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.

The 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...

Death Worm, Death Worm...

And those files disclose investigations

by the police, by governments,

by spy agencies.

Shortly after that transmission,

Captain Schaffer'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.

Our first entry takes us back to a simpler time.

A time when it was still possible to believe in magic.

Do you believe in fairies?

If not, is that because you have never seen them?

But would you believe in fairies if you saw them with your own eyes?

The story begins in the summer of 1917.

Two young cousins,

Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith,

were staying at Elsie's family home in Cottingley,

which was then a little village

on the outskirts of Bradford in West Yorkshire.

Elsie was 16, Francis was 9,

and both liked to play in Cottingley Beck,

a little stream which ran through the wooded valley

and right beside the end of the Wright family garden.

But Elsie's mother, Polly,

didn't like Francis playing in the beck.

Frances' daughter, Christine,

tells of the extraordinary events that followed.

And her mother used to come home tired,

and got angry with her,

for always continually getting

her shoes and stockings wet.

And so then one day, she said,

"Why do you go down to the beck? What takes you down there?"

And she said, without thinking, "I go to see the fairies."

Suspecting the comment was a child's made-up excuse,

Polly told Frances that she couldn't tell tales.

At which point, Elsie told her mother she's not making it up.

"I see them too."

Evidently, this remark was greeted

with some scepticism by Elsie's mother

because the girls then decided

that they would take photographs of fairies down by the beck.

Elsie borrowed her father's camera,

and she and Frances went back down to the beck.

And when they came back, they said

they had photographed the fairies.

When the negatives and the prints came back...

...they appeared to bear out

Elsie and Francis's story.

One of the images showed Francis lying on the ground,

surrounded by little dancing fairies,

figures in diaphanous clothing

who were dancing around a young girl.

Two weeks later,

Elsie borrowed her dad's camera again

and went back down to the beck

and, this time, Francis snapped Elsie

sitting on the ground

with a little gnome dancing beside her head.

Arthur Wright, Elsie's father,

thought it very suspicious

but couldn't work out how the images had been made.

But Elsie's mother was more receptive.

She was a member of the Theosophy or Spiritualist Society.

And she took the photographs to a meeting.

The meeting to which Polly took the photographs...

...had a subject for the night

and that subject was "Fairy Life".

Victorians really loved

the idea of fairies in the countryside.

And one of the reasons for that,

and perhaps this is particularly relevant to Bradford,

was the increasing, the growing sense that

the countryside was disappearing into industry.

Fairy lore was just huge in this period.

It's not that long since the play "Peter Pan" first opened,

with Tinker Bell, the fairy.

Pantomimes with fairies were kind of an annual event.

Well, Polly's photographs caused a stir.

And soon they were brought to the attention of

the Theosophical Society's president.

Edward Gardner was a prolific writer on the subject

and travelled internationally

to give lectures about the society,

about its beliefs, about its theories.

Gardner was so excited by the photographs

that he took them to the best known supporter of spiritualism

in the world at that time, Arthur Conan Doyle,

the author of Sherlock Holmes.

Don't you, for one moment,

suppose that I am taking it upon myself

to say that I am the inventor of spiritualism

or that I am even the principal exponent of it.

There are many great mediums,

many great psychical researchers,

investigators of all sorts.

All that I can do is to be a gramophone on the subject.

Conan Doyle's son, Kingsley,

had very sadly died

just towards the end of the Great War

and so, you know,

he was already interested in spiritualism.

When he heard about these photos,

it's possible that he also kind of wanted to

lean into the idea that fairies were real.

Arthur Conan Doyle was commissioned to write

um, articles on fairies

for the Christmas edition of the Strand magazine.

I take it the new issue of The Strand magazine is out,

containing another of your slightly lurid tales.

- It is indeed. - And what do you call this one?

I call it "A Scandal in Bohemia".

It's not a bad title, eh?

Although he gave false names for the girls,

inevitably they were tracked down.

And so suddenly, she had people following her,

trying to get a photograph, trying to talk to her,

and she had to slip out of the house, back of the house,

go on the back streets to get to school and avoid them.

The attention of the media

focused the spotlight of scepticism on the charming story.

How could these photographs of fairies be real?

So they were sent to Kodak for analysis.

Well, what the experts were looking for was a double exposure.

They were looking for the idea

that the plate had been first exposed

as a photograph of one of the girls

and then exposed as a photograph of fairies.

That was the kind of faking that they were thinking with.

And of course they were able to rule that out.

But despite the doubts,

Conan Doyle's backing ensured

the status of the photographs in the public mind.

His fame essentially sealed it.

These two photographs...

...because Conan Doyle had endorsed them,

were in homes up and down the land,

believed as absolute cast-iron proof...

...that fairies had been photographed.

What happens next

is what always happens in these stories.

Interest died down.

The girls grew up, got married

and got on with their lives.

But the Cottingley fairies didn't just disappear.

People were still intrigued by what had happened.

And in the 1960s,

interest in the story piqued enough

for journalists to trace Elsie and Frances

and ask them if they really took the photographs of fairies.

The first time journalists did this,

both Elsie and Frances said,

"Nope, the photos were real.

We really saw fairies.

We didn't fake anything."

The first crack in the girls' bond of silence

came when Elsie suggested

that the fairies might be photographs of her imagination.

But then Joseph Cooper,

an academic who was interested in the story,

befriended Frances.

Joe Cooper came down, spent the weekend with her,

and she said, Joe, "I've written a secret part of my story".

So he didn't say anything. That was okay. Um...

They went to bed as usual at 10 o'clock at night.

And next thing she heard a sound downstairs.

And so she called down, "Joe, what's wrong?"

And he called back up, "Francis, very often I stay up at night.

I can't sleep too well. Do you mind if I stay downstairs?"

She said, "No, no, that's fine, that's fine."

Totally unsuspecting.

But he knew where she kept her documents.

And she was totally trusting him,

not believing anything would happen.

And two weeks later,

the Unexplained Magazine had the whole story of the fix.

So what fiendishly clever trickery

did these two young girls use to fool the world,

and no less a figure than Arthur Conan Doyle

into believing that there really were fairies

at the bottom of the garden.

They went about this really systematically.

They created tracings from a book.

It was actually called "Princess Mary's Gift Book."

She was very clever, very artistic,

and she drew them, cut them out beautifully,

tinted them, and then when it was all ready,

they asked the father to borrow the camera,

and then she artistically arranged the fairies in front of her,

sticking the hat pins on the back of the figures,

putting them into the grass

and very artistically arranged in front of Francis,

so Francis was standing like this on the bank,

looking at the camera,

and the first photograph was taken.

I don't think that there are any bad actors here.

I think, in effect, everybody played their part in this.

You have Francis, who is the fairy experiencer.

You have Elsie, who enjoyed the limelight

and enjoyed the attention that these photos were garnering

and, you know, but we have Elsie's glamour, in effect,

to thank for the reason why we're talking about these photos now,

because Elsie was the one with the creative talent,

the artistic talent, enabling her to create these fairies

and produce the photos.

But there is one photograph

that is different from all the others, both in style

and for the fact that it features neither of the girls.

Totally different.

The others are solid paper. You can see the paper,

you know, when you really look, because it's solid.

But that last photograph,

the grasses are there,

and you can see transparent figures.

You can see the grass is behind, the grass is in front.

You can see one beginning to appear.

See a tiny little face on the right hand side,

that's peeping out of the grasses.

And my mother said, "That's genuine.

That is real. Those are the fairies I saw."

I really believe that Frances did see fairies.

She gives a wonderful description in her memoir.

She reports that, at that time,

she saw a leaf twirling, without a breeze,

and later on she sees a little man

that is twirling that leaf.

She also talks about little men trooping over the branch,

over the beck on a willow branch

and this place, she comes to take it for granted

that she goes there and she sees these beings.

Today, the pictures are categorised as a hoax

in the pages of the British X-Files.

But although there may not have been any fairies,

is that really fair on Frances and Elsie?

I don't think it was a hoax.

I think it was, and the girls themselves said it: mischief.

And now mischief is a very fairy quality.

I personally love the idea

that these two innocent girls

completely tricked Conan Doyle,

who clearly believed that his own powers of reason

were magically akin to those of his creation, Sherlock Holmes.

What a mind!

Sharp enough and brilliant enough

to outwit the great Sherlock Holmes himself!

Our next file takes us to the high seas,

where a cursed ship roams the great oceans.

Its cargo? Nothing but bad luck.

The 17th century was the golden age

of the Dutch East India Company.

Sailing ships from the Netherlands

sailed the globe in search of trade.

Their determination to make their fortune

meant taking risks on the high seas,

and this inevitably led them into danger.

But sailors are superstitious

and knew that if they weren't careful,

they might anger the gods of the sea

and summon up a deadly curse.

The Flying Dutchman is a ship under a curse.

It's a curse brought on it

by the captain of the ship

who is, typically, trying to round a point,

trying to make his way through a storm

and makes a rash vow.

He swears that he's going to round this point,

even if he has to keep trying for the whole of eternity.

He swears that he's not going to give in to the storm.

He says, "No, I'm going to make it. I'm going to make it."

And, as a result of that curse,

he's doomed to keep trying for ever and ever.

The earliest sightings of the Flying Dutchman

were in travellogues,

and people were basically repeating

what they'd heard sailors talking about

on board ship.

And yet this evolved, in the 19th century,

with more of a backstory.

So that actually has a figure,

a character who becomes Captain Vanderdecken,

and he's this damned sailor of this sinful crew

who are forced to sail around the world until doomsday.

Sightings of the ship,

vainly battling against the sea in order to make port,

became common amongst sailors.

But the curse wasn't confined to

the captain and crew of the Flying Dutchman.

Any living crew on a genuine, real-life ship

who spotted the ghost ship

would become struck down,

would be killed or condemned to devastation,

doom and destruction.

It's linked to the disappearance of a ship

around the Cape of Good Hope.

And the story elaborated from there,

it sort of existed in folklore

until the sort of late 18th century,

and then it started to get picked up in literature.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,

this myth grew and grew and grew.

It formed the basis for supernatural tales

by novelists and poets,

and the German composer Richard Wagner

composed an entire opera based on the story.

The original story was set in the 17th century

around the Cape of Good Hope,

a notoriously stormy area

in the southern tip of South Africa.

However, since then,

sightings of the Flying Dutchman have spread around the world

and into more modern times.

One of the examples I've found

was reported in the New York newspaper in 1920s

and it referred to a sighting by a British Navy,

Royal Navy convoy during the First World War

and the mysterious appearance

of an additional ship in that convoy.

What happened was the convoy was then attacked

by German submarines

and again, the person who had sighted it

on board his particular ship,

that was the only ship that was destroyed.

And then after the conflict,

that ghost ship disappeared.

NARRATOR In 1886,

John Dalton contributed a story to a book called

"The Cruise of Her Majesty's Ship Bacchante."

In it, he described an encounter with the Flying Dutchman.

But more extraordinary still

was the identity of one of the witnesses.

One of the people who spotted that infamous ghost ship

went on to become King George V.

According to Dalton's account,

the crew, and there were a lot of them,

spotted the ship off the coast of Australia,

and they saw it as a sort of phosphorescent glow.

"July the 11th.

At 4am the Dutchman crossed our bows.

A strange red light,

as of a phantom ship all aglow,

in the midst of which light, the mast spars

and sails of a brig 200 yards distant

stood out in strong relief

as she came up on the port bow,

where also the Officer of the Watch

from the bridge clearly saw her,

as did the quarterdeck midshipman

who was sent forward at once to the forecastle.

But, on arriving, there was no vestige

nor any sign whatever of any material ship.

At 10:45 am...

...the ordinary seaman who had this morning

reported the Flying Dutchman

fell from the foremast crosstrees

onto the topgallant forecastle

and was smashed to atoms."

This account was written by John Dalton,

who was the prince's tutor.

Given its paranormal nature,

we might expect Buckingham Palace to have objected

or even censored the story,

if they felt it was inaccurate

or damaging to the future king's reputation.

But that didn't happen.

So was it true?

Did King George V really see the Flying Dutchman?

On closer inspection,

the ship's log contains no reference to the sighting.

However, that logbook does record

the death of the crewman

who fell from the topmast,

to the deck, to his death.

So are there any rational explanations

that might account for all the sightings of the Flying Dutchman?

There's a range of theories that have been suggested.

There's those kind of rational scientific theories

that, essentially, this is misperception.

The watery environment of the, of the sea,

you've got mist, you've got mirages,

you've got the sort of play of sun and water

can easily distort what people are seeing.

You've then also got the fact that

there are quite a lot of derelict and abandoned ships

that can drift into the shipping lanes.

And so people just see at a distance

these eerily empty ships

that have been sort of exposed to the elements.

They have this kind of haunting quality to them.

Virtually all sailors,

even as late as the Prince of Wales account,

suffered to some extent with scurvy,

and that can affect both eyesight and the mind.

It's not that uncommon

for scurvy to induce hallucinations

and altered states of consciousness.

And one of the altered states of consciousness

that it tends to induce is anxiety, fear and paranoia.

If visions of the Flying Dutchman

were caused by scurvy,

that might explain why the sightings have now stopped.

However, do we really want a rational explanation?

Isn't there something in the story of Captain Dedecker

and his crew sailing the oceans for eternity

that speaks not only to frightened sailors, but to us all?

I think we just find the idea of someone

who's both immortal and deeply unhappy,

a fascinating tale.

The idea of somebody who lives forever

but doesn't gain any benefit from it,

who, indeed, wants to escape from life into death,

is always a very powerful tale

that reassures the rest of us

about the fact that, actually, immortality

might be a blessing and not a curse.

The arms race produces

ever more powerful weapons,

but what if there was a device

that could destroy the missiles

that threatened to destroy the world?

Death rays are the stuff of science fiction,

comic books and B movies of the 40s and 50s,

or even earlier works by H.G. Wells,

depict Martians laying waste to whole cities with one lethal burst.

What general wouldn't want to get his hands

on such a deadly weapon?

In the years following World War I,

governments across the world

took the idea of a death ray

very, very seriously indeed.

And a dusty file,

held at the British National Archives at Kew,

contains an astonishing story

that a self-proclaimed inventor could make them.

A death ray, which would help vanquish their enemies

in all future conflicts.

The nature of warfare changed in World War I.

It was now industrialised and mechanised.

Governments realised that the next war could be won

by the side with the best technology.

Everybody thinks that the coming war

is going to be dominated by aerial warfare,

in particular, and that the, you know,

that the nation that commands the air

is going to win the war.

The government of the day was desperate to find

something that would bring down enemy aircraft quickly,

conveniently and cheaply.

Step forward, Harry Grindell Matthews.

Born in Gloucester in 1880,

he trained as an electrical engineer

and went on to become an inventor

specialising in the relatively new

and exciting field of electronics.

Harry Grindell Matthews was one of the greats.

In fact, I'd almost say the greatest forgotten inventor

of the first half of the 20th century.

He made his name as a maverick, as an outsider.

He kind of styled himself as

Gloucester’s answer to Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison.

Someone who was just bursting with ideas

and knew how to make them happen.

He was someone who saw himself

as someone who could see a new world that was coming.

The files in the National Archives record

that he had staged a demonstration

for Britain's military chiefs.

In which, for the first time,

his radio telegraphy was able to put the ground

in contact with a pilot in a plane

600 feet up in the sky, and two miles away.

Now, that had never been done before

and was a positive advance.

He also invented, or at least claimed to have invented,

the first talking pictures.

He produced a film featuring

an interview with Ernest Shackleton

before Shackleton set off on his expedition.

And Matthews' technology didn't really catch on.

But it wasn't these inventions

that would earn Harry Grindell Matthews his reputation.

In 1923, newspapers across Europe

began reporting experiments in Germany

and the scientists there had allegedly been

conducting experiments using a death ray.

And that death ray was able,

apparently, to bring down aircraft in flight

and had done so, allegedly,

to French planes flying over German territory.

The military potential was obvious.

Unfortunately, there was not a shred of truth...

...in these extravagant claims

for the German "death ray".

Within months of the German claims,

Grindell Matthews announced to the press

that he had been working on a similar experiment

and made the bold claim

that he had made a death ray that really worked.

At the time it was received kind of rapturously.

It received so much press attention.

I mean, it's a great piece of branding: the death ray.

Everyone knows where you stand with a death ray.

This was exactly what the British government

needed to blast their military into the future.

Under a certain amount of pressure from the government,

who were at least potentially interested in a death ray,

he invited government scientists to his laboratory.

So there was Grindell Matthews

and three representatives from the War Office,

two of them scientifically based;

one was an engineer, the other one was a physicist.

The test itself was in two parts.

In the first part...

Matthews fired his ray at a light bulb

some distance away;

a light bulb that was not connected to any form of electricity

or any other wiring.

And Matthews’ ray lit up the light bulb.

Having shown that he could

turn on a disconnected light bulb,

they then moved on to the second part of the test.

The test was supposed to show

how the Death Ray could take out enemy aircraft

by turning off their engines from the ground.

Basically, if you fire it at the aircraft.

It shorts out the Magneto in its engine,

then it comes to the ground.

The Death Ray looked like a big spotlight

with three smaller spotlights sort of around its rim.

Turned it on,

it shot, apparently, a jet of blue light

across the room.

And turned off a single-stroke motorcycle engine,

which had been running on a table. - On the surface, then,

it looked like the death ray was potentially viable.

What were the problems?

Well, the first was that

the experiment with the light bulb

was hardly innovative science.

It was actually a standard attraction

at Fairgrounds at the time;

and as for the motorcycle test,

well, the military chiefs noticed

something a little bit strange about that,

because throughout the experiment,

and particularly at the crucial time

when Grindell Mathews pressed the button...

...he had one of his assistants

standing conveniently beside the motorbike.

Government officials themselves were...

...dubious, to say the least.

They strongly suspected that they were being fed a line

and that the Death Ray didn't really do

what Matthew claimed it could do.

They suspected that they weren't being allowed

to properly inspect the apparatus...

...simply because it wasn't what Matthews said it was.

Undeterred by the demonstration,

Grindle Matthews decided to use

his considerable skills as a showman

to make a film showing

what his powerful death ray could do.

Matthews, looking visionary,

looking scientific,

white-coated in his laboratory,

then switches to a scene of the death ray itself.

This huge futuristic-looking cannon,

smoke reeling all over it,

and then an image of a city in flames.

It didn't escape attention,

certainly on the part of government scientists,

that the death ray, as portrayed in the Pathe newsreel...

bore very, very little resemblance

to the apparatus that they'd seen in the laboratory.

A very different kind of thing.

The film, which has been very, very carefully edited,

doesn't actually show the death ray in action.

The most it shows is Grindell Matthews

standing beside the machines,

the machines having been switched on,

and something in the distance lighting up.

As evidence of a lethal death ray,

it's worthless.

Matthews claimed that if the British weren't interested,

then he had backers in France.

But the truth was they didn't really exist.

Pursued by angry shareholders,

Grindell Matthews bounced back with a new invention,

a sky projector that could throw images onto clouds.

And in 1937,

he got real interest in his invention from Germany.

He was summoned to Berlin

to talk about the sky projector,

where he met Hermann Goring

and he met Goebbels, as well, to talk about it.

Apparently, they wanted his invention

to beam Hitler's face onto the underside of clouds

while at huge Nazi rallies.

He didn't, in the end, end up licencing it to the Nazis.

After a period in America,

he once again found himself in financial trouble

and settled down on top of a mountain in Wales.

There is a story of Grindell Matthews

having a little box

with sort of knobs and dials on the side,

and him lying on the grass bank by a road,

watching cars going up and down,

fiddling with the dials on his box

and watching the cars stop of their own accord.

Did Harry Grindle Matthews

perfect his death ray

at his secret laboratory on top of a mountain in Wales?

Or was this story perhaps like the death ray itself,

all a hoax?

I think you would probably be overstating it

to say there was a straightforward hoax.

It seems pretty clear to me, at any rate,

that the death ray...

...didn't do what Matthews said it could do.

In the end, it simply wasn't suited for the battlefield.

Apart from anything else,

if a plane is flying about 200 miles an hour,

how are you going to be able to train a laser on it

from about 5,000 feet away?

He had an idea.

He thought he could make it work,

but to get it to work he needed funding,

he needed money...

...and he never got that money,

so the death ray never developed, really,

beyond the pipe dream that it was.

Our next story comes from Britain's darkest hour.

In times of danger, our senses are often heightened.

But does that also apply to our extra-sensory powers?

Suddenly, all of London seemed to be aflame.

Hermann Goring's arrogant Luftwaffe had struck from the air.

Millions of tonnes of incendiaries and high explosives

rained down from the skies.

Over 40,000 civilians killed.

Over 130,000 injured.

Two million houses damaged or destroyed.

This was the was the Blitz.

It lasted nearly two years

and marked Britain's darkest period in World War II.

And one of the greatest dangers was to the air raid wardens

and the emergency services,

because it was they who had to dig out the dead

and barely living, once the damage was done,

not knowing whether more attacks were coming

or whether they would stumble over unexploded ordnance

which could blow them sky high.

This led to one of the strangest episodes

in Britain's X-Files, and that was

the dowsing detectives of World War II.

It all seemed to sort of be kicked off

by an incident in 1941, in Warwickshire,

near a small town called Leamington Spa.

The Luftwaffe were targeting various cities,

Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry,

and, on some occasions,

aircraft would have gone off course

or they would have dropped the bombs

and they didn't hit the target,

and maybe they had a load

and they just wanted to get rid of the bombs on board

before they flew back to Germany.

In this case, the aircraft were over

this rural part of Warwickshire

and just dropped a load of bombs in the middle of a field.

By unlucky chance,

two local factory workers,

Harry Marston and James Hyatt,

were walking along the path

and were caught in the appalling explosion.

And of course, the local police

were immediately brought in, trying to find the bodies.

They'd obviously been killed, these two guys,

but they needed to locate the remains.

There was one particular constable called Philip Terry

and he was someone

who was able to divine,

using twigs or metal rods,

where buried objects were

and, in this case, he used a hazel rod.

And then he came up with an additional suggestion.

He said, "If I had an article of the men's clothing

and I wrapped that round my divining rod.

I don't know, but maybe that would help

direct the search."

So Marston's cloth cap was somehow obtained.

And he wrapped it around the hazel rod

and started walking around

over these mounds of earth

and straight away, he got this sort of feeling that,

you know, he could feel the rod moving in his hand.

And said, "That's where they are."

And he could pinpoint exactly.

And straight away, they dug down and found the bodies.

As the country was at war,

there were strict instructions to report

any unusual events like this to the war office.

These bomb sites must be reported.

The report landed on the desk of a Ministry scientist,

Professor William Curtis,

and he was both curious

and slightly sceptical,

and he resolved to see for himself...

...where this apparently miraculous divination had taken place

and to test, with some degree of scientific rigour,

whether it had actually occurred.

And so Curtis went to the bombsite

and he got PC Philip Terry to meet him there

and as they wandered over the craters

left by the German bombs,

Professor Curtis spotted the obvious.

The two craters, basically,

where these bombs had dropped

and there was a path going between them,

and this is where the two guys had walked,

and the body was found near the lip of the crater.

So he was quite sceptical. He was saying,

you don't need this special dowsing ability

to work out how, perhaps,

Philip Terry guessed that that's where they were.

Because if they were by this, walking along this path

and you've got the crater there,

it's likely that it's here and they've been buried

immediately to the side of the crater.

He then wrote up a report in which he said,

this can't be taken as

a particularly convincing case of divination.

But a short while later, Philip Terry struck again.

This time he used dousing

to find the location of a man who had drowned

and had been washed up on the bank of a river.

The actual rod in his hand,

it was twisting round.

There's no doubt about this. It was actually moving.

He could feel the hazel rod.

And so it's all pointing at that tree by the riverbank.

Of course, they went there.

The body of the drowned man was there.

So again, a copy of this report was sent to London

and, of course, this is a bit perplexing for them.

NARRATOR Once again,

Professor Curtis visited the location.

And once again came to the conclusion that

the place where the body was found

was the most logical location for it to wash up.

There were others in the war office who were still convinced

that divination might be useful on the battlefield,

and, in one instance,

an officer was tasked with using dowsing

to find the location of gas pipes at an army base,

but the experiment was a complete failure.

And a note in the Ministry's files

pointed out there were better uses of resources

than pursuing the belief in a folk myth.

This man is a douser,

and he works with a dowsing or divining rod

to find radiation that is undetectable to normal instruments.

And some dowsers don't even need tools.

They just use their hands.

But regardless of how it's done,

the purpose of dowsing is simple.

To find radiations or mysterious powers

emanating from the earth.

Now, is this real or just an elaborate act?

Amongst the believers in dowsing and divination,

however, were senior members of the establishment,

including former Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Mrs. Wylie will show you

how she discovered this well.

She walked about here for some time, the rod in her hand.

There was no movement.

She came along there,

then, suddenly, you found the rod going up.

In times when, perhaps, water was short

and they needed someone to locate a water course,

and they went to a certain person

who had a reputation,

you know, the cunning folk, they were known as,

and these were maybe people

who employed other magical practises

to find lost treasure, lost objects

and if you gave them a coin

or, you know, there'd be some sort of financial transaction

they would employ whatever arcane methods

that they had at their disposal to find these things.

So it's a genuine folk tradition.

Rescue squads laboured night and day.

Hey Warden, I've found her!

Desperate times lead to desperate measures.

And Philip Terry's success,

backed up by a long folk tradition of dowsing,

led a desperate government

to seriously investigate his claims.

This is not surprising,

the fact that a dowsing detective

or people with alleged psychic ability

have been in some way tested,

because during this hour

any possibility have been in some way tried.

However, psychic detectives have never been officially tested

or officially involved by the government.

Only some people within the army

tried to use those and tried to test them

because they have the belief, personal belief,

that this power actually existed.

But any of those tests proved

that this ability didn't exist

and were completely useless.

There was to be no more official interest

in divination as a useful tool...

...for more than 20 years.

Then at the height of the Cold War,

the military, the British army,

once again picked up the idea

as something which could prove useful

should the army have to deal with buried bombs.

They'd heard these stories that

dowsers had the ability to find buried mines.

It was obviously something that took root

in the intelligence arm of the war office,

that certain people had this ability.

Blue is for water,

red is for diagonal positive streaks,

green is for growth,

yellow is for the global net, and white marks

the medial eloquent lines for the power point.

Now, don't look for this in any scientific textbook.

Dowsing isn't accepted by the scientific community.

All the tests that have been done around the world

on dousing detectives

under controlled conditions,

from searching for water,

from searching for a specific target,

have been completely unsuccessful.

So it has been always proved

that all these alleged power do not work.

So what is really happening

when someone is dowsing?

Why does the rod or the pendulum move?

What is happening is that

just thinking about a possible movement of the object

that the person is touching or holding is creating

very tiny movement between the finger,

for example, of the person,

and these movements are increased and emphasised

by the shape of the object.

Dowsing may have a long folk tradition,

but when it comes to the harsh realities of warfare,

if it doesn't work on the battlefield,

then it will be cast aside.

And that is what happened to the dowsing detectives of World War II.

Despite PC Terry's conviction

that he was able to use

traditional divination rods to find bodies,

despite all the other experiments and tests,

it was abandoned as a technique

in the late 1960s.

The only thing we can say with absolute certainty

is that those experiments took place

and that they eventually formed their own little corner

of Britain's extraordinary X-Files.

Next time on Britain's X-Files,

do big cats really stalk Bodmin Moor?

What do the files tell us about

planes and ships that vanished near Bermuda?

What explanation do they give

for a sad painting that would not burn.

And what were the strange lights

that terrorised the north of England?

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