‘What I’ve seen is incredible’: Bradley Walsh

Over the years, Bradley Walsh has sat opposite countless people, asking questions and receiving ready replies. In his newest series, the dynamic is different: he remains the questioner, but the answers are far less forthcoming and sometimes, it's uncertain whether there are any to be found. 

Out of this World, which begins on Sky HISTORY on 3 November, finds the presenter ranging across UFOs, Stonehenge, Atlantis and a handful of other enduring puzzles. He approaches the material with the same mixture of curiosity and residual scepticism that marked his earlier series on Egypt. He has never seen a UFO. What he wanted, he says, was to sit with people who claimed they had, and to hear the accounts before they were further diluted by retelling.

“Since the war you’ve seen snippets in the papers of these sightings,” he explains, “but not everyone has put them together. People are quite happy saying ‘that happened in the 1950s, that happened in 1970’. There might be a correlation, and not everyone has brought it under the public gaze. I wondered why.”

The question is reasonable. In recent years former American military personnel have testified under oath before Congress, while newly released Ministry of Defence files in Britain have added further detail to the historical record. The public reaction has been muted. Walsh finds this hard to fathom.

“There are really credible people who have seen unexplained things. But we live in an age where we’re more interested in what pair of shoes one of the Kardashians wore than what a lieutenant colonel is saying he saw.”

He is careful about his own role. Before filming he was, in his own phrase, “on the fence”. His job, he says, is to remain there and act as a kind of jury for the viewer: to listen and report. “I haven’t seen anything, and seeing is believing. But I have to tell you, some of what I’ve seen, witnessed and the people that I’ve spoken to is incredible.” He has a simple test for credibility. “When you’re looking at someone and they’re speaking to you, you can usually tell instinctively if they’re telling the truth. And if these people – who I believe are very credible – aren’t, then they deserve a double Oscar.”

Image: Bradley Walsh: Out of this World

The first two episodes take him into the declassified MoD files and then to Rendlesham Forest, the Suffolk site long described as Britain’s Roswell. There he meets Lieutenant Colonel Charles “Chuck” Halt, who was on duty on those December nights in 1980. Walsh has read the transcripts and listened to the contemporaneous radio traffic. “It’s extraordinary. Really extraordinary.” Halt produces a plaster cast of a tripod imprint allegedly left by the object. “That’s a lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force. He’s a top boss. I don’t know if it’s real, but I also think that he’s not going to lie, and why would he make it up?”

What happened at the Rendlesham Forest Incident, Britain's answer to Roswell?

Later the series moves to Arizona and the Phoenix Lights of March 1997. Walsh meets Dr Lynne Kitei, a physician who abandoned her medical career after watching lights the size of a football pitch hover above the airfield. Thousands of others reported the same phenomenon. Official dismissal lasted, Walsh notes, until a pilot radioed the tower to say he could not take off. The pilot was Kurt Russell. “I don’t know what it was for sure, but I believe that these people saw what they said they did.”

Not everything is airborne. At Stonehenge he is more irreverent. The monument was raised, roughly speaking, around the same period as the pyramids, yet the comparison does not flatter the British. “The Egyptians are better builders than the Brits. That’s the end of that conversation. Bless them. They’ve tried hard, but it’s not a pyramid.” The mystery remains: how the stones were moved, some of them possibly from Wales or even further north, and what the site was for. Walsh is content to leave the question open. “There’s a big rabbit hole of mysteries with Stonehenge, some perhaps true and some perhaps not, but it’s the mystery of it all.”

Atlantis receives the most sustained attention. Accompanied by the historian Tony McMahon, he follows Plato’s clues to the area around Cádiz, where the researcher Michael Donnellan believes the city has been located. Divers and high-resolution imaging have produced sonar pictures of walls that appear to match the ancient description. Walsh was struck by how close one must approach to see them clearly. “You’re practically touching it. It’s just extraordinary. I didn’t expect this journey to be the journey it was.”

Image: Bradley Walsh talks to Tony McMahon during his hunt for Atlantis | Bradley Walsh: Out of this World

For all the evidence he has been shown, he remains reluctant to close the cases. Finding Atlantis and turning the site into a commercial attraction would, he thinks, spoil the point. “I think it’s probably better to have the mystery and let it roll on. The danger is that all of a sudden you find it, announce it, and that tiny place becomes some great attraction. It opens up a Pandora’s box where people look to monetise things and the mystery is lost.”

He is not fully convinced. “Am I convinced by all of this? Still no. Why? Because I haven’t actually seen anything with my own eyes. But I’m erring on the side of perhaps these things have happened because who I’ve spoken with have all been so earnest about it.”

The series also touches on crop circles and other anomalies, yet Walsh ends by looking in a different direction. “We spend a lot of our time looking up. Why don’t we look down? There’s so much more to see under our oceans. Who knows what is happening down there.”