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William Shatner: You know what?

I've been around for a while.

I've travelled the world, met some interesting people,

done some crazy things.

So, you might just think

there's not much that could take me by surprise.

You'd be wrong.

The world is full of stories and science

and things that amaze and confound me

every single day,

incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

Some I can answer.

Others...

just defy logic --

like the heart transplant patient

who undergoes an uncanny transformation,

assuming the personality of his donor.

Scientists ask,

could the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

be real?

A weird phenomenon is appearing in lakes and rivers --

perfect circles of ice,

some so big they're visible from space.

What are they?

And a DNA test that suggests the impossible --

a mother somehow genetically unrelated to her own children.

Could the test be wrong,

or is the truth beyond reason?

Could it be possible for a human being

to have more than one set of DNA?

Yup...

it's a weird world.

And I love it.

You don't need me to tell you

that modern medicine is utterly remarkable.

The kind of procedures that only existed

in the realm of science fiction 50 years ago

are now commonplace.

Take heart failure --

still the world's biggest killer,

but these days, if you're lucky,

doctors can transplant

a healthy heart into your chest.

Within weeks,

you can be up and running, with a whole new lease on life,

thanks to the kindness of some recently departed donor.

Incredible!

But as this next

weird tale will reveal,

transplant patients

may be getting more than they bargained for --

not simply someone else's heart

but their personality, too.

I had worked very hard, and I had sold my soul

for the greenback.

I was a fat, out of shape businessman,

not taking care of himself.

William Shatner: Bill Wohl was obsessed with making money,

but when he suffered a massive heart attack in 1999,

his life changed forever.

They told me a number of times

I was their worst cardiac case, ever.

William Shatner: Bill needed a new heart, and on February 22, 2000,

a suitable organ became available.

The donor was a Hollywood stuntman

named Brady Michaels,

a fit, focused, passionate man,

who tragically died

doing the job he loved.

Brady's death would ultimately save Bill Wohl's life.

Bill Wohl: I remember waking up that afternoon, very sore,

but I had a new heart,

and I was smiling.

I was grinning from ear to ear

'cause I was so thankful, 'cause,

living in the hospital,

you get to appreciate.

And if you're smart, you learn

love, patience, tolerance and understanding,

'cause there are so many angry people in the world.

William Shatner: But after his operation,

Bill says he started acting in strange new ways.

Bill Wohl: Well, the first thing that really shocked me

was that day, driving to work.

I usually listen to classic hard rock --

Led Zeppelin, things like that.

Don't ask me why,

but, that morning, I flipped it to,

like, a jazz station.

And I'm driving to work,

and I hear this song,

and it was Sade, the Kiss of Life.

And I started crying,

and it was like butter going through a knife.

And I usually don't cry.

It takes a lot to make me cry,

and, uh, here I was,

like, freaking out.

William Shatner: Bill learned later that his heart's donor,

Brady Michaels, was also a jazz aficionado.

According to Bill,

the transplant didn't just change his musical tastes.

It also changed his vocabulary.

Bill Wohl: And it's really funny.

I can tell you, as a cutthroat businessman,

the surfer lingo and "dude" did not fit into my character.

William Shatner: He also found he was copying

Michaels' taste for healthy food.

Bill Wohl: He was a health nut.

He was very big on salads.

In the old days, if there weren't French fries,

if there wasn't a steak

or a lobster tail or something fried,

it wasn't gonna happen.

Now, once in a while, as a treat,

I'll have something like that, but I actually love salads.

William Shatner: Most astonishingly,

Bill's new heart transformed him from an overweight couch potato

into a physical fitness freak,

just like Brady Michaels.

Bill believes that in taking Brady Michaels' heart,

he has taken some of Michaels' personality.

I'm living with a part of him that he's blessed me,

and with that blessing

has come some ideas and thoughts and characteristics

that have kind of melded

and become a part of my everyday life.

Well, this is all very weird.

I told you it was weird.

A guy gets a heart transplant, and he believes he got a bonus.

He got the donor's personality, too.

And it's more than the heart.

Think about it.

There are thousands of other transplants done each year --

lungs, kidneys, livers.

If this guy is right,

are those people getting

their donor's personalities as well?

Is this even possible?

Bill Wohl's remarkable story

suggests something that common sense says cannot be.

Could our organs really store

the essence of our being?

Can one person's body assimilate the personality

of someone long since dead?

Psychology Professor Dr. Gary Schwartz thinks so.

If all tissues could store information and energy,

then, if tissue was removed from one person

and was surgically placed in another,

there would be a transplant not only of the matter

but of the memory as well.

William Shatner: Schwartz has researched

the transfer of memory for 30 years

and has tracked down some 70 cases

of similar donor stories.

Gary Schwartz: I have seen

too many cases of uncanny and accurate

parallels for me to question

whether there's a phenomena here.

William Shatner: In 1988, Claire Sylvia received the heart and lungs

of a young man who died in a motorcycle accident.

After the operation,

she develops a new taste for beer,

green peppers and chicken nuggets --

things her former self would never have eaten.

The donor's parents tell her that their son, Tim,

loved nothing more than beer and green peppers,

and, chillingly,

on the night Tim died,

he was riding his motorcycle with a box of chicken nuggets

in his pocket.

There are examples from Bill's case

which indicate the specificity,

above and beyond simple changes in diet or exercise

which a lot of people might do

because they had a heart transplant.

William Shatner: Can't these personality changes

be explained as a reaction to a brush with death,

or even as side effects

of the powerful anti-rejection drugs

used after transplant surgery?

The first thing one wants to entertain

are conventional explanations,

like side effects of the drugs,

stress of the surgery

or just changes in philosophy of life.

They're given drugs and medication

to tame down their immune system,

and most of the side effects and toxicity

come from these immunosuppressant drugs

that reduce the response of the body to the new organ.

A side effect of a steroid might change people's

anxiety level, or it might change,

maybe, a certain food preference,

but it's going to be random in relationship

to the preferences and personality of the donor.

I don't think the anti-rejection drugs,

as toxic as they may be,

could explain the specific information

that gets transferred.

That would have to be pure luck

or some actual mechanism of transference

from the donor to the recipient.

William Shatner: So, it appears to be

too much of a coincidence to be the drugs.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff has a radical theory

that suggests something almost beyond belief.

Can the human heart

actually store our memories?

♪

William Shatner: Bill Wohl has undergone

a seemingly supernatural transformation --

a heart transplant he believes changed his personality,

his tastes, even his memories

into those of his donor,

all-action Hollywood stuntman Brady Michaels.

Could something that appears

straight from a horror movie

actually be real?

Dr. Stuart Hameroff has a radical theory about how memory

is stored in the human body.

It's not only the brain that can store memory.

We have muscle memory.

We learn to play tennis, and there's information stored

in the nerves that control the muscles,

and the heart has a lot of neurons.

Outside the brain,

it's one of the largest collections of neurons

in the body.

The nodes that control the beating of the heart

and the conduction and the synchrony of the muscles

so the heart beats together, synchronously,

are a fairly substantial complex of neurons.

William Shatner: Neurons are specialized cells

that transmit information

via electrical impulses and chemical signals

throughout the body's nervous system.

The information they carry allows us to move, think,

learn and feel.

Most neuroscientists believe that long-term memories

are stored exclusively by neurons in the brain.

Dr. Hameroff has a more radical theory.

He believes memories can also be stored by neurons

in other parts of the body,

within a cellular structure called a microtubule.

Microtubules seem to be

the most likely site for memory to be housed

because we know that in Alzheimer's disease,

where you lose memory,

it's the microtubules in the brain neurons that fall apart.

So, there's a number of avenues of evidence

that lead to the fact

that the microtubules are housing and storing memory.

But it would be focused and more prevalent

in parts of the body that had the most neurons,

the most microtubules --

namely the brain and the big nervous ganglia like the heart.

William Shatner: If Dr. Hameroff is right,

memories can be stored by microtubules in the brain,

the heart and the spinal cord --

or anywhere else there are neurons.

This could explain why,

when Bill Wohl got a heart transplant,

he got a memory transplant, too.

Dr. Hameroff came to his theory of memory, initially,

by studying neurons in anesthesia

and then extending that to other organs,

particularly the heart.

So, he's looking at a very special case

of how a particular component of a cell can have memory,

and I wouldn't disagree with him.

Throughout human history,

poets and philosophers have invested the heart

with powers and meaning beyond that of a simple organ.

In Papua, New Guinea,

victorious warrior tribes

would consume the hearts of the vanquished

to absorb their qualities.

In the arts,

the heart has always been seen

as the source of all love and passion.

"Who could refrain, that had a heart to love,

"and in that heart, courage to make love known?"

That's Shakespeare.

The heart is central to our culture,

and it is our own centre.

From the heart, everything flows.

Now, some scientists believe

the heart literally has a mind of its own.

But could memory and intelligence be found

in more than our hearts and heads?

Could it be coursing

through our whole bodies?

Dr. Schwartz's theory takes things a step further.

He thinks memory can be stored in all cells

throughout the body,

not just the neurons,

thanks to something called...

"feedback."

Feedback is the essence of learning and memory.

Now, that same feedback process operates at any level.

It's what operates within the neurons

that allow the neurons to learn between them.

But that same feedback that allows the neuron cells to learn

is feedback that can operate

within the interconnected network of cells

in the heart or the lungs or any other organ.

William Shatner: Feedback occurs when a past event

influences the response to the same event

in the present or future.

According to Schwartz, this loop

allows individual cells to have a sort of memory.

That's another thing about these feedback loops

is recurrent process.

Each time you repeat the process over and over again,

it makes the memory stronger.

William Shatner: Could our individual cells

have a form of memory?

Schwartz believes they do,

and, what's more, he thinks he can prove it.

We typically think of muscle memory

as being mostly the brain,

but it turns out

the muscles have the potential to learn as well,

because all muscles have feedback,

ergo feedback memory

and muscle memory in the muscles themselves.

William Shatner: Schwartz can show this principle in action.

A person is able to train his muscles

to shoot basketball hoops, using feedback,

so that he continues to hit the basket

even when blindfolded.

According to Schwartz,

it is not just groups of tissue that can have memories.

He thinks it is possible

that every single cell in the body

can store information.

Gary Schwartz: Since feedback loops

are operating at every level in the body,

at every level, there's gonna be,

theoretically, memory and,

to various degrees, learning,

at every level in the body.

William Shatner: Although unproven,

this theory could help explain

the cases of transplant recipients

who report receiving the donor's memories,

tastes and behaviour

along with their new organ.

Interesting but, unfortunately, all theoretical.

Maybe, to find the answer to this mystery,

we should take a look at a different organ --

the human brain.

Maybe, just maybe,

now that Bill has his new heart and his health,

it's gone to his head.

Could getting a new lease on life

convince you that you are a whole new person?

Bill doesn't think it's all that simple.

Certainly, just getting a transplant

and a second chance at life

changed me in a major way,

but I also totally believe

that certain characteristics of my donor

have become a basic part of my life,

and I feel that this is

the cellular memory that's changed my life

and, I honestly feel, made me a better person,

a happier person.

And I actually love, now, caring and helping and wanting

to make a difference.

William Shatner: Most neuroscientists remain skeptical

that cellular memory exists at all.

Nevertheless, Bill Wohl believes

memories, just like organs,

can be transplanted.

One thing is true.

Bill's experiences have definitely been...

weird, or what.

Across the planet,

a strange phenomenon is appearing in lakes and rivers --

perfect circles of ice, some so big,

they're visible from space.

Are these ice circles forming naturally,

or is this some kind of elaborate hoax?

Now, for the first time,

scientists plan to uncover the truth.

♪

Pie --

warm, round,

delicious.

Simply nothing weird at all here,

but this got me thinking about pi.

No, not, not, not this pie --

the number pi.

You need the number pi to explain the simple circle.

And just like the simple, round, delicious pie,

when you dig deeper, it gets more complicated.

Pi is a constant --

the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter.

But that ratio can be calculated forever

without coming to a final decimal.

Circles,

they start off looking so simple,

but when you get down to it,

they're really complicated.

On December 13th, 2007,

amateur photographer Brook Tyler was walking through

Rattray Marsh Conservation Area, Southern Ontario.

Brook Tyler: Well I love to do nature photography,

landscapes, primarily,

and creeks and waterfalls

and anything that's sort of remote

and off the beaten path.

William Shatner: When he got to Sheridan Creek,

Brook saw something bizarre, majestic

and totally unexplained.

Brook Tyler: Well, I was coming down here

to see what the creek looked like,

and as I was coming around the boardwalk over there,

I happened to see it.

It was about 6', maybe a little bit more,

in diameter, and it was turning.

William Shatner: Brook had stumbled upon

a strange, beautiful and mysterious phenomenon.

Brook Tyler: I was really amazed.

It was so cool --

a perfectly round circle, inscribed in the ice.

So, I set up my camera

and started shooting.

William Shatner: Brook posted the photo on the internet,

and, after 150,000 hits,

he quickly learned that ice circles

were a global mystery,

found across the US,

Canada, Europe, Russia.

But what,

or who, was creating them?

To Tyler, the similarity

to a famous English hoax seemed obvious.

Brook Tyler: Well, I entitled my photograph Creek Circle --

a takeoff on crop circle --

because the crop circles

are obviously a little bit mysterious.

Perfectly round circles forming naturally in the ice --

come on!

It's too good to be true, right?

Too perfect, too weird.

Surely, someone is messing with us,

creating ice circles

like they would create crop circles?

For over two decades, strange geometrical designs,

known as crop circles, appeared in British farmland.

In 1991, two men admitted they were behind the hoax.

They created these amazing patterns

with little more than a length of rope

and a plank of wood.

So, could the ice circles be the handiwork

of human hoaxers,

just like many crop circles

turned out to be?

It's impossible for somebody to generate these circles.

Uh, the ice is very, very thin,

very delicate, very, very fragile,

and you try and put any sort of thing

to cut the ice,

you're gonna leave evidence of it,

or you're gonna have to somehow be standing in the ice,

or standing in the water,

to be able to hold whatever tool

that you have to cut the circle.

So, I wouldn't--

It's not--

It's Mother Nature doing her finest.

William Shatner: Len Zabilansky is an engineer

at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory

in New Hampshire.

Their research helps the US military

operate in cold climates.

Ice is nice.

This is what we do, day in and day out.

We have three facilities here that we replicate

the different processes,

the ice processes, in different phases.

We're in the test basin, where we do flat ice, sheet ice.

We have another facility where we bring a river system inside,

and then we have a large general research area.

William Shatner: Len sees a fundamental problem

facing people wanting to hoax an ice circle.

Because ice floats on top

of the flowing river, there's no support below.

Len Zabilansky: The ice has no strength, and so, he has to basically

stand in mid-air to be able to do this,

and that's physically impossible.

William Shatner: Zabilansky believes these perfect ice circles are formed

by a unique combination of natural processes,

and, for the first time,

using a unique experiment, he intends to prove it.

Len Zabilansky: The way the ice circle's formed is basically in a back eddy.

The ice will follow the water,

and if the water goes in a circle,

so will the ice.

Back eddies can be found on bends in rivers

where a constriction

forces some of the water to flow back on itself,

creating a rotating pool.

So, the theory goes that in the winter,

when ice flows into an eddy,

it too becomes a part of the rotation

and begins to grow and grow outward,

until it grinds against the surrounding static ice,

like a gristmill,

creating the perfect, beautiful ice circle.

And what happens in the winter environment --

ice that's coming down

into this backwater area,

actually goes around as well,

and, as the ice is contributing into this background,

it continues to grow in a larger and larger circle.

If you look at ice circles that we've had pictures of,

it looks like a vinyl record,

because everything is all very circular

with different little ridges around.

So, what's happening is the ice is coming down,

bangs into the circle, and it just sort of squashes in,

and you get a little ridge,

and that ridge just keeps building up in time

and getting larger and larger

and larger and larger, in diameter.

William Shatner: Like a gristmill,

the rotating ice circles

grind against the surrounding ice,

creating a perfectly round circle

and its mirror image.

Len Zabilansky: The two pieces will sort of nest together with a little bit

of open water between them.

You can see there's a very narrow gap,

but you can actually see the milling process

actually taking place.

William Shatner: Len believes this is exactly what happened to create

the ice circle in Brook Tyler's photo.

This is more--

This is the kind of ice circle

that we're going to duplicate today.

William Shatner: What are these mysterious circles of ice?

Are they a natural process of nature?

Can they be recreated in a lab,

or does the answer to this bizarre mystery

lie beyond our planet?

♪

William Shatner: A weird phenomenon is appearing in lakes and rivers --

perfect circles of ice.

Some so big, they're visible from space.

What are they?

At the Cold Regions

Research and Engineering Laboratory in New Hampshire,

engineer Len Zabilansky intends to find out,

with an experiment that has never been attempted before --

recreating the conditions

that he believes will lead to the creation of an ice circle.

Len Zabilansky: What we've created here

is the river process that would be--

That would contribute to the formation of an ice circle.

William Shatner: In a temperature-controlled laboratory,

Len has recreated the prevailing

physical and environmental conditions that existed

when Brook Tyler photographed the ice circle.

The water is coming from our upstream reach of the river.

It's coming down, past where we have

more water coming into this section of the river

than we can actually allow to leave,

to sort of create a backwater eddy.

What happens is the water coming into our eddy,

our hydraulic section,

is less than the water that we're allowing to release

from our control section,

so we're continually recirculating.

That's the recirculating section.

And so, a little bit of the water will come out,

but the ice will actually stay in

and continue to circulate.

William Shatner: The back eddy is a rotating pool of water

Len believes is needed to trap and grow ice into a circle.

Len Zabilansky: We're generating

small snow crystals that are settling on the water surface,

and that's what we're using to initiate ice.

And as the ice forms and creates and circulates around,

we're controlling the amount of ice that we're generating,

so we're not plugging up the system.

William Shatner: The snow acts like a seed and helps ice crystals

to form in the flowing water.

Len Zabilansky: And one submersible pump,

and as the water comes around,

it just shoots it forward, along with the ice,

down into our eddy section.

William Shatner: The experiment begins.

Will Len's river form an elusive ice circle?

Len Zabilansky: See, there's a piece of ice

that just started spinning around in our circle.

It will continue to build, and as it continues to rotate,

ice that's coming from upstream may accumulate on the edge,

and that's why you're gonna start seeing these ridges.

At first, the ice in the back eddy grows as predicted,

but it isn't forming as a uniform disc.

It's ice but nowhere near the perfect ice circles

he is trying to recreate.

We just jammed it!

William Shatner: Joe Desloges

is a fluvial geomorphologist, or river expert.

He believes he has a better theory

to explain this weird quirk of nature.

Let's not assume the most wild, to start with,

and let's start thinking about the true explanations

that really help understand these.

And that is the science.

William Shatner: But can science explain

the three-mile wide ice circle in Russia's Lake Baikal?

Joe Desloges: Features, from space, look fantastic,

but when you're actually on the ground,

you get a better sense

of what's likely to be controlling them --

and probably a different perception,

entirely, about what the composition of them are

and what they're made of.

So, the best science really requires you

to be out in the field.

William Shatner: Joe has spent years

studying how rivers behave in cold regions

like Canada and Scandinavia.

Well, cold climates are fantastic,

in terms of water and the way water freezes.

Uh, you can see a whole range of shapes,

but one of the most common is circular.

William Shatner: Joe believes there's another natural process

that forms frozen circles on a river.

It's called frazil ice.

Joe Desloges: Frazil ice forms in rivers when the water cools

to a point where you begin forming these ice crystals,

or we call them ice nuclei.

The process is called supercooling,

when water is just slightly

below the freezing temperature and these nuclei begin to form.

As the tiny ice crystals start to collide,

they grow into larger clumps of frazil ice.

Ice is lighter than water,

so, as the clumps grow, the more buoyant they become.

Joe Desloges: And as they float to the surface,

they tend to form these nice, circular ice pans.

So, they actually look like a rather weird phenomenon

on a river's surface.

William Shatner: It's a promising theory, but Joe's ice pans

don't look like the spinning, perfect ice circles

Brook Tyler photographed in Ontario.

Back at the US Army

Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory,

Len Zabilansky is still having difficulty

creating an ice circle in the lab.

It's possible the rate of freezing is too slow,

meaning new ice

isn't filling in the gaps to make a circular shape.

So, that just shows you how delicate this process is,

when Mother Nature's generating these ice circles.

William Shatner: Len decides to drop the ambient temperature.

Len Zabilansky: We've just dropped the temperature two degrees,

and we're generating more ice, and it's freezing faster.

William Shatner: The experiment begins again.

This time,

the colder temperature is helping build the ice

as quickly as it is melted or eroded away.

Len Zabilansky: You can see that some of the ice

is starting to freeze into a circle.

William Shatner: As Len predicted, the ice is growing,

thanks to new ice crystals joining from upstream

and sheet ice growing out from the circle itself.

If we let this run for another six to 12 hours,

that ice will become very, very strong.

William Shatner: Allowing his man-made river to flow for hours,

Len hopes his experiment

will produce a genuine ice circle.

The results are remarkable.

Len Zabilansky: This is the first time we've created

an ice circle of this quality in the lab.

Sometimes, we've been able to kick out.

Sometimes, we almost had it,

but this is the first one

that's actually starting to become circular,

because it's starting to be mature.

William Shatner: For the first time,

Zabilansky has shown one way ice circles can form.

But many of these beautiful natural phenomena

remain mysterious, and not just on earth.

In 2010,

NASA discovered circular grooves,

hundreds of miles wide,

etched into the surface of Europa,

Jupiter's ice-bound moon.

And that, for now,

will remain weird, or what?

A mother undergoes a routine DNA test.

The results are seemingly beyond reason.

She has two sets of DNA.

Is it a cruel mistake,

or is it possible for the genetic information

of two different people to exist in the same body?

Weird, or what?

♪

Four unremarkable letters --

A, T, G and C --

that's all there are in our DNA alphabet.

Take these four letters, multiply them by billions

and arrange them in a unique sequence

long enough to fill hundreds of telephone directories,

and you have one strand of DNA --

the source of the information that makes you you and me me.

But what if someone examined your DNA

and revealed that you were not who you thought you were

and, in fact,

you were sharing your body with someone else?

In 2002, Lydia Fairchild,

mother to four children fathered by her partner,

Jamie Townsend,

applied for state benefits to help raise

her young family.

In accordance with state law,

Lydia and her children had DNA tests

to prove parentage.

At conception, we inherit

half our DNA from our mother and half from our father.

When all is normal, every child will have

a genetic inheritance that can be easily traced

to both parents.

But Lydia's DNA results

would prove to be far from normal.

Lydia Fairchild: I got a call,

and the prosecutor

had asked that I come up to the office.

He started asking, like,

was I trying to do fraud

by getting help from the state,

"because these kids aren't yours,"

and I stopped him for a minute.

I was like, "What do you mean these kids aren't mine?"

And he says, "Well, the tests came back.

"Jamie is the father of all the kids,

"but you are not the mother."

William Shatner: The tests were repeated twice more,

but, both times, the results were the same.

Jamie was the father.

None of the four children appeared to be related to Lydia.

I was so scared.

They said that they were gonna take it to court

because they didn't find that I was telling the truth.

They thought I was lying.

William Shatner: The state prosecutor started an investigation,

and Lydia found herself in front of a judge.

Lydia Fairchild: The judge looked at me,

and he says, "Are these your children?"

And I said, "Yes, they are.

"You know, I got pregnant.

"I carried them; I delivered them.

"The doctor has ultrasounds of them being in my stomach."

The judge said, "You opened a big can of worms."

He's like, "We don't know what's going on here,

"but we're gonna figure it out."

Despite overwhelming evidence supporting Lydia's claim,

four DNA tests show that she is not the biological mother

of the children she gave birth to.

But why?

First and most obvious reason to be explored --

the possibility that the DNA tests

could be wrong.

To be told that DNA is essentially foolproof

is very problematic.

William Shatner: Dr. Kerry Bowman

specializes in the ethics of medicine.

Kerry Bowman: Many people in medicine,

and I'm one of them,

would say nothing in medicine is a hundred percent.

It can get close to it, but it's not a hundred percent.

The talk, though, with DNA, is that there's an exception

and that DNA is virtually foolproof as a testing strategy,

when, in fact, they may be rare,

but there are exceptions to that.

So, in fact, did Lydia

really have a fair consent process?

I would say not.

William Shatner: Parental DNA tests themselves

are more than 99% accurate,

but humans can and do make mistakes.

Had this happened to Lydia's tests?

Perhaps, somehow, the samples got screwed up.

Maybe they mixed up her DNA samples with some other woman's,

and then, when they tested it,

of course, it would show that it wasn't her kid.

And my first goal was I was gonna ask the court

to order a whole new set of DNA tests that were separate --

a new laboratory to do it --

to see if the second laboratory

came back with the same problem.

William Shatner: Medical mix-ups do happen.

In 2002, Linda McDougal from Woodville, Wisconsin,

was diagnosed with breast cancer

and underwent a double mastectomy.

However, two days after the operation,

doctors told Linda it had all been a mistake.

Her biopsy results

had been accidentally switched with another patient's.

Linda never had cancer,

and so, the surgery had been completely unnecessary.

Did a similar human error skew Lydia's DNA results,

or is the real answer to this mystery

beyond anything medical science has ever imagined?

So, what is going on?

Another theory suggests

that Lydia could have given birth to her children

and yet not have been their biological mother.

It is speculated

that Lydia was an IVF surrogate.

So, what a surrogate pregnancy is

is what used to be called test tube babies --

when egg and sperm

are introduced outside the womb,

in a lab condition.

Put together, they create an embryo,

and that embryo is then put into

the uterus of a surrogate mother.

So, this woman has no biological relationship to the child

that she is carrying and will eventually bear.

William Shatner: But why would Lydia have carried the fertilized eggs

of another woman four times over?

It certainly wouldn't benefit fraud.

Kerry Bowman: IVF itself

is extremely expensive,

and to speak in American dollars,

you could easily be talking about

$30,000 or $50,000.

And how someone like Lydia Fairchild

would want or could possibly do this

to create some kind of welfare scam,

I can't even imagine how that would work.

The costs simply don't line up to whatever benefits, um,

someone could pull from this, in terms of a welfare scam.

It doesn't make any sense.

William Shatner: And as Dr. Chitayat explains,

IVF is not something that can be done at home.

David Chitayat: It's impossible to do in your kitchen,

in-vitro fertilization.

You have to stimulate the ovary of the mother,

and you have to make sure that you don't over-stimulate,

because then it will produce huge cysts in the ovary

and can cause her to have dehydration and even death.

So, it has to be monitored very carefully

by expert in this field.

William Shatner: There's an even bigger problem with this theory.

The father of all four of Lydia's children

had been confirmed as her partner,

Jamie Townsend.

Alan Tindell: It wasn't logical

that somebody would hire Lydia to carry a surrogacy

and then have them all fathered by Jamie Townsend.

Why would they pick him?

And besides that, the children didn't go off

to live with the contracting people

who had hired Lydia to be a surrogate.

It was just illogical.

I mean, it could have been an explanation that she was a--

That she was a surrogate parent,

but I'd asked her,

"Was there any surrogacy contract

"between you and anybody else?"

"No."

She was adamant she was not a surrogate parent for anybody.

William Shatner: The obvious answers were exhausted.

Here was a case that made no sense to anyone.

But a new theory was about to emerge --

an explanation for Lydia's DNA results

as fantastically rare

as it was biologically extraordinary.

♪

William Shatner: Lydia Fairchild is a biological marvel.

In 2002, routine DNA tests

taken for an application for US state benefits

revealed she is

genetically unrelated to her own children.

This outcome was so incredible that,

at first, it was believed to have been a mistake,

or that she was somehow involved

in an elaborate fraud.

None of the theories seemed plausible,

and the case seemed destined

to remain as mysterious as it was bizarre,

until Lydia's attorney discovered something

almost too weird to be believed --

a description in a medical journal

of a rare and almost unheard of genetic condition

only known to affect

around 40 people in the whole world,

something called tetragametic chimerism.

He was doing a little

trolling on the internet,

and he wondered if maybe it fit our scenario.

So, I read it,

as much of it as I could understand,

but it sounded very much like what we were dealing with.

So, I contacted Doctor Kruskall,

who was one of the authors of the paper --

she's now deceased --

and, um, introduced myself on the phone and said,

I think, "I read your article.

"I think I have a case very much like it."

Of course, they were intrigued about it.

I said, "Could I send you the test results we have,

"and maybe you can give us some insight

"into what's happening here?"

William Shatner: One way a chimera can form

is when two separate eggs are fertilized by two sperm

and then merge to form a single embryo.

Put simply, it's two non-identical twins,

merging, very early on in pregnancy.

Their two sets of DNA are then intermingled

throughout the body.

If Lydia Fairchild was a chimera,

it could explain how her biological children

have different DNA.

They would have inherited one set of DNA

from one area of her body,

while the laboratory sampled

other areas that contained a completely

different set of DNA.

The problem with chimerism is that you have to actually

do biopsies from different body organs --

liver, kidney, intestine, perhaps --

and find out if all of them contain

the same genetic material as we check in the blood.

William Shatner: Lydia was sent back for more DNA tests.

This time, they took samples from all over her body.

And my hair, blood and swabs from my cheek

came back as the same DNA,

but my cervical smear came back as a different DNA,

and it was actually the DNA that matched my children.

The chimera theory was confirmed.

Incredibly,

Lydia Fairchild has two sets of DNA,

the DNA in Lydia's ovaries being completely different

from the DNA found in the rest of her body.

David Chitayat: Lydia Fairchild shows

that DNA testing,

fingerprinting, may not be perfect.

So, what happened in her

was that the ovaries were produced

by different cells than the cells that produced

the white blood cells and the platelets in her blood.

Lydia Fairchild: And your ovaries are what holds your eggs.

So, when your egg comes down and then you get pregnant,

your child is gonna carry the DNA that's in your ovaries.

William Shatner: Amazingly, Lydia's children

had inherited their DNA

from the non-identical twin that Lydia's embryo fused with

just after Lydia was conceived.

There was a final court hearing,

and the judge,

he granted me my children,

that I am the biological mom of my kids,

and I remember crying so bad that I finally won,

after all that fighting I did.

I believe it was two-and-a-half years I fought for my kids

to keep them in my life.

William Shatner: Lydia's world had been changed forever.

She is one of only about 40 people on the planet

known to be a chimera.

Lydia Fairchild: If I never did that DNA test

to determine if he was the father or not,

I would never have known today that I was chimera.

I mean, I would never know.

William Shatner: Doctors believe there are many more, as yet,

unidentified chimeras out there.

Could someone you know

have an extra set of DNA

they got from their own embryonic twin

without them even knowing it?

Weird, or what?

So, there we have it --

three weird stories,

each with several competing theories.

A man undergoes a life-saving heart transplant procedure

but gets more than he bargained for --

a new organ

and a new personality.

Is this simply psychological or the side effects

of medicinal drugs?

Or can the heart or even individual human cells

store a person's memories

and characteristics?

Around the world,

perfect, beautiful, spinning circles of ice

forming in lakes and rivers --

are they the winter cousins of the infamous crop circle?

Or does science have the answers?

A mother is revealed to be

genetically unrelated to her own children.

Is she trying to commit fraud,

or is she the victim of a series of DNA mix-ups,

or are we dealing with a rare

and extraordinary genetic oddity?

Join me next time for more stories

that will undoubtedly be...

weird, or what?