- Tonight on The Proof is Out There.
UFOs spotted near military aircraft again.
Are alien sizing up our fighting force?
- There have been a lot of UFOs seen around military locations.
- [Tony] Some of the most famous Bigfoot footage ever recorded.
Is this conclusive proof?
- [Paul] Oh, there he goes.
[Tony] This man claims he found a sunken city
off the coast of Louisiana.
- An ancient culture that nobody knew was there.
- [Tony] And what the heck is that going behind the moon?
- I have absolutely no idea what I am looking at right here.
(dramatic music)
- [Tony] Around the globe are videos.
- [Witness] What the heck is this?
- [Witness] It's moving.
- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.
(electric buzzing)
- [Marc] Is it some kind of unidentified object?
What's exciting is nobody really knows.
(plane engine roaring)
- [Tony] What are they?
- [MJ] Some sort of bizarre mutation.
- Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.
- I'm Tony Harris, and as a journalist
for more than 30 years,
I've followed the facts where they take me.
Now I'm bringing that spirit of investigation
to the world's strangest sounds and images.
We'll analyze each one with top experts.
- It's a credible case.
It's a credible video.
- [Tony] And pass a verdict on what it is.
- This video was clearly faked.
- The proof starts now.
(dramatic theme music)
Good evening and welcome to The Proof Is Out There.
Folks, we have another UFO clip
captured by a government camera
and witnessed by military pilots.
In the past year, these videos have spurred the Pentagon
to seriously investigate
unidentified objects in our skies.
So when this next one appeared on the scene
and started raising questions,
we knew it was time for our team to take a look.
November 6th, 2018, Arizona.
A US Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter
is preparing for a training flight.
- [Pilot] 2A1, taxi north to tower 2 west, (indistinct).
- [Tony] The crew is just about to take off
when suddenly, something moves directly in their flight path.
Take a closer look.
The helicopter's thermal imaging camera
picks up three bright objects
that appear to instantaneously circle each other.
UFO Investigator, Andy Marcial, releases the video
after receiving the footage from a secret source
at the Department of Homeland Security.
- One of the things that stood out the most
was the maneuver that was captured
where they kind of went around each other
in this very weird fashion.
There's just nothing I know that can pull
some kind of maneuver like that off in mid-flight.
That's the mystery.
- [Tony] In an earlier episode, we brought you this video,
the mysterious UFO dubbed the Rubber Duck.
Now we have another strange unidentified object,
also captured in Arizona,
by Department of Homeland Security cameras.
According to journalist, MJ Banias, when this video
was examined at the science and tech website,
The Debrief, they didn't know what to think.
- We brought in several experts to look at the footage,
to analyze the objects in this video,
to figure out what was going on,
and confirmed that the point in the video
where the objects appear to rotate around one another
is an impossible maneuver.
- [Tony] We featured videos of UFOs
in bizarre circling formations before,
like these flaming objects captured
in the skies over England.
But the speed and rapid change of direction
with these craft are unlike anything we've ever seen.
So what could they be?
Well, Banias says, if you want an answer,
don't ask the U.S. government.
- When The Debrief published this video and the story,
the Pentagon did not comment on it.
The DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Basically, the United States government did not respond
to confirm the video.
- With the Rubber Duck UFO, this is the second leaked video
from the Department of Homeland Security
that Andy Marcial has brought to us.
Clearly he's got a motivated source sending him this stuff,
and we've got something unusual going on
in the skies over Arizona.
But what?
According to Banias, the DHS wouldn't reveal any info,
and maybe even doesn't want us to know.
So can our experts solve this?
Let's see.
(tense music)
We begin with Rich Hoffman of the Scientific Coalition
for UAP Studies.
- When I first looked at it, I thought that the video
was quite interesting, and there have been a lot of UFOs
seen around military locations.
- [Tony] But is this a UFO?
Hoffman isn't so sure.
- UFOs have a tendency to hover,
and then they'll shoot either straight up,
or they'll shoot off on an angle.
Some are actually seen to flip on its side
and actually shoot off in a specific direction.
You don't see that here.
- [Tony] The footage was captured
at a military training ground,
so could it be another military aircraft?
That's what the pilots initially thought.
- [Pilot] Wow, there's three,
really fast flying jets up there.
- [Tony] But aviation expert Tim McMillan
says not so fast.
- So, let's take some of the fastest or best performance
jets that we could think of that would be
operating in this area.
So, F-16s, F-18s, something like that.
They can't turn at such an extreme angle.
They have to bank at a certain angle, at a certain speed.
The human body, frankly, just cannot handle
the amount of G-force, the amount of pressure
that it would take you.
And so these objects actually change completely,
in a 360 degree rotation, really, in under three seconds,
you wouldn't see that from a jet.
It's too extreme of an angle.
- [Tony] So what could this be?
Hoffman thinks an overhead view could yield some answers.
- I went into Google Earth to be able to see
the measure of the runway, and I determined
it was 1,600 feet.
And if you looked at that angle of the formation,
it was about, maybe 20 degrees above the horizon.
So I'm able to take those and put it
into a trigonometry tool that allows me to very quickly
determine the object here is roughly about 300 feet
in terms of the distance, and then you can come up
with the measures and you find out that the object
is about less than one foot in terms of its total length.
- [Tony] A foot long object that can make quick turns
while flying in a formation?
It leads Hoffman to only one conclusion.
- When you saw the motion and the rotational pattern
like that, it came to mind it's more than likely birds,
because birds move like that.
They do play with each other
in a sense of flying around in circles.
They typically can be moving as quickly
as 85 to 100 miles an hour.
An entire swarm can swivel and turn in less than a second.
(tense music)
- Our verdict? We're going with birds.
We agree with Hoffman that the lightning fast movements
and tight turns aren't examples of jets at mach speeds,
but instead aerobatic animals.
But that doesn't mean pilots should stop speaking up
when they see strange things out there.
Now, from birds to Bigfoot.
Researchers who take Bigfoot seriously
don't take every alleged Bigfoot video seriously.
In fact, they're often the first to call foul on the fakers.
So when they tell us they've seen video they think is legit,
we take a look, too.
(tense music)
August 20th, 1992, Blue Mountains, Oregon.
Paul Freeman, an experienced former US Forest Service
patrolman, has been frequenting Deduct Spring
for a few weeks after seeing unusual footprints.
- [Paul] Yeah, it looks like they've been here.
Looks like he's pretty fresh.
- [Tony] First, he discovers ample evidence
of Bigfoot activity, including multiple tracks.
- [Paul] Yeah, look there.
- [Tony] Next, he hears something forging its way
through the woods, and finally, he sees this.
- [Paul] I hear the brush popping and stuff.
(dramatic music)
Oh, there he goes!
(suspenseful music)
- So there's a lot here
that Bigfoot hunters find fascinating.
One thing is the gait,
especially the big strides, right?
Big strides is spaced through here,
and the low swinging arm movement.
They say that's not human.
Also the detail in the hair.
They say it's too natural to be a costume.
(tense music)
Paul's son, Mike, was in the basement
the day his dad rushed home with the footage.
- I kind of ran up the stairs, and here's my dad standing there
and he's covered in sweat and dirt,
and he's pale in color, and he's shaking.
I always tell people that that's the only time
in my entire life that I ever saw my dad scared of anything.
- [Tony] Field researcher Cliff Barackman,
a close friend of the Freeman family,
is impressed by the research that Paul conducted
in the wake of his alleged Sasquatch encounter.
- Paul had been collecting data on a series of maps
for 10 years.
Every time a sighting report came in,
he would record the location and the date on a large map
that was hanging in his basement.
The evidence collected by Paul Freeman
and his network of researchers in the Blue Mountains
has been closely examined by more PhDs and anthropologists
than any other dataset in all Bigfoot history.
- [Tony] But for Barackman, the Freeman footage
speaks for itself, drawing compelling comparisons
with the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film of 1967.
- There are a lot of similarities
between the Patterson-Gimlin film and the Freeman footage.
The subject does resemble the subject
in the Patterson-Gimlin film.
The head is a little bit lower, the shoulders are higher,
which is a very ape-like characteristic.
The arms are quite long and they swing quite slowly.
I think it's a Bigfoot, but whatever that is,
it is quite large and quite massive.
- In Freeman's Bigfooting career from 1982 to 1997,
he found and casted anywhere between 50 and 75
Bigfoot prints in the Blue Mountains,
many of which have been examined and verified
as genuine by scientists all over the country.
To find out if his 1992 sighting is actually a real Bigfoot,
we turn to our experts.
(tense music)
First, we turn to wildlife biologist, Floyd Hayes,
to rule out any possible animal misidentification.
- A black bear can be large and black,
and it can walk on its two hind legs,
but this animal seems to be a fully functional quadruped
walking routinely on its hind legs,
and bears only walk short distances on their hind legs.
This also seems to have a much flatter face than a bear,
which has a much more pointed snout.
So I don't think that is a bear.
I cannot rule this out as being a Bigfoot.
- [Tony] Next, we turn to anatomist and anthropologist
Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who gained renown early in his career
for his work with Paul Freeman's prints.
- As it walks across, one can't help but be struck
by resemblances to the Patterson-Gimlin film.
The massiveness of this figure is impressive.
This smallish head set low down on the shoulders
with the massive musculature,
trapezius coming high up on the back of the head,
is quite apparent.
The length of the arms is impressive,
as it swings its arm back, the way the sunlight
plays across the hair has a very natural appearance,
unlike the scattering effect of faux fur.
I mean if this was a hoax, it would require
very skilled knowledge of animal anatomy.
- [Tony] It's not only the anatomy of the creature
that works for Meldrum, it's the location.
- It's actually ideal habitat.
The evidence that has emerged from this region
has been examined by more PhDs than from any other
part of the country.
The first evidence of skin ridge detail,
which all primates have on the palms of their hands
and soles of their feet,
was evidenced in examples of footprints
that come from this habitat.
Southeastern Washington has extensive loess deposits.
Loess is a very fine glacial sediment.
As a result, that very fine textured soil
picks up remarkable details in animal tracks.
There's a very high likelihood
that this is a genuine piece of video evidence of Sasquatch.
(tense music)
- Our verdict? Possible Bigfoot.
In our expert's opinions, this could indeed be
a true Sasquatch encounter.
And it's important to note there were two creatures
allegedly seen, even though only one was caught on camera.
That seems to indicate there could be more
where they came from.
So we're gonna keep our ears to the ground
for further evidence.
- We've all heard the legend of Atlantis,
the supposed lost island paradise
first mentioned by the Greek philosopher Plato.
But what if there's actually a sunken civilization
that most people have never heard of,
right off the Gulf coast of the US?
It's May, 2011 on the Chandelier Islands,
50 miles offshore from southeastern Louisiana.
Architect and amateur archeologist, George Gele,
has received permission to do exploration dives
in the area with a remote operated vehicle.
What his underwater videos reveal is astonishing.
Scattered on the sea floor are what appear to be
large granite blocks.
The cubic stones don't seem to be at all natural
since they all have 90 degree, squared edges
and some have carvings and cuts.
Check out what they look like after he's brought them up
and cleaned them off.
Could they once have been part of a larger structure?
George says he's certain this is the site
of an ancient lost city that he has named Crescentus.
- I'm an architect and a contractor,
so I do know what buildings look like,
even if they're underwater and covered up
somewhat with sand, and that's what we have here.
An ancient culture that nobody knew that was there.
- [Tony] George says the location
of this submerged civilization
first came to him while sleeping one night in the 1960s.
- I had an incredibly vivid dream.
I got up and I sketched it, and the dream
was what I call the Star of David Diagram,
and it showed, in that diagram, that if you start off
at Giza, at the Great Pyramid,
there were six cities at the same latitude as Giza,
and one of them was in Louisiana.
- [Tony] Journalist Erin McCarthy says George believes
the block seen in this video could be
at least 12,000 years old, predating the Incan,
Mayan, and Aztec civilizations.
- Granite is not natural to the area.
His theory is that they were brought from somewhere
that's not Louisiana and floated down the Mississippi
at some point before the last ice age,
when this area of Louisiana would've been above water.
- [Tony] And wait, there's more.
George believes that just as we see in Giza,
there was a 280 foot tall pyramid here,
that is now buried in silt.
- He claims that it produces
a ton of electromagnetic activity,
and fishermen who fish out near that area
say that it actually affects their compasses.
- [Tony] George says this buildup of energy
gives more credence to his pyramid theory.
- I know that having done 50 years of research
in how they produce energy,
the only architectural form that I'm aware of
that can do that is a pyramidal structure.
- [TOny] At least one Russian study has found
a pyramid's chambers can collect
and concentrate electromagnetic energy.
It seems clear these huge blots were placed here
by someone or something.
As glacial ice melted at the end of the ice age,
it flowed down the Mississippi River
into the Gulf of Mexico, submerging the coastline,
and moving it 60 miles inland.
So could these blocks have been deposited here by the river?
Or could a lost Louisiana City,
which George calls Crescentus,
have been the ice age's greatest casualty?
(tense music)
Archeologist Dr. Ed Barnhardt says,
if this site is really 12,000 years old,
it would be from around the time of the emergence
of the Clovis culture, thought by some to be
the first inhabitants of the Americas.
- Clovis was not a culture that gathered
in large groups of people or in sedentary ways.
They were hunter gatherers.
They traveled, and that's how they survived.
- [Tony] So if it's unlikely the nomadic Clovis
would build a permanent site like Crescentus,
what about the humdrum explanation
that this is just an artificial reef from more modern times
built as a habitat for marine life?
- Typically when we make reefs,
we don't make them out of stone.
We use things like tires and other lighter material
that works just as well for creating natural reefs.
- [Tony] Physicist Matthew Szydagis weighs another theory.
Could these granite blocks have been ballast
dropped from European ships
colonizing the area centuries ago?
- At one point ballast blocks were needed on ships
to lower their center of mass in order to increase
the stability of the ship.
Then these rocks may get dumped.
- [Tony] The ballast stones were normally discarded
in order to keep the weight the same
as ships pulled into port to pick up new cargo.
- However, calculations have been done
that show you'd need at least three dozen ships or more
to have dumped their ballast all in this one location.
It just doesn't make any sense.
- [Tony] So what about the theory
that the electromagnetic energy detected here
is evidence of a lost pyramid?
NASA geologist, Bob Anderson, investigates.
- If you take a rock that has a magnetic field in it
and you take it out of place and drop it,
it still has the magnetic field in it.
That magnetic field is frozen in those crystals.
So it would not surprise me that if somebody
took a magnetometer down there and looked at these rocks,
that they would have a very localized magnetic field
from somewhere else where the magnetic field is strong.
- [Tony] Then could this actually be a lost city?
- Sea level can change over time,
and so I think it makes sense that you may have a city
that's farther than where the coast currently ends.
(tense music)
- Our verdict? These are possible city ruins.
We know these rocks don't belong there,
and we don't think it's an artificial reef.
And as Professor Szydagis said, sea levels have risen
in the gulf dramatically over the millennia.
But we also need to be cautious.
More research needs to be done before we know for sure
what we're looking at.
- The first prototype of a handheld mobile phone
was introduced in the 1970s, and as we know,
the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since.
But what if we have found proof that time travelers
from the future brought this technology
to people of the past?
In November 2017, just as people are clamoring
to get their hands on the latest iPhone,
the internet is sent into a frenzy,
not by some viral dance craze,
but by a 19th century Austrian painting.
A photo of The Expected One
by artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller
starts getting a lot of attention on Twitter.
- A lot of people online point out
that in her hands there is something very strange
and definitely out of place.
It looks to be like she's checking her Instagram or TikTok
on a smartphone.
- [Tony] Keep in mind, this picture was painted in 1860.
The girl's pose is unmistakably
that of a distracted pedestrian from today
staring at a handheld device.
People online immediately speculated
this could be evidence someone in the future
invented the ability to travel back centuries
and brought back a sample of advanced technology.
This is also not the first historic painting
where 21st century technology was spotted.
This 1937 mural by Umberto Romano seems to show
a Native American staring into his own smartphone,
and this depiction of God and Jesus in an Italian church
fresco from the 1600s had people seeing
something else from the heavens.
- A lot of people online claim that this image of the earth
with these antennae strongly resembles the Sputnik satellite
launched by the Soviet Union in the late 1950s.
- [Tony] But how would late Renaissance painter
Ventura Salimbany, know what our early
satellite technology looked like?
Could he have been a visionary genius,
like Leonardo da Vinci, who prefigured the airplane
with this device called the ornithopter?
Or did someone from the future really go back in time?
We now know Michelangelo secretly painted anatomically
accurate images of the human brain
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
So painters can sneak secret images into their work,
but an artist hiding evidence of future time travelers
would be even more mind blowing.
So is that what we're seeing here?
Our experts enlighten us.
(tense music)
First, we asked physicist Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi
if time travel is even theoretically possible.
- The laws of physics do allow for time travel
under certain situations.
One of them is when you have a wormhole.
If you move around one end of the wormhole
at near the speed of light,
someone could actually exit the wormhole
before they entered it, meaning they went backwards in time.
- [Tony] So it's theoretically possible, but is it probable?
We showed the paintings to Mick West.
He says these modern looking objects
don't quite add up to clear proof some later generations
solved the time travel equation.
- If time travelers were coming from a thousand years
in the future, they would bring things from their time.
I don't think they would stop off in the early 21st century
and pick something up and then go back to the 18th century.
- [Tony] So it seems likely the smartphones
are being mistaken for something else.
But what?
- For the lady that's walking in the meadow,
it was very common to have these little books
that were devotions, or just little religious scriptures.
We have those little hymnals in museums
that are about roughly the same size
the date from that same period.
- [Tony] And as for the Sputnik satellite?
- Between the Christ figure and God
is this huge sphere, which is called a creation globe.
The antenna are actually scepters
that God and Christ are holding.
The Renaissance artist artist was trying to envision
this whole idea of creation with his artistic license.
- [Tony] Clearly, a lot of internet users jumped
to the same wrong conclusion,
and there's a good reason for that.
- When our children and grandchildren
look back on the artwork that we've done,
they may be scratching their heads and wondering
what is that object he's holding in his hand?
- [Tony] So by the time our descendants
look at artwork from today, technology will have moved on
and they may similarly confuse certain objects
for newer technology that has since emerged.
(tense music)
Our verdict? A collective case of misidentification.
We can't rule out that somebody in the future
has unlocked the secret of traveling to the past,
since even scientists of today say space and time
are not absolutes.
But these paintings are not proof of that being the case.
- Over the years, we've heard a lot
of different scenarios that describe how life on earth
might one day end.
Disease, meteors, even deadly gamma rays,
but a rogue planet slamming into Earth?
Well, according to some, it was predicted
thousands of years ago,
and our next video might be evidence
that it may happen sooner than we think.
September 30th, 2018.
It's a sunny, blue sky day in the suburbs
of Indianapolis, Indiana.
After purchasing a brand new camera,
Scott Hansen steps into his backyard
looking for something interesting to photograph,
and glances up to see the daytime moon.
He takes out his camera and points it skyward,
but then, zooming in, is shocked to see this.
An oval-shaped object appears to be hovering
just above the moon.
Look closely.
You can see it has a bright white outline
with a darker interior.
Then, as Scott continues to film,
it slowly disappears behind the moon.
- I posted it to YouTube immediately.
I had a lot of people excited,
and some people thought it might be from out of this world.
- [Tony] So what is it?
According to writer Amy Teitel,
some believe we may be witnessing
an ancient prophecy coming true.
- Some people watching this video theorized
that the object near the moon is the planet of Nibiru,
which is part of a end of the world prophecy
that said Earth and Nibiru would collide
in a cataclysmic event, effectively ending the world.
- [Tony] Believers will tell you
the proof has been recorded in antiquity.
- There are some modern writers
who have pointed to Sumerian tablets
as having record that Nibiru has an orbital period
of 3,600 years.
People who believe in Nibiru's existence
generally believe that it orbits the sun,
but that it can come very close to the moon's orbit
with some regularity.
- While the idea of an unknown planet may seem like fantasy,
in 2015, researchers at Caltech found mathematical evidence
suggesting there may be a Planet X deep in our solar system.
It's hypothetically a gas giant in a highly elongated orbit
and may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years
to make one revolution around the sun.
Is this object some other type of previously unknown world?
And if not, what the heck is it?
Let's see what our experts think.
(tense music)
We begin with aviation expert, Tim McMillan.
Could we just be seeing something
that is supposed to be up there,
like, say, the International Space Station?
- The International Space Station
moves around the earth relatively fast.
It would appear to be just a small speck in the sky
as it's traveling across,
but this appears to be moving behind the moon,
so that doesn't make sense.
- [Tony] McMillan also points out an important clue
which confirms it can't be any other human made object.
- Now, it looks really tiny
when we're looking through this viewfinder,
but if we were to put this comparatively
of how big it would be to the moon, this is huge.
- [Tony] In fact, as the moon has a circumference
of almost 6,800 miles, this object would have to be
about 100 miles across.
So McMillan thinks there may be another possibility.
- But that perfect circle that you see here
makes me question if we're looking at a artifact
of the camera system.
Something that's happening with the lens
of the actual camera that's filming it.
- [Tony] Could this just be a camera defect?
We take that question
to astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy.
- I spend my entire life observing celestial objects.
This doesn't really seem to be an artifact.
That wouldn't make sense, because the movement appears
to travel behind the moon.
- [Tony] If it's not manmade or a camera artifact,
could it be a planet?
- This video was captured in September 30th, 2018,
and we know, during this time, Venus was actually
on the opposite side of the sky from the moon.
So we can safely rule out Venus,
but Jupiter and Saturn are both actually visible
during the day, however those were also very far away
from the moon at the time this was taken.
- [Tony] However, McCarthy does see a clue in the shadows,
which he believes solves the mystery.
- When photographing the moon during the day,
the dark side of the moon is going to be invisible.
But when you look at this video,
you see almost like an increase in saturation
right along the terminator line.
- [Tony] The terminator is the line that divides
the daylight side and dark night side of a planetary body.
- That suggests to me that this video
was potentially a photograph or a video of the moon
taken at night and then superimposed onto a daytime sky.
- [Tony] That leads us to our ace video forensic analyst,
Michael Primeau.
- So the first step is to look at the metadata
and within the EXIF information, there are signatures
from After Effects that indicate specific layers
in After Effects, including precomps, spotlights,
other layers of footage.
So there were a lot of different ingredients
that went into this video, which leads us to
that the video is is cooked.
- [Tony] Once we presented the evidence to Scott,
he came clean.
- I like people to watch my videos
and consider whether or not they're real or fake.
I really enjoy evoking that emotional response in people.
(tense music)
- So there you have it.
Our verdict? Just a classic YouTube hoax for clicks,
but the next one might not be.
With a recent launch of the James Webb telescope,
we're hoping scientists are going to be on the lookout
for that theoretical Planet X,
which could lie way past Pluto.
- Ancient Chinae may be best known
for the 13,000 mile long Great Wall,
but some of the country's greatest treasures,
like the terracotta warriors, were long hidden from view
under the earth, and one of these amazing
subterranean sites seems to defy all explanation.
It's March 2018 in Longyou, China,
about 200 southwest of Shanghai.
Researcher Andrew Kuznetzov is visiting the area
to see what some call the Ninth Wonder of the Ancient World.
His footage reveals a gigantic cavern with huge pillars
supporting a 60 to 100 foot high sloped ceiling.
The walls are covered in a series
of parallel chiseled lines and symbols,
including stone carvings of animals.
- [Tony] Journalist Erin McCarthy says the caves
were only recently discovered in 1992
when four farmers were trying to drain
what legend said was a bottomless lake
gifted from the gods.
- When they drained the first pond,
they discovered a huge cavern.
They ended up draining a bunch more ponds,
and in all, they discovered 24 caverns.
But the average size of the caverns is 11,000 square feet,
which is seven times bigger than the average American House.
- [Tony] Archeologists believe these underground grottoes
were carved by hand more than 2000 years ago
during the Han Dynasty.
And what's even more remarkable is that the walls
and columns supporting the caves are relatively thin,
yet they have remained intact for millennia,
despite seismic activity in the area.
Still, though this is considered a wonder of the world,
unlike the Pyramids and the Colosseum,
there's no universally accepted idea
of what it was used for, which is rather bizarre.
- Some have speculated that perhaps
this is some kind of underground palace,
or a tomb for an emperor.
The first emperor of China was buried
with 8,000 terracotta soldiers.
Another theory is that this was always meant
to be a reservoir.
- [Tony] Whatever its purpose, the network of caves
is so massive and detailed that it seems it would be
nearly impossible to construct with only the hand tools
available back in ancient China.
- Experts have estimated that it would've taken
1,000 people working 24 hours a day for six years
to carve out all of these caverns.
Workers would've had to remove nearly a million
cubic meters of rock.
- Some questions that add to the mystery,
if workers excavated all that rock, then where did it go?
And why were no tools found in or near the caverns?
There's also no mention of the caves in any written records,
so no one even knew they existed until 30 years ago.
Let's see what our experts can unearth.
(tense music)
Archeologist Dr. Ed Barnhart considers
whether this cave system could be an ancient palace.
- A palace has a number of different functions
and individual rooms for privacy.
The kind of individual spaces that a palace needs
to function are not indicated in these caverns.
- [Tony] Then since they're so elaborate,
could they have been burial chambers,
like with the emperor's terracotta warriors?
Anthropologist Kathy Strain thinks it's unlikely.
- They have to continually pump this
because water keeps getting in it from natural sources.
I would not assume that someone would wanna bury somebody
in a constructed cave that continually filled with water.
- [Tony] Others have wondered if the caves were used
by miners to extract some valuable mineral.
But no trace of mining equipment has ever been found.
And since these spaces seem to fill naturally with water,
Strain suggests they could have been
originally created as reservoirs.
- They were precisely built so that water coming down
from rain or a monsoon would get captured
into these caverns and that it'd be used
by the local people for a water source.
It's like a big gutter, and it's all focused
to go into the caverns.
- [Tony] Yet Barnhart isn't so sure.
- If these were reservoirs, why would they bother
carving the walls in these nice linear formations?
- [Tony] Barnhart thinks there might be another explanation
for why water was welcomed in this space.
- The very few objects that that we have found
in these caverns are from the Han Dynasty.
The Han Dynasty was famous for its silk technology.
The weaving of silk is best done
in a very humid environment.
With those parallel lines that are really
kind of overhangs, each one of them creating places
where the condensation would rise the humidity
within this environment.
- [Tony] For six weeks after they hatch,
silkworms eat mulberry leaves,
and then start spinning their silk cocoons.
Scientists have found around 75% humidity is ideal
for silkworm growth.
It helps keep the leaves from withering.
Once the cocoons are ready, they are boiled
to soften them into threads.
The threads are dyed, spun, and woven into fabric,
with humid air keeping the natural fibers more pliable.
(tense music)
Our verdict?
The true purpose behind these mysterious caves
remains unknown.
Barnhart's theory about them being used for silk making
is intriguing, but there's no smoking gun.
Archeologists haven't found any artifacts like looms,
silkworm cocoons, or minerals for dyes in or near the caves.
- In a previous episode, we brought you a fascinating story
about an alleged UFO caught on camera by the Chilean Navy.
This image here not only stumped the Chilean military
for years, but after examining it,
we couldn't find a definitive answer either.
However, one of our experts, Mick West,
wasn't satisfied with that explanation,
and he decided to dig deeper.
November 11th, 2014.
A Chilean Navy helicopter is on a routine patrol
off the coast near the capitol of Santiago.
They're testing out a FLIR camera,
which stands for forward-looking infrared,
when the pilot suddenly observes this.
Two large orbs appear to overlap each other,
then seem to release a plume of gas.
The helicopter hails the craft by radio with no response,
and it doesn't show up on their radar.
The Chilean military spent two years bringing in
an array of different experts to try to figure out
what this was.
- They went through all the possibilities
that they thought it might be,
and one by one, they eliminated them.
Ultimately, they weren't able to identify
what was in the video.
- [Tony] Chile has been a well known UFO hotspot for decades.
In one report from May 2018,
the crew of six commercial aircraft
independently and simultaneously spotted
three triangular light sources flying in the skies.
So when this video stumped the Chilean military,
our team took on the challenge,
but didn't have enough information
to come to a definitive conclusion.
- The Chilean video has an object that has
all the appearances of being something
that we would think of as being an aircraft,
but we just don't know for sure.
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- While our original analysis indicated
this mysterious object was possibly an aircraft,
in the end, without hard evidence,
we classified it as a genuine UFO,
at least until we could get more information.
But video analyst and science writer Mick West
told us later, he'd done his own investigation
with his team at the website Metabunk.
They may have solved in four days
what the Chilean government couldn't in two years.
(tense music)
First, West says that the original analysis was right
to suspect an airplane,
and that the plume behind the object
is a distinctive hallmark.
- I recognized what was coming out of the back of the plane
was probably what's called an aerodynamic contrail,
which is a trail left behind a plane
that usually appears at lower altitudes.
- [Tony] Aerodynamic contrails are formed
because when a wing decreases the air pressure around it,
it also lowers the air temperature.
If there is high humidity,
the drop in temperature and pressure
can form a contrail cloud.
Then, as the plane continues on,
we see the contrail disappear, likely because of a lack
of available water vapor in the atmosphere.
But why aren't we seeing the shape of a plane?
West explains.
- You'd expect to see a clear outline of a plane,
but what we're actually seeing here
is the infrared glare of the engines.
Jet engines are very, very hot,
especially when you're looking at them
from almost directly behind.
So what we're looking at here
is glare from the engines obscuring the plane.
- [Tony] But how can he prove it?
- We have so much information on the screen.
Right here, we have the date, 11th of November, 2014.
We have the time.
We have a compass heading.
The aircraft's latitude and longitude.
- [Tony] Mick creates the path of the helicopter,
which as it turns out, runs alongside
Santiago's main airport.
- [Mick] So we looked up in the flight tracking software
that was available, what planes were in that area,
and we found Iberia Dixie A-30.
- Mick plots the coordinates of Iberia 68-30 on the map,
along with the location of the helicopter.
- Now, if we take the camera,
where the helicopter actually is,
we can actually take some of the images
from the video, and we can actually fit them
to what we're seeing here.
We can see right here, the shape of the bay
matches perfectly, and we can see right in the middle
where the crosshairs are is exactly where Iberian 68-30 was.
If you take a 3D model of a plane
in the orientation for that path, it matches up
in size and in shape.
So I'm 100% sure that this is the right plane.
- [Tony] So after two years, why didn't the Chilean military
come up with the same conclusion?
Mick explains it began with the helicopter pilots.
- They thought that this was about 20 miles
in front of them, and so they looked in the radar
on that area, and of course they didn't see the plane.
The reason they didn't see the plane
was that the plane was actually 40 miles away,
not 20 miles away.
And in fact, at the end of the video,
the plane is 100 miles away, because it has traveled
such a long distance in that time.
But all this time, they were looking in the wrong place.
(tense music)
- Our revised verdict? This is a commercial airplane.
Thanks to Mick West and his team for solving that one,
but what about all the other mysterious sightings over Chile?
Well, maybe their official agency,
the Committee for Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena,
should go to Mick the next time something unusual
pops up in their skies.
And that's our show for tonight.
Send us your most unexplainable videos,
and remember to keep those cameras rolling.
(dramatic theme music)