Paranormal Files Marathon: Mind Boggling Sightings and Abductions | Season 1 | Retold

[Music] you're seeing a flesh and blood being in the middle of flames and it's not burning this object was something out of star wars of today i just sat there and i was totally gobsmacked the very strange thing was about to happen to me that changed my life forever these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] when in shropshire 1995 [Music] horrified locals witnessed a fierce fire demolish the old town hall the true cause of the fire remains unknown even today but as the smoke cleared a far more sinister mystery rose from the ashes [Music] today the restored town hall is once again a local landmark its restoration was a huge project for the town and one of the first people on the scene the morning after the great fire was demolition's expert roger stokes it was the morning after that i arrived here at the town hall to look at the damage along with the the fire officer and assess what we could do to make the building safe so we walked up the metal fire escape which was had managed to survive you get this oily deposit as we got up there and we came to walk onto the landing i noticed a series of what appear to be footprints uh coming across diagonally across the the landing looking at them i thought well these are a child's footprints they look to be about the size that are i don't know 10 12 possibly 14 and i happen to mention to the fire officer i said the kids have been up here early this morning aren't they and he said well no there's been nobody up here at all we've been the first we're the first two people that have been up here we've had fire crew on duty all night and there's also been police officers outside so there's no nobody been up here at all roger stokes is not naturally superstitious and as the reconstruction of the hall was a priority he wrote the incident off until a few weeks later one of the labourers along with the site agent saw a figure they couldn't see the head in detail but it looked like somebody wearing a long dress and there was a glow around it they obviously didn't really take too long a look at this they saw it and hightailed it back down there the stairs as fast as they could go had something sinister happened on the night of the fire what or who was behind these unexplained sightings when the demolition crew had moved in to clear the wreckage why a small section of the original town hall had mysteriously survived charred but intact this plaque now hanging in the new entrance held a vital clue it was in march 1677 that the what's become known as the great fire of wham broke out in a cottage at the top of lake lane at the about 50 yards from what is now the modern town hall the fire swept through the town uh virtually destroyed it and at the end of it all uh the scapegoat i suppose for it was jane cherm a 14 year old maid who was preparing a fire for uh the sister coming home from work and um she accidentally set fire to the inside of the thatched roof of the cottage where she was living and working the fire over 300 years ago started by the young jane chern combined with the mysterious survival of the commemorative plaque intensified the intrigue but a crucial witness from the night of the fire emerged that would propel the mystery to the front pages of the world's press yeah on the specific night i was answering where i'm about to see him right away and i saw a large plymouth smoke and it's got a nice guy now i always take my cameras with me and at this time this the specific day i had him with him in the car so i jumped out run rain and took as many pixel as possible of the fire one was right in the back on the fire escape there's some on on the main roof of the building and also around the front where i thought the front that the game is going to come down when i was developing the negatives i noticed there's a spot on whether nexus shouldn't have been there i noticed there's a like a small head sticking over the railings by the fire escape so then i developed it on paper and as i was swirling it starting to develop it this little head comes through and it's like a body of a young girl it looks like a girl standing behind the fire escape with the flames lapping around it and where come i don't know the figure in the photo stands directly on the spot where roger stokes discovered the footprints the following morning could this apparition be jane chern was this the figure the construction workers saw before they fled if it wasn't jane churn who or what was it it's very unlikely that anybody could have just wandered around in an area where firefighters would have been working for several hours unnoticed and then to have climbed to the external staircase and stood where allegedly the photograph suggests that they would have stood it's the way i imagined jane cham might have looked uh sweet-faced lots of curls the sort of girl who would fill a major role in a cottage or house yes if anybody been standing there you know their clothes would have ignited within seconds as their skin with a blistered belly very quickly no human being could have stood there for at all let alone for any length of time with a photograph as important visually as as web it's important that we look for any explanation that we possibly can so first of all we look for could it possibly be a double exposure a little bit of hoax and from our point of view having looked at the the negative the original negative on high power digital enhancing equipment we couldn't see any evidence of trickery double exposure fraud or anything like that we approached dr vernon harrison he was past president of the royal photographic society and he'd been heavily involved in in kodak for for many years he said he could find absolutely no evidence of double exposure no rooms of fraud what he did find in his opinion and that has to be stress it's only vernon's opinion uh was that what tony had caught on film basically quite innocently and what he's on the photograph is a large chunk of wood happened to be caught in the act of falling so in vernon's opinion this was basically just bits of debris from the building dr vernerson stated in his lecture that he thinks it's a fallen piece of wood falling from the roof um i can't shout myself i to me it looks very much like a young girl but at the end of the day what i decided i don't know but it looks like a young girl to me i suspect it's not a piece of timber it actually looks as if the the apparition whatever it might be is outside of the building more than inside the building anyway it doesn't look like a piece of timber might look actually it's definitely a face definitely a young girl a nice pretty young girl yes footprints in the still smoldering aftermath of the great fire two construction workers fleeing an apparition and then the photograph a burning log a clever hoax or jane chern the young servant girl responsible for the devastating fire in whim 300 years before nobody's trying to hoodwink anybody as certainly as far as i know and as i believe it this story is true i really don't know what it was whether it's a piece of timber or whether it's a real apparition but i do know what it wasn't it certainly wasn't a human being i don't think it's double exposure i don't think it's falling wood well i think the photograph possibly shows is maybe an apparition and as far as we're concerned the case still remains open i don't believe in ghosts but i know that's something i've photographed that shouldn't be there at the end of the day this photograph has made my life hell and i wish that someone had said to me what is on the photograph and explaining what it is and i'll be quite happy then you're seeing a flesh and blood being in the middle of flames and it's not burning and you have seen or i have seen the results of that figure being there you don't believe what you've seen you can't believe what you've seen and yet you have seen what you've seen even as i tell the story now the hair on the back of my neck is honestly he's standing up on end there's a light coming from underneath i'm getting back into the cam i'm going this unique video footage is of police constable alan godfrey in a state of hypnotic trance doctors are attempting to recover 40 minutes from alan's consciousness lost on a cold night in november 1980. [Music] pc godfrey had been out on night shift driving out to a local estate near todd madden to investigate a series of strange reports from concerned locals just as i'm about to turn up there something caught me caught me my eye i was kind of gonna turn up and then i looked up the road and it was an object whatever that object was it made me stop turning and i decided to go investigate i got within about 20 yards of this object and i'm telling you now forget what you might believe or disbelieve this object was something out of star wars of today [Music] was i scared i suppose i was i'm scared when i go to a domestic i'm scared when i go to a pub to eject a drunk you get adrenaline rush i just sat there and i was totally gobsmacked it's never crossed my mind at that time was it a spaceship you know that was the last thing i was thinking i was just wondering what the hell it was what it was doing there and i was more concerned about somebody coming the other way and crashing into it i just didn't know what to do with it pc godfrey tried to radio back to base on two separate radios but was unable to get through one either so i'm left here with a situation i was a panicking but wondering what to do next i had to make a decision pretty quick what you're going to do i remember picking my clipboard up and i thought i'll do a sketch a quick sketch of this it was approximately 20 feet wide it was about 14 feet high it was hovering off the ground i could see my police car the headlights were shining right underneath it it was diamond in shape but the bottom half of the object seemed to be rotating anti-clockwise very slowly but as i'm watching it you know we're in cobble i realized that it was actually going that fast clockwise it was the optical illusion of going backwards [Music] and then it was just this brilliant brilliant bright light it was just a and then i was at the other side of the object just like that it was another 40 yards up the road and i'm driving the car first reaction looked in the mirror nothing there turned the car around went back to the scene nothing there what's going on you know have you hallucinated if it was it was very very real it was a very very real hallucination no i realized what i'd seen was real and it happened why would he come forward unless it was true what's he got to gain he's not doing it for financial gain and that money has never been discussed when i'm talking to him you know he's just clearly bothered him uh he has seen something at close proximity within 30 meters in this case for a duration of seven to eight minutes you know you can't get confused at 30 meters and at 30 meters you can rule out all the usual excuses of a meteor balloon swamp gas airplanes whatever what other people have said over the years you know i've been told it was venus what venus was doing blocking the road i don't know i mean lots of theories have gone around at the time uh i'm telling you that object was real it was solid it was a nuts and bolts craft believe you me over the next few weeks several other sightings of strange objects in the night skies came in five other police officers from the surrounding areas all reported that they had seen something strange that night allen was asked by his superiors to sign the official secrets act but the story had already hit the national press and attracted the attention of ufo investigator harry harris i was then contacted by norman collins he was then a detective inspector of police head of the manchester fraud squad he invited me to come and interview alan a crowd of us crowded into allen's front room and alan related his event and then after that he's grilled by norman collinson and i mean grilled at some stage and i can't remember at what point it became apparent that he'd lost time through exhaustive interrogation the team discovered that roughly 40 minutes of allen's evening remained missing but they couldn't account for what happened when we discovered that allen had suffered an amnesia a missing time it occurred to me that hypnosis might assist in probing his missing memories and we arranged acts of hypnosis to be carried out by a consultant psychiatrist and lecturer in clinical psychiatric medicine at manchester university and another doctor who carried out hypnosis uh for the there's a police from underneath i'm getting back into the cam i'm going for the camera it was a bit strange watching yourself asleep if i wanted a better word and but i was telling the incident as a as i remembered it in my conscious memory or leaving the police station doing or what i've told you earlier on right up to during the sketch i hear myself saying that i'm floating i'm being carried or floating as it's black everything's black and i tell him to uh i'm in a room and there's some horrible things in there and he i had to describe them horrible who's horrible who's there i want to talk about them why not that's horrible can you briefly describe [Music] he mentioned i mentioned uh these little creatures uh about three foot three foot six i uh with lamp-shaped deads dark eyes that's how i described and i was very very frightened of them any objects on the bed no completely going to get on they want you to get on it are you getting on it what's happening now it was kind of watching yourself and saying yeah i would react like that i would i would do that but i can't remember doing it you know this is weird this this isn't this can't be right you know he's i'm going to know him you're getting on the bit and why are you i describe these creatures attaching something a bracelet or something to my leg and these little things came over and plugged into this oh when when i heard that that that did it for me i had to what do you do do you believe what you're saying i mean been abducted by an alien i mean it's not right is it you know come on it was bad enough having to live with the i've seen the euphor syndrome never mind i've seen a uniform been abducted disturb me so i had to come up with a solution all these things are flying around in my head and i'm thinking there's got to be an answer there's got to be a rash i'm a pleasure i could be it's going to be a rational answer this why am i saying this what am i going this incredible story for did it happen or didn't it happen i i believe alan wholeheartedly i don't believe he's capable uh or that for that matter anybody he's capable of duping something for so long under those conditions i.e three months apart quite obviously hypnotized quite obviously deeply hypnotized comes out the same scenario same answers to same questions no i i don't believe his life one moment if it was the only case ever reported and nobody else had ever said anything similar then you might say well this is odd how come it's only just happened to one west yorkshire bobby and not to anybody else but there's a rash of cases not only in this country all over the world alan godfrey is not alone i know the incident the encounter was real that's no argument that i'll stand up anywhere you like and i have done for 22 years and i'm not going to change my mind now that incident happened it was a nuts and bolts crap and i wasn't the only person that saw it the hypnotic regressions and the abductions one or two things it happened it was real or i was reliving something that i'd read about and got it confused with my own and memory i've been hypnotized i've come out with that nobody'll ever know not even myself but that is the way i cling on to reality what on earth is it never seen anything um quite like that before we didn't know what it was because it wasn't moving like an aircraft most ufo sightings can be dismissed pretty pretty quickly others take a little bit longer but then there's some that still leave us scratching our heads something happened there i don't know i think it's put there for some reason and i cannot understand what it is [Music] these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] august 2000 the skies above brighton a strange light is encountered by a police helicopter crew could it be a ufo [Applause] my name is john tickner i was a policeman until um just a few weeks ago when i retired from sussex police where i've been for 30 years the last 12 years of my service was on the air support unit working on the police and ambulance helicopter as far as i remember it was a normal day it was a a night shift that we do we'd work through until two o'clock in the morning and we just had a normal shift it was a fairly clear night as i still like quite a quite a pleasant typical august summer evening we were then heading back towards shawron which is about 12 miles away it's normal practice for us just to instead of just going from one place to another and focusing on on the home part because we're in an emergency service we'll listen into the police radios in the towns as we pass them and just generally look about and what i was doing that night was i was operating the the thermal image camera and just just looking around casting around the brighton area that we're passing over and we're listening to the brighton radios just to see if anything that was going to happen um that we were ready for and briefed about so that we knew what was going on john's crew were nearing the end of their working day on a routine collared brighton's revelers below them parted into the night unaware of the mysterious drama unfolding in the skies the first thing that happened was in fact sean that the paramedic he was sat in the uh right hand rear seat looking out the window and he was the first one to see just a light as soon as i saw it i i notified the pilot so that he was aware of it so he could say in case we needed to get out of the way and also if he could talk to the pilot and see why they were in our area um and while they were flying so low we then flew around and tried to identify as soon as we could but the helicopter pilot was unable to open communications with the other vehicle concern grew for whether the object was a danger or not so i looked out of the window initially and saw the light just so i could work out where to take the camera and then brought the camera around onto it to see what the thermal image picture would give me it didn't have the the normal you know the tail lights and the flashing lights you would you would sort of normally see on an aircraft so we didn't actually know what it was with the camera trained on the object the mystery would surely be solved what i was expecting to see was the shape of an aircraft because that's what we normally see if we can't work out what the lights are or where they are or where they're going and put it on the thermal image camera and you get a lovely silhouette of the aircraft or the helicopter and you can actually work out what it is usually but on this occasion i found it on the camera brought the camera around onto it and it was a cylinder it's difficult to say how big it was it's very difficult at night time in the dark to judge a distances and size of things and all we could see was this light so didn't have a clue how big it was when it's at night you can't tell how close it is you know it could be very very close but it could be very very far in the distance that's the problem with any video footage of lights at night john's camera was now carefully tracking the object's path giving his crew the images they needed to solve the mystery initially it did give the impression of moving quite quickly and away from us so we were kind of moving around you can actually see that on the video footage that it does seem to be we do seem to be chasing it around um and that was quite odd to start with that it gave the impression it was moving very fast we had sight of it and either it passed us or we passed it it went down the starboard side of our aircraft [Applause] we were we were curious as to what it was because we we need to know just on safety grounds really what's in our airspace it is very unusual to have anything at that particular height over brighton over any town or city that's general aviation is not permitted that low commercial aviation is many thousands of feet higher than that most kites and balloons and things are well below it it's an area where we're normally on our own at that height so that's i suppose what took us a little bit by surprise we then flew around and it seemed to um it gave the impression of moving away from us and we gave the impression that we would you know we were trying to have to chase around to catch it up [Music] there may be a whole reason a whole variety of reasons why a police aircraft would take an interest in in something else certainly another aircraft reasons that they may not make public either the shape was something that that i just wanted to try and work out what it was working most of the time with the thermal image camera you like to think you get quite good i mean i can't tell you whether it's a boeing 737 or an airbus or something but you can see very clearly you know two engines and an aircraft you can see the military helicopters that are sometimes around at low level that's the only other thing that was going through my mind that it might have been but you can see the shape of the helicopter the rotors going around the heat from the jetty exhaust all the things you could see what i could see here was just one single light in a daylight camera and this this cylinder shape in the uh in the night camp and he's trying to put those two together just to make some logical sense of what we were seeing we talk about credible witnesses and you know one of those that you put in that category is is a police officer not only a police officer but in a helicopter at the time with some very good quality photographic equipment films an anomalous object at night both with night vision and ordinary so that's why you know people become interested in it because police officers you know respected members of the community not likely to make up stories people are more likely to believe it because it's come from a reliable source it was something so unique to them and bear in mind they're in the air all the time and the following this that the other that they perceived it as being extremely strange when you see it on the film it looks extremely bizarre it's an unusual shape it quite clearly is there and he quite clearly gets quite close to the helicopter he was corroborated by the other people in the helicopter you know it's a very puzzling case [Music] i was very pleased in some ways uh to be able to to record it if you see something that's slightly different or slightly interesting i mean the general rule of thumb is no one believes you and i'm probably included in that same bracket as a one of life cynics as a policeman and as a pilot having seen something that i found interesting and then a little bit out of the ordinary i was very pleased that at the time i was able to uh to record it i actually had the camera on and managed to get this little bit of footage photographic video testimonies is no better than just ordinary eyewitness testimony they're coup two are combined i mean most photographic evidence is submitted when people say well i've taken this picture or i've taken this video and they observed something thereafter it wasn't something they were actually filming and without question usually this is something conventional it's just something that's appeared on the film a bird or a photographic fault of some kind um but the the good thing about um photographic evidence is you can actually put it under the microscope so to speak you know witness testimony is fine to a point but you can't examine it any further scientifically whereas a film or a photograph you can you can you can analyze it by computer take it to the laboratory and so on so it's something a little bit more tangible which makes it that much much more interesting and um you know hopefully we'll we'll give you some more answers than just what the witness claims to have seen john tracked the object using the sophisticated technology in the helicopter hoping to finally identify brighton's visitor we've reviewed this tape um many times and it's been the subject of much discussion even a little bit of mirth i suppose i'm i'm happy in my own mind i know what it is when you look at footage uh i'm very very uh cautious to say whether something's a ufo or not as such are you genuine supportedly et because it's very difficult to verify and you can make you should really only make informed judgments when the analysis has been made yet it looks very unusual and i think in this case was treated quite rightly as an unidentified aerial object which it was but after investigation it would appear now that there is a credible explanation initially we got it on the infrared camera and that you can see on the on the um on the video footage and that that you know confused us we didn't know what it was in and then we managed to pick it up on the on the normal video camera when you look at the film uh in in color rather than through the night vision you can see it is a man-made balloon of some kind what it does demonstrate is that the people who are involved in ufo research do not accept things can't blanch you know you know you just don't take it as red right that's an alien it's not like that at all the close encounter between the helicopter crew and the strange craft lasted about four minutes but they were still unable to solve the riddle of brighton's alien visitor if you see the video you will see exactly what we saw no more and no less and and you can make up your own mind in my mind it's it's fairly clear i believe it's a hot air balloon or a lantern uh something of that description um who's to say whether i'm right or wrong i've i've made up my mind that's what it is but i mean you look at the video you make up your own mind the white horse of westbury wiltshire an internationally renowned landmark in a county that boasts some of the world's oldest mystical sites in august 1980 three circles appeared overnight in a cornfield below the horse it was the beginning of a crop circle phenomenon that provoked intense media attention and a whole generation of hoaxers crop circles came to the fore in the early to mid 1980s when some of the national media national newspapers picked up on them headlines such as as e.t phoned home i think was one of them so give you some idea of the time frame we're dealing with and they've been a subject of hot debate ever since freddie silva is a respected researcher into crop circles through scientific investigation he has developed plausible theories of some mind-boggling concepts wheelchair has a very interesting relationship with the crop circles principally because of the location on the earth which just sits on one of the world's deepest aquifers it's a chalk aquifer about 400 feet deep and as such the water that trickles through the chalk in itself creates an electromagnetic spin effect i certainly believe that there are energies within the earth that again conventional science tends to ignore or dismiss if you were to look up crop circle in the dictionary what you probably find would be something like a perfectly unsized area in wheat rye barley whatever there are areas where the plants are bent an inch above the soil perfectly laid in waves as if flowing water there are genuine crop circles but they are the simple circles rather than the uh the hieroglyphics and heavens knows what else that we see today in hoax crop circles you find that the edges are imprecise that the plants are damaged that the plants instead of being perfectly laid are very waved i don't mind if people make cropped circles if the farmers in on it and it allows people to analyze things from a scientific point of view it does give us a barometer with which to uh judge the real phenomenon by because when you look at the man-made once you can start looking the difference you can start looking at the ground saying well wait a minute the lay in this particular crop circle is not the same as that one but our crop circles all hoaxes while there are many reported incidents of fake circles others remain unexplained local shop owner ray barnes has taken walks through westbury's fields every day since 1979. it was a saturday early in july 1981 the corn circle started by me noticing a line in the crop just this side of that hedge and it traveled across the field it looks i guess about 50 miles an hour because it's quite wide of that field than you think the heads of the corn were jiggling about they were actually moving i mean when you see them over a 50-yard front it's hard to miss them i mean it wasn't just one or two everything else was perfectly still it started at that angle and finished at that angle so it came round on a radius then it just dropped to the ground described a circle it has only been to my knowledge about 80 people around the world who've seen the crop circles form in about 15 seconds so it's it's good because now it gives us some kind of a base of which to establish what's happening here there was no bounce back of the corn heads as it would when a tractor passing that was one of the things that surprised me at the time actually in ray's case where he sees the invisible line snaking across the the crop and then laying the crop down in four seconds seems to actually correlate to what's happening on the ground and again it also is interesting in that his description of the laying down method where there's no spring back means that there's no damage either and this is what we're finding and relating it uh to the physical evidence so i find his case is very very compelling i think rey's account is is unique in my understanding i've not heard that that type of description before the other eyewitnesses to um to crop circles forming as being you know more or less just a puffer wind and a few bits of the corn into the air and that's it it's there it happens very very quickly had ray's sighting been by chance or had he been chosen to witness the rare phenomenon why he saw it is unknown but what he witnessed in 1981 was merely the beginning of his strange relationship with that field i saw two combine harvesters and i looked up and decided that in 20 minutes they would finish the field because they were working together working against the middle i walked 10 feet looked up and it packed up that finished and there was no way they could have combined those last few rows the roots in plants are supposed to be geotropic in other words they move downwards to face the actual point of gravity in the earth which is right the center now in crop circles uh what we begin to find is that the roots are actually not growing downwards they're actually going horizontally so which means that something must have happened here which has altered the actual root structure in a very very short space of time which has allowed them to move now time as uh physics knows is something that's related to our gravitational field if you alter the gravitational field of the earth then obviously time has to be affected in some way a couple of scientists took clocks digital clocks into a crop circle one was in the crop circle one was far away back at home time to the same moment and when they put the two clocks back together found that 20 minutes had been missing so clearly there's nothing going on here at the start of the 1990s that same field of corn once again disturbed ray's peaceful walks it appeared to have many more secrets to share i came down here and looked across this field and it was full of billowing brown smoke from a from a heath fire down in dorset and when it reached this point here it was held by a wall but by what appeared to be a wall and over the other side it was perfectly clear and you could see the sky and clouds and everything through it but on this side you couldn't even see the sky through the thick brown smoke the smoke just seems to hit this invisible wall so it actually delineates this invisible tube of energy again this tube has actually been photographed we know it's there we know that pilots go across these tubes of energy and their equipment fails so we know it's there around this time ray barnes was contacted by colin bloy colin studied the practices of divining and had read about ray's original crop circle sighting because of his interest in the area he too witnessed the events in the field certainly we were able to establish that there were energies in that place which weren't disturbing normal phenomenon like shadows like light light time ray took this photo in the summer of 1990 he had become unsettled once again by what he saw in the field i noticed that the tree shadows laying across the field where the first corn circle had formed were in fact converging they weren't parallel this tree here had a shadow which laid that way across the field and those two trees up there their shadows laid this way across the field the shadows of the trees that have been powered they were all converging on the point of the circle uh it was very odd um it can only happen when the energy is a bit strange i stopped several people i said what do you think of those shadows over there and they said they're not right are they they're not right i cannot understand what it is i cannot understand what causes the shadows to go one way one side of the wall and the other way the other side of the wall these are all things that perhaps indicate an alteration of the local gravitational field an invisible wall converging shadows the desynchronization of time and the formation of a crop circle these events were all beyond obvious explanation but seemed to be connected i had come down and i'd actually gone up to photograph the trees on this side of the field to see if the shadows were straight and then i spotted this corn circle the main circle was clockwise and the two on the right hand side were also clockwise now when that began to sprout again which was several months later three four months later all the clockwise circles were filled with a yellow rank grass you know the sort of stuff you see growing on the seashore but the fourth circle which had gone the other way anti-clockwise that was filled with a lush green growth over the years we've had many many theories as to what it's causing crop circles and a lot of them are very plausible a lot of them were very implausible at the beginning because we didn't know much at the time but now we do for example we started off with things like the weather theory the plasma vortex theory part of which i think to be true i don't have any theories about the wall at all i think he's connected with the circles i just don't know what it is i had to say and conclude that it's not weather but it's a natural source which is found all around the earth which has been harnessed in a certain way that we are not not totally aware of yet and it's been used in a certain very specific way very focused way to create these interesting shapes ray is still disturbed by what he saw despite the efforts of freddie silva and colin bloy to explain the phenomenon so far no one can say what is creating it and why there's that many different kinds of phenomena reported regularly that something's happening here we know it's not an airplane for a fact because this doesn't have all the characteristics of an airplane or anything like that or an earthly object at the end of the day it comes to be a classic ufo unidentified flying object [Music] these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] these three locals are ufo enthusiasts in recent years their long sky watches have paid off with some astounding sightings but to this day they remain mystified by the failure of both local authorities and the ministry of defense to identify the object we investigate ufos over southern england and try and find out the answer to some of these sightings will get reported to us in may 2000 we were doing a sky watch in a local area at netley southampton we set up camp in one of our usual spots and along with us we take our cameras binoculars night sights which are not intensified cameras which we can see in total blackness we set everything up ready for a sky watch now this particular night was set up everything was loaded set up camcorders were turned on ready and suddenly oversampton water to our surprise we saw this light we suddenly saw this orange kind of globe appear on the other side of southampton water [Applause] all of us have lived in this area for a long time we've done sky watches before on many many occasions and we've never seen anything flying that low coming upside down to water we looked at it for a while and couldn't quite make it what it was so we got the um camcorder going we thought we'd film this it's slow at first it's nothing doesn't appear to be anything interesting it's just a single light just flying along could be anything what made it interesting was as we watched from the opposite end of southampton we have this airplane i was flying down sent out to water towards this object and we just thought well you know it's obviously police spoiler plane turns really good before it's turning around yeah it's following it look it's circling we're circling it in there bloody yeah [Music] yeah [Music] we didn't quite know from what we could see we could see the lights of the plane and coming out and it approached this uh orange globe which was still hovering in the same place and it went round it twice and it went away this plane and came back again and had another look at it and you can actually see this on the video at one point he actually almost stopped dead still right then turns right round i was looking at through binoculars at this point and i can see a row of about five or so or golden orange golden lights so we're sort of thinking each other you know exactly what is this thing the amazing thing is when this object starts to speed up it stretches so you've got like a row of eight lights it's completely changed from a one round ball of light and it's astounding to me it is and group when we saw it we just lost our breath sort of thing show up and take a breath and wow is it an airplane is it a helicopter and all the way through the sighting we were asking each other questions and we still come away just in all wondering what this object was so it was quite stunning really but we thought well we better check up on this and as the police spot a plane was involved we can certainly find out they've been to tell us what it was 48 hours later i sat down at my telephone with a list of phone numbers and began to rig around all the local authorities ernie sears contacted numerous local police authorities and coast guards from the surrounding area but none of the organizations said they had any aircraft flying in the area that night the team had video evidence of a plane circling the mystery object but could find no one that would reveal the plane's identity it wasn't a commercial plane it was very slow and this police spotter plane can is a very slow aircraft it will go very slow and very tight to this object definitely the police spotter plane you can actually see the navigation lights on the plane as it bank rain and the shape and yet when i phoned the police up afterwards and this is police central control we should have known anyway uh they completely denied there was anything up we know there's something there we filmed it we filmed another aircraft flying down and looking at this thing so somebody knows it was there increasingly bewildered ernie sears contacted the chief of hampshire police and finally confirmation was given that they were flying in the area that night despite this breakthrough however the police could offer no reports of anything else in the skies the response i got the second time was completely different to the one i got the first time i've actually got a letter from hampshire police saying at the time of the sighting the police plane was in the air at the time i mean they actually circle around it twice now if there was nothing there why would they circle around it the pilots must have seen the same thing that we saw whether it was captured on the spot of planes cameras etc we don't know there's a good chance that the possibility is that there is some footage of this somewhere or have they just wiped over it or has it been sent to the ministry of defense to some laboratory somewhere to be enhanced to look at properly we simply don't know we'd like to know again it's one of these avenues we keep coming up to these brick walls all the time we get so far then it's just a brick wall in front of us we must be able to see it whatever it is [Music] there is quite clearly on the footage in interaction which to my mind makes it pretty clear that that helicopter knew that there was something in the skies above southampton that shouldn't have been there ernie continued to climb further up the chain of command to discover exactly what the authorities knew about what was in the skies that night i contacted the mod this chappie came on he just said uh you're actually talking about a ufo aren't you and he was laughing in his voice yeah i said well yeah it's a ufo unidentified flying object he said well you know i couldn't tell you that anyway could i we went through all these bases in the area and out of the area official and they all said the same thing there was nothing up the team was left frustrated and confused once again but their story was about to take a new astonishing turn the ufo was back we're actually a year to the day we're filming over sampton docks area across the water and suddenly this ball of light appears in the sky you know it was a clear night there was nothing around and lo and behold what happens again the police spotter plane appears in the frame flies across our view and flies back again now eventually the plane just disappears and flies upstairs from water and this light is still there when it goes and it's just so suddenly it starts to fade fade and it just fades out of sight it's fading though yeah it's going it's gone yeah gone just vanished the second sighting one year on renewed the team's determination to push for answers this time ernie would go right to the top demanding the case be investigated by dr louis mooney the undersecretary of state for defence the interesting thing with dr mooney's two-page letter was he finally said we do not have any problems with in an extraterrestrial civilization but the object was of no defense significance so therefore we do not investigate it we do not have the finances to investigate it no defense significance full stop when the mrd come out with the phrase of no defense significance that strikes me as being pretty strange because why would the helicopter be there monitoring quite obviously what this light is doing and if the evidence from video experts film analysis proves that there is an object there then you have to say well that's an object in our airspace and it and two you know you've got to say well what is that object and quite clearly we don't know what that object is or if we do somebody's certainly not saying when you look at what is there you've got oil refinery you've got march with military base there you've got other things there that in my way of thinking would be a defense significance yes on both occasions it would appear that the police spotted lane had been scrambled to intercept this object and have a look at it they were curious about it that is moving okay now yeah what are they hiding why are they afraid of telling us what exactly happened that night pretty quick in many of these cases where the being officially reported is sure enough the mrd man comes out but that's usually the last time the policeman ever hears anything so they never get any feedback what was the conclusion and it would be interesting to see these files and i will be applying for these files in due course we know it's not an airplane for a fact because this doesn't have all the characteristics of an airplane or anything like that or an earthly object at the end of the day it comes to be a classic ufo unidentified flying object either they really don't care about it they've looked at the footage and they really just don't care this is not interested or they do know what it was they didn't they they knew before we even contacted them this case doesn't mean the end of the samsung ufo group it means we'll be get better we'll become stronger and we'll carry on with our investigations our sky watches we truly believe there is something out there and maybe one day we'll get to the truth you might say this thing is bigger than all of us they don't know what to do about it they can't do anything about it and they hope the enigma will go away leave them alone there remains no rational explanation of the craft's origins in either of the sightings despite the group's claim of a police spotter plane videoed circling the mystery object none of the authorities contacted have admitted any reports of anything else flying in the area on those nights it would be nice to think it is life from elsewhere it's a nice thought but whether it is or not we will never know even asking questions in the house of lords i don't think we will ever know the true answer to what this object was belgrave hall in leicester steeped in mysteries for centuries a victorian woman has repeatedly been seen and heard walking its corridors but recently the ghostly rumors were propelled into the 21st century by this cctv image of what appears to be the mysterious resident staff contacted paranormal investigators to get to the bottom of the mystery our approach really is to recreate by natural means whatever the anomaly is it happened just before christmas 98. and we did our investigation in march 99 from early on in their investigations many witnesses were claiming that this was the ghost of charlotte [Music] the ellis family the most interesting of all the families who've lived at belgrave hall he came here in about 1845. there were five daughters who remained in the house until um they passed away and the last one did so in 1923. five very interesting women all of them had very strong personalities particularly charlotte john ellis purposely brought this house to bring some security to the girls to the women this house really became their refuge [Music] i've worked for the museums now for 16 years and i've heard stories about the hall one day about four o'clock in the afternoon i came into the hall and the two museum assistants were stood roughly where i'm stood now and i could hear footsteps upstairs [Music] and i said we have a visitor in i really think one of you should be upstairs patrolling and they both looked at me and said no we haven't and i said well i can hear the footsteps and he said so can we um which then encouraged me to go upstairs to see the visitor and there was nobody there they knew full well that was nobody in the house um so maybe they run a little bit of a game with me me being the new room and everything so you know he'll learn that sometimes you hear footsteps here and there is nobody in the house the paranormal team realized the cctv image was just the beginning of a lengthy investigation belgrave hall's ghostly activities were extensive because so many different people have multiple witnesses to different events here people have had different experiences ranging from full color apparition to cooking smells and and other anomalous sounds and the whole the whole area around belgrave there appears to be something going on here a few years ago later it was november my colleague and i were downstairs in the hall when we were talking there's nobody in [Music] and then we had footsteps crossing the landing so he looked at me and said i thought we were empty so well that makes two of us i said i thought we were so he said tell me what we'll do bolt the door so we bolted the front and back doors so you know if someone tried to get out with there the bolt was going we then both came up under the beds lifted the chests and at the end of it we looked and as this chap said to me i've never believed in ghost or anything he said but i can't explain that i'm still to this day only the ones but i'm convinced we heard footsteps i've heard things i've spoke to people who have seen things and spoke to other people who other things and interestingly when the media bandwagon started a few years ago the nice thing about that is visitors who came to the hall in the 1950s 1960s 1970s started to come forward and give us their stories so there's a vast amount of stories about what people have seen and experienced in the hall the growing number of witness accounts of unusual phenomena convinced the investigators to conduct a series of scientific vigils when we're on a vigil what we do is arrange to have 45-minute sessions the team used a range of high-tech detection equipment from electromagnetic radiation detectors to highly sensitive audio monitoring equipment everything that is seen or heard is meticulously recorded and cross-referenced to eliminate all possible explainable sources despite the team's objective attempts to discover rational explanations some incidents simply couldn't be resolved by scientific means well on one of the vigils that we did here a couple of our investigators heard a very loud sigh up on the first floor it was certainly heard because it was heard by more than one person that actually remains unsolved we don't know what that side was fresh accounts of actual sightings continued to motivate the investigations he was standing around the the fireplace trying to keep him warm really and mike was looking up the stairwell all of a sudden he did go very ash and very pale and he described a woman in a terracotta dress coming down the stairs he thought that she seemed to stop near a window just at the bottom of the stairwell and then pass away but when he tried to look properly at her it disappeared [Music] so the reported phenomena have been of course the lady in the terracotta colored dress coming down the stairs uh looking through the window walking towards discovery here the sightings without over both sightings of butter in the same style address which we can take it back to the 1870s 1880s when the ellis is lived in the house whether it's one of ellis's daughters john ellis's daughters i don't know there is something in the house it's very difficult to say who the person is in the territory dress we have to say um charlotte was muted as somebody who possibly could have been and also it's recorded within the diarist she really loves the gardens the gardener at belgrave hall has himself claimed to have witnessed the apparition but he is only one of the hall's many visitors with experiences they cannot explain when he walked in he was sitting in the bathroom he said he was sitting there shaking his hair was standing on him part of that expression it was like you've seen the ghost he said well i have i went in the music room there's something in there and he said i'm out he said i don't know what it is but i sensed something in the music room he said i'm not running there so [Music] amid the ever-growing mass of accounts from numerous witnesses the men from asap believe that in at least one of their investigations they may have made their first breakthrough people were suggesting it looked like a martin looked like a bat so we brought plastic bats and thankfully at the time we were recreating a moth did fly by so we eliminated that one it turned out in the end to be an oak leaf and i was the one volunteered to climb the ladder and wave the bat and drop the various leads down but the one particular oak leaf that we dropped recreated the the more exactly more or less exactly people fall into two encounters those that believe and there's others who just don't believe i don't think there's a middle path for this on this soldier personally speaking there's not many different kinds of phenomena reported regularly that it's still intriguing that something's happening here we've had things on camera on audio sounds which we can't explain there's something happening around here which which is intriguing and will carry on hopefully to try and investigate the cause [Music] there are things that happen that you can't explain away there's something up on that top floor that's walking around that is not of this world this thing was coming towards our window of course my first thought was jason you know how where's jason is he okay there does seem to be certain places that have a kind of energy that maybe facilitates it for the visitors to actually access you these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] this is mickelgate bar the imposing main entrance to the ancient city of york dating from 1196 it is the place where kings and queens have entered the city for centuries to be greeted by the sheriff the lord mayor and other local dignitaries but it has a darker past too criminals traitors to the crown and others all passed through the gates of mikkelgate bar on the way to their deaths a ghost story in a historic city like york is by no means unusual but a group of ghost enthusiasts recently dubbed york europe's most haunted city it's a label that suits the city and it's a claim that some of the visitors to mickelgate bar would support there's been talk and stories of ghosts in this place which is bound to be in an 800 year old building where they used to put their heads but i've had the the experience if you like of that ghost you can't be near as much time as i am as long as i am without coming across the yard experience things that go bump into night or even during the day well i live in york and i've never been and you tend to avoid the tourist attractions sometimes but people say oh have you been here have you been there we thought had some time free with a friend i thought well we'll just go and have a look around it's very pretty from the outside i thought there must be lots of history so i'll go in and check it out the first time i actually came in here was only a few weeks ago and i came with a group of friends specifically to have a look around and hope that something unusual would happen one of my people came in here people have worked here came in one day and found that the soldiers with the model soldiers that we have that we sell in the shop had all been rearranged um that happens quite the things the magnets that we have on the shelves they have a habit of coming down falling down and things get knocked over and which you we can't explain away one of the centres in this country of paranormal activity appears to be the city of york there are enormous numbers of ghost reports from the city itself from just outside places like sheriff hutton and so on and the best interpret the best guess that i could put on that is that it itself is in touch with its own history therefore people are emotionally involved with its own history it started in the shop really we were in the shop a few minutes and i was talking to the guy behind the counter and this noise went off this man's voice and it sounded artificial anyway i said what was that he goes oh it's okay it's the motion sensor i said oh we must gone across something he said no he says he does that all the time what do you mean he said well it's in there he said you have to walk in there to set it off but we didn't walk in there neither did is there someone in there no he said he just does it it's probably the poltergeist i thought okay i do think that some people are more susceptible to seeing ghosts than other people whether it's because they themselves have a particular mindset or not or whether it's because they have some other a talent or ability is undecided the motion sense sensitive um voice thing set off without anybody moving and obviously we're the only people back there at the time austin little huddle were nowhere near it there's a guard a riley scar that challenges people which causes a bit of a shock when they go in there but it causes a shock when it goes off and there isn't anybody near then that happened with rachel has happened uh too many people have been in michael great bar got up to the first floor and i was absolutely convinced i could hear footsteps absolutely convinced and i looked at my friend and they looked at me we never said a word but it's that you heard something didn't you and i thought well it's okay there'll be people elsewhere in the building there's three floors it's it's fine of course later we found out there was nobody but us absolutely nobody well i heard initially three raps like suddenly knocking on the floor above us and i stopped to look around and see them nails hey that i'm sure can hasten you upstairs so dave said well i think he's empty up there and with that we heard this footfall and there's definitely footsteps on that top floor and that dave shot up the stairs to look and said there is definitely nobody up here you can be in this room and you can hear footsteps very clearly walking backwards and forwards when i first used to come here i used to go up the stairs to look to see if there was someone there after a while you get used to it you don't bother a talking exhibit triggered with no one in the room unexplained movement of artifacts changes in temperature an unseen hand tugging at people's clothes some visitors claim first-hand experience we kept feeling sort of cold spots as we're wandering around think of both flaws but then with the nature of the building i couldn't really say well this is something supernatural happening because it is an old building it there are drafts and it's made of some quite thick stonework it was like a column of cold it felt like a column just passed through me and around me it wasn't a draft it just literally went through it's the strangest feeling and it went through up to about my shoulder and i absolutely felt freezing cold and even through it went through my body that's how i felt all the time now i'm starting to feel as if someone behind me kept on looking around expecting my friend to be there but of course he's not he's there and there was nobody there and everyone knows what it feels like when someone creeps up behind you and you know they're there without looking it's you just know and that's how it felt like so i'm disturbed all the time i think there's someone there there's someone there and we're still walking around i'm still feeling very very very funny the next thing i know is this attack on my skirt it's no mistake my skirt's not caught on anything you've seen for yourself that the place here there's nothing it's going to catch on me i'm in the middle of the floor i feel attack on my skirt i can sense the presence i felt the cold you know now there is something going on and i'm still feeling really funny i had a curl some quite heavy sleeves and it did feel like someone's tugging at my sleeves and at the time just tried to ignore it thinking well this is a bit corny because we already knew the story whilst i was still on that top floor i had the i felt like someone had walked into me or as soon as catches his shoulder as the bumpier and [Music] i still got a beery smell like a drunken man or i have no idea who that was but there was definitely nobody there when we looked around one of the resident ghosts we have in here is sarah brocklebank the gatekeeper's daughter she actually used to live in this building back in 1797. her father thomas was a gatekeeper and on her birthday she played a childish game she took the keys to the city of yours these are just replicas she took the originals and hid them so well that no one could find them it's her ghost or her poltergeist if you like because apparently she moves things i've not been witness to that but it's her ghost that he's trying to find the keys but it's also make herself whether she's still here she hit him so well she couldn't find them so her father lost his job no good having a gatekeeper who loses the keys the family were thrown out into the street she never married she spent the rest of her life searching for the keys never found them and on her 72nd birthday came back to where their keys were couldn't get in here to recover them went to tell the lord mayor of york where they were but before she could tell him she was so excited she had a heart attack and died she told a secret with us at the grave she's still seen from time to time wandering around this building that may account for some of the things that happened here a lot of the things that happened in this room in particular the things that a child will do they're childish pranks and quite a number of people uh that's happened the other week when there was a number of people here they felt like somebody tagging like a small child would target your clothes so that could possibly explain some of the things that happen they do say that a poltergeist i understand is a young child is the ghost of sarah brocklebank responsible for the strange experiences claimed by some of the visitors to mikkelgate bar the legend is compelling the atmosphere is eerie but is this an example of people wanting to believe in something that doesn't actually exist i do think in ghosts the the living play some part in investing some kind of emotion into making those replays and so on and york along with perhaps colchester along with perhaps places down in wiltshire in warminster and so on are those centers where people are very aware of the ancient history of the place and i think that plays a part in it the fact that i've had my skirt tucked it's very a very childish thing to do isn't it you know it's not something an adult is going to do and the cold was it was just it just made so much sense then i could hear the footsteps as well as if somebody was wandering around um and i just constantly felt there's somebody with me i don't think there's anything evil here there's nothing that worries me here other than the cold it gets very cold in here the walls are five foot thick but uh i think our ghosts were very fortunate they're more mischievous as far as i'm convinced yes there's something up on that top floor that's walking around that is not of this world if you spend any time in here for any length of time you get around to the feeling there are things that happen that you can't explain away it just all fitted it was just really really strange for it to fit like that whatever the explanation the ghosts of mikkelgate bar are a magnet for tourists and ghost hunters alike there are many well-documented reports of close encounters with aliens but few people experience more than one in their lifetime anne andrews and her two children all claim to be the victims of repeated alien abductions over a period of several years but are these genuine accounts of alien contact or another entirely different paranormal experience it began in 1983 when anson jason was born we would find him missing from his cart he would sometimes be underneath it we would hear him cry in the night and go into his room and find that he'd been he was at the wrong end of the cot where it was impossible for a month old baby to to get to mary rodwell is a counselor who deals with people who say they are the victims of alien abduction she feels jason's case is authentic it's absolutely classic abduction right from the whole parameter of you know jason being born and you know that finding that you know him as a baby outside the cot and not explaining it where i hear that the same thing from other people saying you know my son was not in the cop you know and i couldn't work it out a lot of very tangible physical things i think there's more to lose than they have to gain by claiming these accounts so it's usually that kind of thing that convinces me that whatever these experiences are that people like anne and others are on the level they are they are relating the information as to the best of their ability but the unusual events happening to jason were about to take a new and frightening turn on the 2nd of july 1987 jason's fourth birthday the family would experience a visit they would never forget jason had fallen asleep on the couch and suddenly there was a real sort of heavy banging at the door you know it's like really really hard you know not like just a normal knocking it was like you know somebody was kicking and of course you know my husband he just jumped straight up to who the is that you know doing that to my door and then he just sort of flung the door open and there was nobody there at all and he looked up and down the lane and there was nothing um he came back in closed the door and said to myself my mum well that's odd you know there's nobody there but we'd all heard the knock in then there was a really sort of bright bolt of lightning [Music] he just stomped his mouth and just started spewing out all these fantastic numbers it was it was just like a computer [Music] this went on for a few minutes and as he was talking the numbers um the banging began again um but this time it seemed to reverberate sort of you know it got louder and louder and it seemed to be coming not just from the front door but from the windows the back of the house jason just seemed to get up from the couch and he walked over towards the door my husband restrained jason and he just literally looked up my husband and just said but i have to go they're waiting for me and the banging all the while was just going on and on and um it was it was just so strange it was like you know as soon as jason started to blink you know as if he was coming out of this trance-like state he started to blink and as he the more he came round you know the more the banging receded there are fascinating series of events plus the fact that it involves more than one person again i think the vast majority of this type of experience involves a single witness but it's not uncommon that other family members are involved was this evidence of alien visits or were the family experiencing a different paranormal phenomenon the house was never the same after that it was it it got really bizarre at times you know it was like we had um a lot of poltergeist activity that the cooker would come on the television would switch on sort of in the middle of the night and you know really blaring and it didn't matter if you had the plugs in or out you know it would still it's like everything electrical had a mind of its own loud bangs like someone's crawling over the ceiling and three loud knocks is a very common one that they will hear it's almost like what the et's are doing is saying this is real take notice of us if you check out the content for a while and look at the parameters that build up these experiences you can transpose them on to other paranormal accounts paranormal sightings paranormal phenomena and so on so the parallels are there for all to see it's just the content that differs and we've often argued that you know we could be looking at different sides of the same coin they are all interrelated in some way i still for a long time believed that they were dreams they were nothing more than nightmares you know my i suppose social upbringing would not allow me to consider any other possibility but the stories of alien visits were not just confined to jason his elder brother daniel said he too had strange encounters my older boy daniel said you know don't you both get it you know don't you see what's going on can't you understand it yet he said so remember when i used to tell you about when i was little i used to tell you about my soldier guy you know that used to come and see me and we said yes which we'd always thought was an imaginary friend and he said well he said i know now that he was real he said i think i've always known he was real he said but he said he stopped coming to see me because he said that they've made a mistake and that jason was the one that they should be working with [Music] we were talking to experts in the ufo field we were speaking to people about ufo alien abductions we don't know enough to make any quantifiable definition of what they are we have to be open to maybe all possibilities but there's certainly a tangible interaction and there's certainly a physical interaction jason always described the same scenario he will be lying in his bed he would first of all notice like what he was referred to as the big one would rise up through the floor at the foot of his bed um then he said um there would suddenly be um like you know six or eight of the smaller ones he said that he could he could see but he couldn't move and he will be taken to another place which when he was younger he described as a hospital place but he said it was always very cold extremely cold he said it was he described it as like being laid on like a marble slab um something of this this kind um he said there was always a light coming from somewhere but you could never see where it was coming from it was now anne's turn to claim that she too had been abducted by aliens she didn't know i think that she was an abductee or experiencer to start with she only thought jason was it was only later that she came to an awareness that it affected her and her husband and and dan as well so that was an um something for her but by the time she was corresponding with me and we were talking it was an everyday part of their life something that they'd already come to a certain extent to terms with we saw what we thought initially to be a star very bright star which we didn't take too much notice of but then when the stars started getting bigger and bigger and looked as if it was coming straight for our window we did get quite alarmed we don't remember any more than that you know other than sort of the panic that this thing was coming towards the window um and of course we we woke in the morning just as normal and then all of a sudden i remembered of course my first thought was jason you know how where's jason is he okay i spoke to him and i said to him that you know we'd seen this really bright light last night and he then went on to explain that he'd been taken to a place it wasn't a usual abduction this time which he was relieved about but then he started to say that he was in a room with hundreds of other people and there was like a big like cinema screen um and it was just so weird because i finished off his sentence for him you know i told him what was on the screen and what was going on and about the other people there and he just looked at me and smiled and he just said i knew i saw you there mum is this proof of aliens abducting a whole family or does it show an unexplained psychic bond between a mother and her children they'll talk about stuff that would blow your mind they talk about things that are almost like science fiction and yet they go into detail and they have so much depth of knowledge of it you know full well this is no fantasy if you talk about theories in general the theories to try and explain these experiences are largely put forward by the ufo researcher be in the uk or be in different parts of the world it is rare that anyone asks the individuals who've had these experiences what their theories are and i've done this recently very very recently to a small group of known abductees and i've asked them what they believe was the nature and origin of their experience and surprisingly not all of them said extraterrestrial some believe that they were actually having some kind of spiritual experience so when indeed think this was et related also there's thoughts it was some kind of paranormal phenomena so when it comes to theories the most popular and the most romantic if you like is that we've been visited by extraterrestrials and we're conducting some kind of experiment but it is by no means the only theory people always ask how we deal with this situation i suppose it's like the realization hits you that there's nothing you can do about this situation if jenny is right and we we are reincarnated over and over again that has a tremendous uh bearing on the way we lead our lives and and our future lives as well a very strange object was seen by him and today it stands to test the time of one of the most bizarre incidents in the world of ufology these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recanted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] when i was very very young i had memories of a number of past lives reincarnation experience of a past life a genuine paranormal experience or a trick of the mind jenny cockle believes she is the reincarnation of a woman who lived in a village in ireland over 80 years ago this is her story one of the earlier memories was of standing on a jetty with the wind blowing at me my shawl wrapped around me to try and keep warm at dusk waiting for a boat [Music] and i always wondered what what the boat was what i was waiting for because i could never remember that bit just standing there again and again waiting for a boat from early childhood jenny cockle saw nothing unusual about her vivid experiences of previous lives mary sutton actually lived in the village of malahide just outside dublin jenny believes that she was mary sutton in a previous life one of those lies certainly the strongest of those lies was as mary a mother of eight children in ireland um husband i remember working on some sort of building work and the time period was from just before the turn of the century until the 1930s she was getting on before the first time i discovered anything about this she'd gone off to the little local sunday school with her brother and she came back and i was at the sink washing up or something like that and she came and perched on a high stool at my side and said did you enjoy it what's it like oh she said yes it was very nice i enjoyed all the singing but they kept talking about life and death nobody said anything about what their last life was like what they remembered of it and i just said well no it's actually a lot of people this isn't something that everybody believes in or understands it's called reincarnation when it happens and it's not not generally accepted i reached the point where i realized that other people weren't talking about their past lives and i wanted to know if it was because it was private and you weren't supposed to or what was the reason so i started talking to my mother and then of course it was it was um described to me as a belief rather than a reality which i found very confusing i believe that culture is probably the dominant influence i mean for example in this country if a child does remember a past life and starts to talk about those memories the chances are because of our culture that we will dismiss them as being imagination uh maybe something that the child has seen on television and and not pursue it not assume that it's a past life in the cultures that accept reincarnation it's quite natural for the parents to ask more questions and if the child is showing really strong emotions about it maybe pursue it and try and find the past life family it wasn't i suppose until she was about 16 that she started to allow herself to think about what had been going on and it was about then she discovered um country music and eventually irish music which absolutely blew her mind she hadn't known such music existed and she didn't realize that this was her music this was the music she was comfortable with jenny accepted that her memories could actually be of real people she felt that she had to find out more about what she saw as her previous life as a child she drew maps of where she used to live using these she set out to find out if the memories she felt so strongly were real she had the little map that she had drawn years ago and she asked the bookseller in toaster to get her a map of ireland and they both put it against the map of malahide the north was where it was supposed to be the road to dublin was the road she'd called the road to the city i think the road where she'd lived as mary was there everything was exactly where she had said it was which was a huge step forward for her because it began to feel that this was right this really was as she had always imagined it to be the the owner of the book shop was really quite surprised when i put my little drawing next to it and it was a fairly accurate drawing of the the main routes through the middle of malahide so it was then able to confirm and move on from there the memories were right at the front of my mind there was no way i could spend years trying to compartmentize them again i couldn't shut them away again so i had to act on it and it's then that i realised i'd have to go to ireland [Music] jenny now knew that the answer to the mystery lay in ireland she had to find the village that she believed had been her home when i went back to malahide and i said back to it was the first time i went uh this in this body but um i was able to walk around uh through the village recognize things there's a sense of belonging that it was um or had been my home it was like going back to my hometown it was uh very easy to feel comfortable in malahide once i was able to find where the cottage was and confirm that these were real people as i had always thought all the self-doubt was uh washed away and i was able to then trace the family mary sutton's short life in malahide ended tragically at the age of 37. she left behind five young children who had to fend for themselves all of the memories that i have have a sense of unfinished business um certainly the the main thing with the life in ireland which finished early was that the separation from the children not knowing what had happened to them the sense of failing in my responsibility so it was a sense of failure and guilt that carried over that i could not come to terms with in jenny's case the motivating uh emotion was this feeling of unfinished business um and as she progressed in life and got near to the age when she died that sort of peaked mary sutton's children had been separated shortly after their mother's death jenny's extensive research finally enabled her to trace the family and bring about a bizarre family reunion when i met the children all together children i mean they were in the 60s and 70s by then i didn't really recognize their faces very much except christy looked the image of his grandfather their their characters i frank was still very quiet and shy and i still felt very protective towards him it was many months before the family could begin to accept jenny's incredible story but after those first few meetings her deep and intimate knowledge of their childhood seemed undeniable [Music] they would be um asking me that the younger ones would be asking me where the what windows were and what room they were in and were quite happy for me to explain where things were they were accepting that i did remember the cottage sonny the eldest son i think was a bit bit taken aback by the whole thing and in the end he was completely convinced he said this woman knows things that only i know and only my mother knows in fact one or two things nobody else even his brothers and sisters didn't know one or two of the things really took him by surprise because there were things that nobody outside the family knew about nobody outside the family knew that they were poaching certainly didn't know how they were poaching and the the the detailed descriptions of where they managed to trap particular animals so he really was quite shocked by one or two of the bits and would turn to me and said but how could you possibly have known that she's not somebody that is really trying to push a belief in reincarnation not even on her past life family but she is saying to us i came into this life with these memories i've pursued them i've uncovered my past life family this is something that maybe we affects us all that we are all souls on a journey and for that reason alone i think we should be looking at what she told us in some detail and contemplating the the implications of that if jenny is right we we are reincarnated over and over again that has a tremendous uh bearing on the way we lead our lives and and our future lives as well [Music] when i met sunny the oldest son he was able to explain that he used to go caddying for the golfers on the island across the inlet and at dusk he would come across on a little row boat little ferry boat back to the jetty and hand over his earnings some of his earnings and his mother was always there to meet him and walk back with him [Music] i was actually standing at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes i saw this it was like a big orange glow or a glowing light in the sky it was way in the distance away towards the west and it was strange i didn't pay too much attention to start off with but after a couple of minutes i realised that this seemed to be hovering obviously wasn't a helicopter or aeroplane or anything like that but it was strange it just seemed to come from nowhere and came up in an arch but it was very precise in the way it moved um arching up there and came up to about 90 degrees and when it got up to that point as it started to move away again another one appeared just to the very same flight path and then a third one appeared there's no way any helicopter or airplane could have possibly moved like that something i've just never seen before don't suppose i'll ever see it again either barbara gerrard's story at strange things in the night sky will ring true to the many thousands of people who claim to have witnessed alien visits to this planet but her story of lights in the sky may also be linked to another unusual encounter nearby six hours before barbara's sighting forestry worker bob taylor was working in nearby woods this morning i was during my usual work at death meant hill i walked out through the wood eventually would come to a clearing i just couldn't believe what was in front of me when i turned the corner into this clearly bob described the craft standing in the clearing as a huge dome with what looked like windows and a large flange around the outside [Music] as he stood there transfixed two smaller globes he thought looked like sea mines dropped from the rear of the craft and rushed towards him from either side they wrestled him to the ground and began to drag him towards the larger craft after that i can't really tell you what happened and just passed the attack on bob taylor left him unconscious for several minutes his face grazed and his clothes torn he gradually drifted back into consciousness bob could not recall what had happened to him exhausted and disorientated he staggered home and managed to alert the police with no other witnesses and no explanation for his condition pc bill douglas of lothian and borders police was treating bob's experience as a case of assault i went to see bob on the sunday at his home i could see it was still a bit shaken by his experience but i asked him what can you tell me about this stupidity and i i got a straightforward reply says i might think it was stupid but something certainly happened up there and i believed him because all i was looking for was a reaction that i believe what he told me was quite true during the interview i was quite taken with him he wasn't trying to enhance the situation he walked down to this clearing stood there on that point and in front of him was this craft over there in the trees [Music] you could see it the bottom was a sphere a spherical uh with a like a rim like a saucer around it and the top was dome-like but it was translucent so he couldn't really get a good look at it and while he was standing there these two machines or robots if you wish came from the rear of the machine and circled around him they had like hooves on some of the legs and hooks on the others and they grab either side of his trousers and gripped him by the thighs and pulled him forward to such an extent they pulled him off his balance and it landed down on the ground and he started dragging him towards the craft over there [Music] he was nauseated he couldn't speak he had a terrible pounding headache these are totally different symptoms from your normal run-of-the-mill person who sees a ufo this we're talking about is completely close contact with something unbelievable it was the next morning when we heard on the news i wish you could have seen my husband's face and that was when i decided to phone the police in glenrothes and they told me there was actually an incident room set up in lothian and the guy that was there i'm sure he's well i know he thought i was an absolute idiot but when i said to him you know i don't even want my name mentioned it's just that i you know i do believe what this man saw because i knew what i saw and i just went you know to know that i did see something what it was i don't know but i want you to know that i saw those three objects in the sky barbara's story was unusual but police were astonished by bob's experience when they examined the scene they found strange indentation marks on the ground which were recorded by an amateur cameraman at the time bob himself was over there by that big tree the indentations in the ground there was one down here and the other down here the marks on the ground from the two spheres the two mine-like spheres that actually attacked him ran from behind here behind these marks and swung around both sides of the tracks and grabbed bob over there pulling forward towards the machine here bob claims that he saw these two spherical objects which descended from beneath this larger object rolled across the grass making sucking or plopping noises on the grass and pulled them very very forcibly pulled them at the hips towards this larger object but the marks here were very very different because it was like a scuffle it was like um you could physically see the distortion in the grass as if someone had been dragged physically for about two yards the grainy amateur footage was of little help to the investigation but police continued to examine the site i searched this area looking for something that might have picked this machine up but there was nothing else out there nowhere for it to go there were no reversing away and there was no tracks driving away the only way this machine that was sitting here must be something like a couple of tons could leave here was to go up through there well after it finished interviewing bob we had some tangible evidence here regarding his clothing which had been damaged in this assault so i obtained the clothing from him and we sent that off to forensics department in edinburgh for examination [Music] good thing about this particular case is the fact that not only do we have a witness who has seen something absolutely fantastic we have in our possession the actual trousers that robert taylor wore on that eventful day on november the 9th 1979 these trousers they actually show rips on the left hand side on the right hand side just below the pockets this is where these spikes these rods were emitted and grabbed him these reps are consistent with the testimony of robert taylor the the result from the forensic department uh corrupted the fact that these machines had attached themselves to bob's trousers and had pulled them up and forward causing the rips the large amount of physical evidence police gathered didn't help to solve the case it was passed on for further investigation the case was considered serious enough for cid to take over so all i had to do was make out my statement and my sketch of this location here and submit it to cid [Music] they treated us just like a criminal episode they fenced off the the particular area by a wire fence they put a fence around it to stop members of the public coming in and destroying any evidence that was there which clearly there were bob's attackers were never found the police file remains open i know they attacked me but i don't believe they were there to do me any harm you know before all this happened i wasn't really a believer but now i have to think are we the only planet with intelligent beings on it there must be something else out there robert taylor said he saw something very bizarre which didn't conform to a helicopter or any flying machine that he has ever saw in his in his life and uh today it stands to test the time of one of the most bizarre incidents in the world of ufology i know what i saw and i believe for those so [Music] what was it in if it wasn't a ghost what was it she bears on them very quickly she turns quickly with this uh hideous face there are two spirits in this building i i believe but the one down here is not at all friendly just it's just a different feeling comes over you it's almost as if you think something bad could happen to you these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] bluebell hill in kent a local beauty spot that harbors a mysterious secret over the last 30 years there have been over 20 reported sightings of ghostly figures in the roads around the hill a road ghost could be any kind of ghostly activity that manifests on our roads that could include vehicles people even animals [Applause] the first recalling sightings which are really nothing more anecdotes at that stage um begin really in 1967. uh this is two years after a fatal car crash on the hill in which three young women died thereafter there was one in 68 a prominent one in 74 and pretty well a gap until 1977 where we have another named uh witness encounter in the earliest reports uh relating to blue bell hill involving the phantom hitchhiker the girl who would wait by the roadside she was a young woman often described with fair hair and light clothing and macintosh something of that nature and uh the earliest reports describe her entering the car and describing excitedly her the wedding that she was going to uh to be on the next day she did be married the following day uh in some other versions it's been a supposed bridesmaid talking excitedly about her friend's wedding but ian sharp knew nothing of these reported sightings as he drove home late one night in 1992 coming down blue bell hill he thought he saw a woman in the road when i first saw her she was standing in the center of the road by the crash barrier just standing there and i was driving down i was doing about 50 miles an hour and as i saw i started to break and then she just sort of not run but a fast walk straight out in front of the car and i hit her and it seems as if everything went into slow motion she went under the car and as she went down i hit her on the left on her left hand side and as i hit her she was looking at me [Music] i do i straight at me ian jammed on the brakes but when he got out to help the woman had vanished who or what had stepped out in front of the car he went straight to the police to report the accident when i came back with the police not knowing anything of this accident that happened 27 years beforehand i was still convinced there was somebody lying somewhere or and we had a the police had torches and they were looking all around and couldn't find anything at all and it was the policeman then who told me it's another sighting of the blue bell ghost to ian i'm sure this was absolutely a totally shockingly real experience he observed this woman some way ahead with 1700 yards ahead it was i believe at 10 to midnight on the on the 8th of november sunday and he was doing around about 50 miles an hour and he saw this woman under very good observational conditions uh we've overhead carriageway lights a few years before blue hill was totally dark so uh he had good time to see this woman be sure of what he saw not be mistaken and and he was more attuned to what her behavior was going to be than what she was [Applause] for ian the mystery deepened when paranormal researcher sean tudor began investigating his sighting he bought a book with him all the the police files were in the book and different pictures and picture of the car and he said would i like to look at the the pictures of the four women who were in the car and when i was looking at the pictures in sean's book the third picture that i came to was i just froze and sean took the book away from me and i said that's the girl that i hit it's not surprising the 65 car crash should be the focus for the ghost stories that grew up thereafter we want to assume a connection between tragic or untimely death and hauntings the encounters of blueberry hill are quite varied the there are three characters that are routinely seen so we can break them down into a young child in the age of age group of 10 to 13. that immediately differs with some of the descriptions of women in their 20s who were the the victims of the 1965 car crash for one so we have young women with 20 as a young girl and most bizarrely in 1993 and in some subsequent accounts have come along from different dates an old haggard woman in dark clothing [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is a character who's hunched in the middle of the road waiting for the vehicle in a similar manner but as the vehicle slows and approaches with her in the middle of the road she bears on them very quickly she turns quickly with this uh hideous uh face with a biddy eyes and a black more of a mouth and hisses at them some people have seen an old woman running up and down the hill and someone else has seen a woman floating across with no legs could these reported sightings be related to the fatal crash in 65 blue bell hill had been a sacred site for thousands of years is this linked to the women's presence or could there be a psychological reason behind these phenomena blue bell who has a stock of of legends not surprisingly long before the phantom hitchhiker or the modern spate of encounters many of the ghost reports and spirit reports around the country particularly in the open air and that includes the phantom hitchhiker reports of places like blue belt hill and so on are also happening in areas where you have a very ancient you have stone circles you have runic stones and so on and they often happen in proximity to those and there is a feeling that actually what the witnesses are doing is tuning in in some way to this ancient history of the site when we look at places like blue barrel here we have a natural sanctity marked by the neolithic ancestors who four thousand years ago revered the site enough to build their constructions their monoliths and stone circles in more recent times we come to the romans there's a site for roman temple on blueberry hills it was obviously a place that was held in the mines to be something special are the sightings somehow linked to ancient legend or could there be a more modern explanation the phantom hitchhiker phenomenon appears to be not exactly unique but it has some interesting characteristics one of which is to do with hypnopompic and hypnagogic imagery as you go in or out of normal sleep it's the point at which you're really susceptible to hallucination and this may happen with highway hypnosis when you're driving you may get into a kind of altered state of almost trance-like state you're aware but you're not quite with it and when you move out of that state because the car has to be adjusted in some way or direction and so on you have to turn the corner then it may be that you come out of that state and you are prone to to hallucinations it's my belief that uh at places like blue bell hill where the two come together where we have um a history of um [Music] reverence by the by ancient peoples um even today it has an aura about it which people tend to market as unusual plus this switched off state which is the night driving condition the two coming together make it a prime uh area for low ghost activity to occur albert budden a researcher into electromagnetic fields has also looked into this hypnosis theory it's a kind of um highway hypnosis it's also known as highway hypnosis where um visual stimuli fed in through the windscreen um again and again in a darkened situation um will create effect called habituation this is where these monotonous stimuli fed into the brain repeatedly will cause the brain to switch off [Music] the brain can be triggered by electromagnetic fields can be triggered spontaneously people can have hallucinations and the electromagnetic fields can also alter the environment apart from the ancient stones around blue bell hill there are of course very modern artifacts such as the bbc transmitters such as ordinary power lines and so on and there is a whole school of study in this area that those power sources can literally scramble the signals in the brain and create hallucinations and so on in actual fact i have had cases where there have been two or more people who have been in an electromagnetic hot spot and they have already reported the same phantom perceptions the mind's important are we talking about when we imagine this this this form if so then lots of people uh who've heard nothing about blue bell hill i imagine the same thing in the same location the same description the same pattern of events and there obviously is a mystery there whether it's related to ghosts as we might understand them it's another matter but there's obviously something there that's worthy of exploration so are these sightings the result of hallucinations highway hypnosis and electromagnetic radiation or could there really be ghosts haunting the roads of blue bell hill the figures seen on blue bell hill are ghosts in as much as they appear to be figures that are not actually there in in the way that we would perceive ourselves to be there but where they come from we don't know i can't convince myself myself that there's ghosts but then the other hand says well what was it ian if it wasn't a ghost what was it in 1995 a small group gathered in this suburban london house to try and discover the cause of a series of paranormal events [Music] scenes like this are not uncommon but these events have not been taking place in an ancient castle or a victorian cellar [Music] the manager of the nursery at this community center in an ordinary london suburb wishes to remain anonymous when we first come here with the children and the staff it was just quite a normal setting and then one day um some big cars um like coupe cars started moving across the room by themselves the children actually saw the coupe car moving and notified one of the staff um they said look oh look the cars are moving by themselves so the staff in in order not to sort of frighten the children we actually made up we were pulling it by string we call out goes russell um he tends to help us and i actually think he's he protects us i mean there's been burglaries here where things have been on tables ready to go out the door and nothing's been taken and i feel that russell's probably shown himself and frightened off the burglars workers at the community center soon accepted the strange but harmless occurrences they even nicknamed the friendly ghost russell thanks to the frequent but unexplainable sounds of rustling paper staff would often arrive at work to find the kettle already boiling or the tv mysteriously turning itself on and off once we saw that there was a frequency of what was happening we started doing a log of dates times and incidents that that were occurring we would put the day the time and there was lots of different incidents from the cars going around the route to noises to what sounded like tables falling around the building and you're going to the room and nothing was there in 1994 i became a local beat officer for the area i came and introduced myself to the staff here pauline and dawn they offered me a cup of tea and while i was having the tea i noticed on a metal cabinet an a4 sheet of paper saying russell's done this and russell's done that and i said well who's this russell you keep mentioning oh that's our local ghost you are kidding me it's a lot of all of me very very skeptical of all of this you know i didn't believe any of it so we did a ghost watch here a co one of my colleagues and a few other people came along we turned up and we had various people in various rooms i was allocated the main canteen area [Music] and then a few things started to happen [Music] it's about one o'clock in the morning and we're sitting there and suddenly there's a loud ticking noise in front of us and it's sort of moving around the room and the girls asking me about it i said oh no it's just a clock in the corner down there and then i remembered that the clock hadn't got batteries in it and that the kids from the youth club had actually tied the two hands together so it couldn't have been that at that point i started to get very jittery we then heard in this room we're in now which is a witch room we could hear the wits downstairs rolling about the floor now that part of the building was locked up i had didn't have a key for it there was no one down here as you've seen yourself it's well secured from the back no one could have got in but you could hear the weights rolling about and been lifted and dropped now that really did frighten me and it was then i started to realize well there's more to this than meets the eye paul doran's skepticism was blown away by his ghost watch experiences desperately searching for a rational explanation he called in paranormal investigators from assap the association for the scientific study of anomalous phenomenon the purpose of coming to here is to is not in fact to try to prove that ghosts and spirits and poltergeists exist that would be a very far too pointed a way for us to approach our work what we come here to try and do is be open-minded about what might happen about what has happened and to bring some scientific rigor to the examination of that having put a team together basically what we do is we come in to uh stake out the place if you like or call them vigils and so on and that would include us positioning people in different plants all over the building controlling the environment so that for example we know that no one else can enter the building we know where we are at any given time and we even have what's called an emu an environmental monitoring unit which monitors the whole building while we're in it we try and bring in a balance of viewpoints so we bring in believers who believe fervently that you know the ghosts and spirits are the dead et cetera we bring in as skeptical a bunch of people as we can do as well so that rather than trying to sort of investigate from the point of view of something we already believe in we already come in ready to argue with each other in the most constructive way possible during several overnight vigils the investigators witnessed a series of unexplainable events these strange occurrences were consistent with the stories they'd been hearing from the staff at the center an incident i recall was in the gym area down here when there was a punchback swinging hanging from the ceiling motionless and we would always steady anything like that we would always make sure the environment was controlled and this punch back just started swinging now again we did have the environment controlled no one was near it no one should have been able to move it from physically walking about near or anything of that sort of thing and yet spontaneously it seems to have started um it's very difficult to explain that we're underground here so wind doesn't really come into it the place would have been closed out properly the walls are very very thick here so uh that one again we thought was something quite strange a key discovery by the asap team confirmed what workers at the center had already suspected russell the friendly ghost upstairs was not the only presence there was another source of the eerie events in the basement which did not appear to be quite so affable in this building upstairs there's an atmosphere it's friendly it's like it's like casper your family goes from the movie but you come down here it's very oppressive down here can be very frightening down here and i'll be honest with you i don't want to be down here there are two spirits in this building i i believe but the one down here is not at all friendly when you go downstairs just it's just a different feeling comes over you it's almost as if you think something bad could happen to you on a couple of occasions when it has been very very oppressive and i have just gone back up those stairs as fast as my legs would carry me because i don't want to be down here i do not want to be down here it's fine being down here with a lot of people but being down here one or two of you when you walk down those stairs and you come into this room or you go into that boiler room and the temperature drops you know you know there's something wrong and we decided to do a ouija board um the reason of this was to try and find out who actually was in the building they cajoled me in the taking part and i thought yeah well fair enough i'll sit down here with them so i sat down with them thinking to myself well i'll see who's pushing this glass around this board the hardest that was my my whole idea was this is going to be a hoax set down and suddenly it's uh started the ball rolling and then it comes through a message for paul and going yeah and then we just said well who is it and then suddenly that glass took off and it shot across that board p c 1 4 9 q my best friend in the police had died a few years before and that was his shoulder number now no one around that table or in that building at that time knew who he was or what his shoulder number was and at that point i jumped up from the table i'd gone pure white i was shaking like a leaf i grabbed hold of a metal cabinet that was there i just held on to it until i stopped shaking and i refused to go back into that circle no one in the center has ever been hurt by any of the extraordinary events but they continued to trouble the staff to this day i haven't got an answer to why they're here i don't know i think they're asking for help in my opinion i'd be very sad to lose russell though when you walk in the building sometimes by yourself you shiver and shake i actually think of him as a friend the other spirit downstairs i would just like to see shot off i don't i've got no qualms about that one with a lot of the paranormal you're also down to the witness you're down to how much you trust the witness and i found the witnesses here to be totally trustworthy people including the the policemen involved and including the manager of the center i i had no reason to to doubt their honesty so i think something real was happening here during my time in the police service i've had knives pulled on me i've been beaten up i've had guns pulled on me i've been frightened then but not as frightened as i am of this stuff i ran up the hill after him but when i got to top it disappeared they're not really there in in any spiritual or intelligent sense you know the fact that you put them there like keys or something like this and you go back to the place and it wasn't there sobbing the crying the lights being turned off glasses being broken [Music] these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] battle abbey in sussex built on the site of the battle of hastings one of the bloodiest ever fought on british soil a likely place you would think for paranormal activity recently the ghostly figure of a monk has been seen amongst the ruins is the abbey haunted or is it all just a hoax my name's daryl birchmoor and i'm deputy head custodian here at battle abbey working for english heritage battle abbey was founded in 1070 on the spot where the battle of hatings was forged in 1066 it was finally completed in 1094 and consecrated in the presence of william rufus we've had lots of legends connect with battle abbey over the years the most famous being the curse which was lifted in 1933 that was a curse that was placed on the family of anthony brown by one of the monks who who deemed it unfair that uh anthony brown had been awarded the abbey in all its uh grounds and the uh monks have been basically evicted from the site since 1990 which has been my time at battle abbey i've heard a number of ghost stories here um mainly involving police officers who've been doing nighttime stakeouts trying to catch vandalism uh in the act and what have you and they've seen monks there have been no monks at battle abbey since the 16th century but recently at least two witnesses have come forward claiming to have seen a figure dressed in a monk's habit earlier this year june 2002 we had a school party on site nothing unusual in that we have loads of school parties but this particular one it was sutton valence school for a maidstone in kent and one of the teachers and and two of her class um actually witnessed a monk outside the undercroft it was about 11 o'clock because we had arrived there we had walked around the battlefield and then we'd walked around the abbey ruins and we were then trailing back in groups to the shop before we settled down for our packed lunch it was a very very short time we saw him fall we were walking straight ahead and he was to our right and he was walking towards us and then turn into a doorway so he would have taken maybe 10 paces that we saw and you know i would have thought i'd had too much wine the night before i think if it hadn't been the fact that two children saw him with me he was wearing a white robe and had a bald patch on the top of his head and well he had gray hair he looked really real because at the bottom of his um robes there were you could see where his legs were touching it when he walked his robes did move they flowed and and they were they were so clean he was immaculate really actors do dress in period costume at the abbey but never as monks at the same spot 12 years earlier daryl had also witnessed an unusual event during the summer of 1990 i was doing a lock up for the evening it was around about six o'clock in the evening the only people i could see were out on the far battlefield i want to walk through the chambers which were a series of wine cellars no one around at all and i came out slot the inner door and then the outer shutters and suddenly was banging from inside real real banging as if someone was trapped inside i opened up the door no one there so i locked up again ran back to the shop and my colleague who was deeply religious looked at me said you're joking then he saw me again he says you're not joking are you he came back with me checked the place over no one around and later that night he and another colleague went into the same chambers with a dividing rod and it kept pointing to a particular corner jill found out that the monk had also been seen there before over 20 years earlier an abbey maintenance man had been working at that same spot there was a hole dug in there once wasn't there and a workman was down the hole he looked up and the monk was leaning over the side i believe this is what they told me and the workmen completely freaked out and ran away now what makes that interesting is that was on the saxon line of defense where most of the bloodshed happened on the battle of hastings i have heard since that he's been seen there since we saw him and many times before the teacher came back to the shop and reported to one of my colleagues who then reported it to me that [Music] she'd uh witnessed a monk in the presence of two of her children and what what sticks in my mind about this was the fact that she said the monk looked humanoid not not uh not transparent at all and she actually asked whether anyone was doing guided tours or anything in munk costume which of course we were replied in the negative a lot of reports are of monks and nuns often in contemplation often walking in rows towards their old cloisters or in their cloisters often chanting and so on and i think that's actually fairly consistent the last monk left the abbey over 400 years ago and no staff have ever dressed as monks so just what was this mysterious figure only a few weeks later it was seen again the raj family from wakefield in yorkshire stopped off at the abbey on the way back from a trip to france we arrived at batlabe mid morning we went through the gift shop and out onto the courtyard just in front of the school we went to the right and followed the designated walk as we came off the battleground we decided to take the disabled route which was up a slight incline but as we started walking up uh jonathan looked forward and pointed out the moon there was a monk walking about 30 feet in front of us the monk was dressed in a brown habit with the hood over his head his hands were raised in front of him and his head was bowed he walked from one building across a sharp pathway into another building we were stood together i was trying to get my camera out of my bags as i say we we thought it was a real monk because it looked so real um and while i'm in the process of getting the camera out from my bag i also took jessica's head and pointed it in the direction of where he was but she still couldn't see him i ran up the hill after him but when i got to top it disappeared i looked to left first and he went there so i looked right there the raj family had no reason to think there was anything unusual about the monk we thought it was a normal person when we saw him it was a solid figure and it was walking we didn't realise it was anything but a real person until we went back to the gift shop we did ask if there was anybody dressed up as the monk and the categorically denied that there was i'm always disappointed when people come along and say they've seen a ghost because yes it's something that i'd like to see myself i really would i don't know what my feelings would be if i actually saw something but i mean no one's ever been hurt by ghosts have they they were more excited than we were we were quite shocked when we found out that it was something that we didn't expect but they were quite excited what makes me interested with these two sightings that both as far as i'm concerned very credible both um the raj family and sutton valence school it was an adult and two children involved in both sightings both lots of people said that they saw a solid looking monk and not the transparent figure um both were willing to talk about it in great detail to me and um both sightings would have happened where where there been great loss of life in the battle of hastings the raj family sort of saw their monk up on the top of cenlak hill where the victorian dairy now stands um and sutton valence school saw theirs on the lower terrace where once again the saxon london defense would have been so as you can imagine there would have been bloodshed in in both those areas but why it's a monk and not a knight of some description i can't understand one theory suggests that apparitions like these are images of the past replayed under certain unknown conditions like a video recording replayed again and again if the theory that some ghosts are recordings is correct then we don't know either what conditions embed that recording in the first place or what caused the replay but we do know that since the world is not continuously full of ghosts that it has to be a fairly unique set of circumstances therefore i think it's quite normal if that's the word to use that a ghostly figure that hasn't been seen before should suddenly appear even if it does appear to have come from a long way back in history i would like to think that someone was dressing up that day and does it regularly and fools the tourists um because i didn't really believe in guys i thought that the monk was a real person but i wasn't quite sure i've always had an open mind on ghosts i'm not a believer i'm not a disbeliever with the these sightings i think they're very credible and i'm just jealous that i haven't seen saint myself i still am 100 sure that it was a ghost but i'll never know could it be a wandering monk with an interest in history is it all just an elaborate hoax or could this really be the ghost of a 16th century monk returning to haunt the abbey from which he was evicted the case remains a mystery go back to the place and it wasn't there but then you look a little bit later on and it reappeared sobbing the crying the lights being turned off glasses being broken [Music] in 1992 the dartmouth family fulfilled the dream of a lifetime when they bought and moved into the union inn pub in the idyllic village of rye in sussex before long their dream turned sour when the family began to report strange events that began to upset them it was a dream and we were perfectly happy for you i think um it was fine to begin with but it just seemed to be a gradual effect nothing you would notice you know it was sort of a gradual thing it was a series of events which eventually i i realized weren't normal um we've had experience of hauntings in the past i have and i began to realize that something abnormal was taking place when i know damn well i turn off every damn night as secrets as i go up the stairs all of a sudden at the job the stairs the lights will run again and i knew something was actually happening [Music] you just put things down and they would move you know and you know the fact that you put them there um like keys or something like this and you'd go back to the place and it wasn't there but then you look a little bit later on and it reappeared and so you'll question your insanity sometimes [Music] the noise of the sobbing and the crying the lights being turned off glasses being broken things being thrown around the kitchen knives etc um dancing lights we had at the bar like dancing little dancing red lights at the bar were inexplicable forces from the spirit world at work in the pub we tend to bracket ghost spirits and poltergeists into one phenomena as if it's part of one thing and indeed i've written books which bring them all in because people expect them to be in one compendium my instinctive view is that they're not the same thing at all and that certainly ghosts which may be say recording type ghosts they may be an echo of something that once happened but the sense of the person that you're seeing is not really there it's like a video replaying and you're just watching a replay of something spirits where there seems to be a real presence a real person that you're you can even communicate with and poltergeists which are sort of an external activity and noises which go on now it's tempting to think that the dead perhaps can cause all of those things and we must bear in mind that that may be possible but i think there's also other possibilities and that they are not only three different completely different phenomena but even within those there may be lots of different subsets that are actually nothing to do with each other and that we're mixing them together wrongly the family felt the paranormal experiences were becoming more frequent and were taking on an eerie presence well it was like a great big shadow of human shape um the cloak sort of thing that just came through the wall came through anywhere at you but it was immensely cold and you knew it was there because you could feel it was cold also you felt something watching you all the time and you looked round and as you walked towards the door wherever you walk in the room you'd feel the cold spot and you knew it was there in a room upstairs you'd go up to it and you could feel the cold as you approach the room yet everywhere would be very hard or more and this one would be freezing cold would be like a block of ice walking through it it didn't actually go for you in any way it just made its presence felt which unnerved you all the time and it reached the point sometimes where you wouldn't even sleep you'd be laying in bed waiting for something to happen and then of course those times never did happen when you eventually fall asleep you'd be woken up at any time in the hour of the morning with this thing standing there but i did feel things touch me and things like this around and a lot of other people complained of that you feel so there was a hand on the back of your neck or something and it was touching you and you looked around there was nobody there i do believe in this kind of recordings theory that somehow the fabric of buildings the fabric of the the land can embed and record something perhaps it takes emotion or particular climatic positions or particular stone or quartz or whatever but that some unique combination comes together and can can embed a recording just like a video can embed a recording i just can't explain what what's causing things to move or lights going on and off i don't know i'm i don't work in that field but it just i saw that with my own eyes and i'm one of these people i've got to see things with my own eyes before i really believe the dartmouth began to fear for their livelihood as all the stories made the pubs customers start to feel uncomfortable too they were sitting in the corner and they just suddenly felt as though there's somebody touching them with the back of their necks as though somebody was sort of tickling their neck and it was very so essential but it they didn't like it because they didn't couldn't understand what it was but it was give them shivers up their back and this sort of thing and that happened to a couple of the staff members female staff members as well it really was nasty used to chase the people around the building basically [Music] when we're dealing with spirits i i tend to veer to two types of things one is that it may be an intelligent dead person or that it may be telepathy of the living that you create the spirit or even that you create the ghost or whatever in order to receive a message which is actually a telepathic message so it's all to do with the living and not to do with the dead perhaps the problems got worse for the dartmouth family when even the staff started to report strange experiences i was sitting down and this girl she was sitting down and it was as though her face was changing shape and it was becoming a sort of man shape and it was she was in a slight chart trance and it was only sort of a matter of seconds and it changed completely and it frightened me she wouldn't even come back up in here and collect her money she said no more she just left that was it the strange phenomena showed no signs of going away what's more they started to affect their son james who was then only four years old [Music] i was concerned for my son more than anything else because he was only small at the time and i was worried about him and it was having a bad effect on him it was as though he was being trained of all his well energy he came over here he came over here perfectly well normal he'd leave with drain of energy physically tired headaches didn't want to come over anymore i come here normal sometimes like when you'd walk into a room it'd be all cold and you'd feel like somebody's watching you and and things like that and then you'd hear noises like moaning noises like my dad said earlier on and it was that sort of thing and then i started to feel ill but as soon as i left the pub and then gone home whatever i'd be perfectly okay it was as though he had a continual sort of flu type thing when he was over he had no temperature he had a normal temperature but he just felt run down but as soon as we got him back home he was fine but in the end i said no more and this was it something had to be done and they got the mediums in eventually the dartmouth called in a medium to help them investigate the eerie events the medium came and he [Music] he talk to um i don't know what it was but he said there were three entities in here and one was a young girl and somebody else and this man who had a beard and he was a sailor well from what i can vaguely remember is that probably when i was little i imagined it to look like i saw it look like um postman packed with a beard and a weird sort of uniform now the family were running out of options they called in a team of paranormal specialists and after many months of research and investigation they recommended a ritual to rid the pub of its problems they threw water i believe everywhere and laid crystals down and the the lady of the the couple said my son would be all right after this and he'd make a quick recovery which he did but in an hour or two his headaches had gone and he was up and brought and sprightly again and he did say my friend's gone i said well where has he gone he says he's gone through a hole in this room and it did stop after that they put crystals all around the place and whether or not that was subconsciously thinking it was working it did work and he did he did not seem to have any more problems of all the theories that i've been impressed with i think poltergeist to an exteriorization of internal energy and most of the best cases of poltergeists pure poltergeists seem to involve people who have incredible frustration it's not just stresses we all have stresses but people who cannot relieve those stresses because there's no one to blame there's no way out of the situation and and they perhaps exteriorize some kind of energy which can literally move objects in the environment and we've yet to learn about that i think i think the whatever it was i mean if it is a ghost i think it was trying to communicate with him because he was young he was more susceptible to it and he didn't like the intrude well if you do believe in it from what i can gather he didn't like the intrusion of people in here [Music] i'm left with no doubt now that uh you know there is something out there and we are being visited the bells were ringing there were things happening from the moment you sat down there was something going on all the time these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] many people embrace a deep desire to prove their belief that we are not alone in the universe chris martin has spent many hours gathering remarkable video footage of what he believes is undeniable evidence of an alien presence in our skies his footage is a source of great debate and there are many skeptics but chris himself has not always been a believer i was a professional musician session guitar player and i was doing that uh pretty much when i left school and i used to do sessions for various bands in the kind of rock genre um i did that up until probably about 97 yeah about 1997. that's when i got more involved in the researching the ufo phenomena in 1996 chris was introduced to the concept of alien phenomena by his girlfriend at the time vicky it was probably two or three months into the relationship that she confided in me that she'd had this kind of paranormal side to her existence that she'd had she'd met these entities in in kind of dream states at night and then actually physically she'd seen these small figures in her room when she was very young and i remember being absolutely fascinated and i wanted to actually come try and get to the bottom of that and find out whether it was this was a reality or some kind of fantasy in her mind at first chris was not convinced of vicky's claims but he started to take the subject seriously when he too began to witness strange objects in the sky [Music] the very first time we saw a ufo we weren't weren't actually looking we were going to the shops and vicky saw this white sphere the side of a cloud was a sunny afternoon and this thing was just hovering on the edge of the clouds and what was really old is that it went into the cloud and reversed out and did this a couple of times like we both stood there trying to work out what what kind of vehicle or aircraft could do then we suddenly realized that you know there wasn't anything um that we knew of that could perform those kind of maneuvers you know reversing mid-air you know this thing didn't look like a helicopter it was round and metallic and that's when it hit us that we were actually looking at an actual ufo and that was that was the first time but it was it was i'll never forget it it was amazing after that first sighting chris began to capture many strange images on video of objects in the sky that he believes are alien craft i popped out into the garden uh on the off chance to to see if there was anything there and i saw this thing just above the roof just tumbling it seemed very reflective it was catching the light and i managed to get the camera set up and film the thing probably only visible for maybe 10 15 seconds but it was significant that it looked very unlike a balloon or a bow some believe chris's footage plays an important role in backing up claims of an alien presence in our skies but for many others the evidence remains far from conclusive what's the law of averages here if you go out and purposely look for something i'm pretty sure you'll find something certainly in in in areas where there's a lot of aerial activity i.e london you know the busiest airports in the world live just outside london so it's no great surprise that you can see something and film it in the night sky but chris is not alone in his beliefs many people who have viewed his footage believe it to be true evidence of alien visitations stewart wisdom has actually been along on several of chris's sky watches and has even begun to film his own sightings you have to see these things for yourself i mean you can show footage but it doesn't once you see one of these um spheres for yourself firsthand it's it's a whole new ballgame it really brings it home [Music] this is some of chris's most intriguing footage to date as yet no one has been able to prove whether this is azkaris claims an alien craft or whether there is a more conventional explanation as soon as i looked at it i thought it was this was something very strange so again you know i set up the camera zoomed right in onto full zoom and i really can't describe what it was it was just very very unusual orange uh horseshoe shaped kind of object hadn't had kind of ribs around it uh it seems solid it's not a hollow it's not a kite of any kind and we've estimated that it's at least 100 feet wide and that negates any kites or fairground balloons because there is nothing uh available in this country that is that size some skeptics have said it's um a kite that was uh broken loose from a march that was on in on that day in london but again i've had a look on the internet and some of the kites that i've seen displayed are very very small they certainly don't look anything like this orange object so again it's another classic ufos not on it's not identifiable [Music] over the years chris has videoed so many unusual objects that it appears he has developed an instinct for when and where they might appear people say to me well how do you know when there's going to be a sighting and i can't really there aren't really the words to describe how it is but it's more a sense of um uh knowing it's like kind of knowing someone's going to visit you i wouldn't say something that i'm special or you know i think anyone can do it anyone who's watching this you know to actually go out and try and initiate contact you know chris's catalogue of footage is undoubtedly intriguing but with numerous theories that offer more conventional explanations ufologists like chris know they must attempt to approach the evidence with an objective and rational mind there's a great will to believe um in a lot of people and it's a common factor that if someone does have an experience or a sighting then they're looking for further confirmation if you like they'll look skywards some people just content to look while others in certainly modern times use technology they use the video camera or still camera to try and confirm what they've already believe or they've already seen or experienced and chris may fall into that category i'm not saying he does but he may do and um he's certainly got a sharp eye for this type of thing so points his camera skywars when he thinks he sees something on conventional and films it what i tend to do is film whatever i see and then look at it later and then decide if it's something anomalous or not most people are not very good at judging distances or size because you if you're dealing with something that's very high up it looks high up it could actually be something that's very small but very low but i'd like to think now you know i'm fairly good judge of what i see the past myself and others would take those less um experienced out into the into the moors to look at the night sky to show them how to identify conventional objects like the stars and the planets and aircraft and and even hot air balloons at night and which are rare but we didn't know where there would be some so that if they get a report of this nature they know how to um cross it off the list so to speak when you film a balloon especially what i've got where um a healing balloon is highly reflective when it's high up in the sky but it with a hearing balloon it would it's going to be wobbling around it's and it's going to be doing sort of erratic movements a lot of what i've got um it does seem to be they're either stationary or they do move in a very very controlled manner he seems a very genuine young man very sincere in his beliefs and he obviously believes himself that what he's filming is something anomalous and that's fine if if that suits chris but um i'm afraid i don't share his opinions i've watched chris martin's videos and i'm with the greatest will in the world i can't see anything on there that can't be explained in conventional terms you know most of them look like balloons of one sort or another with a few mixtures of aircraft thrown in for good measure and they don't display any non-ballistic motions they behave just like conventional objects do and they even look like them um that's no disrespect to the gentleman in question um but um to me they've all got a conventional explanation i wish they didn't have i'd like to say that they don't but they do well i was someone that used to be uh interested but um now it's something that i feel passionately about i feel it's something that needs a much wider public recognition i think it's something that the media should really um investigate and and in an unbiased way um i think it should be much higher on the political agenda at the moment it's still regarded as a joke you know kind of a cranks topic i'm left with no doubt now that uh you know there is something out there and it's an old cliche but i believe that we are being visited and you know i have no doubts anymore [Music] the bells were ringing there were things happening from the moment you sat down there was something going on all the time [Music] in spring 2001 paranormal investigator montagu keane came across a case that would turn into one of the most intriguing paranormal investigations of its kind we came across a lady who had had some experience trying for physical phenomena and she was interested in getting investigated by the society of psychical research which is a scientific body concerned with objective investigation the group claimed that they had witnessed a series of paranormal activities in a house in eling west london they wanted to prove their claims to a group of independent paranormal investigators they performed a series of experiments within a controlled environment they wanted to see whether they could produce physical phenomena similar to that which they had experienced in another group that i had also investigated but to do so in conditions which enabled objective and critical scientific observers to be satisfied that there was no possibility of fraud and she was genuinely enthusiastic about a scientific approach to these phenomena so they volunteer this is very unusual they volunteered to be investigated and i was doing the preliminary work with my colleagues to see whether the conditions were right the experiments were arranged to enable the investigators to discover whether any strange activity was the result of human intervention or indeed something truly unexplainable clearly we couldn't lay down conditions that they couldn't comply with and vice versa we wanted to have conditions which would be acceptable to us from the point of view of controls against fraud or deception of any sort so they had to be pretty rigorous on the other hand they had to agree what what they could do the investigators insisted that everyone in the sealed off room was secured behind a large net curtain to prevent any tampering however the previous strange activity in the house had occurred in virtual darkness and this would have to be replicated if the experiments were to reveal anything with all conditions in place montague didn't have to wait long for the strange activity to begin one of the most interesting and exciting things that happened almost at the beginning was that in front of the curtain there was a small table it's a little pedestal table only about two feet wide and the table would rise in the air uh turn over so that it was the top was facing us and would greet us by just bending down in front of us one after the other moving along the ropes clearly intelligently motivated this bizarre event was also witnessed by veronica ford one of several observers present at the experiments well as soon as the table started responding to me i thought my god this is real this is not this is not anyone's imagination this is for real after the table had um as it were greeted us by moving across the row uh the table then having been upended in some way uh bending itself towards us it did this gentle dance backwards and forwards in time for the music i found that incredible because it was up so high nobody else could touch it the investigators were truly intrigued by the strange movements of the ordinary objects in the sealed off room but in near total darkness the real evidence remained inconclusive the observers could hear unexplained sounds and make out movements in the dark they even felt water spraying around them but couldn't make out the cause of any of the strange events bells were ringing there were things happening from the moment you sat down there was something going on all the time so what could have been causing these strange occurrences the investigators had rigged up a special camera to try and capture any unexplainable activity on film i think one of the um most important if not the most important uh bit of evidence for a paranormal phenomenon was the production of films from one of these very cheap instant cameras this is actually the camera that was used and the film was loaded new the camera was new uh the lens of the camera was sealed uh by my colleagues and we heard the characteristic sound of this being pulled out i don't want to do it now because this is actually still has in it the cassette that i originally put in and we know that there was no question of substitution because fortunately these films have on them numbers each one and so we pulled out a sample film as a control in order to check that the subsequent film that we found produced by some form of magic had the same the sequel number to it so there could be no uh substitution possible to the amazement of the investigating team the camera revealed a series of strange images that montagu keane is still trying to explain to this day the main question was whether conceivably someone could have got access to the camera in the dark through the netting and after pulling it out um scribbled and scratched around on the top of the film before the gel had done its work have about 30 35 seconds to do this and produced some sort of image and fortunately we have one piece of evidence which i think shows conclusively that the picture must have been produced inside the camera in one of the photographs the chemical gel that is released onto the film inside the camera appears to cover part of the unexplained image montague claims that this is proof that the image must have been created inside the sealed camera itself bearing in mind that this was a in the dark and b in any case the camera had the lens totally um sealed and and we checked to make sure that no one could have interfered with the seal but even if they had done they would have required quite elaborate uh light and equipment to be able to produce this sort of picture the strange events reached an unsettling climax during the third and final experiment now in total darkness the witnesses claimed to have clearly heard and even felt the presence of birds and other wild animals inside the sealed room some of the observers even felt the presence of a large snake i am terrified of snakes and even though my logical mind was telling me there wasn't a snake there i could sense it and and you heard it slithering right up and going up on his lap and he strapped it i was so frightened and i felt ridiculous because i was frightened and lots of wonderful things happened and the most spectacular one was when a an owl came in and got caught in the netting and the noise of the netting and the you don't actually hear ours screaming but you hear a very characteristic sound there were lots of birds flying around the room but the one that got trapped i don't know whether you've ever heard a bird who is trapped it is really very traumatic to hear it and you feel so bad because you're sitting there and you're not helping it and we all sat there totally helpless and yet every one of us were distressed because you felt so helpless it was struggling it was caught up in the net and we couldn't do anything by the end of the three experiments a long series of mysterious events had been witnessed by the participants montague was now faced with the difficult task of explaining exactly what had caused the strange phenomena i don't think we could have absolutely ruled out an elaborate hoax without introducing something like infrared cameras i think we felt that we had virtually ruled it out by looking at a combination of all of the things that would have had to have been hoaxed but what made it i think impossible was the fact that one of the pictures produced out on the second sitting was inherently paranormal unless someone had managed to get hold of the camera take it out of the room remove the cover have plenty of light take very careful precise photographs put it all back again and bring it back and this was a scenario which was just simply not not feasible so i think if you take that into account and then you ask yourself well if that is genuine would all the other things be fraudulent um would they have gone to the trouble of faking lesser things because they've already got something which is quite clearly paranormal the answer is no no one in their senses would wish to do that [Music] balls of light between triangles we've seen cigar-shaped objects is it something from another planet like everybody i'd like to find out it was as if you'd gone through it into a different time zone and pop back out again they have had a what's called a time dilation effect or a missing time effect there's a period of time that they can't account for these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] bonnie bridge in scotland is a village with an unusual claim in the last few years it has become the ufo capital of the uk thousands of strange objects have been spotted in the skies above the village are they visitors from outer space or is there a more straightforward explanation one man has become determined to provide proof that there is an extraordinary reason behind these celestial phenomena i would say the first major time was when we got to nvidia was in 1991 when my brother came into the house and said i've seen something something's chased me type of thing so we were like yeah hi okay fine and we went outside and true enough there was this thing flying about in the skies and it was doing like a figure of eight in the sky moving about and it looked really bizarre looking as we watched it actually watched like balls of light coming out of the back of it and flying away from this object so that eliminated like obviously aircraft helicopters blah blah blah because there was no noise on anything off at the time so that's the very very first sign that i can see we've got concrete proof that there's something strange so that's how it all started bonnie bridge certainly over these last few years has been probably the center of ufo sightings in the uk we often use the term window area for something like bonnie bridge it's a small geographical area where a lot of things seem to happen there are others around the country bonnie bridge seems to be the current one now why this happens why it should be in this one particular area is anyone's guess but the fact that it is and we just have to live with that but there are other areas around the country and indeed around the world that seem to have a a concentration of strange things happening not just ufo sighting but a whole host of things there was one night in question i just actually finished work and i was at the back door of the house it was approximately six o'clock at night and my dad it was november my dad had shouted me there's something in the skies just at the back of the house so we started to watch this like it wasn't just one it was there was two or three of some like balls of flight doing kind of acrobatics in the sky and the next thing there was like helicopters appeared like unmarked helicopters and the helicopters they seemed to be chasing the balls of flight it was like cat and mouse they just seem to be one or two individuals that for whatever reason are in the right place at the right time to make these observations sometimes it's because of their profession for example police officers are often out at night and so on when a lot of sightings are made so it wouldn't surprise me if a police constable or whatever made a few sightings in a particular area especially if there were a lot of sightings in that area at the time the odds must be in his favor but it's it's not uncommon for some individuals to be around at the right time whether they're tuning into something or it's just pure look is another argument of course from the first one it just snowballed we've seen dozens and dozens within a matter of six months or so we've seen loads and logic balls of light we've seen triangles we've seen cigar-shaped objects you've seen lights bouncing about in the sky like absolutely no way it's aircraft do some people actually see more ufos or are they just more willing to believe in extraordinary explanations for everyday events friend of the family john wilson was skeptical until one night a few years ago we were leaving the house to go home craig spotted it and it was over at the back there so we all come out the house and we all walked over to the gates and there it was it was bright like a bright ball and i mean nothing moves as fast as that and comes back and goes up and down as fast as that you know so and then after seeing it on the video you know it does look like it is obviously something that needs to be investigated you know with all the commotion jim was saying oh look and craig's camcording it and my daughter's gripping me arm because i think she was a bit frightened you know but after a while after we watched it all and it just just shot from off from nowhere you know gone it wasn't just there and then it vanished it was there for a good quarter of an hour 20 minutes i'd say we're all meds mesmerized by it because i'd never seen anything like that before my daughter hadn't obviously jim and and craig has you know and it's all on on on the ta on the the camcorder you know i mean they even hear me swearing like that because i've never seen anything like that there's nothing that would would pinpoint bonnie bridge to be a you know an attraction for ufos or any kind of other phenomena and the same goes for other window areas like i said there's many of them around the around the world but there doesn't seem any particular reason why or reason that we currently understand why they should have a concentration in just one small area so why bonnie bridge there are several airports in the area could this explain the sightings when you go out sky watching it's a process of an elimination type of thing i mean aircraft you know aircraft you can hear them you know the lights on them you know the color lights on them helicopters again you can hear them they've got lights on them you know the cars as well as strange lights oddly shaped objects have also appeared the cigar shaped one that i've gotten video it was actually again we were just sitting in the house meeting my dad and my mom and it was my brother and it came in the house and says you're going to have to come and see this the movement of the cigar-shaped object was nil it was just like sitting in the sky and it was it wasn't sitting in a straight line it was sitting like kind of a horizontal type of shape it was it was it was weird it was offset in the sky but i i was that was one of the weirdest ones but it was quite close as well but again it's hard to judge how close and how big it is because it's in the sky you've not got anything to kind of like any backing to judge size or scale on it most sightings if not all sightings of lights in the sky irrespective of whether they're backed up by by video or film footage have a conventional explanation vast majority of them without question our aircraft the the next category are known astronomical uh observations stars planets and so on uh and i have no reason to believe that just because you know he's made a lot of sightings or filmed a lot of these things that should be any different during his nighttime vigils craig has captured hundreds of these objects on video he has also experienced another strange phenomenon sudden unexplained equipment failure you're trying to capture something on video that you're no one else has seen and you're intrigued to try and you push yourself with allowance to try and get this but it's very difficult because it can be frustrating because you're standing there all geared up with your your camera and everything ready to roll and you you start taking your pictures or your camcorder in the body just goes bump and that's it there's absolutely no power in it and it's hard on several occasions even with brand new batteries the reason for it for the batteries going flat i have no idea it could be like power surges or whatever i mean i really don't know i mean it could just be faulty batteries but i wouldn't say like my but i think it's possible like 10 batteries of might be bought over the years i wouldn't say 10 batteries would just go knackered within 10 seconds of the first time we've ever used them could this just be a coincidence most ufo sightings happen spontaneously you're not prepared for it so you grab your if you you know you've got the wherewithal to grab your camera you do oh i've no film in it oh the battery is low and so on so you know you're putting two two and two together and making five sometimes but i think it's just because we're not prepared for it and um it's very easy to to put a spooky atmosphere around this that i just went to film it and my battery run out it must have been the aliens well i'm afraid not probably because you haven't charged it beforehand it's as simple as that strange objects can still be seen in the skies above bonnie bridge many people want to believe they are ufos visitors from outer space or even top secret military aircraft craig malcolm continues to scan the skies with his camera hoping one day to find and prove beyond all doubt the true cause of these events before the sighting we used to see odd things in the sky but you never took really much notice you know [Music] but like talking to craig and jim what they'd seen you know and then the night that i did see it it was it was unbelievable [Music] as if you'd gone through it into a different time zone and pop back out again they have had a a what's called a time dilation effect or a missing time effect there's a period of time that they can't account for [Music] time slip a bizarre phenomenon the apparent distortion of time is time travel possible or is it all in the mind cultibragon training camp at cumbria in scotland and in the summer of 1993 home to army cadet trainer sue underhill it was the 8th of august and the day was absolutely frantic everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and it was a half past two on the eighth before we managed to get a book out for the guard room and get out of camp i drove out of camp i knew the roads fairly well i'd actually wrecked the campsite so i maybe just exceeded the speed limit a little bit um because they're not the best of rates but i was familiar with them i've been out to cadets on the campsite anyway so i flew down and killing um the village where you turn off to go down the tiny road down the other side of lochte we're already getting very late sue and her colleague david hardy were heading to the aberfoill visitors center 40 miles away they had to be there by quarter to four david took over the driving while sue nodded off in the passenger seat the next thing i remember which seemed an instant later but you know what it's like when you've been short of sleep for days there is so where's owen is a fishing town on the west coast why oh we're five miles away from it and sure enough he'd stopped and reversed up and there was a sign hoban five miles there's no way we're going to get back in time just turn around and head back you know it's straight back you know we must be on the right road if we go back the way we've come we're going to get back to where we started from say turned around and we nattered away and we didn't idle but um we weren't so belting along because we knew there's absolutely no hope of getting back and we came across locker and head and i said straight by um we better go to the visitor center and you know just leave a message he's going to wonder when it's happened and i looked my watch as we approached the visitor center turning and it was in quarterback three we left camp at half past two if you later when we look to the map it's sort of a round trip of about 153 miles how had they managed to cover 150 miles in just three quarters of an hour albert button a researcher into the effects of electromagnetic fields may have an answer they feel that a short period of time has elapsed and an enormous amount of activity has occurred um this is desynchronization in actual fact a normal amount of time has occurred but their perception of it is distorted but why should they even perceive time to be distorted i find it uh very interesting that these two people spent all of their life living on military bases because the military produced powerful communication systems and radar which is pulse microwaves and they would have been exposed to higher levels of electromagnetic pollution than the average person which would sensitize them to electromagnetic fields in the environment so this is a very a key factor in their sensitization only two days earlier sue and david had come across other evidence of a strong magnetic field we saw a lot of lights ahead of us and as we got near it they were eyes and pulled up and there must have been why didn't they i mean i'd say probably 40 or 50 i might be exaggerating this seemed that density of cats all different sort of sizes something quite large and they were sitting around totally ignoring us but they weren't right across the road and when they were in circle just before the turning to the junction and i mean we couldn't go they were there so two or three minutes and then they also got up and strolled off their different ways um seemed absolutely weird to me but apparently i've heard since that there was probably a magnetic field there and they love it and they'd all be attracted to it again sit there and do whatever cats do yes susan underhill and david hardy produced a report on some unusual experiences they had when they went driving through parts of scotland looking at the areas that they they covered i can see that most of the area is on the highland boundary fault i talked about geological faults and the energies that these can produce at the surface they are actually in a highly faulted area that is driven by dip and strike faults um producing piezoelectric picture magnetic field at the surface driving through these produce all kinds of anomalous effects could these geological faults produce fields that disrupt perception of time sue and david thought little more of it until one evening at the same camp two years later at half past nine went and checked on the card booked out and drove out of camp and we headed off a calendar where there's a chinese restaurant and we spent a good hour every meal i would think um they i mean i knew we left camp at half past nine because booking out and we hadn't hurried calendar but i know as we left the restaurant it was quarter to 12. and we set off walked to the car drove out of calendar and it was one of those magical clear nights that you you really only get in in scotland and the moon shining down on loch ledna was spectacular i drew david's attention to it of course when you're driving you can't really appreciate these things quite as well and i was still i i think admiring the moon's reflection when david went into complete panic jammed the brakes on skidded the car to hold and there in front of us was our famous sign that we'd seen two years before open five miles somehow they had arrived at the same sign over 70 miles away but this time as they drove back they seemed to be on a different road they had never seen before it was really very quite spooky and we seem to drive forever and ever and ever and eventually we came to a a little village and a railway bridge and it was quite a long railway bridge you went round a corner actually under the bridge it was quite quite a width of bridge i'd never seen it before the only railway bridge over that road had been demolished in 1965. as they came out from under the bridge sue recognized where they were and as we came out of the other side i realized we were actually at locker room head and actually david had gone past it we had to reverse up because the turning wasn't like it should have been it wasn't a big turning with your white lines in the middle of the road for sort of right turn and keep left signs and things it was only a little turning with no white lines at all and it was an old-fashioned sign and we thought it was probably a different road let's look let's go somewhere we know let's turn down it say we turned down and um drave along and we were beside the lock and the looks locker was on our right hand side so it had to be the right road but there was sort of white painted fence down bed besides between us and the lock the road hadn't looked like that for at least 30 years there was still no no sign of cars anywhere no cars parked outside the houses or anything it was quite really weird and it wasn't until we got back to conrie and to the fish farm just as you turn into conor may that the street lights were there and everything was long behind everything was just normal areas that they drove through seem strange and unreal this is another effect that is also very well documented in the neurological literature called jamesville which is the opposite of deja vu deja vu is where you something happens to you and you feel that it's quite familiar jaime vu is the reverse where you feel that things are strange were sue and david somehow seeing images of the past driving 70 miles back from oben they expected to get to camp in the early hours of the morning but when they arrived they found the gates still unlocked and we drove back into camp and david was really annoyed because the camp gates were still unlocked and it is rural that they lock the gates up up at night david wound winded let the window down and to book back in his guard came up that you you have to book in as well as out of camp and uh the rsm came out of the guard room and he's not timed a lot of gates yet and we told him what had happened and he just couldn't believe it because of course he remembered they sat on sunday the eighth of august two years before we'd gone we got lost we thought and and ended up just outside urban and here we were outside open again it was as if you'd gone through it into a different time zone and pop back out again sue and david had again covered the distance in an impossible time had they also traveled back 30 years or is it all the work of electromagnetic fields and james vu i didn't really really realize that we had lost time it was just incredible because we seem to have been walking backwards in time obviously now it's amazing that knowing how or what the distance we must of travel but at the time it seemed perfectly acceptable according to some of the witnesses there was a close encounter of the third kind it sounds like a b science fiction movie it just does but there they were and they weren't from here [Music] these stories are some of the strangest experiences ever described in the uk we can't tell if they're true but they are all recounted by ordinary people now they are your witnesses [Music] this unique audio recording is of conversations between us air force soldiers and their superiors as they investigate a series of strange lights in the uk's most outstanding and controversial ufo encounter the rendelsham incident maybe further out over three nights up to 40 u.s air force personnel from bases in suffolk saw strange lights nearby there are many conflicting accounts and interpretations of what actually happened in the forest even those who believe that something unusual happened do not all agree former airman larry warren was one of the witnesses who came forward on december 28 1980 i at that period in time i was a security policeman at rf bent waters and i had a secret clearance i was an airman first class and i was assigned to d flight that night i showed up at 11 30 on the bentwater's flight line for guard mount i was in a five-man group and i was told to move off into the forest the big event took place on the night of the 28th and the early morning of the 29th of december this is when the huge spaceship landed it was about 30 foot wide and multiple colors uh sort of spinning if you like and there were about 30 to 40 witnesses in this incident the first two witnesses that were involved in this incident um were told to go out to investigate lights over the forest the first thing i saw was a giant probably 50 foot across diameter a yellowish green translucent object on the ground it was probably a foot in height it was attached to the ground it wasn't hovering above it but had shape and definition you could see through it at times periodically and the lights went from green to yellow mist is all i can describe it as it was like a platform but fluid beyond all this was a farmer's house and there was a light on on the second floor there was a car in the driveway and there were people probably outside watching this also we do have evidence that this since the first incident took place because we've got the photograph of the landing site also a a patrol went out following this and took radiation readings [Applause] on the 29th of december two days after the original sighting the soldiers took radiation readings and mounted cameras in the area to see if they could make some sort of sense of the situation to my right there was a motion picture camera on a tripod and someone else had at that time a video camera filming everything i'm about to describe that night larry warren claims he witnessed alien life forms the place of the explosion of light was this triangular structured object that had like a rainbow effect on it it had box boxes and pipes or things on its surface it looked very heavy it looked very old i had this feeling it was this old thing i don't know why time seemed to be at half speed i wasn't looking at this as a rational normal person i i don't know how it affected others there again there was no heat there was no sound that i can recall in fact it was everything was almost like in a vacuum [Music] some people ran off had run retreated quite quick the cameras were filming this the whole while some people just stayed in place i was we're probably shocked you know the man in charge of the patrol was lieutenant colonel charles halt larry warren remembers the encounter his team had in the forest as recorded on the u.s air force tape halt's tape actually describes the beginning of this event through a scene from about 200 yards away through the trees where the red light comes in and then there's an object or something explodes and that's what they were seeing in capo green through the three hundred yards forest it looks like an eye winking at you still moving from side to side and when you put the star scoop on it it it has a hollow center like a dark center it's just this light came around this blind side of the object never saw the back of it it couldn't move from the air it was in and inside the light where these um the light diminished in brightness it was a foot off the ground and there were well you'd only describe his children at that time i wasn't the only one that did it some other people said i thought these were children and they had four four and a half feet tall above the ground very bright translucent at points you couldn't see the lower extremities but you could clearly see the face and it wasn't human but it seemed like it was either a projection or it was separate from us or was protected from us it was but it was alive there was no doubt in my mind the way these things moved the upper extremities there was a noise behind this at one point in the arms on one of these three beings uh raised almost like this in a defensive posture it had some kind of equipment around its belt all three of them and it sounds like a bee science fiction movie it just does but there they were they weren't from here at all according to some of the witnesses there was a close encounter of the third kind there was actually um beings these were translucent they were almost human looking but translucent the witnesses were absolutely in a terrible state i mean these are military men we see strange stroke-like flashes to the sporadic but there's definitely something some he approached these uh things uh i there's been mis statements over the years that there was communication with sign language and all this like closing the movies it wasn't it was definitely a visual standoff a very uncomfortable one so it looked with this phenomenon some of the other people looked totally buried like everything they knew collapsed it was done we were called off by our shift supervisor back to the staging area parking area and it seemed the lower ranking guys were called out first so i i gladly left i looked over my shoulder my left shoulder as i was going over the rise and this face-off was still going on on this field called cable green and i'll never forget it and there it was we got back to the vehicles and uh left the objective the witnesses were believed they made statements the british police were also called out where the ufo had landed and they found three indentations in the ground which were photographed and remarkably in 1983 they were sent a copy of a memorandum that was written by lieutenant colonel charles halt the very person who went out there with the patrol and investigated this case for many years the truth behind britain's equivalent to roswell remains surrounded in secrecy closely guarded by both the british and u.s governments then in 1983 after years of campaigning the u s government was forced to release official documents on the incident under the freedom of information act this controversial report is signed by lieutenant colonel charles holt the commander in charge on the night this memorandum was sent to the ministry of defence and it's really what it what it depicts is what happened during that week it mentions the triangular shaped craft it also mentions that colonel holt was out there himself at a later date mentions the radiation readings and and numerous other things so here we have for the very first time an official document to say that this case actually took place the halt memo dated january 13 1981 just weeks after these events as important as it is an official air force letterhead authored by a deputy-based commander of a very important nato air base describing phenomena that reads like science fiction all that is good and fine but the bottom line is i witnessed it and it's the biggest story ever told really when it gets down to it if this case is brought into a court of law the testimony from the witnesses and the evidence that could be brought forward would bring this house of cards down in a matter of hours and that i stand by [Music] over three nights in december 1980 a series of strange lights was seen at a u.s air force base near reynoldshum forest in suffolk the lights were investigated by military police but they could find no explanation for the extraordinary sights in an official memo written by lieutenant colonel charles halt he described his men as reporting seeing strange objects in the woods early in the morning of december 27 1980 approximately 0 300 hours local two usaf security policemen the individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest the object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape 150 feet had a pulsing red light on top and banks of blue lights underneath the object was hovering or on legs as the patrolmen approached the object it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared the next day according to halt the site was checked for evidence of anything unusual three depressions one and a half inches deep and seven inches in diameter were found where the object had been sighted on the ground was checked for radiation beta gamma readings of 0.1 milli run chins were recorded with peak readings in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle formed by the depression on the evening of the third day halt himself reported further sightings of unexplainable lights in the sky red sunlight light was seen through the trees it moved about and pulsed at one point it appeared to throw off glowing particles and then broke into five separate white objects the object to the south was visible for two or three hours and beamed down a stream of light from time to time numerous individuals including the underside witness police were called in after their initial examination they found nothing significant they decided that they too could see nothing further to investigate now the british police were also called out on the night that on the the time it took place but they they were actually called 4 a.m in the morning when it was all over so what we have now is a police officer who's saying oh but there was nothing there when you know when i went out to investigate it but of course it was all over by that time the official line was that the lights had an innocent rational explanation possibly the beam from a nearby lighthouse but some still think differently throughout the last 20 years gradually some of the witnesses have come forward and started to talk about what happened one of the witnesses was told that what he had seen was the beam from the nearby lighthouse now this is five miles in the distance he said no i did not see a lighthouse beam what i saw was an unidentified craft they kept on and on and in the end he finally said okay it was the beam from the nearby lighthouse he was so upset about this that when he was returned back to his quarters he actually thought of going awol official reaction from the u.s air force and the uk ministry of defense was the same and remained so to this day the ministry of defense have denied this incident um took place in other words they just say oh it was lights in the sky it was of no defense significant no matter how many times people talk about it no matter how many witnesses come forward the ministry of defense continued to deny that this incident took place the ministry of defense statement was clear and unambiguous the lights posed no threat the ministry of defence examines any reports of unexplained aerial sightings it receives solely to establish whether what was seen might have some defense significance namely whether there is any evidence that the united kingdom's airspace might have been compromised by hostile or unauthorized air activity the judgment was that there was no indication that a breach of the united kingdom's air defenses had occurred on the knights in question and no further investigation into the matter was deemed to be necessary the government of great britain has always said these cases these events were of no defense significance and i countered that by saying we had the largest backline supply of tactical nuclear weapons and nato secretly housed in east anglia these objects were flying with impunity over the weapon storage areas firing beams of light down to the ground at these hardened weapon storage areas adversely affecting the ordinance in that sounds to me like extreme defense significance there are actually a number of reasons why the british and american governments would not want to admit that this very powerful incident took place at that particular time it was the height of the cold war the bases deployed nuclear weapons that we weren't supposed to know about there was a lot of conflicts going on in the world but if you actually look back on on the historical records on ufology you will realize that every case is being covered up um including of i've never seen course roswell so is this britain's roswell the conspiracy theorists and believers had a field day though they don't all agree they felt they had credible eyewitness evidence of sightings of alien craft but the ministry of defense and u.s air force still maintain that there was no threat to air defenses even though nuclear weapons were stored nearby there could be a whole reasons a whole host of reasons why we're talking about a cover-up it could in its simplest form be bureaucracy it could be red tape and it's nothing more than that i mean our own official secrets act in the uk buries things for years some of it is quite trivial and there's no reason why it shouldn't be released it's just that the way that's the way bureaucracy works again it could be that that's the way bureaucracy works regarding the rendering events alternatively it could be that there was no aliens involved at all that the events in question were something that our own military forces were experimenting with playing around with that went wrong so therefore there's a reason for hiding this you know military blunders in the past have been been hidden for a long long time but again if it is an alien presence who knows the reasons why this may be kept secret amid the many conflicting stories of the rendelsham incident whether it was a lighthouse beam or other rational explanation larry warren still believes that he saw alien beings that night to the best of my knowledge larry's the only one that actually states that aliens were there at the time were responsible for this that he physically saw aliens i'm not sure that any of the other witnesses to these events even talk about aliens but to be fair to larry um he said on many occasions that if you take larry warren out of the whole renders from story there is still a story there and he's absolutely 100 correct how do i know the truth on uh these events i i know uh from first-hand experience and 23 years later i'm looking for ranches still i was 19 years old when it happened i'm in my 40s now and i'm still looking and i think everyone else that went through them in their own ways are doing the same thing i don't know what the great truth of who they were that was there i know the object i saw was not built in detroit and i know the uh pilots weren't lighthouse keepers um it's to be funny about it but the explanations the counter explanation the more ridiculous in the fact that there was a non-human presence in that forest on the night i was involved and that was the third night that involved the most participants i've named them for years long before this was part of any part of pop culture at all and the bottom line is i wrote a book about this just to set the record straight on what happened to me and five years later i have never been sued for what i said or naming the people and placing them in the roles they were in at all larry has had some difficulties however the us government temporarily suspended his passport restricting his freedom to travel i can look at myself and say that i'm the first person ever to be an alleged whistleblower and i am a government whistleblower uh to have his united states passport suspended officially which does not happen our passports are given to us and it's a matter of constitutional right unless you're a convicted felon i'm not i had mine suspended for a year and with the simple reason that i spoke about sensitive defense issues on public soil and it took a former united states attorney general under two presidents ramsey clark to get it back now i can't think of any witness over the last 50 55 years in the subject that has had repercussions like that the definite heat reflection off the tree is about three or four feet off the ground twenty years after the event the ministry of defense released documents relating to the rendlesham incident but this was not enough to satisfy the believers there were more than 150 documents but there were really only 12 documents that were very important to the case most of them were just letters from the public or letters from mps i mean over the years members of parliament have asked questions in the house of lords you know but still the ministry of defense denied that this incident was of any defense significance i had the opportunity to interview margaret thatcher in 1997 and of course margaret thatcher was the prime minister in 1980 when this incident took place i talked to her about military personnel scientists who are now coming forward and talking about their encounters she turned around and said you have to have the facts and you can't tell the people now why can't i tell the people why can't the people be told but if you have if you think about it does the government know what's going on i mean are they able to deal with this what president or prime minister would want to risk their reputation by standing up and saying yes we have had contact [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Retold - Documentaries & Reconstructions

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Id: V2x62RXuEKA

Length: 223min 1sec (13381 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022