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 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.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services