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WILLIAM SHATNER: You know, I've been around for a while.

Met some interesting people, done some crazy things.

So you just might think that there's not much that

can 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.

[♪]

NARRATOR: Are aliens among us?

In Colorado, a farmer makes a gruesome discovery.

A cow is mutilated by technology

beyond human comprehension.

MIKE DURAN: My first thought was uh they're back.

NARRATOR: Did aliens commit this ghastly crime?

Across the world, thousands of people are

being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night.

Are they being abducted by extraterrestrials?

JIM SPARKS: There was nothing normal about these beings.

NARRATOR: And in the USA, an astronomer makes

a remarkable discovery -

a cryptic message from outer space.

Could this be the first scientific evidence

of alien contact?

WILLIAM SHATNER: Yeah, it's a weird world.

And I love it.

[♪]

WILLIAM SHATNER: Aliens exist.

And what's more, they not only aim to take over our planet,

they're already here -

and they're breeding with us.

Do you think I'm crazy?

Well, maybe but think twice.

More than fifteen million Americans claim they've

seen a UFO and let's face it, most of us believe

that aliens are somewhere out there.

But now, all over the planet weird,

unexplainable and sometimes horrific events

are telling us something else.

They're not only right here,

they're up to no good.

Weird - or what?

NARRATOR: The San Luis Valley is a beautiful

corner of Colorado and home to hundreds of cattle

ranchers just like Mike Duran.

MIKE DURAN: I grew up in the area here,

lived here all my life.

NARRATOR: But on March 8th, 2009, Mike's perfect world

was shattered when one of his prized cows went missing.

MIKE DURAN: The last time we saw her was Friday for sure.

Sunday when I came to feed, I noticed her little

baby was by itself.

NARRATOR: It's not unusual for cows to get separated from

the herd, but farmers must find these valuable animals

- and fast.

MIKE DURAN: So I went around the property

looking for her and I did not find her so I went on

a ridge and on the ridge I could see the whole

property very, very good.

NARRATOR: Finally, Mike finds what he's looking for -

but it's not good news.

MIKE DURAN: I figure well she came down and she just

fell and she just died.

I thought to myself well, she's been a good cow.

NARRATOR: But on closer inspection, Mike makes

a horrifying discovery.

MIKE DURAN: And that's when I noticed that her

udders had been removed.

And then I looked and also noticed that the female

organ around the vaginal area had also been cut out

and it's weird because there's no blood around,

there are no tracks.

NARRATOR: It appears Mike's cow has been

brutally mutilated.

But remarkably, this senseless crime isn't the only one.

[♪]

REPORTER (ARCHIVE): In the dead of night someone or

something crept onto the Martins' property and

removed the sex organs and other parts from a

seven hundred pound steer.

GARTH LAM (ARCHIVE): I don't see anything on this side.

REPORTER (ARCHIVE): Garth Lam had never seen

anything like it.

GARTH LAM (ARCHIVE): It appears to be something very sharp.

NARRATOR: During the last century, cattle mutilation

has been reported all over the world.

The incidents are all chillingly similar.

The animal's sexual organs, tongue, eyes and

ears are often missing.

Its blood has been drained and there is no evidence

to identify the attacker.

Mike believes he knows what is responsible for

these vicious mutilations.

MIKE DURAN: The cuts are something that uh you

cannot just make with a knife or anything.

It looks like it's cut and cauterized at the same

time, like a laser cut.

My first uh thought was uh they're back.

I believe that it's not something from this world.

People may think I'm crazy, but I think it's

likely that it's something extraterrestrial or aliens.

WILLIAM SHATNER: It's horrific, isn't it?

Innocent cows, farmers' friends, sliced and

seemingly dissected, mutilated beyond

recognition by something and besides - what a waste

of delicious steak.

Can we simply blame aliens every time something weird

like this happens?

Why should they take the rap?

But if aliens aren't beating up our beloved

bovines, who or what is?

NARRATOR: Arkansas State Police officers

Sergeant Rick O'Kelley and Sergeant Doug Fogley are

cow mutilation experts.

They personally investigated nearly forty

identical cases in Washington County in 1979.

RICK O'KELLEY: We started having a rash of

mysterious deaths of livestock and our job is

to determine whether a crime has occurred.

DOUG FOGLEY: I got to review most of the cases

in Arkansas, look at their photographs and go to

a few scenes.

There were a lot of theories.

A lot of people crawled out of the woodwork.

NARRATOR: But this was a crime they had never seen

the likes of before.

They decided to use detective work to try and solve it.

RICK O'KELLEY: Sheriff Herb Marshall come into my

office and outlined an experiment he wanted to do

to determine, you know, what might be causing

these cattle mutilations.

NARRATOR: Using surveillance cameras to

study sick and dying cows from the moment of their death,

they hoped the experiment would reveal how

injuries in the mutilated animals might occur.

RICK O'KELLEY: What we were seeing within just

a couple hours, these animals would start to

bloat from the gasses inside and that would

force all their organs on the outside.

The eye that was turned up, that was exposed to

the air, it was missing, it was gone.

The tongue was missing and the sexual organs of the

animal, they were, they were all gone.

NARRATOR: But could escaping gasses account

for other classic signs of mutilation?

Could they produce the precise laser-like cuts

Mike Duran found on his dead cow?

RICK O'KELLEY: There was a lot of talk about surgical

incisions and things like that but this was all done by flies.

The flies would lay the eggs in the carcass and

within just a very short period of time,

they'd hatch out into maggots and these things would,

they're great surgeons.

I mean they, they took care of it very quickly.

We were able to produce that in our experiment.

DOUG FOGLEY: There's no difference in the classic

mutilation photos and the photos taken by Washington County.

RICK O'KELLEY: I'm absolutely positively

convinced that our experiment proved it

beyond a shadow of a doubt.

NARRATOR: It's a compelling experiment,

but questions remain.

What killed seemingly healthy animals in the

first place?

And what about the lack of blood?

NARRATOR: Christopher O'Brien is an

investigative journalist.

He's been independently researching livestock

mutilations since 1992.

CHRISTOPHER O'BRIEN: I find it very hard to

believe that aliens are coming light-years to

harvest parts for lip-and-eye stew or

udder soufflé, or for whatever reason.

Somebody somewhere knows what is behind these

perpetrators' agenda.

NARRATOR: Chris believes the answer is far more sinister.

CHRISTOPHER O'BRIEN: We have 350 reports,

very good documented reports, of helicopter activity

in and around cattle mutilation sites and since

then we've had about a hundred more.

They are monitoring what I think is a scourge in the

food chain, which is known as Mad Cow disease.

NARRATOR: Mad Cow is a highly infectious and

deadly disease that can spread from cows to humans

with horrific results.

When it's discovered in livestock,

all hell breaks loose.

CHRISTOPHER O'BRIEN: Because of the pervasive

spread of this disease in England, six million head

of livestock were slaughtered.

NARRATOR: Chris believes this deadly disease and

the cattle mutilations are linked.

CHRISTOPHER O'BRIEN: The first outbreak in '67

occurred right when the first publicized cattle

mutilation case occurred.

Now I find it interesting that Mad Cow disease

should break out in, in the environment and then we have

uh these unusual livestock death cases commencing.

And if we do have Mad Cow loose in the food chain,

it stands to reason that there's some

quasi-military, possibly a government group, that's

going around lifting these cattle from the pasture,

doing environmental monitoring to find out how

pervasive this is sweeping through cattle herds.

NARRATOR: Covert government choppers

dragging cows away to be tested for Mad Cow disease?

It might explain why there were no footprints at the

scene, but does it tell us why their organs were removed?

CHRISTOPHER O'BRIEN: The soft tissue organs that

are most commonly removed in, during these cattle

mutilation experiments are the organs that humans

develop cancer in most often.

I think that there's a connection there.

NARRATOR: It's a remarkable claim,

but why keep it secret?

CHRISTOPHER O'BRIEN: If the government ever let

word out that they were doing this and that the

food chain had been compromised, you can just

imagine what the panic would be in the red meat

eating public.

And that's not gonna happen.

WILLIAM SHATNER: So let's think about this.

What have we learned so far?

Horrific cattle mutilations are taking

place all over the planet.

These mysterious and unthinkable crimes have so

far been blamed on choppers kidnapping

mystified animals in the middle of the night - part

of a mad mad cow conspiracy and if you

think that's hard to follow, others believe the

culprits for these heinous crimes are, are flies.

Maybe the idea that these were encounters with

aliens isn't so crazy.

Have I killed an alien?

[♪]

NARRATOR: Worldwide, cattle are being

mysteriously mutilated.

Is ET responsible?

PHILIP HOYLE: The evidence that we have is that alien

intelligences are actually sampling the environment

through the removal of tissue and glands of

animals on a global scale.

NARRATOR: Philip Hoyle is the director of the

Animal Pathology Research Unit in the UK.

He believes that not only are aliens guilty,

they are more advanced than we can imagine.

PHILIP HOYLE: Some of the weirdest stories we hear

from farmers that actually have these mutilations is

they see spheres of light and within those lights

what clearly can only be described as UFOs and they

operate completely differently and unconventionally

to any helicopters or any known aircraft.

We have some evidence that the perpetrators are

actually taking the animals from the farms,

are using special what we call transference beams.

These beams are an anti-gravity beam and as

soon as the animal is placed in the beam they

are taken onboard the craft where the animals are

obviously dissected and then placed back onto the ground.

NARRATOR: Transference beams might account for the

lack of evidence surrounding the cows on the ground.

But does Hoyle have an answer for the precision surgery?

Yes.

PHILIP HOYLE: Some of the actual injuries that we've

investigated, the technology that's been

used is quite frightening because some of the actual

injuries would indicate the tissue has been

unzipped, totally different to when a

scalpel would be used.

So it's obviously far in advance of anything we

have at the moment on planet Earth.

NARRATOR: Philip Hoyle is not only convinced he's right,

he thinks the other theories are crazy.

PHILIP HOYLE: If maggots have caused these injuries

what happens um when an animal's found within

minutes or hours of the last time it's been seen?

What's responsible for that? Super maggot?

NARRATOR: So if aliens are abducting and mutilating

our innocent, beloved cows, what do they want with them?

PHILIP HOYLE: I think there is a number of alien

intelligences with a vested interest in planet

Earth and humanity and they are monitoring the

food chain and the environment through the

sampling of genetic materials and tissues

taken from animals.

So I think that they're not hostile and they've

really got our interests at heart because if they

didn't we wouldn't be here today.

NARRATOR: In the end, we are left with more

questions than answers.

Are cows being mutilated as part of a government

conspiracy?

Are their injuries the result of natural causes?

Or are aliens plotting to take over the planet?

CHRISTOPHER O'BRIEN: This is a true mystery.

This is weird, people. This is weird.

NARRATOR: Or what?

[♪]

WILLIAM SHATNER: You know, I love my sleep.

I sleep like a baby.

In fact, there's nothing that can wake me up save for,

well, never mind.

But across the world, for hundreds, indeed thousands

of people, sleep is a living nightmare.

These chosen ones are being woken up in the

middle of the night, dragged from their beds

and taken to ... somewhere ... strange.

Where are they going?

And who?

[Screams]

No, no, not there, not there!

Oh please not there!

NARRATOR: Jim Sparks is a very down-to-earth kind of guy.

JIM SPARKS: I've always been considered to be an

honest, logical, straightforward person.

NARRATOR: But in 1969, he experienced a string of

events that would threaten his hold on reality.

JIM SPARKS: I kept having the same reoccurring dream

where some things were coming into my bedroom,

escorting me out of my bed, uh through the

hallway and across the yard into the woods.

NARRATOR: At first, Jim tries to dismiss the

dreams as nothing out of the ordinary,

but they soon turn into something far more sinister.

JIM SPARKS: I would be asleep and I would be

instantly paralyzed and I would hear this uh loud uh

whipping, whirling sound inside my head and then you

feel a sense of acceleration and it scared me to death.

So you scream inside your head: I don't want to die.

I don't want to die. And then you black out.

NARRATOR: When Jim eventually wakes up,

he can't believe where he is.

JIM SPARKS: I was in this room um and light was

emanating from everywhere but nowhere specifically.

Try to imagine yourself, this average person,

finding yourself in a room, not knowing where

the heck you are and why you're even there.

NARRATOR: But the one thing Jim does know

is he's not alone.

JIM SPARKS: Everything was weird.

There was nothing normal about these beings.

JIM SPARKS: They did a variety of experiments.

There were mental experiments, physical

experiments, uh medical experiments.

It was horrifying. It was scary.

Uh I didn't know what was going on.

I had no clue that they were aliens.

All I was doing was yelling and screaming is:

Where am I? Where am I? Why am I here?

Who's doing this to me?

NARRATOR: Suddenly, Jim is no longer an ordinary man.

He now has an extraordinary claim.

JIM SPARKS: I've been abducted many dozens and

dozens and dozens of times in the, over the

last twenty-three years.

I understand that there's going to be doubters

but this is real.

NARRATOR: After a series of bizarre events,

a man claims he is being removed from his bed at night

and experimented on by aliens.

Could this be true?

NARRATOR: Susan Clancy is a Harvard psychology researcher.

She believes alien abductions are easily explained.

SUSAN CLANCY: Could it be aliens came into your room

and took you or touched you or performed sexual

experiments?

It could be, but it's far more likely that it's an

episode of sleep paralysis.

NARRATOR: Sleep paralysis is a little known medical

condition that affects one in five Americans.

SUSAN CLANCY: Sleep paralysis is one of the

weirdest things that can happen when you're sleeping.

NARRATOR: During sleep, neurotransmitters in the

brain send out signals that shut down major

muscles and prevents us from acting out our dreams.

SUSAN CLANCY: So essentially you're

paralyzed when you're sleeping, which is very good.

Otherwise, you'd be thrashing around and

beating up your partner, etcetera, etcetera.

NARRATOR: But this self-defense mechanism can

backfire when your brain wakes up before your body.

This behaviour has been shown in clinical trials.

SUSAN CLANCY: When you experience sleep paralysis

and you wake up, you're still experiencing the

paralysis that accompanies sleep so it really is this

limbo state where your two sleep cycles,

sleep and awake, have temporarily overlapped.

It is a terrifying experience.

NARRATOR: In this bizarre limbo state, terrifying

images from the dream world can take over.

SUSAN CLANCY: You can feel that there's something in the room.

You open your mouth to scream but you can't

because you can't move.

If these are people that are familiar with movies

about alien abduction or have read books about

alien abduction, many of them will think wow,

is it possible that I was abducted by aliens?

They're searching for meaning.

That's perfectly natural.

NARRATOR: Are thousands of people who claim to be

abducted by aliens simply victims of sleep paralysis?

Or can these bizarre stories be explained by something else?

Neuroscientist Dr. Michael Persinger believes he has

solved the mystery with a remarkable invention known

as the God Helmet.

MICHAEL PERSINGER: The helmet has little devices

that generate magnetic fields.

They are pulsed through the brain at very weak

intensities, very much like putting your face in

front of a computer screen.

NARRATOR: The God Helmet was designed to discover why

our brains are so receptive to religious experiences.

But during a series of experiments in 2005,

Persinger discovered it produced something

unexpected - and weird.

MICHAEL PERSINGER: You said you felt the presence

of something.

GIRL: Yeah there's like other things around me.

MICHAEL PERSINGER: I would say the vast majority say

it's an alien thing of something, it's not theirs.

NARRATOR: These volunteers claimed they were seeing

alien entities in the room.

Persinger believes these visions were produced when

electricity from the God Helmet stimulated the

temporal lobes on one side of the brain.

MICHAEL PERSINGER: So here's a human brain,

it's shrunk a bit because it's been fixed.

But you can see that you'll have a, a left side

and a right, two hemispheres.

It's only when we stimulated the right hemisphere

that people started to report these entities.

NARRATOR: So what is it about the right side of

our brains that can create life like aliens?

WILLIAM SHATNER: Let's see if I can explain.

The left and right sides of our brains are

noticeably different.

If I asked the left side of my brain, who am I,

it would answer with words smart, charming, handsome,

all those obvious things.

But if I ask the right side of my brain, who am I,

it couldn't answer.

You see, the right hemisphere doesn't

understand language.

It only recognizes and stores shapes and images.

Fair enough, but what's this got to do with aliens?

NARRATOR: Many of the images stored in the right

hemisphere of the brain represent ourselves.

Persinger believes stimulating this area

causes them to be projected, seemingly

outside of the body, as aliens.

MICHAEL PERSINGER: When you're aware of it,

it feels like an alien type of sense of self and

it could be described depending upon the culture,

everything from an incubus or a succubus to a,

an angel to a demon, to even in terms of

contemporary context, in our space oriented

society, an alien.

NARRATOR: But there's just one problem.

People like Jim Sparks weren't sleeping with

brain-bending helmets on their heads.

So how did they see aliens?

MICHAEL PERSINGER: Some people are more prone to

it than others.

These individuals pick up all kinds of small

alterations in the environment and what

triggers it can be something as minor as

simply a single neuron.

NARRATOR: Are alien abductions simply a trick

of the mind?

Or could they be true?

One man believes we should be very afraid.

DAVID JACOBS: I fear for my kids and everybody

else's kids.

NARRATOR: Thousands of people worldwide claim

they're being abducted by aliens.

Is this simply a sleep disorder or a trick of the mind?

Temple University professor David Jacobs

has spent his life studying alien abductions.

He's come to an incredible conclusion.

DAVID JACOBS: I was not a great believer in

abductions when I began this work and now the

evidence has persuaded me that alien abductions are real.

NARRATOR: Over three decades, Jacobs' research

has stacked up numbers which are impossible to ignore.

DAVID JACOBS: I have looked at approximately

eleven hundred different abduction events.

People are abducted with their families, they are

abducted with strangers, they're abducted in groups.

People can verify each other's abductions.

NARRATOR: Should we believe the claims of

thousands of victims of alien abduction and,

if so, why is ET coming to earth?

DAVID JACOBS: You know, lots of people believe

that this is a benevolent phenomenon, that these are

loving, caring light beams who are concerned with

our wellbeing.

NARRATOR: But Jacobs believes the aliens have

a much more sinister purpose.

DAVID JACOBS: People have unusual experiences

related to UFOs and they can't remember what

happened to them.

There might be a two, three, four hour missing

time period that they cannot, they can't account

for and nobody else around them can account for it either.

NARRATOR: Are aliens erasing the memory of

their victims? Why?

Jacobs believes he can find the answer using hypnosis.

SARAH: I feel I'm sliding out of the bed.

DAVID JACOBS: Are you alone at this time?

SARAH: No. I feel like there's something around me,

beings, and they're on either side of me. I'm scared.

SARAH: When I'm under hypnosis, I remember being

examined, some sort of medical exam or some sort

of medical procedure.

DAVID JACOBS: All abductees say the same thing.

They are required to lie on a table and when they

do that a series of physical, reproductive and

mental uh procedures are performed upon them.

If it's a man, sperm is taken.

NARRATOR: Why would aliens perform these brutal acts?

When Jacobs digs deep, he uncovers something bizarre.

SARAH: There was one experience I can remember

um with um a small baby.

I don't know what you would call it.

The baby that I was holding was very pale coloured,

seemed very weak to me and didn't have a lot of hair.

DAVID JACOBS: They all describe unusual looking

babies or children who look sort of like a cross

between alien and human.

There was a spectrum.

Some looked more human and others looked more alien.

NARRATOR: Jacobs believes there can only be one answer.

Aliens are breeding with humans.

DAVID JACOBS: Why are all sorts of people describing this?

We think that this is an integration program

into the society.

It's adding up to the exploitation of one

species over another.

I fear for my kids and everybody else's kids.

I fear for the, for the generations coming up.

I, I don't think that they're gonna be leading

the lives that they think they're going to be leading.

NARRATOR: Are aliens abducting innocent people

in order to create a breeding program and take

over the planet?

Are they walking amongst us?

Whatever the answer, this story is definitely weird or what?

[♪]

NARRATOR: August 1977.

A mega telescope records what could be the most

important broadcast in history.

[beeping]

Could this be the first proof of contact with alien life?

Weird or what?

WILLIAM SHATNER: If we're to believe that not only

do aliens exist but they're here and breeding

half-human, half-alien children.

Most sane, normal people are going to want

something more concrete than some theories by uh,

sorry, nut jobs.

We're looking for something a little more

substantial like scientific proof, right?

Well here it is.

NARRATOR: In 1977, Jerry Ehman was

a university professor with a unique hobby:

hunting for alien life.

JERRY EHMAN: I was actually a volunteer at

the Ohio State University radio observatory.

NARRATOR: Jerry's job was to study data from a

giant telescope called the Big Ear.

Acting like a giant radio antenna, Big Ear hoped to

receive a message from outer space.

But finding a needle in a cosmic haystack wasn't easy.

JERRY EHMAN: I had been looking at the printouts

for many months but seeing nothing significant.

NARRATOR: After years of little more than radio silence,

at 10:16 pm on August 15th, 1977,

the Big Ear suddenly came to life.

For the next 72 seconds, it would pump out

a message that could ultimately change the world.

JERRY EHMAN: I looked at the computer output and

just within two or three pages I saw the signal.

This was so unusual.

NARRATOR: Normally, printouts from the Big Ear

contained a few ones and twos, representing weak

signals from the lifeless vacuum of space, but what

Jerry saw could only be described as weird.

JERRY EHMAN: I saw 6EQUJ5, a sequence of numbers and

letters representing a signal that was rising,

reaching a peak and then falling off.

I called the director of the radio observatory.

We decided to start looking up known sources

of radio waves - planets, satellites, anything we

could think of.

Nothing matched, not a thing.

So I circled it and wrote the word wow.

Since we couldn't identify it with anything else,

we just started calling it the Wow signal.

WILLIAM SHATNER: A 72 second message sent to

earth from someone or something deep in outer space?

Jerry's right - wow!

Is this what we've been waiting for?

Is the wow signal the first indisputable

scientific proof that we are not alone?

If so, who sent it and what did it say?

But, but, but, but let's think about this for a minute.

If you were an alien making contact with earth,

wouldn't you like to make more of a grand entrance -

like they do in the movies?

Why bother with something low tech?

DAVID GRINSPOON: You wouldn't put a record on a

spacecraft and send it out in some random direction

at a relatively slow speed.

Uh, you know, if you really want to talk to the

neighbours on other star systems you send a signal

at the speed of light.

NARRATOR: Dr. David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist.

He believes the Wow signal is something we should be

very excited about.

DAVID GRINSPOON: It seems quite possible to me that

the Wow signal really is a communication from an

extraterrestrial intelligence.

NARRATOR: Did ET really call us?

And what is it about the Wow signal that makes

Grinspoon so sure?

DAVID GRINSPOON: It's a narrowband signal, which

means all of that energy is in one little radio frequency.

It's not spread out.

You go a little bit on the dial one direction or

the other and there's nothing there.

NARRATOR: Naturally occurring radio waves

travel across space in a wide range of frequencies.

Narrowband signals are concentrated into one channel,

which lets them travel vast distances.

But if the Wow signal really is a message from

an advanced alien civilization, where are they?

DAVID GRINSPOON: Well we, we know what direction

it came from.

It came from um a uh point in the sky in the

constellation Sagittarius.

NARRATOR: Sagittarius is a group of stars we can see

from the earth on summer nights.

If Grinspoon is right, it could mean the Wow signal

came from somewhere close within our own galaxy.

DAVID GRINSPOON: We're now discovering all these

planets around other stars so we know enough to know

that there are, are billions of planets out

there in the galaxy.

There's gotta be life out there and probably lots of it.

NARRATOR: Remarkably, there's even more mystery

surrounding this amazing event.

If an alien race did send us a radio beam,

they only did it once.

JERRY EHMAN: We were hoping that the signal

would repeat itself, so we covered that strip of sky

close to a hundred times and didn't see anything again.

NARRATOR: An American radio telescope intercepts

a powerful and mysterious radio wave from deep

in outer space.

Scientists call it the Wow signal.

Could this be the first scientific evidence

of alien contact?

Astronomer Dan Werthimer has analyzed the Wow signal.

He thinks he has the answer.

DAN WERTHIMER: It's an interesting signal and

I'm very proud of what these guys did.

They were pioneers early on in the 70s but

I don't think they found ET.

NARRATOR: But if Jerry Ehman didn't find proof

of extraterrestrial life, what exactly did he find?

DAN WERTHIMER: A radio telescope is very sensitive.

So anything passing over the beam of the telescope

we can detect but it's also unfortunately

sensitive to signals that can come in from the side.

Radio pollution comes from people with cell phones,

television transmitters, radar, airplanes.

NARRATOR: Every second, human technology produces

billions of radio waves.

On a radio telescope, most of them are seen as random

energy, but the Wow signal was a concentrated signal

over 72 seconds long.

Could anything man-made produce something similar?

The answer is yes.

DAN WERTHIMER: And that kind of thing can come

from a satellite passing over the dish.

As it gets nearer to the dish, it gets stronger.

As it goes right over the dish, it's very strong and

then as it moves away from the dish, it gets weaker.

We have a hundred of these things that look very

similar to the Wow signal but they're not ET.

NARRATOR: Did Jerry Ehman mistake a satellite for

a message from aliens?

It's certainly a plausible explanation but there's

just one big problem.

JERRY EHMAN: We investigated, you know,

all known satellites and none were in the area

at the time of our observation.

NARRATOR: Could they have missed something?

Could there have been a secret military satellite in the area?

JERRY EHMAN: A satellite closer in, three,

four hundred miles off the earth's surface would have

moved so rapidly we wouldn't have got the beam

shape that we observed.

WILLIAM SHATNER: So if it's not a satellite,

if it's not some guy on a cell phone or a

bad seventies rerun and if it's not a broadcast from

aliens, what else could possibly produce a signal

that makes us go wow?

NARRATOR: Caleb Scharf is an astronomer who peers

into the deepest regions of space.

He has seen things that make him believe neither

man nor alien made the Wow signal.

CALEB SCHARF: There's a lot of weird stuff

happening in the universe.

The universe may look quiet when you're standing

outside on a, on a peaceful night but the

truth is, there are phenomena in the universe

that are explosive, violent and changing all

the time and sometimes we see that energy as bursts

of radio emission, even bursts of x-ray light.

NARRATOR: The space weirdos Caleb refers to

are things like neutron stars, the leftover cores

of once great stars, and supernovas - the explosive

results of when even bigger stars die.

But one of the weirdest are black holes.

CALEB SCHARF: We think that black holes form when

a really massive star burns through all its fuel

and can no longer support itself against

the force of gravity.

Its own weight crushes it.

The truth is, as material drops into a black hole

and gets shredded by the intense gravitational field,

it releases energy back out into the universe.

And that energy can be in the form of x-rays,

of light and of radio waves.

It's as if, after the black hole has a meal, it burps.

And that burp can be heard across the universe.

WILLIAM SHATNER: So the Wow signal, the thing that

we thought might be the first message from an

advanced intergalactic civilization in one of the

greatest moments of human history is just a

black hole belching after gulping down a nebula too fast?

Is this guy for real?

And does it explain the biggest mystery of all -

why we only heard the Wow signal once?

I'm not sure it does.

[Burps] Excuse me.

CALEB SCHARF: There are many phenomena out there

that may only happen once in a human lifetime.

So imagine you're in a big stadium and there are

20,000 people around you and they all have cameras

with flashes.

You'll see a flash and you'll try to locate it.

The problem is, it's almost impossible to know

exactly who used their camera at that moment

and the Wow signal is kind of like that.

NARRATOR: Could the Wow signal be made by

something so strange science hasn't even

discovered it yet?

It may be the best explanation yet.

But many believe this mystery isn't solved so easily.

DAVID GRINSPOON: This could be some natural

phenomena that we uh we don't know about but people

have tried to sort of match it up with natural phenomena

we do know about and it just it doesn't work.

It doesn't have the right characteristics.

NARRATOR: So if the Wow signal wasn't something

natural, what was it?

Did we just get lucky and catch an alien conversation?

And if we did, it raises one last compelling question -

what were they saying?

DAVID GRINSPOON: I think of it as what I imagine

is a ship-to-ship communication.

It almost seems accidental, like maybe

we were eavesdropping on something because

it's there and then it's not there.

It's uh it's sort of haunting that it's still out there.

The Wow signal now is, you know, however many light

years away from earth still traveling through space.

It's a beacon that's saying hey, this is not

completely fruitless, this search.

Keep, keep looking.

There are things out here to find.

NARRATOR: In the end, we are left with a mystery.

Is the Wow signal just some freaky radio

transmission from earth?

Was it the bizarre burp of a black hole?

Or could it be the first real proof of alien life?

Whatever the truth, it's definitely weird or what?

[♪]

NARRATOR: So there we have it, strange and mysterious

stories of encounters with aliens.

In Colorado, a farmer discovers a cow

mysteriously mutilated by unknown forces.

In Texas, a man is taken from his bed night after night,

abducted and experimented on by beings

he cannot comprehend.

And in Ohio, an astronomer receives a cryptic message

from outer space.

Are these bizarre stories evidence of human

encounters with aliens?

Can we dismiss thousands of eyewitnesses who claim

they're true?

You decide.

WILLIAM SHATNER: Join me next time for more stories

that will undoubtedly be weird or what?

[♪]

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