- Tonight on "The Proof Is Out There."
A photo bomb in Brazil.
Did this man capture a UFO while snapping a selfie?
- He alleges that his home was raided
by soldiers looking for more evidence.
- [Tony] Could a massive burst of energy
be a sign that we are not alone?
- Some say that the burst of energy would be something
that's propelling a giant spacecraft.
- [Tony] A mystery over Skinwalker Ranch?
What's this flying above one
of America's most notorious paranormal hotspots?
- I was about to pass Skinwalker Ranch.
They were just leapfrogging between clouds.
I was so dumbfounded.
- [Tony] A mysterious Roman artifact.
Did the ancients master stunning modern technology?
- There are some who believe
that the Lycurgus Cup is so advanced
that the Romans simply could not have created it themselves.
- [Tony] And, a gigantic creature is lurking
by the side of a road.
Is it a hungry Bigfoot?
- Sasquatches are known scavengers.
People have reported seeing these things eating roadkill.
- Around the globe are videos,
[witness screaming]
photos,
And sounds that defy explanation.
[electric whirring]
- [Expert] We don't know where they come from,
who made them, or how they operate.
- [Tony] What are they?
- [MJ] Some sort of bizarre mutation.
- [Marc] What's exciting is nobody really knows.
- 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.
- [Witness] It's coming towards us.
- [Tony] We'll analyze each one with top experts.
- It's a credible case, it's a credible video.
- [Tony] And pass a verdict on what it is.
- This video was clearly faked.
- The proof starts now.
[dramatic music]
Good evening and welcome to "The Proof Is Out There."
Can you guess the Oxford English Dictionary's
Word of the Year for 2013?
It wasn't swag, it wasn't YOLO.
It was selfie.
That means both the word
and the pictures have become commonplace.
But have you ever seen a selfie photobombed by a UFO?
You're about to.
It's 2011 at Chapada Diamantina National Park in Brazil.
Eddie Moralez is driving out
to a remote waterfall when he says
he notices a mysterious craft hovering above his car.
Eddie quickly jumps out of the vehicle
and makes a run for it, but not before capturing this.
A perfectly spherical orb appears to float
behind a visibly shocked Eddie.
He takes several photos with the object,
each one adding to the mystery.
In some, the objects appear metallic.
Others show what look like three
small landing lights around the bottom.
But Eddie isn't out of the woods yet.
- According to Eddie, he was unable
to start the car immediately after his sighting.
And there's a lot of accounts
where people see objects hovering in the sky
and experience car trouble.
Electrical systems fail,
and the belief is that the UFO is somehow disrupting
the electrical signals from the technology.
- [Tony] When Eddie finally does make it home,
he shares the photos online,
dubbing them the first ever UFO selfies.
The pictures draw massive attention,
but according to Eddie, it's not all good.
- He alleges that his home
was raided by soldiers
in military camouflage, looking for more evidence.
And they subjected him to intense interrogation,
so intense, in fact, that he was hospitalized as a result.
- [Tony] According to some, this wouldn't be the first time
the Brazilian government has concealed claims
of UFO activity.
It all goes back to one
of the country's most famous UFO cases,
which occurred 34 years prior and about 1,000 miles north
in a town called Colares.
- The Colares UFO incident of 1977
is what we call a mass sighting.
So several hundred people in the town saw strange lights,
and several alleged that they were injured by these lights.
- [Tony] The Brazilian Air Force even
investigated the claims, in an effort
known as Operation Prato, which means Operation Saucer.
- Officially, the Brazilian government has come out
and said that it found no evidence of anything unusual.
However, some ufologists believe
that that's simply a coverup.
- [Tony] So what's going on in Brazil?
Maybe Eddie's photos can reveal the truth.
- A lot of people online believe that the base
of this round object, that reflective part,
shows distant worlds
and acts as a sort of portal to a far away place.
There's people who believe that what Eddie saw
was not necessarily a UFO as an object,
but rather a portal to another dimension.
[camera clicks]
- I'm terrible at this.
Selfies are usually meant to capture our best selves,
but they can capture a lot more than that.
For example, in March of 2025,
a South Carolina thief accidentally snapped a selfie
while stealing a trail cam from someone's home.
Take a look at that.
He captured proof of his own crime.
But did Eddie's selfie capture proof of a UFO?
[tense music]
- We don't see any propulsion system.
We don't see any flight control surfaces.
There aren't many conventional objects
that can maintain a perfect spherical shape in flight.
- [Tony] True, but we can think of one.
- I think, perhaps, one of the more plausible theories
is that this might be some kind of spherical drone,
which is usually a permeable shell
around a coaxial drone,
but it looks a little bit too solid
to be that type of drone to me.
- [Tony] Then could this be something as simple
as a water droplet on the camera lens?
- This looks a little bit like a drop of water,
but water drops on the lens,
even if you use a macro lens, aren't in focus.
You actually have to have the water drop
some distance away from the lens.
If you put the drop on the lens, you don't see that shape.
So this is not a water drop on the lens.
- [Tony] So could it just be a balloon?
- I can't see a tether or string to the object
that might indicate it's a balloon,
but at the same time we know that, you know,
balloons can be spherical,
and so this could quite easily be some type
of a mylar party balloon
where you're looking at the back side of it,
giving you that reflective quality.
- [Tony] Of course, that would call
Eddie's entire story into question,
and maybe it should.
- We're led to believe that something shut down
the electronics in the eyewitness' vehicle
but evidently had no effect on his camera phone
or whatever he filmed the pictures with.
- I don't think people will be taking the time
to take selfies if there was a weird object
floating around in the sky.
[tense music]
- Our verdict, this is a hoax made possible by a simple,
spherical balloon.
But as far as we're concerned,
that Colares case is still open.
Some people, including our own Lou Elizondo,
are convinced the Brazilian government hasn't released
all the information they have.
We'll be ready when they do.
Now let's talk about weaponry.
If you're a "Star Wars" fan, like I am,
you've probably dreamed of wielding a real-life lightsaber
or firing a blaster gun,
but that's impossible, right?
Well, we know that military technology is rapidly advancing,
and this next video might be proof of a laser weapon
that could change everything.
It's March 2023, at an unknown location.
It seems to be an ordinary night
until something strange flits across the landscape.
This cell phone video shows a series
of red beams firing down from the sky
into a fenced-off area.
As each beam approaches the ground, it takes a sharp turn,
shooting straight toward the fence
and whipping by the camera.
Watch how the beams seem to pass through the fence.
They don't destroy it,
but they do appear to disturb it
as if warping space in their wake.
Many are quick to speculate
that the beams could be some sort of laser
or directed energy weapon.
- What a directed energy weapon is
is nothing more than taking a band
of the electromagnetic spectrum,
and then using that to either intercept missiles,
for example, high-energy lasers,
or even fry an enemy's communication system.
- [Tony] But if it's a directed energy weapon,
whose is it?
- People may be surprised to learn that the US government
and her adversaries have had a deep
and rich involvement in the development
of directed energy type weapons.
And so every year, there's new developments in this.
- [Tony] Believe it or not, this footage
of a US-made laser weapon dates all the way back to 1973,
and the technology has only gotten better
and more widespread in the years since.
- In fact, handheld laser weapons are being used
in the field by soldiers today.
We have a video from November of 2021
that shows a conflagration between Polish
and Belarusian troops.
[beeping]
And the Belarusian troops appear to be using a laser weapon
to blind their Polish counterparts.
- [Tony] There's also space-based
laser technology, like this mysterious sight,
caught on camera in the skies
over Hawaii in 2023.
That video sparked fear
that laser weapons firing down from space may be closer
than we realize.
The US military officially started researching directed
energy weapons in the 1960s.
After all this time,
is it possible someone else is beating us in the directed
energy arms race?
We asked our experts to take their best shots.
[tense music]
First, the good news.
Those green lasers over Hawaii turned out
to be pollution-detecting LiDAR, not a weapon.
And when it comes to our video,
we know that real laser weapons look less like "Star Wars,"
and more like those Belarusian beams.
- You're not going to see them as we do in this video,
so definitely isn't any type of sophisticated,
classified, or secret direct energy weapon.
- [Tony] So is it a faked video?
Looking closer, we find an important clue.
- What we're seeing here looks like slowed down video
of something that's actually moving a lot faster,
because we see these long streaks.
So it seems to be footage that has been slowed down
that has a lot of motion blur.
- [Tony] And there's something else off about it.
- It looks like this video has been reversed.
The biggest tell is the fact that when they're coming down,
they're coming from different points on the screen,
whereas they're all going back to a single source.
- With the video slowed down to its original speed
and reversed,
the origin and identity of the beams becomes clear.
- What we're seeing here is very consistent to me
with tracer fire,
which is a type of munition that has a pyrotechnic in it
that allows someone to see
where they're firing at nighttime.
And then the upward movement
is the actual pyrotechnic going up
after the bullet itself impacts with the target.
- [Tony] That means the beams aren't going through the fence,
they're being shot by someone inside of it.
But then how come the chain links on the fence
look like the bullets are hitting and moving them?
- When you slow down a video
to make things seem to move slower,
you actually have to create additional frames.
It seems to be using a frame blending technique
called obstacle flow or motion flow,
where the algorithm tries to figure out,
from previous frames, what should be in the next frame.
- [Tony] West demonstrates with a video
of himself waving a flashlight,
- I take that same video
and turn it to 1/4 speed with optical flow
and you see straight away the light itself looks like
it's moving correctly,
but the background is being distorted.
So this is exactly the same thing
that is happening in this video.
[tense music]
- Our verdict, tracer fire.
This video is not proof of an advanced laser attack.
It's a hoax.
But be advised, in 2024,
the Belarusian Defense Ministry announced plans
to develop more laser weapons based on, quote,
"New physical principles."
We will be on the lookout for those weapons
in the near future.
- The only place more Bigfoot-ish
than Washington State and Oregon,
is Canada,
where the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization
has documented more than 300 credible
reports of the creature.
Can we add this next video to the list?
March 4th, 2007, a man and his son
are driving down a back road in Peguis, Manitoba,
when they spot something strange up ahead.
The son quickly grabs his dad's video camera
and captures this.
The shot zooms in, and we're able to see
a blurry figure from a good distance away,
emerging from behind a ridge.
It's dark and uniform in color,
with a bouncy step and arms swinging widely at its sides.
The camera shakes,
and by the time we're back on the figure,
it's disappearing into the forest.
According to the experts, there's an interesting reason
so many Bigfoot sightings
happen next to major roadways.
- Roadkill.
Sasquatches are known scavengers.
That's a very easy food supply.
And if you're gonna walk the roadsides looking
for dead animals to eat,
that's an efficient way to bring calories in
without expending practically any.
And, you know, about half of Sasquatch reports
happen as road crossings.
- [Tony] And in Manitoba, Sasquatch sightings
go back nearly a century.
- One of the most compelling stories happen in 1941
to a 17-year-old named Peter.
He was hunting meat for his family.
He was out there and he saw a moose,
and he took a shot at it, and dropped it.
But as he approached, he was aghast
to see a human-shaped figure covered in hair,
lying dead on the ground in front of him.
- [Tony] According to the story,
the young hunter was perplexed as to what he had shot,
since the term Bigfoot hadn't even been invented yet.
- He estimates the animal was probably
at least 7.5 or 8 feet, and he was terrified.
He thought he might have killed somebody.
But he started looking into Bigfoot stuff himself
and a researcher named Kurt Nelson came along.
And Kurt recorded this story 62 years after it happened.
- The late comedian Mitch Hedberg may have put it best
when he said, "Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem.
It's not the photographer's fault."
Maybe so, Mitch, but we still need to get to the bottom
of this blurry Bigfootage.
[tense music]
First things first,
could this possibly be the misidentification of a bear,
since this particular region is filled with them?
- The northern area of Manitoba is one
of the only places in the world where all three species
of North American bears coexist.
The American black bear, the grizzly bear,
and the polar bear.
However, although bears stand on their hind legs
when they're curious
or they're trying to get a better view of something,
they rarely just walk around on their back two legs
when they could be using all four.
- [Tony] So, could this bipedal beast
be a Canadian Sasquatch?
- Especially interesting is the line between the shoulders
and the upper back of the head.
Instead of a contour of the back of the skull
and the taper of the neck as in the human,
there's a remarkably straight line from shoulder to head.
This is kind of suggestive of the Sasquatch
because of its very high attachment on the skull.
On the other hand, I must say, it looks
remarkably like a hoodie.
- [Tony] And as far as the figure itself is concerned,
there are some red flags.
- Sasquatch descriptions by eyewitnesses
usually describe something
that's much bulkier, that's much larger.
It's almost like a gorilla on long legs.
Whereas this has the proportions
and the slenderness of a typical person.
- [Tony] And it's not just the figure itself that's suspicious.
- The person who recorded it does not want to be interviewed.
It seems like they are trying to be low-key about it,
but still put it out there.
If they really did find something incredible,
why wouldn't they want to talk about it?
- [Tony] So we dug deeper,
and found out local police reports said
a hoaxer was running rampant in the area.
- At this time and in this vicinity,
the mounties apprehended a youngster
who was terrorizing campers
with a gorilla costume.
[tense music]
- Our verdict, whether this was a merry prankster or not,
we agree this figure is definitely human,
but our friends from the north
are still furiously hunting the creature.
In fact, a recent Canadian man's obsession
with the beast was cited in a judge's decision
about paying alimony in his divorce.
That's about as real as it gets.
- [Tony] Utah's world famous paranormal hotspot,
Skinwalker Ranch, is 512 acres of anomalous activity.
The site has been monitored for decades,
but have you ever wondered what goes on
just outside the property?
In this next video, one local
saw something down the road from Skinwalker Ranch
that she couldn't explain and we couldn't ignore.
November 6th, 2022, it's 5:00 PM
in a region of Utah known as Uinta Basin.
Jessica Blunt is driving her bus down Highway 191
when she notices something out of the ordinary
materializing in the sky.
- I continued driving, but I watched it for a few minutes
before I could even grasp that something was happening.
- [Tony] Jessica pulls over to the side of the road
and records this.
Two amorphous lights float high above a group
of trees at sunset.
As the left light drifts to the side,
another seems to drop from the light on the right.
Then, the lights undulate and morph a bit
before dissolving into the air one after the other.
- This thing had to have been several football fields wide.
It shifted from this dome shape
into this triangular shape,
and it like, opens out and then just disappeared.
- [Tony] The sighting leaves Jessica confounded.
- I haven't been able to find anybody that could say
that it is a explainable object,
but I would love to know if anybody else
has seen anything like it.
- [Tony] As it turns out, plenty of people
have seen plenty of things right around here.
That's because Jessica's sighting is just down the road
from the legendary Skinwalker Ranch.
- We have these very, kind of spooky tales.
There have been stories of strange animal mutilations.
There have been stories of ghost sightings.
There have been stories of UFO and UAP sightings.
There have been stories of strange electrical phenomena,
and apparitions, and that type of thing.
- I've been to Skinwalker Ranch myself.
And while our team didn't experience anything unusual
that particular day,
other visitors have reported strange symptoms like vertigo,
nausea, and even temporary paralysis.
Is Jessica's sighting tied to the ranch's uncanny energy?
[tense music]
Before we start scanning for Skinwalkers,
could these strange shapes
actually be something completely normal?
- It could be a distant cloud that is only illuminated
in the very top portion of the cloud.
This is due to the curvature of the Earth as the sun is setting.
However, we don't have any clouds reported
anywhere across northeastern Utah
on November 6th, 2022.
- [Tony] Okay, not clouds, fine.
But Utah is home to several military bases
like the Dugway Proving Ground.
Could we be looking at something
made by afterburners from a fighter jet?
- This could potentially explain
why there's a pair of features,
if we're talking about a pair of engines on a jet.
However, this would not explain why these two features
are not perfectly the same and symmetric in their behavior.
With jet afterburners, you're typically gonna see
a shock, diamond, or ring formation.
That's not exactly what we see in this video.
- [Tony] Instead, we consider another feature of the area.
- There are a lot of oil
and gas fields across the Uinta Basin.
About 280 billion cubic feet
of gas are extracted every year.
My leading theory is that what we're looking at
is gas flares due to the oil and gas fields.
- Gas flaring is the practice of burning excess gas,
often to relieve pressure and prevent explosions.
- There might be a stack in this general vicinity.
We just can't see it
because the sun is starting to set,
it's getting dark out there.
Maybe there's some fog or something
that is impeding our visibility.
This area has always been known for peculiar sights,
but I don't believe it's a UFO.
If it is a UFO, then it needs to call the fire department.
[tense music]
- Our verdict, given all the oil
and gas fields in the Uinta Basin,
we think the probability Jessica saw fire
from a gas flare is high.
But that doesn't explain all the other strange phenomena
on Skinwalker Ranch.
We think the probability we'll see more oddities in the area
is also high.
- "Islands in the Stream" is a famous duet
between Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.
If we could afford to license it,
we would be playing it right now.
Well, you know, it might also be the perfect title
for our next story, in which a pair of islands
seemingly move or float to their own beat.
Check it out.
July 10th, 2022,
Begansar Protected Lake, Indonesia.
It's an overcast afternoon,
but a serene moment by the lake is broken
when an eyewitness sees something
shifting in the landscape and records this.
What at first appears to be an ordinary stand of trees
reveals itself to be an island on the move.
Moments later, we can see a second small landmass
following in the wake of the first.
In this sped-up footage,
we can see these strange islands rotating
and changing direction.
- According to some estimates,
as many as 50 people have hitched a ride
around the lake on these land masses.
And according to the people who live around the lake,
they actually move in a recognizable pattern.
They begin their journey around 8:00 AM, and by 3:00 PM,
they're back in their original position.
- [Tony] It's almost as though these islands are alive
or being moved by a sentient force.
- There's an Indonesian legend about a large,
snake-like creature called Naga Padoha
that lives in the underworld and is said to support
and even move around the Earthly realm above.
But there's also a more scientific explanation
for what might be happening with these islands.
According to one paleobiologist,
he's actually seen trees move 65 feet
in search of better soil or better sun,
a process that he says takes up to two years.
So could the trees on these islands actually be
looking for better light?
- [Tony] And islands do move for other reasons.
- In 2019, a husband and wife team of Australian sailors
encountered this extraordinary floating landmass
in the midst of their voyage to the Fiji Islands.
It was 58 square miles,
about the size of 20,000 football fields,
and it was later identified
as a textbook example of a floating pumice raft.
A pumice raft is a landmass
of porous, soft pumice stone.
Active underwater volcanoes
spew out lava.
As this lava cools,
it congeals into pumice stone,
which can form, essentially, a floating island.
- It is a scientific fact
that all land on Earth is on the move.
Experts say that, on average,
land masses naturally move at a rate
of about 1.5 centimeters a year.
Incidentally, that's about the same growth rate
as our toenails.
But these islands are moving much farther
and faster than that.
So what exactly is pulling the strings here?
Let's check with the experts.
[tense music]
Some wonder if this could simply be an optical illusion,
known as the parallax effect,
which we've seen before.
Is that what's happening here?
- With optical illusions like parallax,
if something is closer to the camera and it's being recorded
and the camera is moving at a high rate of speed,
it can make it look like the thing
that we're passing is moving at a high rate of speed.
In this case, different situation.
We have a stationary camera and an object that's moving,
thus giving a fixed perspective
and not the result of an optical illusion like parallax.
- [Tony] What about that pumice raft theory?
Well, it won't float.
We checked, and there are no reports
of an underwater volcano here to form one,
but the answer might be a different geological phenomenon.
- There is a plant that, it grows in this water
and it actually has the consistency to hold together
and form, like a mat.
And what you see is this mat is broken off
and it's moving with respect to the water currents.
- [Tony] These masses, called tussocks,
typically occur in wetland areas
when growths of vegetation
move outward from the shoreline and break off.
As the land mass floats into deeper waters,
it uses the oxygen in its root mass for buoyancy.
- Although these islands here are very similar
to floating islands,
they're unique in Indonesia because of their size.
You don't normally see these large trees
and everything forming and floating on these things
in the other parts of the world.
[tense music]
- Our verdict, natural phenomenon.
We agree with our experts that these islands are tussocks
propelled by the water's current.
Let's just hope they don't stray too far
before our next trip to Indonesia.
- In ancient Rome, there was no shortage
of lasting innovation.
Consider the massive aqueducts,
one of which still feeds into the Trevi Fountain
more than 2,000 years after its construction.
But what we are about to show you
is such a wonder of design,
it's a mystery how the Romans ever made it.
Rome, the fourth century AD.
The empire begins a monumental conversion to Christianity.
But before the pagan gods are banished altogether,
one is immortalized in an object
as mysterious as it is beautiful.
This is the Lycurgus Cup.
Its carved glass depicts the mythological conflict
between the cup's namesake, King Lycurgus of Thrace,
and the Roman god of wine, Bacchus.
When the cup is lit from the front, it appears a jade green,
but watch it as it transforms
into a ruby red when it's lit from behind.
How is this possible?
- One of the reasons the Lycurgus Cup attracts
so much attention now is because
it's an early example of nanotechnology.
So, you've got these minute particles,
literally hundreds of atoms across, in the glass.
In the case of the Lycurgus Cup,
they're made of an alloy of gold and silver.
- [Tony] Hang on.
Nanotechnology is a modern innovation, right?
That's how, today, we make dichroic glass,
famed for changing color based on light exposure.
The very concept of nanotechnology
wasn't introduced until 1959.
So how can we explain the ancient Romans using it
to create this cup at least 1,600 years ago?
- There are some who believe that the Lycurgus Cup
is so advanced that the Romans simply
could not have created it themselves.
You might think this sounds kind of far out there,
but the annals of imperial Rome actually have
what some people believe are encounters with UFOs.
One from the year 100 BC has two Roman consuls
seeing an unknown circular object
in the sky, moving from west to east.
That's made some people wonder if the Lycurgus Cup's
advanced technology was actually given to the Romans
by ancient astronauts.
- [Tony] This isn't the only example
of a seemingly advanced Roman artifact
whose origins have been lost to time.
- There's another bizarre piece
of Roman technology called the dodecahedra.
They're these 12-sided bronze objects.
Hundreds of experts have posed guesses
as to what these things could be,
from a weapon, to a talisman for good luck,
to a device for divination.
So the verdict is still out on that one.
- How advanced is the Lycurgus Cup?
Well, scientists are studying it
in an effort to improve cloaking technology.
Theoretical simulations suggest
that modifications in the cup can turn objects
placed inside it invisible.
How did the ancients create this remarkable artifact?
We turn now to our experts to find out.
[tense music]
With technology this advanced, is it possible
that extraterrestrials really were involved?
- We would expect in the vast corpus of Roman art
to find at least one example that clearly was
some sort of extraterrestrial teaching techniques.
And yet, we have nothing like that.
- [Tony] But perhaps the Romans
did represent extraterrestrials in their art all the time.
Some have argued that images of Roman gods
with all their assorted powers are interpretations
of extraterrestrials.
That includes gods like the one carved into the cup, Bacchus.
- People suggest that perhaps this is the God
who taught them this kind of technology,
being extraterrestrial.
But Bacchus is a party god [transition whooshing]
He's in charge of fun and libations and drunkness.
And if we were gonna see one connected to technology,
we'd expect perhaps Vulcan
or another god that was connected to craftsmen.
- [Tony] But we still have to explain
how the Romans mastered nanotechnology.
- The gold and silver particles
that create the color change effect are approximately
50 nanometers in size in this cup.
But particles or particulates of such a small size
can be created through patient grinding of silver and gold.
- When you're making something at scale,
that's an opportunity for both experimentation
but also accidental discovery.
And I think either it was a happy accident
that happened during mass production,
or experts who spent their entire life
studying glass made an innovation.
- [Tony] But then, why don't we see
more ancient objects like this?
Well, there probably were others.
They just didn't survive the centuries.
- This is the only intact example.
But we do have fragments of the type of glass used here
that go back to a similar ancient timeframe.
So things get forgotten and they get rediscovered.
So I think it's a mistake to look at all of human history
as some sort of linear progression
and then claim that if something is too advanced,
allegedly, for a certain ancient time period.
[tense music]
- Our verdict, this is a case of trial and error.
We can't say exactly what trials and errors were involved,
but to the ancient Roman artisan
who created this masterpiece, cheers.
- The search for extraterrestrial life
isn't just about biological specimens.
Scientists are increasingly searching for techno signatures
or technical traces of intelligent life.
And one new discovery may be proof
that's eight billion years old.
Take a look.
It's June 10th, 2022,
at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory
in Western Australia.
A radio telescope is surveying the sky
when it picks up something unprecedented.
In less than a millisecond, radio waves,
a form of light invisible to the human eye,
strike the telescope in what's known
as a fast radio burst, or FRB.
They've been detected before,
but astronomer Alexa Gordon
has never seen any like this.
- It was four times as energetic as any other one.
It broke models for
how energetic we think FRBs could be.
- [Tony] The astronomers get to work tracing
where it came from,
and that's when they find this.
It's an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Specifically, the area of deep space
where scientists believe the FRB originated.
Those blue and orange streaks, those are galaxies.
- We traced it back to
this compact group of galaxies that are really rare.
It's this incredibly dense system of many galaxies,
and we've never seen that before for FRBs.
- [Tony] News of the fantastic FRB takes the world by storm.
After all, it's as powerful as the sun's emissions
over the course of 30 years.
But it's not the first FRB to catch humankind's attention.
- The first FRB was discovered in 2007
by a team of astrophysicists led by Duncan Lorimer.
To this day, the cause of the Lorimer Burst
is still unknown.
- And then in 2015,
scientists actually discovered the first repeated FRBs,
which all seemed to come from the same direction.
That totally upended the previous assumption
that FRBs were coming
from some kind of cataclysmic explosion.
Because if they were repeated,
then clearly whatever was creating them
hadn't been destroyed.
- So some believe that the only explanation
for these FRBs could be alien intelligent life.
So the burst of energy we see would be something
that's propelling a planet-sized spacecraft,
and we're capturing a brief moment
of that expelling energy.
- [Tony] And here's where this one gets really out there.
The galaxies where this FRB originates are about
8 billion light years away.
That means a radio burst that reaches us
from those galaxies must be 8 billion years old,
and this may be just the tip of the cosmic iceberg.
- In April 2024, scientists recorded another FRB,
and it was later determined
to be the farthest FRB ever recorded.
It originated 9.1 billion light years away.
Do these FRBs indicate that technological civilizations
were thriving across the universe billions of years ago?
- Aliens and their ships are said
to possess enormous amounts of energy.
In fact, this CIA document includes a wild account
of Soviet soldiers who allegedly shot down a flying saucer,
only to be turned to stone when the aliens
inside exploded in a ball of light.
Now, this is an unverified story,
but could this FRB be scientific proof
of immense alien energy?
[tense music]
Before we consider the cosmic,
we first ask if this FRB
might have originated right here on Earth.
In astronomy, this is known as a peryton.
- A peryton event is a short, manmade radio signal.
For instance, once in Australia, a radio phenomenon
that was alleged to have been from outer space
was actually attributed
to a nearby microwave.
And so this can create the illusion of an FRB.
I don't think that's what's happening here, however,
'cause we've had multiple confirmations
of not just this FRB, but other fast radio bursts.
- [Tony] If the FRB really does trace back
to this cluster of galaxies,
could this simply be an energetic celestial body
like a magnetar?
- A magnetar is a magnetic star
that releases a tremendous amount of energy
in the form of magnetism.
Could it be a magnetar?
Well, not an isolated one.
We're talking about energies even greater
than just one star.
So a single magnetar would not rival the energy
being seen with our instruments today.
- [Tony] Could that energy be the lingering signature
of an alien species?
Perhaps a powerful craft or even a weapon?
Problem is, we don't think intelligent life was even
around 8 billion years ago.
- We think the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.
So this signal would've been sent
when the universe was less than six billion years old.
I don't think the universe would've had enough time
in order for intelligent life to have evolved somewhere.
- We will eventually unravel the mystery of these objects.
But at the present time,
this FRB still remains a cosmic mystery.
[tense music]
- Our verdict, this remains unexplained.
We're not sure what produced this 8-billion-year-old FRB,
but let's hope it doesn't take another 8 billion years
to find out.
And that's our show for tonight.
Thank you so much for watching,
and let's keep those cameras rolling.
[dramatic music]