All language subtitles for Britains.X-Files.S01E02.1080p.NOW.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-RAWR_track3_[eng]

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 a 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 rate.

Everyone knows where they stand
with the death rate. Death rate.

Our first entry
from the British X-Files takes us

back to the horrors of World War I.

Did a guardian angel really
rescue outnumbered

Tommies from certain death?

In the first few weeks of World War
I, the British Expeditionary Force

was sent to France to try and stop
the German army taking Paris.

The two sides clashed near Mons,
where despite heavy casualties,

the small British force,
who were outnumbered 10 to 1,

managed to stop the German advance.

It was nothing short of a miracle.

So there were these stories
that what had happened was

the British were about to be
overwhelmed,

and this vision
appeared on the battlefield.

There was a Latin scholar
who was fighting there,

and he invoked St George to help
the British forces.

Some people said it
was like a luminous cloud.

Other people said it

was actual angels
descending on the battlefield.

Everybody claimed that they'd seen
an apparition or apparitions

that are described as angels
suddenly

appearing between the British forces
and the Germans,

engulfing them in a white light,
a sort of protective shield.

The story of the angel,
Angels of Mons begins with bowmen,

with archers.

Ghostly archers from the Battle
of Agincourt turn up

and kill the German troops.

And there were even stories
about German soldiers being found

with wounds on them that
they'd been hit by phantom arrows

But the story
of the mystical angels

and bowmen didn't begin
that day in Mons.

It actually started later, on the
29th of September 1914, in London.

There was a story
published in the Evening News,

and it was written by Welsh
storyteller Arthur Machen.

So it's an incredibly stirring
story, but it was a story.

In the first
edition of the newspaper however,

it wasn't marked as such.

People at home were wanting
to know what had happened at Mons.

There'd been no reports because the
British press censor appointed by

the government had basically stopped
any real news reaching London,

and then Arthur Machen writes this
story, plants it in the evening

news, people read it alongside
actual real stories from the front.

And they think,
that must be what happened,

something supernatural that
has saved our troops.

The original story
was about bowmen saving British

troops, but as the story spread
and grew in popularity,

the mystical side of the story
became embellished, and angels

were added to the events that saved
the British at the Battle of Mons.

So it's not about Bowman killing
the enemy now, on behalf

of British soldiers, it's about
angels protecting British soldiers.

Lots of parish magazines wanted
permission to reproduce this

story, and they got in contact
with Arthur Machen directly,

and he informed them that it
was only fiction, and they said

to him, “oh no, you must be
mistaken, this is a real tale”.

Today, we would
say that the story went viral,

but what was it about the story
that touched people to such

an extent that they were
so willing to believe bowmen

and angels appeared
on a World War I battlefield?

Here we've got World War I
and people dying en masse

and going off to war, loved ones not
getting an answer to what has

happened to their loved one.

No body, no funeral,
no last goodbyes.

Many, many people were
turning their interest once

again to spiritualism
and the idea of saving angels,

apparitions returning to you
and having a goodbye

if you've lost your son at war, your
nephew and your father and so on.

It helped people believe that we are
going to win, the British forces are

gonna win and God is on our side as
well, so why should you doubt that?

The story was
proving to be good for morale,

so the British government didn't
want to do anything to dampen

the idea that God was on our side
in the form of the Angel of Mons.

A military officer turned
up at the offices of a spiritualist

magazine in London and said 'all
the stories about this being

something that had been inspired
by Arthur Machen were untrue'.

And he knew that because he was
there at the Battle of Mons,

and he personally
witnessed this cloud,

mysterious sort of figures
in the cloud that had blocked

the German advance against the
British, and that people had also

seen St George with a sword leading
the fray against the Germans.

Even more surprising is
the fact that it wasn't just

British troops who
came to have seen something

supernatural on the battlefield
that day.

It was reported that some of the
Germans interviewed afterwards

had said 'where did the British get
these reinforcements from?

We saw like thousands of British
troops amassing',

so they saw something different
apparently to what the British saw.

Arthur Machen claimed that
the idea came to him during a mass.

He had read about how the small
British force had

seen off a larger German army,
came up with the idea of St George

riding into battle
to save the British troops.

But there are those who think
that he got the idea from someone

who had actually been at the battle.

The private journal of a brigadier
was recovered, in which he

described hearing from survivors of
the battle about the Angel of Mons.

What is important about that is
that this British brigadier

general wrote that entry
in his diary

more than a week before

the very first story of supernatural
intervention

ever appeared in print.

General Charteris, John Charteris,

he was interested in all these
rumours and in 1931,

he published his memoirs, which
he presented as almost like a diary.

And in the memoirs,

there's an actual entry which is
dated the 5th of September 1914.

And this says he'd heard
the rumours about the Angels of Mons

and that the soldiers had seen
St George, the patron saint,

on horseback with flaming sword,
charging the Germans

and scattering
the Germans at the Battle of Mons.

If that diary
entry of John Charteris is correct,

the 5th of September, that's a whole
two weeks before Machen was

inspired to write that
story of the bowman, and therefore

he couldn't be the person who
triggered off this rumour.

So the only evidence that
backs up the claim that the story

of the Angel of Mons might be true
is the diary of General Charteris.

David Clark
went to the archives to see

if his claims stand up to closer
scrutiny.

September 1914, there's nothing,
there's no, there's

nothing in his diary, there's no
postcard or letter back to his wife.

Then I started
reading his book again,

and in his book he says he didn't
actually keep a proper record of

what went on at the time, because he
was involved in the first battles of

the First World War so what he did
after the war, he put together what

he did have, and from his memory
of what happened, and from later

sort of stories he'd heard and he
sort of like said, oh well, I think

that happened in 1914, so I'll put
that down in September in his book.

So in actual fact,

the idea that he'd written this
specific letter that mentioned

the Angel of Mons in the 5th of
September 1914 didn't hold up.

To make matters murkier,

the Brigadier General wasn't
your ordinary British Army officer,

he was in fact head of military
intelligence at the time, the army's

top spy, tasked with pumping out
morale raising propaganda stories.

So are there any other witnesses
amongst the other ranks who

might have seen something to inspire
the story of the Angel of Mons?

Subsequent inquiries suggested
that nobody who had

been at the battle had actually seen
anything on the battlefield.

What happened, of course,
was that those who wanted to believe

began to think
they had seen something,

that seems to have been the essence,
so that by 1915, you do have one or

two those soldiers who were present
in France in August 1914, who are

saying they did see angels or bowman
or whatever on the battlefield.

But an inquiry conducted by the
Society for Psychical Research

in 1915 concluded nobody had.

Despite his best efforts,

Arthur Machen was never
able to convince those who wanted

to believe that the Angel of Mons
was just a story he had made up.

He himself protested afterwards,
he published a pamphlet called

The Bowmen and Other Legends
of the First World War

specifically to say that they
were legends.

And he later in life regretted
in some respects ever having

written the piece.

Our next entry
in the British X-Files takes us

into the world of premonitions,
where we find out what happened

when this extra-sensory power
was tested by science.

Disasters occasionally wreak havoc
in our mundane everyday existence,

destroying our hopes and dreams,
and often claiming innocent lives.

Yet they are often
foreseen by people who

seem to be in contact
with paranormal forces.

Could a scientific understanding
of these premonitions offer a

solution that would protect us from
the vagaries of our unknown fate?

At 9:15 on the morning
of Friday, October the 21st, 1966,

a vast,
coal tip on a Welsh mountainside

slid down the slope towards the
small village of Aberfan.

The tip was huge,
it was 111 feet tall and it

moved at astonishing speed, up to 21
miles an hour in waves which

reached up to 31 feet in height.

Within minutes the avalanche
struck Pantglas village school,

engulfing it in more than 150,000
tonnes

of sludge and spoil.

In total,
144 people were killed that day,

28 adults
and 116 children in the school.

It was the last day of term.

This terrible event filled
the newspapers

and television screens
like an inescapable black shroud.

I'm sorry to say there's
still about 110 or 115 or even

a few more who still
have to be got out.

One story they told
concerned a boy who survived

the initial tragedy only to die
later from shock.

This caught the attention

of Dr John Barker, who was writing
a book on the subject of people who

had died of fright.

He arrived in Aberfan the day
after the tragic event.

Dr John Barker was a consultant

psychiatrist at the Shelton Hospital
in Shrewsbury,

and he was a member of the Society
for Psychical Research.

Naturally, he had
an interest in psychical phenomena

and had heard about the Aberfan
disaster.

Dr Barker realised he wasn't
going to get much out of being

there in Aberfan after
the event had happened.

So he decided to contact

a colleague of his at the
London Evening Standard, who was the

science editor, to put out a call
for interest of any that believed

that they'd had a premonition
of the event before it came about.

This eventually was published

and they got 76 letters of people
talking about the premonitions.

The large
number of responses intrigued Barker

and made him determined to find out
if the phenomena of premonitions

could be useful in providing
warnings of imminent disasters.

He persuaded the editor
of the London Evening Standard

to open something called
The British Premonitions Bureau

and this would be run out of
the newspaper's offices,

and it invited readers to send
in all their premonitions.

And Barker had a very
clear purpose in this.

He had no longer any doubt that
premonitions were a genuine

phenomenon.

As a psychiatrist,
Barker's scientific method

relied on his understanding
of people who might want to help or

just feel involved in a new story,
so he insisted that the only people

he would follow up were those that
could prove that their prediction

was recorded before the event
they foresaw actually happened.

63 year old J Arthur Taylor,

who lived a long way
away in Lancashire, was typical.

He told Barker that several days
before Aberfan,

he'd had a dream.

And in that dream,
he'd been in a Welsh town,

and had been going to buy a book.

And on the wall of the bookshop,

he saw in big black letters
the words, Aberfan.

And he saw in his dream
a little village

and a coal tip
coming down the mountainside.

There were also
responses from people who actually

lived in Aberfan.

On the night before the disaster,

a little girl called Eryl Mai Jones
surprised and upset her

mother by suddenly announcing,

'Mummy, I'm not afraid to die'.

And she told her mum that on the
previous night she'd had a dream

in which she'd been going to school

and that the school wasn't there.

It had been covered by something
huge and black.

All the children
who died that day,

including Eryl Mai Jones,
are buried side by side in Aberfan.

But their tragedy was not
the only one that

came to the attention
of the Premonitions Bureau.

There were a few
sort of high-profile premonitions

and accurate hits that came
through to the Premonitions Bureau.

One of the most famous ones was
submitted by Alan Henschler,

one of the kind of virtuoso
premonition receivers.

All that's left of a Swiss
tourist airliner

struck by lightning over Cyprus
during a driving hailstorm.

Everyone aboard except four
crewmen was killed.

He predicted that there would be
a plane crash

with 124 victims.

And a month later,
the Britannia air crash took place.

There was 126 victims,
so he was slightly off.

But in general,
the things that he claimed to have

witnessed in his premonition
came true.

Most of the victims were Swiss
and German tourists.

Someone else who seemed
to be able to foresee terrible

events in the future was
Lorna Middleton.

She kept having these
premonitory experiences where

she felt like something terrible was
going to happen to Robert Kennedy.

She was adamant
and she kept sending in reports

to the Premonitions Bureau
and phoning them in.

And sure enough, you know,
not long after,

Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

Training in the medical
schools of the world today

are the physicians, the surgeons,
the medical researchers of tomorrow.

In fictional
stories of the supernatural,

such as Frankenstein or Dr Jekyll,

there is often a price to
pay for dabbling with the unknown.

But in Dr Barker's case,
that fiction became fact.

More than 700 people
wrote in with their premonitions,

their visions, of disasters and all
of those reports stacked up

on Dr Barker's desk.

And the weight of this

was taking its toll, not just

because they seemed to foresee
disasters all over the world,

but some of Barker's correspondents
told him they foresaw his death.

In August 1968,
that premonition came true.

Barker died suddenly from a brain
haemorrhage.

He was just 44 years old.

We have all heard of the terrible
punishments meted

out in the Middle Ages.

Poor unfortunates on the edge
of society were easy to blame

when a crop failed or
when plague descended.

But in the 1940s, during our darkest
hour, we once again

turned to these old laws
when evil was knocking at our door.

We associate witches with folklore
and the dark distant past.

So it might come as something
of a surprise that the last

conviction for witchcraft happened
as recently as the Second World War.

When according to some, it

became a very real
danger to national security.

The extensive collection
of dossier in Britain's once

secret X-Files is truly

a cabinet of curiosities.

But the X file on the prosecution
in 1944

of Helen Duncan is

one of the most curious stories
in this cabinet of curiosities.

It's the story of one of the last
women in Britain to be tried

and convicted and sent to prison
for practising witchcraft.

Between the 15th
and 18th centuries,

thousands of people accused of
witchcraft were executed in Britain.

90% of them were women, and the
overwhelming majority of them

were in Scotland.

In the Middle Ages, the church is
responsible for prosecuting

witchcraft, but in the 16th century,
the government takes that over.

So you start getting
the kind of trials where people are

accused of harming their neighbours,
and they're put on trial.

And at the end of that, they might
be executed

if they are found guilty.

The witch hunts died out in the
early years of the 18th century.

In 1735, Parliament passed a new
act,

the Witchcraft Act,

which reduced
the penalty for practising

witchcraft from death to one
year's imprisonment.

From that day on,

no one needed to worry that they
might be executed as a witch.

The new law sat on the statute
books.

It would be nearly 200 years
before the authorities once again

found a use for this
law against witchcraft.

Helen Duncan was a Scots
woman from a market

town in the Menteith
district of Perthshire,

whose nickname as a child was
Hellish Nell, simply because she

was a scamp, a tomboy, always up to
tricks, always getting into trouble.

She starts to believe that she
can see events

that are happening in remote
places from her.

And she thinks that she has
a kind of second sight, basically.

Later on in her life,
she develops that into a business.

She becomes a spiritualist medium.

In the wake
of World War I,

there was barely a family in Britain
that hadn't lost a relative.

And people longed to see or speak
to their loved one one last time.

Helen held seances, which offered
them the chance to do just that,

and in the process,
she could make a living.

The room in which she held
the seance would be dramatically

darkened, and Helen Duncan

would
go behind an opaque curtain,

and then she would go into a trance.

The really, really sensational
thing about Helen,

which drew massive public attention,

was that she seemed able not
just to talk to the dead but to

materialise them, to take them into
her body, and then pour out this

ghostly substance called ectoplasm,

which looked like a shimmering

cloud and would materialise into the
forms of recognisable people.

That is spectacular.

Not only did the people
from the dead materialise,

but they spoke in their own
voices through Helen.

But not everyone was
happy with Duncan's seances.

Some thought that she was
exploiting people's grief

and that the authorities should
put a stop to her business.

It wasn't until 1931

that Helen Duncan first got her
comeuppance.

Scottish police arrested her

and they charged her
with conducting a false seance.

She was convicted.

She was fined 10 pounds,

which is the equivalent of 600
pounds today,

and sent on her way.

By 1941,
Helen had moved to Portsmouth,

where she continued to offer her

services as a medium to the citizens
of this famous naval town.

And it was at a seance in 1943
that she made contact with someone

she shouldn't have.

The big warship called HMS Barham
went down in the Mediterranean

with 868 lives lost.

It's a Portsmouth ship
and Helen materialised

the spirit of a sailor
with HMS Barham upon his cap.

What is remarkable
about the appearance of a dead

sailor from HMS Barham is that the
public had not yet been

told that the ship had been lost.

It was still a military secret,
so this incident became

part of Helen's legacy as her
granddaughter remembers.

She told them that she'd
told their son that his ship had

gone down such and such a day
and all hands were lost.

And it was months before the Navy
gave out that information.

The British public wouldn't learn
about that officially until January

the following year, which raised
the question, how in the previous

December did Helen Duncan know
the name of

a sailor who had died.

The news of Helen's
seance reached

the ears of the authorities,
who were concerned that Helen was

able to access such sensitive
information.

They were worried that a loose
tongue was passing on Naval

secrets, so they decided to keep
a watchful eye on Helen.

In December 1943 and January 1944,

she held two seances,

and those seances were attended

by undercover naval personnel.

In the midst of the second seance,
in which she had retreated

once again behind her white sheet
and gone into a trance to

conjure up the spirits of long dead
soldiers and sailors,

they stood up and they grabbed the
sheet

to expose the very corporeal form
behind it.

It wasn't a spectre or a ghost.
It was Helen Duncan,

pretending to be a ghost

and issuing forth bogus voices.

It was no surprise to many
that Duncan had been

exposed as a fraud.

What was surprising were the lengths
to which the authorities were

willing to go to shut down her
activities.

Most mediums were prosecuted
at the time under the 1824

Vagrancy Act,
which focused upon the claims

they were making in their actual
seances, and the penalties tended

to be fines, but she was prosecuted

under the 1735 Witchcraft Act.

It was unusual to charge
people under the Witchcraft Act

in mid-20th century Britain.

The Witchcraft Act is from 1735,

so by then it
was a very old act indeed.

But it could be used to charge
people who, as the act said,

pretended to conjure up spirits.

Not only did
the authorities change

the charge to one of witchcraft,
they moved Helen's

trial to the highest criminal
court in the land, the Old Bailey.

After a gap of several
hundred years,

a charge of witchcraft was once
again heard in a British courtroom.

Everybody involved regarded it
as the trial of spiritualism,

and as a result,
there was gigantic press interest,

most of it hostile to Helen.

Gigantic interest
among spiritualists, which was,

of course, supportive.

The defence called
almost 50 witnesses to testify

to the truth of spiritualism.

So culturally, it
was a landmark case.

In the end,
the jury believed the prosecution.

It found Helen Duncan
guilty of witchcraft,

and she was sentenced to nine
months imprisonment.

Arrested for conspiracy and fraud,

but convicted in just 30 minutes
under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

She'd even offered to hold
a seance at the Old Bailey,

but the judge declined.

She became the last ever
witch to be jailed in this country.

It seems a very
heavy-handed way to treat

Duncan for what it was, at best,

a minor case of pretending
she could speak to the dead.

But what the authorities couldn't
tell anyone was that Duncan

was now at the centre of a news
blackout operation that could

help determine
the outcome of the war.

These men who have come from
so many countries and speak

so many tongues gathered together
in Great Britain to form this

vast Allied army.

From late 1943 onwards,
British military planners

and their American counterparts were
hard at work

on top secret plans.

Portsmouth was one of the most
important

locations for the planning of D-Day.

And the presence of Helen Duncan,

a known fraud who had previously

winkled out secret military

information and then used it to her
own advantage posed

an enormous risk to the plans
for D-Day -

that's ultimately why

she became a victim of one
of Britain's last witch hunts.

The one positive that
emerged from Helen Duncan's

case was the removal of the 1735
Witchcraft Act from British law.

In 1951, it
was replaced by a law that made it

illegal to hold fake seances.

And today, it is
covered by consumer protection

and unfair trading regulations.

Helen Duncan's case became a cause
celebre for the spiritualist

movement and remains so today.

Her
supporters demand a reinvestigation.

They demand her exoneration,
an official pardon for her

because they say she was genuine

and just happened to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time.

Famously,

the main topic of conversation
in Britain is the weather.

Its unpredictability can always
surprise us, so it is tempting

to try and control it, but
we tamper with nature at our peril.

Lynmouth is a pretty fishing
village on the Devon

coast in the southwest of England.

In the summer, when the weather is
fine, it fills up with visitors

keen to sample its charm
and the fresh sea air.

Like all English seaside resorts,
Lynmouth offers sun and fun,

boat trips and gay crowds,
bathing and dancing,

and all manner of amusement.

What the people
of Lynmouth couldn't have known

was that running through its very
heart was a destructive force

that would bring disaster and
tragedy on an unimaginable scale.

At seven o'clock on the evening
of Friday the 15th of August 1952,

the residents of Lynmouth
heard a terrifying sound.

Within minutes, a raging torrent
of water

flooded through their town.

Nine metres of water came
barrelling down through the river.

Millions of tonnes of water,

hundreds of thousands of tonnes of
debris cascaded through the village.

This flood in Lynmouth
happened during the night.

They were in darkness.

All they could hear was
the roar of the water.

That must have been
incredibly frightening.

This awful scene of destruction
following violent flash floods.

Eyewitnesses described it
as an avalanche of water roaring

out of the night to strike
the slumbering coastal region.

Hardest hit is Lynmouth,

a facet retreat near the romantic
Lorna Doone country.

Calm rivers were suddenly
changed into walls of water,

hurling a barrage of huge
boulders on the defenceless town.

And then as we watched further,

we saw a row of cottages near
the near the river and the flashes

of lightning, because it was
dark by this time, in the flashes

of lightning, we saw these houses
fold up like a pack of cards.

We swept out with the river
amid the agonising

screams of some of the local
inhabitants, which I knew very well.

The worst news
was still to come,

34 individuals lost their lives.

As people
searched through the wreckage,

they also looked for answers.

What had gone so terribly wrong?
How could this have happened?

Rain had been
falling in the area all day,

and the River Lyn, which was
normally a very shallow little

stream, placid, if you like,

was
transformed into a raging torrent.

In the days
before the disaster,

nine inches of rain fell on Exmoor,
which fed the River Lyn.

Normally, that would have been
absorbed by the moor, but this

time that didn't happen because the
ground was already sodden.

But there was another factor that
created the deadly nine

metre high wall of water that
rampaged through Lynmouth.

As the water came down from
Exmoor, it hit these bridges.

I believe there was 41. 38 of these
bridges were knocked out.

But every time that bridge was
knocked out, it gave a wall

of water behind it, which came down
at tremendous force to the next one.

So by the time the last
bridge was knocked out,

people saw this huge wall of water
coming along at a great height,

which must have been

incredibly frightening before it
actually eventually got to the sea.

At first, people were
willing to accept the natural

explanation that this was
a freak accident.

But then whispers began to
circulate that the murderous flood

might have been man-made.

One important discovery is
the ability to increase rain or

snowfall through cloud seeding.

From the 1940s onwards,
we had governments across the world

all experimenting for military
purposes, the forcing of rain

out of clouds to impede,
for strategic reasons, other armies.

The modern rainmaker
flies through clouds that have the

potential for rain.

He then scatters dry
ice particles that

act as a catalyst for the clouds'
moisture.

The people of Lynmouth
were too busy

rebuilding their village
and their lives to worry about cloud

seeding and whether it
played any part in the flood.

That is until a BBC radio report of
2001

produced new, shocking claims.

A BBC radio documentary alleged
there was a much more

sinister cause and one which
the government had been

responsible for and which it
had then sought to cover up.

What led the BBC to allege that
cloud seeding had been

responsible for the Lynmouth flood
were interviews with two retired

RAF officers and these officers told
the BBC journalists that in

August 1952, they had been deployed

on cloud seeding operations.

They said they were told when
they got back to base by Ministry

scientists that the experiments had
been successful, that the

cloud seeding had
resulted in a downpour.

Operation Cumulus
ran from 1949 to 1952,

the year of the Lynmouth Flood.

It was based at RAF Cranfield
in Bedfordshire, where

scientists worked with Ministry of
Defence meteorologists to identify

which chemicals, when seeded
into the clouds, could produce rain.

On the day of the flood in 1952,

we have this experiment of clouds

being seeded to force the rain.

One account says it's a failure,

but it does happen on the same
time as the Lynmouth Flood comes.

And what's interesting about this is
we've got a cloud formation,

a storm coming up from the southwest
approaches,

and the theory which is put
forward later on is this is

stalled by the efforts to the east
of Somerset to cloud seed.

So if you can imagine one storm's
coming up, it's pushed

back by another storm, gets stuck
and all the rain falls in Exmoor.

The BBC searched
for flight logbooks to confirm

the retired RAF pilot's testimony
about the cloud seeding flight.

And they found them.

What changed this from a curiosity
into a conspiracy theory?

It was that the BBC journalist
looked and searched in vain

for any official records
relating to Project Cumulus.

None existed.

And that led to concerns that
Project Cumulus may have

provoked the Lynmouth Flood,

and that it had been shut
down immediately after the disaster,

and then all the records relating
to the operation had been destroyed.

It's been rumoured since 2002
that there were secret files,

but I don't know of any
such files existing.

It's easy to say something is there,

it's harder to prove
something isn't there.

The gap where the missing
files might have been is

the perfect size for a conspiracy
theory, which, like all urban

legends, relies on a lack of
evidence rather than positive proof.

You could make a pun of this
and say the seed has been sown

because there's enough doubt as to
whether it was effective or

not to make you think perhaps
there was something to this.

Meteorologists say no.

The president of the Royal
Meteorological Society, Philip Eden,

went public, he said,
'this is nonsense'.

Firstly, the clouds

which these pilots flew above

and which were recorded
in the logbooks were the wrong

type of clouds, only certain
types of clouds are susceptible

to cloud seeding and these were
the wrong types of clouds.

More importantly

that experiment took place 300 miles

away from Lynmouth, it
took place over the home counties.

And although it
did produce a little bit of rain,

that rain fell on Staines,

which was even further to the east.

According to Eden,
this theory belongs to the never let

the facts get in the way of a good
story variety of journalism.

The problem
with conspiracy theories

is that they often ignore the real
human cost of the harsh

reality they seek to twist.

We gotta remember 34 people
lost their lives

in the Lynmouth Flood, and it
was for the generation that lived

there a life-changing experience,

and it haunts that village.

People who live there
still talk about it,

and it's part and parcel of who
they are and what Lynmouth is today.

Because the subtext underneath all
of this is with climate change,

is this going to happen again?

After the Lynmouth floods,
government did take a look

and say, you know,
were we prepared enough?

Were- are we really focused
enough on flood defences?

And they found there was a lacking.

So there was a re-look at how
we deal with flooding

and our flood defences in the UK.

And I think as time goes on,
the focus of this can often get,

you know, become diluted.

And then actually as climate
change becomes more prevalent,

we're seeing the results of hotter
weather and droughts

and more rain with more flooding,
then perhaps again

a re-look at this and how we can

avoid having such a disaster again.

But for that to happen,
we need to stop ignoring

the evidence and ensure a climate
of openness inside government.

But the signs are not good.

Now the curtain of official
secrecy is once again being

drawn back over what governments
and official agencies are up to.

What that means is that conspiracy
theories will mushroom.

They will metastasize in the dark

and damp caused by official secrecy.

And the result is that
when there is another disaster

like the Lynmouth Flood and there
will be, because there always is,

it will be blamed on some mysterious

secret and indefinable government
project,

whereas the likelihood is
that it's natural events.

Climate change, and an act of God.

Next
time on Britain's X-Files,

we look at the only known
photographs of real fairies.

A ship that is cursed to sail
the seven seas for eternity.

A death ray that can
destroy enemy aircraft.

And an incredible ancient power that
was put to use in World War II.

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