Original subtitles

[narrator] Worldwide, 36 billion cameras

are watching us

on our streets, at work

and in our homes.

They capture things that seem impossible.

Science says this shouldn't happen.

[man] Do you see that?

[narrator] Experts carry out forensic analysis of these unusual events.

Wow! What a blast.

[woman screams]

This doesn't make sense.

There has to be some sort of explanation.

What else is going on here?

[narrator] Coming up,

is this is a scrap cut from the carpet of death?

Black Carpet crawls across the ocean floor,

devouring anything in its path.

[Ashanti] Now that we know that this stuff exists,

we need to figure out how to destroy it.

[narrator] The invisible man appears.

[Athena] Are there portals between worlds?

Science says it's a possibility.

[narrator] And a handful of horror...

[gasps]

...as mystery mini-beasts invade a kitchen.

I've never seen anything like it.

They look almost alien.

[narrator] Bizarre phenomenon.

Oh, my Gosh. [gasps]

[narrator] Mysteries caught on camera.

[girl screaming]

[narrator] What's the proof behind this

strange evidence?

The island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean.

April 2nd, 2020.

Two men explore the coast, a haven for wildlife

like bottlenose dolphins and leatherback turtles.

But on this beach...

...they find a hideous black slime

writhing on the rocks.

[Eric] It's slimy, it's black,

and it keeps retracting.

What is that?

That's unpleasant.

This looks like a writhing, slithery mass

of weirdness.

This pushes the boundaries of "disgusting."

[narrator] The throbbing blob seems impervious

to the men's slashing machete.

It has this strange quality to it that,

as the person cuts into it, it reforms.

It's almost like self-healing or something.

Very bizarre. I've never seen anything like it.

[narrator] The men don't dare touch it.

[George] I was half-expecting to see this

lump of black mass jump up at the camera.

[man] It makes me think of Venom from Spiderman,

the black symbiote alien that takes over your body.

Did this come from the ocean

or has someone brought it to this place?

This island is supposed to be a paradise,

but you sure don't see this in the tourist brochure.

[narrator] Saint Lucia's beautiful seas

have long been thought to hide hideous monsters.

This lends credence to ancient stories of

some kind of creature

that lives in the tropical waters of Saint Lucia.

[narrator] The Lusca is a sea creature

described by pirates and other adventurers

who came here in the early days of European settlement.

This tentacled beast was said to grow to over 75 feet long,

and reported to lurk in the deep trenches

and blue holes in the Caribbean.

Some of which plunge to over 400 feet deep.

But, recently, reports have come in

of a new tropical terror.

For years, divers night-diving

off of the coast of Saint Lucia

have reported this writhing creature,

fifteen feet long and as wide as a man's arm.

They've nicknamed it, aptly, "The Thing."

[narrator] For decades,

The Thing was believed to be just a salty sea tale,

but then, one was caught on film.

It's a segmented worm called Eunice roussaei.

And the face of this worm is

truly out of a sci-fi horror movie.

That's where the mandibles

and all the eating parts are,

and various tentacles that senses environment.

Active at night.

This is a great example of some of the sea tales of divers

turning out to be absolutely true.

[narrator] But recent reports have come in of a new tropical terror.

Scuba divers speak of encounters

with a mysterious writhing mass

that sounds strikingly similar to the thing in the footage.

They call it "The Black Carpet."

The Black Carpet appears to be

a single organism

that could be hundreds of feet across,

that crawls across the ocean floor devouring anything in its path.

[narrator] This creature has so far not been photographed,

but sightings of this undersea entity

coincide with an increase in scuba deaths in the Caribbean.

Over 90 divers perish in just ten years.

There's a monster in paradise, and humans are on the menu.

[narrator] Biologists haven't yet identified

this massive black sea monster.

But in the Pacific in 2010,

scientists found an enormous White Carpet,

consisting of billions of microbes

forming a living mass on the ocean floor.

It certainly makes you wonder what other mysteries are hidden below the sea floor.

[narrator] This film could be the first photographic evidence

of a Caribbean Black Carpet,

a writhing mass of interconnected organisms,

perhaps a section cut off from the main body,

or a young one in its early stages of formation.

Are we looking at something that's about to become a giant Black Carpet?

[narrator] Biologist Kiki Sanford

wonders if this could be one monstrous creature

bathed in its own slime.

The slimy mucus and dark coloring

leads me to believe that this is a bootlace worm.

Bootlace worms are known to grow to extreme lengths.

One individual was found to be 180 feet long.

That's two blue whales, end to end.

[narrator] And these enormous creatures can be deadly.

When bootlace worms are attacked or threatened,

they produce a sticky mucus

that is actually a powerful neurotoxin.

Many ribbon worms

are known to produce tetrodotoxin,

which is the same toxin produced by puffer fish.

[narrator] Tetrodotoxin is 1,200 times more toxic

to humans than cyanide.

Just a pinhead of it is a lethal dose.

-[vomiting] -[narrator] First you begin vomiting

and experiencing excruciating stomach pain.

Then comes muscle paralysis, and finally, death, from suffocation.

[monitor flatlines]

[narrator] In 2019, a Florida man

permanently lost the use of his kidneys

after tetrodotoxin got into his body.

In 2020, two Cambodian men,

a dog and seven chickens

were all killed by the poison after eating it in sea food.

But that's not the only trick that ribbon worms have up their sleeve.

They're also incredibly hard to kill.

If you try to kill a ribbon worm by cutting it in half,

it just produces two new worms.

They survive.

And, in fact, one ribbon worm can be cut

into 200,000 new worms.

So this guy hacking away at this worm

with his machete is not gonna hurt it.

He's just going to make an army of worms.

[narrator] But a bootlace worm

shouldn't be living on a busy Caribbean beach.

They aren't normally found in the Caribbean.

They're native to cold-water regions.

So, how did it get here?

[narrator] Coming up,

is this Arctic alien poised to bring death to paradise?

Even humans can find themselves under threat

from their presence.

[narrator] And a doorway to another dimension

seems to open on to a street.

Could whatever it is invade this world?

[narrator] A man films a sinister-looking black ooze

writhing on a beach in the Caribbean.

Biologist Kiki Sanford

identifies it as a poisonous bootlace worm,

a cold water species that shouldn't be found here.

Sanford suspects transatlantic ships

crossing from cold seas to the Caribbean

could've brought a stowaway bootlace worm with them.

Invasive species can rapidly adapt

to threats and prey opportunities in new environments.

[narrator] These invasive species can quickly spread.

Every year, from Saint Lucia to Cancún

and up to the Keys in Florida's coast,

millions of sun lovers

stretch out on the beautiful golden beaches

that lie in the tranquil waters of this region.

Newly arrived bootlace worms

could turn these sun-traps into hellholes.

Could the bootlace worm have adapted its neurotoxin

to be even more dangerous

to Caribbean predators? In fact, it might even be

more dangerous to us.

[narrator] If these toxic monster blobs are spreading,

the residents and tourists at the Caribbean

will have to find ways to deal with this

virtually indestructible menace.

Now that we know that this stuff exists,

we need to figure out how to destroy it.

If you can't kill it with knives,

burn it with fire.

[narrator] Now, Tokyo, Japan.

September 23, 2019.

A busy daytime street in a downtown area.

As pedestrians go about their daily business,

a CCTV security camera

captures a mysterious arrival.

Wait. Can you rewind? How on earth did he do that?

He just appears out of nowhere.

[narrator] Experts don't detect a glitch in the footage

or any lost frames to indicate a camera fault.

The man seems to step out of thin air

and over a small fence onto a busy sidewalk.

I've seen a lot of strange things,

but this one particularly is blowing my mind.

It was weird.

It was weird to see that man come out of nowhere.

[narrator] Magician Ben Nemzer

discovers a theory being widely circulated on the Internet.

Many of the people who've been watching this online

think that he's a visitor from another dimension.

[narrator] Stories of people and things

suddenly appearing out of interdimensional gateways

go back centuries.

There's a famous story about two children with green skin

that were found wandering in the forests near the village of Woolpit

in the UK in the 12th century.

The girl learned English

and told people that she and her brother had come from

another dimension, a place called Saint Martin's Land.

They said they heard a loud noise,

then passed through a tunnel-like opening

that dropped them in medieval England.

[narrator] More recently, Japan has had strange visitors.

Newspapers report that during the 1950s,

a man approaches customs at Tokyo Haneda Airport

with a passport from a country called Taured,

which doesn't exist in our world.

It's claimed that the man is detained by immigration

and held under guard on the 15th floor of a hotel.

When the guards enter the room to check on him in the morning,

the man has allegedly vanished.

Are there portals between worlds?

Science says it's a possibility.

[Saad] Stephen Hawking's paper suggests that ours

isn't the only universe created in the Big Bang,

but a whole multitude of others were created at the same time.

[narrator] Physicists have put forward a number of theories

that argue that multiverses are not only possible,

they're actually very likely.

These include bubble universes

where many universes exist side by side,

each within their own space-time bubble.

Daughter universes,

where every action creates universes of alternative outcomes.

And parallel universes,

where our own universe is replicated infinite times.

This sounds far-fetched, but the equations in these theories

make this theoretically possible.

[narrator] Scientists at

the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee

have started conducting experiments,

hoping to prove the existence

of a mirrorverse parallel world.

What would lie on the other side?

Some of these universes might contain

Earth-like planets, societies

and even individuals that look just like people here on Earth.

[narrator] Image analyst Ben Radford

looks at the other people in the street

and notices something strange.

[Ben] When you're analyzing this video,

you can look at the bystanders' reaction.

In this case, we have at least half a dozen people

walking on the street who are within

ten, fifteen feet of when this guy suddenly appears out of nowhere.

And what they do is interesting.

And what they do is nothing.

They're not surprised, they're not shocked,

they don't stand back and say, "Where did this guy appear?"

They go about their day.

So this tells us that

what we're seeing in the video clip

is not what happened in real life.

It's a digitally manipulated image.

[narrator] The area the man appears to be stepping out of

seems to have been overlaid with another image

to conceal something or someone.

So then the question is, okay, well, why take an image of the empty road

and overlay it so it's covering up

where the guy comes from?

[narrator] Coming up,

are invisible yakuza assassins stalking the streets of Tokyo?

If these gangs could cover their tracks so efficiently,

law enforcement does not have a chance.

[narrator] And twitching in the kitchen.

Have micro-rats broken out of a lab?

[Kevin] He saw those things on the floor,

and then he just picked them up.

There's no way I would touch that at all.

[narrator] CCTV captures a man who seems to step out of nowhere

onto a busy Tokyo street.

Former FBI agent Rhonda Glover

locates the area where the camera was installed.

This is the Shibuya ward in Tokyo.

This is a busy downtown neighborhood.

[narrator] Glover discovers that

beneath its respectable-looking main streets,

a group of criminals has ruled the underworld of Shibuya for decades.

The yakuza.

And their rule has often come at a bloody cost.

They spent years fighting and killing each other

in inter-gang wars.

[narrator] The yakuza are criminals with a reputation for violence.

One of their godfathers, Kenichi Shinoda,

murdered a rival with a katana.

The yakuza are involved in running gambling,

prostitution and protection rackets,

but have also penetrated the mainstream business world.

But in recent years,

the yakuza have turned from guns and knives

to keyboards and hard drives.

Many people say that the yakuza are becoming more sophisticated,

using technology to become less visible to the police.

Like any business, they're becoming more modern

and they're hiring hackers.

[narrator] And the yakuza are using these hackers

to commit truly audacious crimes.

In May 2016,

the yakuza were involved in a digital heist

from cash machines across Japan,

stealing 17 million dollars in just three hours.

If these hackers are sophisticated enough

to steal 17 million dollars from ATMs,

surely they're also good enough

to scrub somebody's image from a security camera.

[narrator] Security cameras were a criminal's worst enemy,

forcing thieves to try to disguise or cover their appearance.

But now the yakuza seem to have the power

to hack security systems

and edit out their crimes altogether.

The yakuza have attacked politicians

with Molotov cocktails.

They've stabbed their enemy's children in the street.

[narrator] Glover discovers that the yakuza

are involved in a violent turf war

with Iranian gangs in the Shibuya area.

She suspects part of this conflict

might be playing out on the road behind the man

who seems to step out of thin air.

Maybe this camera recorded somethin'

that could send someone to jail.

Considering their history of violent crime,

anything that was caught on tape would be hard to miss

and very dangerous to the organization.

So, if this was worth erasing,

it must've been pretty bad.

[narrator] Author H.G. Wells

wrote The Invisible Man in 1897,

a tale of a man embarking on an almost

unstoppable spree of crime and murder.

A hundred and twenty years later,

science fiction looks like it could become science fact.

[narrator] Camera technology

has led to a 25% reduction in street crime.

But if gangsters can now make their digital footprints invisible,

crime fighters will have to find a new way of catching them in the act.

If these gangs could cover their tracks so efficiently,

law enforcement does not have a chance.

If these hackers are sophisticated enough

that they can hack into a security camera,

then that is terrifying.

[narrator] Now,

the city of Auckland in New Zealand.

January 30th, 2019.

A man notices something moving on a kitchen floor.

He saw those things on the floor.

And then he just picked them up.

Now there's no way I would touch that at all.

[narrator] They look unlike any creature on Earth

and appear to be twitching.

I would be worried that they would burrow in,

like a tick or something like that,

leaving a disgusting little tail sticking out.

This is one of the creepiest things I have ever seen,

that it will not stop twitching.

[narrator] Their strange appearance

leaves experts unsure about their origin...

I've never seen anything like it.

They look almost alien.

[narrator] ...and whether they might be intelligent.

Are they reaching out for each other?

Are they kinda communicating with each other?

Are they dangerous?

[narrator] Biologist Leslie Samuel studies the footage,

and thinks these tendrils could be some kind of tail.

They look like they have tails,

which is something we see in certain types of maggots.

I think we're looking at some sort of insect larvae.

[narrator] The most common of these tailed larvae

is the rat-tailed maggot,

which is the spawn of a type of hoverfly.

The tail acts as a snorkel

that allows them to breathe while submerged.

And they thrive in wastewater environments, including swamps,

sewers and even human stomachs.

If you're unlucky enough to ingest rat-tailed maggots,

they will feast on your flesh

causing lesions, intense stomach pains and uncontrollable diarrhea.

The problem with that is the rat-tailed maggots

are usually a totally different color.

So maybe we're looking at an entirely different creature.

[narrator] Coming up,

could these horrors be an experiment in vermin control gone wrong?

These are things that have taken millions and millions of years

to evolve just the way they are.

And now we're coming along and we're chopping and changing them,

you know, overnight.

[narrator] And in Texas,

a mirror that seems to have a mind of its own.

[Ben] That's just not how mirrors work.

Your reflection's supposed to copy you exactly.

[narrator] A man in New Zealand films weird, twitching objects

he discovers on the kitchen floor.

Biologist Steve Potvin thinks they remind him of an all too familiar pest.

It almost looks kind of like a rat, but that's way too small.

[narrator] New Zealand was isolated for over 80 million years

from the rest of the planet.

It became an avian paradise.

Birds here were so safe from any kind of predator

that many took to the ground and lost their ability to fly.

Big mistake.

When humans came around 1300 AD,

they brought rats in their boats

who enjoyed an easy-to-eat bird buffet.

Now the New Zealand government

is looking at a controversial solution

to dealing with these ravenous rodents.

Potvin believes these twitching horrors could be the result.

One technique that's come up recently

to deal with populations of rats

is CRISPR gene editing.

[narrator] CRISPR is a technology that allows scientists

to directly alter parts of an organism's DNA

to change biological traits.

Scientists in New Zealand are hoping that gene editing

will work where traps and poison have failed in the past.

Scientists have been using CRISPR technology

to mess around with the genes of animals to try and control their population.

[narrator] This technology could sterilize rats

or make them all male, preventing breeding.

New Zealand has vowed that all rats will be gone from the island by 2050.

But many scientists fear that this Frankenstein technology

could also lead to genetic abominations.

[Steve] These are things that have taken millions and millions of years

to evolve just the way they are.

And now we're coming along and we're chopping and changing them,

you know, overnight.

[narrator] Potvin investigates if the footage is evidence

that genetically modified rats have already been released in New Zealand,

causing horrifically shrunken pups.

Could it be that they're producing offspring but they're just too small

or, you know, they have genetic defects?

Or could this be affecting rats in some other way

that's making them look like this?

[narrator] Entomologist Kevin Kasky

detects deposits of a shiny dust near the twitching objects,

leading him to believe that these might not be individual organisms

but rather parts of a larger creature.

[Kevin] You can see a little sheen on this guy's palms.

Moths. They're covered with a dust-like scale.

Could these be the legs of a moth?

[narrator] Severed moth legs can exhibit

the strange twitching behavior seen in the footage.

Like a lot of insects if a moth's legs are removed from its body,

there are still electrical impulses in the leg muscles

that can explain this twitching that we're seeing.

The fact that they're still twitching

means that they haven't been detached for very long.

[narrator] If these are moth legs, they look truly massive.

It begs the question, what kinda moth do these legs belong to?

How big would this moth have to be?

[narrator] Some of the largest moths in the world

can be found in this part of the southern hemisphere.

The Hercules moth that lives in Queensland, Australia

can have a wing span of over a foot.

I mean, these moths are bigger than your head.

[narrator] Moths may seem harmless,

but some have a sinister reputation.

One, known as Calyptra or the vampire moth

feeds on the blood of mammals.

Their powerful proboscis works like a drill

allowing them to penetrate even elephant skin.

Vampire moths can suck blood for over 50 minutes,

and they have even been known to feed on humans.

Imagine one of these moths paying you a visit in the middle of your night

flapping around your bedroom.

I'd probably wanna keep my windows closed.

[narrator] New Zealand is a land of enormous bugs.

The giant weta is native to New Zealand.

It's about the size of a gerbil,

and it's been around for 190 million years.

[narrator] Twenty-three percent of the country

is dense virgin forest

where many moth species reside.

If you're looking for a giant insect,

then New Zealand is the place for you to go.

[narrator] Could this clip be evidence of an undiscovered giant moth?

Perhaps, an unknown carnivore

that's been hiding out in the island's remote wilderness?

At least 70% of the plants and animals living in New Zealand and Australia

have yet to be discovered and are complete mysteries.

Maybe they're lucky they only found the legs.

I personally would not wanna come close

to a moth with a two-foot wingspan.

[growling]

[narrator] Now, San Antonio, Texas.

August 2018.

A young boy is filmed playing with a mirror.

It's a kid looking at himself in the mirror sticking out his tongue.

[narrator] Then the camera captures something disturbing.

-Ooh! Oh, my goodness. -What happened there?

Wait, hold on. Did that kid's reflection just move before he did?

[narrator] The child's reflection appears to break the laws of physics.

The longer I look at this clip, the weirder it is.

Because how is it possible that the person's reflection

can leave before the person themselves?

[Ben] That's just not how mirrors work.

Your reflection's supposed to copy you exactly.

It looks like his reflection has a mind of its own

and isn't taking orders from anyone.

[narrator] Humans have been making mirrors for over 6,000 years.

And although they are found in almost every home in the developed world,

we are still not entirely comfortable having them around.

In Jewish culture when someone dies

all the mirrors are covered while the household mourns.

It's a tradition called Sitting Shiva

that some people believe protects against demons that visit the home

after a loss or tragedy has occurred.

These demons can't be seen with the naked eye,

but their horrifying reflections can be seen in mirrors.

[narrator] Some cultures believe mirrors can even steal your soul.

In German and Dutch cultures mirrors were always covered up when someone had died.

This is because they say that if you saw

your reflection in the mirror after someone had died,

it is believed that you would be the next one to die.

[narrator] Magician Ben Nemzer wonders if this footage shows a clever trick

intended to shock and disturb audiences.

There's a lot of illusions that are spooky and frightening and unsettling,

and this is definitely one of them.

[narrator] Nemzer suspects this isn't a mirror at all

but instead, two identical twins working in perfect unison.

[Ben] So the way the classic mirror tricks work

is usually there's an empty frame

and there is somebody on the other side of the mirror

and every move is exactly choreographed and rehearsed

to make sure that the person pretending to be the reflection

and the person who looks just like them

are doing the same movements at the same time.

[narrator] Around half a million identical twins are born every year.

As many as one in three claim to have a telepathic connection

that allows them to anticipate their sibling's next move.

Some twins use these powers for criminal ends.

In 1994, identical twin Donald Anderson

did jail time for his convicted brother, Ronald,

with the authorities none the wiser.

If the kid had a twin

and they practiced that "ahh" with the tongue

exactly at the same point, it could be pulled off.

[narrator] But historian Marcus Harshaw

doesn't believe the dimensions of this ordinary looking room

would support such a trick.

Given the angle of the mirror and the space between that and the wall,

it doesn't seem likely that someone could fit back there.

It's definitely a true reflection.

[narrator] Coming up,

Chad Orzel attempts to bring his own reflection to life.

Wow, look at that.

There's a real biological basis

for why many people find mirrors to be unsettling.

[rumbling]

[narrator] And locals rush to escape the village of the damned.

What kind of powerful underground force

is being unleashed here?

[narrator] In Texas, the reflection of a young boy

playing in front of a mirror appears to move by itself.

Physicist Chad Orzel suspects that a strange scientific illusion

associated with mirrors can explain the boy's disconnected reflection.

He sets up an experiment to see if he can recreate

the unnerving effect seen in the video.

I wanna test if the angles between the camera, the boy and the mirror

are what's causing this phenomena.

[narrator] He copies the setup of the mirror and camera in the footage.

I know the mirror needs to be tilted

slightly away from the line of sight of the camera.

And now I just need to adjust the camera to get exactly the right line of sight.

[narrator] Orzel believes the boy's head

moves imperceptibly towards the camera.

But the angle of the mirror exaggerates the movement of his reflected image.

[Chad] So now I'm standing very close to the mirror,

holding my head still and my refection isn't going anywhere.

But if I just lean my way back a little bit,

I see my reflection move in the mirror.

The question is, what does this look like

to the camera looking over my shoulder.

Have I managed to make my reflection look like it's moved of its own accord?

[narrator] Orzel reviews the footage.

Wow, look at that. That is exactly the thing in the clip.

[narrator] Orzel thinks he solved the riddle

of how the boy's reflection appeared to move by itself.

[Chad] We managed to find exactly the right set of angles

to make my reflection look like it moved on its own.

This wouldn't work in any other orientation.

It's really amazing that this kid was able to get this effect by accident.

[narrator] This footage offers a unique window

into how susceptible the human psyche is

to the brain-bending power of mirrors.

Moments like these are a reminder

of how easily the human brain can be tricked.

And it can make you ask what else is there

that we see in the world around us

that looks different because we're looking from the wrong angle?

[narrator] Now, Mahakalapada in Odisha, India.

June 5th, 2020.

It's a quiet afternoon in a small Indian village

as a group of men stand around a work site.

There's a whole bunch of guys. I don't know exactly what they're doing.

[narrator] Then, without warning,

the ground begins to churn as though it's alive.

[gasps]

How is that even possible?

It looks like the ground is just boiling.

[narrator] And locals fear that their entire village

is about to be consumed by the exploding earth.

The only thing that you can do if you were standing there

is pray that it won't spread any further.

[Craig] This is a terrifying scene.

There's a force in nature here.

It's completely out of control.

What kind of powerful underground force

is being unleashed here?

[narrator] George Kourounis investigates the area

and discovers a widespread undercover industry

that could be responsible for disturbances beneath the earth.

Here in the Odisha region of India, there's been a recent explosion

in the illegal mining of gemstones like rubies, emeralds, garnets

and even some diamonds.

Is it possible we're looking at an illegal mining operation that's gone horrible wrong?

[narrator] It's one of the toughest jobs in the world.

[Craig] Illegal mines in India are often called rat holes

because they are very small, very confined,

and that's the space that illegal miners are forced to work in.

[narrator] An emerald plucked from the ground here

can be worth around $7,000 per ounce.

But an illegal miner will get paid less than two dollars a day

by the mine's gang masters.

And for this meagre wage the miners endure terrible conditions.

One area in India called Meghalaya, there was a mining accident

where one of these rat holes actually collapsed. 15 miners lost their lives.

Why? Because the mine was too confined to execute a rescue operation.

[narrator] Being trapped and killed in these tiny tunnels

isn't the only danger miners face.

Journalist Jeff Wise discovers that many of these secret illegal mine shafts

are funded by a dangerous organization.

This illegal mining, we're not talking about mom and pop operations.

These are really large and well-funded operations

that are run by a terrorist rebels.

[narrator] Coming up.

Is this village hiding an underground criminal operation?

So what we're seeing here is something's that's putting the entire village at risk.

[narrator] A man films villagers fleeing

as their home seems to explode from below.

Journalist, Jeff Wise discovers that many illegal gem mines in this region

are being run by a dangerous guerrilla group known as the Naxalites.

The United States' state department has categorized these rebels

as the world's sixth most dangerous terrorist organization.

[narrator] In just under a decade,

illegal mining in the Odisha region of India alone

has unearthed over 9.6 billion dollars' worth of minerals.

And this money funds acts of terror.

Just in 2018 alone the insurgency in India killed more than 300 people.

[narrator] The Naxalites exact terrible retribution against anyone who stands up to them.

[Jeff] In 2010, the rebels watched a revenge attack on a village

just for the arrest of some of its members,

and they burnt a family of four to death.

[narrator] Wise believes that this group

would even be willing to sabotage one of their mines

to punish a village for threatening their operations.

If someone has accidently uncovered a rebel

illegal mining operation, that would be extremely concerning.

[narrator] But historian Craig Gottlieb looks at mining surveys

and doubts this is an exploding or collapsing mine.

Geological surveys of the area do show mineral deposits

in this region, but not in this village. So that tells me

this is probably not the result of an illegal mining operation.

[narrator] Image Analyst Conor McCourt studies the footage

and wonders if this could be a disaster caused by India's unquenchable thirst.

So what we're seeing here is something that's putting the entire village at risk.

It's very unusual, the floor is bubbling.

There is mud splashing everywhere.

We see a blue pole in the middle of watery mud.

I think what we have here is a well drilling operation.

[narrator] India is suffering from a catastrophic shortage of fresh water.

Looking at the water situation in India,

by 2030 it's estimated that there's gonna be twice the amount of demand

compared to what they can actually supply.

A solution for this lack of water

is to go underground to find new resources.

For instance, utilizing aquifers.

[narrator] Aquifers are large layers of super saturated rock

located underground below the water table.

They contain about 30% of all the available fresh water on earth,

over 2.7 million trillion gallons.

If aquifers are near the surface

then they will easily release this water through natural springs.

Or even by digging a shallow well.

But many aquifers lie over thousand feet beneath the surface.

And tapping their water is like drilling for oil.

Your ground water is an essential resource that's in crucial demand right now.

When you take it out, it doesn't just magically reappear.

So as you use up your ground water

you have to dig deeper and deeper and deeper to get that resource.

[narrator] Across India 33 million borewells

have been drilled to depths of up to 1800 feet.

So much ground water has been extracted,

that it has caused the Earth to tilt on its vertical axis,

shifting eastwards seven inches a year.

If the world was to tilt too far,

our seasons and climate would be thrown into chaos.

But there are other more immediate dangers.

Now the thing is there's a lot of complications with drilling.

If you drill a little bit you might be okay.

But the deeper you drill and the further you go the older the rock gets,

there's quite a lot of risk at hand.

For instance, gas pockets.

[narrator] It's not just India that's at risk.

The United States sits upon

the fifth largest natural gas field in the world.

Estimated at more than 450 trillion cubic feet.

When released by a drill, this high pressured methane

will hit straight to the surface without warning.

And if the friction of the metal drill against the hard rock causes a spark,

it will ignite.

Now drills have caught fire before.

And borewells have burst into flames.

[narrator] But it's even more dangerous if the gas reaches the surface

without encountering a source of ignition.

Natural gas is odorless.

So it could be seeping on the surface and cover everything

and nobody would know.

[narrator] In August 2014, Cody Murray, a Texas rancher

investigates why his groundwater well isn't pumping correctly.

A build-up of methane in the pump shed ignites

and turns the air in the shed into an explosive fireball.

He survives the blast, but suffers third-degree burns over a quarter of his body.

[sirens wailing]

[narrator] If the churning ground captured in the video

is the result of huge quantities of methane gas,

then hundreds of lives could be in danger.

[Craig] It could entirely impregnate the ground

making the village a powder cake ready to explode.

One spark and boom!