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.

[loud explosion]

[woman screams]

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

[man 1] Check this out.

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

-[loud explosion] -Wow!

Now that's a cracker.

-[loud explosion] -[man 2] Oh!

This doesn't make any sense.

There has to be another explanation.

So what could it be?

[narrator] Coming up, weird lights in the Arctic.

Whoa!

[narrator] Do they point to a secret Nazi laboratory?

Himmler sent teams looking for Thor's hammer,

which he believed to be a thunder weapon.

[Craig Gottlieb] Could these strange lights represent some forgotten

Nazi technology found by the Russians?

Did I see that right?

[narrator] Home improvements poltergeist style.

We feel like it was a cry for help to get our attention.

You're definitely going to believe this place is haunted.

[narrator] And...

[man speaking Cree]

Is there a tree moving?

[narrator] When trees attack...

Just moving in a way that trees really shouldn't move.

[narrator] Bizarre phenomena...

Oh, my God!

[narrator] ...mysteries caught on camera...

This is just mind-boggling.

[narrator] ...what's the truth behind this strange evidence?

On the northern edge of Norway, in the Arctic Circle.

April 6th, 2019,

a man films the nighttime horizon.

It's a beautiful scene. Looks like a screensaver.

Beautiful mountains, dramatic clouds.

[narrator] Suddenly...

Whoa. Hang on. What?

Whoa! That is pretty spectacular.

[narrator] An object seems to fall from above and explode,

setting off a colorful chain reaction.

There is a series of dots that seem to kind of drip down

and create contrails over the top layer of atmosphere and then it happens again.

[Gottlieb] Nothing's left but the trails.

I don't know what's going on.

[narrator] The alien-looking imprints have no clear origin but hover in the air.

That is wild.

I can honestly say, in all my years of looking up at the sky,

I have never seen anything like this.

[David Wallace] We have to ask ourselves,

"Who or what is creating this light show we're seeing in the sky?"

[narrator] This footage was filmed two degrees north of the Arctic Circle,

the line of latitude on the earth beyond

which the sun doesn't set in the summer solstice

and doesn't rise on the winter solstice.

The sky here often looks weird, but not weird like this.

[Orelon Sidney] If I'm not mistaken, those little lights at the bottom,

those are actually little spirals.

They're not just flashes of light.

So they actually have kind of a structure to them.

[narrator] Space journalist Amy Shira Teitel

discovers the location is close to a recent archeological breakthrough.

[Teitel] Russian scientists surveying the northern Arctic islands

found something really strange.

They found what looks like an old wartime bunker.

And there was stuff inside, like paperwork, shoes, gas canisters,

and everything inside was carrying the Nazi insignia.

[Patrick Tomlinson] It didn't take long for the Russian scientists

to figure out what they'd found,

Schatzgraber, the treasure hunter,

the Nazi polar base dating back to the Second World War.

[narrator] Schatzgraber was built right at the top of the world,

just 650 miles from the North Pole.

Schatzgraber is always shrouded in mystery.

Everybody had heard about it.

No one had ever found physical evidence

that the place actually existed until now.

The question is, what was it for?

[speaking German]

[narrator] Nazi high command had a dangerous mystical fascination

with the icy wasteland of the north.

[Tomlinson] Nazi mythology held that the Aryan race descended

from a race of Nordic supermen.

The Nazis had a history of searching the world for Aryan artifacts.

Himmler himself sent teams looking for Thor's hammer.

Which he believed to be a thunder weapon.

[thunder rumbling]

[narrator] The land above the Arctic Circle covers

an area 50% larger than the United States

but has a population of less than two people per square mile.

Hitler saw this icy frontier as a future racial utopia

and more practically as a commanding position

from which he could reign terror on the lands to the south.

One of the Nazis' greatest technological triumphs

of the Second World War was rocketry, the V-1, and most importantly,

the V-2 rocket, which was the first real guided missile.

[narrator] And Hitler was working on other high tech secret weapons,

including self-propelled super guns

and a parabolic mirror that could be launched into space

that could fire sunbeams onto targets below.

[Gottlieb] Could these strange lights represent some forgotten

Nazi technology found by the Russians?

[narrator] But meteorologist Orelon Sidney

believes these bizarre blotches of color

above the Arctic must be linked to the northern lights.

This nighttime display, also known as the Aurora Borealis,

appears in the skies above the Arctic Circle.

[Sidney] The aurora are charged particles from the sun

that interact with the Earth's magnetic field.

And those charged particles travel down

the Earth's magnetic field lines

and they excite oxygen atoms, nitrogen atoms.

Observing the northern lights from Earth, it's beautiful, it's serene.

It's very calming. But it's actually an incredibly violent event.

You're actually seeing the sun trying to kill our planet

and our atmosphere protecting us.

Without the Earth's magnetic field, life simply could not exist.

[narrator] But these northern lights look very different.

[Teitel] The colors aren't the same as the Aurora.

The Aurora is very green and these colors turn blue

and kind of get deeper blue as they fade.

[narrator] David Wallace runs Mississippi University's High Voltage Laboratory.

[narrator] He wants to determine if the colors

in the video could have been produced by the Aurora Borealis.

The atmosphere's constructed of different gases, oxygen, nitrogen, argon, helium.

So these different gases are gonna glow

different colors in the electromagnetic field.

[narrator] The green light of the Aurora Borealis

is created by charged particles striking oxygen atoms.

We are gonna try some argon gas

and see if we can get a different color.

[narrator] Argon is the third most abundant gas in the Earth's atmosphere.

To simulate the aurora effect,

Wallace and his team will pipe it through

a plexiglass container housing an electric field.

I'm putting around 40,000 to 50,000 volts.

This is more than enough to kill you very quickly.

-[narrator] Coming up... -Let's get some voltage.

[narrator] ...do these lights show the aurora is going haywire...

Now, this would make human life unsustainable on the Earth.

[narrator] ...and does a man have a poltergeist in his kitchen?

There's something in that room.

[narrator] In the Arctic Circle,

a camera captures a mysterious light show

that seems to show the northern lights going haywire.

David Wallace has set up an experiment to see

if the processes that produce the legendary aurora borealis

can also produce the colors in the video.

Okay.

So I think we're ready to give it a try.

Let's get some voltage.

Run me up to 70 KV.

All right. Give us house lights off.

So this is beautiful.

We have the argon flowing through the tubes.

We have the electric field around it.

The argon giving us a nice blue glow.

This is a very good example of what we're seeing in the video.

Okay. Lights on, house and control.

[narrator] David Wallace's experiment proves

an electromagnetic field like Earth can create colors

similar to the spirals at the bottom of this weird phenomenon.

You have charged particles falling down through the atmosphere,

interacting with the gases in the atmosphere,

creating the different colors.

[narrator] But it doesn't explain why the gases

were contorted into these bizarre shapes.

And Wallace fears there may be a problem

with our planet's protective magnetic shield.

Maybe the Earth's magnetic field is weakening,

creating concentrated areas very similar to what you see in the video.

[narrator] Scientists at the European Space Agency

have found Earth's magnetic field has weakened

by a global average of 9% over the last 200 years.

And this could be because a major geological event

is about to take place.

Most people don't know this, but on average,

the Earth's magnetic field reverses itself every 200,000 years or so.

And we're overdue.

[narrator] In a polar flip,

the north and south magnetic poles switch places.

And Earth's protective shield can drop below 10%

of its normal strength for thousands of years.

If our magnetic field does flip,

that will expose us to damage from solar particles.

And it's something that we will have to face sooner rather than later.

[alarm blaring]

[narrator] In the 1960s,

US Air Force employee Chan Thomas wrote a book called The Adam and Eve Story.

Thomas claimed the apocalyptic biblical flood of Noah had been caused

by the poles reversing.

And he said he had evidence that another cataclysmic

polar flip was just around the corner.

But the book was immediately classified by the CIA.

[car horns honking]

We don't know when the next polar flip will happen,

but we do know oxygen ions find it easier to escape

Earth's atmosphere during a polar flip,

which is bad news for any lifeforms experiencing an event like this.

A normal human needs between 19% and 21% of oxygen in the air to live.

And from the scientific studies,

it looks like when the polar flips happened,

it actually dropped the oxygen level down to around 14%.

Now, this would make human life unsustainable on the Earth.

[Sidney] Being somebody who has had a tube in their chest before,

I can tell you that when there isn't enough oxygen,

what actually happens is you freeze.

You need oxygen circulating through your blood

to metabolize and move your muscles.

So you basically freeze in place.

You can't move.

Could this light show be a precursor to an extinction event?

[narrator] David Wallace discovers the lights

are connected to the aurora borealis,

but he finds records from the Andoya Space Center just over a mile away

that show a manmade origin for the display.

They were shooting rockets up into the atmosphere

to study the aurora borealis at the time.

[Tomlinson] These rockets are releasing glowing tracer clouds

so that scientists can learn more about the movement

of wind and the magnetic field in the upper atmosphere.

It's almost like leaving a trail of paint

that will catch on the electric field

so that we can see these invisible forces.

[narrator] Scientists' increased interest

in the inner workings of the aurora may be linked

to the looming threat posed by Earth's weakening electromagnetic field.

[Sidney] We live on a knife edge.

I wish people really understood that.

There are so many things that could wipe us out just like that.

[narrator] Now, Buckinghamshire,

southeast England,

May 14th, 2021, 11:29 a.m.

It's a quiet, sunny morning on a residential street.

Inside a house, a couple's security camera films their kitchen.

When slowly...

Wow, that drawer just slid open.

Did something go flying?

[narrator] Silverware is flying out of the drawer

as though thrown by an invisible hand.

What the hell just happened here?

This is so strange.

[narrator] A utensil shoots out and hits the window,

and then another flies out in a different direction.

Maybe a spoon, knife, or fork shoots more horizontally

straight across the room, hitting the counter on the other side of the room.

[narrator] Then the invisible force

seems to move across the kitchen.

[Tony McMahon] Oh, this is weird.

The drawer opens, the cutlery flies out, and the door closes by itself.

There's something in that room.

[narrator] Coming up, is this family living with the dead?

We've had doors slamming in our faces.

We constantly hear running up and down the stairs.

[narrator] And what is moving these trees?

That's not blowing in the wind. That's gone for a walk.

[narrator] In Buckinghamshire, England,

a homeowner captures what seems to be

a violent poltergeist throwing utensils from his kitchen drawer.

Ben Hubbard was thrilled to move

into this modern house with his wife Lainey in 2018.

But after a series of terrifying events,

he put cameras in all the rooms.

Almost on a daily basis,

there would be things happening like we've had doors slamming in our faces.

We constantly hear running up and down the stairs.

[narrator] Ben feels the cutlery throwing

is some kind of violent form of communication.

We really feel like it was a cry for help to get our attention.

[narrator] Experts are baffled by this footage

of what seems to be a poltergeist.

These violent, invisible spirits have been recorded

plaguing people in their homes for at least 2,000 years.

[Ben Nemzer] People who believe in residual haunting

generally believe that something nearby so traumatic caused an event

that just echoes throughout time,

creating this supernatural phenomenon that just never stops.

So, if you believe in ghosts and the negative energy

that violent acts leave behind,

then you're definitely going to believe this place is haunted.

[narrator] Engineer Nick Householder discovers

the research of a British civil servant

who wanted to understand these violent domestic hauntings.

In the 1950s, a British man by the name of Guy William Lambert

was concerned by the ever-increasing reports of poltergeists,

and he wanted a rational explanation

to explain what all these sightings were.

[narrator] After studying the locations of over 50 paranormal cases,

Lambert suspects the answer is hidden underground.

The idea was that underground rivers

and turbulence inside of them was causing structural damage

to the undersides of these homes.

[narrator] And maps show that nearby there is one particular river

with some very strange associations.

This underground river is connected to a place

known as the Hellfire Caves.

In 1748, there's a gentleman by the name

of Sir Francis Dashwood from West Wycombe,

and he carves out local caves to be a meeting space

for the legendary Hellfire Club.

These caves were used for the gathering of aristocrats and nobles

to throw, some say, pagan rituals.

[narrator] The 850-foot deep Hellfire Caves

lead to an underground river called the Styx, the same name as the river

which separates the world of the living

from the world of the dead in Greek mythology.

A murdered maid is said to haunt the cave's narrow passageways.

There are reports that these caves are haunted,

but perhaps it's just vibrations of the underground rivers

that's causing the noises and actions people are seeing.

Could it be that this couple has a river flowing under their house

and that river is causing all of the things that we're seeing?

[narrator] But historian Kenya Davis-Hayes doubts

an underground river could cause all the activity seen in the footage.

An underground river could definitely cause vibrations in a home.

It could even open a drawer.

But it doesn't explain why cutlery would fly across the room.

[narrator] This is not an earthquake zone

and there are no nearby sources of magnetic electricity

powerful enough to cause the metal objects to fly like this.

But Hubbard remains convinced the poltergeist

is an intelligent spirit and says the haunting keeps getting worse.

We think the cause of this could be frustration from our poltergeist, um,

which could explain these big explosive actions

like knives and scissors being thrown across a room.

Even in my experience of what I studied and researched for years,

I am still astounded from time to time by some cases.

Living in a house where you've got things happening all the time

is unnerving to say the least.

[narrator] Now in the forests near Mistassini, Canada.

January 2019,

two friends trekking deep in the Quebec wilderness

miles from any major settlements film their surroundings.

What a perfect winter day to be outdoors.

[narrator] But when they zoom in...

It looks like the tree is...

is there a tree moving?

[narrator] A 100-foot tall tree on a distant ridge starts to shake violently.

Look at it go.

Oh, that one's just gone.

And another one. Oh, my God.

It's like wobbling two.

Moving in a way that trees really shouldn't move.

[narrator] Both trees are swinging back and forth,

almost as if they're learning to walk.

They're not falling.

They're upright and they're moving.

[narrator] One seems to move at least 60 feet horizontally across the snow field.

It's not just one tree.

It's a series of trees.

That's what makes it even more weird.

[narrator] The forest goes calm again, as if nothing has happened.

Then it happens again.

What's going on? A tree can't just uproot itself.

That's not blowing in the wind. That's gone for a walk.

How is this happening?

[narrator] The friends run terrified of what they've just seen.

These guys are noping right out of there. I don't blame them.

[man speaking Cree]

[narrator] Coming up, a big discovery suggests

a First Nations legend is coming true.

Could it be some kind of enormous beaver

that's ripping down these tree?

[narrator] And man versus bird.

They're just dive-bombing him as he walks along the street.

[narrator] Two friends run from 100-foot trees

that seem to be physically walking

across a remote snow field in the 345,000 square mile

wilderness of Quebec, Canada.

So because this area is so mountainous

and forests like, it's more wild.

Not a lot of people really live there and see

what's in these forests, except for, you know,

people of First Nations, who are more familiar with the area.

[narrator] Historian Marcus Harshaw recognizes

the language the people filming the trees are speaking.

[man speaking Cree]

The language you heard in that clip was Cree, a First Nations language.

The Cree have been inhabiting and braving

the harsh conditions of Canada for thousands of years.

[narrator] The fear in the men's voices could be

because the weird movements of the trees remind them of a legendary creature.

[man speaking English]

For the Cree, the beaver was deeply significant

to their whole creation mythology, the creation of the world.

[narrator] In Cree mythology,

a giant beaver is said to be at large in these ancient woods.

When an attempt is made to kill it,

it unleashes an apocalyptic flood on the world.

While myths are fun, some myths are based in just a hint of reality.

We know for a fact that about 10,000 years ago

there was a giant beaver species, Castoroides.

This is a beaver the size of a bear with six-inch incisors.

It didn't build its dam out of branches.

It would have built its dam out of entire logs.

[narrator] The mammoth Castoroides weighed over 200 pounds.

Officially, it's extinct.

Could it be some kind of enormous beaver

that's ripping down these trees?

[narrator] It sounds impossible,

but a recent discovery found something is building huge megastructures

in this wilderness, and it's not the work of humans.

In 2007, researchers using satellite imagery noticed

something very unusual in Canada.

What they found after additional investigation

was a half mile long beaver dam.

[Kourounis] It's almost 2,800 feet long.

That's twice the size of the Hoover Dam.

[Lovell] So for a dam of this size,

it's likely that it had been there for decades.

But because of the area being so rural and remote,

just no one had noticed it before now.

What else is there hiding amongst these rural areas that we also haven't noticed?

[narrator] An eight-foot beaver would be

a more dangerous opponent than a bear.

People think that beavers are cute and cuddly,

but their front incisors never stop growing.

They're reinforced with iron.

They're actually orange from that iron,

and they can chew through pretty much anything.

If there's any animal out there that can do this to a tree, it's a beaver.

[narrator] But when anthropologist Karen Bellinger

analyzes the way the tree is moving,

she doesn't believe a beaver is to blame.

I don't care how big a beaver is,

no creature could gnaw at a tree

in such a way that it hops to the side rather than

falling over once it can no longer stand.

[narrator] Explorer George Kourounis believes these trees'

violent motions could be the work of a secret criminal gang.

Is this someone or something shaking

these trees and ripping them down?

[narrator] Lumber prices in Canada rocketed from $300 per 1,000 feet

in 2020 to $1,600 a year later.

These soaring prices have tempted criminals

into the wilderness to steal the country's ancient trees.

[Larsen] They're doing it in places where they think

people aren't going to notice like the Canadian wilderness.

But people are noticing, the people who have lived there,

that's their home. They notice.

People recorded this are Cree and they're people who come from this landscape.

I mean, they must understand, you'd think, what's going on.

[narrator] And drugs seem to have made the situation even worse.

In 2019, there was an unusual spate

of tree thefts in British Columbia,

and authorities identified this as coinciding

with the peak of the opioid crisis.

Their conclusion was that people

who were desperate for funds were actually stealing

the trees in order to raise money to feed their addictions.

The problem was so bad that one forest patrolman

observed he was seeing new tree stumps every day.

These 120 foot massive trees were just disappearing overnight.

The problem of these missing trees

became so bad that people actually

called it the Chainsaw Massacre.

And of course, when you're really desperate, you'll do anything.

[narrator] But logging equipment is loud.

A tree ripper that could replicate what we see in the clip

can reach over 100 decibels.

The tree movement in the clip is eerily silent.

The reason these trees are making

these strange movements remains a mystery.

Now one of these guys are running off.

They look like they got scared and they tried to put it away

because they had stumbled upon something that they did not want to see.

I would hate to think what could have possibly

gone wrong in such a remote area.

[narrator] Now, Shivpuri,

central India.

August 1, 2019.

A man walks barefoot beside a dirt road,

a group of birds watches overhead...

[Liberty Vittert] There's a guy, he's just walking along, wandering along the street.

Looks like there's some small structures around,

but pretty much the middle of nowhere.

[narrator] ...when suddenly he comes under attack.

They're just dive-bombing him as he walks along the street.

And they're, they're really attacking him.

[narrator] The man swerves out of the bird's path,

narrowly dodging its razor-sharp beak,

then another swoops in for an attack.

What do these birds have against this guy?

[narrator] The man ducks escaping this second assault.

There are other people on the street,

but the birds are only interested in him.

This happens every day when he comes out of his house.

They're... they're definitely targeting him.

This brings a whole new meaning to angry birds.

But I mean, it is genuinely sort of terrifying, like,

these birds won't leave him alone.

[narrator] Coming up, a tragic misunderstanding

leads to an incredible act of vengeance...

Are these birds actually targeting this man on purpose?

Seeking their revenge?

[narrator] And what kind of blast produces this sickly smoke?

That yellow smoke is completely unnerving.

It doesn't look right at all.

[narrator] In India, a man is mercilessly targeted

by a flock of birds who seem to have

a bizarre personal grudge against him.

India is home to over 900 million Hindus.

Their religion dates back over 4,000 years.

Biologist Roland Kays finds animal attacks in India can be linked

to a Hindu belief that the soul can pass into another creature

after death and sometimes exact revenge.

In India, there's widespread belief

in reincarnation and good karma and bad karma.

So in reincarnation you can be reborn

as another human, as an animal.

What you put out, perhaps in this life,

is what you will get back in your next life.

[Vittert] If we go along with this way of thinking,

maybe the man in this footage needs to look back over his life and anyone

he could have wronged.

[narrator] But biologist Kelly Price thinks

the species of bird in the footage provides an important clue.

What we know about crows is they're actually highly intelligent.

After humans and primates,

crows are believed to be the smartest animal on the planet.

[Davis] Crows have been known to use tools to solve puzzles.

They use gestures to communicate with one another.

They even will throw their food or prey into the road

and wait for cars to drive over it

so that they can get inside because they're also scavengers.

They live close to people all around the world,

and we're starting to realize that they're actually very tuned into us.

[narrator] A University of Washington study in 2011

found crows can recognize human faces

and attack the ones they don't like.

[Kays] Researchers devised an ingenious experiment

where they would wear full face masks,

usually of someone famous like a president.

And so now that crow associates that face,

you know, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon

with the disturbance at the nest,

they can go back a year later after not having worn

that mask around the crows at all.

And all of a sudden, the crows would go on high alert

and start attacking whoever was wearing that mask.

These researchers discovered that crows can recognize

different human faces and can remember them for a long time.

And they were actually approached by the US military

to ask if they could train crows to learn the face of Osama bin Laden

and then send them out to alert and try to find where he was hiding.

[narrator] Crows can live for up to 15 years

and they don't forget their human enemies.

Data scientist Liberty Vittert confirms

the man's name is Shiva and he says he is the victim

of a tragic inter-animal misunderstanding.

A few years ago, Shiva tried to save a baby chick crow

from a bunch of netting and sadly the chick died in his hands.

It's entirely possible that these crows believe

this man killed their baby and they have never forgiven him for it.

[Kays] He says the adults have been taking it out at him ever since.

Every time he leaves his house, he gets attacked by crows.

And this has been happening for three years.

So now he has to grab a stick just to kind of wave them away,

because otherwise they start to actually land and peck at him.

And they've... they've injured him.

[narrator] The mob of birds seem intent on hurting Shiva,

even though he says he's done nothing wrong.

Is there nothing he can do to make peace?

How long is he going to have to live with this?

[Kays] It's really remarkable to realize that these crows

could recognize individuals and keep track

of what kind of person they are.

They might know all of us and we don't even know it.

[narrator] Now Aktau, Kazakhstan, November 7th, 2021.

On a main road, a CCTV camera films the nighttime traffic.

It looks like a pretty ordinary night.

There's cars driving along the street.

Nothing much is happening.

[narrator] Then...

[loud explosion]

-Yikes. -[loud explosion]

[narrator] A huge explosion rocks the street.

-What... what happened? -[loud explosion]

[narrator] But this is no normal blast.

That yellow smoke is completely unnerving.

It doesn't... it doesn't look right at all.

Whatever happened was extremely fast and extremely violent.

[narrator] The noxious cloud continues to expand,

coating the street and choking fumes.

[Linda Rodriguez McRobbie] This explosion on this kind of scale,

the billowing yellow smoke,

it seems like the kind of thing

that would destroy not only property but kill lots of people.

If I saw smoke like that coming my way, I'd get out of there.

[loud explosion]

[narrator] Coming up...

Does yellow mean danger for the people on the street?

We need to be prepared for the worst.

[narrator] A Kazakh city's CCTV camera captures

a nighttime street engulfed by a mysterious yellow blast.

Though we see the initial explosion,

it doesn't look like there's anything on fire after it explodes.

There just seems to be this giant cloud of noxious looking gas

that looks thick coming from the site of whatever just happened.

[narrator] Kazakhstan is the world's ninth biggest country,

a former Soviet satellite on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Historian Martin Morgan discovers this arid land hides some very dirty secrets.

[Morgan] During the old Soviet era,

Kazakhstan was placed where Soviet chemical weapons were developed and tested

specifically at a place called Pavlodar.

There were also explosive chemicals at this plant,

like yellow phosphorus and nitrogen trichloride.

And these are just the chemicals we know about.

[narrator] Data scientist Liberty Vittert believes this yellow smoke

is the chemical saltpeter also known as potassium nitrate.

Potassium nitrate is one of the main components

in gunpowder, "the granddaddy of all explosives."

In its purest form, it burns purple.

But when it's manufactured cheaply with the addition of salt, it burns yellow.

[narrator] Indian warlords used potassium nitrate

as a weapon back in the 3rd century B.C.,

as a poisonous smoke on the battlefield.

Later, American soldiers extracted it from the caves

in the Appalachian Mountains and used it to attack the British.

Today, it's used in huge quantities by the world militaries.

Storing large quantities of potassium nitrate

is a tricky thing because if it is not stored properly,

it can explode.

In 2015, a Chinese company found out what happens

when you store 500 tons of potassium nitrate the wrong way.

[loud explosion]

It wasn't pretty.

[narrator] The explosion at the Port of Tianjin killed more than 170 people.

We're looking at another Tianjin,

we need to be prepared for the worst.

[narrator] The 2015 explosion almost completely destroyed

the port, but it didn't leave a yellow cloud.

Kenya Davis-Hayes believes the neon color is coming from somewhere else.

Could it be that the smoke was not yellow at all,

but maybe just a trick of the streetlights that gave it a yellow haze.

This explosion occurs at night, and the area,

the scene is bathed in light from streetlights,

which are producing a yellowish hue.

This very suspicious yellow cloud, as it turns out,

might not even be toxic at all.

[narrator] But it was still incredibly destructive.

Journalist Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

studies maps of the area and discovers the building at the heart of the explosion

was a two-story cafe.

This explosion happened at a cafe,

and cafes oftentimes rely on fuel to cook.

Whether that's propane gas or kerosene,

any of these things could be potentially explosive.

[narrator] Kazakhs love fried and fatty food

from daily standards like shelpek,

a fried bread to niche specialties

like miypalaw, which is the brain of a sheep.

One sheep brain contains over eight grams of flammable fat.

All it takes is a little spark,

and it can cause the kind of damage we are seeing in Kazakhstan.

[narrator] And it isn't just Kazakh kitchens that are at risk.

Half of the home fires in the United States start with cooking.

And the National Fire Protection Association

warns that oil and grease fires are a major problem.

They're so common, but so lethal.

Just one spark could cause the type of damage we see in this footage.

[narrator] Kitchens are filled with potentially life-threatening hazards.

Cooking accidents kill four million people every year.

[loud explosion]

[narrator] But this time there were no major casualties.

I think the biggest miracle here is the fact that no one was hurt.

They say if you can't stand the heat,

you should stay out of the kitchen.

But how far away do we have to be to stay away from this?

[loud explosion]