Original subtitles

Tonight on The Proof Is Out There.

We are watching the skies for UFOs camouflaged as clouds.

Could aliens have been hiding in plain sight this whole time?

And maybe they're not just hiding.

Could they have negotiated an alliance

with the US government?

Some think these aliens ended the Cold War.

A haunting howl in the forest.

When this video hit the internet, everybody went nuts.

Is a killer Bigfoot on the loose?

And a mystery on a Florida beach,

is the Bermuda Triangle responsible?

The Bermuda Triangle has claimed so many vessels

through the years, this could be one of them.

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 and welcome to The Proof Is Out There.

The media has been buzzing for the past few years

over the government's release of video

showing unidentified craft filmed in the skies

by our military.

But many believe that UFOs

have been observing our military bases for decades,

and that this next photo proves it.

It's October 16th, 1957.

Ella Louise Fortune,

a nurse at the Mescalero Indian Reservation in New Mexico,

is driving north on Highway 54

when she sees something hovering in the sky

over Holloman Air Force base in Alamogordo.

She happens to have her camera with her,

so she pulls the car over and photographs this.

A glowing, white, elongated, oval-shaped object

is floating above the desert landscape.

You can see why this photo caused such a stir.

Just look at how bright it is, even in broad daylight.

Check out the sharpness of the edges here, there,

and then you have this soft wisp.

Is that exhaust?

How would you fake that if you wanted to?

This photo is a classic in the UFO community

that most people consider a genuine photograph

that was not hoaxed.

Not only has the photo earned a place

in UFO history, it ties into one of the most astonishing

and durable stories of the UFO cannon,

allegations that Holloman Airbase

was the site of an interstellar summit

where aliens forged an alliance with the US government.

There's a story that circulates within UFO circles

that President Dwight D. Eisenhower

secretly met with aliens,

and this alien gets shuffled into a back room

and the president has flown in

to specifically meet with this creature.

So we have a lot of strange stories out there

of secret meetings between presidents

and aliens from other planets.

Now, according to some, during these secret meetings,

President Eisenhower brokered a deal

to allow the aliens to abduct humans

in exchange for extraterrestrial black technology

that would lead to developments like the B-2 Stealth bomber.

Is the photo we have here evidence

of that advanced alien tech?

We asked our experts to decide.

We begin with military aviation expert Tim McMillan.

Is it possible that white color and shape

match something you'd expect to see near an Air Force base,

namely a parachute?

Nothing about it is consistent with a parachute,

in particular, you don't see a payload.

The shape of it is inconsistent with what you would expect

for a parachute that is being weighted down by a payload.

Some have speculated

it could be a balloon or blimp, but McMillan doesn't see it.

It doesn't resemble any obvious shape of a balloon.

Also definitely appears to be extremely bright,

and so it would have to have some type of light source,

which wouldn't make sense for a balloon.

Next, we turn to Rich Hoffman

from the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.

This thing is white and in the sky.

Could it just be a cloud?

It takes very strong winds

to create that kind of sharpness to the edges

and creating the saucer-like look to it

'cause it doesn't even match what you would expect

with the upper-band cirrus clouds.

So I don't see this as a cloud whatsoever.

Instead, Hoffman believes with some calculations

he can narrow down the possibilities.

It was roughly around 10,000 feet,

and roughly they assumed it was 15 miles away.

You do trigonometry, you're able to determine

that it's roughly just over a mile long.

If Hoffman's numbers are correct,

he says we can eliminate several other possibilities.

I would never go to the point of saying that

this is a plane.

The size makes no sense, it's a mile wide,

and it's not a UFO.

No objects, especially one a mile long,

would not have gone undetected by the people

that are positioned there monitoring that part of the sky.

So what could it be?

Hoffman says location is the key.

There's one important thing that you need to know.

Holloman Air Force Base was to the position

of the witnesses left.

The vast majority of this area you're looking at

is White Sands Missile Range.

The fact that this is conveniently positioned

right at 10,000 feet would probably make it very likely

that it's a missile test of some sort.

McMillan agrees,

and believes the photo reveals an important clue.

There appears to be a contrail

behind the object,

which suggests that the object is moving

and leaving a vapor trail

that would be consistent with solid fuel burning.

A large vapor trail could also explain

why this object looks a mile long

when in fact, it's much shorter.

The US at the time

was engaged in significant rocket testing

and especially were in the height of the space race

between the United States and the Soviet Union.

There were a whole variety of missiles

that were being tested.

It could have been fired from an aircraft

or something that would've created

a kind of plume of smoke like this.

But if this mile-long object

is really just a trail of missile exhaust,

we continue to ask ourselves,

why do the edges look so distinct?

Not to mention,

a speeding missile doesn't match the eyewitness's story.

This thing had to hang in the air long enough

for Ella to see it, park her car, get out, and take a photo.

We can't help but feel

we're still missing a piece of this puzzle.

Our verdict, still an unidentified object.

Our experts bring up great points,

but even if the contrail points to a chemical fuel burn

and the missile range was a short 30 miles away,

the image itself just doesn't give us enough info

to definitively call it a missile or anything else.

That keeps it a UFO in our book, for now.

We're gonna stay in the southwest for this next story,

and fast-forward from the '50s to the present day.

We often look up at clouds

and try to interpret the strange shapes.

We might see horses, sharks, maybe even strange faces,

but our next sighting involves a cloud shaped so bizarre,

the video footage set social media ablaze.

Take a look.

July 15th, 2022, it's a clear summer afternoon

as Nisha Higgins is traveling down the highway

in Tempe, Arizona.

But as she drives past the airport,

she catches something floating in the distance

from the corner of her eye.

So she pulls out her phone and captures this.

Let's zoom in.

A mysterious-looking, dark, oblong object

appears to be stationary in front of the clouds.

Honestly, it looks a little like

that 1957 Holloman Air Force base UFO.

Author Jason Martell agrees

that something here doesn't seem right.

We can see other clouds in the vicinity

that are much more fluffy in nature.

This one seems almost out of place.

The object raises enough of a concern

to wonder what exactly it could be,

but just in general, looks very UFO-like.

A UFO in the shape of a cloud?

It may be a possibility.

If we think about ufology in general,

there's many aspects where UFOs have used clouds

or meteorological events

to obfuscate what's really happening.

Social media sites are littered

with UFO cloud sightings.

In California, Mount Shasta is frequently blanketed

by strange oblong clouds,

which has prompted some speculation

that these clouds act as a UFO cloaking device

hiding alien visitation in plain sight.

But others argue these strange shapes

are proof of government weather manipulation.

The phenomenon of cloud seeding

is basically using certain chemicals

that increase condensation inside the cloud,

that way, also increasing precipitation.

This combination of chemicals

has been known to cause rain clouds to form.

We know that no less than eight states across the US,

Arizona being one of them,

actually use cloud seeding to mitigate drought.

Hidden aliens, government weather manipulation

or something else, UFO clouds are having a moment.

For millennia, oracles looked to the heavens

and judged the significance of strange shapes in the sky.

But in this modern space age, some are asking,

could many of these strange shapes have been UFOs all along?

Let's see if our experts can figure out

if this cloud could be more than a cloud.

First, could there be a spacecraft hiding in that cloud?

We asked video analyst Marc D'Antonio.

The ATC, or air traffic control,

has pretty sophisticated radars,

and right now, there's virtually no objects

that can go undetected by airport radars.

A check of FAA records shows no near misses

in the area that day,

nor were there any nearby rocket launches.

And while some argue UFOs

might well have radar cloaking technology,

D'Antonio points out the FAA

isn't the only one monitoring the skies above Tempe.

If this was an actual craft,

you can bet the folks from Williams Gateway

or Luke Air Force Base,

where there's lots of military presence,

would've scrambled to go check it out.

So if it's not a secret alien ship,

is it a government weather manipulation program?

Is this a cloud seeding project?

The problem with that for me

is that this is an extremely small, localized cloud.

But a cloud seeding operation is a vast operation,

you're not gonna cloud-seed right in this one little spot.

I don't see any way

in which this could be weather manipulation actually.

Okay, so if it's not artificial weather,

could it be natural?

According to meteorologist Juan Hernandez,

the clue in the video is the surrounding Arizona terrain.

If we take a closer look down towards the ground,

we notice that there is some terrain.

So this is the Tempe area,

which is surrounded by mountains on the north side

and the eastern side.

These mountains,

or specifically the cold gusts of wind

that run up into them, collide with the moist atmosphere,

creating lenticular clouds

that could look a little or a lot

like hovering flying saucers.

The wind cannot flow through the mountain,

it must either flow around the mountain

or on top of the mountain.

That upcurrent creates a standing wave of cold air

which then collides with moisture

and forms this unique, saucer-shaped cloud.

But why does it appear to stay stationary

like an ominous hovering spacecraft?

Although the wind is quickly moving,

lenticular clouds oftentimes look stationary

because that's the right condition

for the atmosphere to condensate.

After all, the perfect lenticular cloud conditions

are created by unmoving terrain,

so these clouds tend to form and dissipate

in those perfect, stationary spots.

And they oftentimes look fairly ominous

so I can see why someone would mistake this for a UFO.

Our verdict, lenticular cloud.

We agree with Juan Hernandez

that this is an extraordinary looking natural phenomenon,

but if you happen to have your camera

and get footage of a massive UFO drifting over your town,

be sure to send it our way.

We've all seen psychic mediums on talk shows

claiming to communicate with the dead.

But what if instead of on TV,

it was happening live right before your very eyes,

and what if the medium was an infant?

Strap on your Pampers and check this out.

It's December 2021 in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio.

22-month old Evelyn Witt, known as Evie,

is in her highchair when her mom, Tana,

hears something odd and starts filming.

Who are you talking to?

The video shows that no one else is in the room

with little Evie, but she seems to be having a chat-

With an invisible uncle.

Who are you talking to?

Tana wonders

if the toddler is saying the word, uncle.

Who are you talking to?

Evelyn, who are you talking to?

Shh, shh, shh.

That would make sense since Tana's brother,

Evie's Uncle, Tim,

lived at home with Evie's grandmother, Debra Henley.

She watches the little girl during the day.

When I would go to the park,

he'd come with me so he'd help me.

He would take her on the swings and down the slide

and he was just a big part of her life.

What do you think?

Tragically,

one month before Tana filmed her mysterious video,

Uncle Tim died of an accidental drug overdose.

So that begs the question,

are we watching little Evie talking to Uncle Tim's ghost?

She talked a lot about Tim,

and she would say things that I don't think that she knew

as a young child.

Who else is happy?

- Tim's happy? - Yeah.

She was talking to him, I'm almost sure of it.

Author Alexis Brooks suggests

that young children potentially have a sixth sense

and are actually able to see things that others aren't.

There are some theorists that say

that babies can actually see beyond

the visible spectrum of light, and it is said that

the spirit world essentially lives outside

of that visible spectrum.

In July 2021, another child went viral

after he began talking to an invisible presence

while his family was driving

through California's Sierra National Forest.

This apparent ghost sighting took place in an area

where a woman named Sandra Johnson Hughes went missing

a year earlier,

and she looks just like how the boy described.

There is another potential source

of supernatural connection

between children and the spirit world, the pineal gland,

a little understood gland in the center of the brain

that produces melatonin.

It's been connected

to the mystical third eye, chakra, of Eastern religions.

Some claim children's pineal glands have not yet atrophied,

which give them visibility

into a broader spectrum of reality.

But what is our experts' sense?

First, we ask forensic video analyst Michael Primeau

to authenticate the footage,

The recording's structure was analyzed,

and there is specific metadata in the file

which would have been produced from the original version.

So there is no evidence to suggest

that any kind of fabrication occurred with this interaction.

Who are you talking to?

So the video is authentic,

but is Evie's apparent encounter with Uncle Tim?

Can children really see things adults can't?

Can children see outside the visible spectrum of light

as some have claimed?

One 2018 study published by the University of Georgia

showed young people can detect ultraviolet light

down to a wavelength of 315 nanometers,

much lower than the average middle-aged adult.

Still Dr. Ed Hope doubts this study explains

what we're seeing here.

In general, children's vision

is actually worse than our vision.

In fact, when you're born, you only see black and white

and have very limited vision,

and this increases rapidly in the first six months.

So there will still be some development

with the eyes and vision at this age.

Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku

adds that Evie is also still developing her social skills

and her understanding of object permanence.

So could she be chatting with an imaginary friend?

Sometimes, their imaginary friends

are confused with real ones.

It won't be 'til around age three

that a sense of what is real and not real

becomes solidified in their mind.

And realize that she's only 22 months old.

Who are you talking to?

Then what do our experts think

is the cause of Evie's inexplicable interactions

with Uncle Tim?

I think the most likely situation here

is that Evelyn is mimicking behaviors

of the family members around her

going through a bereavement.

Kids are like sponges,

and this is a way of Evelyn dealing with that situation.

Still, Evie continuously turns back

and addresses the same exact spot in the room.

Even Dr. Kaku cautions against jumping to conclusions.

Obviously, she has an emotional connection,

but the key question is to what?

The danger is that we impose our understanding

of life and death to children.

Their understanding of life and death

could be quite different from those of an adult.

Maybe children can see another aspect of reality

that we cannot see.

So this is a tough one, because we witnessed

in real time Evelyn having conversations

with an invisible or imaginary entity.

For now, we're saying these interactions are unexplained.

It's certainly possible

Evie was just imagining her uncle was there,

but we can't say that for sure,

and the family is convinced

that something more was going on.

In the meantime,

they urge anyone affected by substance abuse in Ohio

to contact Hope United.

When you are all alone in nature,

the most innocuous animal noises can be unsettling.

Even the sound of a tiny chipmunk scurrying

through the leaves can feel like a potential threat.

So imagine being alone and hearing the shrieks

of what could potentially be a Sasquatch.

Don't watch this next story alone.

December 2017, Witset, British Columbia, Canada.

It's a snowy, overcast day in this remote village.

Upon hearing something eerie in the woods behind his home,

a man pulls out his camera and records this.

Take another listen,

it's a guttural howl eliminating from the forest.

The witness pans the camera around,

trying to find where exactly it's coming from.

Field researcher Cliff Barackman draws a comparison

with these noises and the famous Sierra Sounds

recorded in Northern California in the '70s.

The Sierra Sounds are singularly important

in the study of Sasquatches.

The sounds represent a wide variety

of very strange vocalizations

that were emitted from unseen entities in the woods.

It sounds like people actually speaking an unknown language.

Important to note,

whatever made the Sierra Sounds has never been identified.

As with the recent sounds in British Columbia,

Barackman thinks they could be the sounds

of Sasquatch communicating.

We believe that Sasquatches are probably moving about

in kind of loose groups.

Even if they move in small groups like gorillas do,

Barackman says they often spread out.

So in the kind of habitat they like to live in,

they wouldn't be able to see the other individuals

in their family groups, they would have to call for them,

whether it's mating or socialization

or feeding or whatever.

However, some wonder

if these sounds could be connected

to another recent horror story from the region.

Between 2007 and 2019 in the nearby Salish Sea,

20 disembodied human feet encased in shoes and sneakers

washed up onto the shore.

Some suggest that this could be evidence

of a killer Sasquatch, while others think

this could be a serial killer running amok.

Is this a deranged human screaming in the wild?

Canada is a vast, wild wilderness.

Could a serial killer be loose in the woods of Canada?

It's possible.

The Harrison River Valley located to the southwest

of British Columbia

is home to the Indigenous nation known as the Chehalis.

They consider the Sasquatch as sacred caretaker of the land,

they even use him as a totem of their nation.

Let's see what our experts think about this Canadian creature.

Biologist Floyd Hayes fills us in

on what we would normally find

or hear lurking in these woods.

There are many species of animals

that communicate by vocalizing.

In general, the sounds are somewhat correlated

with the body size of the animal,

with larger animals producing louder sounds.

The British Columbia wolf is a subspecies of the gray wolf,

and it lives in this area and it grows rather large.

It makes very loud howling sounds.

That leads us to forensic audio analyst

Dr. Rob Maher, who first compares this audio

to that of a large wolf.

So we can compare the sound of a wolf.

So this is a spectrogram of the wolf howl.

If we look at the Witset howl sound,

we see more high frequency information

and the contour is different than the wolf.

So no exact match for the local fauna.

But what about a Bigfoot?

Maher brings up the famous Sierra Sounds for comparison.

The Bigfoot recording has more energy

in the lower frequency range,

and it's more of a whoop rather than a shriek sound.

They seem to be two distinctive types of sounds.

So no Bigfoot.

But what about the idea that the sounds are connected

to some disturbed serial killer haunting the Canadian woods?

Maher says no.

Trying to make the sounds

that are up in the higher range up here

in several thousand hertz,

I'm a little skeptical that a human could make that sound.

So what could be making this horrific noise?

Turns out, maybe nothing, or nothing real, at least.

In the spectrogram, we can see these vertical dark areas

where the sound disappears during the recording.

One of the reasons you might have these dropouts

would be that the audio had been edited or changed.

It raises a lot of questions

about the integrity of that recording

and whether it's really authentic.

Our verdict, with no exact audio matches

and some questionable evidence about the recording,

we're going with potential hoax.

And while we didn't find a Bigfoot this time,

British Columbia's forests cover an area

of 149 million acres,

the size of France and Germany combined,

so there's plenty left to explore.

Coastal erosion has been a concern

for parts of Florida for decades,

especially when big storms strike.

But one Florida town has recently discovered

that with the disappearance of sand comes the reappearance

of strange objects from the past.

It's December 2022 in Volusia County, Florida.

As the area recovers

from the recent onslaught of hurricanes Ian and Nicole,

beachgoers near Daytona Beach

stumble upon an anomaly on the foreshore.

Photos taken from the air by the county

show two parallel rows

of jagged wooden posts sticking out of the sand.

A couple of the boards lie lengthwise connecting the posts,

while others are strewn nearby.

It appears to be a long buried structure.

Archeologist Chuck Meide,

director of the Lighthouse Archeological Maritime Program,

heads to the scene to try to uncover more

of the mysterious object.

We kind of assess the scene,

and it becomes almost like a crime scene investigation,

we're trying to understand what's going on.

Chuck and his team start digging

and discover what looks like wooden timbers.

We could really begin to see kind of patterns

in how these timbers were laid out.

We could definitely tell that we had frames of a vessel.

So it seems Chuck is on the scene of a shipwreck,

but what ship is this, and where is it from?

Journalist Eric Grundhauser says there are several ideas.

One theory is that it is the result

of the Bermuda Triangle,

a fabled triangle of destruction and mystery

that has claimed countless ships over the years.

Could this ship have been a victim

of some unexplained force in the Triangle?

Or is it just an old ship beached during a long ago storm?

A number of fleets

have been sunk off the coast of Florida,

vessels carrying huge amounts of wealth and treasure.

The so-called Shipwreck Trail

that exists in the waters off the coast of the Florida Keys

contains the remains of ships like the San Pedro

that sunk in 1733 that contained a huge amount of wealth.

But maybe this wrecked ship

was hauling booty that was looted.

Famous pirates like Black Beard and Calico Jack

were known to have visited the Florida coastline,

and a number of pirate ships

also were sunk off the coast of Florida.

Some were sunk by natural causes,

others were purposely sunk so that they wouldn't be taken.

Could the remains that we're seeing here

be the remains of one of those pirate ships?

Beyond speculation about piracy

and the Bermuda Triangle,

rough waters off Florida's coast can be dangerous

to wooden boats of any kind.

Though wood naturally floats, leaks between hull planks

can lead to the loss of buoyancy

and even the sinking of ships in storms.

So what was it that brought this vessel down?

Let's let our experts take the helm.

Meteorologist Juan Hernandez says the amount of sand

that's been displaced suggests this ship is very old.

Looks like we've lost 10, 15 feet of sand fairly quickly.

Given the potent storm systems

that plague the Bermuda Triangle,

it's possible that a storm system led to this shipwreck

and then buried it for centuries.

It wouldn't be until another storm came through

that it would be uncovered.

So even if the ship came from the area

of the Bermuda Triangle,

it likely just ran aground long ago in a bad storm.

So could this actually be a real-life pirate ship?

Archeologist Kathy Strain says it's possible.

Piracy is really well-known off the coast of Florida.

In it's heyday in 1700s,

there was up to 5,000 different pirates operating

in those waters.

So it's very possible

that we don't know anything about this boat

because it was stolen.

Chuck agrees, the fact that

there don't seem to be any ships reported missing

or stolen in this area

calls into question the piracy theory.

And here's the thing, his further research reveals

this wrecked ship likely sailed after 1800,

the age of piracy had largely ended by then.

The size of the timbers, how they were shaped,

how they were joined together,

what types of fasteners were used,

all of these things really point

to this dating to the 1800s.

By the 1800s, there's a lot of shipping,

so it's most likely to be a cargo ship, a merchant vessel.

Chuck says the continuous tides on the beach

have made it impossible to uncover much more

than the top of the boat, and so far, no sign of treasure.

Our verdict, this is likely a 19th century merchant ship.

Piracy had mostly died down in the Atlantic by the 1800s

so it's unlikely this ship was purloined

by the likes of Black Beard before it went down.

Still, the lack of any records documenting the loss

of a ship in that area at that time

means this vessel remains part

of the broader Bermuda Triangle mystery, at least for now.

Prehistoric Native Americans left records

of their ancestral traditions in their rock art.

One symbol found among their stone carvings

is said to be connected to a powerful

and mystical ancient being.

Could this rock provide a bridge to another world?

It's January 2021,

deep in the mountains of Jackson County, North Carolina.

YouTubers Shane Simmons and Melody West

have traveled to a mysterious site

famed throughout the state.

Let's get out and take a look.

Let's do it.

- You ready for this? - I'm ready.

At the bottom of a small hill,

a large, gray, soapstone boulder emerges,

nestled in the grass.

A lot of interesting carvings on here.

But up close, it's clear the curves and cuts

combine to tell an ancient story.

And when you get down there,

the first thing you wanna look for

is the seven fingers of Judaculla.

The legend claims the seven fingers

are the actual hand print

of an ancient seven-fingered giant.

Author Alexis Brooks says the Cherokee people

consider Judaculla to be a psychopomp,

a being that guided souls between the material world

and the spiritual one.

The Judaculla giant

is said to be one who comes from the mountaintop,

has landed on this rock, but he did so with a purpose.

He was there to chase off intruders.

But perhaps Judaculla isn't simply a mystical giant

coming down from the mountains,

but rather an ancient astronaut visitor

coming from outer space.

Author Jason Martell says the story goes

that when Judaculla crashed into the rock,

he may have opened a portal to other worlds,

perhaps to where he originated.

We know that there's been a lot of UFO activity

in the area.

It's very possible that this is some type of a beacon

or a lighthouse,

perhaps opening some type of lost energy field.

It has even been suggested

that Judaculla, the giant himself, used this as a gateway

that would allow for communication even today.

Shane says this force of energy

is something he felt firsthand.

Touching the rock itself, it gave a little bit

of a charge, for lack of a better word,

you just feel something from the rock.

Stories of powerful giants

can be found in numerous ancient texts.

From the Greek Gigantes to the Hebrew Nephilim,

some believe these giants really walk the earth.

So could Judaculla be a similar supersized being?

Let's see how our experts measure up.

Archeologist Dr. Ed Barnhart considers if this mark

was truly left by Judaculla, the giant.

Many people believe that print there

was his actual hand print.

But in actuality, we can see

that it is carved into the stone.

Barnhart says the well-defined edges and grooves

that seem to curl up toward the rock face

prove that it's been chiseled out

since a hand print impression like this one made in clay

would be less delineated and more diffused.

This stone was probably carved hundreds

and hundreds of years ago.

What's more, Barnhart doesn't believe the stone

is telling us just one story, but instead, many.

At 1,500 different carvings,

that's the most on any stone in all of North America.

The initial carvings on this stone

could be reaching back thousands of years ago.

In my experience, rocks that have this much carving on them

are not done in a single episode,

they're done repeatedly over generations.

And NASA geologist Dr. Bob Anderson

adds that the type of rock

has made it particularly convenient for petroglyphs.

The rock is made up of soapstone,

which is a metamorphic rock, a rock that has been changed,

it's been heated by pressure and/or temperature.

It actually makes it very soft and as easy to carve into.

Barnhart says, given the location of the rock,

it was likely carved during the Mississippian period,

which lasted from about 800 AD to around 1600 AD,

and saw the development

of some of the most complex societies

that had ever existed in North America.

Big, unique pieces of geology, topography like this

were oftentimes landmarks along protected trade routes.

Of course, the Mississippian civilization

were a bunch of independent city states,

and you didn't want to accidentally,

without permission,

cross from one territory to another

because you would be in big trouble.

So maybe there's some truth

to the legend of Judaculla,

at least the part about the rock being used

to scare away intruders and mark the tribe's turf.

This was a marker

that showed the extent of what their tribe was

so that people would understand

that they would be protecting this land.

Before smartphones, before the internet, before computers,

this is the way that the people

were actually talking tribe to tribe.

It's just like using Google Maps

that you have on your cars nowadays.

Our verdict, these complex markings

were engraved by Indigenous peoples as a sophisticated map.

While the story of Judaculla is compelling,

we have no evidence the markings on this boulder

belong on his list of accomplishments,

though we still have no idea why visitors say

the rock seems to have an other-worldly energy.

We all know they do things differently in California.

The Golden State has its own laws on everything

from fuel efficiency to marijuana,

but does it have its own laws of gravity?

Follow us into the Redwood Forest to find out.

It's January 2023

in the beach town of Santa Cruz, California,

known for its great surfing and long wharf.

But local YouTuber Ryan Sonneville

is interested in documenting a more unusual area attraction,

a strange cabin in the Redwood Forest

where gravity itself

seems to have joined the counterculture.

If you live around Santa Cruz

or anywhere in Northern California,

you probably see people with the very iconic

Mystery Spot bumper stickers driving around.

The Mystery Spot is a small structure

where everything seems just a little off-kilter,

and where a tour guide is effortlessly able

to walk up a wall.

Ryan says it feels very disorienting.

It's pretty immediate the minute you go into it

that it doesn't feel right,

like you're able to stand on a bench

and be leaning forward in a way

that you would generally feel like I'm gonna fall forward.

The Mystery Spot opened to the public in 1940,

and has perplexed hundreds of thousands of visitors

from all over the world.

Journalist Eric Grundhauser

says that this anomaly has resulted

in decades of speculation about why it is the way it is.

So there are a number of theories

about why the laws of gravity and physics

seem to no longer apply around the vicinity

of the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot.

One theory goes that aliens came to our planet

and one of their spacecraft crashed there in the forest,

and that the remains

are somehow causing gravitational distortions.

Or maybe the layer of rock

between the earth's crust and its core is to blame.

Another theory goes,

the Mystery Spot actually sits on some kind of magma chamber

that is producing a lower density of mass

so that the gravity above it in the Mystery Spot

doesn't have the same qualities

that it does elsewhere on the planet.

With thousands of visitors each year,

the Mystery Spot calls to mind PT Barnum's

popular American Museum.

In order to keep the crowds moving,

Barnum put a sign saying, "This way to the egress."

Not knowing egress meant exit,

many people followed the sign in search of a new attraction,

not realizing they were literally being shown the door.

So what do our experts think of this crowd-pleasing sight

in Santa Cruz?

Physicist Dr. Matthew Szydagis says

that electromagnetic effects from an alien spacecraft

probably wouldn't be strong enough

to distort gravity like this.

Gravity, when it's distorted,

needs to be distorted due to extremely strong fields,

so things like a black hole singularity.

In a black hole, the pull of gravity is so strong

that even light can't escape.

I can assure you

that if something like that was in California,

it would've destroyed the state,

if not the entire planet by now.

But what about the effects of a magma chamber?

Science writer Mick West investigates.

The idea is that the movement, the different density

of the magma causes gravity to be different.

The issue is, the Mystery Spot lies on the San Andrea's fault

which is between two continental plates.

That wouldn't allow buildup of magma,

it would escape between the plates,

that would only actually work in the middle

of a continental plate.

So West has a more even-plained explanation.

This is essentially an artificial gravity hill.

We don't see any true verticals anywhere in this spot.

The trees themselves are more or less vertical,

sometimes trees lean over,

the fences are all at strange angles,

the floor is always at an angle,

there's no flat ground anywhere.

And so your brain never knows which way is up.

But Szydagis has the data to prove

this is just a fun illusion.

I've actually been to the Mystery Spot myself,

and I was able to measure the tilt effect

with the digital leveler app.

Has an approximate average tilt of 17 degrees.

A 17-degree grade,

especially when you disguise it by clever construction,

can be very hard for the human eye to perceive.

While it may not be aliens or gravitational anomalies,

I highly recommend the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot

as a wonderful place to go.

Our verdict,

we're going to defer to Professor Szydagis here,

and say this is a well-situated, tilted optical illusion.

In fact, in the mid 1900s,

so-called anti-gravity spots like this

became tourist destinations all across America,

but most of them just didn't have the pull

to keep folks coming back.

And that's our show for tonight.

Please keep questioning, keep exploring,

and keep those cameras rolling.