- Tonight on "The Proof is Out There."
The Defense Department has no idea
what this flying object is.
Will it stump our experts?
- Anything is on the table,
but it's definitely unknown and really intriguing.
- [Tony] What's that disturbing the waters of Loch Ness?
Has the fabled monster been caught on camera?
- Some researchers have called this
the most significant Loch Ness footage in the last 20 years.
- [Tony] A mind blowing underwater discovery.
Are these bricks the road to Atlantis?
- This video appears to be a paved road
at the bottom of the ocean.
- [Tony] And check out the chomp from this headless fish.
Is this proof of life after death?
- Certain types of marine life have actually been reanimated
or brought back to life.
(dramatic music)
- [Tony] Around the globe are videos.
- [Witness] What the heck is this?
- [Witness 2] It's moving.
- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.
(electric static)
- [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 follow 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 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.
It's great to be back.
Last year, Congress held a formal public hearing
on unidentified aerial phenomenon,
for the first time in 50 years.
The Pentagon disclosed to lawmakers
that it has cataloged more than 400 reports of UAPs,
11 of which were near misses with aircraft.
They also released this next video
which made headlines across the world.
It's 2021 and a Navy pilot is flying his F-18 fighter jet
off the East coast when reports come in
of a strange object in his airspace.
As the pilot scans the skies, he also takes out his cell phone
and that's when he captures this.
Watch closely. Did you catch that?
It's not something you'd have seen in Top Gun.
Lets zoom in.
For a split second, what appears to be
an unknown spherical metallic object hurdles past the plane.
According to journalist Amy Teitel,
when this video was shown to Congress,
the mysterious craft shook the halls of Capitol Hill.
- The US government could not say for certain
what is in this video,
but it is something physically going by the window.
- [Congressman] Mr. Bray, can you describe
what we're looking at?
What are we observing?
- It's reflective in this video, somewhat reflective
and it quickly passes by the cockpit of the aircraft.
- It is significant that the government is saying that
they are in fact real and that they are in fact unexplained.
- [Tony] But what makes this such a mystery?
Teitel explains it's that this craft has hallmarks
of what UFO investigators call the five observables.
- They typically demonstrate anti-gravity lift.
They can accelerate very quickly
and they can move at hypersonic speeds
without any kind of exhaust.
They're very hard to see or use some kind of cloaking
and they can move from water to air seamlessly.
- [Tony] This object appears to be flying at mach speeds
without any visible means of propulsion.
The question for Congress and the Pentagon,
why do the vast majority of these unidentified objects
seem to target military aircraft?
- A lot of UAP sightings come from aircraft.
So there are some who believe that this alien technology
is surveilling humans and is targeting aircraft
as a means to explore and study the technology here on Earth.
- So now the military and the Congress are opening the doors
to their investigation of UAPs.
Well, some of them at least.
There are still closed door sessions happening
on what the government is calling more sensitive cases,
but we're gonna stay focused on the case at hand,
because maybe this strange object can be identified.
Let's see what our experts say.
(tense music)
We go first aviation expert Tim McMillan.
Are we simply seeing another aircraft or even a drone?
- We definitely do not see the wings
or any of the control surfaces that you should see
in a fixed wing drone or airplane
and then in terms of a rotary wing drone or helicopter,
we don't see the rotors.
Cubes and balls don't fly.
So to me, the only type of objects
that are airborne that really could match that description
would be balloons.
- [Tony] So could this be a balloon?
The Pentagon claimed the wreckage found at Roswell
in 1947 was part of a military operation
using high altitude balloons.
Believers questioned that explanation, but Rich Hoffman
of the scientific coalition for UAP studies
says there is at least one known balloon designed
to function miles above the Earth.
- Google had what they call the Google Loon balloon.
They were testing balloons to be able to provide internet
to people around the world.
- [Tony] The typical fighter jet flies about 50,000 feet
above sea level.
The Google Loon balloon is designed for altitudes
around 60 to 75,000 feet, but Hoffman notes two issues.
This object doesn't have the shape and size
of a Google balloon,
and that program ended in January, 2021
before this footage was likely taken.
So if it's not a plane or a balloon,
does this mean we've got eyes on top secret technology?
- That would be extremely unlikely
because this comes from the office of Naval Intelligence
and you wouldn't publicize your top secret technology.
- [Tony] So if it's not ours,
is it coming from somewhere further away like outer space?
- It doesn't match our flight physics.
My opinion, anything is on the table till it's not.
Could be an alien, who knows, but it's definitely unknown
and so it's really intriguing.
(tense music)
- Our verdict, genuine UFO.
Our experts agree with Naval intelligence.
They also have no idea what they're looking at.
The good news, the Pentagon is now taking this
seriously enough that it's established a special task force
to detect, identify, and attribute objects of interest.
We're looking forward to their next report.
Now let's turn from the sky to the water.
Strange things can happen when you're on vacation.
Well, at least on my vacations
and now one couple's holiday stroll
may have solved a mystery that dates back to ancient times.
The mystery of the Loch Ness monster.
April, 2022, a couple in their fifties
holiday in the Scottish highlands.
After waking up early on a Monday morning
and heading out with their camera,
the couple is taking in the eerie sight of the still waters
of Loch Ness, when they record this.
- [Witness] What on Earth is that?
- [Tony] Take a closer look as we zoom in
and sharpen the image.
It looks like a creature moving through the water.
So admittedly this video is hard to make out,
but I wanna draw your attention to a couple of features
that really intrigue us.
First of all, it is this wake that leads us to believe
that this is actually a creature moving through the water
and then this hump right here is so consistent
with other sightings of the Loch Ness Monster.
- Some researchers have called this
the most significant footage to come off Loch Ness
in the last 20 years.
It doesn't seem to have an artificial or staged quality.
- [Witness] It's really pushing forward now.
- [Ken] It seems like whatever they're filming
is actually there in Loch Ness.
- [Tony] Field researcher Ken Gerhard says
the elusive legendary creature,
affectionately known as Nessi,
has actually had its fair share of caught on camera moments.
- The first compelling image of the Loch Ness Monster
dates from November of 1933.
And then in April of 1934,
something known as the surgeon's photo surfaced.
It appeared to show a small head, a long neck,
and a hump protruding out of Loch Ness
and quickly achieved worldwide fame.
Unfortunately, in the 1990s,
researchers proved that the surgeon's photo
was in fact a hoax.
- [Tony] But the sightings continue to this day.
Nessi is often described as an aquatic creature
having two humps, which has led to the theory
that there is a surviving Plesiosaur
swimming beneath the surface of the Loch.
- Plesiosaurs were an archaic marine reptile
that lived alongside the dinosaurs
up until the end of the Cretaceous period
about 65 million years ago.
They were about 20 or 30 feet long.
They had a very big body with a long neck and a small head,
four flippers and a very powerful tail
and in some respects this does fit some of the eyewitness
accounts of Nessi.
- [Tony] But Gerhard says there's a good reason
why many Nessi sightings remain unexplained to this day.
- [Gerhard] Loch Ness is incredibly deep,
up to 754 feet, and what's really problematic
in terms of research, is that the water is very dark.
- [Tony] Despite those challenges,
researchers have managed to collect compelling evidence
that something is lurking in the Loch.
- Dating back to 1954,
there have been literally dozens of sonar contacts
with large animate objects swimming in Loch Ness.
20 to 30 feet long, usually serpentine in shape,
and as recently as this year,
there was a sonar contact at a depth of about 500 feet
of a large serpentine unidentified object,
about 20 to 30 feet long.
Further adding to the body of evidence
that the Loch Ness Monster exists.
- [Tony] Loch Ness holds an estimated 263 billion
cubic feet of water,
which is more than all the water and all the lakes,
rivers and reservoirs in the whole of England
and Wales combined.
So could this video be the latest proof
that Nessi is somewhere in there?
We turn to our experts to find out.
(tense music)
Forensic video expert Michael Primeau
determines if this video is yet another hoax.
- In terms of authenticity, nothing appears to be CGI
the video appears to be consistent
and plays consistently.
No editing or splicing was detected.
Through the media interrogation,
digital information analysis, through Medex,
we were able to confirm the authenticity of this video
and it is genuine.
- [Tony] So if a video is real, what are we looking at?
We turn to Marine Biologist Dr. Shea Conger
to break it down.
- You can actually see based on the other objects around it,
that not only is this animal moving through the water,
it's actually navigating.
You can see it turn towards the shoreline.
To me that means it's not something being towed
or something stuck in the water.
This is actually a really large animal
I think moving across the surface of Loch Ness.
- [Tony] So could a dinosaur thought to be extinct
for 65 million years really survive
in the frigid murky waters of Loch Ness?
- Plesiosaurs did actually inhabit this area,
but Plesiosaurs were known
to be very large, voracious predators,
so there would have to be a lot of food to support
a remnant dinosaur.
It would be very difficult for an animal like a Plesiosaur
to obtain enough food.
So I can rule out that this is some sort of living dinosaur.
- [Tony] Furthermore, Conger says that
in one of the biggest DNA studies of its kind,
scientists from New Zealand's Otago University
were able to identify the presence of around 3,000 species
in the deep dark waters of Loch Ness.
- [Shea] This 2019 study actually ruled out the idea
of some Plesiosaur living in Loch Ness
because there was no genetic material associated with that,
that was found.
- [Tony] DNA from whales and dolphins was also identified
in Loch Ness by the researchers.
Conger rules those out though,
because you can't see a dorsal fin in the video,
but she does have one guess.
- The eDNA study actually showed a lot of eel DNA
in Loch Ness, and this brings the possibility
that maybe the Loch Ness Monster is actually just a large eel
being sighted at the surface.
- [Tony] If it is an eel, it's huge,
which is fascinating in itself.
- There's still a mystery that's going on
and we're not really sure what we're seeing in Loch Ness.
(tense music)
- Our verdict, we're going to say
this is possibly a gigantic eel.
Though we can't say for certain what species.
Perhaps one that hasn't been discovered yet,
but the mystery is far from solved,
so we'll keep our eyes peeled for more evidence.
- The biggest undersea treasure ever found
was on a wreck called
"Black Swan" near Gibraltar in 2007.
The salvage team found 17 tons of coins
valued at $500 million, but in this next video,
it seems explorers might have found an entire submerged city
where the streets are paved with gold.
April 2022 and the Papahnaumokukea
Marine National Monument in Hawaii,
the crew of the exploration vessel Nautilus
is live streaming its adventures
when it comes upon this startling sight.
- [Witness] Oh, wow. - [Witness 2] Interesting.
- [Witness] Look at that. - [Witness 3] What?
- [Tony] At a depth of 3,375 feet,
they spot what looks like a bunch of bricks
off to the right of the vessel.
- [Witness] Yeah. - [Witness 4] So weird, yeah.
- [Witness] Okay. - [Witness 4] Cobblestone.
- [Witness 2] Oh, yeah. Whoa.
- [Tony] They're astonished by their find
and wonder if they have just found the road
to the fabled lost City of Atlantis.
Journalist Eric Grundhauser explores
whether this might be the ruins of that legendary lost city.
- This video is really incredible.
This is what appears to be a paved road
at the bottom of the ocean.
You can see what appears to be symmetrical bricks
that look almost manmade except it's hundreds,
thousands of feet underwater.
Who would've built such a structure?
The myth of Atlantis dates back as far as 360 BC
when it was first mentioned in Plato's dialogues
and most people know of the myth that it disappeared
beneath the waves and the ruins
are still somewhere under the sea.
According to the legends, Atlantis became so powerful
and had waged war on so many of its neighboring cultures,
that Zeus himself decided to sink the nation
to make the Atlantians pay for their hubris.
- [Tony] Grundhauser then wonders if this find
could be remains of a land mass
swallowed by the sea long ago.
- Another popular theory about the origins
of this supposed road are that
it is the remnants of a culture that existed
on what is sometimes called the eighth continent
known as Zelandia.
Zelandia broke off of a much larger supercontinent
known as Gondwanaland.
Could this bit of road have belonged to a civilization
that existed millions of years ago,
long before Zelandia fell beneath the waters
of the Pacific Ocean?
- Legends of sunken civilizations appear in cultures
all over the world, from Japan to Scandinavia.
Atlantis, the island subcontinent
was supposedly submerged beneath the waters
somewhere past Gibraltar.
Could that have been as far away as Hawaii?
Let's turn to our experts to clear the waters.
(tense music)
Anthropologist Kathy Strain dives into the Zelandia theory.
- Zelandia has been submerged for over 23 million years.
Humans were not around that long ago.
So the technology to build roads like this is
only about a couple thousand years ago.
So we know that this not possible to be related
to that continent.
- [Tony] Of course, another pre-human civilization
could have existed on Zelandia and built roads,
but we have nothing yet to corroborate that theory.
Next, Strain weighs in on whether this road
could be connected to the Lost City of Atlantis.
- Ancient cities that had these kind of thoroughfares
always had lots of elaborate other artifacts
along the pathway.
You wanted to show off your wealth
and so you would have foundations of structures,
you would have pillars, you would have statues,
some archway, and those things would've been very heavy.
The wave action, time would not erase that.
You at least see some remnants of it.
- [Tony] So the absence of other artifacts
appears to rule that out.
Then what are we looking at here?
NASA geologist Dr. Bob Anderson has a theory.
This is simply a layer of sulfur on the ocean floor.
- This is just one area of sulfur that formed like a road.
The yellow is not really a gold color,
it's a yellow color.
It was formed coming out of a hydrothermal vent.
We see it on Earth, we see it in deserts,
we see it wherever the sulfur deposits are located,
especially around volcanoes or hydrothermal vents.
We have seen sulfur on some of these deposits on Mars.
- [Tony] But what about those strange brick patterns?
So reminiscent of old cobblestone roadways.
- That's pretty common in these areas
where you have a very thin layer that breaks
because of something on top of it.
It'll break into these very nice patterns on the sides.
You can see it on this side too,
but then when you get into the center,
you'll see it's more diffused and broken up
and that's usually because of that
it's an uneven topography underneath of it
that's causing this break.
(tense music)
- Our verdict, this substance is just sulfur.
Because there are no records of Atlantis
before Plato wrote about it,
most scholars believe the Greek philosopher is responsible
for creating this myth.
This might not be a yellow brick road,
but it sure leads your mind to some fascinating places.
- Everyone has their own opinion of what
a father-son relationship is supposed to look like,
spending time fishing, watching football,
but what about UFO watching?
In our next clip, a California dad of two
shows us how what started as some quality time
turned into an out of this world experience.
February 2020.
It's a sunny afternoon in Garden Grove, California.
Typically when Brian Schuller's kids tell him
they've seen a UFO,
he credits it to overactive imaginations,
but on this particular day when his son becks him
into the backyard, Brian also sees something strange
and he records this.
- [Tony] An object floats in the sky overhead
consisting of two connected metallic looking shapes
with a dark underside and for the first time,
Brian can't explain it away to his kids.
- It looked like it had almost a glass front on it
and I couldn't tell what it was on the top it.
It moved towards my left side very slowly
and then passed us and it just moved in a very straight line
out of distance.
- Although the sighting leaves Brian perplexed,
maybe he shouldn't be.
Writer Amy Teitel explains
Southern California's Orange County is historic
when it comes to sightings of unidentified flying objects
in broad daylight.
- Orange county has one of the oldest daytime UFO sightings.
In 1965, road maintenance engineer Rex Hefflen
saw what he thought was a UFO.
So he whipped out a camera and shot some quick Polaroids
of the object.
Hefflin initially brushed off what he saw,
assuming that it was some kind of test
by a nearby military base, but years later,
experts looked at the photographs
and confirmed that it wasn't some government technology.
Both of these objects appear to be flying low in the sky.
They were both cited near telephone poles
and near power lines and they were seen
roughly in the same area.
So some might believe that there is a link
between these two sightings.
- The Hefflin case was one of the most talked about
UFO incidents of the 1960s and when high resolution prints
of the original Polaroid pictures
were reanalyzed 35 years later using the latest
in digital technology,
there were no indications of any tampering.
Now, will the same be said of our backyard UFO?
Let's see what the experts have to say.
(tense music)
It was determined back in the 1960s
that the object in Rex Hefflin's photo
wasn't military technology, but what about this one?
If so, it's in the wrong direction.
- There's Los Alamitos.
The joint base is completely behind him.
It's in the exact 180 degrees behind that individual
looking out to where the object is.
- [Tony] So could this be a drone
used for military purposes?
- I don't think that it's gonna be a drone at all.
It's not a symmetrical object and besides that,
it's flying next to a power line.
Yeah, that wouldn't be too cool. It's too close.
- [Tony] Okay, so no drone,
but Hoffman does believe that the power line is a clue.
- When you zoom in on it,
you can clearly see that it has body parts
and everything in it possibly hanging like a thread.
I think it's a spider that's hanging from the line.
- [Tony] So we've got a spider, mystery solved,
but not quite.
Astronomer and video effects designer, Marc D'antonio
respectfully disagrees.
- I think based on the fact that
if you look at the clarity of this wire
and how this isn't really that clear,
what that means is this object is substantially
further away than the wire
and the giveaway is that when we look at the video,
you see insects flying around the wire.
It's like those black gnats are flying around.
This thing is much further away than that.
So this here would be much bigger than that
if it was an insect, but there's no visible corollary
for this being any kind of animal whatsoever,
not even a soaring bird like a vulture
that might circle in the air.
- [Tony] So what is it?
Brian told us as he filmed,
he didn't think it moved like a balloon,
but D'Antonio says not so fast.
- And it looks like he's just floating there,
but the thing is just gently coming toward the wire,
and I believe where we have something that's floating lazily
along in the sky,
it looks to me like a Mylar balloon from the reflectivity
down to the motion and the shape.
The helium inside the balloon will eventually leak out
and you'll get these little creases and convolutions
and changes in the brightness
and that could be what we're seeing here.
- [Tony] D'Antonio believes it's likely the balloon
spelled out a word and strayed from an outdoor party.
- This looks like it could be an H,
but I see a lot of cases of these silver Mylar balloons
that get away and I agree, it's odd looking.
It's really odd looking.
(tense music)
- Our verdict,
we're going with partially deflated Mylar balloon.
We agree that the combination of light hitting
the various crinkles in the balloon
is what makes it look so oddly shaped in the sky,
but is it an H or maybe a number?
We'll leave that up to you to decide.
Go for the head.
It's good advice for a sword swinging hero.
Talk to Perseus who slayed Medusa.
It feels final, but our next story poses the question,
what if the severed head could bite back?
By the way, this segment contains graphic imagery.
Viewer discretion is advised.
2019 on a fishing boat in the North Atlantic,
fishermen catch something in their nets,
but rather than releasing their find,
the seamen documents something truly astounding.
A large fish head reminiscent of the creature
from the Black Lagoon has been separated from its body.
It looks slimy to the touch with huge unblinking eyes
and a gaping maw.
A gloved hand holds the head of the base
while another holds a can of soda.
It's placed into the mouth of the beast
with shocking results.
Despite being fully decapitated,
the creature bites into the can with a fury
seemingly effortlessly crushing it in its jaws.
Field Researcher Ken Gerhard wonders if this could be
some sort of naturally zombified sea creature.
- So in the animal kingdom, there is a process
that's been documented known as cryptobiosis,
whereby certain types of marine life
have actually been reanimated or brought back to life.
Sea monkeys of course, were tiny brine shrimp
that had essentially been dried out desiccated,
that were for all intents and purposes dead,
but people could reanimate them by introducing seawater.
- Gerhard is also reminded of a phenomenon among humans
called lucid decapitation,
where in the severed head of a person
continues to exhibit lifelike qualities.
- There have been many examples,
particularly during the French Revolution.
They had the famous device known as the guillotine,
which was efficiently designed to chop off people's heads
and there are many stories of disembodied heads
that seemed to be animated and alive
sometimes minutes after the decapitation.
- [Tony] In one famous example in 1905,
a French surgeon convinced an inmate sentenced to death
to blink as much as he could after the beheading.
- Once this decapitation occurred,
he actually called out the inmate's name
and he claims that this beheaded head
actually looked at him as if it recognized its name.
So when we consider these cases of lucid decapitation,
we certainly could ask, is that what we're seeing here?
An example of this particular phenomenon.
- Fortunately, we don't decapitate people these days,
so there's not much recent data to study
regarding headless humans,
but there seems to be ample evidence
of some kind of life after death,
at least physical activity, if not consciousness.
This biting fish head is a fascinating specimen.
Let's see what our experts make of it.
(tense music)
Wildlife biologist Stephanie Schuttler
addresses our zombie concerns.
- There's no cases in nature of
back-from-the-dead zombification,
but there are things in nature that happen that resembles
zombie behavior.
- [Tony] In fact, it's more common than you'd think.
Tropically transmitted parasites like Euhaplorchis californiensis
hijack their hosts nervous systems,
turning these fish into zombies so the parasites
can hop from one host to another.
- It changes their brain chemistry to make them
want to go to the surface of the water
where it's dangerous and flash around
so that they get noticed by predators,
specifically birds, and get eaten up.
- [Tony] But Schuttler doubts that's what's happening.
- I don't think what we're seeing here is due to parasites
because the parasite is not benefiting at all.
The fish being dead doesn't help the parasite at all.
- [Tony] So could this instead be an example
of lucid decapitation?
Marine biologist Shea Conger weighs in.
- When an animal dies like this,
there's a number of things still going on
that don't immediately stop, and one of those is blood flow.
So blood carries oxygen to different tissues of the body
for some period of time.
The brain is really reliant upon oxygen to function.
- [Tony] Because this is a sea creature,
we can assume it's cold-blooded,
which means it requires less oxygen than mammals.
So a bodiless fish can continue to use up
that remaining oxygen for a longer period of time.
- In the case of animals that are recently deceased,
there is something called a cadaveric spasm,
which is when you still have some electrical potential
in your nerve cells,
meaning that there's still some kind
of bionic charge between the nerves
that can fire back and forth.
What I see here is a typical face of a mature Wolf Eel.
They have very strong jaws and what's happening
is that nerves are just being triggered.
This doesn't mean that the animal's alive.
(tense music)
- This phenomenon has been caught on camera numerous times.
So while we're looking at a fish, it's not a fluke.
Our verdict,
this is a decapitated Wolf Eel displaying
some kind of muscle spasm,
a natural occurrence if you can believe it,
albeit a disturbing one.
- Noise making and fireworks on New Year's Eve
are believed to have originated in ancient times
when noise and fire were thought to dispel evil spirits
and bring good luck.
The Chinese are famous for the invention of fireworks
and using them to spectacular effect
in their New Year's celebrations
but it was one US city that rang in 2022
with the biggest bang.
January 1st, 2022,
It's just another cloudy morning in Pittsburgh
but before residents could even start making good
on their New Year's resolutions,
the emergency services hotline lights up with complaints
of homes being shaken and rattled after a loud noise
was reported.
(thunderous boom)
Let's look at that again.
The security footage shows a sleepy morning
in someone's backyard when it is suddenly rocked
by what sounds like a bomb going off.
(thunderous boom)
Pittsburgher Martin Eibeck was tinkering in his garage
when he experienced this strange event.
- What I heard was a rather thunderous boom,
and I'd never heard that sound before.
(thunderous boom)
When I posted my video to social media,
most people really felt that it was probably
extraterrestrial.
(thunderous boom)
- [Tony] Investigative journalist MJ Banias says
that while some viewers jumped to conclusions about UFOs,
many others pointed the finger at our very own air force.
- According to witness testimony,
this sound had a radius of about 30 miles.
So thousands of people in Pittsburgh heard this sound.
With any loud mystery boom sound,
people are gonna start theorizing as to what caused it.
The most common reason is that this was some sort
of aircraft breaking the sound barrier
or creating what we call a sonic boom.
All new aircraft that are being designed ultimately have a
sort of bar they have to reach,
and that's the current F 22 Raptor.
The F 22 can reach speeds of mach 2.5,
which is roughly 24,000 kilometers per hour,
and it can reach altitudes nearing 70,000 feet.
It's possible that something flew over Pittsburgh that day
and broke the sound barrier.
(thunderous boom)
- [Tony] Banias says there's another more
mysterious global phenomenon
that may help us explain what we're hearing in Pittsburgh.
- Some people theorize that what we're looking at is,
is a phenomenon known as sky quakes.
A sky quake is basically a loud boom sound
and there's some people who believe that it has a
supernatural explanation.
- [Tony] Check out this still unexplained sky quake
from San Diego last year.
(loud boom) (car alarm honking)
- We don't really know what causes sky quakes,
but we do know that people have recorded them.
So something is clearly causing these sounds to occur
and that is the big mystery.
(thunderous boom)
- In New York, sky quakes are known as Seneca Guns
after Seneca Lake and the central region of the state.
The sounds were immortalized in James Fennimore Cooper's
classic story, the lake gun.
To find out if Pittsburgh's famous three rivers could have
generated a similar effect, we turn to our experts.
(tense music)
First up, our new audio forensics expert, Ed Primeau.
- So in a jet breaking the sound barrier,
we would hear a gradual building in the amplitude
or the volume of the sound and then we would hear the boom
and then we would hear a trail off of that boom.
(sonic boom)
(thunderous boom)
I don't hear that in this sound.
So the sound here in question is not a jet
breaking the sound barrier.
- [Tony] Next we go to our meteorologist Juan Hernandez,
to test the theory that this might be related to the
mysterious phenomenon known as sky quakes.
(thunderous boom)
- Sky quakes are usually concentrated.
In this case it was heard across a large area.
Therefore it's more than likely something else
other than a sky quake.
(thunderous boom)
- [Tony] When Hernandez goes to look up
the weather conditions in Pittsburgh that day,
he makes a startling discovery.
Using the Geo 13 geothermal lightning mapper,
the National Weather Service reported
a flash on their satellite around 11:30 AM
the same time as the boom.
- It did pick up a couple of flashes that occurred out
in Western Pennsylvania and they were able to confirm
that it was definitely a bolide that was entering
the Earth's atmosphere.
A bolide is a meteorite that is coming towards the Earth.
- [Tony] But how could a bolide hurling toward Earth
go unseen and leave no trace of impact?
- [Juan] Whenever we're talking about meteorites
entering the Earth's atmosphere,
most of them actually burn up.
Now, unfortunately, it was a cloudy day,
but if it were to be nighttime,
this would've been something that those across
Western Pennsylvania would've definitely seen
if they were outdoors.
(thunderous boom)
(tense music)
- So it's a meteorite.
Every year the Earth is hit by about 6,000 of them
large enough to reach the ground.
That's about 17 a day.
The vast majority fall and go undetected
in uninhabited areas.
- Our next story has us baffled in part
because it's been widely misreported.
There is so much misinformation about this footage
that we're not quite sure what to say about it
other than, what's wrong with this dude?
It's September 2016 in the Appalachian Mountains
near Pembroke, Virginia.
Virginia Tech professor, Dr. Marcella Kelly's
ecology research team has set up dozens of trail cameras
around the mountain lake biological station to document
local wildlife populations like bears and bobcats
but after checking the photos one morning,
the researchers detect a much more peculiar creature.
At 6:53 PM, a strange man appears on one of the cameras,
stark naked.
For the next 20 seconds, a series of snapshots catches him
crawling around on camera.
Big deal, you'd think.
Well, there are 25 trail cam stations here,
most just over half a mile to a mile apart
and 23 minutes later he appears on another one.
The internet lights up,
theorizing that this man has somehow
run for miles on all fours as if possessed by an animal.
Marcella says these images came as a bit of a shock.
- We have gotten a lot of different interesting
animals doing really interesting things,
but the one animal that I didn't really expect to get
was a human naked man animal.
- [Tony] Journalist Erin McCarthy says
the legend grew in the press.
- European newspapers grabbed these photos
and they said that what we were looking at was a man
who had taken LSD to treat his depression,
started to think that he was a Siberian tiger,
picked up the scent of an animal
and ran 15 and a half miles totally naked.
- [Tony] So this story now involves liars and tigers,
but one part of the fake news merits investigation.
Might psychedelic drugs play a role in what happened here?
- LSD causes you to hallucinate.
It allows you to experience things that you wouldn't
necessarily experience in your everyday life.
PCP causes hallucinations,
but it also affects the pain receptors.
So people who are on PCP don't experience pain as much.
- [Tony] In another incident from July 2017,
a similarly nude man was said to be high on acid
when he mutilated himself,
vandalized cars and then fled from police in Chicago.
Shamans from indigenous tribes have long used hallucinogens
to supposedly do magical things like transforming
into animals.
Then there's the wild man theory.
Could this person have been raised in the woods?
We're all familiar with the story of Mowgli
from the Jungle Book.
Well, it turns out boys like Mowgli do exist.
- There was one child discovered in India in the 1950s
running around with some wolf cubs.
When he was captured, he refused cooked meat,
didn't wanna wear clothes, bit people,
basically he was just a wild, wild child.
- Strangely enough, this boy, Ramu,
is not the only so-called wolf child from India.
Going as far back as the 1800s,
there have been nearly 50 reports
of feral children being found on the subcontinent.
So is it possible we're looking at a real life Wolf man?
(tense music)
Biologist Dr. Stephanie Schuttler considers the theory
that this man could have grown up in the wilderness.
- I definitely don't think he was raised by animals.
He doesn't look like he really has been living in the wild.
You don't see any dirt on him, no scratch marks,
no scars or anything.
If there was truly a wild person, you would expect a beard
and really long, mangy hair and we're not really seeing that.
- [Tony] So is it possible that he was just high on drugs
and having a bad trip?
Anthropologist Kathy Strain says it's possible,
but that the drugs used in Native American rituals
are meant for a more sedate experience.
- Peyote ritual is very quiet.
The experience that they're having is in their bodies
and in their dreams and in their souls.
They don't usually get up and actually interact
or do movement.
They certainly wouldn't walk a mile or two
during that experience.
- [Tony] Yet Strain concedes that this man does show
some of the telltale physical signs of drug use.
- I can tell that he's under the influence
of something because his eyes are quite dilated.
They're dilated more than what you would expect
for just your eyes adjusting to the dark
or having a flash suddenly in your face.
- [Tony] So this man may be in an altered state of mind,
but after a thorough review of all the images,
we discovered he had his clothes while passing
at least one of the cameras.
So what does that mean?
- When you have a person who sees game cameras
and they decide to take off their clothes
and make sure they're captured on film
is because he wanted someone to see him nude.
It was a thrill for him.
(tense music)
- Our verdict,
this is an exhibitionist hiker who spotted some trail
cameras and decided to put on a show.
We can't know for sure if he was also
on some sort of substance,
but there is a new movement to use psychedelics
as a therapeutic treatment for conditions like addiction,
depression, and PTSD.
And that's our show for tonight.
Thank you so much for watching
and remember to keep those cameras rolling.
(dramatic theme music)