NARRATOR: They're watching you.
More than 5,000 satellites circle the Earth.
Every day, they uncover new
mysterious phenomena that defy explanation.
Murder and Masonic rituals in the wilds of Scotland.
HORTON: This is really weird.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
NARRATOR: The ghost soldiers of World War II.
They've become these almost mythological warriors that
the Germans just don't know how to deal with.
NARRATOR: And terror in the Arctic.
Somewhere down there is an unrecovered nuclear weapon.
NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena, mysteries from space.
What on Earth are they?
[theme music playing]
♪
March 10th, 2021.
The barren borders of south Scotland.
A wilderness of heathland, forest,
and something hidden from human eyes.
I'm really excited about this image, because it's
a genuine mystery that I'm really keen to unravel.
NARRATOR: The laser pulse of a LIDAR scanner has
revealed a bizarre structure concealed by dense forest.
There's something man-made here under the soil.
It looks like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist Mark Horton is hiking into
these remote lands to investigate the new discovery.
HORTON: It's really weird -- It appears to be
a gigantic castle or fortress in these woods.
NARRATOR: Scotland's bloody history is reflected
in the number of castles here,
but they're always built on hills to dominate
the landscape.
There's no historical record of these structures at all,
and then there's a wood placed
on top of them, almost as if these ancient remains
are meant to be hidden.
NARRATOR: Much of the 1,800 square miles Scottish
borders are devoid of life or buildings.
But not far from the LIDAR structure,
Horton spots an outline that matches its scale and shape.
Wow, what an amazing castle.
It's all so complete.
NARRATOR: The hilltop stronghold may hold clues
to the mystery in the woods.
HORTON: It's got arrow slits, but also these holes
for artillery -- Late medieval guns,
so we're talking 14th, 15th century, something like that.
And maybe the images I've seen in the LIDAR
might also be of that same sort of date.
NARRATOR: The walls are up to 40 feet high
and heavily fortified.
Incredibly small entrance.
You could hardly get a horse through there.
NARRATOR: To Horton, there's something
strange about this castle.
Inside, it's all so small.
You'd normally have an enormous castle courtyard, but actually,
this is the size of most people's living rooms.
It's kind of like a domestic house.
NARRATOR: This hilltop fortification
and structure in the woods
both sit on the frontier with Scotland's once bitter enemy.
We're right on the border between England and Scotland,
and of course, up until the 17th century,
there were different nations continually
at war with one another.
[indistinct battle noise]
NARRATOR: War between the English and Scots begins in
the 13th century and rages for 400 years.
The territory around the LIDAR image is contested fiercely,
becoming a medieval Wild West.
This border region was an area of complete lawlessness in
which bandits and raiding parties were killing everybody,
raiding people's stock, destroying their houses,
burning their farms,
and these were known as the border reivers.
NARRATOR: Reivers, meaning raiders,
hailed from both sides of the border.
They have no allegiance to the English
or Scottish crowns, just to their own family clans.
People here lived in very small
communities, and family ties were paramount.
The clan ruled all.
NARRATOR: With crops burned and food scarce in wartime,
cutthroat reiver clans take what they need by force.
Skilled horsemen and masters of arson and extortion,
they terrorized the Anglo- Scottish border for centuries.
SZULGIT: Sometimes, the reivers will be made out
to be these lovable rogues, but in actuality,
these were well-organized, deadly groups,
and it was more like a mafia.
NARRATOR: Modest farming folk are powerless to resist,
but the wealthy build fortified keeps
known as peel towers.
HORTON: They had to live in places like this,
because they were in fear of their lives.
There might also be castles further up
the valley associated with these border reivers.
NARRATOR: Bearing northeast, the archaeologist heads to
the greenery recently scanned by laser.
I think this must be the wood I've seen on the LIDAR image,
but actually, it's quite impenetrable.
NARRATOR: 15 acres of dense forest are
cordoned off with thousands of feet of wire,
much of it ill-maintained.
It's a bit of tumbled down fence,
I think, that might get me in here.
[groans]
♪
Something here -- Kind of depression or ditch.
It's so faint,
very difficult to see.
NARRATOR: The ditches match the outline of the image.
I'm absolutely certain it's what I've seen
on that LIDAR image.
NARRATOR: But there are
no medieval fortifications whatsoever.
There's no masonry here.
There's no collapsed walls -- Whatever it is,
this is really weird.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
NARRATOR: Coming up,
the cult of the invisible castle.
It's a place of secrecy and ritual.
NARRATOR: And Nevada's lost
multibillion-dollar treasure hoard.
It is a geyser of cash for anyone involved.
NARRATOR: Drawn by strange shapes revealed
by LIDAR aerial images,
archaeologist Mark Horton is in the wild Scottish borders.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
NARRATOR: He anticipated a ruined fort,
but these shapes are something else.
What's really odd is that we've got all
these tree stumps on the top of the bank.
This woodland is all a bit higgledy piggledy,
but actually, these stumps form a deliberate
straight line, as if they've actually been planned.
NARRATOR: Lines of rotting stumps match
the contours of the shapes in the LIDAR image.
Someone has planted hundreds
of trees to mimic a medieval fort.
HORTON: Those tree stumps, okay, they're old,
but they're clearly not medieval.
Maybe the whole structure is much more recent.
NARRATOR: The archaeologists scours
English military records.
After they defeat Scotland in 1745,
the English decide that to control this wild land,
they need to map it properly.
This old map from 1858
actually shows our fort.
It's defined by not a wall but a set of trees.
It's not a fort at all,
but part of a planned ornamental landscape.
NARRATOR: This isn't some medieval ruins.
It's a gargantuan garden, a bizarre castle plantation.
Stranger still, this mighty undertaking appears to
have been deliberately concealed in a forest.
Why would anyone go to the trouble
to create these weird features in the landscape?
NARRATOR: Searching the surrounding valley,
Horton finds that the weird plantation isn't
the only relic hidden in this corner of Scotland.
What's that over there?
It looks like a ruined building.
It's in awful condition.
NARRATOR: Father Time hasn't left much to go on.
These are graves.
That must be the east end.
So they also would originally have been around here.
Look, we've got more gravestones.
This must be a broken-down chapel.
NARRATOR: A chapel suggests this landscape wasn't always
so desolate.
HORTON: That makes me think that possibly this is
a big estate here, with a rich landowner
who had the money and resources to do
these fancy plantations,
but why would he put these weird
sort of castle-like features up on the landscape.
It still doesn't make sense to me.
NARRATOR: A ruined monument may hold a clue.
I can make out a sort of schematic skeleton
holding a lance.
He's holding an hourglass
to show the passage of time.
A skeleton with the scepter
and an hourglass is a classic symbol of death,
also known as the king of terrors.
NARRATOR: The king of terrors is rumored to
be a symbol of an infamously secretive society.
It's seen in Masonic texts, so it could suggest that we
are seeing a garden created by a member of the Masons.
NARRATOR: Freemasonry is the world's
oldest and largest fraternal organization.
SZULGIT: No one really knows the true origin of the Freemasons,
but several people say it began in Scotland
right around this area.
NARRATOR: Freemasonry in Scotland is born at
the turn of the 16th century,
cut from the rock that
builds Britain's great castles and cathedrals.
The Freemasons developed out of old stone masons, and it was
a way of ensuring that someone was suitably qualified
to do the job.
There was a secret language that
evolved in symbols, including a special handshake.
NARRATOR: As the building of cathedrals declines,
Masons accept honorary members.
The rich and influential are initiated in
strange ceremonies marked by obscure codes and rituals.
By the late 18th century,
the Masons are a powerful, clandestine cabal,
who count king George IV among their ranks.
One of the most famous of
the later Freemasons was the novelist Sir Walter Scott.
A lot of the pageantry of Freemasonry owes a debt
to Sir Walter Scott, because he was obsessed with medievalism.
NARRATOR: Scott is a Renaissance icon who
writes the legendary historical novel Ivanhoe.
His swashbuckling tales paint medieval Scotland
as a land of heroic chivalry,
while his epic ballads romanticized the outlaws
he calls the border reivers.
SZULGIT: He mythologized the reivers and the early period.
This idea of the past was adopted by
the Masons and became part of their tradition.
NARRATOR: Rich Masons honor Scott with extravagant
tributes to his obsession with medievalism,
coded messages to their most celebrated
member and to their Masonic brethren.
Landowners inspired by Walter Scott and his writings
create structures in the landscape to hark back
to a medieval past and the border reivers.
Freemasons obsessed with secret symbols
would have known what it meant.
NARRATOR: LIDAR has revealed a rotting cipher
grown from Scots pine and stout oak
and hidden by forest in the cradle
of Freemasonry.
But the strangest stories of this site
remain a mystery, safeguarded by Masonic oath.
It's tantalizing to think what might
have actually happened inside these forests,
a place of secrecy and ritual.
NARRATOR: Coming up, Nazi terror from the skies.
The men who survived had gone through a hellish ordeal.
NARRATOR: And a colossal code in the desert sands.
This is an incredible piece of U.S. History,
and you can see it from space.
NARRATOR: December 2020.
A satellite passing over the coastal city
of Tobruk in Libya captures this image.
MORGAN: Everything looks very arid,
but running right through the middle is this line.
Behind the line, are a series of these oval structures.
It looks like two eyes and a nose or a mouth,
perhaps -- it's really strange.
NARRATOR: Further analysis reveals something even stranger.
CAVELL: When we zoom out,
there are dozens of these structures
all over the landscape, and this zigzag line
actually continues in an arc around the entire city as well.
NARRATOR: Military records reveal the satellite has
captured the legacy of an extraordinary
sequence of events,
ones that took place here over 80 years ago.
HYMEL: It's amazing to think that these simple shapes in
the desert
had such an incredible importance to World War II
and world history.
NARRATOR: During World War II,
Tobruk is the only port in Eastern Libya
capable of harboring large military ships.
Between 1940 and 1943,
it plays a central role in the North Africa campaign,
a battle for domination of this region's
strategic and oil-rich sands.
CAVELL: Anyone who has control of the port of Tobruk
is gonna have control of the eastern Mediterranean.
If it's captured by an enemy,
it's gonna be very hard to get shipping
into the Suez Canal.
ALBERTSON: Tobruk was an extremely
strategically valuable city,
and both the British and the Germans wanted it.
NARRATOR: At the outbreak of the war,
Libya is an Italian colony.
To protect his prized asset from advancing Allied troops,
Mussolini surrounds the city with a 28-mile-long anti-tank
ditch and defensive positions.
What you're seeing in the image is actually
a defensive point for the Italians
constructed prior to the Allied invasion.
CAVELL: And then the ovals that we see,
they're actually strong points, artillery positions,
machine gun nests, and places where you can have
a number of infantrymen along the wall.
NARRATOR: On January 21st, 1941, the Allies'
36,000-strong Western Desert Force attacks Tobruk.
The Italian defensive forces, accustomed to fighting
smaller armies in colonized Africa, proved to be no match
for the battle-hardened Brits and Australians.
The Italians were really good at beating up on little kids.
That's a very coarse way of putting it,
but then, suddenly, they're in the war with the big boys.
[explosion blasts]
Despite the Italians' efforts,
it only takes the Allies 29 hours to breach these defenses
and occupy Tobruk.
NARRATOR: The loss of Tobruk infuriates Hitler.
To recapture the port, he unleashes the might of
the Africa Corps, led by the legendary military
tactician, Erwin Rommel.
ALBERTSON: Erwin Rommel was, perhaps, the greatest
armor commander in the German military,
and he was feared by many of the Allied commanders.
CAVELL: Rommel's siege of Tobruk is a ferocious operation.
It's mainly the Australians who are guarding
the city, and what they have to withstand --
It's pretty gruesome.
NARRATOR: For eight months,
Rommel's forces launch a series of brutal assaults
on Tobruk.
Yet using the line of defenses left by
the retreating Italians,
the Allies managed to repel the Nazi attacks.
The Australians actually take on the moniker of
the Rats of Tobruk, because they hang on,
they burrow in, and they don't let go.
They're under this constant threat that
the enemy is gonna break through.
They're air raided almost constantly.
So the men who survived the siege
of Tobruk had gone through a hellish ordeal.
CAVELL: It's this holding out of the garrison that really
turns the Rats of Tobruk into legends of World War II,
but it's this operation that also gives rise to
another legendary group
of military operators, and that, of course, is
the British SAS.
NARRATOR: The SAS, short for Special Air Service,
begins life three months into the siege of Tobruk
as I Detachment, a handpicked group of 65 soldiers.
The brainchild of Major David Stirling,
it will revolutionize the way war is waged.
What Stirling's doing here in the desert in Tobruk
during World War II is really
the birth of the special forces worldwide.
NARRATOR: Like the U.S. Navy Seals,
the SAS will become one of
the most feared and admired special forces on Earth,
elite warriors whose exploits are recorded in
the medals they earn and the blood they spill.
They took guys that were tired
of being collared in a regular unit.
They wanted action with the enemy, and you give them
the fuel, the vehicles, and the weapons to go out
and do it.
NARRATOR: Stirling tasks his elite soldiers with a series of
audacious raids to take out
Nazi-held positions and airfields.
These are men who are fearless, who are being dropped into very
dangerous positions behind enemy lines, where they're going
to commit acts of sabotage.
MORGAN: When you take people like that and give them
latitude to go accomplish a mission without
micromanaging them,
they can very often be capable of producing miracles.
NARRATOR: Throughout 1941, I Detachment destroys hundreds
of Rommel's aircraft, trucks, and trains,
helping to prevent the Nazi conquests of North Africa.
These British commandos conduct raids that are
so audacious and so fast that they become
these almost mythological warriors that
the Germans just don't know how to deal with.
CAVELL: David Stirling becomes a legend unto himself.
The Germans begin to call him the phantom major,
because he just appears and disappears,
seemingly without a trace.
NARRATOR: Eight decades after the city gave rise to
the legends of the Rats of Tobruk and the SAS,
Libya is once again a war zone,
the site and the image inaccessible to outsiders.
Yet evidence of the seismic role it
played in military history remains, revealed from space.
We can't go and walk on the battlefield the way that
we can Normandy, and so it's less familiar to us,
and it's a shame for that, because that is a place where,
in many ways, the outcome of World War II was decided.
NARRATOR: Coming up, death and riches
in the Nevada hills.
They find more than $100 million
in less than a decade.
NARRATOR: And a nuclear face-off in the Arctic.
You've essentially set the stage for World War III.
NARRATOR: November 2017.
480 miles above eastern Nevada,
an eye in the sky scans deserted scrubland below
and captures this image.
We're looking at kind of a hardscrabble landscape, but
then lined up perfectly is a series of silver circles.
It almost looks like six gigantic buttons
that you could push from space.
NARRATOR: The weird line of giant buttons
is over 200 feet long.
Analysts turned to Maxar's SecureWatch
technology to study them in more detail.
JOYCE: Look at the shadows -- Because this
image was captured with a low sun elevation,
we can very clearly see this
cone shape with each of these objects.
NARRATOR: Each of the giant stone cones also has
a hole at its summit -- George Kourounis recognizes
the mystery structures.
KOUROUNIS: I think that these are charcoal kilns.
These kilns would typically be round or beehive-shaped,
so that's a smoking gun here
that tells me that this is exactly what we're looking at.
NARRATOR: Land registry documents reveal
that the kilns are a relic
of an incredible yet often overlooked period in
American history.
Records show that these structures are on the land of
Wards Mine,
which was a silver mining boom town.
RUBEN: Everyone's heard of the California Gold Rush,
but we sometimes forget that there was another big one.
There was the Nevada Silver Rush.
NARRATOR: The Nevada Silver Rush begins
in 1859, when vast reserves of
the metal are discovered in a remote canyon
in the west of the state.
RUBEN: The silver boom is kicked off by the discovery of
the Comstock Lode,
which is the richest deposit of silver ever found in
the western U.S.
NARRATOR: In California,
much of the gold is trapped in veins hidden deep inside
the mountains,
but at Comstock and elsewhere in Nevada, silver forms strictly
on the surface, in beds hundreds
of feet wide and over a mile long.
HYMEL: The Comstock mine on the border of Nevada is
the largest silver mine in
the United States and is really gonna be
the focal point of this silver boom.
They find an ore vein here that's worth more
than $100 million dollars in less than a decade.
HYMEL: The amount of money is mind-boggling.
It is a geyser of cash for anyone involved.
NARRATOR: Soon, more reserves are discovered across Nevada,
and by the 1870s,
20 percent of the world's silver originates from this state.
600 boom towns rise out of the desert soil,
including Ward, the site in the image.
When the word got out,
everyone rushed into that area, and they began prospecting.
If you could find the source, and you could claim it
for yourself,
you could become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.
NARRATOR: Yet Nevada's riches also mean that many of its towns
descend into anarchic,
no-go zones, where murder and rape are commonplace.
MORGAN: The sudden appearance of vast numbers of people
means that you suddenly have problems with crime.
HORTON: The conditions there were lawless.
It was a very dangerous place to be,
and some people made their fortune, but many did not.
[gunshots blasting]
NARRATOR: During the 1860s, the violence unleashed
by the Silver Rush spreads nationwide,
when the state of Nevada sends 1,200 men
and $400 million dollars to aid the Union Army.
It makes a critical difference to the conflict
at a time when the Confederates are going bankrupt.
The discovery of silver in western Nevada doesn't
just enrich the few people who found it.
It finances the Union Army in the Civil War.
It helps build the city of San Francisco.
It leaves an imprint on financial markets for decades
to come.
NARRATOR: When word of the Silver Rush reaches Italy,
specialist charcoal burners called Carbonari head
to Nevada.
They erect the beehive-shaped ovens in the image
to extract yet more riches from the Nevada hills.
In order to purify silver from silver ore,
you need to heat it to very high temperatures.
PEPPER: This is an incredibly efficient way of
producing charcoal,
and it adds to the productivity of the mine.
NARRATOR: By 1879, the Ward mine,
like many others in Nevada, has exhausted its reserves,
and the Carbonaris' kilns grow cold.
Today, much of the former mining town is being reclaimed
by the desert, but the structures
seen from space remain as monuments to
the state's extraordinary Silver Rush years.
This is an incredible piece of U.S. mining history,
and luckily in Nevada,
the dryness has preserved it, and you can see it from space.
NARRATOR: Coming up, something big
and weird in Greenland.
I can't tell what they are, but there's hundreds of them.
NARRATOR: And the code of the cannibal warrior.
A successful warrior might eat his flesh and present
the head as a trophy to his chieftain.
NARRATOR: August 17th, 2020.
A satellite orbiting over
the Arctic scans a series of structures in
northwest Greenland.
MUNOZ: The runway and surrounding facilities
that are Thule Air Base,
and it's the northernmost base that
the Americans have in the entire world.
NARRATOR: As the spy bird moves southeast from the highly
clandestine facility,
it captures something that continues to baffle analysts.
It looks like a big claw or something
just took marks out of the ground.
It's really cut up, like
a knife has sliced through the territory.
It's bizarre.
NARRATOR: Scale analysis reveals the weird scars
cover an area of six square miles.
These are quite regular and definitely don't look natural.
I can't tell what they are, but there's hundreds of them.
Analysts study Thule's history for clues,
a history that begins in the late 1940s,
when growing Soviet aggression prompts the U.S.
to establish a military outpost in the Arctic.
MORGAN: Having a base in Greenland meant that the U.S.
had a last base of operation
where we can launch an attack before Soviet
intercontinental ballistic missiles reached us.
NARRATOR: Using the code name Operation Blue Jay,
planning for construction of the base begins in 1949.
MUNOZ: The construction of Thule Air Base
was probably one of the most complex
and difficult undertakings
by the U.S. military at the time.
Thule is a very, very difficult
place to build anything -- It's uninhabited,
so you have to bring in all the supplies -- concrete,
food, water, everything.
NARRATOR: In July 1951, 300,000 tons of materials arrive
in the Arctic on a flotilla of 120 ships.
Thick sea ice forces the military to use dynamite
to open up a safe passage to the site.
Yet when they arrive, engineers are
confronted with an even greater obstacle.
Permafrost up to 1,600 feet deep.
The first efforts to construct this
base really were not very successful.
They came unglued pretty quickly.
Pentagon planners did not realize
that the heat generated from
the building will essentially melt the soil, and the building
will sink into the ground.
NARRATOR: The threat of buildings sinking into
the thawing permafrost forces engineers to change
their construction plans.
I think there's a good possibility
that these are actually the foundations
of the original air base that was built in 1951.
NARRATOR: In the decade following
the base's construction, Thule becomes
a key staging point for Operation Chrome Dome.
Operation Chrome Dome is the idea that you
have nuclear armed B-52s in the sky
24 hours a day, ready to receive
an order to strike targets in Russia.
NARRATOR: One incident during one of
Operation Chrome Dome's clandestine missions
offers another possible explanation
for the weird marks in the image.
On January 21st, 1968, an American B-52
stratofortress crashed during
an approach to land at this airfield.
There's a cabin fire on the inside of the airplane.
The aircraft commander realizes that they can't
save the airplane and tells everybody to evacuate.
MORGAN: The crew bails out -- The aircraft
then belly flops and bursts into flames.
[explosion blasts]
NARRATOR: The incident claims the life
of one crew member,
but the U.S. military's problems have only just begun.
What the aircraft was carrying was four
B-28 thermonuclear bombs.
Once the plane actually made impact
on the ground, these weapons went off.
[explosion blasts]
NARRATOR: The nukes on the plane
have an explosive yield 400 times
greater than the one which destroyed Nagasaki
in World War II.
The incident threatens to dramatically
escalate hostilities between Washington and Moscow.
MUNOZ: You have this crazy kind of mix
of a catastrophic accident,
and tensions on both sides
during the height of the Cold War --
You've essentially set the stage for what could have
been World War III.
NARRATOR: Mercifully, a safety mechanism
prevents a full-scale nuclear explosion,
but the accident still releases vast amounts of
radioactive material across permafrost near the base.
MORGAN: An area of over three square miles
was completely contaminated by radiation.
The cleanup effort would go on for nine months.
It would involve 700 people
and would cost the American taxpayer $10 million.
Maybe the marks on the soil were caused when
the area had to be cleared out after this accident.
NARRATOR: Officially, the cleanup operation
took place to the north of the marks in the image.
But analysts learn the scars could still
be connected to the 1968 nuclear incident.
They didn't actually manage to get everything
in the cleanup operation -- Declassified
information revealed that one of these bombs was never
recovered -- Somewhere down there
under the ice in the ocean is an unrecovered nuclear weapon.
NARRATOR: A nuclear weapon lost under the Arctic ice.
Strange gashes in the landscape.
In this corner of Greenland,
the Cold War is far from over.
MORGAN: The entire area is subject to top secrecy.
And because of that, it's very,
very difficult to get any information about this base.
So we may never know what we're looking at in the photo.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the lost jungle civilization.
HEIMLER: There are these weird symbols,
and nobody knows what they're there for.
NARRATOR: September 2019.
A drone conducts an aerial survey
over the South Pacific Islands of Samoa.
As it scans the dense tropical forest,
it spots something nestled among the foliage.
HEIMLER: It almost looks like the stump of a giant tree
that has been cut off at its base.
However, this formation is massive.
It's not really obvious at all what this thing is.
Call me confused.
NARRATOR: Further studies reveal that there are around
80 of these giant shapes scattered across
the archipelago,
some thousands of years old.
They're these weird geometric symbols rising up out of
the dense jungle vegetation, and nobody knows
what they're there for.
NARRATOR: Experts delve into the island's history in search
of clues.
What makes this
an especially tricky problem is that the Samoans
traditionally did not have a written language.
This is what's called a memory society, because their stories
and their legends and their histories
were all passed down orally.
NARRATOR: Studies suggest the first star mounds appear
soon after Polynesians arrive in Samoa in around 1,000 B.C.,
having somehow found the island's concealed
in millions of miles of open ocean.
JANULIS: Not a lot is known about the earliest seafarers
that settled Samoa,
but these people colonize almost every island in
the Pacific in a very short amount of time.
One of the more interesting things is they look somewhat
like rays of stars spanning out,
and the Pacific Islanders certainly followed the stars at
night when they'd go across vast expanses of water.
NARRATOR: The seafarers believe in many gods and goddesses,
heroes, and demons.
Some analysts speculate the star shapes could also have
been built to honor the celestial deities
that guided the Polynesians to their new lands.
There's definitely a sort of
symbolic or ritualistic aspect to these.
They're repeating the same shape in uninhabited
parts of very hard to reach places.
NARRATOR: According to Samoan beliefs,
people, spirits, and objects are endowed with a life force
called mana.
As the island's population grows,
it fuels a series of conflicts between tribes hoping to
acquire this supernatural power from their enemies.
JANULIS: Being a warrior was important.
It was something expected of you,
and if you hadn't ever gone to war,
you probably didn't have a lot of respect from your peers.
NARRATOR: The pursuit of mana would sometimes lead to
victorious warriors indulging in gruesome
post-battle rituals.
So a successful warrior might cut the head off of his enemy,
eat his flesh, drink his blood,
and present the heart as a trophy to his chieftain.
By doing so,
they thought that some of the courage and bravery
that was in that soldier would
transfer into them by virtue of eating.
Given Polynesia's tribal history,
it's entirely feasible that these are defensible
fortifications that individual
clans would have retreated to.
NARRATOR: Yet when local archaeologists
begin excavating the shapes revealed from the skies,
they discover something incredible.
It turns out Samoa has a lot more structures on
it under the dense jungle vegetation
than we previously assumed.
BELLINGER: These star mounds are actually just part of
a much broader residential complex that stretches
for acres and acres.
NARRATOR: It appears that the island's dense jungle
conceals a series of megastructures, lost to history.
This shows that we have greatly underestimated how
complex and large scale
the Samoan society was before the Europeans
contacted them.
NARRATOR: European explorers arrive in Samoa
in the early 18th century.
Death comes with them, and over the next 200 years,
a series of epidemics sweep the islands.
Populations that have no contact
with European population for thousands of
years have no immunity to our diseases.
When the Europeans finally got to know the Samoan culture
and people, they were seeing
the remnants of a plague apocalypse.
NARRATOR: Previous studies suggest European diseases
killed around one in five Samoans.
But the scale of the structures hidden by
the jungle canopy reveals
the catastrophic effect of European contact was much
greater than previously feared.
This new evidence shows us that the Samoans were not
a tiny population at the time
the Europeans arrived, and that many,
many more aboriginal Samoans died as a result
of colonization.
NARRATOR: The structures are both a tribute
to the extraordinary civilization
that once thrived here and a record of its sad demise.
We're only beginning to scratch the surface
of this mysterious and enigmatic culture,
and these star mounds may hold part of the mystery.