Original subtitles

Narrator: A facility in rural england

where information was on a need to know basis.

You've got a compound within the larger compound

strongly built to contain something that was very valuable,

volatile, dangerous.

A confused and overgrown collection of ruins

in the woods of Arkansas.

There are fences and cages everywhere.

Obviously, this place has been out of use

for some time.

And that begs the question,

was whatever was being kept here released or did it break out?

A Belarusian town that fell victim to catastrophe

and then cover-up.

This place was populated so briefly

that it doesn't even leave a trace.

It's so new that it doesn't even appear on maps.

And a lush Taiwanese island

where thousands endured unimaginable terrors.

For almost half a century,

this collection of buildings struck fear

into the hearts and minds of every Taiwanese person.

Decaying relics...

..Ruins of lost worlds...

..Sites haunted by the past...

..Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In Suffolk on the edge of rendlesham forest

is a facility that would be hard to miss.

Well, it looks like the biggest runway

I've ever seen in my life

and it's set down in this beautiful bucolic English countryside.

But this is no airport,

this looks more like a military installation.

Rows of uniformed bunkers and hangers populate the site.

But amongst them are other structures

whose purpose is obscured.

Looking at this building it's very advanced,

jetson space age in look and appearance.

There's this one hanger with big doors at the front

and this strange protrusion at the back.

And tucked away on the edge of this vast installation,

a high-security area

designed to keep people out and to keep something in.

It has its own high fences topped with barbed wire

and most disturbing is the watchtower.

Something was kept in here

that they didn't want people to know about.

40 years ago on a winter's evening, something happened

that made this place hit the headlines.

In December 1980 people based here on this facility

saw this strange lights in the sky.

A squad left the compound

and followed the lights into rendlesham forest.

The reports say that they followed the lights

into a clearing and found...

..Well, nothing.

Apart from the imprints of three evenly spaced circles

in the forest mud.

After the rendlesham incident,

this site came to the public's attention,

this is raf bentwaters.

The raf, the royal air force

is the oldest organised air force in the world.

Bentwaters was secured with a ten-foot-high fence.

But in one corner security was taken to another level.

Graham Gilbert grew up hearing stories

about this top-secret place.

This area here is called the entrapment area,

another sliding gate would close behind,

security personnel from the building here

would come out,

check the security passes of the occupants.

When a secure military base has an extra high-security area,

you know they've got something big in there,

something that goes well beyond the pay grade

of your ordinary soldier.

The British armed forces are no stranger to covert ops.

But small details suggest that someone else was in charge.

Bentwaters was under the command of the United States air force.

The us air force came to bentwaters in 1951

and they fashioned this into one of their biggest airbases

in the European space.

So sinister with the crows and the rooks

and knowing what was stored in these bunkers here

is really sort of spine chilling.

Inside the compound is a row of short bunker-like buildings.

At one end of that corridor is a watchtower

patrolled by armed soldiers.

And at the other end is a pillbox with holes for more guns.

This is a killing field.

Clearly whatever went on in here was supposed to be hush-hush.

This is one of the nuclear storage bunkers

in the weapons storage area.

And each bunker is covered in a layer of thick earth

that would suppress any accidental explosion as well.

The United States air force came to bentwaters

in a time when tensions were rising

between NATO and Soviet states in Eastern Europe.

The mission was to bring bentwaters up to new NATO standards

so the day that war with Russia came,

bentwaters would be ready.

They built new infrastructure

like the building with the strange slanted walls

that still stands today.

There's nothing like it anywhere else on the base.

The crews at bentwaters had to be in a constant state of readiness

for a very dangerous mission.

The event of world war III

they were supposed to get in their jets,

fly their missions into Europe,

hit the Soviet targets with nuclear weapons.

Pilots were supposed to eject near the coast

either on the European side or the British side,

come down, land,

Bury themselves under soil for three days

to protect themselves from nuclear fallout.

The plan was

that a friendly submarine would then pick them up

but the soldiers knew

that once the bombs started dropping

the chances were very slim that there'd be anybody left at all.

They knew it was a one-way trip.

Officially the United States neither confirms nor denies

that there were nuclear weapons at bentwaters.

But weapons of mass destruction weren't the only secret

kept on this site.

On the eastern edge is a hangar with a protrusion out the back.

It's a long metal tube that must be, like,

I don't know, ten feet high?

A funny-looking building clearly centred around this port

for either the...

..Expelling something or allowing something in.

This building was called the hush house.

It was integral to bentwaters covert operations.

One thing that the us air force may not have considered

when they came to rural england

was that there were limits

on how much noise they could make and when.

A law prevented the air force testing their engines at night

or on sundays.

The hush house was designed to let them test in secret.

So they'd bring them into the hush house,

they'd work on the engines, they'd test them here

and there would be no sound to disturb the sleep

of the surrounding civilians.

Inside here

when an engine was running full throttle

it would be unbearable.

There's a special control room where the operators sat

behind thickened glass

to protect them from the sound and the heat.

Today the secrets of the hush house are known

but rumours persist

that some information is still classified.

Graham was living in the area when something happened

that would go down in history as britain's roswell.

I was 18 at the time.

I first heard about this incident when it was in the local newspaper.

Security forces went out to investigate it

and they're reporting strange lights and things

zooming about in the sky.

For 40 years some of those soldiers

have been unable to explain what happened

and they're convinced that they had a close encounter.

However, there is another theory that's still out of this world,

it's just not extra-terrestrial.

NASA's Apollo program in the '60s and '70s,

they typically landed, they splashed down in the Caribbean

or in the pacific ocean.

There were contingencies

that if they splashed down in the north sea

or the mediterranean,

they had to have facilities to recover the astronaut

in that case.

So right up until 1975,

they kept a prop capsule on standby in Great Britain

so crews in britain could train on recovering a capsule.

Now one theory is that they used a helicopter

to fly that capsule over bentwaters

but they lost control of it and had to ditch it in the forest

which might explain those strange circular imprints

in the ground.

A dummy Apollo capsule might fit the evidence.

But there are still questions about the rendlesham incident

which remain unanswered.

The us air force was stationed at bentwaters for 42 years

with 11 squadrons based there over that time.

But in 1993 the airbase was decommissioned,

the cold war was over.

Much of the airpower that we were going to deploy

in a third world war against the Soviet union

was based at bentwaters.

This was the world we lived in for so long,

may we never live in this world again.

In northern Arkansas is a wholly unusual scene

lost in the depths of the countryside.

This place is way out in the woods,

it's overgrown.

There are vines creeping all over the place

swallowing it up.

As you travel further into the trees,

you see the beginning of the track

and you start to get maybe some clue of what was going on here.

At one point it goes up pretty high about 30 feet off the ground

so somebody put a lot of engineering ambition

into this project.

Twisted remains are strewn all around,

and together they paint a strange picture.

There are lots of metal grills, bars,

fences and cages,

it's like a prison lost in the jungle.

You're out in the woods, you're miles from the nearest town,

no-one's going to hear you scream out here.

So who or what was being locked up in the cages?

And what catastrophe would cause this site's downfall?

It all looks a little ram shackled

so it makes you think whatever was in these cages,

did they stay in the cages?

What if they got out?

Far from being hidden away, the entrance to this place

was actually designed to catch the eye of passers-by.

So if you were just driving past,

you see what looks like a rest stop

but this was a rest stop like no other in the world.

Rick Montgomery grew up nearby

and can imagine just how strange a site this must have been

for unsuspected travellers.

Well, when you would arrive here and come around that corner,

almost a 90-degree curve

and the first thing you see are these cages.

And in this cage here I'm told was a lion.

That would get your attention.

You begin to look in here and here is a huge black bear.

Everybody's now wondering what is this place?

For those who let their curiosity get the better of them,

a ride upon a miniature railway took them through a dark tunnel,

before all was revealed.

We'd come out of the tunnel and we hit this track.

And as you make the curve you look to your left

and there's giraffes,

and their heads are looking you in the face

because giraffes are so tall

so they're almost level with you.

This strange roadside wonderland once filled with life

was Hallie's rest stop and zoo.

When it opened this place was a huge hit.

People came in droves, they loved it.

People would specifically travel

just to this site from hundreds of miles away

but what I like to imagine is the incredible surprise

of people who didn't know about this.

They just pull over the car expecting a normal rest stop

and ta-da, you've got Hallie's zoo as well.

What an experience.

Opened in the early '70s

and named after its owner Hallie ormond,

visitors would come face to face with an exciting mix of animals,

some more exotic than others.

There was every kind of animal local to the area,

foxes, wolves, deer,

just every kind of animal that you can think of

that's local to Arkansas was here in the zoo,

plus elephant, giraffes,

of course, the orangutan, bear, lion.

But today rusted, broken and weathered

it appears outdated in more ways than one.

You know, a really state of the art zoo

needs a full-time veterinary staff,

it needs people really trained to take care of these animals.

And you see in modern zoos

they at least make an attempt to create habitats

that are more like the habitats of these animals living in the wild,

instead of just confining them to tiny cages

where they go wild with boredom.

This was one of a number of small zoos

that dotted the country at the time,

and regulation of them was relatively light

so, there was a little bit of a wild west feel to it.

Regardless of the approach taken, however,

safety was always a priority.

Wild animals are exactly that, they are wild

and whenever you take them on, even a single one,

let alone the numbers required in a zoo,

you're taking on a huge responsibility.

This was something the management was reminded of

when one resident decided

they'd had enough of sitting alone in their cage.

This cage is super interesting, it's big metal

because originally there was a bear in here,

then they put in here an orangutan.

He was real smart.

He knew how to undo his cage so that he could get out.

And he would get out of his cage and go walking around,

go walking across the street.

That's where the manager was and he knew him.

Luckily no harm was done by the orangutan

masterminding his own escape.

But what if it had been a more dangerous animal?

With this kind of business, if an accident does occur on-site,

the likelihood is it's going to be serious.

As time would tell,

the orangutan wasn't to be the only escapee from Hallie's.

And next time it would be a predator

that would have the locals running scared.

But perhaps this place should never have been opened at all.

Now there are plenty of laws and regulations

regarding exotic animals in the us but...

And this is true of a lot of activities

in the states,

there's a huge amount of variation

and the laws vary state by state

and in some cases, county by county.

What's surprising is that where this zoo was located,

it was actually illegal to own exotic animals.

Whether that law was known at the time or not,

things would soon be brought to a head.

In the late '70s Hallie sold the zoo to a new owner,

and in 1979 the zoo made the headlines

for all the wrong reasons.

Well, this is the cage that got the biggest story to tell.

This was the cage where the lion was kept.

The lion was sheltering in a zoo all of its life,

it was never been out in the wild.

But one day, somebody accidentally left the cage door open

and the lion escaped.

With a lion on the loose, the locals were up in arms.

There are farms all around this place with livestock

and now you've got a predator out there on the loose.

It was spotted a number of times.

The people in the area were pretty freaked out

that there was a wild African lion roaming their backyards.

But luckily, in the end,

it turned out they needn't have worried.

There is a kind of comic end to all this

because after two weeks of wandering the countryside

the lion just wandered back into the zoo,

apparently, because he was hungry.

I guess that lion was a little more accustomed

to being fed

than having to chase down its own food.

The lion came back and went back into his cage here

and they locked him up and fed him,

but that was the beginning of the end

for Hallie's zoo.

No livestock were attacked, no one was injured

but suddenly a new level of scrutiny was focused upon the zoo.

I don't believe that anybody ever knew

that it was illegal to have exotic animals

in Van buren county.

It's just that once the lion incident happened

that was an excuse

to get rid of the exotic animals in Van buren county.

The law was already there,

just no one had ever really enforced it,

no one had really talked about it.

After a decade pulling in excited tourists

and weary travellers,

in 1979 Hallie's rest stop and zoo was shut down.

While the animals are long gone,

there was still another twist in the tale of this place.

When Rick stumbled upon the boarded-up site in 2011...

Well, we were rounding the curve

and I felt like I heard god say, "look to your left,"

and all we can see was the corner of the building.

We pulled over and my wife thought

that we were having some kind of car trouble

and I said, "no, I think this is the place

"we're supposed to be."

It's always nice to see old places get turned into something new.

But the best times

are when there's something so surprising like this.

They turned a zoo into a church.

The old restaurant and gift shop has been restored

and become the church itself.

While the old zoo

has been pulled into the action once again.

We utilised the zoo.

This place has helped our church to reach out to the community.

We have biblical who's who at the zoo.

And we actually have people playing biblical characters

in the old cages.

And then for Christmas we decorate the zoo,

we light up the train track.

It's just a good way to minister to the community.

In Rick's eyes as minister,

they couldn't have wished for a better spot to build a church.

My wife and I love the place, as a matter of fact,

if things go as we plan, we will be entombed here.

We plan on staying here, the zoo is us.

In Belarus,

seven miles from the border with Ukraine

is a derelict land that was once a paradise.

Your first impression here

is that you're in the middle of nowhere.

You don't see anyone even looking down from the sky,

you can't see any people.

The people are gone

but the forgotten pieces of a past life have been left behind.

Murals on the walls have been painted for children,

it suggests that whoever lived here did so happily.

You can see abandoned houses,

you can see some personal possessions

scattered about on the ground.

It appears that when people did leave this place,

they left in a hurry.

The evidence suggests something happened here

which turned this place into a wasteland.

But the truth may be bigger than just one neighbourhood.

Belarus and Ukraine were just two provinces

of the Soviet empire.

Used to be that Soviet power spanned this border,

but now something far darker spans this border.

The town's existence was cut so short

that it was never added to local maps.

So what catastrophic event curtailed its life?

And what invisible danger was left behind?

In the 1970s, at the height of the cold war,

the west and the Soviet union were vying for supremacy.

But behind the scenes, the union was in turmoil.

The Soviet system was going to pieces.

The Soviet system of agriculture, in particular,

could not feed the Soviet population.

There was a great irony

that the Soviets had a world-class military

and they were spending billions on nuclear weapons,

but they couldn't even feed their own people.

Piotr romaniuk grew up in Belarus during this time.

Translation: "We're standing in what used to be a shop.

"Those are the remains of refrigerators.

"This shop supplied the whole town with groceries

"and other necessities."

But this shop was different to many others

across the Soviet union...

..There were no bare shelves.

For here, everyone had plenty of food.

In this part of Belarus the Soviets set up kind of

a model community to raise cattle for food.

And they built the housing, supermarkets, schools,

everything they needed to house the workers

and their families.

The approach worked so well, in fact,

that the people gave this town an unofficial name,

'sunny'.

Translation: "Why sunny?

"Because they planned a hay day for the region.

"Something new,

"that the new town would be bright,

"joyful, sunny."

They wanted this to be a model town

and so it could be used as an example elsewhere

in the Soviet union,

and show that collective work and community could be a big success

for the future.

Translation: "It was a place full of life,

"a place for work and for leisure.

"Behind us is what used to be a house of culture

"which was supposed to have opened in 1986

"but it never happened."

One Sunday morning in 1986 this paradise was lost.

Translation: "It was the first time since world war ii

"that the alarm had sounded.

It was horrifying.

"And people couldn't grasp what was happening."

On 3 may, an order was made,

the residents of sunny were to evacuate

over the coming days,

few understood why.

Translation: "It was horrible.

"People were saying goodbye to each other forever.

"They weren't sure they'd ever see each other again

"because they'd never experienced anything like this before."

A panic had gripped the authorities.

Something so disastrous had happened

that the state tried to keep it secret.

In the Soviet union news was tightly controlled.

Bad news was a state secret,

and there was no news of the nuclear disaster

at chernobyl.

A week earlier,

a large explosion at the site had exposed the nuclear reactor core.

Two of the reactors at the chernobyl nuclear plant

went into meltdown,

they started spewing radioactive smoke into the air.

Firefighters came in to try to put out the Blaze

but, of course, they were subjected to even more intense radiation.

Translation: "Yes, we knew of the accident

"but nobody recognised its scale.

"We thought it would all be over soon.

"They'd put the fire out

"and we would resume living as if nothing had happened.

"When the word radiation was said for the first time,

"the older locals couldn't even repeat it.

"They kept saying 'radio'

"and didn't understand why they were being forced to move out

"of this beautiful place of our country

"because of something that nobody could see."

The town of sunny sits near the border

between what is now Belarus and Ukraine,

chernobyl lies just 20 miles to the south.

Airborne radiation was omitted from the fire at the power plant

for ten straight days.

It spread across Europe,

but around 70% is estimated to have settled

on the ground in Belarus.

It must have been terrifying.

They'd been living in the fall out zone

for almost a week.

But no one really knew how bad the fallout was

and no one really trusted the government

to tell them the truth.

At the time, piotr was working as a teacher

and was assigned to help with the evacuation.

Translation: "We were summoned to the district committee

"so that they could assign party members

"to be in charge of resettlement of different organisations.

"I was sent to kolivan village

"where my main duty was to ensure the resettlement

"of the school."

Within 24 hours,

the town of sunny had been abandoned...

..But the residents of this former paradise

would face one final injustice.

Years later, when scientists went back

to study the soil and to study the people

and look for the effects of the radiation,

they found that the radiation levels were far lower

than they had suspected at first and, in fact,

the residents of this area

probably didn't need to be evacuated.

As the town sat empty from 1986 onwards,

few outsiders heard the stories of places such as this.

What happened in Belarus

is a really overlooked story of chernobyl,

everybody talks about the immediate area around the plant

and about pripyat.

A lot of people don't realise

that much of the dislocation happened in Belarus next door.

Huge areas evacuated,

lives uprooted, disrupted forever.

Life, however, has returned to sunny.

Today it's classed as a nature reserve

and has been reclaimed by wild elk and wolves.

And piotr now looks for the positives in what lies ahead for this region.

Translation: "I suppose I've made my peace with it.

"The reserve employs many of our people.

"It provides workspaces

"so we treat it like a facility.

"You know, it's our facility."

Over 30 years after residents were forced

from their homes, sunny remains a restricted area,

but change may lie ahead.

Translation: "Today we are rebuilding it

"and everything is growing.

"We are developing very quickly.

"It makes me happy as a citizen of this area

"and as someone who is responsible for socio-economic growth

"of this area. It's great."

Off the coast of Taiwan in the pacific ocean

lies a small volcanic island.

Much of the island is covered in a thick carpet

of emerald green grass,

hence its name green island.

It's a place of towering rocks surrounded by coral reefs.

It's not easy to get to.

Fading clues suggest

this island was more than just a tropical paradise.

Something that really strikes you

is you see all these propaganda slogans

and messages daubed, painted, scrawled, engraved.

So clearly the island was of some political importance

but to whom and why?

A series of brutalist concrete structures

hint at the true nature of this place.

As we look more closely we see a walled-off facility

that really stands out from the rest of the landscape.

For almost half a century,

this collection of buildings struck fear

into the hearts and minds of every Taiwanese person.

Green island is forever tied to one of Taiwan's

and humanity's darkest chapters.

During world war ii,

Taiwan and its islands were ruled over by Japan,

after the fallen empire's surrender China took back control.

For the Taiwanese people,

a new age of terror was about to unfold.

Chiang Kai-shek became the leader of China in 1928.

But in 1949, following the Chinese civil war

he and his nationalist party were defeated

by the communist forces

under the leadership of mao zedong.

And chiang Kai-shek takes his government

which used to govern all of China across to the island of Taiwan,

80 miles from the Chinese mainland.

Forced into exile,

the deposed leader plotted to reclaim China

from the newly installed communist government.

And green island would come to play a key role

in chiang Kai-shek's plans.

As you look around

you see all these propaganda messages,

one of which reads,

"be firm against communism and ready to win."

All this propaganda and the barrack-like buildings

make you think it's some kind of military training facility.

However, this was not a place to house his army,

it was designed to destroy his rivals.

Chiang Kai-shek is beleaguered by political enemies inside Taiwan.

The old locals who resent the intrusion

of these mainlanders onto their island,

but also lots of Chinese spies inside the nationalist movement.

In a desperate attempt to cling to power,

he rounded up those believed to be a threat.

Lin xiu wei lives on green island

and grew up hearing the terrible stories from this time.

Translation: "The people's right to freedom of speech

"and freedom to gather together was stripped away.

"For example, if three people got together

"they would be accused

"of joining a trade union organisation."

This period of brutal martial law became known as the white terror.

Chiang Kai-shek creates this green island

as a place where he can send people for interrogation and detention

as he launches this so-called white terror.

This was the new life correction centre.

Locked inside, however,

was not the typical cast of criminals.

Here the ones being persecuted

were those with the power to influence others

not through violence but through art and reason.

This wasn't a normal prison,

full of hardened and violent criminals,

instead, you had scholars and writers,

poets and artists.

As we know nothing is more dangerous than an idea.

Those deemed to be the most dangerous

with the most dangerous ideas, they were sent to green island.

Isolated from the rest of the population

where even the power of their poetry,

the power of their art couldn't reach anyone.

In time, some of these prisoners would transform Taiwan

into the country it is today.

But while caged, they endured an imaginable hardship.

The main building is a strange hexagonal structure

with four lines of prisoner cells extending out from the core.

Hard labour and torture were daily occurrences too.

For a start, each prisoner had a sleeping space

of only two-foot-wide.

This wasn't just a prison, it was a re-education centre,

really an ideological brainwashing centre as well.

And the methods used were very extreme,

to the point at which some prisoners were tattooed

with propaganda slogans

like, "oppose communism, resist the Russians."

While those locked inside these walls dreamt of escape,

the site's position meant this was nigh on impossible.

Translation: "There were reports of political prisoners

"who attempted to escape,

"but they all failed, why?

"Because green island is surrounded by the sea."

Known as the black current,

the powerful waters that encircled the island

pulled flotsam back to the shore.

It's rumoured one desperate prisoner swam all night

towards the mainland

only to find himself back where he started

as the sun Rose.

Translation: "Some prisoners crafted little wooden rafts

"in an effort to escape.

"However, they were just rolled back to the shores by the waves.

"They were then beaten up by the guards in the bunker."

It's estimated that over five decades

the regime arrested up to 150,000 political opponents

with many of them ending up here.

Around 20,000 were executed without proper trial,

most for the crime of criticising a corrupt government.

So chiang Kai-shek's terror really decimated

an entire generation of Chinese intellectuals

and it would take Taiwanese society a long time to recover.

But for the people held against their will,

their dreams of freedom and Liberty didn't die.

The suffering only fuelled a desire for change.

The seeds of Democratic Taiwan were also sewn by this persecution.

One prisoner was kept here for so long

and resisted so valiantly

and his struggle had such a profound effect

on the course of Taiwanese politics

that he became known as Taiwan's mandela.

In total, shih ming-teh, spent 25 years locked away,

much of it was here in solitary confinement

and several years of that was on hunger strike.

So this guy endured all of these things,

asked for no mercy, put up with it all

and really became the conscience of Taiwan.

Martial law was eventually lifted in 1987.

For the first time in a century,

opposition political parties were allowed to form.

And with that, many of the prisoners still being held

were soon released.

And once released, they formed this party,

they insist on democracy, human rights,

they win elections,

and shih ming-teh is one of the guys

who founds the Democratic progressive party,

the party that now governs Taiwan.

This site continued to operate as a prison,

but this time, criminals more deserving of captivity

occupied its cells.

Its prisoners were now the gangsters and mobsters

who had helped the old regime round up the innocent intellectuals.

In the final years of the 20th century,

the prison was closed and abandoned.

But the trauma experienced here

still lives long in the memory of the island's residents.

Translation: "We must remember

"that Taiwan once experienced strict political rule.

"We must learn from the lessons of the past.

"History might be repeated.

"If we don't learn, the tragedy might happen again."

In 2002, the Taiwanese government once again

opened the doors of the prison.

Though it now welcomes a very different kind of visitor.

Green island today is a tourist destination

with beaches, hotels, snorkelling

but it's really a reminder of Taiwan's very complex past.

Taiwan's frosty relationship with China continues

to this very day.

On the one hand,

you have Taiwan, a flourishing free-market democracy,

on the other hand, you have China,

one-party communist dictatorship

that has never recognised the independence of Taiwan.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV