Myths, legends and UFO's: Countryfile's Julia Bradbury takes magical mystery tour of UK

Countryfile's Julia Bradbury sets off around the UK to solve some of Britain's most baffling mysteries

 

  ADVENTURE: Julia is travelling around Britain searching for answers to some of the strangest events [GETTY ]

FROM UFO sightings in Yorkshire to savage wild cats in Cornwall, it appears Britain is a hotbed of paranormal activity. In a new two–part series, Mystery Map, Julia Bradbury and Ben Shephard tour the country to explore some of the UK's intriguing unexplained events.
"It's a fun, investigative programme looking at the myths, legends and strange stories to be found on our very enchanted isle – everything from ghosts to aliens and even unexplained raining objects," explains Julia, 43.
Take the mystery of the tiny rotating Egyptian. In June, the Manchester Museum made headlines all over the world when staff reported a 4,000–year–old relic was rotating in its display cabinet. "There's some CCTV footage and you can see, quite clearly, how it's moving while the other statues around it stay still," Julia says. "Some people wondered if the ancient pharaohs were looking down, somehow vexed by something, but we did some digging ourselves and, in this case, were able to solve the mystery."
But not every mystery is so straightforward. One such case is a UFO incident on the Sheffield moors in March 1997. Unlike the usual theories involving bug–eyed aliens, this wasn't an isolated sighting.
"The eyewitnesses were into double figures," says Julia. "So much so that a massive rescue operation took place because people reported seeing some sort of flying object crashing into the moors, followed by a loud boom and a flash of light."

 
SPOOKY: UFO was spotted by dozens on the Sheffield moors in March 1997 [GETTY]

It's a fun, investigative programme looking at the myths, legends and strange stories to be found on our very enchanted isle – everything from ghosts to aliens and even unexplained raining objects

Julia Bradbury

At Hampton Court Julia watches CCTV footage of a ghostly figure closing fire doors and in Gloucestershire investigates the day villagers awoke to find the ground covered in seaweed. Ben, meanwhile, goes in search of Guy Fawkes' ghost in York, learns how 300 kids fainted simultaneously at a 1980 marching band event and tells the tale of Peter Gibbs, a pilot whose body was discovered on an Isle of Mull hillside in 1976 – four months after his plane went missing – with no crash marks on the corpse and no sign of the plane.
For Ben, one mystery involved a trip to Cornwall to hunt the fabled Beast of Bodmin.
"The theory is that big cats were thrown into the wilderness from the mid–1970s when the Dangerous Wild Animals Act arrived to counter the fashion for exotic pets and that these animals have now reproduced," says Ben, 38. "So I went to Bodmin to meet two 'beast hunters' who believe they saw the cat when they were kids and are really passionate about trying to prove it exists. I spent a night with them in their hide.
"The romantic in me wants to believe these things are possible and I often found I was disappointed if the solutions turned out to be less out of this world," Ben admits. But Julia is intrigued by what makes people believe such stories in the first place.
"The brain is a weird and wonderful thing and humans are very suggestible, which I think is why we enjoy a mystery. We also quite like being frightened," she says. "It must be something to do with the human psyche and I find that fascinating. For me, talking to the experts and eyewitnesses, and getting into the folds of these stories has been the really exciting thing."

Olly Grant

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