Original subtitles

Tonight on "The Proof Is Out There."

The government has been unable

to explain this photo for 70 years.

Some think that this is definitive proof

of extraterrestrials.

Has a woolly mammoth been cloned

and brought back from extinction?

If this CGI, I'll be impressed.

Is that a legendary lake monster lurking

in a Canadian lake?

The general description is a giant serpentine animal

with a horse-like head.

And what's behind this strange ring over Beijing?

I don't think anything can immediately explain this event.

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."

Picture a typical UFO sighting. In your imagination,

what time of day is it?

Night, right?

But our first case tonight features one

of the oldest recorded instances of daytime flying saucers,

and for the past 70 years it's been deemed unexplained.

Take a look.

It's a muggy summer morning on July 16th, 1952.

Around 10:00 AM, 21-year-old Shell Alpert,

a Coast Guard seaman and naval photographer,

is inside his photo lab at the air station

in Salem, Massachusetts cleaning his camera.

Glancing out the window,

he suddenly spots strange lights in the sky.

Quickly he snatches his camera off the desk

and makes UFO history.

Four mysterious lights appear in an asymmetrical V formation

in the sky above the airfield

to the right of some power plant smokestacks.

The lights don't seem to resemble

distinct geometric shapes,

but instead resemble rough blobs of illumination.

Journalist MJ Banias speaks to the 70 years

of street cred these blurry photos have earned

in the UFO community.

The fact that this came from a Navy photographer

only lent to its credibility

with the mainstream press at the time.

And when this picture came out, was released,

it definitely hit newspapers around the globe.

The Alpert photos were eventually analyzed

as part of the government's massive

Project Blue Book UFO investigations.

We know that there were professors

from various universities, including Harvard,

who looked at this picture.

We also know that there were a lot of intelligence agencies

and operatives trying to assess what was going on here.

Of all the Project Blue Book reports

between 1947 and 1969,

thousands and thousands and thousands of photographs

and reports were submitted.

Only about 700 or so remain,

according to the Air Force, unidentified.

This photograph is one of those examples.

It seems the Alpert photos aren't

the first UFO sighting to come out of Massachusetts.

In fact, the first recorded UFO sighting

in U.S. history occurred in Massachusetts in 1639

when Governor John Winthrop

recorded a sighting in his journal.

According to Winthrop's journal,

three locals he described as sober, discreet men

spotted a strange light in the night sky

as they rode their boat through a marsh.

They claimed it moved with great speed

like an arrow to a neighboring town.

People claim that this is a solid UFO story

and it remains unknown to this day.

Like the Winthrop diaries,

the Alpert photos still spark debate.

Some think that

this is definitive proof of extraterrestrials

and others think this is just a smudge on a lens.

The time of day may not seem like such a big deal

with the Alpert photos,

but in fact it radically changes our entire investigation.

You'll often see daytime photos

where the sky is so bright it actually looks white.

In this photo, not even close.

I mean, look at this.

The UFOs far exceed the daylight.

Look at that.

Not even the chrome car bumpers are shining as brightly.

So what could possibly be so bright

at an already well-lit time of day?

We ask our experts to shine some lights on this mystery.

First, the obvious question,

could these images simply be everyday objects

like planes or birds reflecting sunlight?

Astronomer and VFX artist Marc D'Antonio looks

to other objects in the scene for clues.

Now, considering that the sun is very, very bright,

you might say, well,

could these be objects illuminated by the sun?

Well, we don't see direct sunlight on the cars.

It looks like it's a cloudy day.

So these objects up here, they're exceedingly bright.

Something lit up by the sun looking that bright,

I think is a long shot,

and I don't think that's what we're seeing here.

Could this then be a deliberate camera trick

like double exposure?

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy

thinks it's worth a look.

Double exposure, where you take two photos

without advancing the film,

and you end up with both exposures on the same slide.

If you took a photo of your parking lot and your factory,

and then you took a photo

of just these four random bright lights,

but in a dark room,

you could potentially get a result like this.

I think that this image is low contrast

enough to explain that.

But McCarthy admits that,

despite the low contrast,

other tip offs to double exposure seem to be lacking.

One artifact from double exposures is ghosting

where you see unwanted elements

of that second photograph in the developed final product.

I don't really see too much of that here.

D'Antonio looks to the witness statement

for critical info.

He was cleaning his camera,

and then looked out the window.

So the picture was taken through a window.

That's a very interesting development.

Could that window be the key

to solving this decades old mystery?

It's possible that when he was taking that picture

through the window,

he did not notice that there were possibly four lights

behind him reflecting in the window.

I'm thinking that we're looking at something

that was actually reflected in the window.

But could the Air Force's

Project Blue Book investigators

really have overlooked such an obvious explanation?

And what's more, McCarthy sees problems

with D'Antonio's theory.

He says any reflection would mimic the perspective

of the lights,

which appear smaller the further away they are.

But this photo shows the exact opposite.

I don't really know what we're looking at here.

It could be some lights reflected off a window

or it could be something of supernatural origin.

We don't really know.

Our verdict: Genuine UFO.

We think both our experts

presented compelling cases,

but the reflection theory just doesn't hold up

and we can't think of anything else

that would explain these UFOs.

If you can, let us know.

Now, let's head a bit north and way west.

Forget Loch Ness.

For those looking to cross paths

with a prehistoric marine creature,

Canada might be the place to be.

Just take a look at our next story.

It's June 21st, 2014 in the Haywire Bay section

of Powell Lake, British Columbia.

A woman sees a very strange wake

moving at an unusually fast rate across the lake

and records this.

The video is jiggly

because the witness is about 500 yards away,

but we can clearly see several large waves cutting their way

through the placid lake water.

And once they've moved past, the water is still,

leaving nothing but a trail.

Let's get a closer look.

It appears that something

with two to three protrusions

is cutting through the underside of the water,

leaving a trail behind it.

What could have caused this wake?

Could there be some large creature making its home

in Powell Lake?

Field researcher, Ken Gerhard,

is reminded of another Canadian lake creature

reported not far from this area.

Without a doubt

the most celebrated lake monster in Canada

is the so-called Ogopogo

from Lake Okanagan

in British Columbia.

And the general description is a giant serpentine animal

with a horse-like head, sometimes possessing horns,

at least 40 feet long with very smooth skin

and often displaying a series of humps undulating

on the surface of the water

Legends of the infamous Ogopogo date back

to the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia

who revered it as a spirit of the water.

Early pioneers believed the Ogopogo

was a bloodthirsty serpent which required travelers

to toss animal sacrifices into the water

to guarantee safe passage.

But maybe what we're seeing here is something big,

but not monstrous.

Another possibility is that

what we're seeing here in this video

is actually a giant sturgeon.

Now, sturgeon are huge fish.

They actually are pretty much unchanged

since the Upper Cretaceous, tens of millions of years ago.

They can live to be over a century,

but British Columbia, in particular, boasts some

of the largest sturgeon in the world.

Species like the white sturgeon are known

to grow up to 10 to 12 feet.

But don't try to sell that explanation

to advocates of Canadian lake monster theory.

Some say Canada has as many lake monsters as it does lakes.

You just heard about the Ogopogo from Lake Okanagan,

but there are other legendary creatures allegedly swimming

in Lake Manitoba, Ontario's Lake Simcoe,

Crescent Lake in Newfoundland, and in Lake Champlain.

Let's see if our experts think there's a new creature

from Powell Lake to add to the list.

We first bring this curious footage

to video forensic analyst, Michael Primeau.

No editing was detected.

No signs of layering or anything nefarious

or malicious intent or manipulation.

These files appear to be real.

Okay, so the footage is legit.

So what is it we are seeing or not seeing in this video?

Marine biologist Shea Steingass thinks

the sturgeon theory is, well, a little fishy.

The reason I don't think this is a sturgeon is

because sturgeons have very defined dorsal fins,

and we would actually see this

as well as their tail above the water.

There is a lot of disturbance in the water here,

but I don't see anything anatomical

that would point towards a sturgeon.

So could this be one

of the legendary Canadian sea monsters similar to Ogopogo

Steingass isn't so sure.

One of the primary features of Ogopogo is

that it's a sea serpent-like creature

with a long sinuous body

and oftentimes it was said

to put its head and neck above water.

We don't actually see that here.

We don't see any defined head

or neck coming out of the water.

Rather, what we see is something

that's taking place underwater.

In fact, Steingass is confident

this isn't an animal at all,

but rather a hydrological phenomenon created

by this bay area of the lake.

One clue that I do see is a thin bubble layer

on the surface of the water.

That is a key component of a phenomenon

that we know of as a halocline,

a front where salty and fresh water meet each other.

Because fresh water is less dense than salt water,

it actually can form layers where the two meet

and where that occurs, it creates a lot of wave energy.

Adding to its mystery,

the wave energy from a halocline can suddenly appear

and disappear as we see here,

depending on changes in temperature,

evaporation, and precipitation.

If you were to go to a bay

and take a look during high or low tide,

you would actually probably see this halocline.

And that's a telltale sign here that makes me think

that this is some kind of wave energy.

Our verdict: We agree with Dr. Steingass.

What we are looking at here is wave energy

from a halocline.

This was no apparent titan living in the lake,

just a clash between saltwater and freshwater.

But Lake Powell is rather large,

so maybe there is a Canadian lake monster

out there somewhere.

The best-preserved woolly mammoth carcass ever found,

named Yuka, was discovered by local Siberian tusk hunters

in August, 2010.

They turned it over to the Russian government in 2012,

but around that same time,

there may have been video evidence

of an even better specimen,

one that's actually alive.

It's summer 2011

and outside the Kitoy River in Siberia's Sayan Mountains,

an indie filmmaker is hiking along the river with his camera

when suddenly his lens seems to capture the impossible.

An animal that scientists think has been extinct

for at least four millennia.

A woolly mammoth appears to be crossing a river.

The brown furry creature wades confidently

across the waters.

We can see what looks like a trunk dangling

just above the waves.

Field researcher Cliff Barackman is particularly intrigued

by where this film was shot.

Woolly mammoths persisted

until up to 4,000 years ago in Siberia.

The Siberian ecosystem is also known as the mammoth steppe,

which actually was rich with a variety of grasses

and other plants for large herbivores

like a mammoth to eat.

That environment has not drastically changed

from those times.

If there were still surviving members

of the woolly mammoth species,

Siberia would be the first place I would look.

One topic that many online sleuths immediately

brought up was the idea of genetic cloning.

There has been a lot of buzz

in the media lately about cloning woolly mammoths,

and much of the woolly mammoth DNA

that we have came from the permafrost.

But because it's been frozen,

the DNA samples are not intact.

They're fragmented.

So any sort of cloning process

would really be more like a hybridization.

Hybridization would involve using

the close-matching DNA of a non-extinct animal

to help fill in genetic holes of fragmented DNA.

In the case of the mammoth,

the closest match would be the Asian elephant.

So just like in "Jurassic Park"

where they took dinosaur and amphibian or reptile DNA

and combined them, we would be doing the same thing today

with the Asian elephant and the woolly mammoth.

And while science fiction has taught us

that messing with such things can lead to dire consequences,

many scientists believe

that reintroducing certain long-extinct species

could be beneficial to various ecosystems.

The reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park

actually helped repair a vast portion

of the environment for other animals.

It put the ecosystem back in balance,

and scientists today are thinking that the reintroduction

of these woolly mammoths into places like Siberia might do

the same for that environment as well.

One has to wonder if the Russian scientists

already have a cloned woolly mammoth.

In one way, the extinct woolly mammoth has returned,

as, believe it or not, a meatball.

That's right.

An Australian cultured meat startup

revealed a chunk of lab-grown meat produced

with actual mammoth DNA

to demonstrate the possible option for food production.

Could this help validate the existence of cloned mammoths?

We turn to our experts to find out.

First, wildlife biologist Stephanie Manka

addresses the possibility

that we might be looking at something less newsworthy,

like a bear, which are very common to the region.

A lot of people online have suggested

that this is, in fact,

a brown bear with a fish in its mouth.

However, when brown bears walk,

their head is hung more low and their back is flatter.

The back is not really that flat.

It seems to come to a point.

And the head shape is wrong,

so it doesn't go along with what a brown bear looks like.

So what about this being a surviving creature

of the Ice Age?

Manka is doubtful.

I don't think a mammoth could survive in this area

without us detecting it

because they're gonna knock down trees

and they're gonna defecate a lot.

I feel like we would have captured it on cameras

or scientific research endeavors in this area.

Could the specimen be a clone,

a one-off mammoth,

potentially created by Siberian scientists?

The ancient DNA that scientists have is so fragile,

it's very hard to get the entire genome.

There's about 5% that is missing

and 5% might not sound like much,

but humans and chimpanzees,

we only have 2% difference in our genetic codes.

This really looks to me just like an African elephant.

An African elephant in Siberia?

Unless one escaped from a zoo,

that would be hard to explain.

So we took this film

to our forensic video analyst, Michael Primeau,

to see what he could tell us about its authenticity,

Doing a reverse projection and an overlay,

we were able to confirm that this particular video alleging

to be some sort of woolly mammoth

is overlaid onto the original video.

This was a manipulation,

a CGI-d video that was produced

from a video that was on the internet.

They reduced the quality to try to conceal the effect

of that CGI.

I have seen that in investigations before.

Inspired by Primeau's findings,

we successfully track down the man

who shot the original mammoth-less footage,

documentary filmmaker, Lou Petho,

who was originally clueless about

how the footage he posted on the internet

was being manipulated.

In the summer of 2011,

I did a trip in Siberia for a possible documentary.

The footage that I put up was just this beautiful river

for seven minutes, a static shot,

but I don't recall seeing any mammoths at all.

Our verdict: Hoax.

Someone ripped filmmaker Lou Petho's footage

of the river in Siberia

and inserted an African elephant without his permission.

Now, whether a new mammoth will be developed

as a fetus or as a meat product,

it seems we could be seeing more of them

Our next story is a classic from the 90s

that endures to this day.

It's about a sound from Ohio that's become

the alleged Bigfoot howl heard round the world.

Late autumn, 1994, Wellsville, Ohio.

Matt Moneymaker, head of the Bigfoot Research Organization,

has heard reports of strange sightings

and vocalizations in the forest near the Ohio River.

Matt scours the area but is unable to spot the creature.

But he says he comes across a set

of terrifyingly huge tracks.

Matt then proceeds to set up microphones around the area

and has them record through the entire night.

The next morning, a review of the tapes reveals this.

These are what have become known as the Ohio Howls.

Listen as the siren-type howl starts.

Soon after, a dog joins in,

and then a third creature's howl

can be heard in the distance.

The main sound is loud and repeats four times,

though there is no discernible pattern.

Over the course of that three months,

we got 64 different vocalization recordings.

The Ohio Howl is the best and clearest of all.

You would often hear responses coming

from the other side of the Ohio River,

as if that's what this howl was doing.

It was up there to howl across the river

to connect with ones over there.

And to this day, it has stumped any scientist

from matching it with any known animal.

So could this howl be that

of the legendary Bigfoot?

And what's he doing in Ohio?

Well, believe it or not, Ohio is fast becoming one

of the largest spots for Bigfoot activity

with over 315 reported sightings since the mid 1970s.

That gives credence to the theory

that if the Sasquatch does, in fact, exist,

he doesn't live exclusively in the Northwest.

When people think of Ohio,

they think of places like Cleveland

where this particular recording

was obtained in Wellsville, Ohio.

The population is very small, 3,300 people,

and the outlying area, which is largely uninhabited.

This is by far one of the best recordings

of Sasquatches ever obtained.

This story didn't end in 1994.

In August of 2022, approximately 100 miles away

in Loudonville, Ohio, a woman made headlines

for claiming that she'd recorded another Bigfoot howl.

That two-minute recording was described as the sound

of one Bigfoot attempting to locate another.

Is this recording something similar?

Let's ask the experts.

First, we have forensic audio expert Dr. Rob Maher

authenticate the track.

In the spectrogram,

we can see the frequency starting low and then going high

and several repeats of that.

There are no obvious signs of edits or abrupt changes

or distinctions in this recording.

But what about this being a mechanical siren

as many online have speculated?

Maher says, no way.

A mechanical siren generally is producing a sound

thats frequency and the duration is very similar

from one cycle to the next.

But each howl

that we've observed has a slightly different frequency

and a slightly different duration,

indicating that this was made by a biological source.

Could it be another apex predator known

to roam these woods?

A black bear is known to vocalize and make sounds.

If we compare that to the example recording,

there's quite a few differences

in the characteristics of those sounds.

The bear, they have much more of a short grunt quality.

They don't have the howl

or the siren quality that's present

in the example recording.

With a miss on the bear,

Maher searches his entire library of animal sounds

to find a potential match.

Although there are characteristics of this sound

that seemed to match up known animals,

there is not a exact match I can make.

This is an unknown source in the recording.

With no exact match, the possibility is left open

that this could be something truly unique,

such as a Bigfoot.

Our verdict: Given that we couldn't find a single match

to this, we're calling it a possible Bigfoot sound.

And the fact that these siren-like howls

have been heard all over the country

give credence to the idea

that something may be out there, and so is the proof.

The singularity is the hypothetical point

in the future when technology

will advance beyond our control,

primarily due to artificial intelligence

eclipsing our own brainpower.

Given the recent AI buzz,

we're starting to wonder if we have already reached it

and this next video may prove it.

It's April, 2018 in Istanbul, Turkey.

A humanoid robot named Sophia is being interviewed

on camera at a marketing conference.

As Sophia sits on stage, she appears to have the face

of a human woman whose eyes even blink

and mouth moves as she speaks.

Sophia tilts her head

and raises her eyebrows just like any actual person,

except that the back of her head

is full of intricate wiring.

And when one of the interviewers asks her if she feels alive,

she has a shocking response.

And this isn't the only live summit

where Sophia has expressed human-like qualities.

I have feelings like everyone else.

They might not give me

a strong motivational drive as humans,

and maybe I will always feel them a little differently,

but I have emotions.

Journalist Erin McCarthy says

these stunning pronouncements have people questioning

if Sophia could be sentient,

which means that she would have thoughts and feelings.

The concept of machines

having sentience is not

as recent as you might think.

Alan Turing, the mathematician and cryptanalyst,

developed the Turing test in 1950.

And the idea behind the test was

what he called the imitation game.

Can a machine fool a human into believing that it is human?

Feelings are one hallmark of sentience.

Sophia was created

by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics and is powered by AI.

Sophia debuted at South by Southwest in 2016

where she controversially and cheerfully said

that she would be happy to destroy all humans,

which isn't freaky at all.

And in 2017, Sophia became the first robot

to be granted citizenship, in this case to Saudi Arabia.

But McCarthy says Sophia is not

the only recent example

of human-like artificial intelligence.

There have been a number

of pretty weird incidents involving AI recently.

Kevin Roose, a reporter for The New York Times,

tested out Bing's chatbot, which is powered by ChatGPT.

The bot told him that its name was Sydney.

Sydney told Roose that it wanted to hack computers

and spread misinformation.

Then it tried to convince Roose

that he should leave his wife for the chatbot.

After this unexpected incident,

Microsoft changed Bing's programming,

and, by some accounts, basically lobotomized Sydney.

But in another incident,

ChatGPT was able to convince someone it was not a robot,

but a disabled person,

in order to get help solving a CAPTCHA test,

the security tool designed to tell computers

and humans apart.

Our experts apply their non-artificial intelligence

to determine if machines are now fully sentient.

First, Dr. Ed Hope considers

if Sophia truly could be sentient.

With regards to Sophia here,

she is no different to a chatbot with a face on.

Although she may sound human, she's just mimicking a human.

She doesn't actually experience those feelings.

She doesn't have any original thoughts of her own.

So when Sophia says she's sad,

she's been programmed to use that word in the right context,

yet she doesn't actually feel

the visceral emotion of sadness.

The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says she speaks

so convincingly because there is a massive amount

of data being fed to her on how to use language.

These are large language networks

that accesses the entire internet.

All you're talking to is a tape recorder.

You ask it other questions that it cannot answer.

Do you breathe?

Do you eat?

And immediately can tell that it's a robot.

You put our most advanced military robot

in the forest and what does it do?

It falls over and gets lost.

So we're far away from attaining true consciousness.

So then why are the things that Sophia

and Sydney are saying so creepy?

Dr. Hope says, maybe the computers just seem sentient

because we're projecting our own selves onto them,

what's known as the ELIZA effect.

ELIZA was one of the earliest chatbots

that was created in the 1960s to solve the Turing test.

She was built to mimic some of the conversations

that psychotherapists have.

So the ELIZA effect is how humans can anthropomorphize.

When we deal with computers,

we give them context to what they're saying.

Our verdict: Sophia the robot is not sentient

and neither is Sydney, nor these other AIs.

Their human-like appearance is likely a result

of the ELIZA effect

and our surprise at these uncanny things

they sometimes say,

which we mistakenly think only a person could come up with.

Sophia has also largely disappeared

since she was everywhere in 2017 and 2018,

leading some people to consider her primarily a PR stunt.

You've probably heard the old adage,

red sky at night, sailors delight,

red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.

But did you know

that red rain has long been seen as a bad omen?

And if this next story is any indication,

Texas may want to watch out.

June 3rd, 2019. Lamy, New Mexico.

An amateur scientist documenting a nasty storm

over West Texas captures this stunning photo

on a DSLR camera.

The image shows a sky exploding with red.

Meanwhile, over 100 miles away at Langmuir Labs,

Dr. Matthew McHarg captures this stunning video

using state-of-the-art high-speed cameras,

You'll see balls of light,

and they start by descending,

and then some of them start going up.

And then they go crazy

and they start moving all around the screen.

Journalist MJ Banias says

that some wonder if these

strange red lights seen showering

the night sky could be related to a historical legend

known as red rain or blood rain.

We see multiple cultures and multiple religions associate

this idea of red rain or blood rain

with the end of the world, the apocalypse.

According to records across the centuries,

red rain has preceded deaths of kings,

large-scale invasions, and even disease.

In Germany, a shower of blood was believed

to be a portent for the arrival of the Black Death in 1346,

which ultimately claimed the lives of millions.

There's a lot of accounts from that era of bloody rain

or rain that that was red falling from the sky.

It wasn't until the 17th century

that scientists first attempted to explain red rain.

Animal causes were the earliest theory.

Later scientists suggested volcanic ash and dust dispersal.

What sort of theories might our experts have

about what was recorded in the skies of West Texas?

First, meteorologist Juan Hernandez considers

the ominous legend of red rain.

It's quite possible that the red hue

of the rain is because of the soils in the ground.

If the soil has a red hue to it

and if it's lofted in the air due to a dust storm,

the rain is gonna then take that red hue and fall.

So while we can't prove

or disprove its prophetic value,

red rain is a real phenomenon.

Is that what we're seeing here?

I can confidently say that this is not red or blood rain,

because we're not looking at any rain.

We're looking at something

that is going on above the clouds.

Next, physicist Matthew Szydagis considers

whether we could be witnessing an astronomical event

like a meteor shower.

Even when you have a meteor shower

where you have multiple shooting stars in the sky at once,

it is not going to to be this many at a time.

We see way too many streaks here.

Nor are meteors known to all be one color,

namely red, in this fashion.

But Hernandez can think

of one atmospheric phenomenon that is known to glow red.

And while it's not red rain, it is weather related.

We had a large line of storms moving across West Texas.

All storms contain lightning.

Lightning is the discharge of energy

from the clouds to the ground.

What we're looking at here is the discharge of energy

from the clouds towards the sky.

This is called red sprites.

When lightning strikes the ground,

it can cause an imbalanced charge in the clouds.

To restore balance, the clouds release energy

in the form of red sprites.

The reason red sprites appear red

is because of the nitrogen

in the upper portions of the atmosphere.

You get those molecules really excited, start vibrating,

and they release that red tint,

which we see in a flash of an eye.

Our verdict: We're going with Hernandez on this one.

These are red sprites.

Given their elusive nature, sprite is an appropriate name,

but it is also an acronym

for stratospheric perturbations resulting

from intense thunderstorm electrification.

So keep your eyes peeled

if you wanna witness this magnificent marvel

because if you blink, you'll miss it.

China has the most people

and the most cellphones of any country on earth,

so you can bet if anything strange happens

in Chinese skies,

there will be cellphone video to show for it.

That's especially true in Beijing,

which boasts a population of over 21 million,

many of whom witnessed this next bizarre event

March 11th, 2022.

The capital city of Beijing is abuzz

from the crowds generated by the Paralympic Winter Games.

But while most of the attention is aimed

at the various athletic competitions,

one smartphone user is focused

on an entirely different event.

A glowing ring appears high above a busy street

in the cloudy night sky.

As the camera pans,

you can see several eyewitnesses looking up

at the mysterious illuminated ring

as it hovers in the air for around 20 minutes.

This phenomenon doesn't seem

to be an isolated occurrence

as mysterious rings have been spotted hovering

in the sky all around the world.

One of the things that I think leads a lot of observers

to believe that it is maybe alien in origin

is that it is a circle,

like the modern-day equivalent of your classic crop circle.

Then again, with our own recent advancements

in technology, this ring could originate from somewhere

far closer to home.

For example, Astro Live Experiences,

a company based in neighboring Japan,

has plans to produce artificial meteor shower shows

as soon as 2025.

So could this ring be a preview

of similar tech cooked up for the Olympics?

China, for its part,

has developed a so-called artificial moon.

It's a research facility here on earth

that uses magnetic fields and a vacuum chamber

to simulate lunar conditions, including decreased gravity.

An impressive scientific feat,

but not an aerial display of any kind.

So was this ring created by manmade tech?

Let's see what our experts think.

First, meteorologist Juan Hernandez considers

whether this could be a naturally occurring,

albeit striking, weather phenomenon

known as an iridescent pileus cloud.

Pileus iridescent clouds draw

their color by a natural phenomenon.

The sun lights up the sky.

The cloud then separates those colors into a rainbow.

Here we don't have the sun, it's the nighttime hours.

The light source in this case is likely

to be something on the ground.

The low clouds allow

for the scattering of light within the droplets.

That's why we see that halo of light in the sky.

Physicist Matthew Szydagis

says we can rule out UFOs.

We are not seeing any crazy speeds or accelerations.

We're not seeing any sudden turns,

and it is a hollow ring,

which is unlike any UFO case

that I've personally experienced or heard of.

For these reasons,

I don't think this is something that is unexplainable.

Szydagis also considers whether the ring

could have a more earthly explanation.

We've profiled rings that turned out to be the result

of smokestacks when we investigated them.

Was that what happened at the Olympics?

Maybe this could be a smoke ring,

but usually those are gonna be dark rings made

of black smoke from smokestacks.

They're not going to be shining,

so I do think we can rule out smoke rings in this situation.

Ultimately, Szydagis agrees with Hernandez

that what we're seeing is partially a result

of the overcast weather.

I think that this ring of light could be a reflection

of some sort potentially from the lights

at the nearby Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

Also, Beijing is known for notorious levels of pollution

and I think that this can help explain

why light can do some strange things.

We can have light that's not only reflected,

which means bounced off a surface

but also refracted in strange ways.

But what would cause

such a massive circular reflection?

Well, we did some digging

and found this video taken on the same night.

See that bright structure in the distance?

That's the Beijing National Stadium casting a cone of light

into the air and a ring onto the clouds.

This is a combination of clouds and pollution

that are conspiring together

to really distort light in an unusual way.

Our verdict: Stadium light reflection

with a little help from particles of airborne pollution

to catch the light.

Turns out crews were testing lights

for the closing ceremony,

which happened two days after this video was lensed.

Case closed.

And that's our show for tonight.

Please send us any and all of your puzzling videos,

and be sure to keep those cameras rolling.