Original subtitles

[narrator] Worldwide, 45 billion cameras record our daily lives.

In our hands, in our cars, and in our homes.

-[cat screeching] -They capture things that defy explanation.

[man] Really made me ask, "What the heck's goin' on here?"

[man 2] Check this out.

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

[man 3] Wow! Now that's a cracker.

[man 4] Oh!

[Gottlieb] This doesn't make any sense.

There has to be another explanation.

So what could it be?

[narrator] Coming up, a close encounter of the jaywalking kind.

There's a... what is that?

It just doesn't look like a human being.

[narrator] In the American heartland, a hellish harvest.

This isn't a slow, ordinary fire, this is violent and sudden.

What if this is the start of a series of attacks right across the country?

[narrator] And first they buzzed our aircraft carriers,

[pilots speaking]

now, are U.F.O.'s turning their sites on our cruise liners?

[Hovland] There's something really unusual going on here

for the captain to be intrigued.

And if it's weird enough for the captain, it's weird enough for me, too.

[narrator] Bizarre phenomenon.

[gasps] Oh, my God!

[narrator] Mysteries caught on camera.

This is just mind boggling!

[narrator] What's the truth behind this Strange Evidence?

Now, the town of Ichinda in Jharkhand, eastern India.

April 27th, 2021,

cruising down Highway 75,

a motorcyclist is filming the journey on his phone.

[Tomlinson] These motorcycles are going over a bridge

on a highway in the dead of night.

There's no light except for what's coming from their headlights.

[narrator] Suddenly, he spots something strange by the side of the road.

I don't see anything, but wait, there's a... what is that?

[narrator] Caught in the headlights is what looks like a human figure.

Wait! Are they naked? This is seriously creepy.

Is this thing even human?

[McMahon] Keep looking at the figure.

The gait, the way that this figure walks

is really quite of mannered, really very strange, very ethereal.

[narrator] Suddenly, the humanoid figure turns to stare back at its audience,

its face, lost in the shadows.

If I was on my bike, and I saw this

I'd be speeding up, not slowing down to film it.

[narrator] The men stay on their motorcycles, unsure whether to approach.

It just doesn't look like a human being.

[narrator] The gangly biped seems to ignore everything going on around it,

and simply walks away into the gloom.

This would be a very creepy site to come upon on the road late at night.

And you can hear the people filming it are quite concerned.

[speaking indistinctly]

Scared of what they've just come up against.

[narrator] Data scientist Liberty Vittert,

studies local reports on the eerie encounter.

The reports all say the same thing.

The people of Jharkhand, India think that they have seen an alien.

When you first see the figure, it looks like it could just be a rather thin person.

But as the camera gets closer, you notice that the figure's all out of proportion.

It's very tall, very thin, and the arms are quite long in comparison.

The body's not only naked-looking,

it actually looks like there's zero hair on it.

Like it's kind of a modeled, smooth skin of a very strange color,

maybe gray or cream.

A lot of people draw the connection

between this figure, and the kind of classic gray alien

that sort of took over in pop culture after the Roswell incident.

This idea that aliens are humanoid, but not quite human.

They have large heads, large eyes, elongated arms, and fingers,

and are kinda this same color.

I mean, we tend to have the assumption

that aliens will be humanoid in appearance.

There's no reason to assume that intelligent life

from other planets would be humanoid.

It could be very different. It could even be artificial intelligence.

There is a theory that these gray aliens are actually us in the future.

That what we're seeing is a kind of a history tourism

by human beings in thousands, maybe even millions of years' time,

coming back to our time, really just to gawk at us.

In the same way that we might look at people

from the Neolithic, or the Tudor ages.

Do jaywalking laws apply to extraterrestrials?

[narrator] But biologist Leslie Samuel finds eyewitness accounts

that confirm this bizarre-looking biped was no extraterrestrial.

[Samuel] Eyewitnesses reported that they were on their way home from a funeral

and they saw this thing, or this being.

Uh, but upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a woman,

and they confirmed with other people that were passing by that saw the same thing.

In that case, we have to wonder why is this woman walking alone naked

in the middle of the night on a busy street?

[narrator] Biologist, Kelly Price, believes the woman

could be being used as bait to ensnare motorists.

Well, could this be a trap, I mean, is she being used to lure people in

to maybe be attacked and robbed?

[narrator] India has a history of highway robbers,

specifically, a cult of ritual stranglers

who plagued the subcontinent for generations.

This violent cult, the thuggees,

can actually trace their origin back to the 12th century.

Thuggee in ancient Sanskrit actually means deceiver,

and the English word, thug, is derived from that word.

[narrator] The thuggees modus operandi

was to befriend rich merchants and travelers on the trade roads.

And then having gained their trust, they'd kill and rob them.

Children born into this cult were trained from an early age

to use the sacred noose, called a Rumal

to strangle their victims very quickly and silently.

And each death was considered a sacrifice to the dark goddess, Kali.

[McMahon] The thuggees accounted at one stage

for something like 40,000 deaths a year in India under the British raj.

[narrator] One member of the cult known as Thug Behram

holds the record for being the world's most prolific serial killer.

He personally killed at least 150 people,

and admitted to being present at the murders of more than 900.

As India's crime rate soars, locals avoid walking the roads at night.

With a murder rate of something like 30,000 a year,

you might be forgiven for thinking

that the thuggee cult is back and stronger than ever.

But actually, if you look at those statistics a little bit closer,

you'll find most of those murders are centered around domestic violence,

domestic arguments or money between people who already know each other.

What else is going on here?

[narrator] Coming up, naked and unafraid.

Is this woman a member of a fanatical cult said to eat human corpses?

[Samuel] They get together at an event

when hundreds of naked sadhus leap into a sacred river.

[narrator] And fear on the farm,

as a mystery explosion rocks rural Minnesota.

How does a grain silo just explode?

This is violent and sudden.

Could this be caused by a bomb?

[narrator] In eastern India, wary motorcycle riders film a strange, hairless being

walking down the side of a highway naked.

Reports from people in Jharkhand say that they think they've seen an alien.

And at first glance, you can't really blame them.

[narrator] Historian, Tony McMahon suspects this ash gray woman

could instead be a devotee of a cult, known in India as sadhuism.

These sadhus are kind of an extreme form of Hinduism.

They're ascetics, they reject all worldly goods,

they live off scraps, and alms and charity.

They're even believed to have the power of prophecy,

the ability to see into the future.

Most sadhus are male, but you do get female sadhus.

[narrator] One of the most extreme sadhu sects

are said to eat the charred remains of corpses believing it can make them ageless.

Most sadhus hold less extreme beliefs,

and the Indian subcontinent is home to over five million of them.

They get together an event called the Kumbh-Mela,

when hundreds of naked sadhus leap into a sacred river.

[narrator] Some sadhus shave their entire body, while some go naked,

and gray their skin by rubbing it with sandalwood ash.

Many smoke copious amounts of cannabis,

that's said to aid their enlightenment.

This description could help explain both the appearance

and behavior of the woman in the clip.

But Leslie Samuel spots a problem with this idea.

The thing is female sadhus don't go naked.

So I don't think what we're looking at here is a female sadhu.

[narrator] Female nudity is frowned upon in India.

In 2020, a French woman was told she faced up to three years in jail

after stripping on a bridge over the Ganges in Rishikesh.

Local police launch an investigation into the Jharkhand incident,

but the naked woman's identity remains a mystery.

Luckily, the people who were filming her

seemed to have been too scared to have bothered her.

[McMahon] No matter how much we theorize here,

we can only hope that this person got some kind of help.

Whatever it is there's obviously something wrong. I just hope she's okay.

[narrator] Now, the city of New Ulm, Brown County, Minnesota,

population 13,000.

June 1, 2021, around 6:15 p.m.,

a security camera films the quiet farming town.

We're lookin' at a storage area with storage tanks and some piping.

Is it industrial? Is it chemical? I don't know.

-[narrator] All of a sudden. -[explosion]

Looks like a plume of smoke and something flies off the top.

[Wise] Boom. Oh, my Lord. Whoa!

[narrator] Then like rapid machine gun fire.

A lightning quick blast rips through the remaining silos.

Okay, that's a hell of an explosion.

They must have heard this for miles away.

It looks like everything happened so fast.

The explosion looked super violent and I hope no one was hurt.

The obvious question is what happened?

[exploding]

[narrator] Minnesota produces around 40 million tons of grain every year.

That's as much as the weight of 375 Nimitz Class aircraft carriers.

Brown County alone boast around 1,000 farms,

and their number one produce is grain.

[explosion]

[Wise] So what we're seeing is a grain elevator.

This is a kind of agricultural collection station

where the massive amounts of grain are being, you know,

funneled in and stacked up in these big cylinders.

[Teitel] How does a grain silo just explode?

This isn't a slow, ordinary fire this is violent and sudden.

Could this be caused by a bomb?

Grain storage, small town America,

doesn't sound like the standard target for a terrorist attack.

But this is the 21st century, and everything is interconnected by the web.

As a result, nothing is off-limits.

Terrorists will go after military targets, civilian targets

cyber targets, why not agriculture?

Imagine that entire agricultural system has been shut down or disrupted.

Al Qaeda documents discovered in Afghanistan in 2001

revealed a terrorist plan to target U.S. agriculture.

The idea?

Disrupt the American food chain by contaminating supplies,

destroying distribution networks,

and making something as basic as eating a deadly proposition.

[narrator] Poisoning the food chain is a sickening tactic,

but it's worked in the past.

[Gottlieb] Just look at Palestinian terrorists,

and what they did in the 1970's.

They got the not-so-nice idea of injecting mercury into oranges.

[narrator] January, 1978,

The Arab Revolutionary Army inject liquid mercury

into Israeli oranges on sale in European fruit markets.

Only 12 people actually succumb to mercury poisoning,

but that wasn't the intent.

The point was the hysteria that follows.

Well, people got scared, and stopped eating oranges,

and Israel's exports of citrus fruit to Europe dropped by 40 per cent.

[narrator] And it never recovered.

Today, Israel exports 75% less citrus fruit than it did before the attacks.

Agroterrorism doesn't just effect the food on our table,

it has serious financial repercussions.

[Teitel] If this was one attack among many coordinated attacks on U.S. agriculture,

it would be absolutely devastating for the economy.

Corn exports alone, account for 7.6 billion dollars for the United States.

And that's not saying anything of all of the products that are made with grains.

The United States exports over 140 billion dollars a year in agricultural exports.

We're talking about global supply chain issues.

With financial ramifications that could cripple the economy.

Our food supplies chains aren't particularly protected.

We don't really see a need to put armed guards in front of grain silos.

[narrator] But we depend on the supply chain.

Disrupting the food supply

doesn't just mean financial damage in the form of exports.

It means we could be facing food shortages, civil unrest by a bunch a hungry people,

and at the extreme ends, starvation.

[narrator] But engineer, Nick Householder doesn't think

this explosion was caused by a terrorist bomb.

He thinks it could have been caused

by an almost invisible killer that lurks in all grain.

Now in this case, grain by itself isn't particularly combustible,

it's not even that flammable.

But when it's processed,

it produces an immense amount of a very combustible material, dust.

[narrator] Householder wants to discover

if dust can cause an explosion as ferocious as the one seen in the footage.

I'm gonna need a fuel source, a little bit of dust, and a way to light it.

So the classic fire triangle for combustion requires three things,

a fuel source, a heat source, and oxygen.

This is a stick. It's flammable.

If I light one end, it catches fire.

But how do I get it to burn two times as fast?

Light the other end.

Okay, now I've got a stick burning two times as fast.

How do I get it to burn four times as fast?

Well, I can break it in half.

If I light those ends, I now have a stick that's burning four times as fast.

[blows out flames]

Every time I'm breaking the stick, I go to a higher and higher number.

I can burn it at a faster and faster rate that's increasing exponentially.

What I'm really doing is I'm allowing more and more of that wood

to be exposed to oxygen, allowing it to burn.

If it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, eventually, I'm left with just dust.

What does it look like when I get just dust?

Well, you've seen it.

[narrator] By themselves, the fine particles of dust create a flash fire,

but not a violent, explosive force.

The dust needs containment.

Whenever you contain any kind of fire, pressure builds.

With pressure, you get an explosion.

[narrator] Coming up, can Householder replicate the silo blast?

Dust explosion in three, two, one.

[blowing]

[narrator] And a cruise ship captain films a bizarre blob buzzing her luxury liner.

[Sidney] Is it under intelligent control,

or is this something that's just free-flowing in the atmosphere?

This is a mystery.

[narrator] A security camera captures a grain elevator

suddenly exploding in a small, Minnesota town.

Engineer, Nick Householder, wants to discover if grain dust was the cause.

So why is dust so much more combustible? Surface area.

It has way more surface area to interact with oxygen, and therefore combust.

[narrator] Nick wants to replicate the blast,

and thinks the silo building itself, may be a decisive factor.

He uses a plastic tub to replicate the silo,

and drills a hole in the side, threading the hose pipe through it.

Super sophisticated dust explosion delivery system at your service.

The difference between the last experiment and this

is that I'm containing the dust inside of a container.

When you confine it, it increases the intensity of the explosion.

[narrator] Householder is an engineering expert,

and has taken safety precautions.

This experiment should not be attempted inside or outside your own home.

[Householder] Now I need a source of ignition,

so I've filled this small bowl with wood shavings.

[narrator] In order to show us the inner workings of a dust explosion,

Householder leaves the lid off his substitute silo.

Here we go, dust explosion in three, two, one.

[blowing]

[Householder] Wow! That is the power of a dust explosion.

[narrator] As Householder's lung full of air shoots the dust out,

it forms into a contained cloud.

Instantaneously igniting into a searing hot, vertical fireball.

A lid would have focused the blast, and made it even more destructive.

In a typical grain dust explosion,

the initial detonation, and subsequent shock wave

dislodges even more combustible dust particles into the sealed atmosphere.

Leading to an even larger explosion.

Imagine that scaled up to an industrial size,

and I think that explains what you saw in the video.

[narrator] There are an average of eight grain silo explosions a year in America,

and they usually kill, at least, one person.

They're ignited by discarded cigarettes,

faulty wiring,

and sparks thrown from steel machinery.

This goes to show that even the most mundane things,

like dust, can be deadly.

[explosion]

[narrator] No one was killed in this explosion,

but one worker was taken to the hospital for their injuries.

What started the devastating explosion remains unknown,

but one thing's for sure,

you'll never look at dust the same way.

Maybe everyone who's been taking up sourdough bread baking

should think twice.

[narrator] Now, the Caribbean Sea,

June 10th, 2020.

Captain Kate McCue is on deck of the 1,000-foot luxury cruise ship

Celebrity Edge.

15 stories high,

it's the company's most innovative ship,

complete with two-story villa cabins

with private plunge pools

and a cantilevered lounge that can move between decks.

Suddenly, one of her crew members spots something strange in the sky.

McCue immediately turns on her smartphone.

[Amy Shira Teitel] You can see this thing floating in the sky,

and it's unclear what it's doing,

if it's moving or not.

It's very strange.

[Tim Pickens] Looks like something's falling out of the sky,

and it's falling fast.

Don't know what it is.

I can barely see it.

Now wait a minute. Where did it go?

[narrator] The mysterious black blob vanishes

behind the body of the ship.

Captain and crew debate what they have just witnessed.

[crew member speaks]

[crew member 2 speaks]

[narrator] Captain McCue races along the ship's decks

and finds the black object still falling,

about 1,000 feet off the vessel's stern.

[Orelon Sidney] It looks like it's moving away,

so is it under intelligent control,

or is this something that's just free-flowing in the atmosphere?

Hmm. This is a mystery.

[narrator] The crew report a low wind speed,

less than five knots,

and decide it's not a drone,

due to its absolute silence.

What I find interesting about this is that the person who made that video

is actually the captain of the cruise ship,

and she's surprised by what she's seeing, you know.

She's clearly spent a lot of time on the ocean,

looking up at the sky free from light pollution,

and she's seen something that she cannot explain.

There is something really unusual going on here

for the captain to be intrigued,

and if it's weird enough for the captain,

it's weird enough for me too.

[narrator] Despite having over 20 years' experience on the world's oceans,

Captain McCue is unsure of what she's just caught on camera.

According to her eyewitness report,

the strange sinking blob drops into the ocean and vanishes.

Now what could possibly do something like that?

Hover in the sky and then go into the water.

[narrator] Coming up,

could this floating black blob actually be a vacationer's terrifying death ride?

A parasailor became untethered from her boat,

and she sailed off into the skies on her parasail.

-[crowd chatting] -[man] Holy [bleep]!

[narrator] And, in a high-security gated community,

a strange shadow caught on CCTV.

That's very, very large and monstrous-looking.

What the hell are we looking at right here?

[narrator] The captain of a cruise ship spots this strange floating blob

above her boat,

12 miles from land in the Caribbean sea.

The ship's captain,

uh, she pulled out her cell phone,

and she took a video of it,

because, she says that, you know,

she's never seen anything like it.

[narrator] Journalist Amy Shira Teitel finds Captain McCue

stated that this looked like a kind of living organism.

According to the captain, it looks like a black jellyfish

that's floated up out of the water somehow

and is hovering in the sky and passes over the ship.

I would say yes, that could possibly happen.

A waterspout could pick up something,

loft it into the atmosphere,

and depending on its weight,

could deposit it somewhere downwind.

[narrator] No hurricanes or waterspouts were reported on the day of the event.

But Shira Teitel finds some marine animals can fly by themselves,

with no help needed from Mother Nature.

The flying squid shoots out water at an extremely high pressure,

enough that it's able to lift itself out of the water,

at which point it can glide down,

opening itself to gain some kind of gliding ability,

before going back into the water.

Scientists originally thought the flying squid did this

exclusively to avoid predators,

but it turns out they've realized that this is just the faster way to travel.

[narrator] But physicist Michio Kaku has a problem with this idea.

Squid do have the ability to use Newton's third law of motion like a rocket

to propel themselves out of the water,

but this thing was hovering,

and that does not sound like the capabilities of a squid.

[narrator] Ex-NYPD image analyst Conor McCourt studies the footage.

He agrees that this object is no animal.

When I analyzed this video

and I looked at the shape of the object,

it's consistent with some kind of parachute or parasailing activity,

to me.

I understand that it's 12 miles offshore,

but this is the most logical explanation.

[narrator] Meteorologist Orelon Sidney believes the captain could've captured

the final moments of a tragic vacation.

About five million people go parasailing

in the United States every year,

but it can be really dangerous.

The National Transportation Safety Board found

that there are no requirements for certification,

for training or safety equipment for parasailing operators.

[narrator] Over the past 30 years,

around two people die annually in parasailing accidents,

and over 60 suffered serious injuries.

A parasailor in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

became untethered from her boat,

and she sailed off into the skies on her parasail.

[narrator] 29-year-old Katie Malone spent a terrifying 45 minutes

hundreds of feet up in a storm,

before crashing to earth in a crocodile-infested airfield along the coast.

She shattered her pelvis, her ribs,

and suffered a collapsed lung.

A few years later,

exactly the same thing happens on the same beach to another tourist.

[man 1] It's so windy they can't reel him in.

Damn, he's going.

Oh, [bleep]!

Holy [bleep]!

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God!

-Dude. -[man 2] I know.

[man 1] They just lost that dude.

[narrator] But this wasn't a dude,

but another unfortunate woman,

who later crashed inland on some power lines.

Fortunately, she's okay,

but I bet she got a little bit more than she bargained for

on that vacation.

[McCourt] When I look at this object,

I can see here that it's descending on its own accord,

just like a parachute.

[narrator] It may look like a parasailor floating off into oblivion,

but no vacationers were reported missing on the day the film was shot.

The strange black blob's identity remains unknown.

Move over, Nessie.

This object is yet another mystery of the world's waters.

[narrator] Now, a quiet suburb in Bangkok, Thailand.

December 30th, 2020.

At just past 1:00 a.m.,

a CCTV camera films the front driveway of a family home.

[Dustin Growick] We're looking at what appears to be security footage.

Uh, residential area,

couple of gates, trash can,

couple of parked cars.

Nothing too out of the ordinary.

[narrator] But then...

[Rhonda Glover] Oh, my gosh, it's a shadow.

It is a shadow that is...

Oh, my goodness.

[narrator] Coming from nowhere,

a huge dark shadow suddenly looms across the pavement.

[Deborah Hyde] That's really strange,

'cause that's really very, very large and monstrous-looking.

[narrator] It's unclear who or what could be casting it.

So, I'm looking for something on the ground floor that's creating this shadow,

um, but I'm just not seeing anything.

[narrator] This strange silhouette seems to show something or someone

creeping along, just off-camera.

What the hell are we looking at right here?

Is that something from above?

[Hyde] It looks to me as though something is being backlit,

though it might be backlit from a very low angle,

so the shape is incredibly distorted.

I wanna know what that shadow is

or where it's emanating from.

Is there something above that's casting that down on the street?

[narrator] Coming up,

is this a high-wire hoodlum,

attempting the ultimate breaking and entering?

It takes a certain kind of stealth, skill and fortitude

to be that kind of burglar.

[narrator] And in New Mexico,

an insect armed with a monstrous weapon.

[man] How long is this thing's stinger?

I mean, it would, like, reach your bone.

[narrator] In Bangkok, Thailand,

a stealthy silhouette is caught on security camera.

If I were walking down an empty street at night

and saw a black shadow like this pass in front of me,

I would be a little intrigued,

and I would look around to see what may have caused that shadow,

and seeing nothing,

that's maybe when panic might set in.

[narrator] Former CIA agent Tracy Walder analyzes the footage.

She suspects foul play.

What I see is really someone who is walking overhead,

casting a shadow down onto the ground.

Thailand has a rather substantial cat burglary problem.

In the fourth quarter of 2020 alone,

the country experienced 11,000 property crimes.

[narrator] Sun-drenched Thailand is no paradise if you are disadvantaged.

Some Thais earn as little as $11 a day,

while the rich live in lavish gated communities called moo-bahns,

protected by armed security guards and CCTV,

like the camera that filmed this bizarre shadow.

Breaking into one of these homes is tough,

but it can be done.

In 2012, a female cat burglar went on a robbery spree

that lasted for nine years.

[narrator] 29-year-old Monchanok was considered by Thai police

to be one of the country's best and most elusive cat burglars.

It takes a certain kind of stealth, skill and fortitude

to be that kind of burglar.

She climbed up walls,

she crossed over roofs

to get into rich people's homes to steal laptops and jewelry

and any other things she could get her hands on.

By the time she was apprehended in 2021,

she had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars in property.

[narrator] But anthropologist Dustin Growick notices a detail on the shadow

that rules out its coming from a human.

[Growick] If you look carefully at the footage,

you'll see there's a line of a shadow

in addition to the larger, moving shadow,

which leads me to believe that this may be a power line above,

and something... Something is maybe crawling across it.

It's almost as though there's a tail

that is hanging down and following behind as the shadow moves.

If you look at options of what kind of animals live in Bangkok city

that have long tails,

one of the first things that springs to mind are the monitor lizards.

Could what we're seeing here be the shadow of a monitor lizard

running across a wire just out of view?

[narrator] Thailand's native water monitor lizards can grow to over nine feet

and weigh up to 110 lbs.

Teeth, claws and tail can all be used as weapons

to slash, bite and whip their victims to death.

We know these creatures are pretty adept climbers as well.

In 2021, a video surfaced of one of these in Thailand

breaking into a 7-Eleven and climbing up the shelves to the ceiling.

It's really pretty amazing that urban Bangkok has these giant lizards.

They're native, and they're just living there,

and they seem to be doing quite well.

[narrator] Too well.

September 2016.

In the heart of Bangkok's financial district sits Lumpini Park.

Scared for the safety of locals and tourists,

officials attempt to deal with the 400 giant monitors who call the park "home".

The huge reptiles are said to be unafraid of people

and considered out-of-control.

[Growick] These lizards became such a problem to Bangkok residents

that they attempted to round them up

but were only able to capture about a hundred,

which is a drop in the bucket

compared to the larger population in the city.

[narrator] Monitor lizards aren't normally aggressive toward humans,

but when they are, it can be deadly.

Ronald Huff of Newark, New Jersey

was bitten by one of his seven pet monitor lizards in 2002.

Suspected of succumbing to blood poisoning,

he collapsed by his front door.

For the lizards, it was lunchtime.

Getting eaten by lizards in your own home

just sounds like one of the most terrible ways to die.

[narrator] Without further footage or eyewitnesses,

the truth as to what exactly was caught on camera remains in the shadows,

but one thing's for sure.

[Growick] If large monitor lizards have figured out how to traverse power lines,

it might be time to round up another hundred or so.

[narrator] Now, Taos, New Mexico, USA.

August 13th, 2021.

Spotting something strange on the sidewalk,

a pedestrian stops to investigate.

[Craig Gottlieb] This guy's filming with his phone.

It's this massive, big, like, hard and squishy bug with a massive...

Looks like a stinger, bigger than any stinger I've ever seen,

or want to see, for that matter.

[narrator] The needle-like spike in its back

is more than twice as long as the bug's body.

My biology spidey senses are telling me,

"Do not touch that."

This is a "no" for me.

This is a "This is a 'no'" no.

[narrator] The massive insect seems unnatural,

more like something from a nightmare than the real world.

[Leslie Samuel] How long is this thing's stinger?

I mean, can you imagine that piercing your skin?

It would, like, reach your bone.

[narrator] Flashing its brown and orange carapace,

the bug seems to raise its nasty needle towards the camera.

Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of people

more than certain types of insects,

and if you were walking down the sidewalk and you saw this,

and you're one of those people,

what would you be doing?

Running away in fear, screaming.

[narrator] Coming up,

are labs in New Mexico breeding mutant bugs?

Imagine swarms of insects with genetically modified stingers

administering lethal toxins to huge population centers.

[narrator] In New Mexico,

a bug with what looks like a grotesquely extended stinger is caught on camera.

[Dr. Carin Bondar] When I see an unidentified insect with a huge weapon,

I am going to honor the insect and walk away.

[narrator] Historian Craig Gottlieb finds this bug was filmed

close to one of America's most secretive military testing sites.

This footage was shot near Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

That was the home of the Manhattan Project during World War Two,

where American scientists developed our nukes,

the "Fat Man" and the "Little Boy",

but Los Alamos has recently turned its attention

to studying the field of biodefense.

Normally, when we think of animals used in war,

we think of horses

or dogs,

elephants,

even dolphins,

but surprisingly, insects have been used extensively

for hundreds of years.

If you think biblically, thousands of years.

One professor, at the University of Wyoming,

believes that the Ark of the Covenant was full of deadly insects,

and the Israelites would open it

and unleash those insects upon their enemies on the battlefield.

[insects buzzing]

More recently, in World War Two,

the Japanese dropped bombs on China

that were loaded with flies in one compartment

and a biological slurry in the other

that coated the insects on impact.

The contaminated insects then brought horrendous disease

to the Chinese citizens on the ground,

and historians estimate these devices killed over 440,000 people.

War is hell, we all know that,

but in the age of genetic modification,

the idea of insect warfare offers even more terrifying possibilities.

Imagine swarms of insects with genetically modified stingers

administering lethal toxins to huge population centers.

This bug doesn't look natural.

It could be the result of bioengineering.

[narrator] But reviewing the clip,

biologist Steve Potvin believes

this could instead be one of nature's nastiest serial killers.

I think that, most likely, it's some kind of wasp, a big one.

Unlike some bee species that lose their stinger after one sting,

wasps can sting repeatedly,

and some of them have incredibly toxic venom.

The most venomous wasp is the two-inch long tarantula hawk wasp,

which got its name because it preys on tarantulas.

[narrator] The female wasp paralyzes the tarantula with her sting

and drags it to her burrow.

Then, like something from the film Alien,

she lays an egg on the unlucky spider,

who has now become a baby wasp's prepacked lunch.

The sting paralyzes an arachnid,

but for humans,

it's described as the most painful sting in the world,

being instantaneous, electrifying and totally debilitating.

[screams in pain]

[roars]

On average, in the US,

between 40 and 90 people lose their lives every year from wasp or hornet stings.

When a wasp stings,

it releases a pheromone,

and this is an information signal to other wasps,

who will then come and join in with the attack.

The average human can tolerate up to ten stings per lb of body weight,

so if you talk about the average weight of a person

and how many stings they can tolerate,

it's around a couple of thousand,

but with 10,000 individual wasps in a hive,

I'm not sure I like those odds.

[narrator] But entomologist Kevin Kasky discovers

this thing is worse than a sting.

It's a kind of drill.

The long stinger on the back of this insect is not a stinger at all,

it's an ovipositor.

It's essentially a sort of syringe

used by female ichneumon wasps

to inject their eggs deep into the wood of a tree.

[narrator] This is a female ichneumon wasp.

Using two tiny blades at its tip,

the impressive spike drills through the bark of the tree

and into insect larvae hidden beneath.

The unfortunate larvae become living incubation chambers for this wasp's young.

[Kasky] If you come across a wasp like this

with one of those amazing-looking ovipositors,

you don't have to kill it.

You can take a piece of paper,

and you can put it on a tree,

and it'll find its way and do what it needs to do.

These wasps might look like monsters,

but they're actually harmless to humans.

[Kasky] Most people see insects

and they, you know, cringe

or give the "ew" reflex.

The insect world is fascinating,

because of what they're doing,

how they're doing it

and why they perpetuate themselves.

I think they're really cool.

[buzzing]