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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.
01:03Everyone knows where they stand with a death ray. Death ray.
01:18Our first entry takes us back to a simpler time.
01:22A time when it was still possible to believe in magic.
01:34Do you believe in fairies?
01:40If not, is that because you have never seen them?
01:44But would you believe in fairies if you saw them with your own eyes?
01:50The 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 Cottingley,
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 Cottingley Beck,
02:17a little stream which ran through the wooded valley
02:20and 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
03:12of fairies down by the Beck.
03:14Elsie borrowed her father's camera,
03:17and she and Francis went back down to the Beck.
03:21And when they came back, they said they had photographed the fairies.
03:24And the negatives and the prints came back.
03:28They appeared to bear out Elsie and Francis's story.
03:38One of the images showed Francis lying on the ground,
03:41surrounded by little dancing fairies,
03:44figures in diaphanous clothing
03:46who were dancing around a young girl.
03:49Two weeks later, Elsie borrowed her dad's camera again,
03:54and went back down to the Beck.
03:56And this time, Francis snapped Elsie,
04:00sitting on the ground,
04:02with a little gnome dancing beside her head.
04:08Arthur Wright, Elsie's father, thought it very suspicious,
04:12but couldn't work out how the images had been made.
04:15But Elsie's mother was more receptive.
04:18She was a member of the Theosophy or Spiritualist Society,
04:22and she took the photographs to a meeting.
04:25The meeting to which Polly took the photographs
04:30had a subject for the night,
04:32and that subject was fairy life.
04:46Victorians really loved the idea of fairies in the countryside.
04:51And one of the reasons for that,
04:53and perhaps this is particularly relevant to Bradford,
04:56was the increasing, the growing sense
04:59that 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
05:08with Tinkerbell the fairy.
05:10Pantomimes with fairies were kind of an annual event.
05:13Well, Polly's photographs caused a stir,
05:15and 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
05:42at that time, Arthur 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.
06:10Conan Doyle's son Kingsley had very sadly died
06:14just 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,
06:22it's possible that he also kind of wanted to lean into the idea
06:25that fairies were real.
06:27Arthur Conan Doyle was commissioned to write
06:31articles of fame for the Christmas edition of the Strand magazine.
06:37I take it the new issue of the Strand magazine is out,
06:39containing 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.
06:47Not a bad title, eh?
06:48As though he gave false names for the girls, inevitably,
06:52the worst right down.
06:53And so, suddenly, she had people following her,
06:57trying to get a photograph, trying to talk to her,
06:59and she had to slip out of the house, back of the house,
07:02go on the back streets to get to school and avoid them.
07:05The attention of the media focused the spotlight of scepticism
07:08on the charming story.
07:09How 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
07:23as a photograph of one of the girls
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
07:37the status of the photographs in the public mind.
07:42His fame essentially sealed it.
07:46These two photographs, because Conan Doyle had endorsed them,
07:52were, in homes up and down the land,
07:55believed as absolute cast-iron proof.
08:01That 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 Cottingley 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
08:24for journalists to trace Elsie and Frances
08:27and asked them if they really took the photographs of fairies.
08:31The first time journalists did this,
08:33both 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
08:43came when Elsie suggested that the fairies
08:45might be photographs of her imagination.
08:47But then Joseph Cooper, an academic who was interested in the story,
08:52befriended Frances.
08:55Joe Cooper came down and spent the weekend with her.
08:58And she said,
08:59Joe, I've 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,
09:13Joe, what's wrong?
09:14And he called back up and says,
09:16very 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.
09:23Totally unsuspecting.
09:24But he knew where she kept her documents
09:27and she was totally trusting him,
09:30not believing anything would happen.
09:32And two weeks later,
09:34the Unexplained magazine had the whole story of the fix.
09:41So what fiendishly clever trickery did these two young girls use
09:45to fool the world?
09:46And no less a figure than Arthur Conan Doyle
09:49into believing that they really were fairies
09:51at 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.
10:04And she drew them,
10:05cut them out beautifully, tinted them,
10:08and then when it was all ready,
10:11they asked the father to follow the camera
10:13and they artistically arranged the fairies in front of her,
10:18taking the hat pins on the back of the figures,
10:20putting them into the grass,
10:21and they artistically arranged in front of Frances.
10:24So Frances was standing like this on the bank,
10:27looking at the camera,
10:29and 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 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,
11:00the 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.
11:16The others are solid paper.
11:17You can see the paper, you know, when you're really low,
11:19because 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.
11:37That 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,
11:50she 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,
12:01over the beck on a willow branch.
12:04And this place, she comes to take it for granted
12:07that she goes there and she sees these beings.
12:09Today, the pictures are categorized as a hoax
12:12in the pages of the British X-Files.
12:15But although they may not have been any fairies,
12:17is 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
12:33completely tricked Conan Doyle,
12:35who clearly believed that his own powers of reason
12:38were magically akin to those of his creation, Sherlock Holmes.
12:43What a mind!
12:44Sharp enough and brilliant enough to outwit
12:46the great Sherlock Holmes himself.
13:15Our next file takes us to the high seas.
13:18But a cursed ship roams the great oceans.
13:22Its cargo?
13:23Nothing 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.
13:58The 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,
14:10trying to make his way through a storm, and 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,
14:28he'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
14:42talking about on board ship.
14:44And yet this evolved in the 19th century
14:47with more of a sort of a backstory.
14:49So it actually has a figure, a character,
14:51who 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,
15:03vainly 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
15:11of the flying Dutchman.
15:14Any living crew on a genuine, real-life ship
15:19who spotted the ghost ship
15:22would become struck down,
15:26would be killed or condemned
15:28to devastation, doom and destruction.
15:32It's linked to the disappearance of a ship
15:35around the Cape of Good Hope,
15:36and the story elaborated from there.
15:39It sort of existed in folklore
15:40until the sort of late 18th century,
15:43and then it started to get picked up in literature.
15:46Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,
15:50this myth grew and grew and grew.
15:54It formed the basis for supernatural tales
15:58by novelists and poets,
16:01and the German composer Richard Wagner
16:03composed an entire opera based on the story.
16:09The original story was set in the 17th century
16:12around the Cape of Good Hope,
16:14a notoriously stormy area in the southern tip of South Africa.
16:18However, since then, sightings of the flying Dutchman
16:22have spread around the world
16:23and into more modern times.
16:25One of the examples I found
16:27was reported in the New York newspaper in 1920s,
16:31and it referred to sighting by a British Navy,
16:36or Royal Navy convoy during the First World War,
16:39and the mysterious appearance
16:41of an additional ship in that convoy.
16:43What happened was the convoy was then attacked
16:46by German submarines,
16:47and again, the person who had sighted it
16:50on board his particular ship,
16:52that was the only ship that was destroyed.
16:54And then after the conflict,
16:56that ghost ship disappeared.
16:59In 1886, John Dalton contributed a story
17:02to a book called
17:03The Cruise of Her Majesty's Ship, the Kante.
17:07In it, he described an encounter
17:08with the flying Dutchman,
17:10but more extraordinary still
17:11was the identity of one of the witnesses.
17:14One of the people who spotted
17:16that infamous ghost ship
17:19went on to become King George V.
17:23According to Dalton's account,
17:25the 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 the 11th.
17:39At 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,
17:50and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out
17:54in 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,
18:05who was sent forward at once to the fo'c'sle.
18:07But on arriving, there was no vestige,
18:10nor any sign whatever, of any material ship.
18:14At 10.45am, the ordinary seamen,
18:18who had this morning reported the flying Dutchman,
18:21fell from the four-mast cross-trees
18:24onto the top-gallant fo'c'sle
18:26and was smashed to atoms.
18:30This account was written by John Dalton,
18:33who was the prince's tutor.
18:34Given its paranormal nature,
18:36we might expect Buckingham Palace to have objected
18:40or even censored the story
18:41if they felt it was inaccurate
18:43or damaging to the future king's reputation.
18:45But that didn't happen.
18:48So was it true?
18:49Did King George V really see the flying Dutchman?
18:53On closer inspection, the ship's log contains no reference to the sighting.
18:59However, that log book 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
19:13that 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
19:22that essentially this is misperception.
19:24The watery environment of the sea,
19:27you've got mists, you've got mirages,
19:29you've got the sort of play of sun and water,
19:31can easily distort what people are seeing.
19:34You've then also got the fact that
19:35there 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
19:45that have been sort of 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
20:05and altered states of consciousness.
20:07And one of the altered states of consciousness
20:09that 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.
20:21However, do we really want a rational explanation?
20:24Isn't there something in the story of Captain Dodeca
20:27and 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
20:36who's both immortal and deeply unhappy,
20:38a fascinating tale.
20:41The idea of somebody who lives forever
20:43but doesn't gain any benefit from it,
20:45who indeed wants to escape from life into death,
20:49is always a very powerful tale
20:52that reassures the rest of us
20:54about the fact that actually mortality might be a blessing
20:57and not a curse.
21:20The end of the story of Captain Dodeca
21:29has the greatest fear of God.
21:29The world's most likely have been a blessing
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,
21:54or even earlier works by H.G. Wells,
21:56depict 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?
22:05In the years following World War I,
22:08governments across the world took the idea of a death ray very, very seriously indeed.
22:17And a dusty file held at the British National Archives at Kew
22:23contains an astonishing story that a self-proclaimed inventor 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.
22:43It was now industrialized and mechanized.
22:46Governments realized 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
23:08that 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
23:22and went on to become an inventor, specializing 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,
23:38forgotten inventor of the first half of the 20th century.
23:42He made his name as a maverick, as an outsider.
23:45He kind of styled himself as Gloucestershire's answer to Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison.
23:51Someone who was just bursting with ideas and knew how to make them happen.
23:56He was someone who saw himself as someone who could see a new world that was coming.
24:02The 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
24:26600 feet up in the sky and two miles away.
24:29Now that had never been done before and was a positive advance.
24:35He 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 and the scientists there had allegedly been conducting experiments using
25:06a death ray.
25:08And that death ray was able, apparently, to bring down aircraft in flight and had done so, allegedly, to French
25:20planes flying over German territory.
25:23The military potential was obvious.
25:27Unfortunately, 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 that he had been working on a similar
25:49experiment
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. It received so much press attention.
26:00I mean, it's a great piece of branding, the death ray. Everyone 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, who 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. One was an engineer, the other one was a physicist.
26:29The test itself was in two parts. In the first part, Matthews fired his ray at a light bulb some
26:39distance away.
26:40A light bulb that was not connected to any form of electricity or any other wiring.
26:47And Matthews' ray lit up the light bulb.
26:52Having shown that he could turn on a disconnected light bulb, they then moved on to the second part of
26:57the test.
26:58The test was supposed to show how the death ray could take out enemy aircraft by turning off their engines
27:08from the ground.
27:10Basically, you fire it at the aircraft. It shorts out the magneto in its engine and then it plummets to
27:18the 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.
27:40On the surface then, it looked like the death ray was potentially viable.
27:45What were the problems? Well, 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.
27:59And as for the motorcycle test, well, the military chiefs noticed something a little bit strange about that.
28:07Because throughout the experiment, and 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 and that the death ray didn't really do what Matthew
28:38claimed it could do.
28:39And they suspected that they weren't being allowed to properly inspect the apparatus, simply because it wasn't what Matthews said
28:47it was.
28:50Undeterred by the demonstration, Grindle Matthews decided to use his considerable skills as a showman to make a film showing
28:57what his powerful death ray could do.
29:00Matthews, looking visionary, looking scientific, white-coated in his laboratory, then switches to a scene of the death ray itself.
29:10This huge futuristic looking cannon, smoke reeling all over it, and then an image of a city in flames.
29:19It didn't escape attention, certainly on the part of government scientists, that the death ray as portrayed in the Pathé
29:28Newsreel bore very, very little resemblance to the apparatus of the they'd seen in the laboratories.
29:35A very different kind of thing.
29:38The film, which has been very, very carefully edited, doesn't actually show the death ray in action.
29:45The most it shows is Grindle Matthews standing beside the machines, the machines having been switched on, and something in
29:54the distance lighting up.
29:56As evidence of a lethal death ray, it's worthless.
30:01Matthews claimed that if the British weren't interested, then he had backers in France.
30:06But the truth was, they didn't really exist.
30:10Pursued by angry shareholders, Grindle Matthews bounced back with a new invention, a sky projector that could throw images onto
30:18clouds.
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, where he met Hermann Goering, and he met Goebbels
30:35as well, to talk about it.
30:36Apparently, they wanted his invention to beam Hitler's face onto the underside clouds while at huge Nazi rallies.
30:45But it didn't, in the end, end up licensing it to the Nazis.
30:49After a period in America, he once again found himself in financial trouble, and settled down on top of a
30:56mountain in Wales.
30:58There is a story of Grindle Matthews having a little box with sort of knobs and dials on the side,
31:04and him lying on a grass bank by a road, watching cars going up and down, fiddling with the dials
31:12on his box and watching the cars stop of their own accord.
31:17Did Harry Grindle Matthews perfect his death ray at his secret laboratory on top of a mountain in Wales?
31:24Or was this story, perhaps like the death ray itself, all a hoax?
31:29I think it would probably be overstating it to say there was a straightforward hoax.
31:36It seems pretty clear to me, at any rate, that the death ray didn't do what Matthews said it could
31:45do.
31:45In the end, it simply wasn't suited for the battlefield.
31:48Apart from anything else, if a plane is flying about 200 miles an hour,
31:52how are you going to be able to train a laser on it from about 5,000 feet away?
31:56He had an idea, he thought he could make it work, but to get it to work he needed funding,
32:03he needed money.
32:05And he never got that money, so the death ray never developed really beyond the pipe dream that it was.
32:43The End
32:44The next story comes from Britain's darkest hour.
32:47In times of danger, our senses are often heightened, but does that also apply to our extrasensory
32:55powers?
32:57Suddenly, all of London seemed to be aflame.
33:00Hermann Goering's arrogant ruffer had struck from the air.
33:03Millions of tons of incendiaries and high explosives rained down from the sky.
33:08Over 40,000 civilians killed.
33:10Over 130,000 injured.
33:13Two million houses damaged or destroyed.
33:16This was the Blitz.
33:18It lasted nearly two years and marked Britain's darkest period in World War II.
33:25And one of the greatest dangers was to the air raid wardens and the emergency services,
33:30because it was they who had to dig out the dead and barely living once the damage was
33:35done, not knowing whether more attacks were coming or whether they would stumble over
33:40an exploded ordnance which could blow them sky high.
33:43This led to one of the strangest episodes in Britain's X-Files, and that was the dowsing detectives
33:54of World War II.
33:59It all seemed to sort of be kicked off by an incident in 1941 in Warwickshire, near a small
34:07town called Leamington Spa.
34:10The Luftwaffe were targeting various cities, Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry, and on some occasions, aircraft
34:18would have gone off course, or they would have dropped the bombs and they didn't hit the
34:24target, and maybe they had a load and 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 and just dropped a load
34:37of bombs in the middle of the field.
34:38By unlucky chance, two local factory workers, Harry Marston and James Hyatt, were walking along
34:46the path and were caught in the appalling explosion.
34:54And, of course, the local police immediately brought in, trying to find the bodies.
34:59They'd obviously been killed, these two guys, but they needed to locate the remains.
35:04And there was one particular constable called Philip Terry, and he was someone who was able
35:11to divine, using 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.
35:26He said, if I had an article of the men's clothing and I wrapped that round my divining rod, I
35:35don't
35:35know, but maybe that would help direct the search.
35:39So, Marston's cloth cap was somehow obtained.
35:43And he wrapped it around the hazel rod and started walking around over these mounds of earth.
35:49And straight away, he got this sort of feeling that, you know, he could feel the rod moving
35:54in his hand and 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 to report any unusual events
36:06like this to the War Office.
36:08These bomb sites must be reported.
36:12The report landed on the desk of a ministry scientist, Professor William Curtis.
36:17And he was both curious and slightly sceptical.
36:22And he resolved to see for himself where this apparently miraculous divination had taken place.
36:31And to test, with some degree of scientific rigour, whether it had actually occurred.
36:39And so Curtis went to the bomb site, and he got PC Philip Terry to meet him there.
36:44And as they wandered over the craters left by the German bombs, Professor Curtis spotted
36:50the obvious.
36:51The two craters, basically, where these bombs had dropped, and there was a path going between
36:56them.
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.
37:05He was saying, you don't need this special dowsing ability to work out how perhaps Philip
37:13Terry guessed that that's where they were.
37:16Because if they were walking along this path and you've got the crater there, it's likely
37:20that it's here and they've been buried immediately to the side of the crater.
37:24He then wrote up a report in which he said, this can't be taken as a particularly convincing
37:31case 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 and had been washed
37:42up on the bank of a river.
37:43The actual rod in his hand, it was twisting round.
37:47There's no doubt about this.
37:48It was actually moving.
37:49He could feel the hazel rod.
37:52And so it's all pointing at that tree by the riverbank.
37:56Of course, they went there.
37:58The 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 and once again came to the conclusion that the
38:11place where the body was found was the most logical location for it to wash up.
38:15There were others in the war office who were still convinced that divination might
38:20be useful on the battlefield.
38:21And in one instance, an officer was tasked with using dowsing to find the location of
38:26gas pipes at an army base.
38:28But the experiment was a complete failure.
38:30And a note in the ministry's files pointed out there were better uses of resources than pursuing
38:38the belief in a folk myth.
38:41This man is a dowser and he works with a dowsing or divining rod to find radiation that is undetectable
38:48to normal instruments.
38:50And some dowsers don't even need tools.
38:52They just use their hands.
38:53But regardless of how it's done, the purpose of dowsing is simple.
38:57To 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, were 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, there was no movement.
39:26She came along there, then suddenly you found the rod going up.
39:31In times when perhaps water was short and they needed someone to locate a water course,
39:38and they went to a certain person who had a reputation, you know, the cunning folk they were known as.
39:45And these were maybe people who employed other magical practices to find lost treasure, lost objects.
39:52And if you gave them a coin or, you know, there'd be some sort of financial transaction,
39:58they would employ whatever arcane methods that they had at their disposal to find these things.
40:04So it's, it's a genuine folk tradition.
40:08Rescue squads labored 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 or people with alleged psychic ability
40:34have been in some way tested, because during this hour, any possibility have been in some way tried.
40:42However, psychic detectives have never been officially tested or officially involved by the government.
40:48Only some people within the army try to use those and try to test them,
40:54because they have the belief, personal belief, that this power actually exists.
40:59But any of those tests prove that this ability didn't exist and were completely useless.
41:06There was to be no more official interest in divination as a useful tool for more than 20 years.
41:15Then at the height of the Cold War, the military, the British army, once again picked up the idea
41:21as something which could prove useful, should the army have to deal with buried bombs.
41:25They'd heard these stories that dowsers had the ability to find buried mines.
41:31It was obviously something that took root in 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, green is for growth, yellow is for the global net,
41:47and fight marks the medial eloquent lines for the power point.
41:51Now, don't look for this in any scientific textbook. Dowsing isn't accepted by the scientific community.
41:58All the tests that have been done around the world on dowsing detectives under controlled condition,
42:05from searching from water, from searching for a specific target, have been completely unsuccessful.
42:13So I've been always proved that all these alleged power do not work.
42:21So what is really happening when someone is dowsing? Why does the rod or the pendulum move?
42:27What is happening is that just thinking about a possible movement of the object that the person is touching or
42:35holding,
42:36is creating very tiny movement between the finger, for example, of the person.
42:41And these movements are increased and emphasized by the shape of the object.
42:46Dowsing may have a long folk tradition, but 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, it 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.
43:32Next time on Britain's X-Files, two 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 terrorized the north of England?
44:00Yes Wooc!
44:15Whatever the destinely noticed on this time,
44:15To tell us whatже does to persones to those who have created such graphics?
44:15Well, I think there are some other things that do whatakkani is going to favor.
44:19If Goddi has read it, let's use this backlink.
44:22You
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