Original subtitles

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

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

They capture things that defy explanation.

Really made me ask, "What the heck is going on here?"

[man] Check this out.

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

Wow. Now, that's a cracker.

[man exclaims]

This doesn't make any sense.

There has to be another explanation.

So, what could it be?

[narrator] Coming up...

Massive, mysterious and muddy.

What's on the move in this Indian riverbed?

[Hannah Rudd] Is this some kind of creature that's been disturbed

and is now rising from the depths?

[narrator] A moonlit night, a military checkpoint,

then a ghostly gatecrasher.

[soldiers screaming]

I'm not sure which is worse, is it the cackling,

or is it the well-armed soldiers screaming?

[narrator] And who is trying to blow up

England's most beautiful towns?

A really spiteful, deliberate act of malice

to try to wipe out the best parts of England.

[narrator] Bizarre phenomenon...

[gasps] Oh, my God.

...mysteries caught on camera.

This is just mind boggling.

What's the truth behind this strange evidence?

Now, the small village of Kuchpura, in Haryana state, India.

July 2021.

I'm looking at what seems to be some kind of muddy field

or just maybe a shallow pond.

[men speaking other language]

Oh, wow. Something is coming up out of the water right now.

It looks like the back of some gigantic pre-historic creature,

as if Godzilla is making his emergence

in the countryside of India.

There is no way I'd still be standing there at this point.

What is going on here?

[narrator] This bizarre object emerges from waters

in one of the luscious parts of India.

But journalist Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

finds local stories

suggesting that this network of life-giving waters

hides a killer monster.

Ancient legends tell of a giant carnivorous white worm 10 feet long,

that, during the day, lives and tunnels

under the waterways of India.

But, at night, comes out

to eat livestock and unwary travelers.

[narrator] The Indus worm, also known as the Skolex,

has two enormous teeth,

which it uses to rip apart and devour its unfortunate prey.

It's said that the brave men would hunt down these giant worms

and fight them.

After they would hunt and kill the worms, they would string them up,

and oil would drip from the carcass.

[narrator] Reports of the Skolex Indus worm

date back to the 5th century BC.

It's easy to look at this footage and wonder

if the worm has returned.

[McRobbie] It really looks like

there's something under the ground

tunneling and moving that earth out of the way.

And whatever it is, it's going fast.

[narrator] But explorer George Kourounis

thinks this uncanny upheaval

could be the work of a criminal gang,

who are stripping these riverbeds

of a very valuable commodity.

Criminal organizations have formed that are called sand mafias.

These guys control the sand market

in a similar way that the mafia

controls certain industries in places like Italy.

[narrator] Sand is the world's most consumed raw material after water

and an essential ingredient to our everyday lives.

Glass, silicon chips and concrete

all require huge quantities of this finite resource.

India's building boom

in cities like Delhi and Mumbai

eats up 60 million tons of sand a year.

That's more than two pounds per urban resident every day.

The Thar desert covers 7% of India's land,

but the grains on these dunes don't cut it for construction.

[Cate Larsen] Why don't we just take sand from the deserts?

That sand is so fine.

It's so tiny and round.

Something that is more angular is going to bond better

when you're making concrete,

as compared to rounder grains of sand.

So, instead, we look to rivers

to find our sand for our building materials.

[narrator] The Himalayan mountains erode away

at a rate of 1/25th of an inch every year.

That may not seem like much,

but since they cover 230,000 square miles,

in reality, that's a huge quantity of silt and sand

carried down annually by rivers to the plains below.

[Rudd] The problem is, in India,

the demand for this river sand

has essentially put huge pressure on the ecosystem.

[narrator] Government rules controlling the taking of sand

from India's rivers

have led to a black market worth more than $250 million a year.

People involved in it will stop at nothing

to make sure that they get their hands on that money.

[Kourounis] One journalist who was reporting on this was kidnapped and lit on fire,

another person was hacked to death with a machete.

All of this over seemingly worthless sand.

[narrator] Between 2019 and 2020,

193 people in India died

as a result of illegal river sand mining.

This rapidly rising earth could be evidence

of the river bed being recklessly disturbed by one of these gangs.

[Rudd] What we're looking at here looks like quite a water-logged area,

so maybe it's located near to a river,

where illegal sand mining activity has been taking place.

[narrator] But geologist Cate Larsen finds maps of the area

show no evidence of no sand beds in this village.

[Larsen] As a normal person, I'd want to run away from this,

because it looks kind of scary.

But the geologist in me just wants to get closer

and investigate what's happening.

[narrator] Digging deeper, Larsen suspects

this could be a tragedy caused by removing something other than sand.

There's another very valuable asset in this part of India,

and that is dirt, soil.

They're digging up soil and selling that.

[narrator] Indian farmers are selling their golden goose

for a fast buck and a pile of bricks.

Sometimes farmers have been known

to strip the top layers of their fields,

we're talking two to four feet of soil,

and sell it off to companies who use that soil to make clay bricks.

Taking the soil has an effect on the environment.

[Kourounis] Of course, you've stripped away all of your precious top soil,

and now, the lower sections are more prone to flooding.

So you're not gonna fill it in with sand,

because that's already very valuable.

They're gonna fill it in with other things.

[Kourounis] So, has the landowner here

sold off his top soil,

and then refilled the pit,

perhaps with some other material

that maybe shouldn't be there?

[narrator] Coming up...

Is this a guilty secret rising to the surface?

Mother Nature comes along and exposes the truth.

[narrator] And over Kuala Lumpur,

mysterious headlights appear in the sky.

[Liberty Vittert] It's like there's a flying car

straight out of a sci-fi movie,

hovering above the city.

[narrator] In rural India, a hulking mass

emerges from a farmer's waterlogged field.

Explorer George Kourounis finds an interview with the farmer's brother.

The landowner's brother reports that he did actually remove

a section of top soil off of about an acre of his land,

and filled in that gap with about 15 feet worth of rice husk ash.

And then covered up that ash with a layer of soil,

completely hiding it underneath.

[narrator] The rice husk ash seemed to work well as substitute soil

for a while,

then the monsoon rains arrived.

In this case, they filled the hole in with a very absorbant material.

[Kourounis] In the days leading up to this video,

heavy rains had fallen in the region

and flooded out this field.

[McRobbie] That rain soaked into the earth

and reacted with the rice husk ash somehow,

and created this, kind of, expansion effect.

Almost like crazy foam.

Mother Nature always has a way of uncovering buried secrets,

even if that's just rice husk ash.

[narrator] Now...

Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.

January 4th, 2021.

A man is filming the world-class skyline

from one of the capital's many rooftop bars.

The Petronas Towers in the background.

Beautiful picture, little bit of a cloudy sky.

You can hear his friends laughing in the background.

This is at a social event.

But he moves the camera up towards the sky.

[man speaking]

I can't even imagine what those are.

[Nick Householder] They don't look like stars.

It doesn't look like a plane.

What could be just hovering in the sky above Malaysia?

I may not necessarily be the biggest believer in aliens,

but this is the kind of evidence

that could make you rethink about it.

[narrator] Meteorologist Orelon Sidney finds Malaysia,

with a population of 33 million people,

has a history of close encounters.

This is absolutely not the first time

there have been UFO sightings in Malaysia.

There are lots of reports in the area.

One of the most notorious Malaysia alien overlaps

is the story of Malaysia Airlines 370.

In 2014, this flight disappeared without a trace.

And people have claimed that there was alien intervention.

That something other worldly interfered with this flight.

[narrator] March 8th, 2014,

flight MH370 takes off at 12:41 am from the city's airport.

Flying out over the skyscrapers

as it heads for Beijing, China.

With 227 passengers and 12 crew onboard,

less than an hour later, the plane's transponder ceases transmission.

The plane vanishes without a trace.

One of the most widespread conspiracy theories

about what happened to the plane

is some sort of alien interception.

[narrator] In 2018, a Twitter user receives a cryptic message

in a robotic voice.

Deciphered, the message reads,

"Danger. SOS. They are not human."

[automated voice] Five-nine...

[narrator] The voice then gives a series of numbers,

believed by some UFO watchers to be coordinates.

Shockingly, these numbers corresponded to coordinates

just a few miles from where the Malaysian Airlines plane sent out its last signal.

This case is very strange.

It's like an episode of Lost.

[narrator] So, perhaps it's no surprise

these lights close to the original path of the doomed jet

spark uproar in Malaysia.

This gentleman uploaded this video to social media,

and the Internet absolutely exploded.

Convinced that he had finally captured video evidence

of aliens existing right in our own skies.

[narrator] Data scientist Liberty Vittert

finds a Malaysian government report from 30 years ago,

known as Vision 2020,

that points to this being a secret test flight.

Vision 2020 was a legitimate plan

to change the country for the better.

The Prime Minister wanted to tackle poverty,

build the economy,

and some people wanted to replace

boring, old regular cars with flying ones.

[narrator] Back in 1991, Malaysia's gross domestic product per person

was less than $3,000.

Today, it's more than $10,000.

It's a massive South East Asian success story,

featuring a booming technology sector.

The Malaysians are already in the process of developing a flying car,

so could we be seeing some kind of test run?

[narrator] Jetson-style aerial cars

have been a dream on the drawing board for more than a century.

But the physical constraints of making them work

have often been a nightmare.

The Waterman Arrowmobile was a flying car

with incredibly wide wingspan and a tiny cabin.

Cool to look at, but not very practical.

[narrator] Ten years later, the ConvAir 118 took to the skies,

with equally limited success.

But in the 21st century,

flying car technology is closer to taking off.

In January 2022,

Slovakia issued an air worthiness certificate to the Aircar.

[Tim Pickens] So the Aircar is really cool.

Reminds me of watching a Transformer,

like you'd see on TV.

[Householder] You can fly it over 100 miles an hour,

and it only takes three minutes

to convert from car mode to plane mode.

I think that's a lot closer to what we envision as a flying car.

[narrator] But aerospace engineer Nick Householder

is not convinced that these weird lights in the sky

reveal the future of Malaysian automobiles.

[Householder] I don't think this is a flying car.

Any kind of controlled vehicle

flying over, especially, a city,

has a very specific series of lights to it.

We see none of that on these lights in the sky.

[narrator] Coming up...

Are these lethal lights that could down a plane?

[Vittert] Three different pilots were blinded.

The FBI was brought in to investigate the growing threat.

[narrator] And a mysterious explosion

in one of England's most beautiful cities.

What that looked like to me was a car bomb.

[explosion]

[narrator] Witnesses at a rooftop bar are baffled as they film

strange lights in the sky above Kuala Lumpur.

[man speaking]

[Pickens] So, what are these lights?

They're clearly not stars. It's cloudy.

This is something different.

[narrator] Nick Householder studies the footage,

and suspects these lights aren't coming from the sky at all.

[Householder] I think it might be projected onto the clouds from below.

Dense clouds can act as, kind of, a light filter.

They'll diffract and reflect light.

Maybe we're seeing an optical illusion.

A hologram projected into the sky.

I have an experiment that might explain what we're seeing in the video.

Let's give it a try.

This is a piece of plastic,

but it's been coated with a special film

that gives it similar diffraction and refraction properties

to the misty clouds above.

If this were just a clear piece of plastic,

light would shine straight through it.

But because of this diffraction that it has,

an image will appear if we shine something onto it.

Exactly like what I think is happening in the video.

[narrator] Nick uses a projector attached to his computer

to stand in for lights on the ground.

[Householder] I'm trying to align the beam

so that it hits my sheet of plastic and creates an image.

Let's see if it works.

Wow. It's a hologram.

This specially coated piece of reflective plastic

is acting like the clouds.

It's allowing the light to hit something,

reflect off of it and hit your eye.

What we get is an image that looks like it's floating above my desk,

just like the image we see floating in the sky in the footage.

[narrator] Householder's experiment shows

that light from the ground could appear to be coming from above the clouds.

What we don't know is the source of the light.

Is it coming from a spotlight or a high-powered laser?

[narrator] Meteorologist Orelon Sidney

has no doubt that this is a dangerous beam

that could imperil thousands of lives.

[Sidney] I think a very good candidate for this might be lasers,

because laser light is extremely concentrated.

[Vittert] If the lights we're seeing are being made

by lasers pointing up at the sky,

there could be really dangerous consequences.

[narrator] Across the world, incidents of lasers

targeting aircraft are on the rise.

In the US, the FAA catalogue 9,723 incidents

in 2021 alone.

If you hit a plane, it can dazzle the eyes of the pilot,

potentially risking their ability to fly.

Some lasers have power enough to actually injure a pilot.

[narrator] In 2013, California police pilot

Sergeant Steve Robertson's helicopter

was hit by a powerful beam of green light

while he was on patrol.

I was struck with a very powerful laser

that burned both of the corneas in my eyes.

[narrator] Robertson was incapacitated,

and would have crashed if his co-pilot

hadn't been able to land the chopper.

These threats are real.

[narrator] The sky above Kuala Lumpur

is crowded with potential targets.

Almost 60 million passengers pass through the airport here

on almost 125,000 flights every year.

A plane coming down on this city

could lead to thousands of deaths.

No plane crashes have been caused

by a laser incident yet,

but the authorities feel like it's just a matter of time.

[narrator] Now, England, Exeter.

February 27th, 2021.

Evening is falling over the sleepy cathedral city.

Aye, lovely, little college town here.

Everything seems fine.

[explosion]

Ka-boom!

Holy cow!

Well, wasn't expecting that.

That was a very high energy explosion.

[narrator] Another camera also captures the explosion.

The camera actually rattles.

So you can just imagine this shockwave

moving out at the speed of sound.

This type of explosion is not something that I would expect to see.

Was it an accident?

Was it some kind of act of aggression?

What happened here?

[narrator] Engineer Nick Householder wonders

who would bomb a city best known for its historic buildings,

tea shops and tourist destinations?

[Householder] Is it possible that someone with an agenda has chosen this town

as a target of an attack?

[narrator] In 2007, a terrorist group

declare themselves ready to fight for an independent Cornwall,

the county that lies just next door,

40 miles to the west of Exeter.

[Householder] Cornwall has its own language and traditions.

It's a Celtic nation,

and there's a lot of anger at how the place is treated by the rest of England.

[narrator] The rich treat the picture-postcard county

as an ostentatious playground,

while many of its local residents are priced out and deprived.

Cornwall is the second poorest area in all of Northern Europe.

The Cornish Liberation Army want the county of Cornwall

to be recognized as an independent nation, known as Kernow.

And it carried out a series of attacks

to further that objective.

[narrator] The CLA seems particularly angry with English celebrity chefs,

like Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein,

who set up restaurants for well-healed tourists

on the beautiful Cornish coast.

[Householder] In 2017, they firebombed a restaurant in Porthleven,

and announced that they had members

who were ready to become suicide bombers

for the cause of Cornish independence.

[narrator] Exeter is the county capital of Devon,

and a symbol of the hated English.

Could this be a Cornish Liberation Army bomb?

[narrator] Military historian Martin Morgan analyzes the blast.

That was some HE right there.

High explosive, like TNT, or hexanite or something like that.

[narrator] This is not the signature of a local terrorist group,

but of a major global power.

This is not something that's an explosive vest for a suicide bomber.

That's more than 500 pounds of high explosive that just went off.

How did that get into the middle of a sleepy, little town?

[narrator] Coming up...

A man with a grudge against beauty.

Throughout history, people who have wanted to make statements

combine explosions with symbolic buildings,

such as cathedrals, to a devastating effect.

Could we be seeing something similar here?

[narrator] And in New Jersey...

Does a wormnado mean an earthquake for the Garden State?

You see all kinds of things in Hoboken, don't get me wrong.

But this...

This is really, really unique.

In Exeter, England,

a massive explosion shakes the historic city.

Military historian Martin Morgan

discovers that this detonation

is truly a blast from the past.

What we're looking at here is a bomb dropped by the German Luftwaffe,

specifically it was a 1,000 kilogram bomb.

That's a bomb that weighs 2,200 pounds,

so an extraordinarily powerful weapon.

[narrator] By 1940, Adolf Hitler was determined to break Great Britain,

the one European nation holding out

against the ferocious advance of the Nazis

during World War II.

But Exeter was a town of little strategic importance.

Hitler attacked it to get revenge.

[Jeff Wise] The raids were known in England

as the Baedeker Raids,

because before the War,

Germans traveling on vacation to the UK

would carry a series of guidebooks

published by a company called Baedeker.

And these were, of course, all the lovely spots that you would want to go.

By selecting these towns for no other reason

than they were recommended by the Baedeker guide.

It was thought that the Germans could shatter

the will of the English people

to continue fighting Germany.

The raids target Canterbury and its 1,400-year-old cathedral,

Bath, famous for its elegant 18th century streets and Roman remains,

and the ancient city of Exeter,

which is devastated by the Baedeker bombings.

[Wise] So, a really spiteful, deliberate act of malice

to try to wipe out the best parts of England.

[narrator] The south side of Exeter cathedral is destroyed,

but the will of the British people is not.

Yet, even today, the legacy of Hitler's brutal bombing blitz

still threatens civilians.

[Morgan] Over the course of the War,

German aircraft dropped 30,000 tons worth of munitions

on cities in the United Kingdom.

The average failure rate of bombs during the Second World War

is expected to have been somewhere between 15 and 20%.

You're dealing with hundreds of unexploded bombs.

[narrator] Bombs that are still lying undiscovered in 21st century Exeter.

[Householder] It turns out, it was a World War II munition

that had miraculously survived to this day

and was still explosive.

[narrator] An explosives team surround the 2,200 pound Nazi bomb

with 400 tons of sand

to dampen and direct the blast.

Once its contained, they set it off.

[narrator] The explosion blows out windows

and even doors of nearby houses.

But there are no injuries.

They dampened it to the greatest extent possible,

and still they could not contain

the explosive force of that munition,

simply because of the fact that it was so large.

It ended up leaving a crater

big enough to park multiple double decker buses inside.

[narrator] One of Hitler's deadly legacies is destroyed,

but an ever present danger remains.

These unexploded bombs aren't that uncommon.

[Morgan] The United Kingdom has hundreds of World War II era

unexploded bombs, secretly hiding, lying in wait to go off.

[narrator] Now, Hoboken, New Jersey.

March 25th, 2021.

A woman out for a walk is startled

by an extraordinary swirling in the sidewalk.

Oh, my goodness, these are worms,

and there are, like, thousands of them.

And they're not in just some random lay in piles,

they're in more of a spiral shape.

Almost like a cyclonic shape on the ground.

[narrator] The tiny-brained creatures

seem to have been gripped by some unseen force,

spinning them into bizarre spirals across the ground.

[Carin Bondar] It really looks like a little tornado of worms on the ground.

A wormnado.

[narrator] But there's not even a light breeze.

Why are they in this crazy spiral?

What's making them do that?

This is not normal activity that you'd expect out of earthworms.

[Leslie Samuel] Whatever it is, this isn't random.

There's a clear pattern.

So we need to figure out what's going on here.

[narrator] Coming up...

Is this a wiggly warning?

[David Wallace] So, you're walking down the street, and you see this,

I don't think you consider, "Hey, this is my lucky day."

This is more like, "Okay, what is fixing to happen to me now?"

[narrator] And soldiers versus ghosts

on an island with a deadly reputation.

[screaming]

If I was a soldier on post here,

I would be literally freaking out and running the other way.

[narrator] In Hoboken, New Jersey,

an extraordinary whirlwind of worms appears.

It's like a wormnado.

I've never seen anything like this before.

[narrator] Entomologist Kevin Kasky digs into worm lore,

and discovers that weird worm swarms

sometimes appear ahead of natural disasters.

[Kevin Kasky] There have been reports in Taiwan and in Japan

of large clusters of worms appearing

just moments before an earthquake.

[narrator] January 17th, 1995.

The Kobe earthquake shakes Japan,

causing thousands of deaths and billions in damage.

Just before the quake,

scientists observe worms fleeing the soil.

There were reports of these worms

on driveways, sidewalks, gardens

appearing moments before that disaster.

So, are all these worms in Hoboken

a sign of some impending future disaster for New Jersey?

[narrator] New Jersey, the most densely populated state in America,

lies above the Ramapo Fault Line.

This 70-mile long fault is potentially

the most dangerous earthquake zone in America,

because it runs directly beneath

Indian Point nuclear power station.

A disastrous meltdown here would threaten millions of people.

[Wallace] Well, we know that the earthquakes

can generate electrical currents.

Now, is it the possibility that the electrical currents flowing through the ground,

these worms can sense it and react to it?

[narrator] Kasky discovers that the worms have no ears or eyes,

and some have just 300 nerve cells in their whole nervous system.

They may have one super sense that beats humans hands down.

Scientists have recently discovered

that neurons in worms can detect magnetic fields.

[Samuel] Sensing the Earth's magnetic field,

they couldn't work out which way is up and which way is down,

and then burrow accordingly.

[narrator] This could mean that these worms circling

acts as a natural early warning system

of a devastating East Coast earthquake.

Is there some type of charge in the ground

causing these worms to act in a weird manner?

[narrator] Electrical engineer David Wallace wants to know

if worms really can react

to the kind of electrical interference produced by an earth tremor.

Here we have some good old fashioned earthworms.

Perfect for fishing.

But today, we're gonna put them in here

and make them our performing worms.

So, what we need to do now is insert an electrode,

so we'll have a way for the electricity to flow through the dirt.

[narrator] As electrical current flows from anode to cathode

across the dirt,

a magnetic field will be generated

perpendicular to the direction of current flow.

[Wallace] We're gonna start out low.

So, there's about four volts.

We'll run it up to about 12 volts,

which is your typical car battery.

I got a little active one going right here.

Come on, boy. You can get up. There we go.

Second one coming up.

So, you might as well call me the worm whisperer.

I can call them out of the ground.

[narrator] Wallace's experiment shows

that worms do respond to electrical or magnetic fields.

But his worms don't form the mysterious-looking circle

seen in the footage from New Jersey.

[narrator] Biologist Leslie Samuel finds other animals

that run rings around each other.

[Samuel] Army ants will form death spirals.

When a group of ants become separated from the main column,

they lose the pheromone track.

So, instead, each ant follows the one in front

in a never-ending circle.

They can just keep going and going

until, eventually, they die of exhaustion.

[narrator] Other animals form circular formations

for mutual protection.

Female elephants will actually circle around a mother giving birth

to protect her from lions and hyenas.

[Bondar] Reindeer herds will run

in these incredible, round, cyclone formations.

And this is a good strategy for them,

because a predator can't really keep its eye on any one individual.

Are these worms reacting to a predator?

[narrator] Kasky suspects he can see a purpose behind the weird wormnado.

It looks like one large animal.

The bird's gonna look at 'em and go, "Oh, I'm not eating that.

That's way too much."

[narrator] Creatures great and small

sometimes find safety in numbers.

There are loads of critters out there

that love to make their lunch out of worms.

So, it's a worm-eat-worm world,

and they've got to do what they can to survive.

[narrator] Now...

the South East Asian island nation of Singapore.

March 2006.

In the middle of the night, two soldiers are on guard duty at a check post.

One is idly filming on his cell phone.

[Morgan] I like how this guy, the Singapore soldier,

is throwing up this westside sign.

Soldiers doing what soldiers do best, killing time,

trying to deal with absolute boredom at a checkpoint.

[soldier] Full moon.

[narrator] Suddenly, the silence of the moonlit night is shattered.

-[woman shrieking] -[solider speaking other language]

What is that noise?

[Tracy Walder] There seems to be, kind of, a shriek,

or cackling, like a witch's cackle.

[soldiers speaking other language]

These soldiers, these guys with guns, they're freaking out.

-[narrator] Then... -[soldiers speaking other language]

Oh, my God. What is that?

Whoa!

[soldiers screaming]

[narrator] A phantom-like intruder appears out of the darkness.

Is that thing floating? Looks like it's floating.

Looks like a pointy-headed ghost.

What is this? What?

[soldiers speaking frantically in other language]

This has scared these guys half to death.

[soldiers screaming]

[Craig Gottlieb] Those guys are terrified.

I mean, they've got guns, and they're terrified.

[Morgan] There was nothing there a second ago,

and then he's back, and this apparition appears.

[exclaims] That's actually spooky.

Look, here's a serious question. What is that?

[narrator] Coming up...

What's eating these war recruits?

As the pontianak strikes,

she uses these claw-like nails to tear out the stomach.

[narrator] In Singapore,

soldiers on night watch during a full moon

are terrified by an apparently spectral apparition.

[soldiers screaming]

[narrator] Singapore is a tiny nation

of just over five million people,

surrounded by much bigger countries.

[speaking other language]

[narrator] All male citizens over 18 must serve

two years of national service.

Military historian Craig Gottlieb

notices that the soldiers in the footage appear to be very young.

Maybe even fresh recruits,

doing their basic training on Pulau Tekong island.

[Gottlieb] Men in Singapore who get drafted to the National Guard,

they train on this island,

which is known to be one of the most haunted islands

in the entire area.

[narrator] The island of Pulau Tekong used to be home to some 8,000 people

until 1987,

when the military took over and relocated the civilian population.

So, pre-military, there was a shrine.

So, when you got to the island,

you'd leave an offering to appease the spirits there.

Well, the military takes over, they abandon the shrine.

No offering, angry spirits.

[narrator] Today, all civilian access is restricted.

And the island serves exclusively

as a military training area for new recruits.

[speaking other language]

[narrator] But that hasn't stopped terrifying tales from leaking out.

Some of the recruits have reported,

some of the officers that train them have been seen

walking around the island,

leaving little offerings in places

where paranormal activity is said to have occurred.

[narrator] One story from Pulau

concerns a soldier who went missing

during a training march through the jungle.

When his comrades conduct a search,

they find his body hanging from a tree.

His internal organs have been torn out of his belly,

and arranged neatly on the ground,

next to his corpse.

To impressionable young recruits,

it could be the work of a terrifying spirit,

known as the pontianak.

Legends say that the pontianak first appears as a very beautiful woman.

Graceful, pale skin, long, black hair.

Long fingernails, which is a sign of beauty in South East Asia.

And wearing a white robe.

As the pontianak strikes,

she uses these claw-like nails to tear out your stomach,

to rip out your viscera

so that she can eat your intestines.

Legends say that she turns up only at full moon,

which tallies with the footage we see.

-[woman shrieking] -[soldiers speaking other language]

[narrator] No wonder these soldiers are terrified.

So, think about it.

You've got a lot of young guys who've never been out of their village.

They get drafted into the Singaporean National Guard.

They travel to Pulau,

rumored to be the most haunted island in the area.

It's a recipe for paranoia.

[soldiers screaming]

[narrator] But this specter in the footage

isn't a figment of the recruits' over active imaginations.

Martin Morgan looks at the history of Singapore,

and wonders if this footage could show

the state deliberately scaring its own citizens.

This is a country where people are, sort of, terrified into

being orderly members of society.

[narrator] Singapore was founded in 1819,

and became rich from trading pepper and rubber.

Today, it's one of the wealthiest places in the world.

One in every six people here is a millionaire.

But citizenship comes at a price

many in the West would find unbearable.

So, to an outsider, Singapore looks perfect.

It's nice and clean,

the crime rate is incredibly low.

But how they do that is that they rule with an iron fist.

They're very, very controlling.

There are rules and laws covering almost everything.

You can't chew gum in public,

you can't feed pigeons,

you can't even walk around in your own home naked.

[Walder] Singapore is known for having

one of the toughest penal codes, really, in the world.

You can be caned for seemingly mundane offences,

all the way to the death penalty for drug trafficking.

Is it possible that the authorities use people's fear

of the supernatural to keep them under control?

[narrator] Investigators wonder

if this could be an unorthodox training scenario.

[soldier speaking other language]

Could this be an elaborate military experiment

to see how soldiers react to fear?

[soldier screaming]

[narrator] Fear is a natural reaction

to any life-threatening situation.

And overcoming that fear is vital

to performing as a soldier.

In the US, military training is designed

to inoculate troops against terror.

[Walder] It's not difficult to train someone

in, you know, how to shoot a gun

or how to participate in combat.

However, it's really difficult to train someone

in how to respond psychologically and emotionally to fear.

For example, at the FBI, they have a mock city

that's called Hogan's Alley.

[narrator] Hogan's Alley covers ten acres

at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

Dubbed the most crime-ridden town in America,

the bank here is robbed two to five times per week.

The FBI consulted with Hollywood set designers

to create this authentic-looking urban training center,

where recruits' reactions to a variety

of deadly real-life scenarios are tested.

[Walder] The whole point of that is to expose you

to different situations that you have to deal with every single day.

So, I think a country that is highly superstitious,

that has legends that have been handed down for generations,

I don't think it would be out of the realm of possibility

for supervisors to use that,

um, on soldiers, during their training,

to try to invoke fear out of them.

It could be that the senior drill instructors on the island

know good and well that they can use the island's ghostly reputation

to make the troops shape up and pay a little bit closer attention.

[narrator] With the island being closed to civilian investigators,

we cannot be sure what strange creature is appearing in the footage.

[Gottlieb] All I gotta say is, if I was a soldier on post here,

I would literally be freaking out, running the other way.

[soldiers screaming]