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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 like the Yeti and a Mongolian death worm, death worm, death worm.
00:41And those files disclose investigations by the police, by governments, by spy agencies.
00:48Shortly after that transmission, Captain Shaffner's radio went dark.
00:53To examine and uncover the truth about phenomena which are truly out of this world.
01:01It's a great piece of branding, death ray. Everyone knows where they stand with a death ray. Death ray.
01:13We pride ourselves on having conquered every corner of the globe.
01:17But even in Britain, there are still remote areas where monsters can lurk,
01:22and our imaginations can be unleashed.
01:31Bodmin Moor in Cornwall is 80 square miles of beautiful countryside.
01:35With its rocky outcrops and stone circles, it has been home to myths and legends that go back thousands of
01:42years.
01:43However, in more recent times, its bleak remoteness has made it a perfect habitat for a more fascinating creature.
01:50Between the 1980s and 1990s, Bodmin Moor was also home to one of the largest outpourings of alleged sightings of
02:04exotic large cats.
02:07Leopards, pumas, panthers, who had apparently been roaming the moor,
02:14savaging farmers' sheep and terrifying the people who lived in the villages around them.
02:22Whilst cynics and scientists dismissed the sightings of the Beast of Bodmin as delusional,
02:27those who have seen it with their own eyes are convinced that it is real.
02:32There is no doubt that exotic big cats roam the British countryside.
02:36A few years ago, I was travelling from Exeter to Bristol to see some friends in broad daylight on a
02:44coach.
02:45I looked over into a field and I saw a puma.
02:48There is absolutely no doubt that this was a puma.
02:51It wasn't a dog or a fox or anything else.
02:53I used to be a zookeeper.
02:55I worked with all sorts of animals, including cats, and I know what I was looking at.
03:00There have been lots and lots of sightings of a strange creature, a black panther-like creature, on Bodmin Moor.
03:09And the sightings have sort of given rise to this notion of a Beast of Bodmin.
03:15But it wasn't just sightings that made people believe that there were big cats roaming around Bodmin.
03:21The moor yielded physical evidence of dangerous felines prowling the moor.
03:25You also began to get farmers sort of saying, well, my sheep was killed.
03:30And the bite marks are not the bite marks you would expect if it were a dog or a fox
03:36that killed it.
03:36This is quite different from the attacks of dogs.
03:39Dogs kill by biting at the flank and side of the animal.
03:43There is a lot of fleece and fur everywhere.
03:46It's a messy kill.
03:47And as well as eating the internal organs, dogs will crunch up the bones.
03:51But big cats won't. They'll rasp the bones clean with their tongues and eat the soft tissue, but not crunch
03:57the bones.
03:58I've seen a kill made like this in North Devon, transparently from a big cat.
04:05On nearby Exmoor, the situation became so bad that government decided to take drastic action.
04:11The government had sent out, believe it or not, the SAS.
04:19And they spent several months with night sights and high powered rifles trying to shoot the beast of Exmoor.
04:27And it ran rings round them.
04:29They saw it several times, but they could never get a clear shot at it.
04:32And in the end, they had to give up.
04:35If there are big cats roaming our countryside, then the government may well be to blame.
04:40In 1976, the Dangerous Wild Animal Act was introduced to regulate the growing trend for keeping exotic animals.
04:49Well, believe it or not, up until around the mid-70s, anybody could keep any kind of pet they wanted.
04:59The Superstore Harrods in London, their pet department, sold lions and tigers and even gorillas.
05:08All this changed in 1976, when a man was walking his pet lion down the street in Birmingham.
05:17It sounds insane now, but it actually happened.
05:20And the lion savaged a kid.
05:22The government began to intervene on keeping wild animals without a licence.
05:26So you get the Dangerous Wild Animals Act in 1976.
05:30You had to make sure you could keep these animals securely and safely.
05:35And also, you had to pay a very big licence fee.
05:39This gives a reason as to why there might be these animals out there.
05:44People were saying, ah, well, the owners of these wild animals simply released them into the wild
05:49because they didn't want to pay the tax.
05:52Whilst the Exmoor Big Cat evaded the SAS, on Bodmin sightings reached plague-like proportions, with a count reaching 60.
06:01This caught the attention of the press, who descended on Bodmin looking for eyewitnesses, and they had no trouble finding
06:08them.
06:08Rosemary Rhodes farmed on Bodmin Moor.
06:13She had a sheep herd.
06:15And she claimed that she had witnessed the beast, that it had savaged at least ten of her sheep.
06:25Farmer Rosemary Rhodes is out beast hunting.
06:28She's certain there's a family of big cat-like creatures stalking Bodmin Moor.
06:34We're surrounded by moorland and there are areas of coniferous forest, vast areas of coniferous forest above us.
06:40And we've seen them.
06:42We've seen the results of their handiwork when they, in their kills.
06:46What's more, she said, I'm convinced it's a puma.
06:51And I say this because when I was standing at my kitchen window, I heard the beast's cry.
07:01It was like an appalling woman's scream.
07:05Such was the level of public concern.
07:07The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food announced that it would hold a formal investigation into the presence or otherwise
07:15of the beast of Bodmin.
07:18In 1995, the Agricultural Development Advisory Service, what a mouthful that is, sent out a zoologist called Charles Wilson.
07:33Initially, Wilson was given one month to investigate, but the number of sightings meant that he stayed in the area
07:40for six months.
07:42The bulk of the evidence was verbal, but more importantly, he was also given photographs and video recordings to examine.
07:51Determined to get to the truth, Wilson decided to take a forensic approach.
07:56He isolated and examined the backgrounds of the photographs, in particular, the walls that could be identified.
08:02He then went out and measured the heights of those walls.
08:09And when he had that, he had a scale against which he could compare the mysterious black feline captured in
08:21front of them.
08:21And when he checked the ratio of the actual height of the wall against the image of the feline, he
08:31was able to show that none of these supposed big cats captured on these videotapes or in these still images
08:37were any bigger than 12 inches tall.
08:41They were, in fact, domestic cats.
08:46The junior minister for agriculture said that this whole thing is a fantasy and the livestock are being attacked by
08:53dogs and foxes and stuff.
08:55So the farmers got very angry about this.
08:57Today it was announced that after a six month inquiry, costing more than 8,000 pounds, the scientists had found
09:03no evidence of a beast of Bodmin.
09:06I am satisfied from the investigation we've carried out that there is no threat to livestock in that area from
09:13a big cat.
09:14Others, however, are still convinced that there are wild cats living on the moor.
09:19A local animal expert who keeps pumas is among those angered by the inquiry's findings.
09:25Well, it's a government cover. It's just to appease people. That's my personal opinion.
09:30Now, I have seen puma, my friends have seen puma, my neighbours have seen puma.
09:34Throughout the county, the south west, we've seen puma. We know they're here.
09:38Rosemary Rhodes, the eyewitness whose reports had been amongst the earliest to be published in newspapers and on television,
09:48denounced the report. She said she knew that the cat, the beast, existed.
09:54And she sold up her remaining flock and muttered darkly about a British government cover-up.
10:02Why do people have this need to believe that big cats prowl the remote fields and hedgerows of our countryside,
10:09despite the forensic evidence to the contrary?
10:12I think big cats are a very interesting phenomenon. I don't think they roam the countryside.
10:17But what I think they are, are a modern rationalisation of what used to be seen as the kind of
10:23supernatural black dogs.
10:25So they're an otherness. They're an alien. And occasionally you have people suggest that they are alien.
10:32But for the most part, they're thought of as escapees who are living wild and breeding wild.
10:38So I think it's a kind of modern rationalisation of something which would have been seen as supernatural.
10:44And I think you can begin to understand how big cats sit in this kind of popular folklore,
10:49which is spreading and beautifully, beautifully fun to follow.
10:55Ultimately, the truth about the Beast of Bodmin and its ilk apparently at large across the British Isles,
11:06is that these stories are nothing more than catnip.
11:14Catnip which commercially minded newspaper and television executives cannot resist,
11:23because they know that readers want to read and watch them.
11:31The Beast of the World
11:32De complained?
11:55Annexplained disappearances often lead to paranormal explanations,
11:58But one place that appears time and again in the British X-Files can claim the title of the capital
12:05of the paranormal world.
12:16The Bermuda Triangle is this mysterious zone known for the disappearance of ships and aircraft.
12:25And it's basically sort of its points are Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda.
12:31If you kind of make a line from the bottom tip of Florida, upwards, downwards and back, you kind of
12:39hit Florida, Bermuda, Puerto Rico and back.
12:43It's not a definite area, but it's an area where there has been a lot of sort of speculation on
12:50lost ships, lost people, lost airplanes.
12:54Some of the disappearances have achieved legendary status amongst the paranormal community.
13:01One of them is the loss of Flight 19, which was a group of five American planes in 1945 that
13:09disappeared.
13:10Before they lost contact, the main pilot sort of said, everything is gone, nothing is right.
13:15I can't see the sea. And that was that was it.
13:18So you get this kind of dramatic, rather mysterious end.
13:22Wreckage wasn't found and all the flights were lost.
13:25So you have the loss of planes and more to the point, you have the loss of personnel.
13:29The area has certainly attracted serious attention from the U.S. Coast Guard.
13:33They are very kind of diligent in about collecting data, often to try to offset the sort of sensational reputation
13:40that the area has.
13:42So a lot of their data indicates, yes, planes and ships do go missing in this area, but nothing that
13:49really indicates any more than anywhere else in the world.
13:52It's known for cyclones. It's known for hurricanes. It's also known for particularly dangerous waters.
13:58There is supposed to be some kind of magnetic interference with compasses.
14:03So there's there's those kind of interpretations given that it's just it's kind of a dangerous but natural place.
14:10The other explanations are, shall we say, more creative.
14:15I think the most creative one is that the triangle is actually over Atlantis.
14:20And there has always been this speculation that the Atlanteans had weird technology, ray guns and various things.
14:29They say, oh, well, you know, maybe the ancient technology kind of comes up and pulls the ships down.
14:33The other suggestion is that it's a UFO portal and they get sucked down because the flying planes can go
14:42down safely.
14:43But human things can.
14:44It has been suggested that it could be a meeting point or a breach between sort of this dimension and
14:50another one,
14:51and that ships and planes have been kind of drawn through into this other dimension.
15:02The Bermuda Triangle was first described in an article in the early 1950s, which described how planes and boats had
15:10vanished in mysterious circumstances.
15:11But it wasn't until the 1960s that the story really took off.
15:16It was not until 1964 that the true father of the Bermuda Triangle theory emerged.
15:25And he was a none too scrupulous American journalist called Vincent Gaddis.
15:33In February 1964, Gaddis published an article, The Deadly Bermuda Triangle, in a pulp magazine.
15:44And Gaddis followed up this article with a best-selling book later that year.
15:52To support his theory, Gaddis retrospectively claimed disappearances from as far back as 1840.
15:59But his most important source came from an investigation that appeared in the British X-Files.
16:05Tucked into the dusty pages of Britain's extraordinary collection of X-Files are two formal dry reports, official reports, which
16:21have given fuel to the belief in the Bermuda Triangle.
16:25Within the space of 12 months in 1948 and 1949, two identical passenger aircraft disappeared while flying over the Bermuda
16:38Triangle.
16:39The Star Tiger took off from Santa Maria, an island in the Azores.
16:45It was bound for Bermuda.
16:48On board were 23 passengers and six crew.
16:52At 3am on January 30th, the radio operator on Star Tiger sent a message to the operator on the ground
17:04in Bermuda.
17:06That message was the last time anyone ever heard from Star Tiger.
17:14The British government ordered an inquiry, but there was no trace of the aircraft.
17:19No debris recovered, no flight recorder.
17:22We will never know what happened to the Star Tiger.
17:27Within a year, the mystery deepened when the Star Ariel, the sister aircraft of the Star Tiger, also vanished in
17:34the Caribbean Bermuda Triangle.
17:36Once again, the British government ordered an inquiry, but once again they struggled with a complete lack of evidence.
17:42Those twin disappearances formed the foundation stones for Vincent Gaddis' belief and publishing theory that the planes had been swallowed
17:57by the Bermuda Triangle.
18:01Now, as with everything that Gaddis wrote, there was precious little evidence for it, but that didn't stop him.
18:09He wove one phrase into a tapestry of a theory of paranormal explanations.
18:18That phrase said that perhaps, perhaps, Star Tiger had been lost because of some, quotes, external cause.
18:31To Gaddis, external cause equaled paranormal force.
18:46Almost invariably, when you get someone sort of saying, ah, here is this mysterious disappearance, you also get sort of
18:52a counter narrative, sort of pointing out that very often these descriptions aren't particularly accurate.
18:58That they get the time wrong, that they get the time wrong, they don't say that there is bad weather,
19:05in fact, sometimes they say the weather is absolutely clear, when in fact it isn't.
19:09There is one example where in fact the plane landed perfectly safely, but it wasn't reported.
19:17More and more stories appeared telling ever more fantastical tales accompanied by ever more outlandish explanations.
19:24The hunger for stories of planes and ships vanishing meant that over the years, the size of the triangle grew
19:31and grew.
19:32But what about the story from the British X-Files it was all based on?
19:35Was there ever a rational explanation as to what happened to the Star Tiger and the Star Ariel?
19:41When you look more closely at the evidence, it becomes rather more clear that what underpinned their disappearances was the
19:53mundane, prosaic, albeit tragic, realities of a not very good aircraft company flying not terribly good aircraft.
20:04The Tudor 4 series, to which both Star Tiger and Star Ariel belonged, was notorious amongst pilots.
20:13It was notorious for poor engine quality, for bad radio communications.
20:21And the most likely explanation for the disappearances of these two large passenger planes is that they simply malfunctioned and
20:30crashed into the Atlantic.
20:32But if that were the case, people would have expected to at least have seen the wreckage of these aircraft
20:38and official inquiries with clearer conclusions.
20:41But aeroplanes that crashed due to known mechanical faults or human error would not have created the legend of the
20:47Bermuda Triangle.
20:48I think the Bermuda Triangle captured the people's imagination because in a world where we seem to have sort of
20:54the answers to everything in terms of scientific understanding, it's fascinating to think that perhaps there is still a part
21:00of the world that doesn't obey the rules.
21:03You know, it's a place where the supernatural, the paranormal can take place.
21:08We love mysteries and the Bermuda Triangle, although it's not a mystery, is very easy to present as a mystery.
21:15Now, cynics would also point out that these things sell.
21:20They sell much better than the book which says the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle has been solved and it
21:27isn't a mystery.
21:57The Bermuda Triangle
21:58fears so being resistant to the searing heat of flames should be a blessing but in our next x-file
22:05it became the sign of a curse
22:16in september of 1985 a fire in the kitchen of ron and may hall in rotherham got out of control
22:22the result was that their little house was burnt to the ground the only thing that survived amongst
22:27the smoldering ashes was a curse ron and may's house had been destroyed almost entirely in the
22:36blaze a fire which had started when a chip pan caught a fire and rapidly consumed the rest of
22:45their home a local reporter started talking to a fire officer on the scene who said that the only
22:53object that was left unscathed by the fire was a copy of the mass-produced print the crying boy the
23:03crying boy was an extremely popular prints in the 1960s having sold in its thousands it hung on the
23:10walls of many working-class homes particularly in the north of England in those days back in the 1980s
23:15the working class were not afraid of sentiment in fact they courted it in a way that posher viewers
23:20would not so the crying boy is a very good example of the sorts of things that you would find
23:26in
23:26working-class homes raking through the ashes of ron and may hall's home it became clear that their house
23:32was not the only one which had suffered this terrible fate they had a relative in the fire service
23:37um who then said oh well yes it's well known at the station that there are many incidents of this
23:44sort uh fires in homes where they the the print has survived the common feature in all of these stories
23:52was of that the crying boy print had not been damaged in the slightest by any of the flames
24:03on a slow news day the little house fire in rotherham with its remarkable survivor got picked up by a
24:09national newspaper it was picked up by the sun and they ran a story with a very sensationalist headline
24:17um blazing curse of the crying boy picture with a sub headline picture is a fire jinx with the text
24:27tears for fears the portrait that firemen claim is cursed sun at that time which had nearly nearly sold
24:39four million copies um every day was run by an editor called kelvin mackenzie who was notorious for
24:47running a rather lurid inventions in the paper and having a very um detached relationship to the truth
24:53mackenzie was a bare-knuckled bruiser of a hack he's most infamous for showbiz stories which had
25:04very little if any foundation in fact most famously freddy star ate my hamster utterly untrue to mackenzie
25:16the curse of the crying boy was a story which would drag in readers and would cause a sensation
25:25this became a very popular story for the sun there was again another house fire perfectly understandable
25:32reason an electric fire was too close to a bed but there was one of these mawkish crying boy pictures
25:39so every time this happened the sun kept running the story
25:43as they ran the story again and again sentiments about the crying boy started to turn in the darker
25:50direction as people started to think well what is it about all these various prints that you know might
25:57cause this curse was it the case that the subject of the of the original painting was actually abused in
26:04a more serious way than we might have imagined is crying about something really tragic and thus you know
26:11all of these prints are cursed are the fires the the child's revenge in some ways the public reacted
26:18with kind of mass panic and fear lots of readers wanted to get rid of their cursed paintings fearing
26:26that also they would be subject to some curse that they would come to some harm newspaper readers were
26:34terrified because they had the crying boy painting hanging in their living rooms and they phoned the newspaper
26:41and they phoned fire services worried that it would bring doom and destruction down around their heads
26:50at a time when the sun was involved in a brutal war for readers with his competitors
26:55it just couldn't resist taking advantage of the story in a kind of attempt to keep the story going
27:02kelvin mckenzie offered to dispose of people's crying boy pictures on their behalf well over 2 000 prints
27:11showed up and they didn't really know what to do with them they were flooding out the offices and so
27:15on
27:15so they staged this huge bonfire on a pyre quite near reading brought along a reporter and some page
27:23three girls one of whom lit the match they did burn these things and then the story was reported in
27:30the
27:30paper on halloween what the sun had forgotten is that the crying boy if it is notorious for anything
27:39then it is its remarkable ability to survive attempts to burn it although the sun stopped publishing
27:46stories about the crying boy now countless cheap jack books or cheap television documentaries repeat
27:57the story and they've embroidered it
28:01some have concentrated on the identity of the artist who signed himself as g bragolin only to find that no
28:08such painter exists others have concentrated on the subject of the painting who is the mysterious boy
28:15and why is he crying so maybe there's the spirit of a boy is trapped in the print and causes
28:22fires in
28:22order to destroy the print and and free his spirit perhaps the best invention uh is that the original
28:30painter who who took as his subject this crying boy that the boy was a spanish urchin called el diablo
28:39the devil whose parents had died in a house fire and who then either set fires himself or have the
28:47power to mystically attract them and start them off as the story got more and more elaborate and more
28:54bizarre elements were added it became harder and harder to see the original story to find out if there
29:00was a basis in fact maybe if we go back to the burnt out kitchen of ron and may all
29:06we might find some
29:07truth amongst the ashes it's worth remembering that the station officer who first said that he had
29:14seen loads of these paintings at fires didn't think there was anything supernatural there have been tests
29:20done to test whether or not these things are particularly flammable they're not they're printed on high
29:26density fiberboard and the string that held the picture up tended to go in a fire but um the painting
29:34itself didn't so you could quite easily imagine how a perfectly normal fire would burn the string
29:42painting would fall down would fall forward and then it would just seem creepy in amongst everything
29:48else being damaged one other possible explanation was the varnish that covered it which just happened
29:57to be fire retardant so is there something about this tragic portrait that is particularly powerful
30:05this is a really good example of what we call the phenomenon of mass hysteria
30:13so mass hysteria largely works through the orchestration of emotion so it works very much
30:21through the power of suggestion so you can look at all the kinds of headlines that the sun used the
30:28mass
30:28production of fear of panic of anxiety if you think about conspiracy theories they often
30:37unsettle distinctions between fact and fiction between the rational and the irrational between the
30:45natural and the supernatural and people often believe them even if they're debunked or even if there's an
30:52explanation offered that could be plausible so they show how people can invest and believe in things
31:00that probably aren't true that carry people's fears their anxieties there were many people who hung on
31:08to those prints or tried to give them to other people in fact one of the firemen involved in the
31:12story
31:13was handed one that his retirement uh party uh he i think very rationally decided not to accept it
31:20it's a reverse placebo in effect even if you don't you know rationally believe that this thing is cursed
31:27having it in your home seems to be courting bad luck a cheap and cynical publicity stunt exploited for
31:35commercial gain a scientific anomaly or something altogether more sinister you decide
32:07the british x-files are full of the stories of ghosts from the distant past but a whirling sound in
32:13the dead of
32:14night in the peak district heralded a completely different kind of phantom earlier today mr bernaby
32:20drayson conservative mp for skipton was going through his morning mail at his hamstead home when
32:25he became suspicious about an envelope i had opened uh two or three letters and then i came to this
32:30one
32:30i i looked at it and immediately i felt it i felt suspicious about it and i said i think
32:38we've got a letter bomb
32:45in 1973 britain was reeling from a succession of ira bomb attacks the technology was a step up from the
32:53the crude devices they had previously used was this a sign that they were becoming more ambitious
33:02if they continued this escalation people wondered what form their next attack might take
33:13a security guard on duty at a high explosives store in a quarry in the derbyshire peak district
33:24reported seeing a mystery helicopter a phantom helicopter which had been hovering very low over
33:33the ammunition dump the security guard went to investigate this light over the quarry and when he
33:43drove towards the quarry he saw shining lights beaming down onto the ground and he could also hear the sound
33:54of um rotors these lights just lifted out of the quarry and drifted off into the distance it was like
34:00what that what on earth was that but he reported that to the police and that got to special branch
34:06who had also received a whole bunch of sightings not only from civilians but from a police patrol who'd
34:13actually seen very clearly what they described as a helicopter practicing landings and takeoffs somewhere
34:20in the same area of the peak district around the same time police inquirers revealed that the
34:27description matched that of a bell jet ranger but only 37 companies or individuals own this type of
34:33helicopter in the united kingdom an investigation showed that none of them had anything to do with
34:39the sighting
34:42whoever was flying this phantom helicopter was taking an enormous risk flying at such low level at night
34:52over terrain which was dotted with electricity pylons meant either that the pilot was phenomenally
35:02experienced probably ex-military or that he was a reckless terrorist
35:11in recent months the ira had used a helicopter it had stolen one from the irish republic flown it across
35:18the border into northern ireland and used it in a terrorist attack that suggested it had the
35:24capability and indeed the intention of using helicopters in terrorist attacks the metropolitan
35:31police became convinced that this machine was real and it was being operated by irish terrorists because
35:39the police had been given information by uh an ira terrorist who was in custody that the ira were
35:46practicing um some kind of an attack on the british state using a helicopter west yorkshire police told
35:55mi5 that it had received further information that the ira was going to fly a helicopter into a prison where
36:04ira
36:04prisoners were being held lift them up and take them away to freedom this became like a huge thing i
36:14mean most of the regional and national press every day for a period from about mid-january
36:211974 through to the end of february it was headline news it was like phantom helicopter seen again you
36:28know metropolitan police helping derbyshire and cheshire police try and find this pilot there's a big media
36:36frenzy around all these sightings and the the idea that it was the ira was just one idea amongst many
36:45some people felt it was a homemade helicopter and somebody was trying it out another explanation was it
36:54was a devil maker pilot operating illegally at night there was all sorts of rumors that were reported
37:01about who might be flying it the most bizarre one of all i think it was in the daily telegraph
37:05suggested that this was a modern wealthy lover who was having an affair with someone and he was using
37:12this helicopter to visit his mistress in the middle of the night in the hands of fleet street's finest
37:18the phantom helicopter story became a cause celebre the daily mirror flammed up its account by comparing
37:27the pilot to james bond this somehow became a secret agent story
37:39with the press in hot pursuit and the public being whipped up into a frenzy the home office called a
37:46conference to investigate the phenomena of phantom helicopters they had representatives from all the
37:53different police forces involved mi5 ministry of defense and it was they were trying to get to the
37:59bottom of was there something they needed to worry about was this a real machine was it being prepared for
38:07some kind of terrorist attack from the sky on london the home office inquiry had access to
38:14all the radar data for the period for the area on only three occasions did that data indicate that a
38:25helicopter had been in the rough area at approximately the time that a report was cited despite the confusing
38:34evidence the possibility that the ira were using helicopters in the north of england was something
38:40that the government had to take seriously we all know now looking back um on the 9 11 attacks on
38:47all the other things that happened that this is not a fanciful idea you know we know from 9 11
38:52that
38:53terrorists use aircraft and when they crash them into the twin towers etc etc so this is 1974 this was
38:59actually quite a novel idea but the fact that police officers had seen this aircraft that the police had
39:05had intelligence from a convicted ira prisoner that they were using this helicopter so they had to take
39:11it seriously so the home office came up with a request to the ministry of defense and it asked
39:21the army and the air force what its technology and resources could bring to bear on the mystery
39:28and that involved using the air force's own fleet of helicopters or in an extreme case chasing down the
39:38phantom helicopter in harrier jump jets well the ministry of defense quite reasonably responded
39:46that any of these courses of actions were incredibly dangerous quietly the plan was shelved but the
39:56following year there was another spate of phantom helicopter sightings this resulted in the
40:02strangest explanation of all as this time the phantom helicopters were linked with a black panther
40:09there was a weird story that made it into the headlines about um linking the phantom helicopter with
40:15a serial killer called donald nielsen few school boys at kids grove have found a tape with a message
40:22dropped suitcase in hole in the wasteland at kids grove staffordshire nicknamed the black panther by the
40:30press nielsen had murdered four people in post office robberies and had now kidnapped the wealthy heiress
40:36leslie whittle while he searched for the kidnapper mr whittle said he was scared to death so eventually when
40:43he'd been captured he'd been captured by the police and he was on trial um this came up his barrister
40:49at his trial in 1976
40:52asked if anyone had seen a a helicopter on the night he kidnapped leslie whittle charged with the murder of
41:00leslie whittle four days ago
41:01donald nielsen today faced eight further charges the idea that um there was some kind of link with the phantom
41:08helicopter
41:09was actually used by his defense barrister to try and suggest that someone else was responsible
41:14for the kidnapping that the police had got the wrong man and that there was all these sightings of these
41:20strange helicopters and maybe it was the pilot who was involved in the kidnapping and surprisingly
41:26this defense didn't work and nielsen was sentenced to life in prison phantom helicopters were the talking
41:33point of the moment people said they'd seen one somebody else said they'd seen one somebody else
41:38told somebody else that somebody they knew had seen them and that had been reported to the police
41:44and the reports which had accumulated in police inboxes had merely been reports of reports which
41:51eventually could be reduced down to three genuine sightings at most
42:03the files do indicate that a chief constable did write a report about these sightings and
42:11he didn't seem to think it was a real helicopter because there's no pattern to these activities
42:18he seemed to become skeptical of the whole thing being a real helicopter of the ira was involved
42:26the file just ends in october 1974 they didn't follow it all the sightings petered out
42:33and the the result is the the helicopter and its pilot were never identified so it remains a complete
42:41unexplained mystery for aficionados of conspiracy theories and ufo rumors there remains one delicious
42:49irony in the story of phantom helicopters for decades the british government and the british military
42:56has dismissed ufo reports as merely mistaken sightings of normal and perfectly innocent helicopters in the
43:08case of the phantom helicopters the situation was reversed the phantom helicopter was no more than a
43:15helicopter but it was perceived as phantom because people were ufologists in the end it's a story
43:23that tells us both about the fear of the times and the culture of irresponsible sensational reporting
43:32by fleet street newspapers next time on britain's x-files could evidence really survive from a 2 000
43:43year old global catastrophe did a headless ghost stalk london park was a moth-like creature a portent for doom
43:53and our creatures in the atmosphere of the cause of plane crashes
43:58so
44:25You
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