Original subtitles

- Tonight on "the proof is out there."

Dorothy, you are in Kansas.

And so is this ufo.

- [Man] What the [beep] is this?

- [Tony] The loudest sound ever

baffled scientists for decades.

[Sound burbling]

- It was a unique sound

and we had nothing really to attribute it to.

- [Tony] And world leaders replaced by body doubles?

Will the real Kim jong-UN please stand up?

Around the globe are videos-

- [woman] What the heck is this?

- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.

- [Man] Is it some kind of unidentified object?

- [Man] A plane that was literally frozen in the air.

- [Tony] What are they?

- [Man] Some sort of bizarre mutation.

- 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.

[Creature growling]

We'll analyze each one with top experts.

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

- [Tony] And pass a verdict on what it is.

- This video was clearly faked.

- The proof starts now.

[Dramatic music]

Good evening, and welcome to "the proof is out there."

If I say Dorothy and Toto, basketball dynasties,

and wheat, lots of wheat, you think Kansas, right?

Well, not everything is what you'd expect out on the plains.

Check this out.

March, 2021, the good people of Wichita, Kansas

are going about their business.

Property manager Mike marler is one of them.

- I was on my lunch break and I was going back to work,

and I was getting off on my exit.

- [Tony] Mike glances to his right and spots this.

- [Mike] What the [Beep] is this?

I noticed in the sky there was something silver.

It was long, it was shiny.

It was moving very, very fast.

So it was very challenging to get a really good angle.

What is it?

- [Tony] We slow it down and zoom in,

but even then it seems to race out of frame.

- [Mike] And then in a matter of seconds,

it just disappeared.

- [Tony] When Mike posted the video to social media,

he learns that dozens of others saw the same object.

Ufos in Kansas are nothing new.

In 1972, one of the world's most famous ufo encounters

occurred in delphos, Kansas,

witnessed by 16 year old Ronnie Johnson on his family farm.

- All of a sudden a large object descended,

began hovering over his backyard.

And then it disappeared,

but it left burn marks on the ground.

- [Tony] Ronnie's mother took a picture

of this strange circle.

- We call it a physical trace case.

We also know that there was a slight increase in radiation

around the area where the ufo was

compared to soil further away from the site.

- Did the people of Wichita witness something similar?

There were a lot of eyes on this one.

So unless we're dealing

with a massive hoax, the video is real.

And given the sunflower state's history with ufos,

it's worth asking our experts if this is proof

of an extraterrestrial encounter

or a case of mistaken identity.

[Slow dramatic music]

Our aviation analyst, Tim mcmillan

first tries to determine where Mike was

when he spotted the object.

- As they were filming, they passed several street signs.

And so that allows you to narrow down exactly where they are

and what direction they're facing.

- Mcmillan uses the location and timestamp on the video

to compare it to the flight data from that day.

He zeros in on one craft

that is occasionally mistaken for a ufo over Wichita.

- [Tim] The NASA super guppy is a very odd-shaped

wide body cargo aircraft that can even

be used to transport a space shuttle.

There was one in Wichita that day.

- [Tony] The super guppy can carry up to 26 tons of payload.

It looks like a cross between a cargo plane and a zeppelin.

NASA itself says it's often mistaken for a ufo,

especially when its reflective metal catches the sun.

And it frequently flies in and out

of fort McConnell, right near Wichita.

- But when you look at the flight radar data

from that particular day, the super guppy

was actually several hundred miles away to the southwest.

So we can say with absolute certainty

this was not the super guppy that was being filmed here.

- [Tony] With all the military bases in the area,

mcmillan thinks it might've been some sort of test.

- [Tim] Could this be some type of drone testing here

where we're testing autonomous drone in-flight refueling?

- [Tony] But mcmillan can't be sure.

And Mark d'Antonio thinks it looks too square and thin

to be a normal plane.

- It almost looks like it's kind of waving

a little bit in the wind.

So the next question is, could it be

one of those advertising banners

that's towed behind these light planes?

And the answer is, that theory

actually matches this the best.

- [Tony] But mcmillan disagrees and points to his research

on flight data that day as proof.

- There isn't anything in that vicinity

that's showing up on that flight data.

But whatever aircraft it is,

it's not operating a transponder.

So it's not going to be a civilian aircraft.

It's not going to be a commercial aircraft.

- So what do we think?

The guppy? A banner?

A top secret craft?

Or none of the above?

Without more evidence,

we're going to call this a genuine ufo.

But please reach out to us

if you have any more information.

[Slow dramatic music]

Have yet to be classified.

So when the loudest underwater sound ever is recorded

and no one knows what made it,

it makes for a mystery that echoes across the globe.

[Slow dramatic music]

This story starts way back

in the late-20th century, 1997 to be precise.

Researchers from noaa,

the national oceanic and atmospheric administration,

are using hydrophones to monitor volcanic activity.

Now a hydrophone is an underwater microphone

initially developed to listen for Soviet submarines,

since repurposed for research.

And on that February 22nd, a strange sound is detected

1,500 miles west of the southern Chilean coast

by two hydrophones

nearly 2,900 miles apart.

This is that sound.

[Sound burbling]

This underwater acoustic wonder

instantly becomes known as the bloop.

[Sound burbling]

Let's play that again and turn it up.

[Sound burbling]

It may just sound like an air bubble popping in liquid,

but that noise could be heard 3,000 miles

away from its origin, making it the loudest

underwater sound ever recorded at the time.

But marine biologist shea conger explains

that this version is sped up

so humans like us can hear it better.

[Sound burbling]

- The original sound seems to be a much lower, deeper tone.

[Sound burbling]

So the bloop was a pretty big deal

because it was a unique, low frequency,

and highly powerful sound that was one of a kind.

And you had nothing really to attribute it to.

[Dramatic music]

- [Tony] Some at noaa believe the source

may have been biological.

- The lead researcher at noaa claimed that this was possibly

a large yet undiscovered animal

that lives in the depths of the ocean.

And for something like the bloop,

it would take a very large creature,

a very powerful creature in order

to make something like this.

- So could this noise have been produced

by some sort of massive undiscovered sea creature

that's been lurking the depths of the ocean?

If the bloop was made by an animal,

then its lungs must be larger

than any known living organism.

But new species are discovered all the time.

Just last year, a new kind of whale

was discovered off the coast of Mexico.

So could a monster massive enough

to make the bloop really exist?

[Slow dramatic music]

Dr. Conger sees a dilemma here.

If a huge animal lived near the surface,

it would have been discovered by now.

And if it lived thousands of feet down,

it couldn't make a sound this loud.

- Animals that live at these depths

tend to be actually pretty small and compact,

because the pressure they experience at that depth

is 1,000 times greater than we experience at sea level.

[Sound burbling]

This is far outside the vocal range of something

that would live in the deepest parts of our ocean.

So it's really unlikely that this is some sort

of undiscovered giant marine creature.

- [Tony] So we took the bloop recording

to our audio analyst,

acoustic ecologist, Dr. Ben gottesman.

[Sound burbling]

- So if we don't believe it to be an animal,

why don't we then compare it with one of the loudest

human-made sounds we have in our oceans.

And that is the sound of air guns.

- [Tony] Seismic air guns are used by the oil

and gas industry to search for new carbon deposits.

They release compressed air,

which forms a bubble that produces a loud sound

that's reflected off the sea floor.

- Let's analyze this recording.

Here we see pulses of an air gun,

which are very rhythmic,

it has these regular intervals,

broadband loud sounds.

And these can span similar distances to the bloop.

[Sound burbling]

But unlike the bloop,

this is much more broadband.

And the repetitive clicks that are so characteristic

of air guns, we don't see with the bloop.

- [Tony] But if the bloop is not manmade,

where does that leave us?

For answers, gottesman turns to the planet itself.

[Ice rumbling]

- What you're hearing now are giant chunks

of ice and glaciers breaking up.

Similar to the bloop, this recording

has been sped up many times over to make it audible.

[Ice rumbling]

I was amazed when I heard this because we see the exact

same spectral shape, the same duration.

[Sound burbling]

It's really a match to me.

[Slow music]

- Gottesman says when an iceberg

scrapes along the sea floor,

it resonates like a tuning fork,

producing a sound as loud as a magnitude four earthquake

with a noise created by over 200 supertankers.

So Dr. Gottesman has settled it.

Our verdict, this was the sound of glaciers breaking up.

It turns out the bloop was not a monster,

but something even more scary,

evidence of ongoing climate change in the antarctic.

[Slow dramatic music]

Some incredible footage from around the world.

But what happens if you catch something unexplainable

on your own camera?

Well, you send it to us, of course.

And one viewer from Alaska did just that.

It's October in Anchorage and chip Freeman

has grabbed his digital camera to document

some fresh snow around his house.

Yes, it snows in October up there, so that's not a surprise.

But what his camera is about to record certainly is.

As we pan across chip's property,

a strange stationary vertical purple beam of light

appears in front of him.

And it's still there when he pans the camera

back to the same spot.

Chip says he noticed the strange beam as he was rolling.

- I kind of paused for a moment

trying to figure out what this was.

I took my eye off the viewer and noticed

that I couldn't see it by the naked eye.

It was only through the camera lens that you could see this,

which also was intriguing.

- [Tony] Journalist mj banias says this area of Alaska

is a hotbed of strange happenings.

- There's a lot of stories out there

where there's strange electromagnetic forces

or portals that exist in this area.

Similar to a lot of the theories

that exist around the Bermuda triangle,

random gateways to other worlds will open up

or wormholes will occur and planes

will go missing into them.

- [Tony] A stunning 16,000 people

have reportedly vanished in the so-called Alaska triangle

since the late 80s.

Field researcher Ken gerhard has actually been up here

to research such activity.

- Some of the stranger cases that I've investigated.

Back in 1950, for example, a Douglas c-54d military craft,

an airplane with 44 personnel on board

vanished on the Alaska-Yukon border without a trace.

And there was a massive search mounted.

And to this day, no trace of that particular airplane

has ever been found.

- [Tony] Gerhard thinks chip's sighting

could be some of the same anomalous energy fields

emanating from below the Alaska triangle,

that are also rumored to cause

many of the strange disappearances in the area.

- Lights like this could in fact be geological

or electromagnetic discharges from the earth,

basically concentrated energy beams

that are being projected upward into the heavens.

- I really do want to know what this is.

There's just so many strange phenomenons that happens here.

- Perhaps the most famous incident

in the Alaska triangle happened in 1972,

when a plane carrying us congressman hale boggs

disappeared there without a trace.

So might those unsolved mysteries

actually connect somehow to what chip caught on camera?

Chip, you know what's coming next.

[Slow dramatic music]

Astrophysicist hakeen oluseyi initially thinks

this is not the result of an energy portal,

but instead light interacting with a transparent surface.

However.

- What I saw looked to me like a sort of optical effect

that I've seen on glass.

So I could see that sort of effect like a reflection.

But it turns out that the camera's outdoors.

They're not looking through a window.

- [Tony] The beam would stay centered

if it were a mere reflection.

So this beam instead could be a spectrum of light

that the camera sensor can pick up,

but that the human eye can't.

But oluseyi also has his doubts.

- Typically if you had a beam like this,

because the ultraviolet or X-ray has such short wavelengths,

they're going be very strongly scattered in the air.

- [Tony] If this were an invisible energy discharge

being picked up by the camera,

we would see more of a static effect

emanating from the center of the beam

than the concentrated line in chip's video.

Photography expert Andrew McCarthy believes the answer

does in fact involve visible light,

and how when it's particularly bright

it can cause a glitch in how an individual pixel

on a digital camera sensor processes

one part of the image, aka the readout.

- Basically what happens is once the readout

gets too high on a specific pixel,

it bleeds into the neighboring pixel.

And if that happens excessively, it'll actually bleed down

an entire stripe of pixels on that camera.

That appears to be what we're looking at here.

- Since the digital camera sensor is a grid of pixels,

the line of purple light is actually a column of pixels

being overloaded by sunlight in one spot.

And the age of the camera is another clue.

- This image came from 2004.

So those sensors back then are a little bit different.

They don't have today's modern technology

that prevents artifacts like this.

- So chip, here's where we are landing.

That purple light beam is the result

of overexposure on the camera's digital sensor.

And while the footage is not connected

to the anomalies in the Alaska triangle,

the high rate of disappearances in the region

should still give the rest of us

food for thought when visiting.

[Slow dramatic music]

Makes the rounds on the Internet

is that some controversial world leaders

have been secretly replaced by body doubles.

So is the camera just catching these powerful men

from odd angles, or has somebody made a switch?

It's April 2020 and north korean dictator Kim jong-UN

seems to be missing in action.

On April 11th he presides over a meeting

of the North Korean politburo.

But he is conspicuously absent

from the annual celebration of his grandfather's birthday

just four days later on April 15.

As the weeks go by without a public appearance,

there are whisperings that he is gravely ill.

When photos of him were finally released

at the beginning of may

it only intensifies rumors something had happened.

The images show Kim inspecting a new fertilizer plant.

He appears to be happy and healthy,

but some speculate that all is not as it seems.

The skeptics question whether the man in the photo

was actually Kim jong-UN at all.

They point to discrepancies

in the man's head shape,

nose, ears, and teeth,

compared to the

authenticated photos

of Kim in 2019

and 2013 on the right.

Many wonder if a leader did in fact pass away

and has been replaced by a double.

According to journalist Erin McCarthy,

Kim jong-UN isn't the only world leader

suspected of being swapped for a decoy.

- Russian president Vladimir putin

has often been the subject of rumors

that he uses body doubles.

It was even rumored that at some point

after he became president,

he died and was replaced by a lookalike.

- [Tony] Sounds silly, right?

But wait, major world leaders have used body doubles before.

- Indian prime minister narendra modi

has actually admitted to having impersonators

who go on the campaign trail for him.

- It's also been well-established by the Pentagon

that Iraq's Saddam Hussein went so far

as to make his own body doubles get plastic surgery

to add similar identifying marks like moles and scars.

But could one of these current leaders

have actually been replaced by a double?

Time for our experts to face off.

[Slow dramatic music]

First, facial recognition expert hoan ton-that

has his company's algorithm compare the photo in question

of the resurfaced Kim jong-UN

to an earlier image of the North Korean leader.

Again, look at the differences in the teeth ad ear lobes.

- Comparing the two faces,

and the lower the number,

the better it is.

If it's under 1.0, it's a match.

This is at 0.730.

So the algorithm is very confident

they're the same person.

But to make sure, we had a expert facial analyst

take a look at the face.

- [Tony] He found several features that were the same,

like the outer eye and the lower lip area.

But it was a matching crease in the cheek

that really sealed the deal.

- There are unique things that we don't always notice

about someone, like the cheek crease.

He has a cheek crease on his right cheek.

To have a body double to have the exact same feature there

would be very, very improbable.

- [Tony] So it's highly unlikely

this was a decoy Kim jong-UN in the photo.

The analyst also found matching cheek creases

on the two photos of putin, putting to bed rumors

he too was replaced by a body double.

Mick west says there's a logical reason

why these theories of leaders being replaced with lookalikes

have persisted online.

- Even if you take the same person

and you do two photographs in slightly different lighting,

they can look like very, very different people.

- [Tony] West demonstrated for us exactly that.

- These were taken about one minute apart.

If you didn't know better, you might think

these were actually two different people.

The shape of the head becomes very, very different

and the features look a little bit different as well,

like they're a little bit more compressed

than they were over here.

- Our verdict, these theories are false.

Though body doubles have been used,

we can conclude that there is still only

one true Kim jong-UN and Vladimir putin.

And that's our show for tonight.

My body double and I thank you for watching.

And remember to keep those cameras rolling.

[Dramatic music]