Original subtitles

[Harry] Worldwide, 50 billion cameras

record our daily lives

in our hands,

in our cars, and in our homes.

They capture things that defy explanation.

[woman screams]

It really made me ask, what the heck's going on here?

[man 1] Check this out.

[Harry] Experts carry out forensic analysis

of these unusual events.

Wow! Now that's a cracker.

[man 2] Oh!

This doesn't make any sense.

There has to be another explanation.

So what could it be?

[Harry] Coming up, an invisible drug runner.

Did I see that right? Was that a person

or just a pair of pants running away?

[Harry] The coast is toast.

[man speaking]

Last time I checked, water doesn't burn.

[Harry] Is this evidence of a legendary World War II weapon?

The coastal weapon could have been deployed

and actually made that happen.

[Harry] And, from a man's stomach,

living spaghetti.

[Craig] The fact that these things are being removed

from a living person, it begs a really disturbing question.

How did they get in there in the first place?

[Harry] Bizarre phenomenon...

[gasps] Oh, my gosh.

[Harry] ...mysteries caught on camera.

This is just mind-boggling.

[Harry] What's the truth behind this

strange evidence?

Sulawesi Island, Indonesia.

June 15, 2021.

A man on vacation films his family

rushing to the beach

and encounters some very hot water.

[man speaking]

[Cate] There is actual fire

and it's spreading across the wave

as it touches the shore.

The last time I checked, water doesn't burn.

[Harry] The flames create a barrier between the sea and shore.

Fire? Uh, this is not normal, um,

it's not what you'd expect from a day at the beach.

[Craig] Water's supposed to put out fires, not cause them.

Something weird's going on.

[Harry] Geologist, Cate Larsen

finds Indonesia is an island nation

with over 140 volcanoes,

part of the 25,000-mile long

ring of fire.

The ring of fire is this,

this gigantic ring

of tectonic plates

that encompasses the rim of the Pacific Ocean.

So, there's lots of volcanoes.

[Harry] Including the most notorious volcano in the world.

In 1883, there was one of the biggest eruptions

to ever happen in recorded history.

And that was the eruption of Krakatoa.

[Hannah] Krakatoa spewed debris

a 50 miles into the air,

triggered tsunamis

and killed thousands of people.

[Harry] Indonesia's volcanoes are spread across

more than 17,000 islands.

This is a particularly volcanically active area.

So, we know that there's the potential

for this kind of activity to be there.

[Harry] And off the coast of the world's largest archipelago,

there are hidden, fiery dangers.

In 2010, there was the discovery of

this underwater volcano that's over 10,000 feet

in... in total height.

And it doesn't even touch the surface.

So, is it possible that these

burning waves

is somehow a byproduct

of an underwater volcanic eruption?

[Harry] But marine biologist, Hannah Rudd

looks at geological surveys

and finds no volcanic activity

recorded on this particular part of the island.

So, maybe that's not the answer here.

[Harry] When historian, Craig Gottlieb

looks at the way the flames precisely

follow the shoreline,

he is immediately reminded

of one of the greatest mysteries

of World War II.

Rumor had it that England had developed

a weapon, a wall of flame defense.

[Harry] After the fall of France in 1940,

only a thin stretch of water

stood between England and the Nazis.

Along the coastline, the British military were on high alert.

And in the summer of 1940,

residents in the remote coastal village

of Shingle Street, Suffolk

are suddenly evacuated from their homes.

There are reports of flashes and screams

coming from the nearby beach.

[Amy] Witnesses who served in Britain's Home Guard

said that it almost looks like the sun was setting

in the east because there was this big,

orange glow on the horizon.

It looks like the entire ocean was somehow on fire.

On the shore, they found a sea of absolute horror,

dead Germans burned to a crisp.

The soldiers had been horribly burned

by some kind of secret weapon

that the British had set up along the shore.

They sat and waited with the bodies

until British officials arrived

and then were told to never speak of what they saw.

The rumors were that the Germans attempted an amphibious landing

and they were met instead by this weapon.

Once the weapon ignited

and the fire spread,

the assaulting amphibious invasion troops,

uh, were caught on fire from head to toe.

[Harry] Dutch resistance fighters on the other side of the North Sea

made multiple reports of German soldiers

filling up hospitals.

They were badly burned, and rumor was

that it was part of a massive defensive strategy

around the British Isles.

[Harry] But both the British and German authorities

claim that no incident took place at Shingle Street

or anywhere else along the English Coast that night.

Was it some big cover up?

Because neither side would benefit by saying what happened.

For the Germans, it would look like a giant failure,

and for the British, they would want to keep their secret weapon

a secret.

[Harry] Gottlieb discovers that a secret beach burning weapon

was indeed being developed by the British.

The British had established what they called

the Petroleum Warfare Department,

and its mission was actually to figure out

how to use fuel and oil as a weapon.

[Harry] The top secret department developed a weapon

designed to burn invading Nazis

if they tried to come ashore.

It was called the fougasse.

[news reporter] If the Germans had tried to invade Britain after Dunkirk,

they would have had a very hot reception

at many likely spots around the coast.

Fougasse employed oil and other petroleum products

mixed together

that would be stored in containers

right at the water's edge.

So, right at the moment

when the enemy needed

to unload landing craft on a beach,

the beach would suddenly burst into flames

and attacking German forces

would be consumed by those flames.

The British actually built

50,000 of these fougasses

and they buried them mostly along the shores of England.

[Harry] But officially, the weapon was never used.

Indonesia has more than 60,000 miles

of coastline to defend

and less than 300 naval ships.

China has made claims to some of Indonesia's territory.

Have the Indonesian military

created their own version of the fougasse

to protect their beaches?

Could the Indonesian government have deployed this top secret weapon?

Has it been ignited by accident?

[Harry] Hollywood pyrotechnics expert, Matt Kutcher,

has over 35 years' experience

with fiery explosions.

He and his team went to investigate

if the footage shows Indonesia

secretly preparing to deploy this lethal,

World War II wonder weapon today.

So, son, what we're gonna do is use this body of water

to simulate what we've seen in that video,

those burning waves.

I want to take and bubble

some propane, some liquid petroleum,

kerosene and maybe some butyl acetate.

Why would you be using those fuels?

That type of fuel is lighter than the water.

It's gonna stay right up on top.

And I think once we light it and create some waves,

it's gonna look like what we saw in that video.

[Harry] Kutcher runs a pipe under the water

that will bubble the flammable mix to the surface.

He's going to mimic the waves on the ocean's surface

to see if the fire behaves like the one seen in the video.

-Okay, and light it. -Here we go.

[Harry] Coming up...

[Matt] All right. Make some waves.

[Harry] Can Matt Kutcher cook up a World War II water weapon?

Look at that.

[Harry] And who wears the trousers?

This is just bizarre. I mean, you have half a person

running down the street.

Are we looking at a semi-invisible man?

[Harry] On Sulawesi Island,

a vacationing family film

as the ocean bursts into flames.

[man speaking]

Hollywood pyrotechnics expert, Matt Kutcher,

believes Indonesian authorities

could be testing a secret flame weapon

that incinerates invading armies

as they approach its shores.

-Okay, and light it. -Here we go.

[Matt] Nice.

[Harry] The flames burn on the water.

But Kutcher needs to replicate ocean conditions

to make the flames match

what's seen in the original clip.

[Matt] All right, make some waves.

You see how it's pushing it?

That's exactly what we saw in the video.

Look at that.

See how it curls over.

[Harry] The flames continue to burn

despite the waves.

Any enemy soldier attempting a landing on the shore

would be engulfed by fire.

The fire we created looks exactly

like what we see in the other video.

I think it's completely possible

that a coastal weapon could have been deployed

and actually made that happen.

[man speaking]

[Harry] But journalist, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

thinks that the mysterious flames on the water

are not the work of the military,

but of pirates.

This particular area is known for oil piracy

or oil smuggling.

[Harry] Indonesia imports

more than 236,000

barrels of crude oil a day.

Because it has no international pipelines,

every last drop arrives by tanker.

And this precious cargo is vulnerable to buccaneers.

One group in particular

has inhabited these islands for over 400 years,

and their name has become notorious.

The most feared are the Bugis...

of the Sulawesi tribe...

who have pirated European ships

since they first arrived.

And the Bugis people

have been connected to piracy

and pirate attacks

around the Indonesian coastline.

[Harry] Bugis terrified European sailors

from the 17th century,

attacking merchant vessels

as they negotiated Sulawesi's waters.

Portuguese explorer, Duarte Barbosa,

reported that they were not just thieves,

but cannibals.

Descendants of the 17th century Bugis

are still pirates in these waters.

And it's black gold, not bullion,

they have firmly in their sights.

Between 2015 and 2020,

there were over 250 reported attacks.

[Kenya] In January of 2022,

a tanker was anchored

off of the coast of Sulawesi.

Masked pirates arrived in speedboats,

armed with machetes.

[Harry] The pirates seized the crew,

moved the tanker and siphoned off the oil.

Smaller boats are used to offload the oil,

and bring it to, um, its destination.

There's a lot of spillages into the marine environment.

[Harry] The spills are not only deadly for marine life,

when they ignite,

it creates fireballs that can be lethal for humans.

In 2018, four fishermen are killed

when a large oil slick

off the coast of Indonesia catches fire,

with the blaze reaching more than a mile high.

[Kenya] Stealing oil is a messy business.

An oil spillage seems most likely.

Oil can still catch on fire even in water.

[Harry] Because oil is lighter than water,

it floats on the surface.

And if something ignites it,

the flame will remain until it burns itself out.

If the oil piracy in this region continues,

it could turn Indonesia

into a very different kind of vacation hotspot.

Flaming water is gonna ruin my day at the beach.

[Harry] Now, Ulloa, Colombia.

May, 2021.

A mother films her child with his pet.

And this is an ordinary street.

And there's a little bunny rabbit

which suddenly starts to look a little terrified.

Oh! Oh, that's weird.

[Chad] It looks like a person coming around the corner,

but on looking closer,

it's just the legs of a person.

The kid is just sort of... I would be frozen, too.

[Nick] Did I see that right?

Was that a... a person,

or just a pair of pants running away?

[Harry] The disembodied legs vanish into the night.

Whatever this thing is, it seems to be running away.

[Michio] How is that possible?

Pants running by themselves?

[Harry] Former NYPD image analyst, Conor McCourt

thinks digital manipulation is highly unlikely.

When examining the shadow cast by the pants...

it's consistent with just the shadow being cast by pants,

not by the whole body.

Either this is a very good deceptive video

or this is actually happening.

[Harry] Coming up,

can engineer, Nick Householder

create his own invisibility cloak?

I bet you didn't notice the other thing that's behind the lens.

[Harry] And terrifying double vision

over the skies of England.

What exactly are we looking at?

That it seems like we have a second sun in the sky.

[Harry] A woman playing with her son and his pet rabbit

films a bizarre pair of disembodied legs

running down the street in Colombia.

What we see is

just a pair of legs running across the scene.

There's no upper body.

It's freaky. What's going on here?

[Harry] Journalist Sarah Cruddas

is reminded of the classic novel, The Invisible Man

by visionary author, H.G. Wells.

[Sarah] In the story of The Invisible Man,

he uses his power to cause lots of trouble,

and you can't help but wonder,

what would you do if no one could see you?

[Harry] Griffin, the lead character in the novel

uses physics known as the refractive index,

to create his invisibility.

[Chad] The refractive index.

It's a measure of how much light slows down

due to its interaction with the atoms making up a material.

[Harry] Engineer Nick Householder

wonders if an updated version of that science

could be being deployed here in the footage.

The Invisible Man develops a process

that allows him to change his body's refractive index

to be the same as air.

[Harry] When light passes through two materials

with different indexes,

it bends enough for us to notice the distortion.

[Nick] If two objects have the same refractive index,

that means that the light doesn't bend when it passes through,

meaning, to your eyes, it appears invisible.

[Harry] But physicist Chad Orzel

finds H.G. Wells' Victorian era theory

has a major flaw.

[Chad] As it turns out, changing your index of refraction

is one of the worst ways to become invisible,

because it would require a really wholesale change

in the way that your body is put together.

Your retinas would stop working.

You'd effectively be blind,

because instead of the light bouncing around and hitting your retinas,

it would just pass straight through you.

Nobody would be able to see you,

but you wouldn't be able to see anybody else either.

[Harry] Data scientist, Liberty Vittert,

believes this bizarre sight

could be evidence Colombia's drug smugglers

are using technological solutions

to keep their activities hidden.

Maybe, stealth tech

explains what's happening in this video.

I mean, who needs to be invisible more than a smuggler?

[Harry] Colombia is the biggest producer

of cocaine in the world,

with more than 350,000 acres,

equivalent to more than 77,000 baseball fields

being used for its production.

The illegal narcotics trade here

is worth over $10 billion a year,

and the cartels are constantly using high tech innovations

to stay one step ahead of the law.

An example of this is something called

a very slender vessel,

which is a high-speed boat

that can be upwards of 50 feet long,

but 10 feet or less wide.

[Harry] These long, skinny boats

are capable of piercing waves at high speed,

low to the water's surface,

making them nearly impossible to detect by radar.

If we know they're already using technology like this,

it's not a stretch to think

that they may expand into active camouflage of some kind,

like this invisibility cloak.

[Harry] Engineer Nick Householder has built an experiment

to test if a real life invisibility cloak

can match the dramatic effect seen in the footage.

Quantum stealth is a technology

that would allow us to bend light rays

without physically interacting with them.

And it's still theoretical.

There does exist a technology today

that can bend light in a similar way.

This is a lenticular lens.

There's a bunch of vertical corrugations in here

that are in themselves lenses.

Each one of those bends light in an interesting way.

So, what's behind the lenticular lens?

Nothing?

Wrong. There's a can back there.

The lenticular lens is amazing.

It's capable of bending the light

from the left and right,

and making it appear straight to your eyes.

Effectively, it took the light from this side

and the light from this side and bent them straight at the camera.

You're just seeing to either side

of the can simultaneously.

The application for this kind of lens

is typically like those little holographic cards

that look like one object from one side

and one object from another side.

Now, the special sauce is,

when it moves away from the object,

it creates a blind spot directly behind it

where the light from the left and right are bent to go straight,

and there's an invisibility patch directly behind it.

[Harry] But Householder wants to know

if it can shield an entire head and torso.

[Nick] This is a very large, lenticular lens.

It gives you the ability to make any part of your body disappear,

whether it's your torso or your legs.

If the man in the video

had a lenticular lens, the size of a shield,

he might be able to make it look like,

he had no upper half.

[Harry] The video shows no evidence

of the blurring and distortion visible in Householder's experiment.

But an advanced version of this technology,

paid for with plentiful supplies of drug money,

could possibly create something

that gives a much heightened level of invisibility.

[Chad] So, if somebody in Colombia

had wrapped it around themselves,

maybe they could make this kind of an effect.

If we know they're already using military

and stealth technology,

it's not a stretch of the imagination to believe

that if this technology exists,

they're seeking it out and using it.

Who wouldn't want an invisibility cloak?

[Harry] Now, Oxfordshire,

a county in central England.

January 23rd, 2021.

A man out walking

notices something strange in the sky

and starts to film.

The shot looks strange.

The sky looks very dark.

[Harry] Just as the sun threatens to burst through the clouds.

This is two suns.

This is a bizarre sight.

That's impossible, right?

There's two suns. Okay.

Yeah, that happens every Tuesday.

No problem.

This is like the sky has gone mad.

[Harry] It's clear this is no duplicate image

of our sun on the lens

as a bizarre beam of light erupts

from the dazzling intruder.

The sun on the right is ablaze

with this kind of purple laser going through it.

This is really spooky.

[Amy] What exactly are we looking at?

That it seems like we have a second sun in the sky.

[Harry] Coming up, a nearby laboratory

that's meddling with star power.

[Chad] Humans can copy the reactions

that power the sun here on earth.

Is this some sort of experiment

in nuclear fusion energy?

[Harry] And horror hospital.

How did a patient end up with these worms in his stomach?

[Roland] I'm really glad

that I didn't have lunch before watching this clip,

especially not spaghetti.

[Harry] In the county of Oxfordshire, England,

60 miles northwest of London,

a man films as our sun is joined by a strange twin,

burning brightly by its side.

[Orelon] When you see something like this that is really unusual

and it's looking at you,

it's very easy to interpret that as a message from the beyond.

[Harry] When astrophysicist, Michio Kaku, looks at this bizarre second sun,

he is reminded of a dangerous laboratory experiment that is happening nearby.

Scientists are trying to create a piece of the sun in a reactor.

This is called fusion power.

[Harry] The Culham Center lies just a few miles

from where this strange light was filmed.

Scientists here are experimenting with nuclear fusion,

which they claim will be the holy grail of power production.

It involves creating a Frankensun, a man-made star,

by compressing and heating two different hydrogen gases

to temperatures of around 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

A dazzling but dangerous solution.

It's an engineering problem, but what a problem.

Because when you squeeze gas,

irregularities build up.

It's a real headache

trying to keep gas stable.

This is something that can be done.

Humans can copy the reactions that power the sun

here on earth.

Is this some sort of experiment in nuclear fusion energy

that's produced this second sun up in the sky?

The center of the sun is incredibly dense and incredibly hot.

So the challenge is, well, what can contain this?

The answer is you have to build a magnetic containment sphere.

[Harry] Superconducting magnets

are precisely positioned around a donut-shaped containment device

known as a tokamak.

By super heating and compressing hydrogen gases,

atoms are forced together to form helium atoms,

neutrons and vast amounts of energy.

This reaction, which mimics the process occurring inside our sun,

can create temperatures even hotter than our solar neighbor.

And the massive release of energy can be used to create power.

In recent years, they've been making tremendous strides.

An artificial sun, is in a sense, a real possibility.

[Harry] Is it just a coincidence that this apparent second sun

is appearing so close to the laboratory?

Is it physically possible

for a second sun to spontaneously appear in the sky?

[Harry] But journalist Amy Shira Teitel,

finds evidence in local history books

of weird orbs appearing in the skies over this area

multiple times throughout history.

One of the most notable events was in 1461,

right in the middle of the War of the Roses.

They were on the battlefield and saw three suns in the sky,

and it became such a momentous event in history.

Shakespeare even wrote about this.

He describes these three suns in his historic play, Henry VI,

as being of equal brightness

dominating the sky.

This would have been seen as some kind of Godly sight

that would have left a hugely lasting impression on anybody who saw it.

[Harry] Over 400 years later, in 1888,

an eerily similar phenomenon in the skies over Oxfordshire

causes another bizarre chain of events.

It drives thousands of sheep

absolutely crazy and wild eyed.

They stampede through the countryside, causing havoc.

[Harry] Reports say this weird glow turns these animals

from docile creatures into ravenous monsters,

rampaging over an area of 200 square miles.

Meteorologist, Orelon Sidney

suspects there is an ancient phenomenon behind this second sun

that might also explain

the reports of weird, dazzling balls of light

seen here throughout the centuries.

[Orelon] What I thought this was, when I saw it,

is an optical effect called a sundog.

Sundogs are formed when there is a thin layer

of ice crystals very, very high in the atmosphere,

and those refract and reflect the sunlight

depending upon the orientation

of those ice crystals.

When the orientation is just right,

you will see sun either side

of the actual sun.

[Harry] This second sun vanished after a few moments,

perhaps as the ice crystals in the atmosphere warmed up.

And if it was a sundog,

the chances are the people living in the rolling hills of Oxfordshire

could see more twin suns appearing for many years to come.

I think it's part of the human condition to...

realize that what we see that mystifies us,

our ancestors saw

thousands of years ago looking up at that same sky.

And they were just as amazed as we are.

[Harry] Now, Thanh Hoa, Vietnam.

December 21st, 2020,

a bowl full of horror.

Oh, that is just nasty.

That's... There's no need. There's no need for me to see that.

I'm really glad that I didn't have lunch before watching this clip,

especially not spaghetti.

Wow. So we have a bowl of what looks like worms.

[Harry] This bowl is in a hospital,

and these worms just came out of a living patient.

Oh, man. I can't even imagine

taking that out of someone.

[Harry] Over the course of an hour,

surgeons remove more than 100 live worms from the man's stomach.

You can only imagine what it must feel like to have a belly full

of worms

that are moving around like that and like

growing and mating and reproducing inside your gut.

Oh my God.

The fact that these things are being removed from a person's abdomen,

a living person, it begs a really disturbing question.

How did they get in there in the first place?

[Harry] Coming up...

Is this a diet fad gone horribly wrong?

Some people actually decided that they would ingest tapeworms

in order to lose weight.

[Harry] And locals see red,

leading them to ask,

what's being dumped in our river?

[woman speaking foreign language]

The cleanup crews were continuously vomiting

while trying to deal with this problem.

[Harry] In Thanh Hoa, Vietnam,

surgeons pull hundreds of parasitic worms from a living patient.

[Leslie] That's crazy.

I'd expect to see, like, one or two,

but that's a lot of worms

inside of a human.

[Harry] Historian, Craig Gottlieb, finds that some people

deliberately eat living worms as part of the ultimate crash diet.

Some people actually decided that they would ingest tapeworms

in order to lose weight.

[Harry] The worms remain alive inside the stomach,

just like the creatures in the video.

[Kevin] The idea is,

you can eat anything and everything that you want.

And in your stomach,

those tapeworms will ingest all of the extra calories

that you are not using.

So instead of going to your hips and thighs,

you get a gaggle of worms inside your stomach.

[Harry] In the West, this unproven obesity cure

was once used by the rich and famous.

There was an opera singer, for example, in the 1900s, Maria Callas.

They said she had a tapeworm to lose weight.

In 2014,

a British journalist thought he'd put the tapeworm to the test,

so he deliberately ingested the tapeworms to see if he could lose weight.

He had the tapeworms for three weeks.

And you know what? In that three week period,

he actually gained weight.

[Harry] Tapeworms are not large enough to absorb

all the calories humans take in,

and in some cases

the parasites just make people more hungry so they eat more.

Negative health implications from eating a tapeworm

will always trump any alleged benefits.

The larvae can migrate to other parts of the body.

Do you want a tapeworm in your heart as well?

Or how about your brain,

or even your eyes?

[Harry] As developing world countries like Vietnam

have become richer over the last 20 years,

their populations have also become heavier.

Medical journal, The Lancet,

found 62% of all the obese people on earth

live in the developing world.

At 1300 pounds, Juan Pedro Franco of Mexico,

became the heaviest person on earth,

weighing more than a grand piano.

Tapeworm obesity remedies have become popular,

but they can have deadly results.

In 2019, a man in India started having seizures.

When he went to the hospital, they did a body scan,

and they were shocked to find out

that he had cysts all over his brain.

And you know what? Those cysts turned out to be tapeworm larva.

[Harry] Tapeworms multiply at an alarming rate.

In the human intestine,

within two months, their eggs morph into adults,

able to grow up to 80 feet long.

And once they are in, they can be long-term tenants.

Tapeworms can live for up to 30 years.

That's longer than most marriages.

[Harry] But biologist, Leslie Samuel,

thinks the video does not show the grim results of a dieting craze.

Whatever the worms are in this guy's stomach, though, they're not tapeworms.

Tapeworms are generally longer and thinner than whatever these monsters are.

What's more, tapeworms don't reproduce this much.

You wouldn't find that many. Not at this scale.

[Harry] Entomologist, Kevin Kasky,

believes these worms could be some kind of helminth

among the most dangerous parasites on earth.

[Kevin] Once they get into your system,

helminths can cause incredible damage.

They will steal the nutrients from the food that you're ingesting,

all the while, spreading disease throughout your body.

[Harry] There are believed to be around 100,000

different species of parasitic worms

that make up the deadly helminth group,

entering the body through contaminated food, water and even insect bites.

These lethal worms are the leading cause of disease in the developing world.

To make matters worse, helminths also suppress T cell production

that massively compromises the body's immune system.

This makes them almost impossible to get rid of

without medical aid.

Once they get a hold, they're incredibly tough to shake.

[Harry] It's unknown how long it took to remove all the worms

from this man's digestive system.

But the hospital had them all destroyed,

so they wouldn't reenter another unfortunate human.

He must have felt so much better

getting those out.

Can you imagine...

having that one day

and then getting that removed? That must be like the best day of your life.

[Harry] Now, Enshi, China.

July 2021.

A woman films as one of the area's most beautiful rivers

suddenly runs blood red.

I've never seen anything like this before. Never.

Wow! That waterfall does not look right.

It looks like something out of a biblical plague.

[Harry] Locals are terrified. This is the water they drink and wash with.

[woman speaking in foreign language]

Imagine your local river suddenly turning this bright red.

You'd probably be alarmed too.

[Harry] Coming up.

Is this an attempt to hide evidence of a plague?

Three hundred tons of diseased pig carcasses

were discarded and just dumped aside.

[Harry] Enshi, China. A woman films in horror

as her local river turns blood red.

[woman speaking in foreign language]

I know if I was walking through an area

and I saw a waterfall like this

that wasn't any sort of natural water color,

I would be very, very concerned.

[Harry] Engineer, Brian Wolshon,

believes this video could be evidence

Christmas has come early to this river valley,

but not in a good way.

China produces 60% of the world's Christmas products.

That's everything from reindeer antlers and bells to tinsel and baubles.

So, it stands to reason that they might use a lot of the color red.

[Harry] And the conditions Chinese Christmas industry workers have to endorse

anything but festive.

This is no Santa's workshop.

The workers here are consistently exposed to toxic chemicals

that cause health problems.

[Brian] A study of Christmas products showed

that 60% of these products

had chemicals linked to cancer.

[Harry] Red dye Sudan I,

linked to lethal carcinogens is banned in 1996 by the Chinese.

But a government study in 2005

found the chemical was still being used in the country,

not just in products,

but in food to color chili sauce and takeout fried chicken.

It was quite possible that

there was some company that was needing to make a lot of red products

and the dye got into the water supply.

[Harry] But former FBI agent, Rhonda Glover, believes this crimson concoction

might be exactly what it looks like.

This might not be dye.

It may be blood.

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[Harry] China consumes more meat than any other country on Earth.

In 2017,

China ate around 74 million tons of pork, beef, and poultry.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, thinks this local appetite for animals

may explain the blood red deluge

cascading through this rural valley.

Enshi is actually a center for livestock and agricultural production.

Is this somehow linked to that industry?

There certainly have been sort of nightmare scenarios involving livestock.

[Harry] Pig factory farms have become hotspots for viruses

and when swine flu hit the country in 2013,

villagers in the rural outskirts of Huzhou city

started to notice a bizarre smell.

Locals were complaining about this horrible stench.

And it turns out,

illegal dumping of things like agricultural waste

has become a big problem in parts of China.

Three hundred tons of diseased pig carcasses

were discarded and just dumped aside.

[Harry] 6000 rotting pig carcasses

floated down a river that supplies tap water.

The groundwater was contaminated.

The cleanup crews were continuously vomiting

while trying to deal with this problem.

Is it possible that there's been another outbreak

that required the slaughter of thousands of animals?

[Harry] But explorer, George Kourounis, suspects

the mysterious red river

may be down to a toxic mixture of natural biological organisms

and deadly man-made substances.

China is actually no stranger to waters turning red.

The South China Sea has been known to

experience these toxic, bright red algal blooms called a red tide.

They are exacerbated by runoff from animal husbandry, like fertilizer.

As that fertilizer goes into the warm water,

it causes this algae to grow and reproduce at a tremendous rate,

turning the water a blood red color.

[Harry] In 2007, vast areas of the South China Sea,

are turned a grisly red color.

And it isn't just this bright red, kind of terrifying color,

it's also potentially toxic to people and plants, and animals around it.

[Harry] These blooms suck the oxygen out of the water, killing marine life

and pump out poisonous, brevetoxins

that can cause diarrhea, vomiting, nausea,

and respiratory problems in humans.

This isn't just happening in China.

It's happening on coasts around the world.

There's been outbreaks in America.

There have been outbreaks pretty much everywhere.

[Harry] Studies suggest that harmful algal blooms

are also increasing in frequency.

But these blooms tend to occur in saltwater.

But Enshi isn't a coastal town,

and this isn't a coastal waterway system that we're looking at.

[Harry] Scientists scrambled to get samples,

but the river changed back to its natural color before they arrived.

We don't have any answers as to why this river turned this color.

And that's worrying.

Whether it was a natural event or something involving industry,

the fact that we're unsure makes it that much scarier.