- Tonight on "The Proof Is Out There."
Another leaked government UFO video,
this time from southern Arizona.
- When I opened it I realized, wow,
this is like the leak of all leaks.
- [Tony] A strange winged animal caught on camera in Bali.
- It has these tentacle-like structures
coming off its body, as well as wings.
- [Tony] Is it connected to this legendary Indonesian creature?
- That's pretty freaky.
- [Tony] A man in India able to dip his hands
in boiling oil and feel no pain.
- The human can will himself to do something
that seems almost superhuman.
- [Tony] And meet the man who claimed he killed Bigfoot.
- I jumped out of the tent with my firearm
and I shot at him a couple of times.
- [Tony] He says he has the proof,
but what will our experts say?
Around the globe are videos-
- [Woman] What the heck is this?
- [Man] It's moving.
- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.
(staticky buzzing)
- [Man] Is it some kind of unidentified object?
- [Woman] Are we looking at something that's CGI?
- [Tony] What are they?
- [Man] 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."
Last year, the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence issued a much discussed report
claiming that the US military has documented
144 cases of UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.
Since then, the UFO community has been searching
for documentation of others
and maybe, just maybe, they found some.
It's November 23, 2019.
Not far from the southern border between Arizona and Mexico,
Department of Homeland Security agents
are flying an RC-26 surveillance aircraft
on the hunt for drug smugglers
when suddenly their infrared cameras capture this.
Let's zoom in for a closer look.
The strange object has a solid body that tapers at one end
with what looks like a smaller circle above the other end.
Its odd shape has an uncanny resemblance
to everyone's favorite bath toy
and instantly becomes known as the rubber duck UFO.
In September 2021, UFO investigator Andy Marcial
receives the footage from a secret source
at the Department of Homeland Security.
- When I opened it, I realized, wow,
this is like the leak of all leaks.
I've seen many drawings, I've seen balloon footage.
This is what I do for a living.
I do my due diligence
and I believe it's a legitimate UAP or UFO.
- [Tony] Journalist MJ Banias says the video
took everyone by surprise when it first landed online.
- It is shaped like a rubber duck.
This is definitely bizarre,
but using the information on screen,
we can deduce it seems to be around six feet in length,
so it's quite a small object.
- [Tony] The video shows the rubber duck flying
for nearly an hour and because the footage
comes from an official federal agency,
Banias says the UFO community
is taking this rubber duck very seriously.
- What's different about this video
is the other videos that the United States government
has released concerning unidentified aerial phenomena
is its length.
It's much easier to pull data
out of an hour long video to figure out
what we're looking at versus a very short video,
for example, in the Tic Tac UFO video.
- But while no one knows yet what the rubber duck is,
what we do know is that this footage
was not meant for the public to see.
There's another thing that distinguishes
this government UFO video from all the other
headline-making incidents of the recent past.
Those military encounters all took place over water
and were observed by navy planes or warships.
This takes place over land, on the border no less.
So does this signal a new wave of UFOs
interacting with the government?
We're gonna turn this over to our experts
to see if this rubber duck UFO is all it's quacked up to be.
(tense music)
First, we asked Rich Hoffman
of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies
to examine the footage.
- But one of the things we're finding out
about UFO study is that basically,
shape doesn't really seem to matter much.
We've had objects that are discs, some are triangles,
some are cigar shaped, cylindrical.
- [Tony] But while UFO shapes can be different,
Hoffman notes that what typically defines a UFO
are common behavioral characteristics,
including hypersonic speed,
cloaking and trans-medium travel.
- This one didn't seem to make any pronounced
types of beat changes,
that we would say instantaneous acceleration.
It didn't stop in the air and hover.
It didn't do the things that you might typically
see in a lot of UFO cases.
- [Tony] So if the rubber duck is a conventional object,
could it be an airplane?
Hoffman says the shape of the object
and the thermal nature of the camera offer clues.
- The temperature of the aircraft
would not be the solid white that you see on that image.
You would see the variations in terms of color
and in fact in the very beginning of the video,
you could see where the heat is maybe coming out
of an exhaust part of that engine
and that's what it would've looked.
- [Tony] If a conventional aircraft is off the table,
could it be another kind of machine?
We take that question to aviation expert, Tim McMillan.
- We know there's a lot of drone traffic
that comes across the southern border in the United States,
particularly with drug trafficking.
Some type of illegal substance
that's being attached to a larger drone above it.
- [Tony] The cheap cost and low skill level
needed to operate makes drones a common tool
used by cartel members to move drugs across the border.
- We should be able to see the characteristics of a drone.
If this is a quad copter drone,
we should see those rotors spinning.
We never see that.
Based on just the totality of the factors,
I don't have a good answer.
- [Tony] Next we ask science writer
Mick West to take a look.
- We can use the data from this plane
to measure how far it goes over the course of the video.
It actually only moves about eight to 10 miles
over the course of the entire 20, 30 minutes
that it's tracking the object.
It seemed like it was moving 120 miles per hour,
but since it only moves around eight miles
in like 30 minutes,
it really means it's moving less than 20 miles per hour.
Which is, you know, not much faster than normal wind speed.
So we know that this object
probably isn't moving very fast at all.
It doesn't change direction,
it doesn't seem to change altitude.
It's just flying in a straight line.
- [Tony] Mick adds up all these individual factors
and arrives at a hypothesis.
- One possibility is this rubber duck shape
is actually a bunch of balloons,
with some of them at the bottom of the body
and then the upper one is the the head.
It might just be some party somewhere
and they just blew in the wind
and this is what we ended up with.
So I think it's probably not some kind of alien spaceship.
- [Tony] Ultimately the video ends
with the rubber duck still flying,
leaving Mick to admit that his theory is just that, a theory.
- We don't know how this story ends.
All we have is this section of the video.
We don't know what happens after that.
So there's still a mystery
as to what happened after this video.
(tense music)
- Our verdict?
While Mick's analysis of the balloon hypothesis has merit,
the video doesn't give us a clear enough image
to make that call with confidence.
Whatever the image is,
we know border patrol agents filmed it
until their time in the air came to an end.
They probably wouldn't have done that
for something commonplace.
So we're gonna call this a genuine UFO for now
until it's properly identified.
Meanwhile, if any other citizen journalists out there
come in contact with more official government footage
of unidentified objects, please send it to us for analysis.
Now let's hop scotch the globe from Arizona to Indonesia.
Question for you, are you the person
who needs help killing bugs or the person
who gets called to do the dirty work?
In my house, I'm usually that guy.
But if I was called in to whack the thing
in this next clip with a rolled up magazine,
I might have to call for reinforcements.
Bali, Indonesia, June 2019.
Homeowner Hari Toae is relaxing one night with some guests
when they receive an unexpected visit
from something that appears to be absolutely monstrous.
(indistinct audio from television)
- The footage shows a creature
as it hangs from a light fixture.
It appears to have an insect-like abdomen
with small legs.
As it clings to the rod, alien-like tentacles
slowly probe like searching fingers.
Okay, we're gonna play a little show and tell
with a telestrator here.
What do we have here?
Two, three, four, five, six, seven,
there's a little one here.
Legs?
Tentacles?
Is this the head here?
Am I looking at the front of it?
Am I looking at the back of it?
What am I looking at here?
Are these wings? Is it right side up?
Is it upside down? I can't figure it out.
The creature just hangs there, its tentacles pulsating.
Field researcher Ken Gerhard
helps us make sense of this off the wall creature.
Could it be the stuff of local legend?
- I'm kind of shocked and freaked out.
It has these tentacle-like structures coming off its body
as well as wings
and I wouldn't expect to see any animal
that would have both.
That's pretty freaky.
Well, according to the local folklore,
the pelesit or palasik is described
as a shape shifting spirit that often takes the form
of a blood sucking cricket or grass hopper.
Ominously, the pelesit is said to enter
the mouths of its victims tail first.
- [Tony] Gerhard also wonders if radioactivity
could be the cause of this strange beast.
- This bug could be the result of some type of mutation
caused by radioactive contamination.
And in fact, there was a property
outside of Jakarta, Indonesia that was found
to be contaminated
by a radioactive isotope called Caesium-137,
the same amount of radioactive contamination
that was recorded at the site
of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
- [Tony] Gerhard then raises the possibility
of another kind of mutation,
this one hidden in a creature's genetic code.
- So within every species on the planet,
there are exceptional individuals
that are the result of different types of mutations,
and one of these mutations is known as an atavism,
which is essentially an ancient physical characteristic
or trait that will resurface in a modern species.
We know there were a lot of strange looking insects,
hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago
and perhaps somewhere locked in that genetic code
was this strange mutation
that has now come to life in modern times.
- Atavisms are fascinating phenomena
that can result in oddities
like a baby being born with a vestigial tail
left in its genes from our primate ancestors.
Could this be what we're seeing
in this strange hanging creature?
Hopefully our experts have the answer.
(tense music)
Wildlife biologist Stephanie Schuttler
weighs in on the radioactive mutation theory.
- Radiation can definitely affect tissue.
It can cause really bad burns
and it's like melting your skin or your muscles.
It definitely damages DNA which can cause cancer,
so it does cause problems, but not these mutations.
It's more of cancer tumors.
- [Tony] Now as we said, there are atavisms,
which is when an organism has a recurring trait
that once belonged exclusively to its ancestors
due to genetic recombination.
The most extreme example
might be be hind limbs on whales or sea cows.
Other examples of this include extra toes on horses,
vestigial claws, or dewclaws on dogs,
or third nipples on humans.
But in this case we checked and there's no fossil record
of an ancient insect with tentacles.
After analyzing the evidence,
biologist Floyd Hayes says a creature like this
may have inspired the legend of the pelesit,
but he's sure it's a real animal
because he can identify those tentacles.
They're actually scent glands.
- We could tell this is an insect because it has six legs,
it's got a rather thick body and it's got wings,
so it looks like a moth
with these long scent glands on the rear end.
This is a clouded tiger moth which lives in Asia
and and the western West Indies.
It's a male that has these four
elongated tubular scent glands called coremata
and they release a pheromone,
which is a chemical signal,
that attracts other males and females
and they usually do this in the evening
when they're in the mood to mate.
(tense music)
- The verdict? This thing's a clouded tiger moth.
Our experts tell us that this is a normal feature
of all male lepidopterans, like butterflies and moths.
It seems this particular creature's glands
are enlarged with pheromones at that moment
because he's on the lookout for procreation.
As for why the guy is in a house and not outdoors?
He's just looking for love in all the wrong places.
- Boiling cooking oil is not something you want to touch.
At 572 degrees Fahrenheit,
it is much hotter than boiling water,
which is only 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
But video has emerged of one man
whose seemingly superhuman hands are heat resistant.
December 18, 2021.
It's lunchtime in Jaipur, India
and like most days, a crowd is assembled
in front of a popular restaurant.
They're here to sample the fried fish and shishkabobs,
but also to catch a glimpse of chef Abhey Sharma
whose skills aren't just culinary, they're super sensory.
Standing over a vat of boiling cooking oil,
Abhey with no gloves, mitts or tongs
reaches into the scalding liquid,
and to the crowd's wonder,
he continues to pass his fingers through the oil
as if performing his morning ablutions.
As we zoom in and slow down,
we see that he's not covering his fingers with anything.
They're definitely going into the oil over and over again.
Viewers, do not try this at home.
- The chef here seems to be completely comfortable
with dipping his hands in oil.
One theory is that this chef is using a technique
akin to fire walkers.
Fire walking is a long standing tradition
in Indian cultures.
It dates back to India's iron age.
Fire walking was a rite of passage
and a way for people to show strength.
- [Tony] Pain immunity is not exclusive
to Indian fire walkers.
Jewish writer Jack Schwartz became known
for his mind over matter abilities
after being forced to develop them through prayer
and meditation while being imprisoned
by the Germans during World War II.
After the war, he continued to show off his talents,
being capable of pushing a needle through his arm
without experiencing any pain.
Are we witnessing the same thing with Abhey?
- His ability to put his hands in this hot vat of oil,
which is about 575 degrees Fahrenheit,
might be similar in that it's mind over matter.
That the human can will himself to do something
that seems almost superhuman.
- Walking on coals is no joke.
At a 2016 self help seminar hosted by Tony Robbins,
roughly 30 people were treated for burns
after stepping through coals in an exercise.
Though most of the 7,000 guests sustained no injuries,
there's always a risk when playing with fire.
So does Abhey possess superhuman abilities
or is there some sleight of hand at play?
Let's ask our experts.
(tense music)
Professor of biology Floyd Hayes says acquired pain immunity
is a real phenomenon
and that is indeed what we're seeing here.
- I think this is a case of sensory adaptation
where he has become accustomed to do this
and his body has adapted to it.
- [Tony] Humans can and have adapted
to extreme conditions before.
For example, in Tierra Del Fuego
on the southern tip of South America,
the early Yahgan people were able to wear
very little clothing despite the ice cold climate.
Among other reasons, scientists believed this was partly
because they evolved higher metabolism over time.
- And I think that after repetitively
placing his hands in this boiling hot oil,
his body simply became adapted to it
and it no longer affects him.
- [Tony] World renowned physicist, Michio Kaku,
respectfully disagrees.
He thinks the chef is likely putting his hand in water
before he puts it in the oil and that water turns to steam.
- Steam is not a good conductor of heat.
It has very low thermal conductivity.
That's the Leidenfrost effect.
If I get a hot skillet and put drops of water
on top of the skillet,
the water will skidder around because it's floating
on a layer of steam.
That's the same thing happening here.
I think what we did not see is the fact
that he probably put his hand in water first
to get that layer of water so that when he stuck his hand
inside the hot oil, the water turned to steam
and steam protected him.
That's the trick.
And notice that he only did it for a second or so.
If he left his hand there,
the steam would've vaporized eventually
and then of course you would burn your hand off.
- By the way, this is the technique used by fire walkers.
They wet their feet first and as long as they keep moving,
the steam protects them from the hot coals.
So, two diverging expert opinions.
The steam theory is intriguing,
but Abhey has never admitted
to putting his hands in cold water first
and we don't see him doing that on the video.
So for now we're going to go with Dr. Hayes
and say that this is a real deal case
of acquired pain immunity.
- Did you know that there Uare more than 17 verses.
in the Bible about fires in the sky?
Perhaps most famously, the prophet Ezekiel
wrote of a heavenly flaming wheel.
Some feel these are ancient accounts of flaming UFOs.
People today are still seeing them,
but unlike Ezekiel, they have video.
September 19, 2019.
It's a clear night sky over Yuma, Arizona.
A woman is out with friends
when she notices something strange
suddenly appear above the city
so she takes out her cell phone and captures this.
- [Tony] Zooming in, we see four glowing lights
that seem to float in the air,
but wait, suddenly another group of lights appear.
- [Tony] So what are they?
Journalist Amy Teitel is equally curious.
- There's nothing high in this city.
It's not like they're Christmas lights on a balcony
of a high rise building.
They're clearly above some kind of settlement,
some kind of housing development or something,
but they're not moving.
- [Tony] Teitel says these mysterious lights
appear to be a new type of UFO phenomenon.
Not an unidentified flying object,
but an unidentified fiery object.
- The term unidentified fiery object
is a new one in the UFO spheres,
but it's becoming more common.
It's a term used by the European Space Agency
and the United States Weather Service.
They're usually discs or circular
and they kind of seem to glow as if they're on fire.
They're also not solid.
They kind of float off and on,
almost as though they're light bulbs.
- [Tony] Teitel explains that these strange fiery objects
in the sky have been recorded
in both ancient and modern history.
- In 1440 BCE, there was a record
in the Tulli Papyrus by scribes,
of fiery discs seen in the sky.
And in 2022, something similar was seen
in Fresno, California.
A man in Fresno saw six glowing orbs in the sky.
They appeared, they glowed and then they disappeared.
When he alerted authorities,
no one could give him a satisfactory
or any kind of answer about what these glowing orbs were.
- We also reported on this unidentified fiery object
recently documented in Canada.
That turned out to be a big Mylar balloon
reflecting the sun.
But this is a group of UFOs.
Could that be a clue?
Let's ask the experts.
(tense music)
We begin our analysis
with forensic video expert Michael Primeau.
- From what I've reviewed thus far,
I didn't detect any evidence of CGI
or anything that was potentially overlaid
into the recording to misrepresent
that these lights weren't originally captured
within the scene.
They are consistent with the rest of the imagery
as it's being encoded.
- [Tony] So it appears the lights are part
of the original video, but what are they?
Could this be part of a celebration?
- One phenomena that creates an illumination
of being orange and moving through the sky
are Chinese lanterns.
But lanterns tend to go up in an angle.
These are clearly coming straight down
and so it doesn't match something like
a Chinese lantern.
- [Tony] So if fiery objects
have been linked to aliens throughout history,
could it be a UFO?
As he did before with the rubber duck UFO,
Hoffman looks for telltale characteristics.
- They're able to do a lot of different maneuvers
that we're not very familiar with.
They can also go shoot straight up.
But there's nothing characteristic
or very significant about what you see
in this particular video that would lead you to believe
that it's anything alien or something from off planet.
- [Tony] Astronomer and video effects designer
Mark D'Antonio agrees that we're not looking at a UFO,
but he does see a detail in the lights' behavior
that he believes is a smoking gun.
- There's a couple of qualities about the lights
that you have to really notice,
and that is that they're not just solid lights.
They flicker differently than these white lights
down on the bottom.
Also, they look like they're just floating in the sky.
When you measure this here to that
and you just look at how they're coming down,
you see that they're actually coming down just a little bit.
That's very important because it gives us a clue
as to what's going on here.
- [Tony] D'Antonio believes that slight downward motion
is the key to solving this mystery.
- This is near Yuma, Arizona.
Well, in that area of Arizona,
there's a Luke Air Force Base,
so what we're seeing here could very well be
a exercise by the military.
- [Tony] D'Antonio believes these are parachute flares
and the motion is caused by the winds changing
as they drift down.
- Parachute flares are very, very bright burning flares
that drop slowly in the sky.
And in my view, these look to me like parachute flares
that are being dropped by the military.
I've probably seen this
probably 10 or 12 times directly live.
They do these exercises all the time.
- Our verdict? Parachute flares.
It's their down and up motion that sealed it.
A fun fact, the flares can reach a height of about 1,000 feet
and can be seen on a clear night from about 28 miles away.
U- It was the stuff ofs nightmares for some
and a sign of the divine for others.
This next story is sure to give you chills.
It's January 2022 near Lake Erie in Dunnville, Ontario.
A local lake house owner wakes up one wintry morning
and looks out the window.
What greets him is a chilling site, in more ways than one.
A tall, ominous figure seemingly carved from ice
stands before him with deathly stillness.
The icy form is slightly hunched over
and appears to be wrapped in a long shawl or cloak.
Journalist MJ Banias says it's a site
that seems to freeze even time.
- It has a very strange shape, looks very humanoid.
We have this sort of hood, cloak kind of situation.
You know, obviously it resembles, to this man,
sort of this image of death.
- [Tony] We're talking about the Grim Reaper.
And what's even stranger, the man's daughter
said she recognized the shrouded figure from her dreams,
suggesting this might be some kind of deadly omen.
- The daughter of the man who took this picture
has said that prior to this,
she was having very strange dreams.
She was encountering figures, ghosts,
sort of strange entities that she was scared about.
- The Grim Reaper first appeared in Europe
in the 14th century when the world was suffering
through the Black Death plague
that killed one third of Europeans.
The robed figure was depicted carrying a scythe
to reap crops that had been plucked from the the earth,
like those who had died.
But as recently as 2014, stories of the Grim Reaper
stalking a Albuquerque, New Mexico cemetery made headlines.
And this is not the only example
of a seemingly spectral figure frozen in ice.
A drone video from near New Buffalo, Michigan
shows what appears to be an angel standing guard
over the frozen lake in February 2021.
Some who watched the clip viewed it as a sign from God.
Could these icebound figures somehow be related?
Psychologists say dreams and visions of the Grim Reaper
don't necessarily mean imminent death.
They could represent the subconscious mind
processing the end of something.
A transition or just the feeling of missing something or someone.
Still, seeing an image like this in my front yard
would freak me out no matter how I slept.
Let's let our experts tell us what it all means.
(tense music)
Today's ice sculptors are able to construct
elaborate representations of various animals,
so making a Grim Reaper shouldn't be a huge challenge.
But physicist Dr. Matthew Szydagis says
if this was made by an artist,
it would likely be much more precise.
- If you're gonna fake something,
I would do a much better job.
This looks very random to me.
If you look at it,
you don't see a distinct face in the hood,
you don't see a lot of symmetry here.
Like you don't see an equal number of spikes left to right.
So I really don't think this is a case
of a manmade structure.
- [Tony] Then if it's not an artist's sculpture,
could this form be a result of the wintry weather?
Meteorologist Juan Hernandez says the incident took place
on the Grand River near the mouth of Lake Erie,
where the weather data shows a lot of freezing and thawing.
- We can see that there were quite
a bit of fluctuations in temperature.
We saw two dips in the temperature
where the temperature actually decreased
to about 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because of those significant temperature drops,
any kind of water that may be un-frozen in the river
or a lake that splashes up will quickly become frozen.
- [Tony] And Hernandez says that below zero temperatures
and strong wakes from a winter storm can quickly
add up to something that looks like a sculpture.
- This is a perfect example of what happens
when water sprays up into an object.
In this case, it looks like the object is a lamp post
that has been covered in ice over the course of many days
and multiple storm systems.
Because something like this doesn't just happen overnight.
- The same effect likely happened with the ice angel,
with water splashing onto this metal beacon
at the end of a breakwater where the Galien River
meets Lake Michigan.
And Szydagis adds that it's our familiarity
with the human figure that makes our brain
see the Grim Reaper in this form.
- There's a well known psychological phenomenon
known as pareidolia where we can see a pattern
when there is none.
I believe that this is an example of what we're seeing.
(tense music)
- Our verdict? Pareidolia.
This is the same effect we also see with the ice angel,
though some still see it as divine inspiration
manifested through nature.
Luckily for the lake house owner in Ontario,
this representation of the Grim Reaper
didn't turn out to be an omen
of anything worse than cold weather.
We hear that he's alive and well
as is the human brain's capacity for seeing patterns.
- Undoubtedly, one of the most
frightening experiences imaginable
is being caught in the middle of an earthquake.
But what if the terror doesn't end once it's over?
Well, we've got a video of a strange phenomenon
seen in the aftermath of some tremors in Mexico
that has some people wondering
if Mother Nature just wasn't finished
or if something more sinister was responsible.
September 7, 2021.
A severe 7.1 magnitude earthquake strikes Acapulco.
The tremors are so strong they reach Mexico City,
which is 200 miles away from the epicenter.
And unbeknownst to evacuees who have gathered
in the streets of the capitol,
something in the sky is about to steal
the earthquake's thunder.
(dogs barking)
- [Man] Wow.
- [Tony] Take a closer look.
See those blue flashes?
Davo Penaloza, who resides in the Condesa neighborhood
witnessed the eerie spectacle.
- These lights start to appear.
The only thing that you can hear at the moment
are the people shouting because it is so scary.
- [Tony] Davo and his neighbors aren't the only ones
in a state of shock.
The hashtag apocolipsis, Spanish for apocalypse,
begins to trend online,
And in the streets, people feel an evil presence.
- [Tony] Catholic miracle historian Michael O'Neill
says the connection between earthquakes
and fears of the apocalypse is ancient.
- When people see lights and thunder
and unexplained phenomena,
they say this is clearly apocalyptic,
perhaps hearkening back to the Book of Revelation.
- [Tony] In the Book of Revelation,
it's the four horsemen of the apocalypse
who represent evil and disasters
said to occur before the second coming of Jesus.
But strangely, others point not to the work of the devil,
but Jesus as Holy Mother Mary as a presence
connected to catastrophes.
- In Zeitoun, in Egypt, from 1968 to '71,
the Virgin Mary was said to be visibly walking
on the rooftop of St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church.
She was surrounded by lights, glowing figures
and orbs and doves.
These were seen by Christians, Jews, atheists and Muslims
and there were earthquakes happening in that region
right before these events.
So perhaps there's a connection there.
- When it comes to divine intervention,
believers in Mexico City have long looked
to the Virgin of Guadalupe for aid in times of trouble.
She's credited with ending calamitous events
like the flood of 1629 and the epidemic of 1736.
In the meantime, let's see if our experts can determine
if this footage captures something divine,
demonic or just natural.
(tense music)
So are these lights the work of the devil
or signaling the appearance of the Virgin Mary?
Physicists Matthew Szydagis won't go that far,
but he does say the video might capture
a rarely photographed phenomenon known as earthquake lights.
- One potential explanation for earthquake lights
is that they come from friction
of the rubbing of tectonic plates within the earth's crust
that may lead to a pyroelectric effect.
- [Tony] The theory is that chemical elements
travel up through the cracks made during an earthquake.
When they reach the atmosphere,
these ions can ionize pockets of air,
forming plasma that emits light.
- But earthquake lights could be, in my understanding,
a multitude of different colors
and the only colors I see in this video
are ones that correspond with ordinary, boring lightning.
- [Tony] Lightning makes sense.
So we asked meteorologist Juan Hernandez
to look into the weather conditions on September 7th,
the day the lights were filmed.
- We actually have a tropical depression 15,
which had developed off to the southwest of Mexico City.
All of this moisture led to a fairly stormy day
across the city.
We have plenty of lightning that was reported
before the earthquake actually developed,
but we see what appears to be just one explosion
that illuminates the clouds.
If it were lightning,
it would likely be occurring everywhere,
not just along the streets.
- [Tony] Instead, Hernandez suggests we may be seeing
a mechanical failure mistaken for a natural event.
- Mexico City, it has plenty of transformers
that could fail.
A failing transformer is oftentimes caused
by shaking in the ground or something that gets loose.
A lot of times, these transformers
are full of coolant.
It takes one failure for that transformer
to quickly explode, causing the transformer to light up
into that blue hue that we see in this video.
- [Tony] But while there were reports
of transformer explosions, NASA geologists Bob Anderson
says we should still consider a natural explanation
for what we're seeing.
- When you have a massive earthquake like a seven,
the rocks can crack and you get all kinds
of natural gas escaping.
You see these balls of light
and what they are is gas escaping from the ground.
And when it comes up, it sort of either static electrically
or some other mechanism, kind of ignites
and it forms what we call gas balls,
or gas lightning kind of things.
They'll float for a while and then they dissipate.
- [Tony] And if this happens, the flickering
that results will look very similar to heat lightning,
which is cloud-to-ground lightning
that occurs from a distance.
- Lightning is basically from a storm
when the charge comes down,
then the lightning comes from the ground to the surface.
If you think about it,
the gas itself is rising from the ground,
so it would give the effect
that it could have been a lightning.
And sometimes both of those
can be confused with with one another.
(tense music)
- Our verdict? Unexplained phenomenon.
When our experts disagree like this,
we can't come to a definitive conclusion,
though I like Anderson's gas theory.
And for those who believe the natural world
is ultimately governed by divine or devilish forces,
we're in no position to say otherwise.
- Bigfoot is not just big in stature,
for some it's also big business.
There's long been a thriving economy
built around the legend.
Of course, we're a part of that,
but we try to get things right.
So when we heard an account of a man
who said he killed Bigfoot, we had to investigate.
(dramatic music)
September 6, 2012 in San Antonio, Texas.
Rick Dyer, a self-proclaimed Bigfoot tracker,
has set a trap for the elusive beast
after he heard of a 911 call
reporting the sighting of a large, hairy animal
devouring a deer in the woods.
- I wanted to attract him
so I went out and got deer urine and pork ribs
and I hung the pork ribs on a tree.
I scattered the deer urine all under the tree,
because Bigfoot is attracted to deer.
And in the middle of the night,
Bigfoot came back to eat the pork ribs
and I jumped out of the tent with my firearm
and I shot at him a couple of times.
- Rick initially claims he shot and killed Bigfoot,
and soon thereafter, he releases
these shocking photos to prove it.
The images appear to show a frozen body
of a deceased adult Bigfoot.
You can see a face, lips and in this wider shot,
a full body covered in fur.
Rick claims the animal is eight feet tall,
four feet wide and weighs about 800 pounds.
One photo also purports to show a long, sternal scar
allegedly made when the creature was autopsied
at an undisclosed college in Washington state.
Rick nicknames the creature Hank
and takes the corpse on a national tour,
charging people to view the body under plexiglass
in a wooden coffin
and eventually pulling in close to $50,000.
Field researcher Cliff Barackman
says that he's not surprised by where it all began.
Apparently Bigfoot is really big in the lone star state.
- Texas is not generally thought of as Bigfoot habitat,
but it absolutely is.
They have a distribution over the continent
very similar to that of black bears.
They have the same needs as Sasquatches do.
Eastern Texas gets a ton of rain
from the Gulf of Mexico coming north.
The more rain an area gets,
the more Bigfoot reports come out of that particular area.
- [Tony] Reports date back to 1924
when the state's Folklore Society published a story
about the strange case of the wild woman of Navidad.
- The indigenous people of the area
certainly knew about the Sasquatches
that they lived among.
When white settlers started coming into the area,
they also ran across Sasquatches
and they reported them as wild men or wild women.
And you can read newspaper reports and from settlers
from as early as the 1920s or even the late 1800s.
- But as we know, there's a difference
between reports and proof.
There were red flags going up
around Rick's claims almost immediately.
Perhaps the biggest was that he has a history of hoaxing,
most notoriously in a 2008 incident
in which he and another man claimed to have found
a Bigfoot corpse in Georgia.
That turned out to be a frozen Halloween costume.
The folks who consider themselves
serious Bigfoot researchers take offense
to that kind of fakery,
so let's see what they have to say about this.
(tense music)
Anthropologist Kathy Strain believes Bigfoot exists,
but she's doubtful this is it.
- What I find problematic is that
he says he shot it with a shotgun several times
and yet there's no evidence of that on the body.
- [Tony] Wildlife biologist Stephanie Schuttler
also notes that something about the face
just doesn't add up under close examination.
- I don't understand why there's all this, like,
chapping around the eyes
and the lips look extremely chapped.
It looks like it would live in a really cold area.
The fact that this was supposedly
shot in southern Texas,
it's even stranger.
- [Tony] But Schuttler has an even bigger issue
with how it's been preserved.
- It looks almost like the eyes are glued shut.
It just doesn't look like anything from the natural world.
It reminds me of a Hollywood costume.
- [Tony] Professor of anatomy and anthropology,
Jeff Meldrum, perhaps the world's most famous
Bigfoot believer, agrees with Schuttler
about the discrepancies in the face, and then some.
- The brow was quite high.
It had a high forehead.
These everted lips, this pug nose,
these almost cherub cheeks.
It was just such a funny looking depiction
that did not seem in any way to comport
with the many eyewitness descriptions
and the sketches of Sasquatch.
- [Tony] For Meldrum, it's clear that not only
is this creature not Bigfoot,
it's a fabrication that lacks any backbone.
- It was literally just a stuffed mannequin.
(tense music)
- Our verdict? This is just another hoax.
Rick may have provided photos of his alleged creature,
but he never produced the results of his autopsy.
This may have netted him some quick cash,
but serious researchers say it was also a setback
for their work and the reputation
of the entire community.
And that's our show for tonight.
Thank you so much for watching,
and remember to keep those cameras rolling.
(dramatic theme music)