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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.
00:20This 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,
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.
00:53To 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 where they stand in the death ray.
01:05Death ray.
01:05Death ray.
01:05Death ray.
01:05Death ray.
01:11Death ray.
01:13Death ray.
01:15Death ray.
01:16The first X-File we open takes us above the clouds,
01:20where an examination of a spate of frighteningly similar air crashes
01:23can'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.
01:35The 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.
01:44But then a series of crashes saw the project halted.
01:47What was causing the comets to mysteriously fall out of the sky?
01:50Was there an, as yet, unidentified design flaw?
01:54Or could the answer have an otherworldly explanation?
01:59On Thursday, November the 4th, 1954,
02:02one of the strangest exchanges ever recorded in Britain's remarkable collection of X-Files
02:08occurred at the Institute of Civil Engineers in Westminster,
02:12presided over by Sir Lionel Heald.
02:14And Sir Lionel Heald's question in the august halls of a public inquiry
02:20asked whether the plane crashes could have been 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,
02:51as used in bombers during the war.
02:54The airliners were noisy, couldn't fly particularly high,
02:58so they'd be buffeted in the winds as they flew along.
03:01The comet airliner was able to get up to much higher heights,
03:06which was a much more stable journey for the 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,
03:29first of five stops on the 6,700-mile flight.
03:32London to Rome, two and a half hours.
03:34On Sunday, January 10th, 1954, at 10.30 a.m.,
03:39BOAC 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.
04:14So 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,
04:45and another plane crashed that was on charter to South African Airways in exactly the same way,
04:53oddly 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,
05:08as well as the fact that the crew was so experienced.
05:11These were pilots that had served in the Second World War,
05:14that had distinguished flying crosses, flying medals.
05:17And so for this aircraft to have such a disaster,
05:21it was very unsettling for the aviation industry, and particularly in Britain.
05:25There was a lot of speculation. What was it?
05:28Was it sabotage? Was it terrorism?
05:30What caused these two aircraft to 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.
05:51And British government files, files maintained by the Air Ministry,
05:57began filling up with claims that something supernatural or paranormal had been involved.
06:07So this was something that was actually amazingly taken seriously by the Board of Inquiry.
06:13So 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.
07:16The flight reached operating height, which was round about 35,000 feet.
07:25At 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 that came from the pressurisation 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.
08:53So 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.
09:01The 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 3, destined for transatlantic service, is unveiled.
09:47This giant is the latest improvement of the original Comet airliner.
09:51The Comet 1 was grounded due to a series of accidents.
09:54They uprated the engines to make them more powerful engines, and they also re-skinned the plane.
10:00So they put a thicker skin on the aircraft, and they obviously modified the way they made the windows.
10:06But the skin made it more able to withstand any pressure situations.
10:12The Comet 3 will be modified to comply with the inquiry's suggestions.
10:17Both disasters had been caused by metal fatigue, an ill-understood problem at the time,
10:23and were definitely not the result 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,
10:47to Havilland, or the British aircraft industry.
11:04The Comet 3
11:15We often hear eyewitness accounts of strange things at sea,
11:19but if we take a closer look, and they become even 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,
11:39but when something strange happens at sea, the possibilities that lurk in the fathoms below
11:44conjure even greater primordial fears in our fragile minds.
11:48The 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,
11:59the saltwater crocodile, an 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.
12:09We never know what's lurking there. There could be anything, something ready to devour us.
12:14We could be dragged down by undercurrents. We could be caught in a storm.
12:18So the turmoil of the depths of the seas and what lurks there
12:22is as much psychological as it is an actual physical thing,
12:27and we populate it with monsters, perhaps with good reason,
12:30perhaps because there are monsters.
12:37Sometimes sailors get a glimpse of these monsters,
12:40but 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,
12:58and it was on a long voyage,
13:01and it was sort of had a very experienced captain and a very experienced crew.
13:06The HMS Daedalus had been employed fighting pirates off the coast of Borneo,
13:12and she was on the long voyage back to England.
13:16About halfway there, on August the 6th, 1848,
13:21at 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,
13:38with a head and neck just above the water's surface.
13:43The visible portion that they could see above the waves
13:47was approximately 60 feet long,
13:49and its head was held out of the water at around 4 feet high.
13:55The 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,
14:09like 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,
14:19and 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,
14:31and it was a man he'd have known,
14:34he would have been close enough to recognise his face.
14:37That's how close it was.
14:39And it was in view for a good 20 minutes,
14:42which was a long sighting.
14:44If only one person sees it,
14:46then it's only one person's opinion.
14:48But in this case,
14:49it was the captain, a lieutenant, a couple of men.
14:51But what's really interesting about this,
14:53is that he was a really proper captain.
14:56And so he recorded latitude, longitude.
14:59And of course, being an experienced captain,
15:01all of this information is very, very accurate.
15:04Whilst the captain's log records all the nautical details,
15:08such as position, speed, and weather conditions,
15:11it makes no mention of the sighting.
15:13But there was a very good reason for this.
15:16There was a ship's superstition,
15:20dating probably from about that time,
15:23that mentioning the sea serpent in the log
15:27would bring a lot of very bad luck.
15:30Tongs wagged.
15:32Somehow the story got out,
15:33and the media seized on it in a feeding frenzy
15:36not unlike the tabloids of today.
15:38A letter was published in the Times.
15:43There was a much exaggerated account in the Times.
15:46The stories reported in the newspapers
15:48might have been exaggerated,
15:49but these were accompanied by illustrations based on drawings
15:53made by the ship's first lieutenant, Edgar Drummond.
15:56There were some illustrations produced by the Illustrated London News,
16:01which were very detailed,
16:04but 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,
16:18which 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
16:39with 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.
16:57And sightings have continued to the present day.
17:00There seem to be a number of different types,
17:03but the two primary ones are an animal with a long neck 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,
17:27numerous experts came forward offering their own interpretations.
17:32Henry Lee, who was directing the Brighton Aquarium
17:36and wrote a book about giant squid possibly being the subject of sea serpent encounters.
17:43So he thought it was a squid perhaps trailing its tentacles across the surface.
17:50In the meantime, there is the discovery of marine reptiles from the Jurassic on the south coast of England,
17:59which are now being publicized.
18:01And people began to think of the sea serpent not as a mythical Scandinavian tradition,
18:09but more as a plesiosaur, with a much longer neck but a much shorter body.
18:19Even the Natural History Museum in London got involved.
18:22Richard Owen made suggestions that angered the captain and crew of the Daedalus
18:27and ended in an angry exchange of letters.
18:31Richard Owen suggested that he'd seen an elephant seal,
18:34which doesn't grow to nearly that size and 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,
18:47which doesn't remotely resemble what the people saw.
18:51And the captain and his crew argued quite fiercely against that.
18:56Richard Owen eventually it was decided that no, that's not what this is.
19:01It's an anomaly.
19:02And it stayed an anomaly for a very long time.
19:06Richard Owen I don't think the crew were lying.
19:07I think they reported accurately what they saw.
19:10And I'm a believer in sea serpents.
19:12I think there are a number of large unknown animals that we call sea serpents
19:17living in the seas and oceans right up to the present day,
19:21that we have no explanation for.
19:24But in this case, I think there is an explanation.
19:34Recently, because there was so much precise information,
19:38someone 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 behavior of the animal is consistent with a rockal whale,
19:50a sea whale, which 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
20:14and 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 in ancient cultures like Babylon, Sumeria, China,
21:01Japan,
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, it doesn't mean that all of them do.
21:17It's like saying that if one Rembrandt painting turns out to be a hoax, there's no such thing as Rembrandt.
21:23Rembrandt.
21:46Rembrandt
21:47logic 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 has a unique place in Britain's collection
22:28of X-Files.
22:30Because although the arrest, trial and conviction of the ghost's killer were all wrapped up within a space of just
22:3810 days in January 1804,
22:41the case itself would pose substantial legal problems for the next 180 years.
22:56Hammersmith, 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 and was menacing
23:14the neighbourhood.
23:24There were several notable sightings of the ghost itself.
23:27One of them was a man by the name of Thomas Groom, who was the drayman to the local brewer,
23:31Mr Burgess.
23:32He was actually walking through the churchyard of Hammersmith one night,
23:36when suddenly the ghost came out from behind a tombstone and grabbed him by the throat.
23:41And he said he struggled with the ghost for a few moments, and then he hit out at it with
23:44his fist.
23:45And connected with something, he said it felt very soft, like a greatcoat.
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. He was that terrified by his experience.
23:56The ghost, on one occasion, attacked a wagon full of people travelling by night through Hammersmith.
24:03It also appeared to one woman who was pregnant and threw her into a terrible state of hysterics and was
24:12blamed for a miscarriage.
24:13One of the appearances that was reported at the time was a man called Thomas Millwood, who was 22 years
24:19old.
24:20He was a bricklayer, some accounts said a plasterer.
24:23He was walking along Hammersmith Terrace one night when a couple going past and a coach started screaming,
24:29saying, it's Hammersmith ghost, it's Hammersmith ghost.
24:31And he became quite irate and told them off, I'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, he was dressed in his regulation outfit or work clothes,
24:50which consisted of white canvas overcoat, white 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, the actual person who came back from the dead as a revenant
25:16had committed suicide the previous year.
25:20Now, up until 1824, it was a practice that suicides were buried,
25:27not in churchyards, but at crossroads, sometimes with a stake through the heart.
25:33The ghost had become so commonplace, nightly appearances were happening all around Hammersmith,
25:40that in early January 1804, a 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, you get lots of young men going out into the dark of night,
25:54armed with guns and fouling pieces and pistols, determined to apprehend the ghost.
26:02On December 29th, a night watchman called William Girdler stumbled 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 with 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 he would go ghost hunting.
26:37After first fortifying himself with drink, he went out and sat waiting for the ghost,
26:45having first collected his fouling piece, basically a gun which was used for shooting ducks and geese.
26:53And he sat there until he saw a white figure coming up the lane about 10 o'clock in the
27:01evening.
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, which crumpled through the path in front of him.
27:33And Thomas Millwood was dressed in his work outfit, his white waistcoat, his white overcoat, his white trousers.
27:40And Francis Smith simply cocked his fouling piece, demanded who he was.
27:45Millwood made no reply.
27:46So Francis Smith shot him.
27:48And he died instantly.
27:51He 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, realised 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, he appeared at the Central Criminal Court, or the Old Bailey,
28:20on a charge of wilful murder of Thomas Millwood.
28:23Francis Smith's defence was that 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 he 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, deaths 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, and it's not self-defence,
28:57if it's not done under official sanction, then it's murder.
29:01The jury returned with a verdict.
29:04It convicted Francis Smith of wilful murder.
29:07And the judge donned the black cap and imposed the only sentence allowed by law.
29:15For death.
29:16Fortunately, a recommendation of mercy was made to the king.
29:23The pleas reached his majesty, King George III, who granted a royal pardon.
29:31And so the sentence was commuted to one of hard labour for six months.
29:37The pariah of Francis Smith and the tragedy of the shooting dead of Thomas Millwood did lead to information being
29:44given to the local magistrate,
29:46whereby at least one of the perpetrators, who may have been the ghost, was identified.
29:50And it was a local man by the name of John Graham.
29:53John Graham was very religious.
29:54He attended a 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 because they've been terrifying my children with
30:09stories 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.
30:33Then in 1949, a leading academic lawyer called Glanville Williams rediscovered the curious case of the Hammersmith ghost.
30:41Glanville Williams raised the case of the Hammersmith ghost as part of a wider debate about reforming the law of
30:52manslaughter.
30:53This led to the Homicide Act 1957, which introduces the plea of diminished responsibility.
31:00And similarly, the law on mistake developed until finally, in 1984, it was accepted that an unreasonable mistake might also
31:12provide some degree of mitigation or excuse as much as a reasonable, honest mistake.
31:19And at that point, the case of the Hammersmith ghost became one of effectively a historical precedent, because that was
31:30a real life case where the situation of a mistake, an unreasonable one, suddenly came into its own.
31:40But it took 180 years for the law to actually evolve to recognise it.
31:50The End
31:51The End
31:58The End
32:14Famously, the camera doesn't lie. So when a photograph seems to show something extraordinary, we tend to look for an
32:21extraordinary explanation. But 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, mysterious images. What we don't expect
32:36is a little girl holding a bunch of flowers.
32:38But that is exactly what we see in one of the most mysterious images ever taken that has remained an
32:45enigma for over 60 years.
32:47Jim Templeton was a firefighter who was based near Carlisle in Cumbria. And he was also a very keen photographer.
32:57And during the 1960s, he took one of the most bizarre, baffling, iconic mystery photographs in the history of anomalous
33:07photography.
33:07In May 1964, he was out with his wife and daughter. Not only was he trying out his new camera,
33:15but he wanted to take some pictures of his wife 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 time with his
33:27family.
33:28Jim was there with his wife and his young daughter. And they were in Solway Firth in Cumbria. And as
33:35far as Jim can remember, there was nobody else around. They were there by themselves.
33:40So he'd set up his camera. And he got his daughter, Elizabeth, to pose. And really lovely photo. His wife
33:49was 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. You had to take the
34:03film to a specialist laboratory and have it developed, which normally took a week or so before they were sent
34:08back to you.
34:09About a week later, he went back to the chemist to collect the pictures. And he spoke about the photographs
34:16and the assistant looked through the photographs with him. And the assistant pointed out that one of the pictures was
34:23ruined by somebody in the background.
34:25And then when Jim looked at the picture, he realised this strange figure looked very much like an astronaut.
34:34When the assistant handed them back to him, she said, it's just a pity about that one picture, which was
34:41spoiled by the spaceman in the back of the shot.
34:45And he thought, what? As you would. And looked through the photographs and lo and behold, standing in the background,
34:53almost like floating behind the head,
34:55of Elizabeth is this figure that you can only describe as a spaceman.
34:59It looks very much like a NASA astronaut of that period, wearing a big white space suit, a helmet with
35:09a 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 the 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. They 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 Jim.
36:16And that Jim hadn't seen them when he took the photograph.
36:20Templeton was adamant that that was not the case.
36:22And no one could have wandered into the photograph without him and his wife noticing.
36:29When the story of the Solway Spaceman and the picture that Jim had took appeared in national and local newspapers,
36:40the family became instant media celebrities.
36:46Newspaper reporters, television crews trekked to the Templeton's house to interview Jim and Alice and Elizabeth.
36:54The photo got into the media. It went all around the world.
36:58He had people writing to him from Australia, from South America.
37:02He was absolutely open about it.
37:04He used to... He had a collection of prints of his famous photo
37:07and 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.
37:25He just wanted to 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,
37:34there were people who also thought it was a fake.
37:36Back in those days, you couldn't just take a digital print.
37:39You had to have negatives. There was original material.
37:42And Jim was unwilling to part with it. But 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 altered.
37:54What it shows is what you captured.
37:57There's been nothing superimposed or modified about that still frame.
38:04They actually offered a reward of a three years' supply of film
38:09if somebody come up to explain how it was faked.
38:14I don't think he was a hoaxer.
38:15Even though he admitted to me that he liked playing around with trick photography,
38:20I didn't detect any idea that he deliberately faked that photograph.
38:26That is all I can say. And as someone who's worked as a journalist for decades,
38:31I can read people. I can tell when someone is spinning a yarn.
38:35And I didn't pick that up from Jim Templeton.
38:38What had started as a day out at a local beauty spot
38:41was fast becoming a media sensation.
38:44And it wasn't long before the story found a strange resonance
38:47on the other side of the world.
38:51In Wimmera, Australia, they were testing a missile called the Blue Streak.
38:55And the Blue Streak had been partially built at Cumbria.
38:59So there was this link.
39:00There were two technicians there who said
39:02they saw something like the Solway spaceman actually there.
39:06The mission had to be aborted and the technicians saw on the rocket range
39:12two figures that looked exactly like the figure in Jim Templeton's photograph.
39:19So 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
39:34that made Jim Templeton wonder 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,
39:54yeah, we're from the ministry, you're not to talk about this,
39:57we're interested in the photograph, can you take us to where you took the photograph?
40:02When he asked them their names, they refused to give them.
40:06They said, we don't use names, we use numeric designations.
40:12I am number 9, 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
40:22and one of the guys said to 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, that'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,
40:43thinking, hold on 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
40:57who were drilling Jim for extra information, 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
41:09and they were looking into how the photograph was taken
41:12and 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 of interest
41:28could 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
41:36has wandered into the back of Jim's incredible photograph.
41:40Because of the power station nearby, there were inspectors who wore spacesuit-type outfits
41:48to test the radioactive levels in the nearby Selway 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 at
42:09the time when they looked at the image.
42:12Because they had access to the stripper negatives.
42:16Not just the one with the spacemen in inverted commas 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
42:33as they're getting Elizabeth to pose with the flowers.
42:36And 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 the background,
42:50turned 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 back behind the
42:58camera.
42:59And if he was concentrating on getting a really good shot of his daughter,
43:02he wouldn't necessarily remember 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?
44:05Why was a woman charged with witchcraft?
44:05And she was ready for her to be a woman.
44:05And she was snotabel, and she wasarthy in the world.
44:05I'm not a woman.
44:06This is the end.
44:06She's a woman.
44:07And she was in the world.
44:08And I didn't think about being a woman.
44:08And she was transformed into a woman's child.
44:09And she was a woman's father.
44:10And she did that.
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