- Tonight on "The Proof Is Out There,"
a triangle UFO in Italy, and this isn't the first time.
- Some people believe Mussolini
had a secret UFO hunting program.
- [Tony] Look at this famous photo.
Is it proof of an ancient monster?
- Perhaps we're looking at a mosasaur,
which lived from between 82 and 66 million years ago.
- [Tony] A spectral image recorded
on a freighter ship at sea.
Is it proof of a sailor's ghost?
- This is hands down shocking.
- [Tony] And do these ancient cave paintings
portray alien sky people?
- Possibly, these extraterrestrials
were telepathic.
(dramatic music)
- [Tony] Around the globe are videos.
- [Witness] What the heck is this?
- [Witness] It's moving.
- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.
(electric buzzing)
(dramatic music)
- [Marc] Is it some kind of unidentified object?
What's exciting is nobody really knows.
- [Tony] What are they?
- [MJ] Some sort of bizarre mutation.
- Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.
- I'm Tony Harris,
and as a journalist for more than 30 years,
I've followed the facts where they take me.
Now I'm bringing that spirit of investigation
to the world's strangest sounds and images.
We'll analyze each one with top experts.
- It's a credible case, it's a credible video.
- [Tony] And pass a verdict on what it is.
- This video was clearly faked.
- The proof starts now.
(dramatic theme music)
Good evening and welcome to "The Proof Is Out There."
When it comes to UFO sightings,
the classic saucer shape from the 1950s and '60s
has long become passe,
and instead it's often bright orbs and cylindrical objects,
which are reported more and more frequently.
Recently, however,
we've been adding another shape to that list, triangles.
But why and what does it mean?
Well, maybe this next video can shed some light.
November, 2021.
A passenger on a train
speeding through the Italian countryside,
notices something strange outside his window
and starts recording.
Three orange lights in a triangular formation
floating in the air above the horizon.
Let's zoom in.
The lights not only appear to be orbs,
but they're also glowing.
The video is uploaded to social media
and quickly becomes a sensation.
- A lot of the comments on the video
obviously linked this light pattern
to the typical triangular UFO,
making claims that this was some sort of alien spacecraft.
- [Tony] Journalist MJ Banias
says that kind of reaction shouldn't be surprising.
- Italy has a fairly rich UFO history.
In the early 1950s,
an entire soccer game
was actually stopped in the city of Florence
when a crowd of 10,000 people in the stadium looked up
and saw a handful
of strange oval shaped UFOs fly over them.
- [Tony] Even before then, A UFO crash in 1933
allegedly became the catalyst for a secret program
led by one of Italy's most notorious figures.
- Some people believe that Mussolini,
the famed Italian dictator,
had a secret UFO hunting program.
The idea was that in 1933,
a UFO crashed in Italy,
and Mussolini allegedly hired famed radio pioneer
Guglielmo Marconi to figure out
what this technology was and whether it could be weaponized.
(mysterious music)
- The Italian Center for UFO Studies
documented almost 10,000 cases over a 50 year period
and we reported on some of them,
including this anomalous event we investigated last year.
Could this triangle be something related?
We ask for our experts' opinion.
(mysterious music)
We begin with forensic video analyst, Michael Primeau.
Our first question,
has the footage been manipulated in any way?
- The lights appear to be real,
at least to my naked eye when analyzing it frame by frame.
But what the encoder is saying using macro block analysis,
is that this information in this green color is different
than this information in this green color.
So it's a possibility that some use of CGI was added
to this recording based on the the macro block analysis,
but no definitive conclusions can be drawn at this time.
- [Tony] Acknowledging that red flag,
we take the video to astronomer and video effects designer,
Marc D'Antonio, to see if this could be a plane.
- I don't think that this one here is an aircraft
because an airplane light,
this brightness would be the landing lights
and airplanes generally have two landing lights,
if not just one, in some cases, not three.
Now you could say, well,
is this a stack of aircraft one farther from the other,
making a logical triangle from this perspective?
But these lights look all the same brightness,
and if you stack up planes like that,
the furthest plane away
is gonna be more, several miles behind
the first plane in the lines, will look a little bit dimmer
and smaller than the one in the front.
- [Tony] D'Antonio rules out
any commercial or military aircraft,
but he does believe there is a clue
to the mystery in the video.
- If you also look carefully when this train is moving,
it passes a sign along the way.
The sign is being held up by two legs
and this object passes in front of one of those legs.
- [Tony] The lights don't disappear
when the train passes the sign outside.
D'Antonio thinks it's because this mysterious object
isn't actually in front of a photographer.
- I think that this is a light fixture
reflected in the window
from one of the adjacent train seats.
- [Tony] But when we asked science writer Mick West
to study the video, he disagrees.
- I don't think this is a reflection.
For one thing,
it's the only light being reflected that you can see.
If it was a train with lots of people,
you would expect to see more.
And when the person filming it is moving the camera,
you see these bits of dirt on the window move around.
But when they're moving around,
there's no movement at all with this object,
which means that it's not a reflection.
- [Tony] By zooming in,
Mick sees the lights are not staying in one place.
- I took the video
and I tried stabilizing the lights on the screen
so they all stay in exactly the same position
and you can see that it's not like a single solid object.
They seem to be moving somewhat independently.
Another thing that you notice
is that the distance between the lights
and the tree line gradually decreases.
- [Tony] So we have orange objects
that appear to be slowly drifting down.
West believes there's an orange light that fits the bill,
military flares.
- They're attached to little parachutes,
so they just basically sink down fairly slowly
and they burn for about a minute or two
and then they'll usually drop.
(mysterious music)
- Our verdict, this is a toss up.
We can't explain why the lights don't pass behind the sign,
but we can't call it a reflection either.
We can't even say for sure it's real.
The military flare theory feels right,
but our experts aren't unanimous.
Until we know more,
we have to say this remains unidentified.
Now it's time for a classic,
one of those decades old incidents
that still inspires head scratching to this day.
As we say in the business,
this story has legs even though the alleged creature
you're about to see does not.
It's December 12th, 1965.
Robert Le Serrec is on a motorboat
with his family near Hook Island in Queensland, Australia.
While crossing the bay,
Robert's wife notices a strange object
from the bottom of the lagoon.
The family starts snapping pictures.
The photo shows what appears to be a massive sea creature
that resembles a terrifyingly large tadpole.
The serpentine creature is dark black in color
and can be easily seen
beneath the clear waters of the lagoon.
It looks to be at least 30 feet long
based on the proportional size
of the boater in the background,
and it seems to be coiled in the shape of an S.
The Serrecs say they weren't terrified,
they were fascinated.
- They decided to jump in the water
and get a closer look at whatever this thing was.
It wasn't moving, so they assumed that it was dead.
- [Tony] Journalists Erin McCarthy tells us
that serpents like this
are a popular feature of the local Australian lore.
- There's a creature from the mythology
of Australia's indigenous peoples
called the rainbow serpent.
When you see a rainbow in the sky in Australia,
that's said to be the rainbow serpent
traveling from one water hole to another.
- [Tony] So is the rainbow serpent more than a myth?
Could the myth have been inspired
by something rare but real?
- So one theory that has been floated
is that perhaps we're looking at a prehistoric creature,
specifically a mosasaur,
which lived in oceans around the world
from between 82 and 66 million years ago.
- [Tony] Technically, mosasaurs weren't dinosaurs,
they're more closely related to lizards and snakes.
As such, they were able to unhinge their jaws
to eat prey nearly the size of their bodies.
It seems ridiculous to think an extinct sea species
could still be swimming, but McCarthy doesn't think so.
- There was a particular type of fish, coelacanth,
that was thought to be extinct
that was then rediscovered in the 1930s,
so it's not unheard of for science
to believe that a creature has gone extinct
and for it to pop back up.
So we could be looking at maybe a new species
or maybe a creature that we thought was extinct
but actually isn't.
- The people on the boat later surmised
that the creature may have been wounded
by a ship's propeller in deeper water
and had decided to take refuge
in the shallow lagoon to recover.
They said it had eyes with slit shaped pupils
on the top of its head
and its whole body was smooth with no fins or spines.
But what will our experts see?
(tense music)
First off, could the photo have been doctored?
- So from the EXIF analysis,
no signatures of Photoshopping
or any third party editing software
was detected of this particular image.
Now whether or not the print photography
was manipulated prior to production of this image,
I can't say with certainty,
but digitally, nothing has occurred to these images.
- [Tony] So then what is it?
We turn to marine biologist, Shea Conger,
who's pretty sure this is not a mosasaur.
- Mosasaurs were very dynamic predators.
They were probably very fast.
They had four flippers that you would see here
and they had a bit of a long neck
and a smaller head with really sharp teeth.
Also, mosasaurs were typically known
to be deeper sea animals.
They didn't spend any time on land
and so they probably wouldn't be in shallow water like this.
So I don't think this is some kind of
a living predatory animal that we think of as prehistoric.
- [Tony] So could it possibly be a large eel?
- Eels are definitely dark in color.
They can be very large,
but their bodies are much more tubular in shape
and they wouldn't have such distinct large head on them.
In addition, to have an eel like this up in the surf
where you couldn't define any facial features
would be very unusual as well.
An eel would have really distinct eyes and nostrils
that we'd probably be able to see here.
So I would probably deduce that this is not an eel.
Also, you don't actually see any disturbance
or other signs of movement.
So if this were a dynamic object or animal,
you would see probably bubbles or some ripples on the water
and you really don't see anything,
especially for how shallow this water is.
- [Tony] Could it be something
that was never even alive in the first place?
- [Shea] If I had to guess as to what we're looking at,
I think this looks like a really two dimensional object
like black plastic that has been placed on the bottom
of wherever this was taken.
- [Tony] One problem there though,
some maintain that the figure in the water is so clear
we'd be able to identify a piece of plastic
if that's really what this was.
- It's a very clear image and the fun thing about it is,
your brain can't quite make it out.
It's hard to tell what you're looking at
and that's where a lot of the mystery comes from
in the Hook Island sea monster image.
(mysterious music)
- We're going to call this an unexplained object.
The evidence still begets the question,
is this a real sea monster
lurking off the coast of Australia
or just another convincing fake?
But this is hardly the only suspected creature
off Australia's shores.
The country even has its own Loch Ness Monster
called the Hawkesbury Monster,
which is believed to be between 23 and 79 feet long.
So if you're ever in the waters off the coast
of the land down under, keep an eye out.
- Regular viewers will have caught
some of our previous stories
about strange incidents involving airplanes
like this alleged near miss, but I've gotta tell you,
this next video was right up there with the best of them.
Put your seats in the upright position and hang on.
It's October, 2021 in Mossel Bay, South Africa.
A team of 14 stunt sky divers is flying at altitude
and preparing to jump.
Nine members of the team, including their videographer,
are coming out onto the side of the plane
or waiting just inside when suddenly
their adventure takes a nose dive, literally.
(dramatic music)
The plane slips once, twice,
and then falls out of the sky
just as the videographer lets go,
followed by the other waiting jumpers.
The camera keeps rolling as the plane sails past them,
heading down rapidly toward the earth.
Another person jumps from the plane
as it starts to level off and disappear into the clouds.
This video is so incredible
that I think we need another look.
Here's where the plane flips upside down
and goes into a barrel roll before beginning to nosedive.
Even stranger, after the near disaster,
the skydivers proceed with their planned jump.
Journalist Amy Teitel says she can't imagine
what must have been going through their minds.
- It's really incredible
that this plane completely missed the skydivers
and they seem to go right back on with their jump,
getting in formation.
They don't seem phased
by the fact they almost just got hit by a plane.
The pilot also looks like they're very competent.
The plane isn't flying at an angle
where it would naturally stall the instant that it does.
So are we looking at something that's CGI?
Something that has fake elements to a real video?
- In the past, we've shown you videos like the 747 near miss
that went viral but turned out to be fake.
So is this real?
And if so, how is the pilot able
to recover control of the aircraft so quickly?
The standard altitude at which skydivers jump
is 10,000 to 13,000 feet
while the plane moves at 100 miles per hour.
But by the time this plane was in free fall
from a height of 16,000 feet,
it was moving much faster
than the skydivers' terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour.
So, is a smooth recovery
under these challenging conditions actually possible?
Let's consult our experts.
(tense music)
Our pixel man, Michael Primeau,
runs macro block analysis to determine if this is even real.
- As we watch this plane travel towards the clouds,
we see kind of a a glowing shape
and the macro blocks begin to become more compressed.
There's video compression artifacting
that's making it look like
it's kind of glitching in and out of the clouds.
That could be misinterpreted as manipulation
or misinterpreted as CGI or something was placed over,
but we didn't detect any evidence of that.
Although it has been re-encoded at least twice,
the video is authentic.
- [Tony] Theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku concurs.
- It's very difficult to to fake the trajectory
of nine falling people plus an airplane that is spinning.
Everything I saw on the screen, I think,
is consistent with the known laws of physics.
- [Tony] So if the footage is real,
then how and why did the plane just stall?
Normally in skydiving, people jump out one at a time,
but since this was synchronized,
they all jumped at the same time
and Kaku thinks that is the key.
- When we had nine sky divers
jump out of the airplane at the same time,
that created a torque
which caused the back part of the airplane to swerve.
- [Tony] But aviation expert Tim McMillan
thinks this happened because the pilot slowed the plane down
by cutting power to the left engine to make it easier
for the skydivers to get in position.
- The pilot has really brought the plane down
to a slow speed,
may very well have idled the engine, so it's gliding.
After the final jumper jumped,
when the pilot throttled the aircraft back up,
one of the engines spooled up faster than the other,
bringing up the higher angle of attack on the right wing
and the left is trying to catch up.
The air flow was hitting that left wing at an angle
that it was more on top of the wing, forcing it down.
That is why we're gonna start seeing that corkscrew turn
going towards the left side.
- [Tony] So the nosedive could have been caused
by a few factors,
but how did the plane manage to miraculously recover
from this death spiral?
McMillan says pilots train for this exact scenario.
- The pilot is trying to regain his aircraft
into what's called a critical angle of attack,
where the wind hits the wings of the aircraft,
that generate lift and keep it in flight.
And so even though it's dipping down here,
the pilot at this point
is likely controlling the yoke forward
to try to get the nose back up
to where the wind that's pushing over the wings
is now generating lift again and they're staying in flight.
(mysterious music)
- Our verdict,
this is a rare but real life aviation incident
likely set off by too many jumpers
exiting at the same time.
The pilot is flying with asymmetrical power
and the jumpers are blocking airflow
to the left horizontal stabilizer,
which McMillan says brings up the higher angle of attack
on the right wing and leads to the spin.
Amazingly, no one was injured,
and the plane returned safely to the runway.
- Imagine being woken up before dawn
to a strange sound from outside,
but when you go to check on it, you see absolutely nothing.
That's just what happened with our next clip
and the mystery lit up the internet.
Take a listen.
In September 2017 in the city of Albacete, Spain,
Noel Riggs, a Canadian man
who runs an English language academy in the city,
is sound asleep at 6:30 AM.
Suddenly, he's jolted wide awake by a loud noise.
(loud metallic whirring)
Noel goes out on his balcony
and as the thunderous sound continues, he starts recording.
(metallic whirring)
- [Tony] From the footage, we can see
that the streets down below
and the skies up above are completely empty,
but the metallic sounds keep coming in waves.
(loud metallic whirring)
- There was construction in the area.
My brain was saying construction noise,
then I realized it was 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday
and I thought, no, that's not right.
That's not normal.
I think it's even against the law.
(loud metallic whirring)
- [Tony] Noel looks for answers online and a debate ensues.
Journalist Erin McCarthy says a few claim
they've heard a similar sound before.
- There's a theory that these sounds
are something what's called sky trumpets.
(loud metallic whirring)
These are strange, trumpet-like noises emanating from the sky
that have occurred all over the world.
(loud metallic trumpeting)
When people hear these sky trumpets,
their minds automatically go to the Book of Revelation,
which says that there are seven angels
that will blow seven trumpets
that bring about a series of apocalyptic events.
(loud metallic whirring)
- [Tony] The Bible says the Israelites
heard very loud trumpet blasts
that cause them to tremble when God was giving Moses
the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai,
and many centuries later in Colonial America,
the settlers reported hearing
mysterious loud noises from the sky
that the Iroquois told them where the sounds
of the great spirit continuing to shape the earth.
(loud metallic whirring)
Several other physical explanations
have been proposed for sky trumpets,
everything from tectonic plates grinding to tidal waves.
But since this event takes place in an urban setting,
that might offer some clues to its source.
Let's sound off with our experts.
(mysterious music)
Since Noel had mentioned construction in the area,
physicist Matthew Szydagis runs a Fourier transform analysis
to see if that could be the cause.
(loud metallic whirring)
- A Fourier transform is a mathematical tool to take waves
to determine what frequencies are in that sound.
Typically, heavy machinery has some frequencies
that occur at 500 to 700,000 hertz.
The frequencies do appear to match.
(loud metallic whirring)
What makes it unusual
is that it doesn't seem to be a time of day
where you could have construction or heavy machinery.
(loud metallic whirring)
- [Tony] Noel confirms there was no work
going on at the construction site that morning.
So meteorologist Juan Hernandez checks to see
if a bizarre weather event could be to blame.
- It is typical to see a thermal inversion
in these parts of of the country in Spain.
A thermal inversion occurs
when you have cold or cool air near the surface
and then you have warmer air aloft.
Oftentimes that acts as a wall to bounce off any sound waves
that may have come from faraway places.
(loud metallic whirring)
- [Tony] This means a sound dozens of miles away
could deflect off the clouds at an angle.
If that's what's happening,
sound ecologist, Dr. Ben Gottesman thinks
it could come from, get this,
a shipyard 100 miles away.
- So here we can hear a few things,
the motors of different vehicles,
maybe as they're moving things to and fro at this shipyard,
but these impulsive sounds are not similar
to the more droned out metallic sounds
that we were hearing in the Spanish metal noise.
(loud metallic whirring)
(metal clanging) (engines revving)
- [Tony] But Gottesman does concede
that with the sound traveling such a far distance,
there's a chance it could have been warped.
- As it's bouncing and traveling farther than normal,
its frequency response can change
because certain frequencies
are able to reflect better than others
and that can lead to what was a very common sounding sound
turning much more bizarre and strange
because its frequency response is altered.
(loud metallic whirring)
- [Tony] Yet Szydagis has still one more sneaking suspicion.
- Unfortunately, the waters have been muddied
by how easy it is to hoax a sound.
I did a Fourier analysis of some scary fictional noises.
(monster roaring)
- [Tony] While this sound effect,
which is almost identical to the one used
for the smoke monster in the TV show "Lost",
is suspiciously similar, it's not an exact match.
(tense music)
Our verdict,
the source of the strange metal sound remains unknown.
Yes, there's a chance
it could have traveled from a far distance
and been altered due to a temperature inversion layer.
It's also possible the video was staged
and the audio was added later.
But Noel's an English teacher, not a known prankster,
and he's always stuck by his story.
As with many things,
this one comes down to whom you choose to believe.
- The high seas are full of unexplained occurrences,
which makes them a hotbed for reports of ghostly sightings.
So when we heard of a possible apparition
being captured on camera below deck on a freighter ship,
we naturally asked to see the video and here it is.
September 2021.
A freighter is sailing in the Indian Ocean
off the coast of Somalia,
a lawless stretch of ocean notorious for pirates.
So the crew is ordered to their quarters
and all lights are turned off, so as
not to attract any unwanted attention from marauders.
The ship's security cameras are rolling
in a cargo hold below decks when they catch this.
(dramatic music)
A bright orb of light floats through the hall
leaving a vapor trail in its wake.
Moments later, a black mist travels back
in the opposite direction of the orb
before manifesting as what appears to be a human figure.
Look closely as we zoom in.
The mysterious figure is standing
in the corner of the room.
Then as miraculously as the apparition arrived,
it dematerializes back into black vapor and vanishes.
(dramatic music)
- There is a theory amongst paranormal experts
that violent deaths leave a mark
and that the spirits of the people
who have been violently murdered
will return to those areas to continue to haunt them.
- [Tony] So in waters known for piracy,
could this be the spirit of a pirate's victim
or is this shape from elsewhere?
Physicists speak of worm holes,
anomalies that act as portals
connecting one far off place to another.
Could this figure be some extraterrestrial traveler
from a far off galaxy?
We've analyzed videos of ghost ships
and other nautical anomalies before.
For instance, this floating ship we examined
turned out to be a mirage caused by the sky
reflecting off the calm sea in the distance.
So, is this new, uncanny seafaring image
explainable or not?
Our experts will get to the bottom of it.
(mysterious music)
Professor Michio Kaku considers,
could this be proof of an alien traveling through a wormhole?
- Wormholes were first introduced
through Lewis Carroll, who wrote "Alice in Wonderland."
It is basically a mirror.
If you put your hand through the mirror,
you go from one universe to Wonderland.
And who was the first one
to mathematically rigorize this idea?
Albert Einstein.
He took two black holes, stuck them back to back,
so that if you fell through one black hole,
you got blown off the other end as a white hole.
- [Tony] In 2019, a supermassive black hole's shadow
was captured on camera for the first time
by the Event Horizon telescope.
But you probably won't see one on a ship's security camera.
- Why don't we see wormholes everywhere?
Well, there's a catch
and that is that the energy necessary to create a wormhole
is the energy of a star
maybe 10 to 50 times more massive than our sun.
But this is far beyond
anything that we can muster on the planet Earth.
- [Tony] And as for the ghost pirate theory.
- Ghosts are supernatural.
They involve things that seem to be outside
the usual bounds of physics,
unless of course, you edit the tape.
- [Tony] Science writer and video forensics analyst,
Mick West goes even further, demonstrating how one
could fake phenomena like this on camera.
- When cameras don't have enough light,
they need to boost what they're getting from the sensor.
So the camera might have to take multiple frames
and kind of add them all together to get the image.
- [Tony] This is the issue.
In a darkroom, the shutter needs to stay open longer
in order to receive enough information.
This is called a long exposure
and the camera ends up combining
multiple frames into one image.
- And that's gonna leave trails like this
with very bright objects
and with a dimmer object like a person,
it will leave a trail, but much fainter.
Something like the mist that we see when the guy disappears.
So I thought, if this is what's going on,
could I actually duplicate this effect?
- [Tony] West shares a homemade video
that illustrates how to doctor footage
to create the effects we see in the freighter.
- You can simulate what's going on in the camera
by taking the exact same video and adding together
30 frames at a time to create a new image.
And now we get a much cleaner image.
We can see everything that's going on in my garage,
but when I actually walk into the shot,
you just see me come in as a ghostly mistly effect,
and I stand there,
because I'm standing in the same position for a long time.
My image stays there and then I kind of fade out
exactly the same as we saw in the ship video.
(mysterious music)
- Our compass points toward a hoax on this one.
At the end of this voyage,
given the cargo load of evidence laid out,
we think it was trick video editing,
not a ghost or a time traveler.
And by the way, we think the light in the video
was caused by a sailor's flashlight.
- Prehistoric cave paintings
have been discovered all around the world,
but deep in the Australian Outback,
we found some images that appear to be so unusual,
some people question if they are from our world at all.
Instead, could they be ancient alien astronauts?
(dramatic music)
In the Kimberly Region of Western Australia,
the Aboriginal people
left intriguing paintings on cave walls.
They are called the Wandjina,
incredible beings Aboriginals said created the world.
Take a closer look.
Do you see the round heads and the circular eyes?
According to George Haas,
founder of the Cydonia Institute,
the Wandjina could be out of this world evidence.
- They have radiating feathers that come off the head.
Some believe that when you first look at these,
they scream alien.
And the absence of mouths suggests that possibly
these extraterrestrials were telepathic.
- [Tony] Wait a minute, did he say aliens?
It's an intriguing theory.
What we do know is that Australian Aboriginal culture
goes back 65,000 years
and holds that humans were created by the Wandjina.
These unique paintings are a record of that period,
which they call Dreamtime.
- You don't see these type of images
in other cave paintings done by Neanderthals and early man,
which mostly deal with hunting and animals, deer, bison.
But these paintings that we're seeing in Australia
are totally unique.
- [Tony] In some tales,
the Wandjina are referred to as sky beings
or spirits from the clouds who came down from the Milky Way
and created the Earth and its people.
- Some believe that these portraits of the Wandjina
certainly blur the line
between extraterrestrial and spiritual world.
They seem to have aspects of both.
- When it comes to our origins,
some speculate that ancient extraterrestrial visitors
engineered the creation of modern humans
through DNA manipulation or some other means.
The paintings are intriguing.
Look closely at the lines going across,
creating sections on the body, here and here.
Could this be the pattern of an ancient space suit?
We asked our experts.
(mysterious music)
We begin with anthropologist Kathy Strain,
who notes that if the paintings are an elaborate hoax,
someone must have thought of it over a century ago.
- They were documented by anthropologists
more than a hundred years ago.
And outside the fact that you're adding some paint
to keep the color alive, they haven't changed.
These are not a hoax.
- [Tony] So if the pictures are real, are they of aliens?
We asked archeologist Ed Barnhart.
- There are people who envision
that it's helmets on their heads and suits on their bodies,
but this is a very plodding looking helmet.
The kind of helmet that you see in 1950s aliens movies.
It's kind of ridiculous to believe
that an advanced civilization came here in suits
that in our current technology are archaic.
- [Tony] And the idea that these designs
on the bodies are space suits?
- You're gonna see an image like this
and envision suits on their bodies.
But we do see today in Aboriginal ceremonies,
people typically paint their bodies completely white,
their faces, their hair,
and then they'll put some kind of decoration over that.
So I think that it is clearly connected to Aboriginal people
who today paint their bodies in a very similar fashion.
- [Tony] In fact, Kathy Strain sees a clue in one image
that convinces her these are strictly human bodies.
- [Kathy] It is pretty rare
to see genitalia of a male in rock art,
and based on things that witnesses say
that space aliens don't have genitalia,
that that's not how they reproduce.
These look like human genitalia.
- [Tony] So what are we seeing?
- The halo around the head,
I don't believe that they intended it to be interpreted
as anything other than it's the process of transforming
and that's your head kind of extending
and above itself and continuing to carry out.
- [Tony] The halo has been used
in many different cultures throughout history
to represent spiritual transformation,
including the Aboriginal Australians.
- These images around the heads are some kind of symbol
of the expansion of their minds and spirits.
(mysterious music)
- So our verdict, these were likely humans.
In fairness, you do have to ask,
do the Aboriginal traditions of body decorations stem from
a time when strange beings were observed?
It's impossible to completely discount,
but if these particular paintings were aliens,
well then, let's just say they were endowed in a human way.
- We've all dreamt of the day we could press a button
and have our cars take flight,
especially when stuck in traffic.
But does this next video prove
the era of flying cars has arrived?
It's late October 2007 in Hong Kong.
A company called Gear Factory is filming
what appears to be a groundbreaking demonstration.
As the camera rolls in the parking lot
of a typical residential neighborhood,
the front axle of a silver Vauxhall sedan
slowly lifts off the ground.
The rear axle soon follows,
and suddenly the car is hovering in mid air
over the parking lot.
You can hear what sounds like an engine whirring,
but the only propellers
appear to be tiny and attached to the doors.
After a short one minute flight,
it comes back down to rest on the ground.
The company posts the video online
and the internet goes wild at the prospect of a flying car.
Journalist Eric Grundhauser says the flying car
has long been the unicorn of automotive engineering.
- Since the early 20th century,
there have been a number of potential
flying car technologies that have been promised
to roll out to the general public.
In the '60s was a car that the government
was almost going to roll out.
Even in 2006,
a company was promising to release a flying car.
- [Tony] Arguably,
the first flying car prototype called the Avrocar
was designed nearly 50 years ago
as a secret military project during the Cold War.
Resembling a flying saucer,
it would've taken off and landed vertically
before it was ultimately scrapped.
Yet Grundhauser says there are various potential models
for how flying cars could work in real world scenarios.
- If you look at something like a helicopter,
you could simply take off vertically,
like technology known as eVTOL,
which stands for electric takeoff and landing.
This technology would allow vehicles
to be much more maneuverable.
- [Tony] We see the propellers on the side of the Vauxhall.
So is that what's giving the car its lift?
Helicopters use rotor blades that accelerate the air
that passes over the top as they spin to create lift.
But these are complex flying machines
that require hundreds of hours of practice to master.
So have we finally cracked the code for a car
everyone can learn to drive and also fly?
Let's let the experts take the wheel.
(mysterious music)
The video seems so unbelievable,
we had to pay another visit to Michael Primeau.
- You can see the glare from the reflection,
assuming that it's coming in this direction
and we've got a shadow that is produced.
Now we know that these shadows can be produced artificially,
but to this scale of an object in this type of environment,
to manipulate that information would be very difficult,
especially when this car begins to spin.
I would say that this is less likely
to be something that was artificially produced.
- [Tony] So if the footage isn't digitally manipulated,
could this car actually be flying
like a plane or a helicopter?
Physicist, Dr. Matthew Szydagis looks into the science.
- Rotors that will give you an upward lift
countering the downward force of gravity
require large enough blades that produce enough moving air
to produce enough force to counteract the force of gravity.
- [Tony] So Szydagis crunches the numbers
on the required force for this car to go airborne.
- The force of gravity on this car
is equal to mass times the acceleration of gravity.
That will be a lot of pounds of force
that you would need to counteract gravity.
And these puny little blades
are just not gonna make it possible.
- [Tony] So if a heavy car model like this can't really fly
with those little propellers,
then is it actually a real car at all?
- This doesn't seem to be a natural reflection.
In fact, you sometimes see
what looked like bumpiness on the reflection.
You don't have bumpiness on glass,
but you do have bumpiness on a balloon.
- [Tony] We tracked down Gear Factor's owner,
German entrepreneur, Murti Jung,
and he confirms that his flying car
is in fact a high tech balloon.
- We are producing flying objects,
flying solutions for shows and events.
I never had the intention to fool anybody.
It was basically doing some marketing
with something exciting.
(mysterious music)
- Our verdict,
this is a promotional flying balloon
that looks remarkably like a real car.
It's part of a staged event run by Murti's company,
which is known for its innovative flying concepts.
So sure you could say the age of the flying car has arrived,
but this one's too flimsy to transport anything but helium.
And that's our show for tonight.
Send us your videos of the unexplained
and we'll give them "The Proof Is Out There" treatment.
And remember to keep those cameras rolling.
(dramatic theme music)