A man who believes he experienced a face-to-face meeting with an extraterrestrial creature as a child has dedicated his life to finding answers. Ben Walgate was inspired to set up his YouTube channel - 401 Files - after the bizarre encounter in a woodland when he was just seven or eight-years-old.
The 35-year-old now visits various hotspots for alleged UFO and alien sightings across the UK, and notifies to his more than 11.4k subscribers, the Mirror reports. Such locations include the North York Moors, Flamborough Head and Bempton Cliffs in East Yorkshire, and Reminishin Forest, in Surrey.
Ben had been on his way back from a camping trip as a Cub Scout at Snowball Plantation, near York, when the minibus had stopped off to allow everyone to stretch their legs. It was broad daylight and very hot. He ventured up a small embankment which brought him into a wooded area and saw a derelict outbuilding in a clearing.
But suddenly, around 25 metres to his left, Ben said he saw a spindly "green creature" with a tiny head, standing on two feet and well over six feet tall with oversized limbs. He described it as walking with a "stoop" as if struggling to stand or clumsily trying to keep a low profile.
Ben told The Mirror: "The wooded area wasn't that dense so I got a good look at this thing. It might have only been a few seconds, but we made eye contact, it had black eyes. This thing was out of the ordinary, it looked at me I looked at this thing.
"It was definitely not of this Earth. It was such a weird vibe. Its head in proportion to its body was tiny. It's not like the stereotypical alien with the grey skin and the big black eyes. This thing was more lizard. I'm not saying it had scales, it wasn't snake-like.
"It was olive green from head to toe, a very sleek, slender-looking thing, dark black eyes, little tiny head, long over-proportional size arms that came past the knees. It was just other-worldly, it shouldn't have been walking on two feet. This thing was walking right through the woods."
Ben said its attitude was "just so blase" on coming into contact with him, and he's always wondered how it knew he wouldn't simply run off and tell his friends and scout leaders. As it happens, he was convinced it was a prank and headed back to the bus expecting his pals to be laughing at having fooled him - but no-one said anything.
Ben described himself as an "outdoorsy" child who hadn't ever really watched any Sci-Fi films or had any interest in alien lifeforms at the time and for several years he forgot about it. In his 20s, however, suddenly the encounter came " flooding back to me like a bolt of lightning" and he said he could remember how hot the day was and had a clear picture of the 'creature'.
After that he started researching and found online groups of people who claim to have had similar experiences. Around five years ago he set up his YouTube channel but said annoyingly he doesn't remember the exact location of his encounter because he was so young.
The North York Moors is a key hotspot for sightings and being so local to Ben he has undertaken many expeditions there. "I am still very scientifically minded, I won't just jump to anything and say it's an alien," he said. "I'm getting out there and investigating some of these areas and following up on some of the stories that people have shared."
He compared it to how the Panda only became known to westerners in 1869 when French missionary Armand David brought back an intact carcass from China. Due to its sparsely populated habitats, it simply remained out of sight for a long time.
Ben said "it wouldn't be hard for something to stay hidden" on the moors either. If there are intelligent beings out there, and I'm not saying there are, but it's highly likely there are, if they were coming here for some reconnaissance or research, it wouldn't be difficult in a place like the North Yorkshire Moors to stay hidden.
"The foot traffic there isn't too heavy, you have the odd cyclist or dog walker and the area is 500 and something square miles of woodland and moorland."
He said one of the main things many of these hotspots have in common is being close to military bases, including the moors, which contains the RAF Fylingdales base. Ben theorises otherworldly beings maybe "showing an interest in our military" or they are some level of "top secret military equipment".
Referring back to his original encounter, he emphasised: "What I saw wasn't military, that was no guy in a suit, but I'm just trying to theorise." Frustratingly, he hasn't had any experiences as intense as that, though has caught some strange phenomena while shooting videos.
This includes a 'figure' walking behind him in the clip above as well as more on his channel. Last year, Ben and his brother staked out into the night at Flamborough Head and believe they saw a UFO over the North Sea.
They were just about to head back to their van as the temperature dropped when Ben said they saw "five orange lights in a complete straight line". "It went right across the sky," he added. Ben described its movement as how responsive a mouse is on a computer screen.
"It stopped on a dime and went straight back in the opposite direction. And we thought 'what the hell is that thing doing? It can't be a drone, it's way too big, there's no noise, there's nothing, it's just these five lights suspended in the sky moving really like nothing I've ever seen.'
"And then it was so weird because the thing shot out to sea and it was about 20 miles out to sea in a blink of an eye, and then we heard a fighter plane roar ahead above us heading in that direction.
"And this is where it gets weird, we thought this is strange, we've not heard a fighter plane or a plane all night and then the minute we see these five strange lights acting weirdly a fighter plane screeches overhead in that direction. As the fighter plane died out, we look up and it was literally the only little dark cloud in the sky, these five lights emerged eerily out of this cloud.
"We never saw it come back that way, we never saw it make the trip back, it just disappeared out at sea, the plane went that direction after it, I'm assuming, and then this thing, seconds later, emerged out of a cloud above our head. It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen."
Ben said him and his brother were "buzzing so much" and "sat there in the van for ages thinking 'what was that?' "I know this is going to sound really stupid because we think of ETs being really intelligent and they shouldn't have to think about anything, but I believe it knew that plane was incoming.
"The way it moved and we both agreed, the way it came across the sky and back on itself, it was obviously like it was trying to make a decision on where to go. All of these things have really weird questions but I can only report what we saw. I have never seen anything like it in my life.
"If it was a plane, the people inside would have been mush at those speeds, the g-force would have ripped any human to bits. I can't explain it." Ben said the military must know a lot more than they have revealed but there is some hope following the release of a top secret report on 'UAPS' - unidentified aerial phenomena - by the US Pentagon in 2021.
However, he said whenever he or others in his community have tried to report sightings to the British government "it is long winded and no one wants to touch it". "People will pass you from one person to the next, passing the buck.
"Sometimes you can mention it and they promise you'll hear back from them but you never do, so you're forever chasing them up. It's not taken as seriously as it should be," he said. But there is hope, he believes. "We are making discoveries all the time now, people's minds are changing," Ben said.
"If you go back 20 or 30 years people would have been laughed at you talking about this stuff but now those people are becoming the minority. The universe is so big that we can't be the only ones, it wouldn't make sense," he added.
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