- Tonight on "The Proof is Out There."
The International Space Station catches
something inexplicable.
- You have to ask yourself,
is there intelligent life behind what we're seeing?
- [Tony] Something strange is in the water.
These kayakers caught it all on video.
- [Kayaker] What the (beep) just happened?
- [Tony] A trucker spots
these strange lights over Wisconsin.
- [Trucker] Can you guys see this?
What is this thing?
What is that?
- [Tony] And a UFO hunter on the prowl.
Did he finally find what he's seeking?
- [UFO Hunter] I hope I don't get taken tonight, man.
- Some of these videos are very difficult to explain.
(dramatic music)
- [Tony] Around the globe are videos...
- [Videographer] What the heck is this?
- [Videographer 2] It's moving.
- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.
(buzzing)
- [Videographer 2] Is it some kind of unidentified object?
- [Contributor] What's exciting is nobody really knows.
- [Tony] What are they?
- [Contributor] 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 music)
Good evening and welcome
to "The Proof is Out There."
At almost five miles per second,
the International Space Station makes one orbit
around Earth in a little over 90 minutes.
And you can bet it manages
to photograph some pretty cool things
and some pretty strange ones.
Check this out.
(eerie music)
It's July 12th, 2021,
and a live video streams
from an external high-definition camera
on the International Space Station
when the camera captures something that's
out of this world.
It's a cluster of lights passing through its field,
appearing to have a form similar to a constellation.
Look at how they move at a seemingly controlled pace,
holding their formation.
To journalist Alexis Brooks, that's noteworthy.
- This has eluded everybody.
The fact that they moved so intentionally across the sky,
you have to ask yourself
is there intelligent life behind what we're seeing?
If these are intelligent objects,
why would they be interested in the ISS?
It could very well be that they are interested
in us seeing them
because maybe they want to expose themselves.
- [Tony] Brooks says that,
since its inception in the late 90s,
the International Space Station has photographed
many instances of mysterious lights that suggest
the presence of extraterrestrial life.
- The ISS is no stranger
to capturing this sort of anomalous footage.
In 2019, it captured several blue lights
and a blue jet that launched out of a cloud
and into space over the Pacific Ocean.
And then in 2020, a Russian cosmonaut
was filming the aurora.
But something that he did not expect
was what seemed to be a stream of horizontal lights.
He called them space gases.
- It's an interesting thought
that the first extraterrestrial contact
would be a subtle tickle, rather than a bold arrival.
That maybe these lights are just another
in a series of gentle attempts to establish contact.
But let's ask our experts
before we spend too much time prepping our response.
(tense music)
First we turn to Rich Hoffman
to determine could these lights be explained away as stars.
- The lights are pretty much just little dots
moving across the screen
that are not changing size or position.
And they look like that they're in some sort of a formation,
but I have not seen anything where you have stars
that move across the sky like that
in that kind of a pattern.
So they're not any stars.
- [Tony] While stars do move, they're so far away
that this movement wouldn't be visible
to the naked eye or this camera.
And while there are other celestial bodies
that visibly move,
they don't do it in coordination like we see here.
- They're not any planets.
They're not a swarm of meteors
that are coming toward the planet.
- [Tony] As for UFOs, Hoffman points out
that the U.S. has always kept a close eye
on any object entering the earth's atmosphere.
In fact, a 1971 treaty obligates the US and Russia
to notify each other
of any unidentified objects coming from space.
That's to prevent one from being mistaken
for a nuclear missile attack.
- I don't believe that UFOs
in that kind of a swarm would've gone unnoticed by NASA.
We can see something down to the size of a wrench,
and we're doing that to be able
to protect the actual space crew aboard the ISS.
So people who are monitoring on earth
would've been able to readily point that out.
- [Tony] For Tim McMillan, it's the speed of the lights
that becomes an important clue,
telling him the camera isn't pointing toward the stars,
but down.
- The speed in which we see these lights move is consistent
with the speed in which the ISS orbits the earth.
So that gives us a really good idea
that we're looking at something that's fixed on the earth.
- [Tony] Then could these lights be part
of Earth's atmosphere?
Say, weather?
- Even though it's 248 miles above the Earth's surface,
we often see natural phenomena, lightning strikes,
that type of thing.
However, because these lights are static,
I think we can rule out lightning.
- [Tony] If it's not atmospheric,
could they be city lights?
- These really don't look
like what we see with major cities from space.
You can see the sprawling spiderweb
of network of roads and buildings.
And we don't see that here.
- [Tony] So what does that leave us?
Marc D'Antonio has an idea.
- Where I've seen lights like this on earth
is when there have been fishing fleets offshore
using bright lights aimed down into the water
to lure shrimp.
And so that's probably what we're seeing here.
- [Tony] It also explains the darkness
that surrounds all the lights.
That's the ocean.
- These larger bloated areas are where the lights
are being cast out in a very broad area.
Water reflects light very well.
And so you can actually see these lights
from the International Space Station.
(tense music)
- Our verdict? Fishing vessels.
We think D'Antonio's comparison
between this video and other known vessels is a match.
If you wanna see views from the ISS for yourself,
you can visit the ISS HD Earth Viewing experiment online.
To date, approximately 500 million people
have seen the globe this way.
(tense music)
Now from fishing boats to kayaks.
Most people take up kayaking as a way to escape,
bask in nature, and relax.
But just going with the flow was not an option
for the guys who had this intense
and unusual aquatic encounter.
(birds chirping) (tense music)
June 29th, 2017.
On Yale Lake in Southwest Washington,
two men take their kayaks out
for a relaxing afternoon
when the calm waters are suddenly disturbed.
- [Kayaker] Weird (beep).
- [Tony] The video seems to show bubbles rising
to the surface of the water in the center of the lake
as the kayakers paddle towards them.
- [Kayaker] Just bubbles coming from the bottom of the lake.
No current.
I'm afraid to put my hand in the water.
- [Tony] One kayaker dips his camera below the water line,
and we see debris and thousands of bubbles swirling.
- [Kayaker] Weird though, dude.
- [Tony] The bubbling is so intense,
the other kayaker panics and paddles off.
- [Kayaker] Go, go, go.
- [Tony] Then an ominous burst of murky brown water erupts
as hundreds of leaves are belched up to the surface.
- What the (beep)!
What the (beep) just happened?
Something just happened that we caught on camera.
Dude, it stinks!
- [Tony] Field researcher and author Ken Gerhard tries
to help us understand what we're seeing in the video.
- My first thoughts are,
is there something alive beneath the water
that's creating these bubbles
and this disturbance in the water?
Yale Lake is connected to the Columbia River,
which has been said to be home to this massive creature
called Colossal Claude.
Sightings date back to the early 1930s.
The general physical description is a huge animal
about 40 feet long with a serpentine,
although a very thick, powerful body,
and what was described as a very evil snakey head.
Many of the lakes around the world
where these monsters have been reported
all boast healthy populations of salmon and trout.
So perhaps these lake monsters might also live in the ocean
and follow the salmon populations
into fresh water to feed.
(tense music)
- There are dozens, maybe thousands,
of undiscovered creatures inhabiting the world's lakes.
Recently, researchers uncovered around 40 new species
in Lake Mweru,
located between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But was whatever these kayakers saw a creature
from the deep?
Let's see what's swimming in our experts' thought bubbles.
(tense music)
Marine biologist, Dr. Shea Conger, begins her analysis
by addressing the lake monster theory.
- The number of salmon
in the Columbia River's dramatically decreased,
and this is an important resource,
not only for humans, but for wildlife.
So if there were some sort
of abnormally large animal in Yale Lake,
it probably wouldn't have a lot of food to live off of.
And so it's pretty unlikely
that there are undiscovered large animals in Yale Lake.
There are actually a couple
of freshwater seal populations in the world,
but if this were something like a seal or a whale,
we would definitely see the animal itself.
And seals really only hold their breath
for maybe 20 minutes at a time.
- [Tony] What about those bubbles?
Geologist Bob Anderson helps us figure out
what could be happening here.
- Natural gas and oil are formed between sedimentary layers.
And you get a lot of Carboniferous materials
that are from the time before the dinosaurs.
And these areas get buried deep down
and that pressure and heat causes those organic materials
to break down into hydrocarbons.
And all it takes is a crack in the rock,
and they just release and they pop real fast.
- [Tony] The Carboniferous Period
occurred 300 million years ago.
So these organic materials have been building pressure
for quite some time,
just waiting to blow.
- When you look at the video
and you add in the combination of those bubbles
and the smell at the end...
- [Kayaker] Dude, it stinks!
- [Bob] To me, it's a dead clue
that it's some type of a natural gas that's coming up.
- This happens all over the world.
Massive underwater craters have been discovered
off the coast of Norway.
Up to 147 feet deep and 2,624 feet wide,
researchers have deemed them the cause
of expulsions of gas rising to the surface in the area.
Our verdict? Natural gas.
The smell was the clincher.
The kayaker complained about the horrible aroma
which is a common attribute of methane gas
when it mixes with hydrogen sulfide,
causing a rotten egg odor.
While the men didn't come across Colossal Claude,
they did still stumble upon a remarkable piece
of natural history.
- This next story is about a sound
that was heard over thousands of square miles
and yet no one could see what caused it.
Did it come from the ground, the sky,
or the U.S. government?
(tense music)
October, 2021,
it's a quiet fall morning in Leominster, Massachusetts.
But shortly before 11:30 AM,
that tranquil scene is broken
when a backyard security camera captures
this mysterious sound.
(recording booms)
No big deal, right?
(tense music)
(recording booms)
That boom is almost immediately followed
by a softer one,
except neither is soft.
(recording booms)
The sound is heard over three states,
which means wherever it emanated from,
it was as loud as a 100-megaton nuclear explosion.
(recording booms)
- [Tony] So what could it be?
According to journalist MJ Banias,
there are several theories.
- The idea is much
like the earth can fracture and create an earthquake,
frequencies in the sky will also rub up against each other
and create a loud boom sound.
Some people believe it's caused by storms
or it's caused by electromagnetic frequencies.
Some people believe it's caused
by the earth's magnetic poles.
(tense music)
- [Tony] But not everyone agrees skyquakes
are the work of mother nature.
- Other people believe that when UFOs enter our atmosphere,
they create a skyquake of sorts.
Because they would create a loud boom sound,
much like a fighter jet when it goes hypersonic.
(tense music)
- Between 2013 and 2015,
scientists from the University of North Carolina
attempted to determine the origins of skyquakes
with a mobile network
of 400 atmospheric sensors and seismographs.
And while no definitive answers were found,
the research did rule out the possibility
that seismic activity plays any role
in these strange sounds.
(tense music)
(recording booms)
So what do we have here?
(recording booms)
A meteor?
A sonic boom from a jet?
Some other natural or supernatural explanation?
We asked our experts to take a listen.
(tense music)
We begin our analysis with meteorologist, Juan Hernandez.
Could this boom have been caused by a meteor?
Turns out that satellites set up
for tracking lightning strikes have the answer.
- A result of tracking lightning is oftentimes
the ability to detect meteors streaking across the sky.
In this case, we did have an example detected
in the sky across New Hampshire.
The satellite itself picked up the flash
at 11:21 in the morning.
That sound was heard across the region.
(tense music)
(recording booms)
- [Tony] But while radar detection
on a scope appears to be definitive visual evidence
of a meteor,
soundscape ecologist, Ben Gottesman,
says the audio captured
on the backyard camera tells another story.
- Skyquakes refer to a low frequency rumbling.
And they typically occur not when it's storming,
but on nice calm days.
- [Tony] But Gottesman says,
while no one really knows what causes them,
what he hears can be explained.
(recording booms)
- That double boom signature is really characteristic
of sonic booms that eclipse the speed of sound.
The question is,
was it a sonic boom produced by an aircraft or a meteor?
- [Tony] Gottesman analyzes known examples
of the sounds produced by both objects.
First up, the boom of a meteor.
(meteor booms)
- So that is a sonic boom caused
by a meteor ripping through the atmosphere.
And it's characterized by this single impulse
that we see here.
- [Tony] Next up, an example of a boom from a fighter jet.
- Here we're going to listen
to a sonic boom caused by an aircraft.
(jet booms)
Did you hear that double boom?
(jet booms)
Aircrafts have this double boom sound,
because there's a sonic boom created at the front
and at the tail end of the aircraft.
As both of them eclipse the speed of sound,
which is around 750 miles per hour,
those pressure waves collide together
and produce these shock waves
that then ripple through and create these booms.
(recording booms)
And we'll compare that to this.
(jet booms)
To me it's a really good match.
This sound really does have the the shape
and profile of sonic booms created by an aircraft.
- So if you believe our experts,
this is one of the oddest phenomena we've ever covered.
The meteorological data indicates a meteor
was entering the atmosphere
and the audio analysis indicates military jets
were passing over at the same time.
What are the odds of that?
One of those events probably explains the sound.
But our verdict: this is an unexplained coincidence.
Seriously!
Have you ever wondered why the Mouse King
in "The Nutcracker" is sometimes depicted
with more than one head?
Turns out it's based on a real phenomenon.
And after seeing this next video,
I'm glad I've only ever viewed it on a stage.
(tense music)
Tartu, Estonia.
October, 2021.
Johan Uibopuu receives a disturbing phone call
from his mother regarding her chicken coop.
He offers to take a look,
but nothing could prepare him for what he finds.
(rats squeaking)
- Oh boy!
Their tail is really tangled.
- [Tony] That's an understatement.
Let's take another look.
What looks like a heap of black rats
is actually a heap of black rats
with their tails hopelessly entangled together.
There are 13 rats in this bundle, bound together for life.
- One of them, unfortunately,
looks like it has passed on to the next world.
And maybe that's for the best.
I wouldn't wanna be tied
to a bunch of my brothers and sisters either.
- [Tony] Would you believe that
this isn't the first time a knot of rats like this
has been discovered?
It's even got a name: the rat king.
- The term rat king is thought to originate from German.
It's a number of rats whose tails have become entangled
so that they are basically like a rodent super organism.
An older, wiser rat would sit atop a pile of younger rats
and they would serve all of his needs.
Unfortunately for rat kings,
they are considered to be bad omens.
It's thought that they warn of the plague.
They're also associated with witchcraft.
(tense music)
- [Tony] Because of this,
in old Strasbourg, where rat kings were found,
they were usually drowned in a well
or dunked in boiling water before being brought
to the local school teacher to study them.
Because of their supernatural associations
and the rarity of their occurrences,
there's debate as to whether
or not rat kings are cruel man-made hoaxes.
- There's a long history
of fabricating creatures for profit.
Think about P.T. Barnum's Fiji mermaid,
George Hull's Cardiff Giant.
Back in the day, people would take lizards
and glue bat wings on them and say here, buy a dragon.
Or they'd stick a narwhal horn on a horse
and say, this is a unicorn.
So a hoax is definitely not outside
the realm of possibility.
- Knots are complicated.
There's a whole area of mathematics called knot theory
dedicated to studying these things in the abstract.
And the knots of the rat king tales are complex too.
Scientists have attempted to recreate them
and they quickly discovered it
was a lot harder than expected.
The knots they made looked too neat and intentional,
and those rats were dead.
Let's turn to our experts to see what they think
about this whole thing.
(tense music)
First we turn to biologist Floyd Hayes
to find out, is this real?
And if so, how the heck does something like this happen?
- One possibility is that it was faked
and somebody actually stuck the tails together.
But it could also be a natural phenomenon;
and I think that's most likely in this case.
It's been suggested
that perhaps they are stuck together from birth.
But that seems very unlikely
because these are fairly well grown,
and they would likely starve to death
if they were stuck together for a few weeks.
- [Tony] So if they weren't destined at birth
to become parts of a rat king, how do they form?
- So a rat king occurs when the tails are stuck together.
This usually happens in black rats,
which have unusually long tails compared
to other species of rats.
And it happens mostly in cold countries
during the winter months.
And it is believed
that their tails are frozen together overnight
when they're huddling together for warmth
by water or urine or sperm or food.
- However, in a bizarre twist,
when we do some research of our own,
we find that temperatures in this area of Estonia
only had a low of 36 degrees Fahrenheit the night
before this rat king was found.
Not cold enough to freeze.
And what's more, rats, contrary to their reputation,
groomed themselves nearly as much as cats.
The idea that they could get stuck together
with dirt and grime seems unlikely.
So we turn to wildlife biologist, Stephanie Schuttler.
She says the rat king legend carries a grain of truth.
- Rats can be carriers of diseases and parasites.
So the fact that people thought rat kings were bad omens
or carriers or signals of plague,
it's not that unreasonable of a leap.
- [Tony] It might just be coincidence,
but the COVID-19 epidemic was still ravaging Europe
when this video was shot.
And Schuttler says there's another question gnawing at her.
Why do these rats lie down and accept their fates?
Why don't they fight back?
- When animals are stuck or trying to escape from something,
they can do things like chew their own appendage off,
like this has happened in leg traps
with animals like coyotes or wolves.
Why aren't these rats chewing
their own tails off to get away?
- Our verdict?
It seems like rat kings form naturally,
but what we don't know is the why of it all.
Why aren't there more rat kings?
And why don't these rats make more of an effort to escape?
It remains an unexplained mystery.
- The great Jim Morrison once advised all motorists
to keep your eyes on the road
and your hands up on the wheel.
But that's easier said than done
when what's coming at you on the highway
is breaking on through the doors of perception.
It's a November night in 2019
and long haul trucker James Cole
is passing through Stephensville, Wisconsin.
After hours of playing highway,
he comes around a turn and sees this.
- [Tony] A fuschia light glows over the road,
a stark contrast to the dark night sky.
- [Tony] And it doesn't go away either.
As James drives it appears to get bigger and closer.
- I was talking on the CB radio
as I was passing other trucks to say,
Man, do you guys see this?
What is this thing? What is that?
No one was calling back but, it's most unusual.
- [Tony] James is perplexed by why his shout outs
to his fellow truckers are met with radio silence.
- I had posted it to my YouTube channel, it got an uproar,
but no one could really pinpoint exactly what it was
and I couldn't either.
- So imagine you're the driver in this truck.
You glance up to the skies and you see this.
The first thing you notice obviously is the color,
it's pink, and then you notice the shape, right?
Not a sunset that I've ever seen,
not something tied to the Aurora Borealis.
Not a beacon of any kind.
This driver continued on his journey for miles.
It never left the sky. It didn't appear to move.
If I saw this on the road, I'd be pretty freaked out.
Author Amy Teitel says the theories vary.
- One of the leading theories was that this pink cloud
is evidence of chemtrails.
Chemtrails are a theory that government is releasing
toxic chemicals into the atmosphere by plane
for a variety of reasons ranging from mind control
to weather control.
Another theory is that this pink cloud
is some kind of electromagnetic field or radiation,
which is reminiscent of the famous
Zona Del Silencio in Mexico.
This is a region in the Mapimi desert
where allegedly no cell phone or radio signals
can get through.
It is a complete dead silent zone.
- [Tony] An electromagnetic field is a force field
produced by stationary electrical charges
being combined with moving magnetic currents.
This force could become entangled with CB radio waves,
throwing off their signal
or causing them to stop completely.
Perhaps this is why James's CB radio couldn't reach anyone.
What else could be at play here?
Rumors about La Zona Del Silencio began in 1970
when a US military base fired a test missile
toward the White Sands Missile Range and the rocket ended up
in the Mapimi Desert, 400 miles south of its target.
This secret operation remains a mystery.
Could similar forces be at play in Wisconsin?
Hopefully our experts can hit the mark.
(tense music)
First we turn to meteorologist Juan Hernandez.
Could this be evidence of the fabled chemtrail?
- We have actually two satellites
that cover the whole western hemisphere.
We would be able to detect if there was
some sort of chemical being released into the atmosphere.
In reality, what people call chemtrails
are actually water vapor from the engines of the airplane,
usually in a line.
In this case we don't have a line.
It's more like a circular or a blob of light.
- [Tony] But what does he think about this being
some sort of electromagnetic event?
Physicist Matthew Szydagis weighs in.
- I do find it intriguing that the truck driver
claims to be unable to contact others
'cause that would hint towards
something electromagnetic in nature.
But that doesn't necessarily correspond
with a light in the sky.
There are many different ways to create dead zones
with cellular signals,
but they're not gonna produce a visible effect
that you can see in the sky.
- [Tony] So what are we looking at?
- I looked at the exit sign,
where in Wisconsin this video took place,
and it turns out that very nearby
there is an organization that runs an aquaponics facility
that uses purple LEDs to grow their plants.
- [Tony] Aquaponics is a food production system
that combines aquaculture of fish
with hydroponics of plants.
Nutrient rich water and proper lighting
for photosynthesis are key.
So that kind of fits what James saw,
but he started recording that footage miles away.
So how could James see this from such a long distance?
- Colors that are towards the end of the rainbow
tend to scatter more easily in the atmosphere.
That could explain why we see such a large purple mass
in this video.
Because the lights from the LumiGrow LEDs
can really scatter very easily through the atmosphere
and create an eerie paranormal glow.
The clouds could be reflecting light or refracting,
which means bending the light,
making it look much larger than it actually is.
But is just some botanist growing some plants
and vegetation for us.
- So it looks like we've solved this one,
at least partly.
We don't know why the radio went silent,
but the strange purple light was coming from
an aquaponic farm.
Who knows, maybe James will find himself transporting
some of the produce being grown there to a store near you.
In the meantime, brother keep on trucking.
- We love featuring stories
submitted by our viewers.
So here's a doozy.
Now, the majority of UFO videos we investigate
are usually due to the fact someone just happened to be
at the right place at the right time and pressed record.
But you were about to meet a man who desperately wanted
to get a UFO on video and it turns out maybe he did.
We're in Ardmore, Oklahoma for this one
with dedicated proof viewer Joey Franko.
After witnessing what he thinks is a UFO one night
above his home,
Joey makes it his mission to scan the evening sky each night
with his thermal camera for any other signs
of extraterrestrial life.
And on May 26th, 2017, he records this.
- [Joey] Definitely a disc.
- [Tony] Take a closer look.
Watch how the object appears to hover near the clouds.
Then deliberately it moves sideways.
Then Joey points a laser directly at it.
- [Joey] Whoa, did you see it stop?
If I wouldn't have shine the laser at it,
it would've never came back.
It's almost right over the top of me now.
I hope it don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me.
I've made contact with this thing.
(suspenseful music)
I hope I don't get taken tonight, man.
I'm like scared and excited all at the same time.
It's like I never expected this to happen this night,
to make contact with aliens.
Whoa, did you see that? It's gone, man.
At a thousand miles an hour this thing booked.
- [Tony] Even journalist Erin McCarthy wonders
if it's possible Joey actually made contact
with an alien ship.
- It almost seems like there's a bit of an empathetic
connection between Joey and whatever this craft is.
He's talking to the craft.
- It's coming right back at me, man, isn't that amazing?
- [Erin] And it seems to be responding to him.
- [Tony] The idea of humans communicating
with extraterrestrials goes back hundreds,
if not thousands of years.
Some theorized the Nazca people of Peru
communicated with alien civilizations
and that some of the mysterious 1200 foot designs they built
were actually spaceship runways.
And 3000 year old artifacts unearthed at Sanxingdui China
first in the 1920s and then in the eighties
have convinced many of alien contact in our past.
But in the 20th century,
others attempted to use the power of the mind.
- There was actually a man after World War II
named George Van Tassel who believed that he could summon
and telepathically communicate with aliens by meditating.
And they actually telepathically gave him instructions
to build a structure out in the desert
that was supposed to reverse the aging process.
- In the 1950s, author and UFO contactee George Van Tassel
brought together 11,000 people
for his interplanetary spacecraft convention
in the California desert, hoping to make contact.
But was Joey able to communicate with aliens all by himself?
We sent his footage to our experts to decide.
(mysterious music)
We begin with Rich Hoffman
of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
Does Joey's use of a thermal camera offer any clues?
- Could it be a plane?
No, it doesn't have wings to help hold it up.
We don't see any heat coming out of the back end of it,
which might be expelled from the heat
from whatever the pulsion system was.
So I don't put it in any kind of a category
like an aircraft.
- [Tony] Astronomer and video effects designer,
Mark D'Antonio agrees this isn't an airplane
and he says a drone wouldn't move as erratically as this,
but D'Antonio believes that sudden movement
may be a key piece of the puzzle.
- [Joey] Whoa. Did you see that?
You're watching him move through the sky
and then all of a sudden,
it's gonna go right down to the ground.
So the way it's flying right now,
it kind of looks like a hawk.
(hawk screams)
If you have to try to assign it to something
it most resembles a bird of prey.
- Is D'Antonio, right?
Is this a bird on the hunt for it's next meal?
Science writer, Mick West, agrees
the thermal camera does offer a clue.
- All that we can tell about the temperature of this object
is that it's warmer than everything else in the scene.
It could very well be an animal.
- [Tony] So if it's an animal, what kind?
West compares the object to a known creature
that Joey also recorded?
- Joey has this video here, which is a creature
that he recognized as being a bat.
And you can see the object flapping its wings.
And if we take the two videos and put them side by side,
you can see when it's more clearly something with wings
is actually a bit larger,
even though you can't really see anything like wings
flapping like that in the object, it's hard to say.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility that
this isn't a bat and this is a bat.
But in both videos it's kind of very difficult to see
what's going on because of the low resolution.
- So what do we have here?
If we can't see any wings flapping,
it's hard to say bat or bird of prey.
Has it turned out Joey may have found exactly
what he was looking for?
- I think a lot of the time when people think
they are summoning aliens, they're just getting lucky.
Eventually something's gonna fly along,
but this is a UFO because it's unidentified and it's flying.
I don't what it is.
- [Joey] What the hell is it?
- [Mick] Could be a bat, could be a bird,
could be something else.
- [Joey] I've made contact.
(mysterious music)
- Our verdict, genuine UFO.
While this could be some sort of animal,
we agree with the experts that the video doesn't give us
a clear enough image to make that call with confidence
so it remains unidentified.
But when Joey does find that definitive proof,
we'll be here to show it.
Here's a stone cold mystery
that's been millions of years in the making.
A large, strange rock with patterns so precise,
it looks like it has to be the product
of intelligent design.
Let's see if we have the intelligence to figure it out.
It's July, 2016 in Mineral County, West Virginia.
A nature photographer is taking pictures
around Jennings Randolph Lake
when she sees something mysterious and snaps a shot.
Her photo shows a rock formation
with an almost honeycomb appearance on its face
like a stone beehive.
The pattern is geometrical with straight rows of triangles
and rhombuses, which make it look somewhat like a waffle.
It's darker in color than the rock face
and appears in relief, which makes it stand out.
And journalist Eric Grundhauser confirms
that it often draws curious visitors.
- What makes it so evocative is the way that the shapes here
and the design on the rock are so seemingly uniform.
When we see natural formations,
we often think of them as a little bit more random,
a little bit more chaotic.
But the design on Waffle Rock
seems to be a bit more ordered.
It seems to have a reason to it.
- [Tony] So it looks like the rock isn't random
and Grundhauser wonders if it's trying to tell us something.
- One theory is that it is a design created
by an ancient culture that was trying to leave
some sort of message or hieroglyphic
and left it in this indecipherable code.
- If that were the case,
it would've been chiseled into the rock.
We know that ancient Native Americans
in what is now western North Carolina,
etched this curvilinear motif into a soapstone boulder
known as Judaculla Rock more than 2000 years ago.
It is considered a mystical sight to many Cherokee,
but there's an even more ancient possibility.
- Another theory is that this is actually
the fossilized imprint of the skin
of some kind of giant lizard left behind in the stone.
- [Tony] Specifically, some have speculated
that it's the fossilized or even mummified remains
of a dinosaur.
Sound farfetched? Well, look at this.
This is the perfectly preserved mummy
of a Nodosaurus dinosaur found by miners
in Alberta, Canada in 2011.
It got this way because it sank into the muck
shortly after it died, preserving its skin and armor.
Yet Grundhauser has one more idea about the rock's origin.
- Still another theory posits that it was created
by extra terrestrials.
Either created intentionally as some kind of map
for other extraterrestrials or to mark their passing.
- So could this be the work of intelligent alien design?
Though the Waffle Rock formation is not at all common,
similar pattern stones have been found
in Monongahela, Pennsylvania
and at Tea Creek Mountain in West Virginia.
Still this one in Mineral County is by far the largest.
So what are these bizarre boulders
and where do they come from?
Let's turn to the experts.
(mysterious music)
Anthropologist, Kathy Strain considers
if this could be an ancient artwork.
- I'm not seeing anything typical
of what you would see with Native American rock art.
It's not a typical design.
It doesn't have any kind of structure
that a Native American would want to convey.
- Perhaps then this is ancient writing,
maybe even from a lost language?
Archeologist Dr. Ed Barnhart is an epigrapher
who translates cuneiform, hieroglyphics,
and unknown ancient scripts.
He gives the strange pattern a look.
- This waffle rock
doesn't follow any of the rules of making
something that's communicating a message in stone.
The reader and the writer have to agree on a set amount
of symbols or it doesn't work as a code.
When you look at Waffle Rock, there is no pattern.
It is very complex and very geometric.
There's lots of lines,
but there's no repeated or different symbols.
- [Tony] If we can rule out manmade origins.
What about the idea that this is fossilized skin or scales
from an ancient creature like a dinosaur?
- A fossil is simply the calcium in bone
being replaced with rock through millions of years
of being covered with mud.
When I look at it, I don't see any fossilization at all.
There's nothing there that would indicate calcium
like a bone structure or any organics at all.
- We turn next to geologist Bob Anderson.
Perhaps earth science might offer some guidance here.
Could this be some sort of natural geological formation?
- You'll see that there are multiple,
what we call joint patterns here.
And what happens is that these are fluids
that are running through this rock.
Either iron fluids or water fluids,
even magma was running through these cracks in the rocks
and it hardened and it and eroded away at a different pace.
And so you see what's called a waffle pattern,
and this is natural we see in all kinds of crystals.
- [Tony] Anderson says the movement of tectonic plates
caused cracks in the sandstone
that likely filled with iron oxide mixed with sand
and formed a hard cement like material
resistant to weathering compared to the surrounding stone.
As the surrounding rock gradually eroded,
it left behind the iron oxide pattern.
(mysterious music)
Our verdict, this is a natural phenomenon
likely caused by iron oxide flowing into a crack in the rock
and hardening into this pattern.
Scientists who have studied the rock
say the pattern formed hundreds of millions of years ago,
so it had to have resulted from geological processes.
The fact that it's made by nature
makes the waffle rock even more intriguing
and one of the most visually interesting
rock formations we've ever seen.
And that's our show for tonight.
Thank you so kindly for watching.
If you have any videos you think we should investigate,
please reach out and keep those cameras rolling.
(upbeat music)