A missing six-year-old girl was found less than a mile away from her home, asleep in a field.
The child’s ‘terrified’ parents reported her missing on August 7 after they could not find her at her home – on a farm in Chittlehamholt, Devon – in every parent’s worst nightmare.
Officers were quickly deployed on the ground and the South West Regions’s National Police Air Service (NPAS) sent a helicopter to see if they could see her from above.
Rescue teams used infrared cameras so they could see clearly through the dark and eventually spotted a tiny female sleeping in a field over half a mile from the farm.
A video shows the camera operator panning the land below, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
The operator decides to go back over a small black dot he has already passed and zooms in.
As the dot gets bigger and bigger, until it looks like a smudge to the naked eye, a voice says ‘great spot NPAS, it’s a female’.
The operator in the helicopter watches as police on the ground travel to the girl.
He asks: ‘Have you got her?’ and one of the men on the ground replies: ‘Yes, yes she’s alive and well’.
The footage shows the little girl standing up and the ‘smudge’ begins to show the shape of a person.
She walks towards some bushes as her rescuers thank each other over comms.
The NPAS team tweeted: ‘The National Police Air Service operates from a network of 14 bases across England & Wales to support police officers on the ground and help keep our communities safe.
‘In this instance, a massive team effort from the police control room, the police officers on the ground and the officers in the air to get this child home safely to her terrified parents’.
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