Original subtitles

[narrator] Worldwide,

thirty-six 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 1] Do you see that?

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

Wow, what a blast!

[woman screaming]

This doesn't make sense.

There has to be some sort of explanation.

What else is going on here?

[narrator] Coming up...

Is something beneath Seattle

-making its power lines drop like dominoes? -[Martin] Woah!

[David] You could be driving down any road,

and it could possibly happen to you.

[car glass shattering]

[narrator] An Arctic circle appears in the Arctic circle.

[Kevin] It's like a whirlpool,

made out of animals.

You wouldn't wanna get sucked into that.

[narrator] And...

an express train to hell.

Whatever that train is carrying,

I don't wanna be anywhere near it.

[narrator] Can Matt Kutcher solve the mystery?

Mattie, go hot!

[cameras whirring]

[narrator] Bizarre phenomena.

Oh, my God! [gasps]

[narrator] Mysteries caught on camera.

[screaming]

[narrator] What's the truth behind this?

Strange Evidence.

[narrator] The snowbound step near Pavlodar,

in Kazakhstan, Central Asia,

January, 2015,

train cars sit on a quiet railway.

[Brian] It's clearly a very bleak, empty landscape.

It looks like it's freezing!

[narrator] Something seems wrong.

Just the way that the camera person is backing away.

It's like something bad could happen.

[narrator] Suddenly...

What?

What was that explosion?

It's a very high energy blast.

It's like the side of this train

has been blown apart.

Why did this blast occur? What is happening?

[narrator] Historian, Martin Morgan

suspects this railway isn't carrying ordinary cargo.

This doesn't look like a regular train.

It looks like, it has some sort of an industrial container on it.

[Nick] At first, it's difficult to make out.

But when I looked closer,

I can see the central part of the train car is turning.

Whatever this train car is carrying,

it's being dumped out on purpose.

[clanking]

[narrator] Engineer, Nick Householder, discovers that

Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region produces three quarters

of the country's vital ferro alloys.

Iron is mixed with other elements

like manganese or silicon,

in an extremely dangerous process.

[Nick] To make the alloys,

iron ore is melted at incredibly high temperatures

inside of a blast furnace.

[Brian] Red hot liquid metal, is one of the most

dangerous things that I can think of.

[narrator] And the byproducts of smelting can be just as hazardous.

This process creates a lot of waste material.

[narrator] The molten waste can be as hot as 2600 degrees,

a quarter as hot as the surface of the sun.

This waste material

is taken away and dumped into slag heaps.

[narrator] Worldwide, around 500 million tons

of this waste is produced every year.

But normally, when molten waste material is poured onto the ground,

it just solidifies.

It doesn't explode violently.

[metal clanking]

There must be something else causing the blast.

Could this explosion be caused by hot waste slag

that's been dumped onto cold ground?

[metal clanking]

[narrator] Matt Kutcher is the man who can tell us.

A Hollywood pyrotechnics expert,

he has over 20 years' experience

creating massive explosions.

[man 2] Come, check this video out.

What you looking at?

[man 2] Kaboom!

[Matt] Man, the guy knew it was coming.

-[Matt] Did you see how he started to back away already? -Yeah, he's backing away!

The amount of thermal energy coming from that is intense.

-[man 2] So gnarly -[Matt] It is gnarly.

[narrator] Kazakhstan's temperatures in January, when this footage was filmed,

plunge as low as 35 degrees below zero.

Matt wants to discover whether the frozen ground explains the molten waste explosion.

[Matt] So, can hot molten metal

poured right on the ice, create that big of an explosion?

I'm sure we could work something out, as in, test it.

Let's test it, huh?

[narrator] Matt and his team build a rig

to simulate molten metal pouring out of a train car.

I got a nice big block of ice in here.

[narrator] The ice will stand in for the frozen ground of the Kazakh steppe.

Now, the team figure out how to pour molten metal over it,

while standing a safe distance away.

Pour it in.

There you go.

That'll work.

[narrator] Instead of iron waste, Matt is using copper

with a melting point of almost 2000 degrees.

All right, we got our ice, we got some molten copper,

It's on the way.

We'll get the crucible to pull up in here,

we'll take our trip, pour it on the ice

and see if we can get it to explode.

[narrator] If Matt's theory is right, this is a disaster waiting to happen.

[Matt] Okay, we gotta go!

The cable's gonna break.

[man 2] Mattie, go hot!

[Matt] In three,

two, now hit it!

Wow!

What an explosion!

[narrator] The molten copper pours onto the block of ice,

transferring its heat energy to the frozen water on contact.

The ice melts, boils and turns into steam,

expanding to more than 1700 times its original volume,

in a fraction of a second.

The explosion throws molten globules of copper clear across the room.

[Matt] That's one way to break the ice.

Look at all the copper!

-That's what I'm talking about. -[man 2] That was pretty cool.

I mean look at it, just shattered all the ice, it's everywhere.

What ends up happening, right is that molten metal hits the ice and it boils it.

It boils it, creates steam, steam expands, it explodes.

The big railway car, obviously, had something melting in it,

something hot, right?

And when that hot metal or whatever it was, poured out into the snow or into the ice,

it created a huge burst of steam, and off it went, kaboom!

Kaboom.

[Matt] That's what I call "letting off some steam".

[narrator] Matt's experiment shows the explosive power

unleashed when water and molten metal meet.

[narrator] But, Brian Wolshon, notices that Kutcher's experiment

does not cause a fireball, like the one seen in the original footage.

In this transition of frozen water into steam,

what we would not expect, is to see a flash of flame.

So, the question is, what is causing that release of energy?

[narrator] Coming up, hell on wheels.

Is there a secret ingredient that caused the flames?

[Nick] This seems to indicate that

there's a chemical reaction going on,

that produces the boom.

[narrator] And, are Seattle's secret subterranean chambers

causing power lines to plunge onto cars?

They've got live electricity all around.

You're at death's door, knocking.

[narrator] In Kazakhstan, a man runs backward,

as a train dumps hot, molten metal waste onto frozen ground.

[metal clanking]

Explosives expert, Matt Kutcher, suspects

the ice being boiled instantly into steam

causes the initial blast.

But that doesn't explain the huge fireball that comes with it.

[Nick] When ice or water flash into steam,

you don't really expect to see an explosion like we see here.

This seems to indicate that there's a chemical reaction going on

that produces the boom.

[narrator] Water molecules are composed

of two atoms of hydrogen, and one of oxygen.

H2O.

But, split them apart, and you get trouble.

Pure hydrogen gas is highly combustible.

It's the fuel, that powers the sun.

Studying the footage, engineer Nick Householder

is convinced the flames are caused

by a massive explosion of hydrogen.

It's possible, that the heat from the slag is high enough

to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen in the water,

creating an incredibly explosive mixture.

Clocking it at something like 2500 degrees.

[narrator] Incredibly, no one was injured by this massive hydrogen explosion.

As a transport engineer, if I see an explosion like this,

I'm getting out of there as fast as possible.

This video shows us how simple physics

can result in dangerous explosions.

[narrator] Now, the Tukwila district of Seattle,

April 9th, 2019. 3:50 p.m.

[David] Here, we have a local rainy day.

This camera's shaking, bouncing all over the place.

[Martin] Oh, here it goes, here it goes! It's coming down.

It's, down! Look at that.

Whoa!

And that pedestrian just barely makes it

through that intersection without being hurt or killed.

How lucky is he?

[narrator] Then another pole falls.

And another.

It's just snapped in half, like a matchstick.

[narrator] One driver can't stop in time.

It just slammed into the windshield.

It almost cuts that car in half.

I see, part of the power line components inside the car.

[Brian] I mean, that's just crazy!

A genuine "what the hell" moment.

They've got live electricity all around,

and if you're at a point like this, you're at death's door, knocking.

[narrator] Altogether, a chain of 26 utility poles mysteriously slammed down

like massive guillotines across the road.

Incredibly, the couple in the crushed car survived.

But the cause of the collapse is unknown.

How did all of these power poles,

all come down at the same time?

[narrator] David Wallace discovers that Seattle may seem like a modern city,

but it has an ancient secret hidden under the metropolis.

Below the surface, is a network of 19th century streets,

condemned in 1907, for fear of bubonic plague.

The disease, better known as the Black Death,

that wiped out 25 million Europeans in the 14th century.

[David] Really makes you wonder as you're driving over these streets,

running above the ground and you have all these underground tunnels,

that's beneath you.

And if they start collapsing,

what would happen to you?

[narrator] Some of these underground plague chambers

have been accessed to create illegal gambling dens and flop houses.

[narrator] If this dangerous subterranean honeycomb is beginning to crumble,

the effects at modern street level, could be devastating.

It's entirely possible that this has destabilized the ground above it

to such an extent,

that with a hard rainfall, you suddenly get power lines collapsing.

[narrator] Studying the footage, entomologist Kevin Kasky,

suspects the polls themselves may hold a clue.

[Kevin] These utility poles have a dark brown color.

They appear to be made of wood.

Makes me wonder,

is there some sort of critter infesting the pole,

that could cause this kind of damage.

[narrator] Seattle is known as the Emerald City

for its lush, evergreen forests.

But Kasky discovers that's changing fast.

[Kevin] The city is quickly becoming the "brown rusty city",

because the surrounding forests are being devastated

by infestations of the bark beetle.

[narrator] There are over 600 species

of the bark beetle in America.

These tiny terrorists mostly feed on dead or dying trees,

but some will attack healthy ones,

with devastating effects.

[Kevin] The bark beetle burrows in

to the bark of a tree and lays its eggs.

And therefore, the larva then start to eat the tree,

exposing it to outside elements such as disease.

As the climate warms, the bark beetle has spread

north from California up into the lush green of Seattle.

[narrator] But engineer, Brian Wolshon,

finds these poles fell in a place,

where a potentially cataclysmic geological fault

was recently discovered.

This area of Washington State sits on what's known as the Cascadia Fault Line,

which was virtually unknown to science until the last 30 or 40 years.

Could, what we see in these video clips, actually be

the result of an earthquake?

[narrator] The last major seismic shock a magnitude 6.8 quake,

shakes Seattle on February 28, 2001.

It causes $1 billion of damage to roads and buildings, and injures 400 people,

but it's nothing compared to what's coming.

The Cascadia subduction zone runs for 700 miles

along the Pacific Northwest Coast.

[man 3] Every major city in this area of the United States

has been built without knowledge of this fault line,

putting them directly in the line of fire.

[narrator] Scientists believe tension has been building

in the Cascadia subduction zone since the last mega quake in 1700.

The mother of all earthquakes has long since overdue on the Pacific coast.

When it happens, it is not going to be pretty.

[narrator] First, seismic waves will destroy bridges.

and shake unreinforced buildings off their foundations.

The ground under Seattle will liquefy.

It'll cause dams to breach. It will cause fire. It'll cause flooding.

After the shaking, a 700 miles Tsunami

will blast the western seaboard.

[narrator] A wall of water, anywhere from 20 to 100 feet high

will devastate around 140,000 square miles.

Everything, west of Interstate 5

will be what the authorities call, "Toast".

As the massive wave of water recedes,

it will leave an unrecognizable landscape in its wake.

The entire region will be in an utter state of devastation.

[narrator] Experts fear that the cascadia catastrophe

will be worse than any earthquake

in the United States' recorded history.

The odds of the big one happening in the next 50 years

are estimated to be one in three.

We've all been sort of waiting with bated breath for a long time.

And one of these days, it's going to happen

and it will devastate the city of Seattle.

[narrator] No major earthquake is registered on the day the power lines collapse.

But regular miners shaking from the cascadia fault

known as episodic tremors happen every few years.

Could an episodic tremor be strong enough

to cause those utility poles to collapse?

If what we're seeing here is the result of these episodic tremors,

could that also be a forecast that the big one is very near?

[narrator] But not even an episodic tremor

was recorded in Tukwila, that day.

This has to be something else.

[narrator] Coming up, could all of America's power lines

be about to come crashing down?

We can't fix this fast, we're looking at the dark ages reappearing.

[narrator] And in the Arctic, a weird whirlpool of living creatures.

It looks like they're under some sort of trance.

[narrator] In Seattle, 26 utility poles mysteriously slammed down,

trapping a driver and his passenger.

Engineer, David Wallace suspects that the polls themselves are at fault.

[David] A power pole, is basically, constructed out of a tree

and over time, this tree is going to start rotting.

It's going to get weak and it can eventually, fall over.

Your average utility pole lasts about 45 years.

But the climate in the Puget area is mild and wet.

And this just increases the chances for rot.

[narrator] One rotten pole can become the weak link in a whole chain.

Utility lines like this are usually 35 feet tall.

As you can imagine, it's like a lever.

[David] You have these power cables that are pulling on broke directions.

You add a little bit of wind or any other motion to it,

that adds these extra forces which can overwhelm

the strength of the pole and you get a snap.

[narrator] Investigators discover that winds that day

are blowing at 30 miles per hour with gale-force gusts

While rainfall softens the ground.

Utility company engineers later discover

that six of the falling polls show advanced internal decay.

[Martin] Got a bit of a perfect storm going on here.

All of these circumstances conspired to collapse, these power lines.

[narrator] More checks reveal some 6,000 other polls that need urgent attention.

So if we can't fix this fast, we're looking at the dark ages reappearing.

This problem is not unique to Seattle. This problem affects the entire country.

They're nearing the end of their life expectancy

and there are millions of miles of them in the United States.

[Rachel] These polls weigh over 700 pounds,

and when they fall, it's like getting hit by a flattering ram.

[narrator] It takes emergency crews an hour to turn off the power

and cut the unfortunate couple from their wrecked car.

They escaped with severe bruising.

I mean these guys got away, that's some lucky people right there.

They say, the most dangerous thing on the road is other drivers.

Well, it seems like on this day, it was a power line pole.

[narrator] Now, the Lovozero Tundra, in Russian Lapland,

a pristine wilderness, north of the Arctic circle.

April 30, 2018,

a drone captures a mysterious spinning mass in the barren snowfields.

You can see this circle, it's kicking up snow.

[Kevin] What is that circle?

It is huge.

[narrator] As the drone gets closer, it reveals a herd of reindeer.

It's like a tornado of animals. It's kind of surreal.

Why are all those animals circling around each other?

[Jayde] It's like they have a hive mind.

Is there something wrong with the reindeer?

Is this mother nature gone mad?

[narrator] Biologist, Jayde Lovell studies

the dizzying rotation of the reindeer herd.

She has seen this kind of behavior before in other species

and it's not a good sign.

We know that some animals will walk around in circles

if they're sick, if they have a brain infection or a parasitic infection.

[narrator] In some wild animals,

walking in circles is a sign of rabies or worse.

In the Northeast region of the United States,

there has been a noted rise in moose's dying unexpectedly.

And this has been linked to a parasitic worm in the brain

that causes the moose to just wander aimlessly in circles.

[narrator] The parasite, which is killing the moose,

Parelaphostrongylus tenuis,

normally lives in white-tailed deer.

[Kevin] When the parasite gets into a moose,

the worms, move up the moose's spine,

making its way to the brain devouring the gray matter,

slowly driving the moose insane.

The moose begins walking in circles and they do this without eating.

So eventually, the moose expires.

This parasite is becoming more common

because with rising temperatures,

it's allowing the white-tailed deer

to move into areas previously uninhabitable.

Could this strange reindeer behavior be caused by parasites on the brain?

[narrator] Parasitic brain worms don't just attack wild animals.

Humans can become victims, too.

We know that it's certainly possible

for brain parasites from animals to infect humans.

So it makes you wonder when you see this reindeer behavior,

if there's anything that the humans in the area should be worried about?

[narrator] Suicidal thoughts among reindeer herders in Sweden,

are twice as high as among the general population.

A hidden epidemic of brain eating parasites

could slowly be driving the Arctic human population mad.

This is even worse than being a zombie.

Imagine a whole village of people walking around in circles until death.

[narrator] But biologist Carin Bondar,

does not believe these ungulates are unwell.

[Carin] These rangers are actually, moving quite quickly

and in a really coordinated fashion,

which makes me think that they aren't confused at all.

And this isn't a parasite.

But why are they doing this?

[narrator] Coming up, is this spinning disk of deer a way of fighting humans?

[Ashanti] Imagine being plowed down by by 100 reindeer,

you'd be pummeled like a sack of potatoes.

[narrator] And a shape-shifting riddle in the skies over Germany.

This fits the description of what one might imagine

an alien craft from another planet would look like.

[narrator] On the remote Arctic Tundra,

reindeer are filmed spinning in what looks like a terrifying dance of death.

But Ashanti Davis, suspects these reindeer

are acting in a logical and coordinated way

to fight off a stealthy and cunning enemy.

Large herds of animals often stampede as a form of defense.

This large mass makes them harder to target by predators.

[narrator] Schools of fish are known to swim in circles to confuse attackers.

Birds circle in the air for the same reason.

The reindeer want to stay together so they stampede in a circle.

Creating almost like a reindeer cyclone.

[narrator] But what could be attacking these reindeer

here in the high Arctic Tundra?

Biologist Jayde Lovell discovers, Vikings 1,000 years ago,

used to encounter these bizarre reindeer cyclones.

An effective defense against human hunters.

It's possible that this is warming in a circle,

may have been an evolved threat response behavior

to being hunted by Vikings.

They would put their vulnerable members in the center of the herd

and the strongest members on the outside and run at this huge speed.

And you can imagine as a Viking with maybe only a sword,

or a spear would be pretty difficult to take down

a bunch of stampeding swarming reindeer.

[narrator] Reindeer weigh up to 660 pounds and can run 50 mph.

During the spring,

they can mass in super herds of 500,000 individuals.

So when they feel under threat,

the danger to humans is very real.

These are huge creatures and like any of the large game in the north,

reindeers are big enough to trample a human to death.

[Ashanti] Imagine being plowed down by 100 reindeer,

all of that power moving through those hooves

would mean you'd be pummeled like a sack of potatoes.

[narrator] Forget Bambi, worldwidem deer are a doe-eyed danger to humans.

In the U. S., they are the deadliest animal,

killing more people than dogs, bears, sharks

and alligators combined.

But nothing in this drone footage shows anything

that might be a potential threat

to these rapidly rotating reindeer.

Investigators can only speculate

about what is sending them into a spin.

[Carin] They may be sensing danger.

Something that we humans can't see or feel.

Whatever is happening, the reindeer are not happy.

They are ready to do whatever it takes to protect the herd.

[narrator] Now, Ruckersdorf, outside Nuremberg, Germany.

September 9, 2020.

A local resident spots a strange glinting shape moving through the sky.

What exactly are we looking at here?

It looks like something metallic because the sunlight is glinting off it.

[Patrick] It's moving in such a strange way.

I can't quite make out its shape.

It seems to be shifting constantly.

[narrator] This is no ordinary flying object.

It's not like a aircraft where you're going to have wings.

It's not like a drone, where you're going to have propellers going about.

[narrator] Weirdest of all, it seems to change its appearance as it hovers.

[Nick] I don't know of anyone who's developed an aircraft

that just constantly changes shape in the sky.

[woman 3] There's no engine sound.

I can't tell what this is.

This fits the description of what one might imagine

an alien craft, from another planet would look like.

[narrator] Historian, Craig Gottlieb finds a cold war era report

smuggled out from behind the Iron Curtain in 1952.

It might explain what this mysterious object could be.

Germany during this period was a hotbed of UFO activity.

Lots of sightings on both sides of the iron curtain.

[narrator] The declassified CIA file, details the sworn testimony

of East German defector, Oscar Link.

The former town mayor claims he had a close encounter

with a weirdly shaped aircraft.

[Craig] He didn't know what it was.

Said it looked like a frying pan.

[narrator] A crude sketch shows what Link claims he saw,

including the craft's two occupants.

Oscar described how the center part of the craft

could move with ease,

which could explain that once it's up in the air it could change shape.

Mr. Linker seeing this thought to himself,

I might be seeing something top secret and really sensitive.

He thought, what he saw was a top-secret soviet super weapon.

[narrator] Military historian, Martin Morgan

discovers reports of an extraordinary aircraft

developed by the Communist super state,

the EKIP.

It looks like a Buck Rogers concept of what space travel would look like.

It doesn't look like it has wings that will support lift.

It uses some other system to achieve controlled flight.

[narrator] Soviet engineers, claim the disc-shaped fuselage acts like a single wing

providing almost all of the EKIP's lift.

Jets which provide thrust are located inside the craft.

It can supposedly travel long ranges with heavy cargo

and doesn't need a runway to land.

[narrator] But descriptions of the EKIP never mentioned shape shifting abilities.

[Martin] It might be that what we're looking at in this footage

is the 21st-century adaptation

of something first created by the Soviet Union.

It begs the question, is that what we're seeing in the sky?

[narrator] Coming up,

Nick Householder finds a new top secret substance

that could morph an object as it moves.

It's very possible that the shape shifting object

maybe using a memory metal construction technique like this.

[narrator] And is this film proof,

there's a pet door between this world and the next?

If there's any animal capable of coming back from the dead.

It's gonna be a black cat.

[narrator] Over Germany,

an unexplained aerial object hovers

and appears to shape shift in the sky.

Aerospace engineer Nick Householder

is struck by the way the objects casing

seems to have no clearly defined shape.

[Nick] The way the aircraft is changing and morphing implies

that the skin of the craft has some sort of unusual physical properties.

This reminds me of something called memory metal.

Metals that can change shape almost at will.

[narrator] NASA's scientists are experimenting

with the memory metal Nitinol,

an alloy of Nickel and Titanium.

Nitinol is said to be the secret sauce in NASA's next mars rover.

Nitinol wheels will bend around obstacles on the planet's rocky surface.

And then revert to their original form

to carry on the robot's mission.

This is Nitinol wire, it looks like any other wire you might see,

but it has a special arrangement of its atoms where when you deform it,

it actually remembers the original position it was in,

so that no matter how much you change it,

it can still go back.

But what takes it back is interesting.

You can use either heat or electricity

to free up the atoms and allow them to realign themselves

to their original orientation.

So, if I take this lighter and apply a little bit of heat,

the wire jumps back to its original shape.

Straight as an arrow.

I'm going to attempt to replicate what we're seeing in the video

by embedding some Nitinol into this piece of Mylar making a hybrid material.

We'll have the flexibility and the shimmery-ness of the Mylar material

mixed with the rigidity and shape-changing properties of the Nitinol.

[narrator] Nick creates the original shape to be flat.

Now it's ready to go.

[narrator] He deforms the crystal lattice of the wires

and this time he uses electricity to energize them,

allowing their atoms to shift and reform.

Moving back into their original crystalline structure.

[Nick] We have a hybrid shape shifting material here.

It's very possible that the shape-shifting object maybe

using a memory metal construction technique like this.

[narrator] The possibilities of memory metal

are only beginning to be explored.

[Nick] NASA has used memory metals to make wings

that can deform and change shape during the flight.

Nitinol has also seen some uses in adaptive robotics.

You can imagine this being used like a muscle

that is deformed and then when a little bit of electricity is applied,

it returns to its original shape.

This is science fiction, made real.

And just imagine,

if this is the stuff that we're allowed to know about

how far the tech has actually gone behind the scenes.

What if the next evolution is that we can make

an aircraft that like the T-1000 flow into a different shape.

Maybe there's some super advanced research laboratory

that has broken through and achieved that.

[narrator] But even a craft like this would make noise as its engines roar.

Within seconds, the mysterious shifting shape vanishes into the sky

without any perceptible sound.

Without further evidence,

investigators can only speculate

about who is flying it, over a civilian neighborhood.

The troubling thing is we still don't know who built this

or for what purpose?

Maybe that's something that we should take pause and be concerned with.

[narrator] Now Swindon, an ancient market town in Wiltshire, England,

May 24th, 2020.

A security camera monitors an ordinary home.

This is a bog-standard living room, comfy furniture.

And we can see a white cat crowding around the household cat.

Hang on. Whoa!

[narrator] As the lights come on, a ghostly guest appears.

Whoa, wait now there's a cat.

The cat appears on the couch from nowhere.

[Greg] You can see, it kind of fading in

as if it was coming from the ether.

That's kind of creepy.

How does a cat just materialize out of thin air?

[Dustin] Nothing and then all of a sudden we have a cat.

What is going on here?

[narrator] Coming up,

is this proof of a paranormal pet?

What's a little bit creepy, is that the woman had a black cat that died?

This was his favorite spot on the couch.

[narrator] In Swindon, England,

a ghostly cat appears to manifest on a living room couch.

Image analyst Conor Mccourt's studies the curious footage.

What we have here is a cat appearing out of thin air.

Right here, we see what appears to be ears.

[narrator] McCourt deploys analytic software which will identify

any movement of a solid object.

We have two cats in the video

where you see these lines that indicates actual movement.

See the cat jump off the bed.

The other cat, there's no movement at all.

No indication that this thing is alive.

What's going on here?

What's kind of strange is that the woman comes into the room

and she looks around and seems to take no notice of the cat.

So either she's not surprised at all or

we're seeing something that she isn't.

Is it possible that the camera is picking up something

that the woman can't see?

[narrator] Historian Karen Bellinger discovers that the homeowner

didn't see the cat, until she reviewed the footage.

But she has reason to believe the camera captured something supernatural.

What's a little bit creepy is that the woman who owns this place

had a black cat, that died a year before this film was taken.

His name was BlackJack.

And according to the lady,

this was his favorite spot on the couch.

[narrator] Pet owners often feel the presence of a beloved deceased companion.

One former feline friend is even said to haunt

one of America's most famous buildings.

Ghost cats have been reported stalking the US Capitol, in Washington DC.

And people have even reported seeing cat paw prints on the floor.

[narrator] Psychologists say encountering a ghostly version

of a dead pet is a hallucination.

But this apparent apparition on the video,

can't be a figment of its former owners imagination.

Ghost cat or no cat.

Something very strange happened in that colorful living room.

[narrator] Physicist Chad Orzel

believes the answer can be found in the data on the footage.

There's a combination of events

that lead to that cat shape appearing on the sofa.

The light coming through the window looks bright,

but the time on the footage says it's 9:30 p.m.

So it's evening.

The footage is also black and white,

which tells me the camera is in some sort of night vision mode.

Seeing the world through infrared light.

[narrator] Everything in the universe with a temperature

over 450 degrees below zero emits infrared radiation.

Humans and other warm-blooded animals can't see it.

But we can feel it as heat.

[Chad] Colored objects look the way they do

because they're reflecting light that our eyes can see.

The same things will reflect infrared light differently

and will appear different colors under infrared illumination.

[narrator] Orzel sets up an experiment

to discover if a shift from recording infrared to visible light,

might explain the curious case of the couch cat.

I've got a similar home security webcam here

with an automatic night vision mode,

and on the couch, I've placed a camouflage print blanket,

a solid blue t-shirt and a stuffed black dog.

What we're going to do is switch off the lights,

the camera will go into its night vision mode

and we'll see how different these three things look

under infrared light compared to the visible light.

[narrator] Orzel's camera reveals a magical metamorphosis.

When recording infrared light, the appearance of the objects change.

[Chad] This three materials that looks so different

under visible light look almost exactly the same in infrared.

The camouflage print on the blanket has completely vanished.

The solid blue shirt is almost the same color as the blanket,

and even our little black dog is looking much lighter,

nearly the same color as the other two objects.

[narrator] It's possible that a similar effect in the British living room

conceals the ghost cat under infrared light.

And reveals it on the couch in daylight mode.

This is definitely a light bulb moment.

In the black and white night vision mode,

you can't pick up the differences between these materials,

so, it looks almost like there's nothing there.

As the lights come on, the camera readjusts it's settings

and all of the dark objects reappear.

It's almost like magic.

[narrator] Infrared camera technology seems to explain

this ghost cat, but the owner still believes the video is proof

of an animal afterlife and her beloved BlackJack is back.

Maybe this woman's old cat decided to cash in on one more of those nine lives.