- Tonight on "The Proof Is Out There."
Did this video capture something off-world in the Amazon?
- You start to see a face.
It looks like its eyes and mouth are opening, are changing.
- [Tony] And is there a connection
to a famous missing explorer?
- It's rumored that he actually believed this
to be an outpost for some sort of extraterrestrial beings.
- [Tony] Some people thought
that this slab of meat was undead.
- It was speculated that the cow that this meat came from
was a victim of one of these folkloric demons.
- [Tony] Are these strange patterns discovered
on a lake bed a message?
- A lot of people online believe
you have these artificial patterns being dug
for the purpose of communication
with some otherworldly entity.
- [Tony] And does the murderous tale told on this rock
solve one of the greatest mysteries in American history?
- This stone, many believed, could provide a clue
for what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke.
[suspenseful music]
- [Tony] Around the globe are videos,
[witness screaming]
photos,
[entity screeching]
and sounds that defy explanation.
[air squeaking] [suspenseful music continues]
- [Observer] We don't know where they come from,
who made them or how they operate.
- [Tony] What are they?
- [Expert] Some sort of bizarre mutation.
- [Authority] What's exciting is nobody really knows.
- Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.
[fire whooshing] [victim thumping]
- 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.
- [Witness] It's coming towards us.
- [Tony] We'll analyze each one with top experts.
[vehicle thumping] - 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.
[suspenseful music]
Good evening and welcome to "The Proof Is Out There."
We know the Amazon rainforest
is home to some of the planet's most exotic creatures,
but could it also be sheltering life forms
not of this earth?
April 23rd, 2024, a group of conservationists flies a drone
over an undisclosed location in the Amazon.
Later when the team reviews the footage,
something odd appears, a spooky, alien-like creature
seems to be hiding among the green canopy of the forest.
Did you catch it?
The footage is blurry, but when we enhance it,
we see what appears to be a gray-colored being
nestled between the trees.
It looks to have a large bulbous head, a long thin body,
and with these oversized almond-shaped eyes,
it immediately invites comparison
to the classic gray aliens described by alleged abductees.
The footage adds to a long pattern
of strange Amazonian sightings.
Brazilian researcher Rony Vernet recently documented UFOs
near the villages of Amazonian indigenous tribes,
videos our experts still can't explain.
- It makes sense that a hyper- intelligent alien species
might use the Amazon to their advantage.
If you were an alien species
that didn't wanna panic the local human beings
living on the planet,
I think that is a reasonable spot to hide out.
- [Tony] Another theory is that this creature
is returning to a place
where aliens had prior contact with humans.
- In the early 1920s,
there was a British explorer named Percy Fawcett
and he actually uncovered an ancient Portuguese manuscript
that described an absolutely wondrous Amazonian city.
The city supposedly had crazy advanced architecture
and also very advanced knowledge
of astronomy and mathematics.
- [Tony] In his cryptic journals,
Fawcett hinted that the City of Z
was built by a long-lost advanced civilization
of spiritually-evolved entities.
Some believe he was referring to beings not of this earth.
- It's rumored that he actually believed this
to be an outpost for some sort of extraterrestrial beings
that had visited Earth millions of years ago.
- Some people have speculated
that perhaps that's why there are so many UFO sightings
and such alien interests in the Amazon.
[air whooshing]
- After years of searching for the Lost City of Z,
Percy Fawcett and his son vanished deep in the Amazon.
While many believe they were killed
by hostile tribes or succumbed to disease,
others speculate Fawcett
may have made first contact with beings not of this world.
Could this creature be connected?
Let's see what our experts think.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
Are we just not seeing the forest for the trees?
Some foliage can look like animals,
like this supposed dog man creature
that turned out to be a bush.
- As I rewatched it,
I did see something move and I do think
that it is actually something living in the forest.
- [Tony] This is what we're seeing. Here, you can
detect the creature's head turning to the left,
but could this really be an incognito extraterrestrial?
Before we run too far with that notion,
we need to rule out some other potential explanations.
- Although I do see resemblance physically to an alien,
I think there are much plausible
and logical answers as to what this is.
- There is a tremendous diversity of primates,
from capuchins to howler monkeys,
[monkey howling]
but they have very distinctive facial features
that would differentiate the monkeys
from what I'm seeing here.
This could be a young bird perched high up in the canopy
in perhaps a nest.
- The Amazon has many bird species.
One of them is the harpy eagle,
which is a really large bird of prey.
It looks like its eyes and mouth are opening or changing,
but I think shadow effects from light,
because remember, we're in the canopy here,
there's sun going through leaves.
So I think that's what we're seeing
that's creating that appearance
rather than an actual alien with a mouth and eyes.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
- Our verdict?
This is no alien, but a harpy eagle,
one of the largest and most powerful eagles in the world.
While it may not be extraterrestrial,
the harpy eagle is a legend unto itself.
Named after the harpies of Greek mythology,
these birds can build nests about five feet wide
and have talons as long as a grizzly bear's claws.
[air whooshing]
Now let's head home to North America
and one of the most important
and secretive sites in the United States.
The White Sands Missile Range
provides the United States armed forces
with the world's top research,
testing and training facilities,
and some believe this next video proves that research,
testing and training, has involved UFOs.
[suspenseful music]
In the mid-1990s in New Mexico,
a camera man is positioned in the desert
outside the White Sands Missile Range
when he aims his camera up at the sky and catches this.
A bright white object plummets diagonally toward the ground,
but when it strikes the earth, it doesn't explode.
Instead, it bounces, shooting back up into the air.
It almost looks like it's taking off into the sky
until finally, it descends once more,
this time exploding in a shower of debris.
Take another look at that bounce and crash.
This strange footage emerged at a 1997 UFO conference
and has been raising questions ever since.
- Some people have now speculated
that what we're seeing here is a UFO that has crashed
on the White Sands Missile Range,
one of the most mysterious, highly sensitive and secretive
US military installations in the United States
and quite possibly the world.
- [Tony] For this reason, people have speculated
that whoever took this video
worked for a secret government program.
- My colleague, who was a senior intelligence official,
testified to the American people and to Congress under oath.
- I was informed in the
course of my official duties
of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval
and reverse engineering program.
- [Tony] David Grusch says it all started
when the US government came into possession of a craft
that crashed in 1930s Italy.
- There's a memorandum by Mussolini himself
threatening people with their life
if they were to talk publicly about this crash.
It wasn't until after World War II
that the United States allegedly gained control
of this crash material.
- [Tony] Since then, Grusch says the US government
has allegedly been attempting
to reverse engineer that material.
- He actually testified that there is a secret arms race
that we have with other nations to try to crack the code,
if you will, on this technology before anybody else does.
- [Tony] So is this bouncing UFO a failed test flight?
Keep in mind, UFOs have been reported to bounce or skip.
Pilot Kenneth Arnold,
one of the earliest eyewitnesses of the UFO phenomenon,
said the UFO's he saw moved like a saucer would
if you skipped it across the water.
But there's another theory,
that it's not a reverse- engineered craft we've built,
but an actual alien craft crash landing.
Turns out there have been other sightings in this area.
- Believe it or not,
there is documentation from the US government
where UFOs were seen so common
in and around the White Sands Missile Range area
that there was a huge investigation conducted.
So listen to this.
"December 1948 through May 1950.
Phenomena have continuously occurred
in the New Mexico skies during the past 18 months
and are continuing to occur,
and these phenomena are occurring in the vicinity
of sensitive military and government installations."
[air whooshing]
- Based on what Elizondo said, we found another 1950 memo,
this one from the FBI.
It says three so-called flying saucers
had been recovered in New Mexico
and it indicates that our own high-powered radar
may have been what caused them to crash.
It seems something was going on then,
but what about this video?
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
To keep this investigation grounded,
we first asked if the video could be a hoax.
- It did come from some sort of tape,
but it has been recompressed, it has been processed.
When it gets to the last segment of the video,
there is a stabilization that was applied.
The danger with that is you are creating pixels
throughout that area that may not originally
have been in that evidence.
We would need that original tape or that native file
to be able to definitively confirm or deny authenticity.
So in this case, it's inconclusive.
- [Tony] So there's room for doubt,
but a 2024 report from a Pentagon whistleblower
may support the theory
that this could be a reverse-engineered craft.
It alleges that a government program
called Immaculate Constellation
collects and conceals UFO data in an effort so secret
the whistleblower fears execution for exposing it.
But just because the government might be hiding UFO videos,
it doesn't mean this is one of them.
- It doesn't quite match what we would consider
to be a traditional UFO
because it has what looks like some type
of propellant coming out of the tail,
and that is pushing it forward.
- [Tony] That matters because it's indicative
of a combustion engine, which produces exhaust.
By contrast, UFOs are thought
to have more advanced methods of propulsion.
- I would say 99.9% of the UFOs that we know of
don't leave any type of heat trail
or heat signature behind it or around it.
So it's probably a conventional construct that was built
to test out something at the White Sands Missile Range.
- [Tony] So what might that something be?
[missile whooshing]
- I think the luminous object that we see here
is not an object at all.
That's an artifact of the propulsion system of a missile
that as it's entering a terminal phase,
it skips off the ground and doesn't explode,
and then eventually comes back down and explodes.
- [Tony] A missile test at a missile range makes sense,
but is it consistent with the video?
Look closely, the object appears to pull up
as it careens toward the ground
as if attempting to avoid an impact.
- I would not hope to hear anything
about what was tested at White Sands anytime soon
because if they're testing something unusual
beyond a missile, we're not gonna hear about it.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
- Our verdict?
Unexplained object.
While we considered McMillan's missile theory,
this video is just lacking too much information
to draw an informed conclusion.
The video's inscrutability stands as a testament
to the military's ability to keep some things secret.
- Who doesn't love a good steak?
In 2022, Americans ate more than 13 million tons of beef,
followed closely by the Chinese,
who consumed close to 12 million.
But the next time you're in China,
you may want your beef cooked well done,
especially after seeing our next story.
December 2017, Fushun City, China,
a shopper returns home from her trip to the local butcher,
but when she throws her prized slab of meat
on the cutting board, something unappetizing happens.
The beef begins to twitch.
First, a piece of the midsection moves slightly,
but before long, the whole filet begins pulsating.
The slab of mysterious meat even appears to be breathing.
Many online speculated that the strange acting meat
could have been artificially grown inside a lab.
- There's a new technology called cellular agriculture
where you basically grow meat.
They take real muscle tissue from an animal
and then they grow more muscle tissue in a petri dish.
- [Tony] While others thought something, admittedly far out,
could be at play.
- Chinese folklore has a demon called a jiangshi.
It's kind of a cross between a vampire and a zombie.
Some people have speculated that the cow
that this meat came from
was a victim of one of these folkloric demons.
- [Tony] Just like Western vampires,
jiangshi are said to feed on the life force of the living.
According to some legends,
they are corpses whose physical bodies were reanimated
and puppeteered by a necromancer,
someone who can raise the dead.
- They can go after your pets, they can go after livestock,
and it just like wreaks havoc upon the environment.
You don't want one of these things in your neighborhood.
[air whooshing]
- Many people who watched this video were reminded
of a mad cow disease outbreak from the '90s,
where holes developed in the brains of infected animals,
causing them to act nervous, uncoordinated, even violent.
But in those cases, it was primarily the animal's brain
and spinal cord that were affected,
while the muscle tissue remained untouched.
So why is this meat twitching?
Let's check in with the experts.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
First, we checked to see if this meat
could be infested with worms, like many online suggested.
- There is a worm called trichinella, which is a parasite
that you can get from eating undercooked or raw meat.
Now, what people should know
and understand about trichinella
is that they're actually microscopic parasites.
So to think that something that small
would have the strength to move the muscle
of a piece of meat that big would be impossible.
- [Tony] And as far as the reanimating legends
of China's jiangshi are concerned,
even if those stories were true, in this case,
that's not what's happening.
- The Chinese folklore showed sentience and communication,
where the brain is still connected to the muscle
and commanding it on what to do.
That's not what we're seeing here.
This is a piece of meat
that's just spontaneously contracting.
- [Tony] So could this be a strange side effect
of meat manufactured in a lab?
- Now, lab grown meat doesn't look like this.
Lab grown meat is mushy, it's slushy, it's minced.
It looks like ground beef.
It doesn't look like these beautiful long muscle fibers.
- [Tony] Then what exactly is going on here?
- This is really spooky,
but the fact that it's still twitching actually indicates
that the quality of meat is really good
and that indeed it is really fresh.
The animal must have been recently butchered,
and it's likely that she put salt on it.
- Salt is actually sodium chloride
and these muscle cells have sodium channels on them
and if you douse 'em with salt,
it's gonna open up all those channels
and fire off the contractions.
- But this won't happen for much longer.
This only happens for a short period of time
after the animal is butchered.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
- Our verdict?
Salted muscle spasms.
Our experts agree, while it's very freaky,
this is nothing more than meat
from a recently butchered animal,
so recently its muscle cells are still able
to react to sodium chloride,
but if it's still twitching after a couple of days,
we may have a whole new story on our hands.
- As we've seen,
plenty of strange stories come out of China,
alleged dragon sightings, alien egg implants,
and that mystery meat we investigated earlier.
But if you think we dug deep on those stories,
wait till you see what some calling a sunken civilization.
November 11th, 2022, Yueyang, China.
Extreme heat and low rainfall
have caused a catastrophic drought in Dongting Lake.
But when a local resident flies a drone over the lake bed,
he wasn't expecting to find this.
At the bottom of the dried out lake, a pattern is revealed.
Seen from above, it looks like an enormous maze
has been carved into the lake bed's mudflats.
Local residents say that each of these huge,
strangely-shaped segments
is roughly the size of a soccer field.
- The footage went viral
on the Chinese social media app Douyin,
where videos of the patterns exploded
and received millions upon millions of views.
We had a lot of speculation as to what caused these.
- [Tony] Some wondered whether these exposed patterns
are anything like the mysterious Nasca lines of Peru.
- The Nasca lines were built thousands of years ago,
and when viewed from the sky,
you had images of various animals
and people and geometric patterns,
and some speculated that these were essentially a sort
of landing pad for alien spaceships.
- [Tony] Another theory is that these remnants
are connected to a lost continent called Mu,
popularized by British writer James Churchward.
- The idea is very similar
to the lost content of Atlantis.
Churchward did some traveling to India
where he began visiting various temples and monasteries
and he befriends this high priest in this temple,
who shows him these strange tablets that allegedly show
and describe this long-lost continent.
Churchward became convinced Mu existed somewhere
in the Pacific Ocean.
[air whooshing]
- This wouldn't be the first time
that an ancient Chinese ruin was found underwater.
In 2001, scuba divers stumbled upon an entire city
from the seventh century
submerged within the depths of a lake.
The ancient underwater city of Shicheng
was declared a protected historical relic.
Have we found another monument here?
Let's ask the experts.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
First, is this an ancient astronaut landing site similar
to what some believed is the purpose of the Nasca lines?
- This shows me no evidence
that this was any kind of a runway whatsoever,
and there's no evidence of any machinery
or anything left behind.
For example, I mean, the Mars rovers leave tracks behind.
They're actually shedding pieces of wire
or pieces of insulation,
but you see nothing like that in this region.
- [Tony] Could there be some connection
to the lost civilization of Mu?
The evidence doesn't seem to suggest so.
- The problem with that is that Mu, like Atlantis,
was supposed to be a fantastic,
very advanced civilization,
and what we see here on the ground,
if it's a settlement at all,
is a very humble and modest one, mostly loose gravel,
and that is no way to set a foundation,
not the kind of thing we would expect out of Mu.
- [Tony] Is it possible that what we're seeing
was caused by some natural underwater force,
like this artistic puffer fish
that we featured in a previous episode,
which sculpted sand on the sea floor
into beguiling patterns?
- I cannot think of a process
that would've created these elbow joints
and the little spots
and in a perfect rectangle or square like this.
This is almost certainly the hands of man.
- [Tony] If that's true,
who's responsible for building these structures,
and why'd they do it?
- The official conclusion of the Chinese government
is that these represent illegal fishing operations
involving short fences that trap the fish
during seasonal inundation.
- [Tony] A fish trap works by using water currents
to guide fish into a confined area where they become stuck.
Then the fish can easily be harvested at low tide.
But could there be something, well,
fishy about this explanation?
- I don't think the Chinese government
has a great track record
of properly publicly identifying unexplained things.
The government's conclusion
that something this geometrically complex
is simply to capture fish seems lacking in my opinion.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
- Our verdict?
Unexplained construction.
While we agree with Anderson and Barnhart
that this isn't Mu or an alien landing site,
there's no concrete evidence telling us exactly what it is,
who made it, or why.
- In 1587, about 120 English colonists founded a settlement
on Roanoke Island off the coast
of what is now North Carolina.
Three years later when a ship came to check on them,
they had all disappeared.
Can a stone found in the 1930s
finally solve this enduring mystery?
September 1937, Edenton, North Carolina.
Tourist Louis Hammond is taking a walk in the woods
along the Chowan River when he suddenly comes across this.
It's a stone with faded etchings.
On one side there's an inscription written by a woman
with the initials EWD,
saying her husband and child had passed away.
On the back, she writes that all but seven
of the Roanoke colonists were killed by Native Americans.
Hammond brought the stone to experts at Emory University.
- Right off the bat, Emory made a faculty
investigative team to examine this.
And so, you had
English professors and history professors
and scientists on the team.
They spent five days with this guy quizzing him,
and at the end, the historian at Emory,
he believed this is a real message from Eleanor Dare.
- The stone was signed EWD,
which was assumed to be Eleanor Dare,
John White's daughter.
John White was the leader of the Roanoke colony.
- [Tony] Until Dare's stone came along,
the only clue to what happened to colonists
was an eerie message found later at the settlement.
It said "Croatoan," which was the name of a local tribe.
- One theory is that the colonists actually moved inland
and were absorbed into local Native American tribes.
Others believed that they moved inland
and were actually killed by Native American tribes.
- [Tony] Believe it or not, another theory comes to us
from a clue scrolled invisible ink.
- In 2012, researchers were working with the British Museum
and they discovered this map
that was apparently created by John White.
The map had an invisible symbol on it that was created
with some kind of liquid,
and it's believed that this symbol indicated
where the Roanoke colony planned to make its capital.
- [Tony] Experts say that this symbol is of a fort.
- It was about 50 miles inland
from where the colonists originally settled.
So possibly they believe
that's where the members of the Roanoke colony were headed
when they left the island where they had been living.
- [Tony] Could John White's map tell us what happened
to the colonists?
For now, the stone remains the one piece
of archaeological evidence that spells out
what might have happened to these lost souls.
[air whooshing]
After the discovery of the Dare Stone,
a $500 reward was offered for anyone
who found anything similar.
A number of people came forward
with their own stones, like this one,
but their discoveries were all deemed forgeries.
So is the original Dare Stone real
and can it help us figure out just what happened
to these lost colonists once and for all?
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
Is it possible that the Dare Stone,
like the forgeries that cropped up in its wake,
is also just a hoax?
- People that have looked at the letters themselves
are doubtful that they came from the time period
of the colony,
because it's not the kind of script
that the average person would write in
during the late 1500s.
- People have suggested
that maybe a chemical was used on the stone
to make it look like it's weathered.
Well, that's not readily available in the 1930s.
Plus, you can't really fake having edges
of etching worn down.
When you carve into a rock, you wanna leave behind something
that you can easily read.
But over time, those really sharp edges
are going to show examples of weathering.
It's gonna start not being so sharp on the edges.
- [Tony] So the stone may or may not be real,
but what about its message?
Was the colony wiped out in an attack or assimilated?
- I would think if I was a great chief
that had decimated this colony of Europeans,
that those artifacts would be highly prized,
and I'd be showing them off,
except those artifacts don't ever show up again.
- [Tony] Or do they?
In June 2025,
archaeologists announced they discovered iron flakes
in 16th and 17th century soil layers on Hatteras Island,
near where the settlers disappeared.
They say these flakes are evidence of blacksmithing,
which wasn't known to Native Americans of that era
and believe it proves
that the missing colonists were assimilated.
But the discovery of a fort drawn in invisible link
on John White's map suggests yet another possible fate.
- The map was recently reexamined in the British Museum
and they found a fort-like structure about 50 miles inland.
Recent excavations have also found artifacts
at this location that are distinctly European.
And so, they haven't yet found anything
that they can directly tie back to Roanoke,
but it's an interesting possibility
that really they just moved and you couldn't find them.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
- Our verdict?
Unexplained.
Like our experts, we're not only stumped
as to what happened to the colonists,
but the question of the Dare Stone's authenticity
still appears to be uncertain,
and there are no supporting artifacts
to confirm its murderous narrative.
In short, we're between a stone
and a hard place on this one.
- Antarctica is a place of extremes,
an ice sheet covers 98% of the continent,
and it remains, arguably,
one of the most unexplored places on the planet.
So when we saw the weird iceberg in this next video,
we had to ask, what does it mean?
October 16th, 2018,
the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
Operation Icebridge,
NASA's longest-running aerial survey of polar ice,
is flying over this 47,000- square-mile ice sheet.
As the plane surveys the frozen coastline,
something strange appears on the horizon,
and the team captures this.
A massive perfectly- cut rectangular iceberg
stands out in the surrounding sea ice.
Let's take a closer look.
It's 90-degree angles appear so precise
and the walls of the iceberg so smooth,
it looks like nature operating with such precision
that this rectangle must have a meaning.
- Some believe that this is an example
of something known as sacred geometry,
which is the idea that geometric shapes in nature
are sending some kind of message
or have some kind of symbolic meaning.
- [Tony] Perhaps one of the most famous examples
of sacred geometry is what's known as the golden rectangle.
Its sides are in a mathematical proportion
called the golden ratio.
This ratio, roughly one to 1.618,
is said to create a sense of visual balance.
- Is someone trying to tell us something
through these shapes?
Some even believe that they are the building blocks
of the universe.
- [Tony] And it's not just an earthly phenomenon.
Beguiling rectangular shapes
have even been found in the cosmos.
- There's the Red Rectangle nebula HD 44179,
which is a star 2,300 light years away
in the constellation Monoceros.
This star is dying,
and it is shedding material out into space,
and that material creates a rectangular shape
around the star.
- [Tony] Or, if it's not nature,
some are asking if the iceberg in Antarctica
might be part of an unknown structure.
- In 2018, a journalist named Linda Howe
interviewed someone who was a first lieutenant commander
with Naval Special Operations,
and he claimed that in August 2003,
he and his team were sent out
to the southeast coast of Antarctica
to investigate a structure sticking up 18 feet out
of the ice.
When they went inside,
they supposedly saw an illuminated space with walls
that had a bunch of intricate symbols on them,
but they didn't look like
any hieroglyphics we would be familiar with.
[air whooshing]
- In the 1982 John Carpenter classic, "The Thing,"
a team of scientists in Antarctica
discover an alien spacecraft
and encounter a fearsome extraterrestrial being
that wreaks havoc on their research station.
Whether or not what we're seeing on the Larsen C Ice Shelf
is something to be feared,
it certainly merits more investigation.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
Is this remarkable rectangle just random
or proof of sacred geometry?
- I tend to think that throughout the universe,
you are gonna find different kinds of geometries,
but they're not sacred.
- [Tony] So what does science say
about our Red Rectangular nebula?
Well, for one thing, despite its name,
it's not a rectangle, it's an X.
- My personal point of view
is that we're looking at a double star system,
two neutron stars rotating around each other.
Each star has a north pole and a south pole,
and when they circulate around each other,
it creates the illusion of an X.
- [Tony] The star at the center could actually be two stars
that orbit each other.
Left to themselves, the forces of nature
can randomly create some remarkable shapes
the human mind interprets as intentional,
especially with ice.
Look at this iceberg
that bears a striking resemblance to Batman,
or this ice grim reaper created
by a winter storm in Ontario.
And as for our rectangle?
- In this case, we're looking at a tabular iceberg.
It takes hundreds of years for this iceberg to become flat
through wind and storms that have moved through the area.
For that reason, when a rift happens,
the rift will often create those rectangular cuts
that we see.
The rift probably happened two, three, maybe four years ago.
The reason we have such sharp 90-degree angles
is because it hasn't been weathered enough.
- [Tony] In other words, this tabular iceberg is too young.
Over time, wind and weather will reshape it
into something less than perfect.
- [Juan] The wind, the waves,
the sea spray has not taken a toll on those sharp edges.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
- Our verdict?
Natural, young iceberg.
As for the geometry,
it's certainly impressive, but sacred?
That's up to you.
- Deep in the Himalayan mountains,
more than 16,000 feet above sea level
is a secluded body of water
that some call Skeleton Lake.
Why Skeleton Lake?
Well, that's the mystery.
1942, Chamoli, Uttarakhand, India.
A forest ranger is patrolling along Roopkund Lake
in the Himalayan Mountains
when he discovers something disturbing.
Photos from his moment of discovery aren't available,
but here's something better.
This is recent footage
of skeletal remains scattered throughout the site.
There are anywhere from 300 to 800 human skeletons here,
and no one's quite sure why.
Was it some ancient massacre, a bizarre disaster?
- When I saw the skeletal remains,
it was a mystery to be solved.
We wanted to know more about them,
like why these skeletons
are lying out there
in such a huge number.
We do not exactly know how many individuals are there.
- [Tony] The area around the lake has been excavated
and studied by researchers for years,
but no one has unlocked its secrets.
- One theory is that the skeletons at the lake
actually belong to dead soldiers,
and we've seen something similar
in a different area of India.
In 2014, literally hundreds of skeletons
were discovered at the bottom of a well in Punjab.
Experts found that those skeletons actually belonged
to Indian soldiers who had been executed by British forces
following a mutiny in 1857.
- [Tony] Mass graves have been discovered around the world
as murderous regimes have tried
to cover up their war crimes.
- An act of war isn't the only theory.
Some actually believe that the skeletons belong to people
who are victims of a natural disaster,
specifically a hailstorm.
The deadliest hailstorm on record
occurred in northern India
in April 1888.
Some 246 people died,
and the hailstones were said to be as big as oranges.
Could something similar have happened
to the people who ended up at Skeleton Lake?
[air whooshing]
- There's a growing concern about theft at Roopkund Lake.
Tourists have been swiping
skeletal souvenirs from the site.
Experts say that if the bones aren't protected,
they may gradually vanish in the years to come.
But how did these bones get there in the first place?
Let's ask our experts.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
A 2019 forensic examination of the remains
revealed even more mysteries.
- They did a study that included radiocarbon dating and DNA,
and what they found was there were males,
females, and some died just a few hundred years ago,
and some died more than a thousand.
Also, the vast majority come from South Asia.
However, there is some DNA
from people that originated in Crete,
which is thousands of miles away.
- [Tony] But what force could have taken so many lives
from such wide ranging locations and time periods?
- Most myths are born out of a fragment of truth.
In this case, it may be that this area
has a lot of hailstorms, and in 2004,
an expedition went to this location
and they found deep fissures on their heads
and their skulls and on their upper bodies
likely caused from a tremendous hailstorm,
and that's probably what killed them.
- India is notorious for having very large hail,
hail that spans from two to four inches in diameter.
Imagine baseballs falling from the sky.
That can create a lot of damage to someone's property
or even lead to the loss of life.
- You can see the terrain is, is that it's very rugged.
You got ice on all four sides here,
which means when it gets a little bit warmer,
some of that ice melts
and then you'll get a lot of avalanches or landslide debris.
All those people down below or up at near the top,
they'd all be just carried
or buried instantly down that area
at the bottom of the lake.
- [Tony] So the evidence points to this lake being a place
that's killed people across different eras
and from wildly different places,
almost as though it carries a curse.
- When you have people
from different places and different centuries,
there's a possibility
that there were different causes of death.
So there's more research that needs to be done.
- [Tony] As to why these bones have been arranged in piles,
that's one part of this mystery we can solve.
- It's clear to me that people in the past
have taken those bones together
and just stacked them out of maybe reverence for 'em.
[air whooshing] [suspenseful music]
- Our verdict?
Deadly hail.
And by the way, some have wondered
if the discovery of Greek DNA here
comes from descendants
of Alexander the Great's invasion of India,
but the evidence doesn't support that.
So for now, the research continues.
But what do you think?
Send us an email and let us know.
That's our show for tonight.
Thank you so much for watching
and as always, keep those cameras rolling.
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