Original subtitles

I'm Tim Tate.

I've been an investigative journalist

for almost half a century.

And what I specialise in is exploring official archives,

unearthing dusty old files from government departments,

spy agencies, the police.

This strange figure looked very much like an astronaut.

And what I have found in those collections, both in Britain

and in the United States, is a truly extraordinary collection of

real life X-Files.

True Cryptids, like the Yeti and the Mongolian Death Worm,

Death Worm, Death Worm.

And those files disclose investigations by the police,

by governments, by spy agencies.

Shortly after that transmission, Captain Schafer'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 to stand in the death ray. Death ray.

We pride ourselves on having conquered every corner

of the globe.

But even in Britain, there are still remote areas where monsters

can lurk and our imaginations can be unleashed.

Bodmin Moor in Cornwall is 80 square miles of beautiful countryside.

With its rocky outcrops and stone circles, it has been home to

myths and legends that go back thousands of years.

However, in more recent times, its bleak remote-ness has made it

a perfect habitat for a more fascinating creature.

Between the 1980s and 1990s,

Bodmin Moor was also home

to one of the largest outpourings of alleged sightings

of exotic large cats,

leopards, pumas, panthers,

who had apparently been roaming the moor,

savaging farmers' sheep and terrifying

the people who lived in the villages around them.

Whilst cynics and scientists dismissed the

sightings of the Beast of Bodmin as delusional, those who have

seen it with their own eyes are convinced that it is real.

There is no doubt that exotic big cats roam the British countryside.

A few years ago I was travelling from Exeter to Bristol to see

some friends in broad daylight on a coach.

I looked over into a field and I saw a puma.

There is absolutely no doubt that this was a puma.

It wasn't a dog or a fox or anything else.

I used to be a zookeeper.

I worked with all sorts of animals including cats.

And I know what I was looking at.

There have been lots and lots of sightings of a strange

creature, a black panther-like creature on Bodmin Moor.

And the sightings have sort of given rise to this notion of a

Beast of Bodmin.

But it wasn't just sightings that made people

believe that there were big cats roaming around Bodmin.

The Moor yielded physical evidence of dangerous felines prowling

the Moor.

You also began to get farmers sort of saying,

'well, my sheep was killed.

And the bite marks are not the bite marks you would expect if it

were a dog or a fox that killed it.'

This is quite different from the attacks of dogs.

Dogs kill by biting at the flank and side of the animal.

There is a lot of fleece and fur everywhere.

It's a messy kill.

And as well as eating the internal organs, dogs will crunch up

the bones. But big cats won't.

They'll rasp the bones clean with their tongues and eat the

soft tissue, but not crunch the bones.

I've seen a kill made like this in North Devon, transparently

from a big cat.

On nearby Exmoor, the situation became so bad that

the government decided to take drastic action.

The government had sent out, believe it or not, the SAS.

And they spent several months with night sights and high-powered

rifles trying to shoot the Beast of Exmoor and it

ran rings around them.

They saw it several times, but they could never get a clear shot at it.

And in the end, they had to give up.

If there are big cats roaming our Countryside, then

the government may well be to blame.

In 1976, The Dangerous Wild Animal Act was introduced to

regulate the growing trend for keeping exotic animals.

Well, believe it or not, up until around the mid 70s,

anybody could keep any kind of pet they wanted.

The superstore Harrods in London, their pet department, sold

lions and tigers and even gorillas.

All this changed in 1976

when a man was walking his pet lion down

the street in Birmingham.

It sounds insane now, but it actually happened and the

lion savaged a kid.

The government began to intervene on keeping wild animals

without a licence.

So you get the Dangerous Wild Animals Act in 1976.

You had to make sure you could keep these animals securely

and safely, and also you had to pay a very big licence fee.

This gives a reason as to why there might be

these animals out there.

People were saying, oh well, the owners of these wild animals simply

released them into the wild because they didn't want to pay the tax.

Whilst the Exmoor Big Cat evaded the SAS, on Bodmin, sightings

reached plague-like proportions, with a count reaching 60.

This caught the attention of the press, who

descended on Bodmin looking for eyewitnesses, and they had no

trouble finding them.

Rosemary Rhodes farmed on Bodmin Moor.

She had a sheep herd, and she claimed

that she had witnessed the beast, that it had savaged at least

10 of her sheep.

Farmer Rosemary Rhodes is out beast hunting.

She's certain there's a family of big cat-like creatures

stalking Bodmin Moor.

We're surrounded by moorland and there areas of coniferous forest,

vast areas of coniferous forest above us, and we've seen them.

We've seen the results of their handiwork.

When they end their kills.

What's more, she said, I'm convinced it's a puma.

And I say this because when I was standing at my kitchen

window, I heard the beast's cry.

It was like an appalling woman's scream.

Such was the level of public concern, the Ministry

of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food announced that it would hold

a formal investigation into the presence or otherwise of the

Beast of Bodmin.

In 1995,

the Agricultural Development Advisory Service,

what a mouthful that is, sent out a zoologist called Charles Wilson.

Initially, Wilson was given one month to

investigate, but the number of sightings meant that he

stayed in the area for six months.

The bulk of the evidence was verbal, but more importantly, he was

also given photographs and video recordings to examine.

Determined to get to the truth, Wilson decided to take a

forensic approach.

He isolated and examined the backgrounds of the

photographs, in particular, the walls that could be identified.

He then went out and measured the heights of those walls.

And when he had that, he had a scale against which he could

compare the mysterious black

feline captured in front of them.

And when he checked the ratio of the actual height of the wall

against the image of the feline, he was able to show that none of

these supposed big cats captured on these videotapes or in these

still images were any bigger than 12 inches tall.

They were, in fact, domestic cats.

The junior minister for agriculture said that this

whole thing is a fantasy and the livestock are being attacked

by dogs and foxes and stuff.

So the farmers got very angry about this.

Today it was announced that after a six-month inquiry, costing

more than 8,000 pounds, the scientists had found no

evidence of a Beast of Bodmin.

I am satisfied from the investigation we've carried out

that there is no threat to livestock in that area from a big cat.

Others, however, are still convinced that there are wild

cats living on the moor.

A local animal expert who keeps pumas is among those angered

by the inquiry's findings.

Well it's a government cover-up.

It's just to appease people, that's my personal opinion.

Now, I have seen Puma, my friends have seen Puma, my neighbours

have seen Puma.

Throughout the county, the Southwest, we've seen Puma.

We know they're here.

Rosemary Rhodes, the eyewitness whose reports had been

amongst the earliest to be published in newspapers and on

television, denounced the report.

She said she knew that the cat, the beast, existed.

And she sold up her remaining flock and muttered darkly about a

British government cover-up.

Why do people have this need to believe that big cats

prowl the remote fields and hedgerows of our countryside,

despite the forensic evidence to the contrary?

I think big cats are a very interesting phenomenon.

I don't think they roam the countryside, but what I think

they are are a modern rationalisation of what used

to be seen as the kind of supernatural black dogs.

So they're an otherness, they're an alien, and occasionally you

have people suggest that they are alien, but for the most part

they're thought of as escapees who are living wild and breeding wild.

So I think it's a kind of modern rationalisation of something

which would have been seen as supernatural.

And I think you can begin to understand how big cats sit

in this kind of popular folklore, which is spreading and

beautifully fun to follow.

Ultimately,

the truth about the Beast of Bodmin and its ilk

apparently at large

across the British Isles is that these stories

are nothing more than catnip.

Catnip which

commercially minded newspaper and television executives

cannot resist because they know

that readers want to read and watch them.

Unexplained disappearances often lead to paranormal

explanations, but one place that appears time and again in the

British X-Files can claim the title of the capital of the

paranormal world.

The Bermuda Triangle is this mysterious zone known for the

disappearance of ships and aircraft.

And it's basically, sort of its points

are Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda.

If you kind of make a line from the bottom tip of Florida,

upwards, downwards and back, you kind of hit

Florida, Bermuda, Puerto Rico and back.

It's not a definite area, but it's an area where there has been

a lot of sort of speculation on lost ships,

lost people, lost airplanes.

Some of the disappearances have achieved legendary

status amongst the paranormal community.

One of them is the loss of Flight 19, which was a group of five

American planes in 1945 that disappeared.

Before they lost contact, the main pilot sort of said,

'everything is gone, nothing is right.

I can't see the sea'. And that was it.

So you get this kind of dramatic, rather mysterious end.

Wreckage wasn't found, and all the flights were lost.

So you have the loss of planes, and more to the point, you have

the loss of personnel.

The area has certainly attracted serious attention from the

US Coast Guard.

They are very kind of diligent in about collecting data, often to try

to offset the sort of sensational reputation that the area has.

So a lot of their data indicates yes planes and ships do go

missing in this area but nothing that really indicates any

more than anywhere else in the world.

It's known for cyclones, it's known for hurricanes, it's also

known for particularly dangerous waters.

There is supposed to be some kind of magnetic interference with

compasses so there's those kind of interpretations given that

it's just is kind of a dangerous but natural place.

The other explanations are, shall we say, more creative.

I think the most creative one is that the triangle is actually

over Atlantis, and there has always been this speculation that

the Atlanteans had weird technology, ray guns and various things.

They say, oh, well, you know, maybe the ancient technology kind

of comes up and pulls the ships down.

The other suggestion is that it's a UFO portal, and they get sucked down

because the flying planes can go down safely, but human things can't.

It has been suggested that it could be a meeting point or a

breach between this dimension and another one, and that ships

and planes have been kind of drawn through into this other dimension.

The Bermuda Triangle was first described in an article

in the early 1950s, which described how planes and boats had

vanished in mysterious circumstances.

But it wasn't until the 1960s that the story really took off.

It was not until 1964 that the true father of the

Bermuda Triangle theory emerged,

and he was a none-too-scrupulous

American journalist called Vincent Gaddis.

In February 1964, Gaddis published an article, 'The

Deadly Bermuda Triangle', in a pulp magazine.

And Gaddis followed up this article with a best-selling book

later that year.

To support his theory, Gaddis retrospectively

claimed disappearances from as far back as 1840, but his most

important source came from an investigation

that appeared in the British X-Files.

Tucked into the dusty pages

of Britain's extraordinary collection of X-Files

are two formal, dry reports, official

reports, which have given fuel to the belief in the Bermuda Triangle.

Within the space of 12 months in 1948 and 1949,

two identical passenger aircraft

disappeared while flying over the Bermuda Triangle.

The Star Tiger took off from Santa Maria, an island in the Azores.

It was bound for Bermuda.

On board were 23 passengers and six crew.

At 3 am on January the 30th,

the radio operator on Star Tiger sent a

message to the operator on the ground in Bermuda.

That message was the last time

anyone ever heard from Star Tiger.

The British government ordered an inquiry, but there was

no trace of the aircraft, no debris recovered, no flight recorder.

We will never know what happened to the Star Tiger.

Within a year, the mystery deepened when the Star Ariel, the

sister aircraft of the Star Tiger, also vanished in the

Caribbean Bermuda Triangle.

Once again, the British government ordered an inquiry, but once

again they struggled with a complete lack of evidence.

Those twin disappearances formed the foundation stones for

Vincent Gaddis' belief

and publishing theory that the

planes had been swallowed by The Bermuda Triangle.

Now, as with everything that Gaddis wrote, there was precious

little evidence for it, but that didn't stop him.

He wove one phrase

into a tapestry of a theory

of paranormal explanations.

That phrase said that perhaps, perhaps,

Star Tiger had been lost because of some quotes

'external cause'.

To Gaddis, external cause

equalled paranormal force.

Almost invariably, when you get someone sort of saying, ah,

here is this mysterious disappearance, you also get

sort of a counter-narrative, sort of pointing out that very often

these descriptions aren't particularly accurate.

That they get the time wrong, they don't say that there is bad

weather, in fact sometimes they say the weather

is absolutely clear when in fact it isn't.

There's one example where in fact the plane landed perfectly

safely, but it wasn't reported.

More and more stories appeared, telling ever more

fantastical tales, accompanied by ever more outlandish explanations.

The hunger for stories of planes and ships vanishing meant that

over the years, the size of the triangle grew and grew.

But what about the story from the British X-Files it was all based on?

Was there ever a rational explanation as to what

happened to the Star Tiger and the Star Ariel?

When you look more closely at the evidence,

it becomes rather more clear

that what underpinned their disappearances was the

mundane, prosaic, albeit tragic,

realities of a not very good

aircraft company flying not terribly good aircraft.

The Tudor IV series to which both Star Tiger and Star Ariel

belonged was notorious amongst pilots.

It was notorious for poor engine quality,

for bad radio communications,

and the most likely explanation for the

disappearances of these two large passenger planes is that they

simply malfunctioned and crashed into the Atlantic.

But if that were the case, people would have expected to

at least have seen the wreckage of these aircraft and official

inquiries with clearer conclusions.

But airplanes that crashed due to no mechanical fault or human

error would not have created the legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

I think the Bermuda Triangle captured the people's imagination

because in a world where we seem to have the answers to everything in

terms of scientific understanding, it's fascinating to think that

perhaps there is still a part of the world that doesn't obey the rules.

It, you know, is a place where the supernatural, the paranormal

can take place.

We love mysteries and the Bermuda Triangle, although it's not a

mystery, is very easy to present as a mystery.

Now, cynics would also point out that these things sell.

They sell much better than the book which says the mystery of the

Bermuda Triangle has been solved and it isn't a mystery.

Fire is one of our biggest fears, so being resistant to

the searing heat of flames should be a blessing.

But in our next X file, it became the sign of a curse.

In September of 1985, a fire in the kitchen of Ron and May Hall

in Rotherham got out of control.

The result was that their little house was burnt to the ground.

The only thing that survived amongst the smouldering ashes was a curse.

Ron and May's house had been destroyed almost entirely in

the blaze, a fire which had started when a chip pan caught afire

and rapidly consumed the rest of their home.

A local reporter started talking to a fire officer on the

scene who said that the only object that was left unscathed by

the fire was a copy of the mass produced print

The Crying Boy.

The Crying Boy was an extremely popular print in

the 1960s, having sold in its thousands.

It hung on the walls of many working-class homes,

particularly in the north of England.

In those days, back in the 1980s, the working class were not

afraid of sentiment.

In fact, they courted it in a way that posh reviewers would not.

So the Crying Boy is a very good example of the sorts of

things that you would find in working-class homes.

Raking through the ashes of Ron and May Hall's home,

it became clear that their house was not the only one which had

suffered this terrible fate.

They had a relative in the fire service who then said, oh

well, yes, it's well known at the station that there are many

incidents of this sort, fires in homes where the print has survived.

The common feature in all of these stories was of that,

The Crying Boy print,

had not been damaged in the slightest by any of the flames.

On a slow news day, the little house fire in Rotherham,

with its remarkable survivor, got picked up by a national newspaper.

It was picked up by the Sun, and they ran a story with a very

sensationalist headline, 'Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy Picture'

with a sub-headline, 'picture is a fire jinx',

with the text, tears for fears,

the portrait that firemen claim is cursed.

Sun at that time, which had nearly, they nearly sold 4 million

copies every day, was run by an editor called Kelvin MacKenzie,

who was notorious for running rather lurid inventions in the paper.

And having a very detached relationship to the truth.

MacKenzie was...

a bare-knuckled bruiser of a hack.

He's most infamous for showbiz stories which had very

little, if any, foundation in fact.

Most famously, Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster, utterly untrue.

To Mackenzie, the curse of the Crying Boy was a story which

would drag in readers and would cause a sensation.

This became a very popular story for the Sun.

There was again another house fire, perfectly understandable

reason, an electric fire was too close to a bed.

But there was one of these mawkish crying boy pictures.

So every time this happened, the Sun kept running the story.

As they ran this story again and again, sentiments about the

crying boy started to turn in a darker direction as people

started to think, well, what is it about all these various

prints that might cause this curse?

Was it the case that the subject of the original painting was

actually abused in a more serious way than we might have

imagined, is crying about something really tragic?

And thus, you know, all of these prints are cursed.

Are the fires the child's revenge in some ways?

The public reacted with kind of mass panic and fear.

Lots of readers wanted to get rid of their cursed paintings,

fearing that also they would be subject to some curse, that

they would come to some harm.

Newspaper readers were terrified because they had

The Crying Boy painting hanging in their living rooms, and they

phoned the newspaper and they phoned fire services worried that it

would bring doom and destruction down around their heads.

At a time when the sun was involved in a brutal war for

readers with his competitors, it just couldn't resist taking

advantage of the story.

In a kind of attempt to keep the story going, Kelvin MacKenzie

offered to dispose of people's crying boy pictures on their behalf.

Well over 2,000 prints showed up, and they didn't really know

what to do with them. They were flooding out the offices and so on.

So they staged this huge bonfire on a pyre quite near Reading, brought

along a reporter and some page three girls, one of whom lit the match.

They did burn these things.

And then the story was reported in the paper on Halloween.

What the Sun had forgotten was that The Crying Boy,

if it is notorious for anything, then it is its

remarkable ability to survive attempts to burn it.

Although the Sun stopped publishing stories about

The Crying Boy, now,

countless cheap Jack books or cheap

television documentaries repeat the story and they've embroidered it.

Some have concentrated on the identity of the artist

who signed himself as G Bragolin,

only to find that no such painter exists.

Others have concentrated on the subject of the painting.

Who is the mysterious boy and why is he crying?

So maybe there's a spirit of a boy is trapped in the print and

causes fires in order to destroy the print and

free his spirit.

Perhaps the best invention is that the original painter who took

as his subject this crying boy,

the boy was a Spanish urchin called El Diablo,

the devil, whose parents had died

in a house fire and who then either set fires himself

or had the power to mystically attract them and start them off.

As the story got more and more elaborate, more bizarre

elements were added, it became harder and harder to see the

original story.

To find out if there was a basis, in fact, maybe if we go back to

the burnt out kitchen of Ron and May Hall, we might find some

truth amongst the ashes.

It's worth remembering that the station officer who first

said that he had seen loads of these paintings at fires didn't

think there was anything supernatural.

There have been tests done to test whether or not these things

are particularly flammable. They're not.

They're very printed on high density fibre board and the string that held

the picture up tended to go in a fire but the painting itself didn't.

So you could quite easily imagine how a perfectly normal fire

would burn the string, the painting would fall down, would fall

forward and then it would just seem creepy in amongst everything

else being damaged.

One other possible explanation was the varnish

that covered it, which just happened to be fire retardant.

So is there something about this tragic portrait that is

particularly powerful?

This is a really good example of what we call the phenomenon

of mass hysteria.

So mass hysteria largely works through the orchestration of

emotion.

So it works very much through the power of suggestion.

So you can look at all the kinds of headlines that the Sun used.

The mass production of fear, of panic, of anxiety.

If you think about conspiracy theories, they often

unsettled distinctions between fact and fiction, between the

rational and the irrational between the natural and the supernatural.

And people often believe them even if they're debunked or even

if there's an explanation offered that could be plausible.

So they show how people can invest and believe in things that

probably aren't true, that carry people's fears, their anxieties.

There were many people who hung on to those prints or tried to

give them to other people.

In fact, one of the firemen involved in the story was handed one

at his retirement party.

He, I think, very rationally decided not to accept it.

It's a reverse placebo in effect.

Even if you don't rationally believe that this thing is cursed,

having it in your home seems to be courting bad luck.

A cheap and cynical publicity stunt exploited for

commercial gain.

A scientific anomaly or something altogether more sinister?

You decide.

The British X-Files are full of the stories of ghosts from the

distant past, but a whirling sound in the dead of night in the

Peak District heralded a completely different kind of phantom.

Earlier today, Mr Burnaby Drayson, Conservative MP for Skipton,

was going through his morning mail at his Hamstead home when he

became suspicious about an envelope.

I had opened two or three letters, three letters, and then I

came to this one.

I looked at it, and immediately I felt it, I felt suspicious about it.

And I said, I think we've got a letter bomb.

In 1973, Britain was reeling from a succession of

IRA bomb attacks.

The technology was a step up from the crude devices

they had previously used.

Was this a sign that they were becoming more ambitious?

If they continued this escalation, people wondered what form

their next attack might take.

A security guard on duty

at a high explosives store in a quarry

in the Derbyshire Peak District reported seeing a mystery

helicopter, a phantom helicopter, which had been hovering very

low over the ammunition dump.

The security guard went to investigate this light over

the quarry, and when he drove towards the quarry, he saw

shining lights beaming down onto the ground.

And he could also hear the sound of um rotors.

These lights just lifted out of the Quarry and drifted off

into the distance.

It was like, what that, what on Earth was that?

But he reported that to the police, and that got to

Special Branch, who had also received a whole bunch of

sightings, not only from civilians, but from a police patrol.

Who'd actually seen very clearly what they described as a

helicopter practising landings and take-offs somewhere in the

same area of the Peak District around the same time.

Police inquiries revealed that the description matched

that of a Bell Jet Ranger, but only 37 companies or individuals

owned this type of helicopter in the United Kingdom.

An investigation showed that none of them had anything to do with

the sighting.

Whoever was flying this phantom helicopter was taking an

enormous risk.

Flying at such low level at night over terrain which was dotted

with electricity pylons meant either

that the pilot was phenomenally experienced,

probably ex-military or that he was a reckless terrorist.

In recent months, the IRA had used a helicopter.

It had stolen one from the Irish Republic, flown it across the

border to Northern Ireland, and used it in a terrorist attack.

That suggested it had the capability and indeed the intention of

using helicopters in terrorist attacks.

The Metropolitan police became convinced that this

machine was real and it was being operated by Irish terrorists

because the police had been given information by an IRA

terrorist who was in custody that the IRA were practising some

kind of an attack on the British state using a helicopter.

West Yorkshire police told MI5

that it had received further

information that the IRA was going to fly a helicopter into a

prison where IRA prisoners were being held, lift them up and

take them away to freedom.

This became like a huge thing.

I mean, most of the regional and national press every day for

a period from about mid-January 1974 through to the end of

February, it was headline news.

It was like phantom helicopter

Seen Again, you know, Metropolitan Police Helping Derbyshire and

Cheshire Police Try and Find This Pilot.

There's a big media frenzy around all these sightings.

And the idea that it was the IRA

was just one idea amongst many.

Some people felt it was a homemade helicopter and somebody was

trying it out.

Another explanation was it was a devil maker pilot

operating illegally at night.

There was all sorts of rumours that were reported about who

might be flying it.

The most bizarre one of all, I think it was in the Daily Telegraph,

suggested that this was a modern wealthy lover who was having

an affair with someone and he was using this helicopter to

visit his mistress in the middle of the night.

In the hands of Fleet Street's finest, the phantom helicopter

story became a cause celebre.

The Daily Mirror flammed up its account by comparing the

pilot to James Bond.

This somehow became a secret agent story.

With the press in hot pursuit and the public being

whipped up into a frenzy, the Home Office called a conference to

investigate the phenomena of phantom helicopters.

They had representatives from all the different police forces

involved, MI5, Ministry of Defence, and they were trying to get

to the bottom of was there something they needed to worry about?

Was this a real machine?

Was it being prepared for some kind of terrorist attack from the

sky on London?

The Home Office inquiry had access to all the radar data, for

the period for the area.

On only three occasions did that data

indicate that a helicopter had been

in the rough area

at approximately the time that a report was cited.

Despite the confusing evidence, the possibility

that the IRA were using helicopters in the north of England was

something that the government had to take seriously.

We all know now, looking back on the 9/11 attacks, on all the

other things that have happened, that this is not a fanciful idea.

We know from 9/11 that terrorists use aircraft when they crash

them into the Twin Towers, etc, etc.

So this is 1974. This was actually quite a novel idea.

But the fact that police officers had seen this aircraft, that

the police had had intelligence from a convicted IRA prisoner that

they were using this helicopter, so they had to take it seriously.

So the home office came up with a request to the Ministry of

Defence, and it asked the Army and the Air Force what its

technology and resources could bring to bear on the mystery.

And that involved using the Air Force's own Fleet of helicopters.

Or, in an extreme case, chasing down the phantom helicopter in

Harrier jump jets.

Well, the Ministry of Defence quite reasonably responded that any

of these courses of actions were incredibly dangerous.

Quietly, the plan was shelved, but the following

year there was another spate of phantom helicopter sightings.

This resulted in the strangest explanation of all, as this

time the phantom helicopters were linked with a Black Panther.

There was a weird story that made it into the headlines about linking

the phantom helicopter with a serial killer called Donald Neilson.

Two schoolboys at Kidsgrove have found a tape with a message 'drop

suitcase in hole in the wasteland at Kidsgrove, Staffordshire'.

Nicknamed the Black Panther by the press, Nielsen

had murdered four people in post office robberies and had now

kidnapped the wealthy heiress, Lesley Whittle.

While he searched for the kidnapper,

Mr Whittle said he was scared to death.

So eventually, when he'd been captured by the police and he

was on trial, this came up.

His barrister at his trial in 1976, asked if anyone had

seen a helicopter on the night he kidnapped Lesley Whittle.

Charged with the murder of Lesley Whittle four days ago,

Donald Neilson today faced eight further charges.

The idea that there was some kind of link with the

phantom helicopter was actually used by his defence barrister to

try and suggest that someone else was responsible for the

kidnapping, that the police had got the wrong man.

And that there was all these sightings of these strange

helicopters, and maybe it was the pilot who was involved in the

kidnapping.

Unsurprisingly, this defence didn't work, and

Nielsen was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Phantom helicopters were the talking point of the moment.

People said they'd seen one, somebody else said they'd

seen one, somebody else told somebody else that somebody

they knew had seen them, and that had been reported to the police.

And the reports which had accumulated in police inboxes

had merely been reports of reports which eventually could be

reduced down to three genuine sightings at most.

The files do indicate that a chief constable did write a report

about these sightings and he didn't seem to think it was a real

helicopter because there's no patent of his activity, he seemed to

become sceptical of the whole thing being a real helicopter or

the IRA was involved.

The file just ends in October 1974.

They didn't follow it up.

The sightings petered out and the result is the helicopter and

its pilot were never identified.

So it remains a complete unexplained mystery.

For aficionados of conspiracy theories and UFO rumours,

there remains one delicious irony in the story of phantom helicopters.

For decades, the British government and the British

military has dismissed UFO reports

as merely mistaken sightings

of normal and perfectly innocent helicopters.

In the case of the phantom helicopters,

the situation was reversed.

The phantom helicopter was no more than a helicopter, but it was

perceived as phantom because people were ufologists.

In the end, it's a story that tells us both about the fear of the

times and the culture of irresponsible sensational

reporting by Fleet Street newspapers.

Next time on Britain's X-Files, could evidence

really survive from a 2,000 year old global catastrophe?

Did a headless ghost stalk London Park?

Was a moth-like creature a portent for doom?

And are creatures in the atmosphere the cause of plane crashes?

Subtitles by Sky Access Services