomb site
36:41and he got PC Philip Terry to meet him there.
36:44And as they wandered over the craters left by the German bombs,
36:48Professor Curtis spotted the obvious.
36:51The two craters, basically, where these bombs had dropped
36:54and there was a path going between them.
36:57And this is where the two guys had walked.
37:00And the body was found near the lip of the crater.
37:04So he was quite sceptical.
37:06He was saying, you don't need this special dowsing ability
37:10to work out how perhaps Philip Terry guessed
37:14that that's where they were.
37:16Because if they were walking along this path
37:18and you've got the crater there,
37:20it's likely that it's here and they've been buried
37:22immediately to the side of the crater.
37:24He then wrote up a report in which he said,
37:28this can't be taken as a particularly convincing case of divination.
37:34But a short while later, Philip Terry struck again.
37:37This time he used dowsing to find the location of a man who had drowned
37:41and had been washed up on the bank of a river.
37:43The actual rod in his hand, it was twisting round.
37:47There's no doubt about this, it was actually moving.
37:50He could feel the hazel rod.
37:52And so it's all pointing at that tree by the river bank.
37:56Of course, they went there, the body of the drowned man was there.
38:00So again, a copy of this report was sent to London.
38:03And of course, this is a bit perplexing for them.
38:05Once again, Professor Curtis visited the location
38:08and once again came to the conclusion that the place where the body was found
38:12was the most logical location for it to wash up.
38:16There were others in the war office who were still convinced
38:18that divination might be useful on the battlefield.
38:21And in one instance, an officer was tasked with using dowsing
38:25to find the location of gas pipes at an army base.
38:28But the experiment was a complete failure.
38:30And a note in the ministry's files pointed out
38:34there were better uses of resources
38:36than pursuing the belief in a folk myth.
38:41This man is a dowser and he works with a dowsing or divining rod
38:46to find radiation that is undetectable to normal instruments.
38:49And some dowsers don't even need tools, they just use their hands.
38:53But regardless of how it's done, the purpose of dowsing is simple.
38:58To find radiations or mysterious powers emanating from the earth.
39:02Now, is this real or just an elaborate act?
39:05Amongst the believers in dowsing and divination, however,
39:08were senior members of the establishment,
39:11including former Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
39:15Mrs. Wiley will show you how she discovered this wealth.
39:19She walked about here for some time, the rod in her hand,
39:23there was no movement.
39:26She came along there, then suddenly you found the rod going up.
39:31In times when perhaps water was short
39:34and they needed someone to locate a water course,
39:38and they went to a certain person who had a reputation,
39:42you know, the cunning folk they were known as.
39:45And these were maybe people who employed other magical practices
39:50to find lost treasure, lost objects.
39:53And if you gave them a coin or, you know,
39:56there'd be some sort of financial transaction,
39:58they would employ whatever arcane methods that they had at their disposal
40:02to find these things.
40:04So, it's a genuine folk tradition.
40:08Rescue squads laboured night and day.
40:14Desperate times lead to desperate measures.
40:17And Philip Terry's success, backed up by a long folk tradition of dowsing,
40:22led a desperate government to seriously investigate his claims.
40:27This is not surprising, the fact that dowsing detectives
40:32or people with alleged psychic ability have been in some way tested.
40:37Because during this hour, any possibility have been in some way tried.
40:42However, psychic detectives have never been officially tested
40:46or officially involved by the government.
40:49Only some people within the army try to use those
40:53and try to test them because they have the belief, personal belief,
40:56that this power actually exists.
40:59But any of those tests proved that this ability didn't exist
41:03and were completely useless.
41:06There was to be no more official interest in divination
41:09as a useful tool for more than 20 years.
41:15Then at the height of the Cold War,
41:17the military, the British Army, once again picked up the idea
41:21as something which could prove useful,
41:23should the army have to deal with buried bombs.
41:25They'd heard these stories that dowsers had the ability
41:29to find buried mines.
41:31It was obviously something that took root
41:33in the intelligence arm of the War Office,
41:37that certain people had this ability.
41:40Blue is for water, red is for diagonal positive streaks,
41:45green is for growth, yellow is for the global net,
41:47and fight marks the medial eloquent lines for the PowerPoint.
41:51Now, don't look for this in any scientific textbook.
41:55Dowsing isn't accepted by the scientific community.
41:58All the tests that have been done around the world
42:01on dosing detectives under controlled condition,
42:05from searching for water, from searching for a specific target,
42:10have been completely unsuccessful.
42:12unsuccessful.
42:14So, have been always proved that all these alleged power do not work.
42:21So what is really happening when someone is dowsing?
42:24Why does the rod or the pendulum move?
42:27What is happening is that just thinking about a possible movement
42:33of the object that the person is touching or holding
42:36is creating very tiny movement between the finger, for example, of the person.
42:41And these movements are increased and emphasised by the shape of the object.
42:46Dowsing may have a long folk tradition,
42:48but when it comes to the harsh realities of warfare,
42:51if it doesn't work on the battlefield, then it will be cast aside.
42:55And that is what happened to the dowsing detectives of World War II.
42:59Despite PC Terry's conviction that he was able to use traditional divination rods to find bodies,
43:08despite all the other experiments and tests,
43:13it was abandoned as a technique in the late 1960s.
43:18The only thing we can say with absolute certainty is that those experiments took place,
43:23and that they eventually formed their own little corner of Britain's extraordinary X-Files.
43:31Next time, on Britain's X-Files,
43:35do big cats really stalk Bodmin Moor?
43:38What do the files tell us about planes and ships that vanish near Bermuda?
43:43What explanation do they give for a sad painting that would not burn?
43:47And what were the strange lights that terrorised the north of England?
43:51?
44:21You
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