- Tonight on The Proof Is Out There.
We are watching the skies for UFOs camouflaged as clouds.
- Could aliens have been hiding in plain sight this whole time?
- [Tony] And maybe they’re not just hiding.
Could they have negotiated an alliance
with the US government?
- Some think these aliens ended the Cold War.
- [Tony] A haunting howl in the forest.
(entity howling)
- When this video hit the internet, everybody went nuts.
- [Tony] Is a killer Bigfoot on the loose?
And a mystery on a Florida beach,
is the Bermuda Triangle responsible?
- The Bermuda Triangle has claimed so many vessels
through the years, this could be one of them.
(dramatic music)
- [Tony] Around the globe are videos.
- [Witness] What are those things?
- [Witness] It’s moving.
- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.
(electric buzzing)
(dramatic music)
- [Kathy] We don’t know where they come from,
who made them, or how they operate.
- [Tony] What are they?
- [MJ] Some sort of bizarre mutation.
- [Marc] What’s exciting is nobody really knows.
- 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 music)
Good evening and welcome to The Proof Is Out There.
The media has been buzzing for the past few years
over the government’s release of video
showing unidentified craft filmed in the skies
by our military.
But many believe that UFOs
have been observing our military bases for decades,
and that this next photo proves it.
It’s October 16th, 1957.
Ella Louise Fortune,
a nurse at the Mescalero Indian Reservation in New Mexico,
is driving north on Highway 54
when she sees something hovering in the sky
over Holloman Air Force base in Alamogordo.
She happens to have her camera with her,
so she pulls the car over and photographs this.
A glowing, white, elongated, oval-shaped object
is floating above the desert landscape.
You can see why this photo caused such a stir.
Just look at how bright it is, even in broad daylight.
Check out the sharpness of the edges here, there,
and then you have this soft wisp.
Is that exhaust?
How would you fake that if you wanted to?
- This photo is a classic in the UFO community
that most people consider a genuine photograph
that was not hoaxed.
- [Tony] Not only has the photo earned a place
in UFO history, it ties into one of the most astonishing
and durable stories of the UFO cannon,
allegations that Holloman Airbase
was the site of an interstellar summit
where aliens forged an alliance with the US government.
- There’s a story that circulates within UFO circles
that President Dwight D. Eisenhower
secretly met with aliens,
and this alien gets shuffled into a back room
and the president has flown in
to specifically meet with this creature.
So we have a lot of strange stories out there
of secret meetings between presidents
and aliens from other planets.
- Now, according to some, during these secret meetings,
President Eisenhower brokered a deal
to allow the aliens to abduct humans
in exchange for extraterrestrial black technology
that would lead to developments like the B-2 Stealth bomber.
Is the photo we have here evidence
of that advanced alien tech?
We asked our experts to decide.
(tense music)
We begin with military aviation expert Tim McMillan.
Is it possible that white color and shape
match something you’d expect to see near an Air Force base,
namely a parachute?
- Nothing about it is consistent with a parachute,
in particular, you don’t see a payload.
The shape of it is inconsistent with what you would expect
for a parachute that is being weighted down by a payload.
- [Tony] Some have speculated
it could be a balloon or blimp, but McMillan doesn’t see it.
- It doesn’t resemble any obvious shape of a balloon.
Also definitely appears to be extremely bright,
and so it would have to have some type of light source,
which wouldn’t make sense for a balloon.
- [Tony] Next, we turn to Rich Hoffman
from the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
This thing is white and in the sky.
Could it just be a cloud?
- It takes very strong winds
to create that kind of sharpness to the edges
and creating the saucer-like look to it
’cause it doesn’t even match what you would expect
with the upper-band cirrus clouds.
So I don’t see this as a cloud whatsoever.
- [Tony] Instead, Hoffman believes with some calculations
he can narrow down the possibilities.
- It was roughly around 10,000 feet,
and roughly they assumed it was 15 miles away.
You do trigonometry, you’re able to determine
that it’s roughly just over a mile long.
- [Tony] If Hoffman’s numbers are correct,
he says we can eliminate several other possibilities.
- I would never go to the point of saying that
this is a plane.
The size makes no sense, it’s a mile wide,
and it’s not a UFO.
No objects, especially one a mile long,
would not have gone undetected by the people
that are positioned there monitoring that part of the sky.
- [Tony] So what could it be?
Hoffman says location is the key.
- There’s one important thing that you need to know.
Holloman Air Force Base was to the position
of the witnesses left.
The vast majority of this area you’re looking at
is White Sands Missile Range.
The fact that this is conveniently positioned
right at 10,000 feet would probably make it very likely
that it’s a missile test of some sort.
- [Tony] McMillan agrees,
and believes the photo reveals an important clue.
- [Tim] There appears to be a contrail
behind the object,
which suggests that the object is moving
and leaving a vapor trail
that would be consistent with solid fuel burning.
- [Tony] A large vapor trail could also explain
why this object looks a mile long
when in fact, it’s much shorter.
- [Tim] The US at the time
was engaged in significant rocket testing
and especially were in the height of the space race
between the United States and the Soviet Union.
- [Rich] There were a whole variety of missiles
that were being tested.
It could have been fired from an aircraft
or something that would’ve created
a kind of plume of smoke like this.
- [Tony] But if this mile-long object
is really just a trail of missile exhaust,
we continue to ask ourselves,
why do the edges look so distinct?
Not to mention,
a speeding missile doesn’t match the eyewitness’s story.
This thing had to hang in the air long enough
for Ella to see it, park her car, get out, and take a photo.
We can’t help but feel
we’re still missing a piece of this puzzle.
(tense music)
Our verdict, still an unidentified object.
Our experts bring up great points,
but even if the contrail points to a chemical fuel burn
and the missile range was a short 30 miles away,
the image itself just doesn’t give us enough info
to definitively call it a missile or anything else.
That keeps it a UFO in our book, for now.
We’re gonna stay in the southwest for this next story,
and fast-forward from the ’50s to the present day.
We often look up at clouds
and try to interpret the strange shapes.
We might see horses, sharks, maybe even strange faces,
but our next sighting involves a cloud shaped so bizarre,
the video footage set social media ablaze.
Take a look.
July 15th, 2022, it’s a clear summer afternoon
as Nisha Higgins is traveling down the highway
in Tempe, Arizona.
But as she drives past the airport,
she catches something floating in the distance
from the corner of her eye.
So she pulls out her phone and captures this.
- [Tony] Let’s zoom in.
A mysterious-looking, dark, oblong object
appears to be stationary in front of the clouds.
Honestly, it looks a little like
that 1957 Holloman Air Force base UFO.
Author Jason Martell agrees
that something here doesn’t seem right.
- We can see other clouds in the vicinity
that are much more fluffy in nature.
This one seems almost out of place.
The object raises enough of a concern
to wonder what exactly it could be,
but just in general, looks very UFO-like.
- [Tony] A UFO in the shape of a cloud?
It may be a possibility.
- If we think about ufology in general,
there’s many aspects where UFOs have used clouds
or meteorological events
to obfuscate what’s really happening.
- [Tony] Social media sites are littered
with UFO cloud sightings.
In California, Mount Shasta is frequently blanketed
by strange oblong clouds,
which has prompted some speculation
that these clouds act as a UFO cloaking device
hiding alien visitation in plain sight.
But others argue these strange shapes
are proof of government weather manipulation.
- The phenomenon of cloud seeding
is basically using certain chemicals
that increase condensation inside the cloud,
that way, also increasing precipitation.
This combination of chemicals
has been known to cause rain clouds to form.
We know that no less than eight states across the US,
Arizona being one of them,
actually use cloud seeding to mitigate drought.
- [Tony] Hidden aliens, government weather manipulation
or something else, UFO clouds are having a moment.
For millennia, oracles looked to the heavens
and judged the significance of strange shapes in the sky.
But in this modern space age, some are asking,
could many of these strange shapes have been UFOs all along?
Let’s see if our experts can figure out
if this cloud could be more than a cloud.
(tense music)
First, could there be a spacecraft hiding in that cloud?
We asked video analyst Marc D’Antonio.
- The ATC, or air traffic control,
has pretty sophisticated radars,
and right now, there’s virtually no objects
that can go undetected by airport radars.
- [Tony] A check of FAA records shows no near misses
in the area that day,
nor were there any nearby rocket launches.
And while some argue UFOs
might well have radar cloaking technology,
D’Antonio points out the FAA
isn’t the only one monitoring the skies above Tempe.
- If this was an actual craft,
you can bet the folks from Williams Gateway
or Luke Air Force Base,
where there’s lots of military presence,
would’ve scrambled to go check it out.
- [Tony] So if it’s not a secret alien ship,
is it a government weather manipulation program?
- Is this a cloud seeding project?
The problem with that for me
is that this is an extremely small, localized cloud.
But a cloud seeding operation is a vast operation,
you’re not gonna cloud-seed right in this one little spot.
I don’t see any way
in which this could be weather manipulation actually.
- [Tony] Okay, so if it’s not artificial weather,
could it be natural?
According to meteorologist Juan Hernandez,
the clue in the video is the surrounding Arizona terrain.
- If we take a closer look down towards the ground,
we notice that there is some terrain.
So this is the Tempe area,
which is surrounded by mountains on the north side
and the eastern side.
- [Tony] These mountains,
or specifically the cold gusts of wind
that run up into them, collide with the moist atmosphere,
creating lenticular clouds
that could look a little or a lot
like hovering flying saucers.
- The wind cannot flow through the mountain,
it must either flow around the mountain
or on top of the mountain.
- [Tony] That upcurrent creates a standing wave of cold air
which then collides with moisture
and forms this unique, saucer-shaped cloud.
But why does it appear to stay stationary
like an ominous hovering spacecraft?
- Although the wind is quickly moving,
lenticular clouds oftentimes look stationary
because that’s the right condition
for the atmosphere to condensate.
- [Tony] After all, the perfect lenticular cloud conditions
are created by unmoving terrain,
so these clouds tend to form and dissipate
in those perfect, stationary spots.
- And they oftentimes look fairly ominous
so I can see why someone would mistake this for a UFO.
(tense music)
- Our verdict, lenticular cloud.
We agree with Juan Hernandez
that this is an extraordinary looking natural phenomenon,
but if you happen to have your camera
and get footage of a massive UFO drifting over your town,
be sure to send it our way.
- We’ve all seen psychic mediums on talk shows
claiming to communicate with the dead.
But what if instead of on TV,
it was happening live right before your very eyes,
and what if the medium was an infant?
Strap on your Pampers and check this out.
It’s December 2021 in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio.
22-month old Evelyn Witt, known as Evie,
is in her highchair when her mom, Tana,
hears something odd and starts filming.
- [Tana] Who are you talking to?
- [Tony] The video shows that no one else is in the room
with little Evie, but she seems to be having a chat-
(Evie exclaims)
- [Tony] With an invisible uncle.
- [Tana] Who are you talking to?
- [Tony] Tana wonders
if the toddler is saying the word, uncle.
- [Tana] Who are you talking to?
Evelyn, who are you talking to?
- Shh, shh, shh.
- [Tony] That would make sense since Tana’s brother,
Evie’s Uncle, Tim,
lived at home with Evie’s grandmother, Debra Henley.
She watches the little girl during the day.
- When I would go to the park,
he’d come with me so he’d help me.
He would take her on the swings and down the slide
and he was just a big part of her life.
What do you think? (laughing)
- [Tony] Tragically,
one month before Tana filmed her mysterious video,
Uncle Tim died of an accidental drug overdose.
So that begs the question,
are we watching little Evie talking to Uncle Tim’s ghost?
- She talked a lot about Tim,
and she would say things that I don’t think that she knew
as a young child.
- [Tana] Who else is happy?
- [Tana] Tim’s happy? - Yeah.
- She was talking to him, I’m almost sure of it.
- [Tony] Author Alexis Brooks suggests
that young children potentially have a sixth sense
and are actually able to see things that others aren’t.
- There are some theorists that say
that babies can actually see beyond
the visible spectrum of light, and it is said that
the spirit world essentially lives outside
of that visible spectrum.
- [Tony] In July 2021, another child went viral
after he began talking to an invisible presence
while his family was driving
through California’s Sierra National Forest.
This apparent ghost sighting took place in an area
where a woman named Sandra Johnson Hughes went missing
a year earlier,
and she looks just like how the boy described.
There is another potential source
of supernatural connection
between children and the spirit world, the pineal gland,
a little understood gland in the center of the brain
that produces melatonin.
It’s been connected
to the mystical third eye, chakra, of Eastern religions.
Some claim children’s pineal glands have not yet atrophied,
which give them visibility
into a broader spectrum of reality.
But what is our experts’ sense?
(tense music)
First, we ask forensic video analyst Michael Primeau
to authenticate the footage,
- The recording’s structure was analyzed,
and there is specific metadata in the file
which would have been produced from the original version.
So there is no evidence to suggest
that any kind of fabrication occurred with this interaction.
- [Tana] Who are you talking to?
- [Tony] So the video is authentic,
but is Evie’s apparent encounter with Uncle Tim?
Can children really see things adults can’t?
Can children see outside the visible spectrum of light
as some have claimed?
One 2018 study published by the University of Georgia
showed young people can detect ultraviolet light
down to a wavelength of 315 nanometers,
much lower than the average middle-aged adult.
Still Dr. Ed Hope doubts this study explains
what we’re seeing here.
- In general, children’s vision
is actually worse than our vision.
In fact, when you’re born, you only see black and white
and have very limited vision,
and this increases rapidly in the first six months.
So there will still be some development
with the eyes and vision at this age.
- [Tony] Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku
adds that Evie is also still developing her social skills
and her understanding of object permanence.
So could she be chatting with an imaginary friend?
- Sometimes, their imaginary friends
are confused with real ones.
It won’t be ’til around age three
that a sense of what is real and not real
becomes solidified in their mind.
And realize that she’s only 22 months old.
- [Tana] Who are you talking to?
- [Tony] Then what do our experts think
is the cause of Evie’s inexplicable interactions
with Uncle Tim?
- I think the most likely situation here
is that Evelyn is mimicking behaviors
of the family members around her
going through a bereavement.
Kids are like sponges,
and this is a way of Evelyn dealing with that situation.
- [Tony] Still, Evie continuously turns back
and addresses the same exact spot in the room.
Even Dr. Kaku cautions against jumping to conclusions.
- Obviously, she has an emotional connection,
but the key question is to what?
The danger is that we impose our understanding
of life and death to children.
Their understanding of life and death
could be quite different from those of an adult.
Maybe children can see another aspect of reality
that we cannot see.
(tense music)
- So this is a tough one, because we witnessed
in real time Evelyn having conversations
with an invisible or imaginary entity.
For now, we’re saying these interactions are unexplained.
It’s certainly possible
Evie was just imagining her uncle was there,
but we can’t say that for sure,
and the family is convinced
that something more was going on.
In the meantime,
they urge anyone affected by substance abuse in Ohio
to contact Hope United.
- When you are all alone in nature,
the most innocuous animal noises can be unsettling.
Even the sound of a tiny chipmunk scurrying
through the leaves can feel like a potential threat.
So imagine being alone and hearing the shrieks
of what could potentially be a Sasquatch.
Don’t watch this next story alone.
December 2017, Witset, British Columbia, Canada.
It’s a snowy, overcast day in this remote village.
Upon hearing something eerie in the woods behind his home,
a man pulls out his camera and records this.
(entity howls)
Take another listen,
it’s a guttural howl eliminating from the forest.
The witness pans the camera around,
trying to find where exactly it’s coming from.
(entity howls)
Field researcher Cliff Barackman draws a comparison
with these noises and the famous Sierra Sounds
recorded in Northern California in the ’70s.
(entity whooping)
- The Sierra Sounds are singularly important
in the study of Sasquatches.
The sounds represent a wide variety
of very strange vocalizations
that were emitted from unseen entities in the woods.
It sounds like people actually speaking an unknown language.
(entity calling indistinctly)
- [Tony] Important to note,
whatever made the Sierra Sounds has never been identified.
As with the recent sounds in British Columbia,
Barackman thinks they could be the sounds
of Sasquatch communicating.
(entity howling)
- We believe that Sasquatches are probably moving about
in kind of loose groups.
- [Tony] Even if they move in small groups like gorillas do,
Barackman says they often spread out.
- So in the kind of habitat they like to live in,
they wouldn’t be able to see the other individuals
in their family groups, they would have to call for them,
whether it’s mating or socialization
or feeding or whatever.
(entity howls)
- [Tony] However, some wonder
if these sounds could be connected
to another recent horror story from the region.
Between 2007 and 2019 in the nearby Salish Sea,
20 disembodied human feet encased in shoes and sneakers
washed up onto the shore.
Some suggest that this could be evidence
of a killer Sasquatch, while others think
this could be a serial killer running amok.
Is this a deranged human screaming in the wild?
- Canada is a vast, wild wilderness.
Could a serial killer be loose in the woods of Canada?
It’s possible.
(entity howling)
- The Harrison River Valley located to the southwest
of British Columbia
is home to the Indigenous nation known as the Chehalis.
They consider the Sasquatch as sacred caretaker of the land,
they even use him as a totem of their nation.
Let’s see what our experts think about this Canadian creature.
(tense music)
Biologist Floyd Hayes fills us in
on what we would normally find
or hear lurking in these woods.
- There are many species of animals
that communicate by vocalizing.
In general, the sounds are somewhat correlated
with the body size of the animal,
with larger animals producing louder sounds.
(wolf howling)
The British Columbia wolf is a subspecies of the gray wolf,
and it lives in this area and it grows rather large.
It makes very loud howling sounds.
(wolf howling)
- [Tony] That leads us to forensic audio analyst
Dr. Rob Maher, who first compares this audio
to that of a large wolf.
- So we can compare the sound of a wolf.
(wolf howling)
(entity howling)
So this is a spectrogram of the wolf howl.
If we look at the Witset howl sound,
we see more high frequency information
and the contour is different than the wolf.
- [Tony] So no exact match for the local fauna.
But what about a Bigfoot?
Maher brings up the famous Sierra Sounds for comparison.
- The Bigfoot recording has more energy
in the lower frequency range,
and it’s more of a whoop rather than a shriek sound.
(entity whoops)
(entity howling)
They seem to be two distinctive types of sounds.
- [Tony] So no Bigfoot.
But what about the idea that the sounds are connected
to some disturbed serial killer haunting the Canadian woods?
Maher says no.
- Trying to make the sounds
that are up in the higher range up here
in several thousand hertz,
I’m a little skeptical that a human could make that sound.
(entity howling)
- [Tony] So what could be making this horrific noise?
Turns out, maybe nothing, or nothing real, at least.
- In the spectrogram, we can see these vertical dark areas
where the sound disappears during the recording.
(entity howls)
One of the reasons you might have these dropouts
would be that the audio had been edited or changed.
It raises a lot of questions
about the integrity of that recording
and whether it’s really authentic.
(entity howls)
(tense music)
- Our verdict, with no exact audio matches
and some questionable evidence about the recording,
we’re going with potential hoax.
And while we didn’t find a Bigfoot this time,
British Columbia’s forests cover an area
of 149 million acres,
the size of France and Germany combined,
so there’s plenty left to explore.
- Coastal erosion has been a concern
for parts of Florida for decades,
especially when big storms strike.
But one Florida town has recently discovered
that with the disappearance of sand comes the reappearance
of strange objects from the past.
It’s December 2022 in Volusia County, Florida.
As the area recovers
from the recent onslaught of hurricanes Ian and Nicole,
beachgoers near Daytona Beach
stumble upon an anomaly on the foreshore.
Photos taken from the air by the county
show two parallel rows
of jagged wooden posts sticking out of the sand.
A couple of the boards lie lengthwise connecting the posts,
while others are strewn nearby.
It appears to be a long buried structure.
Archeologist Chuck Meide,
director of the Lighthouse Archeological Maritime Program,
heads to the scene to try to uncover more
of the mysterious object.
- We kind of assess the scene,
and it becomes almost like a crime scene investigation,
we’re trying to understand what’s going on.
- [Tony] Chuck and his team start digging
and discover what looks like wooden timbers.
- We could really begin to see kind of patterns
in how these timbers were laid out.
We could definitely tell that we had frames of a vessel.
- [Tony] So it seems Chuck is on the scene of a shipwreck,
but what ship is this, and where is it from?
Journalist Eric Grundhauser says there are several ideas.
- One theory is that it is the result
of the Bermuda Triangle,
a fabled triangle of destruction and mystery
that has claimed countless ships over the years.
- [Tony] Could this ship have been a victim
of some unexplained force in the Triangle?
Or is it just an old ship beached during a long ago storm?
- A number of fleets
have been sunk off the coast of Florida,
vessels carrying huge amounts of wealth and treasure.
The so-called Shipwreck Trail
that exists in the waters off the coast of the Florida Keys
contains the remains of ships like the San Pedro
that sunk in 1733 that contained a huge amount of wealth.
- [Tony] But maybe this wrecked ship
was hauling booty that was looted.
- Famous pirates like Black Beard and Calico Jack
were known to have visited the Florida coastline,
and a number of pirate ships
also were sunk off the coast of Florida.
Some were sunk by natural causes,
others were purposely sunk so that they wouldn’t be taken.
Could the remains that we’re seeing here
be the remains of one of those pirate ships?
- Beyond speculation about piracy
and the Bermuda Triangle,
rough waters off Florida’s coast can be dangerous
to wooden boats of any kind.
Though wood naturally floats, leaks between hull planks
can lead to the loss of buoyancy
and even the sinking of ships in storms.
So what was it that brought this vessel down?
Let’s let our experts take the helm.
(tense music)
Meteorologist Juan Hernandez says the amount of sand
that’s been displaced suggests this ship is very old.
- Looks like we’ve lost 10, 15 feet of sand fairly quickly.
Given the potent storm systems
that plague the Bermuda Triangle,
it’s possible that a storm system led to this shipwreck
and then buried it for centuries.
It wouldn’t be until another storm came through
that it would be uncovered.
- [Tony] So even if the ship came from the area
of the Bermuda Triangle,
it likely just ran aground long ago in a bad storm.
So could this actually be a real-life pirate ship?
Archeologist Kathy Strain says it’s possible.
- Piracy is really well-known off the coast of Florida.
In it’s heyday in 1700s,
there was up to 5,000 different pirates operating
in those waters.
So it’s very possible
that we don’t know anything about this boat
because it was stolen.
- [Tony] Chuck agrees, the fact that
there don’t seem to be any ships reported missing
or stolen in this area
calls into question the piracy theory.
And here’s the thing, his further research reveals
this wrecked ship likely sailed after 1800,
the age of piracy had largely ended by then.
- The size of the timbers, how they were shaped,
how they were joined together,
what types of fasteners were used,
all of these things really point
to this dating to the 1800s.
By the 1800s, there’s a lot of shipping,
so it’s most likely to be a cargo ship, a merchant vessel.
- [Tony] Chuck says the continuous tides on the beach
have made it impossible to uncover much more
than the top of the boat, and so far, no sign of treasure.
Our verdict, this is likely a 19th century merchant ship.
Piracy had mostly died down in the Atlantic by the 1800s
so it’s unlikely this ship was purloined
by the likes of Black Beard before it went down.
Still, the lack of any records documenting the loss
of a ship in that area at that time
means this vessel remains part
of the broader Bermuda Triangle mystery, at least for now.
- Prehistoric Native Americans left records
of their ancestral traditions in their rock art.
One symbol found among their stone carvings
is said to be connected to a powerful
and mystical ancient being.
Could this rock provide a bridge to another world?
It’s January 2021,
deep in the mountains of Jackson County, North Carolina.
YouTubers Shane Simmons and Melody West
have traveled to a mysterious site
famed throughout the state.
- [Shane] Let’s get out and take a look.
- [Melody] Let’s do it.
- [Shane] You ready for this? - [Melody] I’m ready.
- [Tony] At the bottom of a small hill,
a large, gray, soapstone boulder emerges,
nestled in the grass.
- [Shane] A lot of interesting carvings on here.
- [Tony] But up close, it’s clear the curves and cuts
combine to tell an ancient story.
- And when you get down there,
the first thing you wanna look for
is the seven fingers of Judaculla.
- [Tony] The legend claims the seven fingers
are the actual hand print
of an ancient seven-fingered giant.
Author Alexis Brooks says the Cherokee people
consider Judaculla to be a psychopomp,
a being that guided souls between the material world
and the spiritual one.
- The Judaculla giant
is said to be one who comes from the mountaintop,
has landed on this rock, but he did so with a purpose.
He was there to chase off intruders.
- [Tony] But perhaps Judaculla isn’t simply a mystical giant
coming down from the mountains,
but rather an ancient astronaut visitor
coming from outer space.
Author Jason Martell says the story goes
that when Judaculla crashed into the rock,
he may have opened a portal to other worlds,
perhaps to where he originated.
- We know that there’s been a lot of UFO activity
in the area.
It’s very possible that this is some type of a beacon
or a lighthouse,
perhaps opening some type of lost energy field.
It has even been suggested
that Judaculla, the giant himself, used this as a gateway
that would allow for communication even today.
- [Tony] Shane says this force of energy
is something he felt firsthand.
- Touching the rock itself, it gave a little bit
of a charge, for lack of a better word,
you just feel something from the rock.
- Stories of powerful giants
can be found in numerous ancient texts.
From the Greek Gigantes to the Hebrew Nephilim,
some believe these giants really walk the earth.
So could Judaculla be a similar supersized being?
Let’s see how our experts measure up.
(tense music)
Archeologist Dr. Ed Barnhart considers if this mark
was truly left by Judaculla, the giant.
- Many people believe that print there
was his actual hand print.
But in actuality, we can see
that it is carved into the stone.
- [Tony] Barnhart says the well-defined edges and grooves
that seem to curl up toward the rock face
prove that it’s been chiseled out
since a hand print impression like this one made in clay
would be less delineated and more diffused.
- This stone was probably carved hundreds
and hundreds of years ago.
- [Tony] What’s more, Barnhart doesn’t believe the stone
is telling us just one story, but instead, many.
- At 1,500 different carvings,
that’s the most on any stone in all of North America.
The initial carvings on this stone
could be reaching back thousands of years ago.
In my experience, rocks that have this much carving on them
are not done in a single episode,
they’re done repeatedly over generations.
- [Tony] And NASA geologist Dr. Bob Anderson
adds that the type of rock
has made it particularly convenient for petroglyphs.
- The rock is made up of soapstone,
which is a metamorphic rock, a rock that has been changed,
it’s been heated by pressure and/or temperature.
It actually makes it very soft and as easy to carve into.
- [Tony] Barnhart says, given the location of the rock,
it was likely carved during the Mississippian period,
which lasted from about 800 AD to around 1600 AD,
and saw the development
of some of the most complex societies
that had ever existed in North America.
- Big, unique pieces of geology, topography like this
were oftentimes landmarks along protected trade routes.
Of course, the Mississippian civilization
were a bunch of independent city states,
and you didn’t want to accidentally,
without permission,
cross from one territory to another
because you would be in big trouble.
- [Tony] So maybe there’s some truth
to the legend of Judaculla,
at least the part about the rock being used
to scare away intruders and mark the tribe’s turf.
- This was a marker
that showed the extent of what their tribe was
so that people would understand
that they would be protecting this land.
Before smartphones, before the internet, before computers,
this is the way that the people
were actually talking tribe to tribe.
It’s just like using Google Maps
that you have on your cars nowadays.
(tense music)
- Our verdict, these complex markings
were engraved by Indigenous peoples as a sophisticated map.
While the story of Judaculla is compelling,
we have no evidence the markings on this boulder
belong on his list of accomplishments,
though we still have no idea why visitors say
the rock seems to have an other-worldly energy.
- We all know they do things differently in California.
The Golden State has its own laws on everything
from fuel efficiency to marijuana,
but does it have its own laws of gravity?
Follow us into the Redwood Forest to find out.
It’s January 2023
in the beach town of Santa Cruz, California,
known for its great surfing and long wharf.
But local YouTuber Ryan Sonneville
is interested in documenting a more unusual area attraction,
a strange cabin in the Redwood Forest
where gravity itself
seems to have joined the counterculture.
- If you live around Santa Cruz
or anywhere in Northern California,
you probably see people with the very iconic
Mystery Spot bumper stickers driving around.
- [Tony] The Mystery Spot is a small structure
where everything seems just a little off-kilter,
and where a tour guide is effortlessly able
to walk up a wall.
Ryan says it feels very disorienting.
- It’s pretty immediate the minute you go into it
that it doesn’t feel right,
like you’re able to stand on a bench
and be leaning forward in a way
that you would generally feel like I’m gonna fall forward.
- [Tony] The Mystery Spot opened to the public in 1940,
and has perplexed hundreds of thousands of visitors
from all over the world.
Journalist Eric Grundhauser
says that this anomaly has resulted
in decades of speculation about why it is the way it is.
- So there are a number of theories
about why the laws of gravity and physics
seem to no longer apply around the vicinity
of the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot.
One theory goes that aliens came to our planet
and one of their spacecraft crashed there in the forest,
and that the remains
are somehow causing gravitational distortions.
- [Tony] Or maybe the layer of rock
between the earth’s crust and its core is to blame.
- Another theory goes,
the Mystery Spot actually sits on some kind of magma chamber
that is producing a lower density of mass
so that the gravity above it in the Mystery Spot
doesn’t have the same qualities
that it does elsewhere on the planet.
- With thousands of visitors each year,
the Mystery Spot calls to mind PT Barnum’s
popular American Museum.
In order to keep the crowds moving,
Barnum put a sign saying, "This way to the egress."
Not knowing egress meant exit,
many people followed the sign in search of a new attraction,
not realizing they were literally being shown the door.
So what do our experts think of this crowd-pleasing sight
in Santa Cruz?
(tense music)
Physicist Dr. Matthew Szydagis says
that electromagnetic effects from an alien spacecraft
probably wouldn’t be strong enough
to distort gravity like this.
- Gravity, when it’s distorted,
needs to be distorted due to extremely strong fields,
so things like a black hole singularity.
- [Tony] In a black hole, the pull of gravity is so strong
that even light can’t escape.
- I can assure you
that if something like that was in California,
it would’ve destroyed the state,
if not the entire planet by now.
- [Tony] But what about the effects of a magma chamber?
Science writer Mick West investigates.
- The idea is that the movement, the different density
of the magma causes gravity to be different.
The issue is, the Mystery Spot lies on the San Andrea’s fault
which is between two continental plates.
That wouldn’t allow buildup of magma,
it would escape between the plates,
that would only actually work in the middle
of a continental plate.
- [Tony] So West has a more even-plained explanation.
- This is essentially an artificial gravity hill.
We don’t see any true verticals anywhere in this spot.
The trees themselves are more or less vertical,
sometimes trees lean over,
the fences are all at strange angles,
the floor is always at an angle,
there’s no flat ground anywhere.
And so your brain never knows which way is up.
- [Tony] But Szydagis has the data to prove
this is just a fun illusion.
- I’ve actually been to the Mystery Spot myself,
and I was able to measure the tilt effect
with the digital leveler app.
Has an approximate average tilt of 17 degrees.
A 17-degree grade,
especially when you disguise it by clever construction,
can be very hard for the human eye to perceive.
While it may not be aliens or gravitational anomalies,
I highly recommend the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot
as a wonderful place to go.
(tense music)
- Our verdict,
we’re going to defer to Professor Szydagis here,
and say this is a well-situated, tilted optical illusion.
In fact, in the mid 1900s,
so-called anti-gravity spots like this
became tourist destinations all across America,
but most of them just didn’t have the pull
to keep folks coming back.
And that’s our show for tonight.
Please keep questioning, keep exploring,
and keep those cameras rolling.
(dramatic music)