Original subtitles

I'm Tim Tate.

I've been an investigative journalist

for almost half a century.

And what I specialise in is exploring official archives,

unearthing dusty old files from government departments,

spy agencies, the police.

This strange figure looked very much like an astronaut.

And what I have found in those collections,

both in Britain and in the United States,

is a truly extraordinary collection

of real-life X-files.

True cryptids, like the Yeti and the Mongolian death worm.

And those files disclose...

investigations by the police, by governments, by spy agencies...

Shortly after that transmission,

Captain Schaffner's radio went dark.

...to examine and uncover the truth...

about phenomena which are truly... out of this world.

It's a great piece of branding. The death ray.

Everyone knows where they stand with a death ray.

The first X-file we open takes us above the clouds,

where an examination of a spate of frighteningly similar air crashes

can't ignore the possibility that their cause

has otherworldly origins.

In the wake of World War II,

passenger air travel really took off

due to new technology, the jet engine.

Comet jetliner, pioneering the first

pure jet commercial airline service.

Britain sought to lead the way with the de Havilland Comet,

but then a series of crashes saw the project halted.

What was causing the Comets to mysteriously fall out of the sky?

Was there an as-yet-unidentified design flaw?

Or could the answer have an otherworldly explanation?

On Thursday, November 4th 1954,

one of the strangest exchanges ever recorded

in Britain's remarkable collection of X-files

occurred at the Institute of Civil Engineers in Westminster,

presided over by Sir Lionel Heald.

And Sir Lionel Heald's question in the august halls...

of a public inquiry...

asked whether...

the plane crashes could have been caused

by contact... with a flying saucer.

The de Havilland Comet was the first...

jet passenger airliner.

The world now had its first passenger jet air service.

Prior to the Comet, all passenger aircraft were

piston-engined aircraft, as used in bombers during the war.

The airliners were noisy, couldn't fly particularly high,

so they'd be buffeted in the winds as they flew along.

The Comet airliner was able to get up to much higher heights,

which was a much more stable journey for the passengers.

So all in all, the Comet was

a much, much improved airliner.

In fact, some of the advertising actually showed somebody building

a stack of cards on one of the tables.

And here, 40,000ft over the Alps,

en route, Rome, first of five stops on the 6,700-mile flight.

London to Rome, two-and-a-half hours.

On Sunday, January 10 1954,

at 10:30am,

BOAC Comet G-ALYP took off from Rome airport.

It climbed to 31,000ft and headed off over the Mediterranean Sea,

but barely 200 miles into its journey,

it exploded, killing all on board.

Local fishermen reported seeing a ball of light in the sky

and hearing an enormous bang.

The initial mystery that surrounded the Comet

was the fact that they couldn't find the cause.

They had tested the aircraft considerably

prior to its entering of service,

and this was actually the first Comet to enter commercial service,

so it was a trusted aircraft.

So then the investigators had to look for this deadly problem.

It would take several months to reassemble the parts

of the Comet to try and determine the cause of the disaster.

All of the fleet were taken out of service for ten weeks,

and 60 modifications were made to the aircraft

to allow them to fly again.

Once they flew again after the ten weeks,

a further three weeks elapsed,

and another plane crashed...

that was on charter to South African Airways, in exactly the same way,

oddly enough, in the same area off Elba.

Following this second Comet air crash of April 1954,

the fleet was grounded indefinitely.

The fact that this was such a trusted aircraft

added to the mystery and the intrigue,

as well as the fact that the crew was so experienced.

These were pilots that had served in the Second World War,

that had Distinguished Flying Crosses, flying medals.

And so for this aircraft to have such a disaster,

it was very unsettling for the aviation industry,

and particularly in Britain.

There was a lot of speculation. What was it?

Was it sabotage? Was it terrorism?

What had caused these two aircraft to explode

and all these people to die as a result?

But the investigation into the reassembled Comet

ruled out both sabotage and a terrorist bomb.

The rational...

if excitable, newspaper coverage...

gave way...

to more conspiratorial thinking.

And British government files, files maintained by the Air Ministry...

...began filling up with claims...

that something supernatural, or paranormal,

had been involved.

So this was something that was actually, amazingly,

taken seriously by the board of inquiry.

So in the National Archives,

there are files of letters from members of the public saying,

'Have you looked at the possibility that the Comet was struck

by a flying saucer over the Mediterranean?'

And people saw a big flash and explosion in the sky,

so it was perhaps quite logical

that maybe there was another object involved.

And that goes some way to explaining the extraordinary exchange

between Sir Lionel Heald, QC,

and the Director of the Aircraft Establishment...

during the inquiry into the Comet disasters.

From this point on,

stories spread that the doomed Comets may have been victim

of some kind of alien attack.

The higher and faster the jet planes went,

the stranger their encounters became,

all adding to the UFO myth.

When the report into the Comet disasters was finally finished,

it was indeed a tale of the unknown.

But this was a case of pushing the envelope

beyond the capacity of the plane.

The flight reached operating height,

which was around about 35,000ft.

At that height, the...

structure of the hull failed,

which is likened to...

sitting somewhere and a 500lb bomb going off.

So it exploded...

...and blew the whole plane apart, effectively, at that height.

The aircraft in pieces...

with the passengers all on board,

who would have been dead by then...

then fell to the sea off the isle of Elba.

The real culprit?

It wasn't a spacecraft from another planet or little green men.

Thousands of tests revealed a catastrophic weak point

in the Comet's design:

tiny flaws in the riveting around the Comet's windows.

What they eventually discovered going through all of these tests

was that actually 70% of the stress on the aircraft

that came from the pressurisation cycles

was actually located at the front.

It was around where the windows were.

The reason why they burst was because...

the rivets had been punched into the metal,

creating the hole by which the rivet was sealed.

But around it were minute cracks,

which elongated over a period of time.

The phenomenon of metal fatigue

was not yet fully known in this era.

So as a result, this was a case of trying to over-engineer it,

but also using metal that was, ultimately,

far too thin to take these strains.

The Comet jetliner pioneering the first pure

jet commercial airline service.

In this footage of early jet passengers,

you can see that unlike modern jet planes, the windows are not round.

This also played a part in both disasters.

The windows were slightly square.

Where you get a window that's round,

there's less pressure on all points around the window.

When the window is slightly square,

there's more pressure on the corners

than there is on any other section of the window.

Hatfield, England, the 72-ton, 4-jet Comet 3,

destined for transatlantic service, is unveiled.

This giant is the latest improvement of the original Comet airliner.

The Comet 1 was grounded due to a series of accidents.

They uprated the engines to make them more powerful engines,

and they also reskinned the plane,

so they put a thicker skin on the aircraft.

And they obviously modified the way they made the windows,

but the skin made it more able to...

withstand any pressure situations.

The Comet 3 will be modified

to comply with the inquiry's suggestions.

Both disasters had been caused by metal fatigue:

an ill-understood problem at the time...

and were definitely not...

the result of attacks by...

spacecraft from Mars.

Non-stop New York to London in six hours,

as Britain hopes her commercial jetliners

will set a new pace over the Atlantic.

But while the cause of the crashes

appeared to have been identified,

it couldn't save the makers of the doomed airliner,

de Havilland, or the British aircraft industry.

We often hear eyewitness accounts of strange things at sea,

but if we take a closer look, and they become even stranger,

then they might well make their way into the British X-files.

Paranormal encounters on land, or in the sky,

are difficult enough to understand,

but when something strange happens at sea,

the possibilities that lurk in the fathoms below

conjure even greater primordial fears in our fragile minds.

The sea is a very alien

and dangerous environment for human beings.

It's filled with dangerous animals,

things like giant squid,

the great white shark, the saltwater crocodile:

an animal that makes the great white shark look like a pussycat.

And it's deep. We can't see beneath the waves.

It's a psychological thing. We never know what's lurking there.

There could be anything, something ready to devour us.

We could be dragged down by undercurrents.

We could be caught in a storm.

So the turmoil of the depth of the seas, and what lurks there,

is as much psychological as it is an actual physical thing,

and we populate it with monsters, perhaps with good reason:

perhaps because there are monsters.

Sometimes, sailors get a glimpse of these monsters.

These are often dismissed because they are so fleeting and vague.

But that is not the case of a sighting made in 1848

by the British frigate HMS Daedalus.

HMS Daedalus was a mid-19th century navy warship.

And it was on a long voyage.

And it was had a very experienced Captain

and a very experienced crew.

The HMS Daedalus had been employed fighting pirates

off the coast of Borneo,

and she was on the long voyage back to England.

About halfway there,

on August 6th 1848,

at about 5:30 in the evening...

...Captain Peter M’Quhae...

and six other people saw what they said...

was a sea serpent.

It was a long, straight-bodied...

creature, they described, with a head and neck...

just above the water's surface.

The visible portion that they could see above the waves

was approximately 60ft long,

and its head was...

held out of the water at around 4ft high.

The witnesses thought that...

there was considerably more of the creature below the water.

And it had a mane resembling seaweed.

They said that it didn't move side to side...

like a snake, or up and down like a marine mammal,

but it just seemed to slide along in the water.

They described the head of the sea serpent,

and an estimate of what the tail would have been,

and assume that it was about a 60ft-long sea serpent.

Captain Peter M’Quhae said that...

if it was on land,

and it was a man he'd have known, he would have been close enough

to recognise his face: that's how close it was.

And it was in view

for a good 20 minutes, which was a long sighting.

If only one person sees it, then it's only one person's opinion.

But in this case, it was the Captain,

the Lieutenant... a couple of men.

But what's really interesting about this

is that he was a really proper Captain,

and so he recorded latitude, longitude,

and of course, being an experienced Captain,

all of this information is very, very accurate.

Whilst the Captain's log records all the nautical details,

such as position, speed and weather conditions,

it makes no mention of the sighting,

but there was a very good reason for this.

There was a ship's superstition,

dating probably from about that time,

that mentioning a sea serpent in the log

would bring a lot of very bad luck.

Tongues wagged. Somehow, the story got out.

And the media seized on it in a feeding frenzy

not unlike the tabloids of today.

A letter was published in the Times,

so there was a much exaggerated account in the Times.

The stories reported in the newspapers

might have been exaggerated,

but these were accompanied by illustrations based on drawings

made by the ship's first Lieutenant, Edgar Drummond.

There were some illustrations produced

by the Illustrated London News,

which were very detailed.

But, of course, not necessarily very...

representative of what was seen.

What was more representative of what was seen was...

...the diary of Lieutenant Drummond,

which only resurfaced recently.

There's an illustration in the diary which is a lot less elaborate...

...than the Illustrated London News...

...pictures.

Drummond's illustration does not show

the typical representation of a sea serpent with a long body and humps,

which might have been expected if he was following nautical tradition.

There have been sightings of sea serpents

as far back as ancient Babylon and Mesopotamia.

They're seen all over the world, in every sea and ocean.

And sightings have continued to the present day.

There seem to be a number of different types,

but the two primary ones are an animal with a long neck

and a bulky body,

and an elongate animal that throws its body

into a series of loops or humps.

There was a lot of speculation as to

are these things an unrecognised animal?

Not are these things real, but are they an unrecognised animal?

In an attempt to try to explain the sighting,

numerous experts came forward offering their own interpretations.

Henry Lee, who was directing the Brighton Aquarium,

and wrote a book about giant squid

possibly being the subject of sea serpent encounters...

so he thought it was a squid perhaps...

trailing its tentacles across the surface.

In the meantime,

there is the discovery of...

marine reptiles from the Jurassic...

on the South Coast of England, which are now being publicised.

And people began to think of the sea serpent

not as a mythical Scandinavian tradition,

but more as a plesiosaur,

with a much longer neck but a much shorter body.

Even the Natural History Museum in London got involved.

Richard Owen made suggestions

that angered the Captain and crew of the Daedalus

and ended in an angry exchange of letters.

Owen suggested that he'd seen an elephant seal,

which doesn't grow to nearly that size and is not found in the area.

Then he suggested it was a native canoe that had harpooned a whale,

and it was being dragged along by the whale.

And then he said it was a whale shark,

which doesn't remotely resemble what the people saw.

And the Captain and his crew argued quite fiercely against that.

Eventually, it was decided...

that no, that's not what this is.

It's an anomaly. And it stayed an anomaly for a very long time.

I don't think the crew were lying. I think...

they reported accurately what they saw,

and I'm a believer in sea serpents.

I think there are a number of large, unknown animals

that we call sea serpents living in the seas and oceans

right up to the present day...

that we have no explanation for.

But in this case, I think there is an explanation.

Recently, because there was so much precise information,

someone had a look at this

and sort of said, 'Well, if you look at this,

and think of it in terms of the animals we do know,

this sighting, and the behaviour of the animal,

is consistent with a rorqual whale, a sei whale,

which is a baleen whale, who eat plankton, basically.

In order to do this, they skim along the surface with their mouths open.

And so the top of this animal's jaw would be above the water,

and they would be going along at just about...

the same speed that the Captain suggested.

And indeed, if you see pictures of the sei whale sort of going along,

and you kind of don't know that it's a whale,

then it does look very mysterious.

It does look very, very strange because you can't see the eyes

because of the way it's going.

But it's taken a very long time to really come to an explanation.

And one of the reasons you can come to such a good explanation,

which is very rare, is because it was such interesting

and specific information to start with.

But not everyone is convinced that we can explain away

the phenomena of sea serpents quite so easily.

These things have been reported since time immemorial.

And we must remember the ancient legends of dragons

all over the world...

in ancient cultures like Babylon, Sumeria, China, Japan.

They all associate them with water, the ancient element of water,

rather than fire, and there could be a reason for that.

Just because one sea serpent sighting has an explanation,

it doesn't mean that all of them do.

It's like saying that if one Rembrandt painting

turns out to be a hoax, there's no such thing as Rembrandt.

Logic tells us that you can't kill something

that isn't alive.

But if you could, it would change more than just the laws of physics.

It would change the way we think of death itself.

Most ghost stories are told late at night in an eerie atmosphere

designed to create fear in the listener.

But one ghost story not only resulted in a very real death...

but also had consequences that were still reverberating 180 years later.

The tale of the Hammersmith Ghost,

and the murder which resulted from it,

has a unique place in Britain's collection of X-files.

Because although the arrest, trial and conviction of the ghost's killer

were all wrapped up within a space of just ten days,

in January 1804...

...the case itself...

would pose substantial legal problems

for the next 180 years.

Hammersmith, which was still very much part of the countryside

rather than the great metropolis,

became awash with rumours...

that the ghost of a suicide had left its grave in the churchyard

and was menacing the neighbourhood.

There were several notable sightings of the ghost itself.

One of them was a man by the name of Thomas Groom,

who was the Drayman to the local brewer, Mr Burgess.

He was actually walking through the churchyard

of Hammersmith one night when suddenly,

the ghost came out from behind a tombstone

and grabbed him by the throat.

He said he struggled with the ghost for a few moments.

Then he hit out at it with his fist and connected with something.

He said that was... it felt very soft, like a great coat.

He managed to then wriggle free, but he was actually took to his bed.

When he got home, he took to his bed for over a week,

he was that terrified by his experience.

The ghost, on one occasion, attacked a wagon full of people

travelling by night through Hammersmith.

It also appeared to one woman who was pregnant

and threw her into a terrible state of hysterics

and was blamed for a miscarriage.

One of the appearances that was reported at the time

was a man called Thomas Millwood, who was 22 years old.

He was a bricklayer. Some accounts said a plasterer.

He was walking along Hammersmith Terrace one night

when a couple going past in a coach started screaming,

saying, 'It's the Hammersmith Ghost, it's Hammersmith Ghost.'

And he became quite irate and told them off.

'I'm no more a ghost than you are.'

He thought it was hilarious and went home and told his mother-in-law.

His mother-in-law said, you know, 'You really have to be careful,'

cos he was dressed, being a bricklayer,

he was dressed in his regulation outfit or work clothes,

which consisted of a white canvas overcoat, white waistcoat,

white trousers hanging over his shoes.

So that's what the people had seen and why they thought he was a ghost.

Whilst the British X-files don't contain the name of the ghost,

they do tell us why he was attacking people.

As far as we can ascertain, the...

actual person who came back from the dead as a revenant

had committed suicide the previous year.

Now, up until 1824,

it was a practise that suicides were buried not in churchyards

but at crossroads, sometimes with a stake through the heart.

The ghost had become so commonplace -

nightly appearances were happening all around Hammersmith -

that in early January 1804,

a clergyman and a gentleman offered a reward of five guineas

to anybody who would go out and capture the ghost.

So in early January 1804, you get lots of young men

going out into the dark of night, armed with guns,

and fowling pieces and pistols,

determined to apprehend the ghost.

On December the 29th, a Night Watchman called William Girdler

stumbled into the taproom of a local pub

and said he had just seen...

the Hammersmith ghost.

And he regaled the customers in the bar

with the spine-chilling details

of the white-clad spectre.

One of those in the bar that night was Francis Smith,

and he resolved that over the next few nights,

he would go ghost hunting.

After first fortifying himself with drink,

he went out and sat waiting for the ghost,

having first collected his fowling piece:

basically a gun which was used

for shooting ducks and geese.

And he sat there until he saw a white figure

coming up the lane...

about 10 o'clock in the evening.

He was shocked...

by the sudden appearance of the ghost.

He was hunting. It rose up in front of him.

And Smith cried out, 'Damn you, who are you? Damn you, I'll shoot you.'

And when the ghost didn't reply,

he fired a single shot.

The shot hit the ghost,

which crumpled to the path in front of him.

And Thomas Millwood was dressed in his work outfit,

his white waistcoat, his white overcoat, his white trousers.

And Francis Smith simply cocked his fowling piece, demanded who he was,

Millwood made no reply, so Francis Smith shot him.

And he died instantly.

He was killed instantly by the bullet.

It actually hit him under the chin, and he died instantly.

Smith very quickly, and to his credit, realised what he'd done,

that he had shot to death someone posing as a ghost...

...and he confessed his crime.

In January 1804, he appeared at the Central Criminal Court,

or the Old Bailey, on a charge of wilful murder of Thomas Millwood.

Francis Smith's defence was...

that he hadn't intended to shoot Thomas Millwood.

He'd simply gone out and intended to shoot the ghost,

and his defence was he bore no malice whatsoever

against Thomas Millwood, so therefore, he hadn't murdered him.

Unfortunately, the court took a different view.

As the law stood at the time...

...deaths had to be the fault of somebody.

And this was a case of murder.

As the Judge said, the law is the law.

And the law states that if you shoot somebody dead,

and it's not self-defence, if it's not done under official sanction,

then it's murder.

The jury returned with a verdict.

It convicted Francis Smith of wilful murder.

And the Judge donned the black cap...

and imposed the only sentence...

allowed by law: death.

Fortunately, a recommendation of mercy

was made to the King.

The pleas reached His Majesty...

King George III, who granted a royal pardon,

and so the sentence was commuted

to one of hard labour for six months.

The trial of Francis Smith,

and the tragedy of the shooting dead of Thomas Millwood,

did lead to information being given to the local magistrate,

whereby at least one of the perpetrators,

who may have been the ghost, was identified.

And it was a local man by the name of John Graham.

John Graham was very religious. He attended a local chapel.

He had a family.

In short, he was the last person you'd expect

to go out at night disguised as a ghost.

And the Magistrate asked him why he'd done it, and he said,

'Well, I did it to take revenge on my apprentices

because they've been terrifying my children with stories of ghosts.

So consequently, I decided to get revenge on them.

That's why I went out as a ghost.'

But he maintained he'd only ever done it once,

so that meant that the ghost was still out there somewhere.

It might have started out as a prank

and ended up in a tragic death,

but the Hammersmith Ghost would reverberate across the centuries.

Then in 1949,

a leading academic lawyer called Glanville Williams

rediscovered the curious case of the Hammersmith Ghost.

Glanville Williams raised the case of the Hammersmith Ghost

as part of a wider debate

about reforming the law of manslaughter.

This led to the Homicide Act 1957,

which introduces the plea of diminished responsibility.

And similarly, the law on mistake developed,

until finally, in 1984,

it was accepted that an unreasonable mistake

might also provide some degree of mitigation, or excuse,

as much as a reasonable honest mistake.

And at that point,

the case of the Hammersmith Ghost...

became one of, effectively,

a historical precedent.

Because that was a real-life case

where the situation of a mistake,

an unreasonable one,

suddenly came into its own.

But it took 180 years...

...for the law to actually evolve to recognise it.

Famously, the camera doesn't lie,

so when a photograph seems to show something extraordinary,

we tend to look for an extraordinary explanation.

But that isn't always where the truth is to be found.

When we think of photographs of paranormal phenomena,

we expect to see dark, blurry, mysterious images.

What we don't expect is a little girl holding a bunch of flowers.

But that is exactly what we see in one of the most mysterious images

ever taken that has remained an enigma for over 60 years.

Jim Templeton was a firefighter,

who was based near Carlisle, in Cumbria.

And he was also a very keen photographer.

And during the 1960s, he took one of the...

the most bizarre, baffling, iconic mystery photographs

in the history of anomalous photography.

In May 1964,

he was out with his wife and daughters.

Not only was he trying out his new camera

but he wanted to take some pictures of his wife,

because she'd just bought a new dress,

so it seemed an ideal opportunity for him to...

play around with his camera and spend some time with his family.

Jim was there with his wife and his young daughter,

and they were in Solway Firth in Cumbria.

And as far as Jim can remember, there was nobody else around.

They were there by themselves.

So he'd set up his camera,

and he got his daughter, Elizabeth,

to pose and really lovely photo.

His wife was standing behind him.

And took a series of pictures

and didn't see anything unusual.

In the days before mobile phones,

pictures taken on a film camera weren't instantly accessible.

You had to take the film to a specialist laboratory

and have it developed, which normally took a week or so

before they were sent back to you.

About a week later, he went back to the chemist

to collect the pictures, and he spoke about the photographs,

and the assistant looked through the photographs with him,

and the assistant pointed out that one of the pictures was ruined

by somebody in the background.

And then when Jim looked at the picture,

he realised this strange figure looked very much like an astronaut.

When the assistant handed them back to him,

she said, 'It's just a pity about that one picture

which was spoiled by the spaceman...

in the back of the shot.

And he thought, 'What?' As you would.

And looked through the photographs, and lo and behold,

standing in the background, almost, like,

floating behind the head of Elizabeth,

is this figure that you can only describe as a spaceman.

It looks very much like a NASA...

astronaut of that period,

wearing a big white spacesuit,

a helmet with a black visor.

Everyone had been watching it on TV, astronauts in their spacesuits.

So everyone knew what an astronaut looked like:

silvery-white suits and the domed helmets.

And this figure that is standing behind Elizabeth

looks like an astronaut that's sort of turned.

You can see the helmet almost, and you can see the white suit.

And so he was absolutely baffled.

What on earth is this figure?

When he wasn't taking photographs,

Jim Templeton was a fireman,

and he was used to dealing with the police.

So that was his first port of call.

'I've got this weird photograph, with this strange figure on it,

and it was taken overlooking the Solway Firth,

where there's these Ministry of Defence establishments.

Could it be something we need to let the Ministry of Defence know about?'

So they looked at it. They couldn't explain it.

They didn't think it was a double exposure or anything of that kind.

The head of Carlisle CID told Templeton

that it wasn't a hoax: it was a genuine photograph.

They thought that someone had wandered into the shot

and had been caught momentarily by Jim,

and that Jim hadn't seen them when he took the photograph.

Templeton was adamant that that was not the case,

and no-one could have wandered into the photograph

without him and his wife noticing.

When the story of the Solway Spaceman,

...and the picture that Jim had took...

appeared in national and local newspapers,

the family became instant media celebrities.

Newspaper reporters, television crews...

trekked to the Templetons' house

to interview Jim and Alice and Elizabeth.

The photo got into the media. It went all around the world.

He had people writing to him from Australia, from South America.

He was absolutely open about it.

He used to... He had a collection of prints of his famous photo,

and he was happy to give them to people randomly

who was interested in the subject.

Never tried to make any money out of it.

He said, if you use the print, if you publish it,

make a donation to charity.

So he had no financial sort of interest

in making money out of that image.

He just wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Who was that figure in the photograph?

As well as people who believed the face value of the story,

there were people who also thought it was a fake.

Back in those days, you couldn't just take a digital print.

You had to have negatives. There was original material.

And Jim was unwilling to part with it,

but Kodak could see the prints.

Kodak's technicians came back and said,

'What we can tell you...

is that the film hasn't been altered.

What it shows is what you captured.

There's been nothing superimposed...

or modified about that still frame.

They actually offered a reward of a free year's supply of film

if somebody come up to explain how it was faked,

I don't think he was a hoaxer, even though he admitted to me

that he liked playing around with trick photography,

I didn't detect any...

idea that he deliberately faked that photograph.

That is all I can say,

and as someone who's worked as a journalist for decades,

I can read people.

I can tell when someone is spinning a yarn,

and I didn't pick that up from Jim Templeton.

What had started as a day out at a local beauty spot

was fast becoming a media sensation.

And it wasn't long before the story

found a strange resonance on the other side of the world.

In Woomera, Australia, they were testing

a missile called the Blue Streak.

And the Blue Streak had been partially built

at Cumbria, so there was this link.

There were two technicians there who said they saw something

like the Solway Spaceman actually there.

The mission had to be aborted,

and technicians saw on the rocket range

two figures that looked exactly like the figure

in Jim Templeton's photograph.

So this got back to Jim in England,

and he took it on board as being significant.

I mean, he was looking for an answer.

'Is this connected to my photograph?'

But reports of strange goings on in Australia

weren't the only incident that made Jim Templeton wonder

how far his story had travelled.

He was about to get some unwanted visitors.

Jim Templeton did say that he was visited

by two strange men who wore black suits.

So, these two guys dressed all in black,

the classic men in black, MIB,

said, 'Yeah, we're from the Ministry.

You're not to talk about this. We're interested in the photograph.

Can you take us to where you took the photograph?'

When he asked them their names, they refused to give them.

They said, 'We don't use names.

We use numeric designations.'

'I am number nine,' said one of them.

'And I am number 11,' said the other.

So they drove him out to the Solway Firth in this Jaguar car,

and one of the guys said to him, 'When you saw the spaceman,

what did it look like? What did you see through the camera?'

And he says, 'I didn't see anything. That's the whole point.

I didn't see anything until we had the photos developed.'

And he said, well, at that point, the guy just said,

'OK, thank you very much,' and they both turned around,

trotted off back to the car, leaving him there thinking,

'Hold on a minute. Are you giving me a lift back to the fire station?'

They got in the Jaguar, disappeared,

leaving him to walk back to the road about five miles.

This could, of course, have been just a couple of UFO fans

who were...

drilling Jim for extra information, really.

He was convinced at that time that these were genuine...

officials from the Ministry of Defence.

He said, 'No, I'm convinced they were from the MOD,

and they were looking into how the photograph was taken

and whether there was any...

significance from an intelligence point of view.

If these really were government officials,

then the reason the photograph would have been of interest

could be that it was taken in the vicinity of a nuclear power station,

and that also provides a possible explanation

for how a man from outer space

has wandered into the back of Jim's incredible photograph.

Because of the power station nearby,

there were inspectors who wore...

spacesuit-type outfits

to test the radioactive levels

in the nearby Solway Firth.

One theory is that one of them appeared in the scene

just as Jim was taking the photograph.

I think the most logical explanation for it

is the one that was suggested by the CID in Carlisle

at the time when they looked at the image,

because they had access to the stripper negatives,

not just the one with the 'spaceman'...

in inverted commas on it.

They could see what Jim had photographed before and after.

I've seen some of the other images, and they don't often get published.

And what you see on the other images is Jim's wife...

kneeling down beside him

as they're getting Elizabeth to pose with the flowers.

And she's got a very distinctive...

blue-and-white patterned dress on.

And I think what happened was...

his wife sort of momentarily walked

behind the camera into the background,

turned her back, and that's when he took the shot.

And what you're seeing is the light reflecting off her dress

as she turns around and walks back behind the camera.

And if he was concentrating on getting a really good shot

of his daughter, he wouldn't necessarily...

remember his wife...

getting into the background of the shot just for a few seconds.

And she might not have even realised

that that's what had happened herself.

So that is my best guess.

But apart from that, I haven't a clue.

Next time on Britain's X-Files...

did an angel rescue British soldiers in World War I?

Can people really foresee terrible tragedies?

Why was a woman charged with witchcraft during World War II?

And did a reckless climate experiment

destroy a Devonshire village?

Subtitles by Sky Access Services