Original subtitles

NARRATOR: They're watching you.

More than 5,000 satellites circle the Earth.

Every day, they uncover new,

mysterious phenomena that defy explanation.

Revealed from space,

the ghost towns of the twilight zone.

It's like the inhabitants just vanished.

Death stalks America's suburbs.

WALTERS: I've got bad news for you.

There are hundreds of places like this all over the U.S.

NARRATOR: And the atomic ice worm.

RUBEN: Humans have done some pretty weird things.

This is right up there.

NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena, mysteries from space.

What on Earth are they?

[theme music playing]

NARRATOR: June 6th, 2018.

An orbiting satellite passes

over the Eastern European country of Belarus

and captures something disturbing.

HORTON: This image of a town is really weird,

because it looks as if nobody's living there.

It's just been left for nature to reclaim it.

When we zoom out, we can see that it's not just this town,

but there are abandoned towns all around it.

Whatever affected this place, it was absolutely immense.

NARRATOR: A mystery event has forced vast

numbers of people to flee their homes.

Something catastrophic seems to have happened here.

There's not a sign of human life anywhere.

It's like the inhabitants just vanished.

NARRATOR: Drawn by the mystery ghost towns,

a team of Dutch urban explorers

is trekking through Belarus to investigate.

To reach the settlements, they must navigate

a restricted area patrolled by guards and beasts.

This whole area has a pretty strong military presence.

Obviously, the authorities are very keen to make sure that

people can't find out what's going on inside this area.

NARRATOR: Belarus has a dark history,

one that could explain the presence

of military personnel around the ghost towns.

HORTON: Belarus was taken over by the Red Army in 1919

at the end of the First World War

and remained a key republic in

the Soviet Union until 1990.

During the Soviet era,

Belarus became kind of a testing ground for lots of

Soviet weapons.

SZULGIT: We know that the Soviets did some terrible

experiments with biological weapons in some

of their satellite states, and they weren't afraid to test

these on live subjects.

NARRATOR: As the team navigates their way towards

the ghost towns, death hangs in the air.

[gagging noise]

NARRATOR: The scale of what happened here soon becomes

all too apparent.

SZULGIT: We can see by the infrastructure

that this was a highly populated area.

There were thousands of people living here.

LEVINE: From the satellite, it looks eerie.

But when you actually get in amongst these buildings,

it takes on a kind of post-apocalyptic atmosphere.

HORTON: I can't see any physical damage to these buildings.

So one explanation is that the whole

area has been contaminated by biological agents.

NARRATOR: One of the buildings yields more

possible evidence of Soviet military activity.

We can see tributes

to Lenin everywhere and other Soviet propaganda.

It's absolutely surreal.

NARRATOR: It's clear that the young were

also among the many casualties here.

The presence of gas masks on

the desks of schoolchildren is especially troubling.

What's really creepy is the kids were trained to use

gas masks, but they fled so quickly

that they left their masks behind.

NARRATOR: As the team explores more buildings,

they discover that the people here were indeed exposed to

lethal aerial toxins,

but not ones created by Soviet weapons tests.

This postcard is very easily overlooked.

It's just a scrap of paper with some scrawling on it.

But actually, it becomes very, very significant

if you look at the date.

HORTON: This date is highly significant, because

it's shortly before

the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

NARRATOR: The towns in the image

and the thousands who lived there

are the forgotten casualties of the most catastrophic

nuclear disaster in history.

This satellite image shows sort of

a lost chapter in the history of Chernobyl.

NARRATOR: That history begins in the early hours of

April 26, 1986,

when engineers begin a safety

test on Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4.

After a drop in power, it becomes unstable,

resulting in a cataclysmic explosion.

[alarm sounding]

The explosion is so massive that it blows

the 1,000-ton lid off of the reactor.

That's the equivalent of three 747 jets.

The ensuing fire burned for 10 days.

So this hot plume of radioactive smoke

was spreading across the globe.

NARRATOR: The blast releases a cloud filled with

190 tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere.

What happened next has long remained shrouded in secrecy.

It is a story of murderous, state-sanctioned coverups

that continue to claim innocent lives.

To this day, we still don't know the number of people

who died in Belarus from the Chernobyl accident.

Because of the secrecy, the consequences of the disaster

are not over now,

but are still present 35 years later.

NARRATOR: Coming up, the ghost town's terrible secret.

There are reports of people coughing up parts of their lung.

NARRATOR: And Rome's lost mega structure.

This is an astonishing feat of engineering.

NARRATOR: Dozens of ghost towns revealed from space

have drawn Dutch urban explorers

to a restricted area of Belarus.

NARRATOR: They have discovered evidence of

tens of thousands of ruined lives,

secret victims of the horrors of Chernobyl.

The Ukraine side of the Chernobyl story

has been well told,

but the Belarus part of that story

remains shrouded in secrecy.

NARRATOR: In the hours following the Chernobyl explosion,

the Kremlin learns that a massive radioactive cloud is

moving towards Belarus.

Chernobyl is only about a dozen miles

from the Belarus border.

And because of the weather conditions,

a lot of the radiation was carried into Belarus.

NARRATOR: In an attempt to stop the cloud from reaching Moscow,

the authorities launch an audacious, murderous plan.

Military planes are dispatched to drop shells laden

with silver iodide into the skies above Belarus.

This so-called cloud seeding creates a rainstorm, which pulls

the radioactive dust from the air and down

onto the ghost towns.

It's been estimated that around 70 perfect of

the fallout from Chernobyl actually landed in Belarus.

A quarter of the country became heavily contaminated.

A fifth of all agricultural lands

were left completely unusable.

NARRATOR: When the western world learns of the disaster,

the government finally orders the evacuation of hundreds of

square miles of southern Belarus.

Almost overnight,

half a million people leave their homes,

creating an 800-square-mile Cold War time capsule.

MORGAN: This footage is emotional, because people

created lives there

and it's evidence of lives that were shattered

as a result of the Chernobyl accident.

NARRATOR: Those who flee have been exposed to 90 times

the amount of radiation released by the Hiroshima

nuclear bomb.

And as they flee, they begin to die.

LEVINE: Their hair started to fall out.

Their skin turned red as though they had very

bad sunburn.

[coughing]

SZULGIT: There are reports of people coughing up blood

or even parts of their lung.

That's how severe this radiation can be.

NARRATOR: Following the disaster, cancer rates in

Belarus increase by more than 20 fold.

And birth defects rise by 250 percent.

SZULGIT: The high-energy radiation from Chernobyl

can pass right through a person's body,

knocking holes in all of their DNA and their cells along

the way, leading to tissue destruction throughout.

NARRATOR: The exact death toll in Belarus remains unclear,

but it's believed to be in the tens of thousands.

And its government continues to perpetuate

the deadly lies and coverups surrounding the disaster.

Belarus is the last dictatorship in Europe.

Belarus has been governed by President Lukashenko

since 1994.

NARRATOR: Alexander Lukashenko rose to power soon

after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He rules his people through terror,

deploying death squads and silencing opposition.

SZULGIT: Lukashenko is clearly dangerous.

He ordered the hijacking of an airliner

in May of 2021 to arrest a journalist.

MORGAN: He represents continuation of the old

world of the former Soviet Union.

He is behaving as if the Cold War never ended.

NARRATOR: In 2004, Lukashenko declares that many of

the contaminated zones close to the ghost towns

are fit for human habitation.

Today, some two million people,

including 800,000 children, live in areas with radiation

levels 1,500 times higher than

that found at atomic test sites.

Radiation is one of those insidious things that leaves

no physical trace but lurks

there, hidden in the earth and landscape.

Many of the people in this region have no

other choice but to eat local fruits and vegetables.

And of course, these can be

contaminated with the radioactive fallout

from Chernobyl.

NARRATOR: In this part of the world,

the Chernobyl disaster is far from over, and its specter of

death is still visible from space.

HORTON: The terrifying thing is, with Lukashenko in charge,

what other terrible secrets lie hidden in Belarus?

NARRATOR: Coming up, America's secret starvation experiment.

They found that the physiological side effects

are devastating.

NARRATOR: And terror rises from the ice.

CAVELL: We've got something big, and it

doesn't look to be a natural occurrence.

NARRATOR: July 2019.

Eyes in the sky scan a suburban neighborhood

in Minneapolis.

WALTERS: You've got lakefront homes with jetties,

tree-lined avenues, and then in the middle of it,

You've got what looks like

a pretty nasty chunk of brutalist architecture.

NARRATOR: The crumbling secure facility covers

around 2,500 acres.

JANULIS: In the middle,

we have these square, regimented-looking objects.

They're in a grid, like a checkerboard.

MORAN: This is a really strange ray of squares,

and there's some structure within each one.

NARRATOR: Local historical records offer a clue to

the purpose of the compound's cell-like structures.

In the mid '40s,

the university ran this research experiment in

which they looked at the impacts of starvation.

Is it possible that this area has something to do with

the Minnesota starvation experiments?

NARRATOR: In November 1944,

government-backed scientists in Minneapolis

round up 36 conscientious objectors and subject them to

systematic starvation.

They wanted to see how humans became obsessed with food

and what actions they would take in order to get food.

There was a good reason behind this almost

preposterous experiment,

which was that World War II had really ravaged Europe,

and there were countless people

living on the verge of starvation.

NARRATOR: Over the course of World War II,

famine claims around 20 million lives, and some

prisoners of war must survive on just 600 calories a day.

To replicate these horrors,

researchers cut subjects' food intake in half and force them

to follow strict exercise regimens.

This would have been not much of a problem if it was only

a few weeks -- most people can handle that.

But this went on for six months.

NARRATOR: As the experiment progresses,

the subjects displayed dramatic declines in physical

and mental abilities.

Some resort to eating pencils.

The psychological effects were far worse

than they ever expected.

FANARA: The men ended up with vivid dreams,

nightmares of cannibalism.

Are we looking at housing, specifically for this study?

NARRATOR: Military journalist Carlo Munoz confirms that

the compound did play a role in World War II,

but in a very different way.

What we're actually looking at here is some

of the remnants of the Twin Cities Ammunition Plant.

This facility was really

a powerhouse, providing the ammunition for U.S. troops

fighting in World War II.

NARRATOR: During the war, the U.S. produces

11 million tons of artillery, equivalent in weight

to 30 Empire State Buildings.

It also churns out over 40 billion rounds of ammunition,

enough to take 10 shots at every person on Earth

at that time.

The 26,000 workers of the Twin Cities Ammunition Plant play

a pivotal role in this conveyor belt of carnage.

The ammunitions they produced here ran the gamut

from bullets, rifles,

and armor-piercing,

all the way to incendiary rounds.

This is a really key kind of military industrial

complex that's part of the Second World War effort

in the fight against Hitler and Japan.

NARRATOR: On average, it takes 45,000 bullets

to kill a single enemy combatant.

Yet such is the scale of production at the Twin Cities

Ammo Plant that, by the end of the war,

millions of rounds remain unused.

So what these squares are, are chambers, they're ammo dumps

where you've got vast amounts of ammunition being stored.

These protective walls were designed to keep any potential

explosion enclosed and from spreading across

the entire facility.

NARRATOR: In the decades following, World War II,

the Twin Cities plant produces ammunition for the wars in

Korea and Vietnam,

wars that claim over eight million lives.

But the bullet factory also brings

death to the suburbs of Minneapolis.

The thing about producing ammunition is it creates a lot

of really toxic byproducts,

and a lot of these chemicals end up seeping into the ground

and into the groundwater.

WALTERS: You've got cyanide, you've got hydrocarbons.

You've got God knows what leaching out

of this plant into the water supply

in what should be a really nice unpolluted area.

NARRATOR: For decades,

the factory disposes of huge amounts of carcinogenic

chemicals by dumping,

burying, or burning them on site.

It wasn't just one or two burn pits on the facility.

There were thousands of these fires just smoldering

and releasing these toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.

You look at the Twin Cities plant, and you go,

"Well, I'll be delighted to hear

that's the only one like it in America."

But I've got bad news for you.

There are hundreds of places like this all over the U.S.

NARRATOR: Across the country, munitions disposal

has contaminated more than 40 million acres of soil,

an area bigger than Florida.

At the site in the image, and elsewhere in the U.S.,

the deadly legacy of World War II lives on.

Who knows what dangers lie in hundreds

of sites like this across the United States,

and what costs American people will have to

pay with their health and perhaps their lives.

NARRATOR: Coming up, revenge of the ice worm.

RUBEN: What could possibly be lurking under the surface?

And is this something that humans made?

NARRATOR: And the island that changed history.

This is where it all begins.

NARRATOR: January 31st, 2017.

NASA scientists take to the skies

over Greenland as part of Operation Ice Bridge,

humankind's largest ever polar survey.

As radar beams penetrate

remote tundra in the northwest of the country,

the team discovers something unexpected.

We can see the various layers of snow and ice that seem

very smooth and uniform up until there's an anomaly in

the Greenland ice.

We've got something big, and it

doesn't look to be a natural occurrence.

NARRATOR: The data suggests the mystery object is

metallic and could be hundreds of feet long.

RUBEN: What could possibly be lurking 100 feet

under the surface of the ice?

And is this something that humans made?

Whatever is out here was meant to be hidden.

It was meant to be buried.

So it suggests something military.

NARRATOR: Analysts cross-reference

the image coordinates with declassified records.

The anomaly it transpires, is all that remains of one

of the most outlandish projects ever devised

by the U.S. government.

RUBEN: The idea is almost absurdly grandiose.

Humans have done some pretty weird things.

This is right up there.

NARRATOR: The audacious scheme has its origins

in the late 1950s, when the U.S.

turns to Greenland to give it the edge in the battle for

nuclear dominance.

As the Cold War heats up,

the competition is on to be able to achieve

a first strike status.

The U.S. was constantly looking for

novel ways to hide nuclear weapons.

CAVELL: Greenland was gonna be the perfect place,

because it was in striking distance of Moscow.

NARRATOR: The U.S. is aware that soviet spy planes

can identify and target stationary missile silos.

Its solution is to turn Greenland's Ice Sheet

into a giant game of atomic whack-a-mole.

KOUROUNIS: What they came up with was Project Ice Worm,

and the plan was to build a series of

interconnected tunnels

within the Greenland Ice Sheet to store and launch

nuclear missiles.

MORGAN: You would have a nuclear arsenal,

and then you continually moved it.

This would keep the enemy guessing whether or not

there would actually be a missile in it.

NARRATOR: Project Ice Worm's

blueprints called for 2,500 miles of tunnels,

allowing nuclear missiles

to be shuttled between 2,000 subterranean launch silos.

This represents an area about

the size of the state of New York.

This plan is massive.

One small fact about Greenland is that

the United States does not own it.

Greenland belongs to Denmark.

And so the U.S. had to be a little bit deceptive.

KOUROUNIS: So in 1959, the U.S. announces the construction of

Camp Century,

which is to be this elaborate scientific research base

built to study the Greenland Ice Sheet.

NARRATOR: As a cover for Project Ice Worm,

construction of Camp Century begins in June

of the same year.

Over the following months,

engineers carve out almost two miles of tunnels and install

homes for 200 personnel.

KOUROUNIS: This was an amazing facility.

There were shops, a church,

even a barbershop, all underneath the ice.

CAVELL: They then had to deal with a source of power.

The best solution, it was believed, was

to bring in a portable nuclear reactor.

NARRATOR: While the project progresses,

the military goes to extraordinary lengths to hide

the truth from the Danish government.

MORGAN: They even sent Boy Scouts to keep diaries on what

their life was like when they stayed under the Ice Sheet.

ANNOUNCER: Two young Boy Scouts from Neodesha, Kansas,

earned their keep as junior scientific aides in

Camp Century.

And these Boy Scouts didn't understand that they were

part of the establishment

of a vast network of nuclear missile

launch platforms.

NARRATOR: But four years into Project Ice Worm,

Camp Century goes into meltdown.

The scientists didn't take into account

the plasticity of the ice

and how much it would actually move and shift over time.

You had tunnels that were cracking and collapsing,

and so what it proved overall was that

this grand ambition of establishing a nuclear launch

site was all silly daydreaming.

NARRATOR: In 1967,

the U.S. abandons Camp Century, and it becomes enveloped

in ice.

But today, as Greenland thaws,

Ice Worm is threatening to rise from its frozen tomb.

If this were to happen, it would

be an absolute disaster for the U.S. military.

There's six million gallons of wastewater generated

from the camp that are still there, locked in the ice,

not to mention radioactive waste from the nuclear

generator that powered the place.

NARRATOR: In this part of Greenland,

the Cold War could yet turn hot.

Scientists locked in a race against time to find a way to

keep this buried city and everything within it

locked within the ice.

RUBEN: Honestly, Project Ice worm is one of

the most insane projects I've ever heard of.

NARRATOR: Coming up, the mystery ancient mega structure.

BELLINGER: It's hard to wrap your head around

the awesome effort required to craft something like this.

NARRATOR: And heist on Nazi headquarters.

It is an almost perfect stealth commando operation.

NARRATOR: January 1st, 2020.

A satellite flies over the west coast

of Italy and captures a bizarre structure

in the landscape.

WALTERS: It looks like a massive purpose-built lake.

But the first thing that stands out here is the shape.

It looks like somebody just took

a cookie cutter and stamped a perfect hexagon.

NARRATOR: The weird, hexagonal lake

covers around 100 acres.

It's surrounded by fields, and this hexagon takes

up the size of, like, three or four.

So this thing is huge.

The lake sits next to the River Tiber,

gateway to Rome,

capital of the most powerful empire of antiquity.

And historical documents reveal

it is a relic of one of its most

extraordinary achievements.

It's hard to wrap your head around the complexity

and the awesome effort required

to craft something like this.

NARRATOR: The structure's story begins

soon after the birth of Christ,

when the Roman Empire enters a period of massive expansion.

♪

Rome's population soon reaches one million,

a figure that will not be surpassed for 1,800 years.

Rome is becoming this huge,

what we today call kind of a megalopolis.

It's a mega city.

JANULIS: Rome is undergoing great political

and economic change.

Massive amounts of wealth are suddenly coming into the empire,

and the emperors are ruling as gods.

NARRATOR: But among Rome's masses, discontent is spreading.

The city's growth has created food shortages,

leading to riots.

This burgeoning population needs huge quantities of food

to sustain it, particularly grain.

This grain has to be brought by ship, a lot of it from Egypt.

NARRATOR: To feed Rome,

the emperor needs to bring in

1,000 ships filled with grain every month.

But the city's waterways can't handle that kind of traffic.

So you've got Emperor Claudius, and he's scratching his head.

He's got a problem, because his port

of Ostia is simply too small for Rome.

So what's he gonna do?

To solve this problem,

Emperor Claudius commissions an artificial port,

the Port of Portus.

NARRATOR: For Emperor Claudius, Portus is

an opportunity to both

pacify his restless citizens and create a lasting monument

in honor of his rule.

These emperors had egos, and they had agendas,

and they expressed them architecturally.

Caesar built the Teatro Marcello.

Hadrian built a wall and the Pantheon

and Flavian built the greatest coliseum known to humanity.

NARRATOR: Emperor Claudius chooses the now landlocked area

to the west of the lake for his new port.

He orders the construction of an artificial

harbor big enough to accommodate fleets of ships,

each laden with 500 tons of Egyptian grain.

BELLINGER: This port is on such a large scale,

it's actually almost hard to picture it,

but it helps to imagine that it could hold over

300 ships at one time.

NARRATOR: Construction begins in 46 A.D.

It takes almost 20 years to carve

out the 20-foot-deep, 500-acre basin.

You gotta remember, you're not just building

a hole in the ground -- you're building cays,

temples, houses.

This is like a little city in itself.

NARRATOR: But after a few years, even this

colossal harbor can't sustain the might of Rome.

As Rome's population got even larger,

so it was necessary to build a second harbor.

BELLINGER: This very distinctive hexagonal shape

actually was applied to

the harbor under the Emperor Trajan at around 100 A.D.

HUNT: Today, you can still see the foundations of the giant

warehouses where the goods that came out of the ships

were stored.

NARRATOR: For the next 300 years,

the hexagon lake is the nexus of Rome's trade

with its empire, a hub

connecting Europe with Africa and Asia.

The ships coming in

were supplying Rome's growing population with the food

it needed, but also with

luxury items, with slaves, and even wild animals

that would have participated in the games in the coliseum.

If you were standing along one of the sides of this hexagonal

harbor in the year 100 A.D.,

could hear the roar of lions,

the howls of monkeys, you could hear everything that

told you Rome is the center of the world.

NARRATOR: By the fifth century A.D.,

the Roman Empire is in terminal decline,

and as the port silts up, it is abandoned.

Today, only the strangely shaped lake remains,

lone relic of one of the greatest engineering

projects of the ancient world.

This is the high water mark, the zenith of the Roman Empire.

NARRATOR: Coming up, the $4.5 billion dollar gamble.

The world had seen nothing like it before.

NARRATOR: June 23rd, 2018.

As an orbiting camera scans an island in

northwest France,

an echo from the past emerges from the Earth.

What we see in this image is a deserted island with a series

of concentric circles,

one within the other.

It's like a drop of water has left

a ripple in the middle of this island.

Whatever it is has been abandoned for decades.

NARRATOR: For military historians,

the crumbling structure's location is significant.

This was a very strategically important place

for the Nazis in World War II.

And when we see circles like this,

we immediately think of something like

a radar installation.

NARRATOR: During World War II,

the U.S. and its allies launch around

four million bomber and fighter attacks on Nazi-held

positions in Europe.

During each mission, they must evade a 1,500-mile-long

line of coastal radar installations that stretches

from France to Scandinavia.

It was bad news, because if Allied aircraft wanted to fly

under the cover of darkness toward occupied France,

they would have to fly through a phalanx of these

radar stations.

NARRATOR: The German radar wall means just

a third of Allied bombers complete their missions.

This is why the Allies ultimately

choose to do something about it,

and what they do is called Operation Biting.

Operation Biting was this special

forces raid on German radar installations.

NARRATOR: Operation Biting's primary target is

a coastal radar station near the structure

in the image.

Now, what this special forces

group does is land on the coast.

They attack the radar installation, and they bring

back some of its details and its secrets.

HYMEL: It is an almost perfect stealth commando operation.

The British have stolen the key

that's gonna unlock the secrets of German radar.

NARRATOR: The British figure out that by dropping

reflective bits of aluminum,

they can disrupt German radar

and greatly increase the number of successful

bombing missions.

MORGAN: One airplane loaded full of chaff could

suddenly look like 50 airplanes in flight.

And so Operation Biting paid off in

a very meaningful way during World War II.

NARRATOR: Historical land records confirm that the mystery

circles are the remains of a ground station,

but one that played a role in

an even more important event in 20th century history.

RUBEN: The archives tell us that this was not

just any ground station.

This is actually part of the birth of international

satellite transmissions. -MORGAN: And as it turns out,

the satellite was the grandfather of all of

the telecommunications satellites

that we know and use today.

NARRATOR: In 1938, the first electronic TV sets

go on sale in the U.S.

Within 15 years,

they can be found in 20 million households

across the country.

As the market explodes, broadcasters look to

the heavens for ways to reach yet more viewers.

This was essentially the birth of the idea that you can

communicate with someone on

the other side of the planet by bouncing those signals off

of things we've put in the sky.

NARRATOR: One of the first satellite transmissions

takes place in 1960, when NASA

uses the Echo 1 spacecraft to broadcast a speech by

President Eisenhower.

EISENHOWER: It is a great personal satisfaction to

participate in this first experiment in communications.

It was just a metal-covered balloon called Echo 1,

but more commonly known as the sata-loon.

It really was very primitive, but it did allow radio

communications to go back and forth

around the Earth.

NARRATOR: Despite the success of Echo 1,

the ability to transmit images from orbit remains elusive.

Then Telstar came along and Telstar

is not just a metal-covered balloon.

It's a legitimate satellite.

CAVELL: Telstar really is a foundational piece

of equipment.

This is where it all begins.

NARRATOR: Telstar is to be the world's first true

communications satellite

and will work by bouncing a signal between

the U.S. and France.

[pinging noises]

Before the $4.5 billion dollar program

goes live,

engineers want to be sure it works, and that's where

the circles in the image fit in.

HYMEL: In the center of that circle was

a 600-foot tower.

And that was used as sort of a receiving

station, which would simulate a satellite low on the horizon.

MORGAN: In other words, the tower on the island

made it possible for them

to calibrate all of their equipment so that when

the Telstar satellite was launched,

they could receive the signal.

NARRATOR: On July 10th, 1962,

a delta rocket launched from Cape Canaveral carries

the 170-pound Telstar satellite into orbit.

48 hours later, it begins broadcasting

the first live images from space.

MORGAN: It marked a major and important milestone

in our history, because we were

establishing what was effectively the worldwide reach

of telecommunications.

Just a few weeks later, President Kennedy is able to

beam an entire press conference over to Europe.

And then other big events are getting beamed

around the world, like boxing matches.

And even more importantly, Elvis Presley live from Hawaii.

MORGAN: We were watching the absolute

cutting edge of human progress.

The world had seen nothing like it before.

[pinging noises]

NARRATOR: After being operational for six months,

the U.S. accidentally fries Telstar's circuits

with radiation from a high altitude nuclear test.

But six decades later,

its impact continues to be felt

in almost every aspect of our lives.

That satellite really brought the world closer together,

and that spot in France was part

of making the world smaller.