1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:09,800 Over the last 30 years, there have been thousands of reported sightings of unidentified flying 2 00:00:09,800 --> 00:00:13,840 objects over the British Isles. 3 00:00:13,840 --> 00:00:18,600 You think I'm bloodied up, but this is a UFO. 4 00:00:18,600 --> 00:00:23,400 In the summer of 2008, reports of flying saucers and other crafts were capturing the headlines 5 00:00:23,400 --> 00:00:27,560 again. 6 00:00:27,560 --> 00:00:32,760 Over the years, numerous eyewitnesses, including military personnel, police officers and experienced 7 00:00:32,760 --> 00:00:38,560 airline pilots have testified to seeing strange lights in the sky and other mysterious phenomena. 8 00:00:38,560 --> 00:00:43,560 Well, look, very bright yellow, hot pink. 9 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:48,560 It was nothing like an airplane that I'd ever seen before. 10 00:00:48,560 --> 00:00:53,560 It's the brightest light I've ever seen in my life. 11 00:00:53,560 --> 00:00:57,560 Many of these UFO sightings remain unexplained to this day. 12 00:00:57,560 --> 00:01:00,560 But what or who were they? 13 00:01:00,560 --> 00:01:05,560 Could they really be evidence of extraterrestrial life? 14 00:01:05,560 --> 00:01:07,560 I don't think that's strange. 15 00:01:07,560 --> 00:01:09,560 It's a small red light. 16 00:01:09,560 --> 00:01:10,560 Weird. 17 00:01:10,560 --> 00:01:11,560 It's coming this way. 18 00:01:11,560 --> 00:01:13,560 It's definitely coming this way. 19 00:01:13,560 --> 00:01:17,560 It was just something out of science fiction for me. 20 00:01:17,560 --> 00:01:19,560 It was totally unbelievable. 21 00:01:19,560 --> 00:01:25,560 We hear first hand from those who witnessed them and examine the truth behind some of 22 00:01:25,560 --> 00:01:46,560 Britain's most celebrated UFO sightings. 23 00:01:46,560 --> 00:01:51,560 The remote Bearwind Mountains are the Welsh village of Hlandrichlow. 24 00:01:51,560 --> 00:02:00,560 In 1974, the sight of an infamous UFO encounter. 25 00:02:00,560 --> 00:02:04,560 My first thoughts were, wow, what was that? 26 00:02:04,560 --> 00:02:11,560 It was a very, very bright green light, different to anything I've ever seen before. 27 00:02:11,560 --> 00:02:14,560 Good God, he says, what happened there? 28 00:02:14,560 --> 00:02:17,560 I don't know. 29 00:02:17,560 --> 00:02:20,560 But I never seen nothing like it. 30 00:02:20,560 --> 00:02:26,560 99% it was a flame source. 31 00:02:26,560 --> 00:02:33,560 If a UFO did visit that night, has the story become shrouded in official secrecy? 32 00:02:33,560 --> 00:02:38,560 The government obviously did not want us to know what had happened. 33 00:02:38,560 --> 00:02:42,560 Four years on, the story continues to intrigue. 34 00:03:00,560 --> 00:03:04,560 We were sat down watching television, roughly about 20 to nine. 35 00:03:04,560 --> 00:03:08,560 There was a, like a, like a thud. 36 00:03:10,560 --> 00:03:15,560 And then the whole place started shaking, quite violently. 37 00:03:17,560 --> 00:03:21,560 It didn't last long, but it was very frightening. 38 00:03:21,560 --> 00:03:27,560 You know, we were just stunned, we were looking at each other and, I don't know, 39 00:03:27,560 --> 00:03:29,560 they said anything about a while or something. 40 00:03:29,560 --> 00:03:34,560 Half a mile away, the Village Postmaster's house was also affected. 41 00:03:34,560 --> 00:03:40,560 We knew there was something wrong, because my son was pedagitated, you see. 42 00:03:40,560 --> 00:03:43,560 And he was, you know, he was on the verge of crying anyway. 43 00:03:44,560 --> 00:03:49,560 The shockwave hit the Bear Wind Mountain Range and travelled four miles from 44 00:03:49,560 --> 00:03:52,560 Clandrichlow to the nearby town of Corwin. 45 00:03:53,560 --> 00:03:58,560 It sounded, to be honest, exactly like a steamroller coming up the road. 46 00:03:58,560 --> 00:04:04,560 Oof, it, like, hit the house, the city tipped, and I landed up on the hearth. 47 00:04:05,560 --> 00:04:10,560 In the next valley, Police Sergeant Elvid Roberts was settling down for the evening. 48 00:04:14,560 --> 00:04:20,560 All of a sudden, I felt this ominous rumbling and clearly something quite 49 00:04:20,560 --> 00:04:27,560 major had happened. And my first thoughts were, oh, heavens, it's the dam. 50 00:04:28,560 --> 00:04:32,560 The Clint Selen Dam holds 16 billion tonnes of water. 51 00:04:33,560 --> 00:04:37,560 Fearing it had been breached, Sergeant Roberts rushed to the scene. 52 00:04:42,560 --> 00:04:47,560 Having taken a moment to collect my thoughts and got in the car and thought, 53 00:04:47,560 --> 00:04:52,560 right, I'm going to need to drive down towards Balla and see what I can discover. 54 00:04:54,560 --> 00:05:02,560 Had it been the dam that had burst, undoubtedly the water would have engulfed the town by the time I had driven towards it. 55 00:05:02,560 --> 00:05:06,560 And it would have been a very major tragedy. 56 00:05:10,560 --> 00:05:14,560 The more I drove towards Balla, the more reassured I became. 57 00:05:15,560 --> 00:05:19,560 So I then decided, well, I can rule that out with safety. 58 00:05:20,560 --> 00:05:23,560 So I drove then to the police station in Balla. 59 00:05:24,560 --> 00:05:28,560 And as soon as I went into the police station, the telephone was ringing and it continued to ring, 60 00:05:28,560 --> 00:05:34,560 each time I answered it, with reports coming in that something very big had happened. 61 00:05:38,560 --> 00:05:42,560 999 calls were flooding in from the villages of Flandrichlund. 62 00:05:42,560 --> 00:05:46,560 The locals were alarmed, no one quite knew what was going on. 63 00:05:46,560 --> 00:05:51,560 Not only had their houses been shaken, they were seeing lights in the sky above them. 64 00:05:54,560 --> 00:06:00,560 We dashed out into the village square and, of course, there was a lot of people out there already. 65 00:06:01,560 --> 00:06:08,560 I looked up on the left-hand side of the shop and we could see this ball of fire, 66 00:06:09,560 --> 00:06:15,560 which was quite bright and had a bit of a tail on, you see. 67 00:06:16,560 --> 00:06:21,560 We just saw it coming down at the back of the house, really. 68 00:06:23,560 --> 00:06:25,560 Of course, it was frightening. 69 00:06:29,560 --> 00:06:34,560 Police Sergeant Roberts and Inspector Glen Evans headed to the village to investigate. 70 00:06:35,560 --> 00:06:42,560 As we were driving, all of a sudden, we both saw this green light in the sky ahead of us. 71 00:06:43,560 --> 00:06:46,560 And it seemed to be an arcing light. 72 00:06:47,560 --> 00:06:53,560 But it was very sudden, totally unexpected, different to anything I've ever seen before, 73 00:06:54,560 --> 00:06:59,560 particularly because it was this green arcing light with sort of blue tinges to the edges. 74 00:06:59,560 --> 00:07:04,560 The police didn't know what would confront them when they arrived at Clan Wichla, 75 00:07:04,560 --> 00:07:10,560 but January 23, 1974 would be one of the longest nights in the village's history. 76 00:07:11,560 --> 00:07:18,560 Were these strange phenomena naturally occurring terrestrial events or something otherworldly? 77 00:07:19,560 --> 00:07:25,560 I'm sure all the locals who can remember it would daily love to find out what was going on. 78 00:07:25,560 --> 00:07:32,560 On January 23, 1974, an explosion rang out and something shook the Bowen Mountain Range in North Wales. 79 00:07:34,560 --> 00:07:41,560 After receiving dozens of 999 calls, police officers Elvid Roberts and the police were on the way to the village. 80 00:07:42,560 --> 00:07:47,560 The police were on the way to the village to find out what was going on. 81 00:07:47,560 --> 00:07:51,560 The village was now in the middle of an arcing fire in the north of the town. 82 00:07:52,560 --> 00:07:56,560 The fire was now on the way to the village of Clan Wichla. 83 00:07:59,560 --> 00:08:04,560 After receiving dozens of 999 calls, police officers Elvid Roberts and Glen Evans 84 00:08:05,560 --> 00:08:09,560 raced from their headquarters to the village of Clan Wichla. 85 00:08:10,560 --> 00:08:16,560 On their way, they'd seen what many of the villagers had also seen, a bright light arcing across the sky. 86 00:08:17,560 --> 00:08:21,560 They were serious enough to get all the drinkers out of the local pub, the Dudley. 87 00:08:22,560 --> 00:08:26,560 And they all wanted to tell us what their experience was. 88 00:08:27,560 --> 00:08:35,560 Some of the villagers had seen a very large round bonfire they described it as, upon Cadevronwyn. 89 00:08:36,560 --> 00:08:42,560 With 24 of its peaks above 2,000 feet, the Bowens are notorious for air crashes. 90 00:08:43,560 --> 00:08:47,560 Just two years earlier, a military aircraft had come down in the area 91 00:08:48,560 --> 00:08:52,560 and the police made an air accident their first line of inquiry. 92 00:08:54,560 --> 00:08:58,560 Had it been a crashed aircraft, perhaps there was an explosion somewhere 93 00:08:59,560 --> 00:09:03,560 and that was the sort of arcing light from the explosion. 94 00:09:05,560 --> 00:09:08,560 To begin their search, the police needed to climb the mountainside, 95 00:09:08,560 --> 00:09:11,560 but they lacked a suitable vehicle to make the ascent. 96 00:09:14,560 --> 00:09:17,560 They decided to call it the nearby Garethian Farm, 97 00:09:18,560 --> 00:09:23,560 the home of 14-year-old schoolboy Hugh Lloyd and a four-wheel drive Land Rover. 98 00:09:28,560 --> 00:09:33,560 He was a police officer there. He said there had been reports of a plane crash 99 00:09:34,560 --> 00:09:37,560 and the actual words he said were like to command the area. 100 00:09:38,560 --> 00:09:42,560 Land Rover, I remember that word. I didn't quite actually know what he meant really. 101 00:09:58,560 --> 00:10:01,560 When we were on top of the mountain, we actually used our own torches 102 00:10:02,560 --> 00:10:07,560 and then there was a period when we said, right, let's put the torches out 103 00:10:08,560 --> 00:10:11,560 and let's just be still for a while and look around and listen. 104 00:10:17,560 --> 00:10:23,560 As much as we could, we tried to establish if there was anything at all unusual up there. 105 00:10:26,560 --> 00:10:28,560 Four miles away in the village of Glendafell, 106 00:10:28,560 --> 00:10:32,560 another vehicle headed up to the mountains in search of a crashed aircraft. 107 00:10:33,560 --> 00:10:36,560 The occupants travelled to a peak called Cadabrewin 108 00:10:37,560 --> 00:10:41,560 and looked across the range toward the mountain the police were searching. Cadabrewin. 109 00:10:48,560 --> 00:10:52,560 District Nurse Pat Evans had taken her first aid-trained daughters with her 110 00:10:53,560 --> 00:10:55,560 in case anyone needed medical assistance. 111 00:10:56,560 --> 00:11:00,560 Although she didn't find a plane wreck, Pat Evans did see something else. 112 00:11:04,560 --> 00:11:09,560 In 1974 she gave a statement which described seeing a perfect round circle 113 00:11:10,560 --> 00:11:16,560 like a red bonfire with lights moving around it, changing colour to yellow and back again. 114 00:11:26,560 --> 00:11:31,560 On the mountain opposite, the police searched for the crashed aircraft and drawn a blank. 115 00:11:33,560 --> 00:11:41,560 It was with a great degree of disappointments that we came back down from Cadabrewin, having found nothing. 116 00:11:43,560 --> 00:11:47,560 Whatever had happened that night was still a mystery. 117 00:11:56,560 --> 00:12:03,560 By the following morning in Flandrichlo, news of what the villagers had experienced had sparked a media frenzy. 118 00:12:04,560 --> 00:12:08,560 But no one had spoken to Pat Evans and there was no talk of UFOs. 119 00:12:17,560 --> 00:12:21,560 Hello again, a remote area of north Wales was shaken by a mysterious explosion 120 00:12:21,560 --> 00:12:24,560 drawing the night and no one yet knows why. 121 00:12:24,560 --> 00:12:31,560 It's a greenish-blue colour. We were standing just by the pre-station there when it was just over there. 122 00:12:32,560 --> 00:12:34,560 What was it? Was it a streak or a flash? 123 00:12:34,560 --> 00:12:36,560 Yeah, it was a streak. It was just coming down. 124 00:12:37,560 --> 00:12:40,560 The whole house was shaking, you know, trembling underneath somewhere. 125 00:12:41,560 --> 00:12:42,560 What did you think was happening? 126 00:12:43,560 --> 00:12:47,560 No idea what was happening. We were all stunned for a few seconds. 127 00:12:48,560 --> 00:12:53,560 The villagers were keen to find out whether there was a rational explanation for the streaking lights. 128 00:12:55,560 --> 00:13:02,560 Experts have been trying to establish all day long whether the explosion was caused by a falling meteorite. 129 00:13:03,560 --> 00:13:08,560 Astronomer Dr Ron Madison was the first scientist on the scene in Flandrichlo. 130 00:13:10,560 --> 00:13:18,560 We were at home listening to the late radio news and there was an account of an explosion followed by great flashes in the sky. 131 00:13:18,560 --> 00:13:21,560 And it happened only about 50 miles from where we were living. 132 00:13:22,560 --> 00:13:29,560 And it occurred to me, being an astronomer, by training, oh, this is probably a landed meteorite. 133 00:13:31,560 --> 00:13:35,560 Joined by colleagues from the astronomy department at Kiel University, 134 00:13:36,560 --> 00:13:40,560 Dr Madison launched a search for what he thought may have crashed onto the mountain. 135 00:13:41,560 --> 00:13:45,560 Not the plane that the police were looking for, but a meteorite. 136 00:13:46,560 --> 00:13:52,560 We went up into the mountains and spent the whole day hooping it around in a big area 137 00:13:53,560 --> 00:13:58,560 because the precision of the direction from which the lights had appeared was not very great. 138 00:13:59,560 --> 00:14:05,560 The situation was complicated by the fact that the weather was not that clear and there was light snow about. 139 00:14:06,560 --> 00:14:08,560 It was really a bit unpleasant. 140 00:14:09,560 --> 00:14:15,560 This is where it's thought the meteorite landed, but looking for it is like looking for a needle in a haystack 141 00:14:16,560 --> 00:14:23,560 because these Berwyn Mountains cover hundreds of square miles and is possibly the most remote isolated part of Wales. 142 00:14:24,560 --> 00:14:31,560 Madison and his team of astronomers spent four days combing the mountain for evidence of a meteorite impact. 143 00:14:32,560 --> 00:14:37,560 Two Canberra surveillance aircraft from the nearby Valley Air Force Base helped in the search. 144 00:14:39,560 --> 00:14:49,560 I thought it would be a good shot to get the Air Force team in Anglesey there at Valley to do a photographic survey. 145 00:14:50,560 --> 00:14:55,560 And they agreed and did a whole survey of the mountain range. 146 00:14:57,560 --> 00:15:01,560 Whilst the astronomers scoured the mountain for evidence of a meteorite, 147 00:15:02,560 --> 00:15:06,560 the police and an REF rescue team continued to search for a crashed aircraft. 148 00:15:09,560 --> 00:15:11,560 But neither hunt was successful. 149 00:15:12,560 --> 00:15:16,560 No physical evidence that anything had hit the mountain was found. 150 00:15:17,560 --> 00:15:21,560 No one knew what had caused the ground to shake so violently. 151 00:15:22,560 --> 00:15:29,560 It was quite a sensation, I can tell you. The house seems to have lived quite slowly really. 152 00:15:30,560 --> 00:15:35,560 And then it felt as if the floor was giving away as well, you see. So it's sort of a parting really. 153 00:15:36,560 --> 00:15:41,560 Bull house rattled basically and I said I think a steamroller has hit the house. 154 00:15:42,560 --> 00:15:50,560 I ran out and there was nothing there except for a small garage and the mechanic was stood in the middle of the road with his spanner. 155 00:15:51,560 --> 00:15:58,560 And he couldn't speak, he was totally speechless and ashen white and he said, good God, he says what happened there? 156 00:15:59,560 --> 00:16:01,560 And I said, I don't know. 157 00:16:02,560 --> 00:16:14,560 We liaised with the Department of Geology in Edinburgh University within a day or so of this event being investigated. 158 00:16:15,560 --> 00:16:20,560 And they were able to confirm that there had been a very, very substantial earth tremor. 159 00:16:21,560 --> 00:16:28,560 The British Geological Survey's observatory had measured a quake with a magnitude of 3.5 on the Richter scale. 160 00:16:28,560 --> 00:16:31,560 The epicentre was just a mile from Glendrichlo. 161 00:16:36,560 --> 00:16:43,560 The earth tremor explained the shaking ground and could also have been responsible for the explosive sound. 162 00:16:44,560 --> 00:16:49,560 In all British earthquakes, often people say that the sound is more terrible than the shaking. 163 00:16:50,560 --> 00:17:02,560 What happens is that when these shockwaves reach the surface of the earth, a certain amount of them change from being shockwaves travelling through the ground to shockwaves travelling through the air as sound. 164 00:17:03,560 --> 00:17:09,560 So what you get is a booming sound or a rumbling sound. These are often very widely reported. 165 00:17:10,560 --> 00:17:19,560 The villagers and police now had concrete evidence that it was an earthquake that had shaken their homes. 166 00:17:20,560 --> 00:17:27,560 But with the searches on the mountain drawing a blank, nothing had yet explained the lights they had witnessed above the bear wind. 167 00:17:31,560 --> 00:17:38,560 It clearly wasn't a crashed aircraft or evidence would have been found so we can rule that out with safety. 168 00:17:40,560 --> 00:17:51,560 I don't think it actually was a meteorite that actually crashed to earth because you would expect to find some evidence of that crater or whatever. 169 00:17:52,560 --> 00:17:59,560 That simply left as far as my experience was concerned the green lights. 170 00:18:00,560 --> 00:18:13,560 Later, evidence emerged that could have explained the arcing lights. The Royal Astronomical Society had tracked a meteor shower heading eastward across northern Britain. 171 00:18:16,560 --> 00:18:27,560 We got letters in the following days from all parts of the country, people who claimed to have seen shooting stars which were very, very bright. 172 00:18:28,560 --> 00:18:37,560 There were at least three, possibly four, sightings of bow-like meteors that night over a three hour period. Very, very unusual. 173 00:18:37,560 --> 00:18:43,560 And therefore that also adds to the mystery factor because one, you could say well that was strange but probably something in the sky. 174 00:18:43,560 --> 00:18:51,560 Two, three and four you think well what's happening? This is going on all night and there's been this huge explosion and rumbling. Surely they must be connected. 175 00:18:52,560 --> 00:18:58,560 That night's events were slowly consigned to memory. 176 00:18:58,560 --> 00:19:07,560 But in the 1980s the Bear Wind shot to prominence again when district nurse Pat Evans gave an interview to a UFO enthusiast. 177 00:19:09,560 --> 00:19:18,560 When her description of the strange lights over the Bear Wind was made public, UFO investigators took a renewed interest in the events of January the 23rd. 178 00:19:22,560 --> 00:19:32,560 Over the last 30 years Jenny Randalls has investigated thousands of UFO sightings. She has looked closely at the Bear Wind case. 179 00:19:35,560 --> 00:19:42,560 When the district nurse came forward with her story the case had really lay in limbo for about 10 or 15 years. 180 00:19:42,560 --> 00:19:48,560 Even within the UFO community nobody was taking it seriously. It had died a death effectively. 181 00:19:48,560 --> 00:20:01,560 Suddenly her story when she gave it resurrected the entire case because at last we had an eyewitness who was describing something that appeared to be more than just a light and more importantly something that was actually on the ground. 182 00:20:01,560 --> 00:20:09,560 Nurse Evans gave a statement to the British Geological Survey in 1974 which only came to light in the 1980s. 183 00:20:12,560 --> 00:20:16,560 UFO skeptic Andy Roberts has examined it in detail. 184 00:20:19,560 --> 00:20:24,560 These pieces of information were gathered within a couple of days, couple of weeks at most of the actual events. 185 00:20:24,560 --> 00:20:29,560 It's contemporary evidence, first hand taking an interview and written down. 186 00:20:29,560 --> 00:20:39,560 I've met her in an interview where she's a very down to earth practical person and I believe that what she says she saw, she saw whatever that was and that's the crux of the matter. 187 00:20:40,560 --> 00:20:46,560 Pat Evans described a stationary light like a bonfire on the hillside. 188 00:20:55,560 --> 00:21:03,560 The revelations that came to public attention in 1980s placed Pat Evans at the centre of the Bear Wind UFO mystery. 189 00:21:04,560 --> 00:21:10,560 She is now tired of the attention and moved abroad. 190 00:21:10,560 --> 00:21:15,560 Nurse Evans does not want to discuss this business for the simple reason. 191 00:21:15,560 --> 00:21:30,560 For the last 30 years the poor lady has been continually hassled by people who look for UFOs and aliens and the likes to all those kind of people and to those who disbelieve all those kind of things. 192 00:21:31,560 --> 00:21:41,560 And she's had the two types on her doorstep arguing with her and basically telling her what she saw wasn't true. 193 00:21:43,560 --> 00:21:52,560 Unlike his near neighbour Pat Evans, after 34 years of silence Geraint Edwards is willing to talk about his close encounter. 194 00:21:53,560 --> 00:21:59,560 It happened on the western side of the Bear Wind just three weeks after the nurses sighting. 195 00:22:00,560 --> 00:22:06,560 The retired gamekeeper has no doubt that what he saw was otherworldly. 196 00:22:07,560 --> 00:22:16,560 We were on the way down to Bray Dads and something took our eye in the southeast and we stopped. 197 00:22:17,560 --> 00:22:23,560 Well it looked like a rocker ball but the ends of it was more pointy. 198 00:22:23,560 --> 00:22:30,560 All red standing in the same place probably about 600 foot above horizon of the mountain. 199 00:22:30,560 --> 00:22:36,560 How long had been there before? We know it's been a while. 200 00:22:36,560 --> 00:22:46,560 But when it took off it just went like lightning on the same line as it's hovered back to the mountain and gone. 201 00:22:48,560 --> 00:22:53,560 Geraint has been keeping weather records for the meteorological office for 40 years. 202 00:22:53,560 --> 00:22:59,560 He keeps a journal in which he writes about the events of the past. 203 00:22:59,560 --> 00:23:04,560 Geraint has been keeping weather records for the meteorological office for 40 years. 204 00:23:04,560 --> 00:23:10,560 He keeps a journal in Welsh and wrote up his UFO encounter at the time. 205 00:23:12,560 --> 00:23:15,560 I put it down the diary, yes. 206 00:23:15,560 --> 00:23:23,560 And not thinking probably I'd be on television in the 30 or 40 years talking about it. 207 00:23:30,560 --> 00:23:34,560 You know it was a sick quarter to seven on the Friday night. 208 00:23:34,560 --> 00:23:43,560 Probably if we were coming home from the pub people would be, oh they've had one or two but this was going to the pub. 209 00:23:43,560 --> 00:23:48,560 It's definitely a flying saucer. Fantastic. 210 00:23:48,560 --> 00:23:50,560 It's a pity I didn't have a camera or something. 211 00:23:50,560 --> 00:23:57,560 You had the time to photograph it because it was there for at least 10 minutes just hovering. 212 00:23:58,560 --> 00:24:02,560 No photographic or other physical evidence exists at the Bowen sightings 213 00:24:02,560 --> 00:24:06,560 but one more recent British encounter has been caught on camera. 214 00:24:06,560 --> 00:24:12,560 Shot in 2000 and never shown before. Could this be evidence of an extraterrestrial craft? 215 00:24:12,560 --> 00:24:18,560 Oh dear. You think I'm bloodied up but this is a UFO. 216 00:24:28,560 --> 00:24:36,560 The proliferation of domestic camcorders and mobile phones means that unlike the sightings on the Bowen Mountains in 1974 217 00:24:36,560 --> 00:24:41,560 more recent close encounters are much more likely to be captured on camera. 218 00:24:43,560 --> 00:24:52,560 In October 2000 Sharon Rowlands was at home in Bonsall Derbyshire watching TV when something outside caught her eye. 219 00:24:53,560 --> 00:24:59,560 Oh dear. You think I'm bloodied up but this is a UFO. 220 00:24:59,560 --> 00:25:04,560 Oh it's gone off, isn't it? It's spinning. 221 00:25:04,560 --> 00:25:15,560 Inside the disc you could see lines around it as if it was in segments with a dark centre to it. 222 00:25:16,560 --> 00:25:22,560 It's moving slightly to the right and it is slightly. It's getting bigger. 223 00:25:24,560 --> 00:25:30,560 I would think the object was maybe as big as a detached house or slightly bigger than that 224 00:25:30,560 --> 00:25:34,560 because at one stage we did think it was going to land in the field in front of us 225 00:25:34,560 --> 00:25:37,560 and that made me feel very, very nervous. 226 00:25:38,560 --> 00:25:41,560 It's now gone like a saucer. 227 00:25:41,560 --> 00:25:50,560 And then it looked as if engines from where this bite was starting up, turns and then it just blinks out. 228 00:25:50,560 --> 00:25:53,560 It just disappears. I've never seen anything move as quickly as that. 229 00:25:53,560 --> 00:25:58,560 It didn't move slowly like an aircraft that you can see disappearing into the night. 230 00:25:58,560 --> 00:26:02,560 It just went. It just completely disappeared. 231 00:26:02,560 --> 00:26:05,560 It's moving. Oh it's going. Wow it's... 232 00:26:06,560 --> 00:26:09,560 There one minute, gone the next. 233 00:26:10,560 --> 00:26:16,560 Days after she'd filmed it, Sharon allowed us still from the video to appear in her local newspaper. 234 00:26:16,560 --> 00:26:19,560 She was shocked at the reaction. 235 00:26:19,560 --> 00:26:26,560 Like Pat Evans in Beowyn, going public with the UFO sighting made her life more difficult. 236 00:26:26,560 --> 00:26:33,560 The ball just rolled and escalated to we'd got everyone knocking on doors following me, 237 00:26:33,560 --> 00:26:38,560 ringing up. It really got quite scary. 238 00:26:38,560 --> 00:26:44,560 So we then put the tape at the solicitors in a vault to keep it safe. 239 00:26:44,560 --> 00:26:49,560 So that's where it stayed until now. 240 00:26:49,560 --> 00:26:53,560 I wasn't prepared to be called a liar. 241 00:26:53,560 --> 00:26:57,560 I'm not a liar. What you see is what you get. What's on the film is genuine. 242 00:26:57,560 --> 00:27:00,560 I can't tell you what it is. I have no idea. 243 00:27:00,560 --> 00:27:05,560 But UFO is the correct term for what's on that tape. 244 00:27:05,560 --> 00:27:10,560 Impartial analysis of Sharon's tape by an expert in the field of visual effects 245 00:27:10,560 --> 00:27:15,560 suggests there may be more to it than at first meets the eye. 246 00:27:15,560 --> 00:27:18,560 We can fake anything. 247 00:27:18,560 --> 00:27:26,560 If you have the right equipment and the expertise, it's possible to make any image appear real. 248 00:27:26,560 --> 00:27:32,560 And certainly if we look forensically at footage, we can usually find some clue. 249 00:27:32,560 --> 00:27:37,560 The pattern in the area seems very constant. 250 00:27:37,560 --> 00:27:45,560 That would suggest we're seeing it from one orientation, but it's not moving at all in the sky. 251 00:27:45,560 --> 00:27:53,560 When we see the object in more detail, a bit closer up, there's one slightly strange part of it 252 00:27:53,560 --> 00:27:56,560 which is underneath it. 253 00:27:56,560 --> 00:28:01,560 There appears to be a little semi-circular dark area. 254 00:28:01,560 --> 00:28:09,560 The most likely reason for that is actually that there's a pole or column supporting the structure. 255 00:28:09,560 --> 00:28:13,560 There is some implied image in that grain structure going down 256 00:28:13,560 --> 00:28:16,560 that suggests to me there is a column there. 257 00:28:16,560 --> 00:28:21,560 I think it's a street lamp, I have some description. 258 00:28:21,560 --> 00:28:25,560 Definitely not a light stuck on a pole. That would be absolutely ridiculous. 259 00:28:25,560 --> 00:28:30,560 There's no way that that could move in and out that quickly. 260 00:28:30,560 --> 00:28:36,560 It was so large as well, now definitely not a light on a pole. 261 00:28:36,560 --> 00:28:40,560 It was a very clear night, no clouds. 262 00:28:40,560 --> 00:28:44,560 You could see the stars. There was no sound, nothing. 263 00:28:44,560 --> 00:28:49,560 It was just very calm, very quiet, very dark. 264 00:28:49,560 --> 00:28:55,560 There are no houses across the valley, so there's no street lights, no house lights, 265 00:28:55,560 --> 00:28:58,560 and there's no road, so there is no light whatsoever. 266 00:28:58,560 --> 00:29:06,560 So when we saw this object, it did stick out very well in the background of the dark skies. 267 00:29:06,560 --> 00:29:10,560 Some UFO sightings have never been fully explained, 268 00:29:10,560 --> 00:29:16,560 but for others the answers can often lie close to home. 269 00:29:16,560 --> 00:29:22,560 Over the 30 years I've investigated somewhere in the region of 10,000 UFO sightings, 270 00:29:22,560 --> 00:29:29,560 and according to my own figures I'm satisfied that about 95% of those have been explained 271 00:29:29,560 --> 00:29:33,560 as what we call IFOs, identified flying objects. 272 00:29:33,560 --> 00:29:40,560 It's easy to assume from an account by a witness that they saw something out of this world 273 00:29:40,560 --> 00:29:45,560 when in truth, very often in the UFO phenomenon, the solution is very much of this world. 274 00:29:45,560 --> 00:30:00,560 Most recently the trend towards releasing Chinese lanterns at Samua Barbecue's has prompted 275 00:30:00,560 --> 00:30:07,560 concerned members of the public to telephone the police to report squadrons of UFOs crossing Britain's skies. 276 00:30:07,560 --> 00:30:12,560 I've had UFOs that turned out to be hats blowing in the wind. 277 00:30:12,560 --> 00:30:18,560 I've even had one case of a reported alien in a shopping centre which turned out to be a dog 278 00:30:18,560 --> 00:30:25,560 that had escaped from a circus and had run off through a pond and was wandering around standing on its legs with its hair all matted 279 00:30:25,560 --> 00:30:30,560 and a terrified one or two people who I suspect were a little bit worse for the wear at the time. 280 00:30:30,560 --> 00:30:35,560 People see unexplained lights in the sky on a regular basis. 281 00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:39,560 We live in a world where people don't really have the first idea about what's in the sky. 282 00:30:39,560 --> 00:30:45,560 People are very ignorant of astronomical phenomena, celestial phenomena, meteorological phenomena. 283 00:30:45,560 --> 00:30:52,560 I've seen several lights in the sky, I haven't got a clue what they are but that doesn't imply any mysterious origin. 284 00:30:52,560 --> 00:30:55,560 It just implies that you've seen something you don't understand. 285 00:30:58,560 --> 00:31:04,560 When it comes to the Bearwind incident, could it be that in 1974 District Nurse Pat Evans 286 00:31:04,560 --> 00:31:07,560 simply misinterpreted the lights she saw? 287 00:31:10,560 --> 00:31:18,560 Skeptics suggest that what she was in fact looking at was the police searching for a crashed aircraft and a group of poachers 288 00:31:18,560 --> 00:31:24,560 all of whom were standing three miles away on the mountain opposite called Cadet Bronwyn. 289 00:31:25,560 --> 00:31:41,560 The large light Pat Evans described as an orb the size of the moon has been credited to the powerful lamp used by poachers when they hunted night. 290 00:31:44,560 --> 00:31:51,560 When I spoke to Pat she told me that she was looking across the hillside and she could see this unusual large light 291 00:31:51,560 --> 00:31:58,560 and she said round it was what she could only describe as fairy lights, little light twinkling as well as some what looked to be car headlights. 292 00:31:59,560 --> 00:32:06,560 What Pat Evans saw is the police and the Landrovers and the farmer with their torches meeting the poachers. 293 00:32:07,560 --> 00:32:14,560 Sheep farmer Yian Roberts was one of the poachers that night and has his own views about the lamp theory. 294 00:32:15,560 --> 00:32:27,560 I was in charge of the lamp, there was a spot lamp which we adapted to put a halogen bulb and that would give you like a pencil beam but nothing else 295 00:32:27,560 --> 00:32:35,560 and I doubt if it looks anything like the moon kind of thing, I wouldn't have thought that. 296 00:32:36,560 --> 00:32:45,560 According to Yian the poachers had stopped hunting by the time the police arrived and what Pat Evans saw was definitely not a poachers lamp. 297 00:32:48,560 --> 00:32:57,560 Then of course we were coming down and the vehicles coming up so we hopped over the hedge, not that we'd really done anything wrong 298 00:32:57,560 --> 00:33:05,560 but it's unusual at that time of night for vehicles to be going up the road and we recognised the Land Rover 299 00:33:05,560 --> 00:33:15,560 and we recognised the shape of a police officer sitting in the passenger seat of one of them and we were starting to wonder now what's going on. 300 00:33:18,560 --> 00:33:22,560 There is another theory that might explain what Pat Evans saw that night. 301 00:33:23,560 --> 00:33:29,560 Earthquakes are often accompanied by lights which rise up from within the ground, so called earth lights. 302 00:33:32,560 --> 00:33:40,560 The fact that earthquakes are known from reports all over the world to generate energy that can create earth lights in the sky 303 00:33:40,560 --> 00:33:43,560 still remains at the back of my mind a possibility in this case. 304 00:33:43,560 --> 00:33:50,560 I do think there is a chance that some of the things that were seen directly over the area where this fault line was activated that night 305 00:33:50,560 --> 00:33:52,560 were earth lights. 306 00:33:52,560 --> 00:33:55,560 Actually this is a fairly common experience. 307 00:33:55,560 --> 00:34:06,560 It's not understood fully but when you get blocks of rock which are made of something like quartz and they move and they're under a huge pressure 308 00:34:06,560 --> 00:34:14,560 and there's a sliding of the rocks this generates a voltage by the piezoelectric effect and it can run into thousands of volts 309 00:34:15,560 --> 00:34:22,560 and if gas is squeezed out from that fault as well which is commonplace that gas would be ionised, it would glow 310 00:34:22,560 --> 00:34:27,560 and you'd get a big glow in the sky like lightning but not the flash, not an arc. 311 00:34:29,560 --> 00:34:38,560 During Jenny Randall's investigations into the Bowen case she claims to have witnessed light emanating from the ground which would fit exactly the same prescription. 312 00:34:39,560 --> 00:34:47,560 On one of the occasions when I was actually there doing this investigation I was quite surprised to see one of these earth lights for myself. 313 00:34:47,560 --> 00:34:57,560 It was emerging from within the rocks itself and climbing into the sky but if that was an earth light and that was what was seen on the night of this particular occasion 314 00:34:57,560 --> 00:35:05,560 I can well understand why the much greater forces that might have been involved at the time of an earthquake would have generated huge glowing lights 315 00:35:05,560 --> 00:35:12,560 that would have been of great fascination to the local people and why they would have thought that they'd seen something very strange indeed. 316 00:35:15,560 --> 00:35:26,560 With explanations for the lights seen in the sky resting on the edge of known scientific fact and no concrete evidence to fully explain all of the events of that night in 1974 317 00:35:26,560 --> 00:35:31,560 the Bowen UFO has become shrouded in rumours of government cover-up. 318 00:35:35,560 --> 00:35:48,560 As time went on the rumours seemed to gather a pace and we got to a stage where people who related very well to the police in this area 319 00:35:49,560 --> 00:35:59,560 in the nicest possible way would be saying things like we understand you can't tell us everything, what were the official secrets act and all that. 320 00:36:01,560 --> 00:36:09,560 Whatever it was it was kept quiet and I think there's things we should know about and things that happened that are being covered up. 321 00:36:12,560 --> 00:36:15,560 Could the Ministry of Defence have covered up the Bowen case? 322 00:36:16,560 --> 00:36:21,560 Nick Pope worked on their UFO investigation desk for three years. 323 00:36:24,560 --> 00:36:37,560 The Ministry of Defence actually takes an interest in all UFO sightings because by implication they are potentially unauthorised intrusions of the United Kingdom Air Defence Region. 324 00:36:38,560 --> 00:36:49,560 Where you have mass waves of sightings the MOD like any other organisation would probably think well there's no smoke without fire, something's going on here. 325 00:36:51,560 --> 00:36:55,560 So did the Bowen case attract the attention of the fabled men in black? 326 00:36:56,560 --> 00:37:02,560 Smart suited men from the Ministry dispatched to fact find after a reported UFO sighting. 327 00:37:03,560 --> 00:37:11,560 We were watching a couple of so-called educated people coming along to find out what we had heard or seen. 328 00:37:12,560 --> 00:37:19,560 Over the years people from the MOD did go and visit UFO witnesses to take details of their sightings. 329 00:37:20,560 --> 00:37:29,560 And I suppose if two people in smart suits turn up on your doorstep and say we're from the government and take details of your report and go away 330 00:37:29,560 --> 00:37:34,560 it's easy to see how that can evolve into a story about sinister men in black. 331 00:37:36,560 --> 00:37:42,560 It may well be that in the case of the Bowen it wasn't men in black at all who were speaking to local witnesses. 332 00:37:43,560 --> 00:37:49,560 The British Geological Survey sent seismologists to Hlandrichlow in the weeks following the earthquake. 333 00:37:52,560 --> 00:37:56,560 Well the interesting thing about the men in black is that the men in black were actually seismologists. 334 00:37:57,560 --> 00:38:03,560 Four of my colleagues went down to north Wales and they asked people how strongly did you feel the earthquake? 335 00:38:04,560 --> 00:38:15,560 And apparently some UFO investigators some years later found out that these mysterious strangers that appeared in the village 336 00:38:16,560 --> 00:38:19,560 and said aha the men in black have been at work. 337 00:38:19,560 --> 00:38:30,560 In this case I had great delight in actually going to buy for my colleagues and they've all retired now and say did you know that you were a man in black? 338 00:38:31,560 --> 00:38:41,560 In May 2008 the government released previously unseen UFO case files. Would they provide any more clues to the Bowen incident? 339 00:38:42,560 --> 00:38:47,560 There's been in the papers recently a big flurry about the government allegedly releasing all these new documents. 340 00:38:47,560 --> 00:38:51,560 Now there was great excitement people thought there's going to be things about Bowen. I'm afraid there isn't. 341 00:38:53,560 --> 00:39:03,560 The information should have been released. It's still not been released and therefore that throws more intrigue on it again as to why not. 342 00:39:04,560 --> 00:39:07,560 What are they hiding? Is there anything to hide? 343 00:39:18,560 --> 00:39:24,560 The Bowen UFO case has been beset by conspiracy theories and one in particular stands out. 344 00:39:25,560 --> 00:39:33,560 If the events of that 1974 were naturally occurring then why was there a large military deployment into the area? 345 00:39:36,560 --> 00:39:42,560 Hill farmer Jeyon Roberts knows every inch of the Bowen mountains. He's lived and farmed on them all his life. 346 00:39:42,560 --> 00:39:48,560 Jeyon remembers seeing a lot of military activity in the days and weeks following the reported UFO. 347 00:39:50,560 --> 00:39:58,560 After we finished with the chores in the morning we were looking across the valley. We could see the army as if they were going to search the area. 348 00:39:59,560 --> 00:40:07,560 Starting off at the woods and facing up towards the summit and rose so many meters apart. 349 00:40:07,560 --> 00:40:13,560 We arrived at the conclusion there were the army. Who else would there be? 350 00:40:15,560 --> 00:40:19,560 Firefighter Adrian Roberts recalls that the mountain was virtually a no-go area. 351 00:40:21,560 --> 00:40:26,560 There was a lot of military action in the area. Areas were secluded off for the public. 352 00:40:27,560 --> 00:40:31,560 It was about three months before anyone was allowed to go anywhere near the site. 353 00:40:32,560 --> 00:40:39,560 But skeptic Andy Roberts isn't convinced the locals are remembering the facts exactly as they occurred. 354 00:40:41,560 --> 00:40:46,560 The following morning a three-man team arrived from RAF Valley, a mountain rescue team. 355 00:40:47,560 --> 00:40:55,560 The fact that they had left their military vehicles in the village has given rise to some people thinking that there was a huge military presence there the day after 356 00:40:56,560 --> 00:40:59,560 and that the military presence was collecting this crashed UFO. 357 00:41:00,560 --> 00:41:09,560 All these various separate elements have become melded together by the media to a certain extent, certainly by some ufologists, into the crash of an extraterrestrial craft. 358 00:41:10,560 --> 00:41:18,560 The stories then extended to the point where some people even believe that they've got a piece of metal in their basement belonging to the craft. 359 00:41:19,560 --> 00:41:23,560 Other people say that they've spoken to members of the crash retrieval crew and so on and so forth. 360 00:41:23,560 --> 00:41:27,560 Fantastic stories, wonderful mythology but there's no evidence. 361 00:41:28,560 --> 00:41:35,560 In 1974 newspapers reported that soldiers had been seen removing boxes from the mountain. 362 00:41:36,560 --> 00:41:45,560 And Bearwen's military mystery deepened in 1996 when a soldier using the pseudonym of James Prescott made a claim in UFO magazine. 363 00:41:46,560 --> 00:41:58,560 He said that it had been part of a unit that had removed two dead aliens from the mountains to the UK's most secret military research base, Porton-Den. 364 00:41:59,560 --> 00:42:03,560 Skeptics have their doubts. 365 00:42:04,560 --> 00:42:10,560 That simply made me smile because it's so improbable. 366 00:42:11,560 --> 00:42:15,560 There would be serious practical difficulties with it. 367 00:42:16,560 --> 00:42:24,560 Had the British government found an alien dead or alive, do you really think that they'd put it in a box and drove it to Porton-Den? 368 00:42:25,560 --> 00:42:32,560 They'd have had a helicopter there straight away, it had been there within a couple of hours instead of a very bumpy rickety ride down a mountain and then a very risky drive down the motorway. 369 00:42:33,560 --> 00:42:36,560 And apparently at one point they even stopped and went to a motorway service station. 370 00:42:36,560 --> 00:42:40,560 Now, you know, they don't even do that when they're conveying prisoners, you go straight from A to B. 371 00:42:41,560 --> 00:42:44,560 So an alien just wouldn't arrive at Porton-Den like that. 372 00:42:45,560 --> 00:42:54,560 Despite the inherently secretive nature of the Ministry of Defence, people of course do chat and gossip to their friends and colleagues. 373 00:42:54,560 --> 00:43:06,560 What I can say is that in my 21 years working there, three years of which were actually working on the UFO issue, I never once picked up even the slightest hint from anyone else in the M.O.D. 374 00:43:07,560 --> 00:43:16,560 that behind my back there had been this secret UFO project, dead extraterrestrials secreted away at Porton-Den or wherever. 375 00:43:17,560 --> 00:43:19,560 Not a hint, not a whisper. 376 00:43:20,560 --> 00:43:30,560 Whether you believe the conspiracy theorists or the skeptics, what the locals of Landrichlo saw that night may never be fully explained. 377 00:43:35,560 --> 00:43:48,560 It was a highly unusual event, unsatisfactory in the sense that it can't be put to bed as it were with a rational explanation and evidence to support that. 378 00:43:49,560 --> 00:43:58,560 All the evidence is documented by the police, the British Geological Society, points to it being a series of natural phenomena which all happened on the same night. 379 00:43:59,560 --> 00:44:07,560 Fantastic coincidence, you know what are the chances of that happening? But it did and people spun from that in mythology which has led to it being a crashed saucer. 380 00:44:08,560 --> 00:44:18,560 I thought Fabio, it wouldn't happen to me to see something like that, but definitely it did happen to me that night in 30th of 1974. 381 00:44:19,560 --> 00:44:30,560 What people have seen and reported and collected just simply could not be made up, so in some ways we've got to try and believe them, haven't we? 382 00:44:31,560 --> 00:44:36,560 What is special about the earth? Absolutely nothing. 383 00:44:37,560 --> 00:44:48,560 Eventually we will get evidence that shows that there is intelligent life somewhere outside the earth. I promise you that with absolute certainty.