1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:16,000 Flying saucers have invaded our planet. Washington, London, Moscow are key targets. The whole 2 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:22,000 world is under attack. Can it survive? 3 00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:27,000 For more than 50 years, reports of flying saucer sightings have been met with both ridicule 4 00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:34,000 and passionate belief. To skeptics, the sightings have logical earthly explanations. But to 5 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:41,000 believers, the truth has yet to be revealed. We now know that the British government has 6 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:50,000 kept secret files on each and every reported sighting. In these files are Britain's best 7 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:57,000 documented UFO incidents, including what two pilots saw on a mission over southwest England. 8 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:04,000 I didn't know what I was looking at. I've certainly never seen anything like it since. 9 00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:11,000 The mysterious shapes in the sky spotted by two Devon police officers. 10 00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:16,000 It was something that we couldn't actually logically account for. 11 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:23,000 And the flying machine seemed by American servicemen in a forest and suffered. 12 00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:30,000 It moved through the trees. The whole time it was appeared to be shedding something like molten metals. 13 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:38,000 But Britain's ex files wouldn't be complete without the strange case of the Royal Euphologist. 14 00:01:39,000 --> 00:01:48,000 He was tremendously excited about flying saucers. But the mere fact that he was talking to people 15 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:54,000 who had seen these things just increased his interest because it made it that much more real. 16 00:02:09,000 --> 00:02:18,000 In October 1952, at an airfield in Gloucestershire, an RAF flying instructor took off on a routine training flight. 17 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:23,000 It was his third flight of the day and everything was business as usual. 18 00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:32,000 We climbed up Thursund Cloud and we broke through at about 14,000 feet. 19 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:43,000 I was somewhat allowed to see right in front of the aircraft, framed in the windscreen, 20 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:50,000 three circular white discs and I thought, my goodness. 21 00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:56,000 Mick suddenly said to me, David, did you have anything to drink at lunchtime? 22 00:02:56,000 --> 00:03:01,000 And I said, no. He said, well, take a look right ahead. 23 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:10,000 I grabbed the control and turned the aircraft away to one side. 24 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:19,000 As they moved out and got further apart, they began to look as if they were that sort of... 25 00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:25,000 This is a magnifying lens, but they were that sort of shape. 26 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:33,000 Even for a trained pilot with seven years of flying experience, this was an unusual and disturbing incident. 27 00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:45,000 Frightened, yes, and I was subsequently told that when I got down from the aircraft cockpit, 28 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:51,000 that I looked somewhat shaken almost as if I'd seen a ghost. 29 00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:58,000 A Swinney and Croft sider was also picked up by a local radar station. 30 00:04:03,000 --> 00:04:11,000 They could see clearly three unidentified blips on their tube. 31 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:17,000 Now, that surely is a bit unusual. 32 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:24,000 This is among the first of Britain's officially recorded and documented UFO sightings. 33 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:30,000 There's no such thing, of course, as an infallible witness, 34 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:35,000 but when you look at, for example, police officers and pilots, 35 00:04:35,000 --> 00:04:42,000 you are dealing with trained observers who, in terms of perception and in terms of not panicking 36 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:46,000 and in terms of the ability to tell a story straight and factual, 37 00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:49,000 these people really are excellent witnesses, 38 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:55,000 and of course the MOD pays more attention to them than, say, a report from a member of the public. 39 00:04:56,000 --> 00:05:01,000 Pilots are required to fill out reports for each flight in a logbook. 40 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:04,000 This is Michael Swinney's. 41 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:12,000 His entry reads, Three flying saucers sighted at height confirmed by GCI, meaning radar. 42 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:16,000 But David Croft's was cautious in his entry. 43 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:26,000 I felt that if someone picked up my logbook and saw that I had written that I'd seen unidentified flying objects, 44 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:30,000 they'd think I was due for the funny farm. 45 00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:39,000 And so I just made three ellipses and a query to indicate to me privately 46 00:05:39,000 --> 00:05:44,000 that that was the sortie on which we saw these objects. 47 00:05:44,000 --> 00:05:46,000 And I should never forget it. 48 00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:56,000 Swinney and Croft's is a fascinating example of a case where there really isn't an agreed explanation for this within the MOD. 49 00:05:56,000 --> 00:06:01,000 And it perhaps demonstrates the dichotomy that the department faces. 50 00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:05,000 On the one hand, it cannot find an explanation. 51 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:13,000 On the other hand, it doesn't want to start public panic or really admit that there's anything operating in our airspace 52 00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:16,000 that we simply don't know about. 53 00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:21,000 Over 10,000 UFO sightings have been reported to the British government. 54 00:06:21,000 --> 00:06:27,000 These reports have been shrouded in mystery and rumor for 50 years. 55 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:33,000 They are now widely referred to as Britain's X-Files. 56 00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:41,000 The X-Files is a phrase that conveniently describes the British government's investigation of aerial phenomena, 57 00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:45,000 UFOs, flying saucers from 1950 or around 1950 to present. 58 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:54,000 It contains sort of a database of reports, of comment, of internal discussion, policymaking. 59 00:06:54,000 --> 00:06:59,000 They are the accumulated knowledge that has been gathered by the Air Ministry 60 00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:04,000 and later the Ministry of Defence, the files that contain the truth. 61 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:09,000 The birth of Britain's X-Files dates back to 1950. 62 00:07:09,000 --> 00:07:14,000 There had been some sightings of aerial phenomena reported by aircrew during World War II. 63 00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:21,000 But in the United States, a rash of sightings resulted in one newspaper corning the phrase, flying saucer. 64 00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:28,000 In response, the British government established one of the most bizarre committees in political history. 65 00:07:30,000 --> 00:07:33,000 The Flying Saucer Working Party. 66 00:07:36,000 --> 00:07:43,000 All through this period, there were various rumors that the British government had set up a secret investigation section 67 00:07:43,000 --> 00:07:45,000 that was dedicated to flying saucers. 68 00:07:45,000 --> 00:07:50,000 But throughout the 50s, the British government said virtually nothing in public about this 69 00:07:50,000 --> 00:07:55,000 because they simply did not want people to know that they were taking the subject seriously. 70 00:07:55,000 --> 00:08:05,000 From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. 71 00:08:08,000 --> 00:08:13,000 In the years following World War II, a new threat to world peace emerged. 72 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:19,000 Two new superpowers, America and Russia, stared at each other over a fearful Europe. 73 00:08:19,000 --> 00:08:26,000 The power struggle of the Cold War would dominate the world's political stage for the next three decades. 74 00:08:32,000 --> 00:08:41,000 Because the Cold War is not fought in conventional terms and looming in the background of the Cold War 75 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:47,000 all the time is this fear of a nuclear holocaust coming from above. 76 00:08:47,000 --> 00:08:55,000 That adds up to a fear of alien culture, a fear of communist subversion, 77 00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:59,000 fear of people coming from other worlds and other planets. 78 00:09:00,000 --> 00:09:05,000 As the Cold War intensified, sightings of UFOs became more frequent. 79 00:09:05,000 --> 00:09:11,000 Both the British and the American governments believed the Russians were developing weapons of mass destruction. 80 00:09:11,000 --> 00:09:17,000 Could sightings be evidence of secret Russian technology or just Cold War paranoia? 81 00:09:19,000 --> 00:09:23,000 In a climate of fear, the West attempted to see through the iron curtain 82 00:09:23,000 --> 00:09:28,000 with the world's most powerful radio telescope at Jadro Bank. 83 00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:36,000 It is an amazing thing to reflect on that at that time, the degree of technological knowledge 84 00:09:36,000 --> 00:09:41,000 in the Soviets of British and American state of technology 85 00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:47,000 and with us, the state of Soviet advance was very small indeed. 86 00:09:48,000 --> 00:09:54,000 And I think this engendered a fear and a desire to look at the sky. 87 00:09:54,000 --> 00:10:00,000 We then had enormous numbers of people in the world gazing at the sky in a way they'd never done so before 88 00:10:00,000 --> 00:10:03,000 because they were expected to see something to happen. 89 00:10:07,000 --> 00:10:12,000 In 1952, Britain's war leader Winston Churchill was re-elected. 90 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:17,000 Seven years after World War II, he found himself leading in a different kind of era 91 00:10:17,000 --> 00:10:21,000 and facing the prospect of yet more conflict. 92 00:10:24,000 --> 00:10:32,000 The cabinet at that time were fully expecting that a third world war could occur at any moment. 93 00:10:33,000 --> 00:10:38,000 British policymakers and politicians, Churchill himself, were really worried 94 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:48,000 that the Americans were so jittery that any incident could trigger this kind of transition to war. 95 00:10:53,000 --> 00:10:55,000 The threats soon seemed very real. 96 00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:01,000 It was reported that a swarm of UFOs had been sighted over Washington. 97 00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:03,000 The city was on high alert. 98 00:11:04,000 --> 00:11:09,000 Winston Churchill was forced to elevate the matter of flying saucers to the highest level. 99 00:11:09,000 --> 00:11:14,000 What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? 100 00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:17,000 What can it mean? What is the truth? 101 00:11:17,000 --> 00:11:20,000 Let me have a report about your convenience. 102 00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:26,000 An event like this in Washington, which seems so extraordinary, 103 00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:32,000 is symptomatic of that level of nervousness in Washington at the time. 104 00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:40,000 Fear of invasion was intensifying on both sides of the Atlantic. 105 00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:45,000 Sightings of strange lights and shapes in the sky were on the increase in Britain. 106 00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:50,000 Suspicious that the flying saucer sightings were actually new Soviet aircraft, 107 00:11:50,000 --> 00:11:56,000 Britain and America embarked on a top secret project to develop their own flying saucer. 108 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:16,000 It was a seemingly impossible aircraft design, but the scientists were determined to bring the saucer to life. 109 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:23,000 The flying saucer project was so important that the team worked for more than a decade to perfect its flight. 110 00:12:23,000 --> 00:12:29,000 Eventually, the US Army pulled their funding from the project and grounded the saucer. 111 00:12:29,000 --> 00:12:32,000 But as science facts struggled with flying saucers, 112 00:12:32,000 --> 00:12:37,000 science fiction was fueling the imagination of the public for all things alien. 113 00:12:46,000 --> 00:13:03,000 If you put a flag in the map and say, on this day British Cold War science fiction culture took off, 114 00:13:03,000 --> 00:13:10,000 you would pick July 1953 and the first showing on British television of Quatermass. 115 00:13:11,000 --> 00:13:18,000 A BBC drama serial about a scientist fighting against alien invasion. 116 00:13:21,000 --> 00:13:33,000 Quatermass was a cultural event and people watched and they saw a British scientist confronting aliens from another world 117 00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:36,000 and it was an electrifying experience. 118 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:45,000 Just a few months after the Quatermass debut, a BBC television news report would cause controversy. 119 00:13:45,000 --> 00:13:49,000 The X-Files were about to become top secret. 120 00:13:49,000 --> 00:13:56,000 Flying officers Terry Johnson and Jeffrey Smythe had decided to go public with their UFO encounter. 121 00:13:56,000 --> 00:14:02,000 Could it have been any sort of meteorological instrument or balloon? 122 00:14:02,000 --> 00:14:11,000 I don't think so. We've gone into this business, we've argued out amongst ourselves and we haven't yet arrived at anything conclusive. 123 00:14:11,000 --> 00:14:16,000 What do you think about this whole flying saucer story or this event? 124 00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:22,000 After this, this time I was confirmed sceptic but now I think I have an open mind. 125 00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:40,000 Late morning on a clear autumn day in November 1953, Smythe and Johnson's vampire jet had been cleared for takeoff from the RAF airbase at West Malling in Kent. 126 00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:53,000 Their plan was to carry out a routine reconnaissance mission over southeast England. 127 00:14:53,000 --> 00:15:12,000 Well the whole incident and the whole sighting is as clear in my mind as I today as it was 50 years ago. 128 00:15:13,000 --> 00:15:21,000 We were flying at about 20,000 feet, daylight, late morning, absolutely clear sky just like today. 129 00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:34,000 And on practised interceptions we were over Kent, I turned onto a northerly heading and saw this bright light which I thought was a star or a planet. 130 00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:42,000 It was like a doughnut with a centre filled but bright light around the doughnut area towards the periphery. 131 00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:46,000 I watched it for about 20 seconds, I gave Jeff a nudge. 132 00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:53,000 I was operating the radar looking actually at nothing at all, I had nothing on the tubes. 133 00:15:53,000 --> 00:15:59,000 And his introduction, I was a bit annoyed actually because I interfered with my concentration. 134 00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:07,000 So I came from under the hood if you like and confirmed that there was something there, there was something there. 135 00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:12,000 And at that point it flew across the right hand side. 136 00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:21,000 It was something a bit odd, it was something odd which has never been proven to us either way right or wrong. 137 00:16:22,000 --> 00:16:32,000 Smyth and Johnson's sighting is to this day unexplained, it's another case where there was some corroborative evidence on radar. 138 00:16:32,000 --> 00:16:42,000 And these cases, well in fact there are a whole string of them which have been going on from the 50s and indeed continue to the current day. 139 00:16:52,000 --> 00:16:56,000 It was claimed that Smyth and Johnson's sighting had been confirmed by radar. 140 00:16:56,000 --> 00:17:01,000 As the 1950s wore on, radar reports of UFOs became more frequent. 141 00:17:01,000 --> 00:17:08,000 The new technology seemed to provide hard evidence for believers while skeptics and the Ministry of Defense 142 00:17:08,000 --> 00:17:13,000 cited that the newness of the technology made it unreliable evidence. 143 00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:25,000 Back then because it was so crude and people didn't really know what all the signals they were receiving were, 144 00:17:25,000 --> 00:17:31,000 you ended up with spurious signals, you ended up with spoof signals based on atmospheric conditions 145 00:17:31,000 --> 00:17:36,000 and at times you couldn't see the side of a house and at other times you could. 146 00:17:36,000 --> 00:17:41,000 For want of a better thought it might be something from outer space. 147 00:17:42,000 --> 00:17:50,000 When RAF officer Smyth and Johnson reported their own close encounter on the BBC, the government decided to act. 148 00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:59,000 There was an order that was sent out to all RAF stations basically saying that this subject to an aerial phenomena 149 00:17:59,000 --> 00:18:03,000 was something that should not be discussed in public by members of the armed forces 150 00:18:03,000 --> 00:18:07,000 and that by doing so they were in breach of the Official Secrets Act. 151 00:18:07,000 --> 00:18:15,000 It just was not good to have members of Her Majesty's forces saying that they'd seen things in the sky over British Isles 152 00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:20,000 that couldn't be tracked, we couldn't do anything about them, they were outside our control, 153 00:18:20,000 --> 00:18:28,000 it just did not give a good impression so the cover-up really seems to stem from that, that it was a cover-up of ignorance. 154 00:18:28,000 --> 00:18:36,000 Just weeks after the Smyth and Johnson incident, the Ministry of Defense issued its first formal report procedure for UFOs. 155 00:18:38,000 --> 00:18:47,000 All reports are to be classified restricted and personnel are warned that they are not to communicate to anyone other than official persons. 156 00:18:47,000 --> 00:18:54,000 Any information about any phenomena they have observed unless officially authorized to do so. 157 00:18:54,000 --> 00:19:02,000 In March 1955, after two more years of UFOs making the news, the government issued further guidelines. 158 00:19:03,000 --> 00:19:09,000 These offered a list of rational and simple explanations for the various lights, shapes and objects 159 00:19:09,000 --> 00:19:13,000 that seemed to be getting the British public so excited. 160 00:19:14,000 --> 00:19:19,000 Its title, The Secret Intelligence Summary on Flying Saucers. 161 00:19:20,000 --> 00:19:27,000 Explanations ranged from present-day jet aircraft flying at great speeds and great heights 162 00:19:27,000 --> 00:19:36,000 to the more fanciful such as bright meteors and fireballs and meteorological phenomena like mock moons and mock suns. 163 00:19:46,000 --> 00:19:50,000 But these attempts to explain UFO reports may have backfired. 164 00:19:50,000 --> 00:19:58,000 A new breed of believer, Euphologists, were convinced that the government had established its own X-Files on mysterious cases, 165 00:19:58,000 --> 00:20:01,000 but was stonewalling the British public. 166 00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:13,000 The UFO debate in Great Britain captured the attention of the public, the media, the government and even the royal family. 167 00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:22,000 It was a very deferential society and things the royal family were into, the public at large tended to take seriously as well. 168 00:20:22,000 --> 00:20:30,000 Throughout the period that the military were trying to keep a lid on the subject, there were various stories that were filtering through to the newspapers, 169 00:20:30,000 --> 00:20:36,000 to the gossip columnists about Prince Philip's interest, about Lord Mountbatten's interest. 170 00:20:37,000 --> 00:20:44,000 He was tremendously excited about flying saucers and he'd read several books including Donald Keyhurst's book The Flying Saucers are Real. 171 00:20:44,000 --> 00:20:51,000 He felt it was very arrogant to assume that we were the most advanced planet in the whole of the system. 172 00:20:53,000 --> 00:21:03,000 My father also had a slight out here, he was a very good pilot, he was a very good pilot, 173 00:21:03,000 --> 00:21:10,000 but my father also had a slight out here emotive in that it was the height of the Cold War, 174 00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:14,000 when America and Russia were absolutely at each other's throats. 175 00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:24,000 And my father thought, well, maybe if there are visitors from outer space, Earth will have to get on with each other, 176 00:21:24,000 --> 00:21:27,000 if they're going to confront people from another planet. 177 00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:37,000 He then asked navigators of the ships and pilots of the fleet, our arm and any RAF pilot he came across, 178 00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:42,000 to record what, if they ever did see anything. 179 00:21:44,000 --> 00:21:51,000 Very often the decryptions did vary, I mean there were the cigar shaped ones as well as the ordinary saucer kind. 180 00:21:52,000 --> 00:21:56,000 He took it very seriously. 181 00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:04,000 Lord Mountbatten's influence with one newspaper editor ensured that the flying saucer debate was headline news. 182 00:22:11,000 --> 00:22:16,000 But not only was the Queen's cousin a believer, her husband, Prince Philip, was as well. 183 00:22:17,000 --> 00:22:26,000 His equity, Sir Peter Horsley, was often sent out on behalf of Prince Philip to talk to flying saucer eye witnesses about what they'd seen. 184 00:22:26,000 --> 00:22:35,000 Following one extraordinary event in 1955, he began to believe that an extraterrestrial had already arrived in Chelsea. 185 00:22:47,000 --> 00:23:04,000 Peter Horsley was introduced to someone called Mr Janus, who he met one night in a flat in Smith Street, Chelsea. 186 00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:11,000 He entered this room, there was this character sat in a high back chair, we couldn't see properly, 187 00:23:11,000 --> 00:23:16,000 it was sort of half hidden in the shadows, it's definitely ex files territory. 188 00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:30,000 He claims that this wasn't an ordinary person, it was someone from another world, and that this person was able to read his thoughts, 189 00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:37,000 and that he knew an awful lot about flying saucers, about the British establishment and also that he wanted to meet the Duke of Edinburgh. 190 00:23:38,000 --> 00:23:39,000 What about UFOs? 191 00:23:39,000 --> 00:23:49,000 All the clues and the background to the story seems to suggest to me anyway that this was some kind of intelligence attempt to find out how much Peter Horsley knew about the subject of flying saucers, 192 00:23:49,000 --> 00:24:02,000 about how deeply Prince Philip was interested in the subject, and whether in a certain situation that any official secrets might be leaked out inadvertently in one of these situations that Peter Horsley found himself in. 193 00:24:02,000 --> 00:24:08,000 They don't amount to a great deal really, what he is interested in is UFOs and aliens. 194 00:24:12,000 --> 00:24:22,000 By 1957 technological developments and an increasing interest in space exploration led the Russians to launch Sputnik, the Earth's first satellite. 195 00:24:22,000 --> 00:24:25,000 It sent shock waves around the world. 196 00:24:26,000 --> 00:24:32,000 British people had been feeling vulnerable from the air for a long time, going back to the Zeppelin raids in the First World War. 197 00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:38,000 In the 1930s they'd had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin telling them that the bomber will always get through. 198 00:24:38,000 --> 00:24:47,000 They'd experienced air attack in the Blitz, and invasion from UFOs was part of the same historical continuum. 199 00:24:48,000 --> 00:24:55,000 The launch of Sputnik seemed to trigger something far stranger than a few unidentified flying objects. 200 00:24:55,000 --> 00:25:01,000 A young woman called Cynthia Appleton was alone in a house one day just messing about with her young children, 201 00:25:01,000 --> 00:25:08,000 and all of a sudden she heard some strange sounds, the atmosphere went slightly sulphurous I think she said, 202 00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:11,000 and all of a sudden someone appeared in front of her. 203 00:25:11,000 --> 00:25:15,000 She was quite shocked obviously and she described this person as looking a bit like a Greek god, 204 00:25:15,000 --> 00:25:21,000 yet he was dressed in a one piece space suit with some form of goldfish bull type helmet on his head. 205 00:25:24,000 --> 00:25:27,000 This person made a prediction, he said you're pregnant with a space baby, 206 00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:33,000 whilst it will be born of your husband, it will actually be spiritually belonging to the planet Venus. 207 00:25:33,000 --> 00:25:40,000 He predicted that he will be born on May 31st, and that the baby would be 7lbs 3oz and he would have fair hair, 208 00:25:40,000 --> 00:25:44,000 and he would develop into a leader of men, and his name would be Matthew. 209 00:25:44,000 --> 00:25:52,000 She became pregnant shortly afterwards, and the baby was born to her on June 2nd 1959, who was 7lbs 3oz and had fair hair. 210 00:25:53,000 --> 00:26:00,000 I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out, 211 00:26:00,000 --> 00:26:04,000 of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. 212 00:26:10,000 --> 00:26:36,000 Music 213 00:26:37,000 --> 00:26:39,000 America joined the space race. 214 00:26:39,000 --> 00:26:44,000 It became a regular occurrence to see pictures of earth from space on our TV screens, 215 00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:48,000 and astronauts were becoming almost as famous as pop stars. 216 00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:59,000 Throughout the 1960s UFO sightings continued to grow in numbers, up to 362 in 1967. 217 00:26:59,000 --> 00:27:04,000 At the same time new religions and cults were attracting devotees. 218 00:27:05,000 --> 00:27:07,000 To skeptics the two trends were linked. 219 00:27:09,000 --> 00:27:15,000 One of the great features of modern Britain is the public drift away from organised religion. 220 00:27:15,000 --> 00:27:22,000 This leaves people with a lack in their lives, and you could call it a God shaped hole in their lives, 221 00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:29,000 and they're going to try all sorts of things to fill this God shaped hole, including UFOs. 222 00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:37,000 Blessed are the wise ones, for they walk through a dark and ignorant world spreading their light. 223 00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:46,000 One new cult that gained prominence in Britain during this period was the Atherias Society. 224 00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:53,000 Its creator was a taxi driver called George King, who claimed he'd been visited by an alien. 225 00:27:54,000 --> 00:28:03,000 When he left I definitely saw him move to the side, and a craft similar to this hovering above the ground, 226 00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:10,000 and there was a green beam of light came from the bottom here, down to the ground, 227 00:28:10,000 --> 00:28:15,000 and he just moved to one side into the green beam and was gone. 228 00:28:15,000 --> 00:28:21,000 During the 1960s people became more and more open about disclosing their alleged contacts with extra stress drills 229 00:28:21,000 --> 00:28:25,000 and flying saucer occupants, and of course the claims got more and more bizarre. 230 00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:29,000 Besides people who were just meeting them and chatting to them and receiving messages from them, 231 00:28:29,000 --> 00:28:32,000 you got people who claimed to actually be able to speak their language. 232 00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:39,000 What does that mean, actually? 233 00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:41,000 That means how are all you? 234 00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:45,000 I am very pleased to see you this afternoon. 235 00:28:45,000 --> 00:28:48,000 How many languages can you speak? 236 00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:52,000 I can speak all together three of the space languages. 237 00:28:52,000 --> 00:28:56,000 But for some, the subject of UFOs was serious business. 238 00:28:56,000 --> 00:29:05,000 In October 1967, one of the most famous cases occurred, involving two Devon policemen on a quiet night shift. 239 00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:12,000 Devon's unidentified flying object, the two policemen who chased it in their car near Ocampton early today, 240 00:29:12,000 --> 00:29:15,000 said later they're certain it wasn't an aircraft or a planet. 241 00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:19,000 They watched the object, a bright light in the shape of a cross, for nearly an hour. 242 00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:23,000 Well, back in those days, I don't know whether it still applies today, 243 00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:30,000 but the traffic department would always be double crewed at night. 244 00:29:30,000 --> 00:29:36,000 And on this particular night, my colleague was either sick or on leave, 245 00:29:36,000 --> 00:29:43,000 and Clifford was a country bobby, and I went out and picked him up as an observer that night. 246 00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:49,000 I remember making our way back between Holmeswood and Hathorley, 247 00:29:49,000 --> 00:29:55,000 when we saw this unusual bright white light in the sky. 248 00:29:55,000 --> 00:29:59,000 What's that light over there? 249 00:29:59,000 --> 00:30:02,000 Over there? Can you see it? 250 00:30:02,000 --> 00:30:07,000 My view of it was that it was moving slowly, 251 00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:14,000 but I thought as the way we were travelling, it would have been on our right when I first saw it. 252 00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:18,000 It was not a star, it was white. 253 00:30:18,000 --> 00:30:26,000 It was bright. It had, if you look at glass, which is got rain on, 254 00:30:26,000 --> 00:30:31,000 and you would see the same sort of inference that it's a splash. 255 00:30:31,000 --> 00:30:33,000 I've never seen, I can't describe it, I've never seen it. 256 00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:36,000 We've both registered that we'd seen something. 257 00:30:36,000 --> 00:30:42,000 It was something that we couldn't actually logically account for. 258 00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:46,000 There it is again. 259 00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:52,000 We said, well, maybe it's going to go back up in the sky, but it didn't. 260 00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:58,000 It was just too eerie. 261 00:30:58,000 --> 00:31:03,000 It was something that I haven't seen before, I haven't seen since, 262 00:31:03,000 --> 00:31:09,000 and something that nobody can explain exactly what it was. 263 00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:15,000 Whatever appeared in the sky that night prompted interest from a much higher level. 264 00:31:15,000 --> 00:31:21,000 The two police officers were called back to their station to explain their sighting once again. 265 00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:25,000 I've never seen anything like it. It was so bright. 266 00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:33,000 We were visited by a boffin from the M.O.D. who told us that we were still officers under the Official Secrets Act, 267 00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:37,000 and they would rather us keep it to ourselves. 268 00:31:37,000 --> 00:31:48,000 The new outbreak of sightings forced the Ministry of Defence to find a new approach to the whole issue of UFOs. 269 00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:56,000 In response to continued UFO sightings in the late 60s, Britain's Ministry of Defence issued a detailed briefing 270 00:31:56,000 --> 00:32:03,000 regarding the media's influence on the increasing number of UFO reports. 271 00:32:03,000 --> 00:32:09,000 When popular interest is stimulated in UFOs, people look for UFOs. 272 00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:12,000 Indeed, they wish to see them. 273 00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:24,000 Another sign of the times was echoed in an official memo to the Defence Secretary. 274 00:32:24,000 --> 00:32:29,000 It simply stated that it is now becoming fashionable for people to see UFOs. 275 00:32:29,000 --> 00:32:38,000 Flying saucers, UFOs and aliens began to invade popular culture, often linked with hallucinogenic drugs like LSD. 276 00:32:44,000 --> 00:32:49,000 From the mid-sixth Fissalmage, you have what would have to be called LSD consciousness. 277 00:32:49,000 --> 00:32:56,000 It permeates the whole of the counterculture side of British society. 278 00:32:56,000 --> 00:33:08,000 You get it in the songs of the Pink Floyd, of Jimi Hendrix, of Mark Bowle and all these bands incorporate LSD-inspired imagery, 279 00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:16,000 which involve dancing gnomes and flying saucers and lay lines and mystical experiences. 280 00:33:17,000 --> 00:33:25,000 That's when really you started to get these sort of spin-off movements that actually went out and, you know, were actually looking for them. 281 00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:33,000 And, you know, they took their sandwiches and their flasks and they sat out on the hillside and looked for objects. 282 00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:51,000 As if to cement pop culture's love affair with aliens and flying saucers, a new nightclub in London's Soho became the most fashionable place in the capital. 283 00:33:51,000 --> 00:33:54,000 It was simply called UFO. 284 00:33:55,000 --> 00:34:03,000 The idea of it was to trip people out and that was the whole idea of the secondary name, the Night Tripper. 285 00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:12,000 Now, a lot of people think that UFO meant unidentified flying object, it did, but it was also underground freak out. 286 00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:20,000 It didn't necessarily mean, you know, there's a spacecraft with an alien in it. The thing that was alien was in your head. 287 00:34:25,000 --> 00:34:33,000 As people spent a lot of time taking drugs, and it's a very important part of this, different ideas emerged. 288 00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:42,000 One of which was that lay lines must have a function, one of which was thought to be as a sort of energy source for flying saucers. 289 00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:52,000 And this was why there were so many sightings around Glastonbury and Glastonbury Torgh was that this was a major connection point for, I don't know, how many, a dozen lay lines or something. 290 00:34:52,000 --> 00:34:57,000 And so it was like a gas station, you know, they would come in and get charged up and off they would go. 291 00:34:57,000 --> 00:35:03,000 And a huge number of people would go from the Kings Road off down to Glastonbury and quite a lot of them did see flying saucers. 292 00:35:10,000 --> 00:35:18,000 But space exploration had now reached a pivotal moment. NASA's Apollo program made history in July 1969. 293 00:35:18,000 --> 00:35:25,000 Just as predicted by President Kennedy, man took his first tentative steps into a new world. 294 00:35:25,000 --> 00:35:40,000 The 1960s is a period of belief in science and technology. Once science fact has overtaken science fiction, then inevitably people become interested in other things. 295 00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:50,000 The science fiction doesn't really bear relationship to the science fact once we've seen pictures from the moon. 296 00:35:50,000 --> 00:36:02,000 They no longer look quite the exciting places that films back in the 50s or comic strips such as Dandere and so on, had really visualized them to be. 297 00:36:03,000 --> 00:36:15,000 In the 70s, official UFO sightings continued, but were largely unremarkable until 1980 when the most famous UFO sighting in Britain occurred. 298 00:36:18,000 --> 00:36:27,000 Britain's most notorious UFO sighting took place in 1980 near the twin U.S. air bases at Bentwaters and Woodbridge in Suffolk. 299 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:40,000 The bases are bordered by Rendlesham Forest. At almost midnight on Christmas Day, U.S. servicemen on duty at one of the perimeter fences reported seeing strange lights deep in the forest. 300 00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:49,000 I turned to Sergeant Stephens and I said, well, what exactly is going on? And he pointed over to the, you know, tree line in the woods adjacent to the gate. 301 00:36:49,000 --> 00:36:55,000 It appeared to be an aircraft that had crashed, had been downed. It was like it was on fire. 302 00:36:55,000 --> 00:37:02,000 And I turned to the buddy, so how long, how long ago did it crash? And he says, he says it didn't crash, he says it landed. 303 00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:10,000 I got permission from Security Control to go ahead and proceed off base with at least two security policemen. 304 00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:21,000 We started to go back down to the log and roam me and one other airline. And we got to the point when we couldn't go any farther than cheap. 305 00:37:25,000 --> 00:37:32,000 Went up to about the tree line, hovered momentarily, and in a blink of an eye it was gone. 306 00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:37,000 Our concerns were the fact of our careers could be in jeopardy. 307 00:37:38,000 --> 00:37:45,000 But how do I explain the report from the East Gate and the 45 minutes in the woods? I mean, I have to report it. 308 00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:53,000 Two nights later, we were having the annual combats support group Christmas party. 309 00:37:53,000 --> 00:38:00,000 We had just finished the main course and we're getting ready for dessert and the on-duty flight commander came in, the security policeman. 310 00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:08,000 And he was just white as a sheet. And he said, it's back. And we said, what's back? He said, the UFO is back. 311 00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:16,000 At that time I'd pocketed my small micro cassette recorder, so I started taking notes, so to speak, on the tape recorder. 312 00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:25,000 It is working directly overhead where I can see an opening in the trees plus some freshly broken pine branches on the ground underneath. 313 00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:31,000 Looks like someone came off about 15 to 20 feet up. Some small branches about an inch or less in diameter. 314 00:38:32,000 --> 00:38:38,000 We moved forward and came to a spot where the flight lieutenant told me this is where it had landed. 315 00:38:38,000 --> 00:38:47,000 We climbed a small forest. It looks like a blasted earth. Scruffed up there right here. We've got pretty positive readings. 316 00:38:47,000 --> 00:38:50,000 See, is that here the center? Yes, it is. It's the one in the middle. 317 00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:55,000 He was quite alarmed because he was getting higher readings than normal background radiation. 318 00:38:56,000 --> 00:39:01,000 That's when I started getting a little bit nervous and how did I get into this and what am I doing here? 319 00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:09,000 And I noticed off to the side some activity and the lieutenant started hollering, look over there, look over there, and we could see something. 320 00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:16,000 It's like we're right at this position here, straight ahead in between the trees where there it is again. 321 00:39:17,000 --> 00:39:24,000 There, I see it too. What is it? We don't know, sir. Looks like an eye winking at you. It's going from side to side. 322 00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:28,000 It moved through the trees as though it were under some type of intelligent control. 323 00:39:29,000 --> 00:39:32,000 The whole time it appeared to be shedding something like molten metals. 324 00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:36,000 It just moved to the right. Yeah. 325 00:39:36,000 --> 00:39:38,000 Strange. 326 00:39:39,000 --> 00:39:41,000 What are we doing here? 327 00:39:41,000 --> 00:39:44,000 Let's approach to the edge of the woods up there. Can you undo our lights? 328 00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:46,000 Let's go carefully. Come on. 329 00:39:46,000 --> 00:39:51,000 We moved forward to try and find out what it was. We were really concerned and wanted to know. We wanted some answers. 330 00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:58,000 It suddenly exploded without a noise and broke into several objects, white objects, and they disappeared. 331 00:39:58,000 --> 00:40:01,000 It's coming this way. It's definitely coming this way. 332 00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:05,000 It looks like we're observing what appears to be a beam coming down over the ground. 333 00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:08,000 This is unreal. 334 00:40:08,000 --> 00:40:15,000 Is this a signal? Is this a warning? Some type of weapon? What is it? We didn't know. We were really concerned. 335 00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:26,000 Lieutenant Colonel Halt recorded the details of the Rendlesham incident in a memo to the Ministry of Defense. 336 00:40:27,000 --> 00:40:31,000 The memo was never intended for public consumption. It was never intended to be a final report. 337 00:40:31,000 --> 00:40:38,000 The memo was intended to get somebody from whatever department in the MOD to come in properly investigate. 338 00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:43,000 The memo detailing the sighting arrived at the desk of the UFO investigation team. 339 00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:55,000 So far as I was concerned at the MOD, looking back through the files, in many senses, it's one of the most compelling cases for some sort of exotic, 340 00:40:55,000 --> 00:41:05,000 phenomenon at work. And clearly when you look again at the fact that the Defence Intelligence staff analysed the radiation readings taken from the landing site 341 00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:14,000 and concluded that despite not being dangerous to Colonel Halt and his team, these readings were about ten times normal. 342 00:41:15,000 --> 00:41:26,000 The only way the MOD were interested in UFOs is if they could correlate a visual sighting by a reliable source with something seen on radar. 343 00:41:26,000 --> 00:41:35,000 But because they could say that there was nothing on radar at the time, therefore whatever the Americans had reported, they didn't need to take it seriously. 344 00:41:36,000 --> 00:41:48,000 There was no official investigation into the incident, but a few years later an American journalist obtained a copy of Halt's memo under the USA's Freedom of Information Act 345 00:41:48,000 --> 00:41:59,000 and flying saucers were back on the front pages. UFO believers looked to Rendlesham as evidence of both extraterrestrial contact and cover-ups. 346 00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:02,000 However, skeptics see it differently. 347 00:42:03,000 --> 00:42:12,000 The Rendlesham incident happened at the time at which the Cold War was at its coldest, certainly since the Cuban Missile Crisis. 348 00:42:12,000 --> 00:42:18,000 It was expected during that very month, December 1980, that the Russians were about to invade Poland. 349 00:42:18,000 --> 00:42:23,000 There was the Solidarity Crisis and there was a crisis in Afghanistan. 350 00:42:23,000 --> 00:42:28,000 So it's the last time that those kinds of phenomenon are actually being officially reported. 351 00:42:32,000 --> 00:42:36,000 The end of the Cold War seemed to mark the end for the flying saucers. 352 00:42:36,000 --> 00:42:40,000 For decades they'd frightened, inspired and entertained. 353 00:42:40,000 --> 00:42:47,000 The government had maintained its position of monitoring incidents, filing reports and avoiding speculation. 354 00:42:49,000 --> 00:42:54,000 But in 2000, Britain's X-Files began to see the light of day. 355 00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:18,000 After 50 years of looking into possible explanations for UFO incidents, the government has wound down its investigations. 356 00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:22,000 So what is its position on the flying saucer debate? 357 00:43:23,000 --> 00:43:31,000 What we've said is that there is no evidence to suggest an extraterrestrial explanation for the phenomenon. 358 00:43:31,000 --> 00:43:37,000 But, however, you can't completely discount the idea. 359 00:43:37,000 --> 00:43:42,000 Therefore, the department has always said, but of course we keep an open mind on the possibilities. 360 00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:48,000 I mean there was an object in the skies, as far as we were concerned. 361 00:43:48,000 --> 00:43:54,000 It was an identified and unexplained to this day. 362 00:43:54,000 --> 00:44:06,000 For 14 years I kept it quiet because one just doesn't tell people I've seen an unidentified flying object. 363 00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:13,000 No explanation really has been given to us by anybody at any time, and we haven't asked. 364 00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:17,000 We've just gently been asked to sweep it under the carpet. 365 00:44:17,000 --> 00:44:22,000 It didn't happen. That's what they say. We know what we saw. 366 00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:27,000 And with the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act in Britain, 367 00:44:27,000 --> 00:44:33,000 the remainder of the Ministry of Defence files on flying saucers will finally be made public. 368 00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:42,000 There are around 190 files that are sitting in the MOD archive waiting for release. 369 00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:48,000 I look forward to 2005 when we'll get to see what is really in Britain's X files. 370 00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:11,000 Sunday 9 at 9, 8 Central only on the History Channel.