Original subtitles

Tonight on "The Proof is Out There."

Is this A UFO tracking an American fighter plane?

I can't think of anything that size and shape

that would be able to keep up with a jet fighter.

Is this a sea serpent in North Carolina?

Look at that.

I haven't seen anything like that

and I've lived down here for 20 years.

Is this a message from another galaxy?

Voyager introduced prospective extraterrestrials

to our civilization.

Maybe this is their response.

And why are geese mobbing this car?

The Earth is going through some changes

that we don't sense but the animals do.

Around the globe are videos...

What are those things?

It's moving.

Photos and sounds that defy explanation.

We don't know where they come from,

who made them, or how they operate.

What are they?

Some sort of bizarre mutation.

What's exciting is nobody really knows.

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.

I'm Tony Harris

and as a journalist for more than 30 years,

I've followed the facts where they take me.

Now, I'm bringing that spirit of investigation

to the world's strangest sounds and images.

We'll analyze each one with top experts.

It's a credible case, it's a credible video.

And pass a verdict on what it is.

This video was clearly faked.

The proof starts now.

Good evening, everyone

and welcome to "The Proof is Out There."

Tonight, we start near the Southern border.

Within the past few years,

three videos shot in Arizona were leaked to the public.

They reignited the conversation

about UAPs and border security.

We've investigated two of these cases before.

Here is the latest clip.

April 14th, 2021, east of Tombstone, Arizona.

It's shortly after 11:00 p.m.

and an agent with the Department of Homeland Security

is tracking an A-10 Warthog plane.

He's operating a forward-looking infrared camera, or FLIR,

mounted atop a truck.

The A-10 appears silhouetted because with this camera,

hot objects are black while cooler objects appear white.

The leaker didn't elaborate on why this plane

is flying over Arizona or why a DHS agent

would be filming it, but it's in our hands

because nobody expected what happened next.

A spherical object appears to be chasing the fighter jet.

Like the A-10,

the object's heat signature is also black hot.

But when the agent changes to a different setting,

the UAP shows up like a bright orb trailing the A-10.

At times the light is traveling so fast,

the FLIR operator has problems following it

and keeping it in frame.

This video remained secret

until it was sent to UFO Investigator Andy Marcial.

When I saw this and I realized that this was real,

I understood that what I got my hands on was a big deal.

For some, this Arizona sighting

falls in line with much of what we've heard

about UAPs from other government sources.

At an April 2023 Congressional hearing,

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO, testified

that in 52% of all UAP cases it has investigated,

the objects are spherical,

most measure between one and four meters across.

Orbs like this one uncovered

by investigative journalist Jeremy Corbell.

This unidentified object was photographed

over Mosul, Iraq in 2016.

And usually, their method

of propulsion is never immediately obvious.

This sighting falls into all of the major categories.

AARO is the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office,

the Department of Defense's official agency

for tracking unidentified aerial phenomena.

And Teitel notes they've seen

some similarities more concerning than others.

Kirkpatrick also presented a number of cases

where spherical UFOs are seen trailing military planes.

The video shows that the object is keeping up

with the A-10 Warthog like it's nothing.

This has led some people to wonder whether these spheres

are actually aliens tracking our military technology.

There are many reasons why extraterrestrials

might be interested in our military.

Surveillance, curiosity.

One former NASA astronaut has even claimed

that aliens prevented a nuclear exchange

during the peak of the Cold War.

So were aliens really monitoring the A-10 Warthog

or was this something else flying in the plane's airspace?

After releasing the footage,

Andy Marcial went to his friend David Falch for answers.

Falch is a FLIR technician and operator

who works with the exact same cameras our video was shot on.

The first question is, could this be much ado about nothing?

Are we simply looking at a bird?

It appears that the object

is flying around the same speed as the aircraft,

which is traveling about 340 to 350 miles an hour.

I don't know any birds that fly 350 miles an hour.

Next, we check with Rich Hoffman

of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.

If it's not a bird, could it be another object

seen over the Arizona desert nowadays?

Within the last year alone,

there's been about maybe 2,200 incidents reported

by Homeland Security of drones being used

to carry drugs across the border and into US territory.

However, a drone wouldn't be changing the shape.

This particular object doesn't remain round.

In fact, we don't know of any technology

that changes shape like this as it flies.

What kind of airborne object can change its shape?

Perhaps a balloon in the process of deflating?

We asked astronomer and visual effects artist Marc D'Antonio

whether or not that theory is full of hot air.

Could it be a balloon?

Probably not, based on the speed of its motion.

It looks like it's something

that's moving along under its own power fast enough

so that it can stay in the field of the A-10.

Now, it's still possible

it could be caught in a fast-moving wind column.

The winds and jet streams on average

reach speeds of about 110 miles per hour.

But if a balloon was caught in that stream,

how could it keep up with the Warthog,

which typically flies at 350 miles per hour?

So with no earthly explanation for this object,

could we be looking at something truly extraterrestrial?

It's changing its size.

We don't know any craft or any objects that can do that.

Our verdict, we're calling this one a genuine UFO

and it's worth noting we see striking

similarities here to other government-released videos

like the infamous USS Nimitz Tic Tac.

But let's be cautious here.

We're still uncertain this object is of alien origin.

In any case, Andy, keep 'em coming.

Now from the desert to the water.

As we've noted before, Scotland's Nessie

isn't the world's only legendary aquatic monster.

People have spotted them right here in the US

and some videos are a cut above the rest.

Check out this footage.

It's January 3rd, 2023 in Morehead City, North Carolina.

Captain Daniel Griffee and his girlfriend Ashley Wright

are out in the port on his boat

when they see something strange lurking in the waters.

Daniel pulls out his phone and takes a video of a mysterious,

possibly snake-like animal circling his boat.

Here's the moment it briefly pops its head out of the water.

Look at that.

The couple is shocked by its sheer size.

My boat is 22 foot long

and it had to be every bit of 25, 30 feet.

It wasn't like something I had seen in the water before.

We didn't have any idea what type of creature it was.

The animal looks like a cross between an alligator,

a manatee, and a dolphin.

Yet compared to the length of Daniel's boat, it appears

to be much bigger than any of those aquatic animals,

though it's difficult to gauge the size

with the shot zoomed in.

Field researcher Ken Gerhard knows the South

is no stranger to mysterious water monsters.

200 miles up the coast from this location,

we come to Chesapeake Bay

nestled between Maryland and Virginia,

which is home to a monster known as Chessie.

Chessie is typically described

as a dark gray serpentine animal about 20 to 40 feet long

with a football-shaped head.

The most notable Chessie sighting on record

occurred in 1982 when a man named Bob Frew

videotaped a suspicious animal swimming

near his dock on Kent Island, Maryland.

He described it as being up to 40 feet long

and he couldn't tell what it was for sure.

Scientists from the Smithsonian Institute

reviewed the footage and admitted

that it appeared to show some type of animal that was real,

that was animate and that he was not familiar with.

Another nearby legend is Georgia's Altamaha-ha,

believed to live in the coastal marshes

around the mouth of the Altamaha River.

This iconic sea monster

with the flippers of a seal has in recent times

been reported as being 30 feet long,

just like the creature spotted in North Carolina.

In 1830, the Captain of the schooner Eagle

claimed he saw Altamaha-ha off the coast of Georgia.

He described it as about 70 feet long

with large protruding eyes, sharp teeth,

with an alligator-shaped head

to go along with its long tail.

Could the creature in the video have migrated from Georgia

to North Carolina's Crystal Coast?

Let's see if our experts can reel in this maritime mystery.

Let's do some process of elimination.

First, could this be an alligator?

Well, it's not moving like an alligator would.

Alligators swim more at the top of the water.

Their tail is propelling them forward,

moving back and forth horizontally.

Manka says that in contrast, this sea creature

is propelling itself by moving its tail vertically.

It's undulating through the water.

So it's going to the surface and going up and down,

up and down repeatedly.

Another disqualifier,

this doesn't look like alligator skin.

Especially in this shot right here

when it's coming out of the water,

the skin looks really smooth.

I'm not seeing the bumpy scales

that you would see on an alligator.

Okay, then could it be a different reptile,

like a giant sea snake?

Sea snakes can get big, but not that big

and they're long and skinny.

This animal is really thick.

Even a thicker snake like an anaconda or a python,

I still don't think it would be as thick as this animal.

Another obvious possibility

often seen in the Outer Banks is the dolphin,

but that's not a good fit either.

The nose and face of this creature

look too wide to be that of a porpoise or a dolphin

and we don't see that dorsal fin or the fin on the back

that we would see for a dolphin or a porpoise.

Though before we plunge into the theory

that this is in fact a legendary sea monster,

this creature does have one feature

found on a dolphin or porpoise that might

provide the definitive clue, a blowhole.

Based on the timing and the anatomical features

that I'm seeing, a defined backbone,

a dynamic tail that is horizontally-oriented,

and what appears to be a blowhole,

I think that this is actually

the calf of a Northern right whale.

These animals actually do travel

as far south as North Carolina to have their young

during the winter months.

So the time and the location matches up.

But how do you explain its slithering body?

A whale that slithers?

This is actually pretty normal movement

for a juvenile whale.

They're pretty active and dynamic.

But the other thing we might be seeing here

is that because this animal is so weak, it's being pushed

by the current and actually just trying to stay upright.

Our verdict, this is a North Atlantic right whale calf.

It is one of the world's

most endangered large whale species.

So Daniel and Ashley are very lucky they got a sneak peek.

In Great Britain, a moor is an open,

hilly area of rough grass,

sometimes wet, sometimes dry, and fairly isolated.

The Yorkshire Moors is where

the classic novel "Wuthering Heights" is set.

Well, according to one person,

the Moors should also be known for something else,

alien encounters.

It's December 1st, 1987.

A story goes that a retired police officer

named Philip Spencer was taking a routine

morning walk across Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire,

England, when his life changed forever.

Local resident and tour guide Tim Barber

knows Spencer's tale and this mysterious landscape well.

Ilkley Moor is this wild landscape

full of heather and wild marsh grasses.

So it's quite a desolate environment

and if I'm taking people up on the moors,

the story of Philip Spencer always comes out.

Barber says back in 1987,

Spencer was walking along the moors

with his camera when he saw something strange

in the distance, and that's when he captured this.

He started to come across, see a figure

which he just thought was another hiker.

But as he got closer,

the figure seemed to be quite strange.

It's got an enlarged head, large, long arms,

and by all account, had a green tinge.

This thing is pretty creepy-looking.

It doesn't look quite human.

Obviously, it's of a mist-shrouded location,

so we don't get a really clear visual.

Years later, the photo showed up on the internet.

By that time, it had been enhanced.

Three versions emerged in different color schemes.

In the enhancements, you can see

what looks to be a face with dark eyes.

It has long arms and large hands.

That helps make sense of the rest of Spencer's story.

Shortly after this, the creature vanished

and he saw what looked to be a strange type of craft

taking off in the distance and going up into the air.

The next thing Spencer remembered

was his watch was behind by an hour

and the magnetic compass that he had taken

with him on the hike had reversed polarity.

He surmised that in that lost amount of time,

he'd been hit with an enormous amount of energy.

In fact, he believed he'd been abducted.

Aware his story was hard to believe,

he created the pseudonym Philip Spencer

to protect his identity.

We don't know what his real name was

and can't even confirm he was an ex-policeman.

But Ken Gerhard says what is certain

is the area's connection to UFOs.

This sighting is just one of several in the area

which actually lies near an ancient,

Neolithic stone circle known as The 12 Apostles

and like many ancient monolithic sites in England,

it's very mysterious, we're not really sure who made it.

There are some who say that this ancient circle

is actually evidence that aliens visited the Moors

a millennia go and that the visitations

continue to this very day.

In 2011, Britain's Telegraph newspaper

called the Ilkley Moor alien sighting

one of the top 10 UK UFO incidents of all time.

For decades, the original photo

and the enhancement have been studied backwards and forwards

and now it's time for our experts to take a look.

First, we ask anthropologist Kathy Strain

to examine the enhanced photo.

The only thing that I can tell

from the photo is that it's bipedal.

I find it creepy in the sense

that it doesn't immediately look like a human.

All the other animals that exist in England,

they're four-legged hoofed animals, dogs, cows, deer.

So I do not know if what we are seeing

in that photograph is an alien or not.

Next, we take it to

forensic photo and video analyst Michael Primeau.

What I find peculiar is that

when I examine images like this, there's always only one.

The operator could have captured

multiple images, so why didn't they?

But it's the enhanced versions

of the photograph that lead Primeau to have grave doubts.

What we're looking at here

is three different iterations of this creature

and what's interesting is the shadowing

on the creature's face and down

onto its torso and through its neck region.

For Primeau, the details of an alien creature

weren't revealed by the enhancement, they were added.

None of that information is represented

in the very first image that was captured.

Information has been introduced,

shapes of things have been altered,

the perspectives have been skewed,

tonal values have changed.

Basically I would not consider this

an authentic representation of the events

because of the number of changes

that this picture has undergone.

It's a logical argument, but Strain believes

the most important detail in Spencer's story,

if true, may not be in the photograph.

He had a compass with him that had reversed polarity

and the only way that you can do that to a compass

is that it is exposed to a high level of magnetism.

So it makes me wonder

if he was near a UFO

and then, that's why his compass had that happen.

And so, it leads me to believe, regardless of the photograph,

maybe he's telling the truth.

Our verdict,

we're going to go with unexplained phenomenon.

Primeau makes a good case

that the enhanced photo was doctored,

but the original can't be entirely dismissed.

In fact, one analysis conducted by Kodak Labs

couldn't find any evidence of tampering

on the original photograph.

Clearly, there's more investigating to do.

Nearly everyone has had to brake

for wildlife at one time or another.

Nothing strange about that.

But the animals crossing in our next video

left spectators with goosebumps.

August 16th, 2022.

It's a beautiful day for a drive through Lanzhou, China,

but on this particular stretch of road, things

have come to a standstill and it's not because of traffic.

A car has pulled to the side of the road to let a gaggle

of geese cross, but the geese have other plans.

Hundreds of the birds strangely circle the car,

surrounding it in an uncanny spiral while blocking traffic.

The sea of beaks moves about

in a counterclockwise direction with no sign of stopping.

When I saw this video, I thought is there a message that

we need to be gleaning from seeing something so ominous?

What if the Earth is going through some changes

that we don't see or sense but the animals do?

Brooks suggests a deeper connection

with Earth's magnetic field may cause animals

to behave in ways that seem odd to their human neighbors.

Scientists believe that we are well overdue

for a full on magnetic pole shift.

A pole shift is when the Earth's

magnetic North and South poles swap location.

The magnetic field becomes jumbled but stays intact.

The last time this happened was nearly 800,000 years ago.

During a pole reversal,

it is said that the magnetic field actually weakens.

Animals are tuned into our magnetic field

a lot more than we are.

We've learned that livestock

actually tend to line up in a north-south line

kind of like a compass needle.

If we're seeing a shift,

this strange animal behavior is apt to happen.

I think that they are maybe more tethered

to terra firma than we give 'em credit for.

Scientists believe that many animals,

such as sharks, sea turtles, and even insects like honeybees,

use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation.

If a switch occurred, it could cause problems in terms

of migration, but Brooks believes there could be another

factor making these geese ambush this unsuspecting sedan.

There's a phenomenon known as imprinting

and imprinting is when a young animal forms an attachment

to this protector mother figure when they're first born.

As I looked at this, I thought to myself,

are these geese imprinting on this car?

In other words,

the geese think the car is their mother.

Turns out animals have been imprinting

on inanimate objects for centuries.

In China, rice farmers have historically

imprinted newly-hatched ducklings to a special stick

which they then use to bring the ducks out

to rice paddies to control the snail population.

So with imprinting, they are sort of looking for

this parental figure as a form of protection.

This is far from the first time

we've covered weird animal behavior.

We've seen an elephant that could supposedly talk

and strange sheep circling in both China and the UK.

Some of those phenomena remain unexplained.

We're hoping our experts

will have more luck figuring this one out.

Wildlife biologist Stephanie Manka

isn't so sure that these geese

are imprinting this car as a potential mother figure.

We have a lot of geese in this situation

and they would all have to be around this car as goslings.

There's a critical window

for imprintation after the young are hatched.

So it is very unlikely that this many geese

were in contact with this car

and happened to come across it now crossing the road.

And as far as magnetic fields are concerned,

Manka points out that the poles have reversed before

with very little fallout from the animal community.

We are overdue to have the poles flipped,

but it doesn't seem to be a big concern.

In history, there haven't been

major changes when this has happened.

Biologist Floyd Hayes says many people online

were comparing this to a death spiral,

an act commonly found in insects like ants

where part of a group loses their orientation

and end up walking in circles until dead from exhaustion.

I think this is quite different

than the death spiral that we see in certain insects.

Birds have larger brains than insects and they're not dumb

enough that they're gonna walk in circles until they die.

Ultimately, Hayes thinks we're simply seeing

a flummoxed gaggle temporarily following its own tail.

I think the geese just got a little bit confused.

They were following the leader

and the leader was following others.

I suspect a few minutes later, they stopped

that behavior and walked off to the side of the road.

I think it was just a temporary phenomenon.

Our verdict, this is a case of mass goose confusion.

Like the blind leading the blind,

a couple of geese got turned around

and let their flocking instincts get the better of them,

leading the rest in a time consuming loop around the car.

We're happy to report that the geese did eventually make it

to safety before the oncoming traffic turned them into pate.

Did you know that the first photograph

was taken in the 1820s?

Since then, humans have taken more photos

than we could possibly count, but who took

the first photo of a UFO, and was it the real deal?

It's the winter season of 1870 and 1871

on Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

Photographers Amos Cloth and Howard Kimball

are on a meteorological expedition

when they unwittingly snap a photo that makes history.

The stereograph, or pair of photos

taken simultaneously by a dual lens camera,

would have originally been viewed through a stereoscope,

a precursor to the View-Master toy we know today.

It appears to show a fluffy white cloud.

But look closer.

Right in the center is a dark, cigar-shaped object

that seems to be flying in the clouds.

It doesn't have any wings

or means of propulsion that we can see.

What could it be?

In 1870, there were no airplanes.

It's clearly not a bird.

So what could possibly be floating

in front of the clouds like this?

This is thought to be the first UFO photo

ever taken but it's hardly the first sighting of its kind.

One such incident was in 1860 in Wilmington, Delaware.

Residents reported seeing something 200 feet long

streaking across the sky and in 1876,

residents of Sacramento, California reported seeing

something that looked like an electric arc lamp propelled

by some mysterious force crossing over them in the sky.

At the time,

these reports referred to the strange objects

as "mystery airships" and with the 20th century

came more photos of them, like the so-called

Sawmill UFO Snapped in Ward, Colorado.

Believed to have been taken in 1929,

Edward Klein was in Ward to photograph the sawmill

when he heard a thunderous boom overhead.

He said that when he looked up,

he saw what looked like a giant,

spherical boulder passing over him in the sky.

That makes at least two

antique UFO photos still drawing eyes today.

The challenge with these vintage UFO photographs

is that we don't have as much data

about them as we do modern photographs.

When we look at certain old UFO photographs,

there really is a mystery as to what it could possibly be.

In a criminal investigation, an open and unsolved case

is generally considered cold after only one year.

So have these UFO cases

frozen in time gone too cold to solve?

We ask our experts to turn up the heat.

First, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy

considers if the Mount Washington UFO

could be some kind of early aircraft.

Today, we have aircraft flying over constantly

and thousands of satellites in our night sky.

Back in the 19th century, none of that was relevant.

Now, there were hot air balloons.

Still, this UFO's oblong profile

clearly doesn't match that of a hot air balloon.

That means an early aircraft explanation is out.

But what about the sawmill photo?

Now, one of the unique things about this photo

is it doesn't actually have an eyewitness

to go along with it, other than the photographer.

The workers heard a noise and felt a shudder

but they didn't see this object.

The photographer did allegedly

see the object at the time he snapped the photo.

But McCarthy questions that claim.

He suspects there may be something else at play here.

What I think we're looking at here is actually a drop

of moisture getting sandwiched in between these negatives.

There's old photos like this just filled with artifacts

and they probably all happened in the dark room

when the film negatives were being processed.

But it's unlikely that a film artifact

could explain away the Mount Washington UFO

since it appears in both of the images.

But film producer Sam Sherman,

who owns the physical stereograph, says

it's that stereoscopic view that unlocks the whole story.

Everybody on the internet who claims

that this is an object flying over Mount Washington,

it's because they're looking at one eye view

of the stereo card.

It looks like it could be flying over the snow-capped

mountain, but then when you see it in stereo,

with your two eyes seeing the 3D,

you see it's embedded in the snow.

Stereoscopy works just like our eyes,

displaying a pair of two-dimensional images

from slightly different angles that, when combined,

create a single three-dimensional image.

And since the background immediately surrounding the UFO

doesn't shift from the left image to the right,

that means this UFO isn't flying at all.

When they list in their catalog

what they've taken a photograph of,

they call it "frost architecture."

In other words, a photo of a snowbank

on the mountaintop that's feet rather than miles away,

not an image of a faraway cloud in the sky.

Hoffman says that when it came to photographing

something as featureless as snow back in the day,

a photographer would often add an object to indicate scale.

So what's happened is that they probably

have set their ruler over there on that frost architecture

to give a perspective in terms of

how big this thing is that they're looking at.

Our verdict, the eyes have it.

Once you understand stereoscopy,

it is easy to identify this as a ruler in the snow.

Of course, UFOs could have been

visiting Earth back in the 19th century,

but we can say for sure they didn't photo-bomb this shot.

Trucking is a unique way to see the country,

if you can put up with the long hours

on the road and if you know your CB lingo.

However, the trucker in our next story

may have seen or heard more than he bargained for.

Breaker breaker one-nine,

this is the Good Reverend T. Boogie here.

Anyone out there with your ears on, roger and copy that.

March 23rd, 2023.

After a long day of driving,

Danny Ramirez has stopped at a truck stop

near Beaver Marsh, Oregon off Route 97.

It's almost 11:00 p.m. but after recording these sounds,

he wonders if he wouldn't have been better off

if he had kept driving.

It did spook me.

I was scared in the video, as you can tell.

I've stopped all over the country.

I've heard a lot of spooky things but nothing like that.

Like many online,

Danny thinks this could be the call of a Sasquatch,

which many Americans often call Bigfoot,

and he's not the only one.

This vocalization was obtained

right on the edge of the Umpqua National Forest,

which is thousands and thousands of square miles of prime

Sasquatch habitat with a long history of sighting reports.

In fact, Highway 97,

the road where this was recorded,

traverses a particularly secluded portion of the national

forest with only one isolated highway intersection.

One might wonder why a Sasquatch would be hanging out

around a rest stop where clearly a lot of people go to.

Well, there's a perfectly good explanation for that.

Food, right?

The Bigfoot is thought to be an

opportunistic eater just like most bears and canids,

sharing the same traits and scavenging for food.

Sasquatches have actually been observed

raiding trash cans at rest stops

along the highway when no one else is there.

Many researchers believe that if Bigfoot does exist,

its diet might resemble that of wolves and coyotes.

As large predators who are opportunistic eaters,

these creatures aren't very picky

and must quickly snatch prey without scaring it off.

Could this be why so many Bigfoot recordings

feature the sound of howling canids?

Let's check in with our experts.

First, forensic audio analyst Rob Maher

rules out some potential local culprits.

Here's a recording of an elk sound

and we can see it's actually a higher frequency

than we observe in the howl.

A wolf sound has the duration similar

to what was recorded in the truck stop recording.

But the wolf howl is very distinctive

and does not have the same rising and falling

characteristic that are present in the truck stop recording.

So could this be Bigfoot?

Biological anthropologist and anatomist

Dr. Jeff Meldrum takes a listen.

As with many animals and especially with higher primates,

Sasquatch seems to present

quite a diverse repertoire of vocalizations

and so this truck stop vocalization is not

out of the character of various reported Sasquatch calls.

But not so fast.

There are a couple segments early in the recording

where there are these dark bands

where the sound sort of disappears.

That always raises some concern about the authenticity.

So trying to understand this,

we did a little bit of investigation

and found on the internet a recording

of various howl sounds and these time gaps

and the sequence of these sounds

matches Danny's recording virtually perfectly.

Visually, you can see here that everything lines up.

The evidence here would indicate to me

that this recording was created by playing back

a known recording in the truck stop and this was a hoax.

Don't be too disappointed, though.

This still doesn't answer the question of what caused

these sounds in the recording we discovered on the internet.

So how those sounds were made

and what those indicate still are unexplained.

And that's a copy, good buddy and be safe out there, okay?

So we are calling this one a hoax.

It's not the first time we've seen someone

stealing an audio sample and it surely won't be the last.

But we still don't know what made the original sound.

So who knows?

Maybe it was a Bigfoot.

We won't know until we investigate further.

In the meantime, keep on trucking.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been crucial

in teaching us more about our universe.

It discovered carbon dioxide on one of Jupiter's moons

and even water vapor on a distant planetary system.

But as many answers as we've been getting, images

like this next one raise even more questions, literally.

July 26th, 2023.

The European Space Agency releases

a brilliant image from the James Webb Telescope

of two young stars forming 1,470 light years away.

Among the other cosmic swirls and sparkles in the picture

are objects easily recognizable as galaxies and stars,

and then there's one detail that shakes the world.

Zooming in below the mass of forming stars,

there's a tiny orange glow

that is shaped like a question mark.

Author Jason Martell explains how this

little piece of punctuation became a big viral hit.

The internet instantly began clamoring

about this strange object, what it could be.

One net citizen suggested,

"The aliens know that we found them."

There were many people that instantly jumped on this,

saying it's a fake, it's been doctored and ESA,

the European Space Agency, quickly said "No,

this is a real image and it hasn't been doctored."

The discovery of the question mark

was completely unexpected.

Some believe it may actually be a response

to humanity's own space exploration.

In 1977, NASA sent the probes Voyager 1 and 2 on missions

to collect data on the outer planets of our solar system.

In 2012, Voyager 1 officially left our solar system.

Could it be someone found it?

Our first Voyager probes included time capsules

and it introduced prospective extraterrestrials

to our civilization.

Maybe this question mark is their response.

Was this perhaps put there to catch our attention?

While others see the possibility

we're witnessing one of the most mysterious

phenomena in the universe, black holes.

Maybe it's literally pulling the swirl

of that galaxy into what looks like now a question mark

being sucked into this supermassive black hole.

This is something that's really unknown

and deserves further investigation.

According to the Center for Astrophysics,

there could be as many as 100 million black holes

in our Milky Way galaxy alone.

Could that be what we have here,

or is there some sort of advanced intelligence involved?

Our experts are ready with some answers.

At the center of almost every galaxy that we've ever seen,

we see a black hole.

But this does not look like what a typical black hole is.

We have images from the Event Horizon Telescope

of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way

and of other black holes, and you see this black circle

or ellipse with an orange-ish light around

that represents the light, the matter,

the dust and gas that's either falling

into the black hole or trapped in eternal orbit of it,

and you don't see this actually.

A supermassive black hole cannot be question mark-shaped.

It can only be spherical, elliptical,

kind of a flat elliptical shape

if it's rotating with a great degree of speed.

Okay then, could it actually

be a message from an alien civilization?

Dr. Szydagis says the answer to that question

is all about time and the speed of light.

We are looking at it as it was billions of years ago,

not as it looks like "now,"

and so not only did humanity not exist,

but any signal from Earth has not been able

to reach these vast distances yet.

But why does it look like a question mark?

Professor Kaku says in order to solve the mystery,

you need to think in three dimensions.

One thing about a two-dimensional photograph

is you don't know how distances are.

If you could somehow leave the Earth

and look at this from a different angle,

perhaps the question mark would fall apart as a consequence.

You would see distinct features unrelated to each other.

As to what those features are,

both Kaku and Szydagis agree.

The question mark is probably

the collision of two galaxies

and when you put them together from this angle,

it looks like a question mark.

The twisting top part would be the first galaxy

and that dot on the bottom, possibly the second.

I'm frankly surprised we haven't found

more question marks because the universe is very big.

If we look hard enough,

we are going to find every kind of punctuation mark.

Our verdict, merging galaxies.

Sad to say, this time, it's no alien message.

But it is fascinating how much we can learn

about the universe from a fraction

of a fraction of a single image.

And the good news is that there will be many more to come.

The telescope is expected to remain operational

up there for at least 20 years.

And that's our show for tonight.

As always, thank you so much for watching

and remember to keep those cameras rolling.