The Great UFO Hoax '67: the hoaxers and a witness, fifty years on

0:04 fifty years ago oh my word top of that hill that's where it all happened yeah we're all kids just playing there just behind us someone said there's something going on up Cheyenne hill so we all came running over there it was what did you see why it's all so fifty years ago today a flying saucer landed on the Isle of Sheppey we're going to find out what really happened out on the marshes 1967 was the year of the Summer of Love science fiction was exciting the imagination of the British public TV screens featured Doctor Who and his foes terrifying viewers hidden behind their sofas you think the Cybermen will help you the threat of nuclear war seemed to be a button push away and the nation was

1:08 in the grip of UFO fever I'm an investigative journalist and I am absolutely fascinated by government archives and files of any description where there might be stories hiding and I've spent two decades combing through what are known as Britain's x-files the Ministry of Defence UFO FILES and there was a there was a UFO report that was coming into the ministry UFO desk or white or on virtually every single day of 1967 but one night was different Sunday the 3rd of September 1967 strange lights in the sky were being reported across North Kent the following morning a flying saucer appeared to have made a crash landing we've been about five minutes all sorts of activity going around people milling around and I

2:08 remember just down the bottom of the hill a police car turned up and we would know what to do were they scared not don't know and they start coming up the hill just along here like this and as I start getting close they started gesturing to us all the kids move away move away and no fright nothing as much as we were the police had received a phone call about a mysterious object not knowing what it was they began to form a cordon but there was no doubt in Ray's mind what he saw well it was a flying no two ways about it it was there it was the old flying saucer shape it was silver big dome with a thing around the outside yeah it was flying saucer reports were coming in of even more landing sites from the Thames Estuary to the Bristol Channel as you may have heard six of them have been found in a straight line starting at Cleveland in Somerset and ending on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent each of the flying saucers began to release a low ominous

3:09 tone was Britain under attack the government didn't want to take any chances at RAF Manston a whirlwind helicopter was scrambled to bring in the sheppy saucer were we about to make first contact with alien life No the flying saucers turned out to be a great big hoax by apprentices led by Chris Southall and Raj Parma from the Royal aircraft establishment Technical College let's take it up to the table Raj yeah they organized the hoax as a rag week stunt to raise money for charity the UFO fever had built up a month or two before this lot went out that's something actually because people are dying for something nice and exciting in their lives and newspapers are dying for good exciting stories along with a team

4:16 of fellow apprentices they built the six flying saucers and delivered them to their chosen landing sites in the dead of night these model flying saucers were very well made the students and obviously spent a lot of time and energy and setting these things up making them look authentic and when people found them and they were making a loud beeping noise you know he convinced people it wasn't just the strange noise the apprentices used to make the sources believable they also took the time to design their very own extraterrestrial life-forms boiled up an assortment of different potential aliens which was flour and water cooked up together just to give us this amorphous horrible slimy and who knows what you know once they get inside you know this is stuff that you can't identify you know which may be dead alien or it may be live you know and it may be about to come out and start eating you or you

5:17 know one of the sources when they actually drilled into it because it was full of this compacted sort of papier-mache mess it actually exploded and showered the police officers with this with this dolphin if it had have been some kind of radiation hazard how would they have dealt with I would have been it would have been a disaster area and I mean what did they do they just washed it down the drains Raj and Chris soon came clean the great UFO hopes became front-page news we've got press cuttings here from American newspapers on the front page as well as making the headlines letters and donations came flooding in the apprentices raised over 2,000 pounds but not all the feedback was positive dear sir next time you start your flying saucer joke just give a little thought to people like my son aged 11 who couldn't rest all evening he had to see

6:17 the news all night on TV and had to have a light on when he went to bed he loves all spaceship plays on TV and he thinks they're fine but last night he had me worried it wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't didn't have a hole in the heart operation years ago your joke wasn't really so good was it you win some lose some yeah and when it comes to UFO landings dr. David Clarke believes this story proves all the conspiracy theories wrong I think is one of the most important stories in the Ministry of Defense UFO FILES and it's the one that is often the most overlooked because I think for people who like to believe that we are being visited by aliens and that the Ministry of Defense and the US government know this and that the keeping it secret for some bizarre reason I think this story when you look at it it shows that that can't possibly be true because if aliens really had

7:19 landed and this is an example where people for a few hours people thought aliens really had landed how could you possibly keep their secret and what became of the flying saucers themselves well we were fairly upset by the fact that one had been blown up by the army which isn't very nice thing to do to the aliens they saw them one open which was a really good way of finding the smelly stuff yeah what was worse one is it accidentally dropped yeah well into a helicopter it back to the airbase yeah 50 years on let's hope if aliens do decide to visit they receive a slightly warmer welcome