Original subtitles

- Tonight on "The Proof is Out There".

More than 20 years ago,

Navy pilots filmed one

of the most consequential UFO videos in history.

And now we're bringing you another one.

- Watching this light emerge from the water

and then go into the air,

I've never witnessed that ever in my life.

- [Tony] 8,500-year-old wheels found

in the deserts of Jordan.

How did they get there?

- Some say that the gods created them.

Others speculate that it was aliens.

But what they mean

and what purpose they serve are still a mystery.

- [Tony] A massive object captured on radar.

Did a famous writer have it right?

- A lot of people have wondered if Cthulhu,

as we know him, exists in our world today

as a living, breathing organism.

- [Tony] Could the aurora borealis be powering UFOs?

- You see this charged energy hitting

the Earth and some people believe

that aliens are using that energy.

- [Tony] And is this microwave haunted

or picking up top secret chatter?

- We hear this talking noise.

So I walk into our kitchen and realize that sound

was coming from the microwave.

- Around the globe are videos. - Oh my God!

- Photos... [siren blaring]

And sounds that defy explanation.

[static hissing]

- [Narrator] We don't know where they come from,

who made them, or how they operate.

- [Tony] What are they?

- [Narrator] Some sort of bizarre mutation.

- [Narrator] 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.

- It's coming towards us. - 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."

More than two decades ago,

Navy aviators from the USS Nimitz encountered this UFO

about 100 miles off the coast of California.

That video was shot from the left wing camera

of an F/A-18 Super Hornet.

And the pilots who saw it up close say it looked like

a giant Tic Tac.

A smooth white wingless object that traversed both air

and water and outperformed their own aircraft.

It produced years of speculation,

even in government hearings. And now another Tic Tac video has

emerged. It is just past 7 PM on February 15, 2023.

And the Navy's USS Jackson combat ship is just off

the coast of San Diego, California,

not far from the site of the 2004 Tic Tac encounter

in a special use airspace area known as W-291.

- An operations specialist on board

the ship, Alexandro Wiggins,

observed something unusual on radar.

And he took to the deck to make an observation

with the naked eye.

And he witnessed some kind of structure

or light emanating up from the water line.

- Watching this light emerge from the water

at a distance and then go into the air

with a solid light, no blinking or anything,

I've never witnessed that ever in my life.

- Wiggins went back inside the control room

to check his radar screen

where he and other sailors witnessed four objects,

at which point they began recording

with the SAFIRE system. - [Tony] The SAFIRE, an infrared sensor

that detects heat, focuses on two of the objects flying

from right to left in perfect synchronicity.

The monitor punches in on one of the objects,

revealing the familiar Tic Tac shape,

apparently hovering over the ocean.

Moments after the video ends,

Senior Chief Wiggins says the watch team zooms out

on the monitor just in time

to see all four objects shoot off simultaneously.

Though odd, the objects show no hostile intent,

so it goes unreported, until April 2025,

when investigative journalist Jeremy Corbell gets a hold

of the video and releases it to massive media coverage.

- The video just caused astonishment

because these things have been a repeat presence

in those waters, including

the original Tic Tac video

and Jeremy Corbell also released the USS Omaha video,

which captured one of these objects splashing down.

- It splashed! It splashed! - In fact,

original reporting on the History Channel series,

"Unidentified Inside America's UFO Investigation,"

revealed that the 2004 Tic Tac was even seen on sonar.

- Sonar said they got a hit.

According to one of the sonar guys,

they were going 70 plus knots under the water.

- We've known that the Navy has been dealing

with these USOs now for decades.

In fact, there's some reporting that's come out

where you actually have whistleblowers

from the US Navy coming out and talking about some

of their experiences, most notably the USS Hampton

that was in the late 1990s during an operation,

had detected something moving very, very fast.

And some of the individuals actually on that submarine

who detected this estimated the speed was faster

than the speed of sound.

- [Tony] The location of that incident

has not been disclosed,

but are these repeated incidents all

in the same area,

evidence of something greater than just

a few flying objects?

- These are all just theories,

but one that makes the rounds among naval personnel

is the potential existence of an underwater base

from which these objects emerge and return to.

It's of course just a speculative hypothesis,

but these objects have been variously recorded

or witnessed emerging from the waters off the coast

of San Diego.

The collective details are just extraordinary.

- This new Tic Tac video hasn't just wowed

the American public.

It was even shared with Navy aviator David Fravor,

who encountered the first Tic Tac back in 2004.

He said he was stunned by the similarities.

Let's see if our experts have the same reaction.

[tense music]

This was February 2023, just days after

a Chinese spy balloon crossed America,

setting the nation on edge and ultimately leading

to a shoot down just off the East Coast.

Could these be intelligence gathering inflatables?

- I took a look at the weather on that day

and you had winds from the west at about six mile

an hour, so if they were balloons,

you would see the balloons going with the wind

in one direction and it doesn't do that.

- [Tony] That still doesn't rule out

a foreign incursion, though.

We know drones have been an issue over military bases

and US soil, and the suspicion is that they are the work

of adversarial nations.

Is this video proof they might be toying with our Navy too?

- I will point out

that the motions you see could be done by drones,

including the synchronicity, but you also

have a situation where these people described it

as being that they instantaneously shot off

and they were talking about a really,

really incredibly fast speed.

And so that doesn't sound like a drone.

- [Tony] Since this is special use airspace,

could these be special aircraft,

perhaps part of a secret military test?

- Could they be doing a test

that the Jackson wasn't aware of?

Yeah, maybe. We have a signal transmedium type thing.

Submarine launch ballistic missiles do that.

But if it was a missile, it'd be moving fast.

And then the size of that object would get smaller

and smaller and smaller and smaller until it was gone.

Right? That would have happened very quickly.

And in this case, it didn't go away.

- [Tony] With those possibilities eliminated,

the question becomes, were these UFOs?

- Well, I believe that they saw

the Tic Tac because you had a very clear observation

by a witness visibly that it was being picked up

on radar, was also being picked up

in this thermal imaging system.

All those things combined put it into a very strong case

of being an unknown.

- Our verdict, genuine UFOs.

Remember, even though the video mostly focused

on one Tic Tac,

all four of these things were seen shooting off almost

instantaneously, making them

all unidentified flying objects.

The release of these Tic Tac videos could be

having an impact.

Recently, the US National Archives opened the floodgates

on decades worth of UFO documentation.

Believe it or not, cattle are amazing creatures.

They have nearly 360 degree vision and can smell odors up

to six miles away.

Are they interesting enough for aliens to study?

This video might be the proof. May 2020.

It's a quiet night in a barn on a rural farm,

exact location unknown.

A herd of cattle is standing peacefully in their pens.

But around 11 PM,

the motion activated camera

captures something extraordinary.

[roof crashing]

A fully grown bull comes bursting in through the ceiling.

Miraculously, the bull appears unharmed.

Now watch, as the bull struggles,

a strange bright orb floats across

the screen from right to left.

After a few seconds,

the bull manages to lift himself off the stanchion

and walk away as if nothing happened.

An anonymous poster soon uploads the video online,

where it immediately begins garnering hits.

- This video kind of ties

into the classic story of cows being beamed up

onto spacecraft, studied and analyzed,

and then dropped back down into their pasture.

Some UFO believers say the glowing orb crossing in front

of the camera is all evidence that this cow

was just returned from a UFO.

- [Tony] But where does that idea come from?

The answer is darker than you might expect.

- The idea of cow abduction

by UFO really started after a wave of cattle mutilations

in the mid-1970s.

Farmers were finding their cows dead in their fields,

but curiously, their eyes, ears, genitals,

and tongues, among other organs,

had been removed and with such surgical precision,

it almost looked like it was done by an intelligent species.

Some farmers claimed to have seen lights in the sky

over the site before they found their cows mutilated.

- [Tony] This bull is still, thankfully, intact,

but incidents like this are strikingly common.

- There are, strangely,

many stories of cows falling from the sky.

In November of 2007, near Lake Shillam, Washington,

a 600-pound cow fell off a mountain and landed

on the roof of a minivan of a couple just trying

to celebrate their first wedding anniversary.

- Holy cow!

This video is intense!

But seriously, it is hard

to imagine any animal surviving such a fall.

Is it possible this creature had a late-night date

with a UFO?

Let's move on to our experts for analysis.

Okay, no more cow puns.

Some online speculate this bull could have been thrown

by a violent storm, but is there any evidence of that?

- There have been known instances

of tornadoes picking up livestock,

but when we look at the video,

there's nothing that leads me

to believe that the wind is strong.

The debris that we see immediately after

the cow falls falls vertically.

There is no horizontal movement.

- [Tony] So could this bull have truly fallen from a UFO?

- If a cow fell a great distance

from a craft, like hundreds or thousands of feet,

it for sure would not survive.

It would die on impact.

Even if it's not from that large of a distance,

they're not great at withstanding falls due

to their body structure.

- [Tony] With its stocky, compact body,

a cow can't distribute the weight of a fall the way, say,

a tiger could.

The entire force instead concentrates on its fragile

legs. A fall over 20 feet would injure a cow,

and 40 feet would probably kill it.

It's likely this bull didn't fall more than 10 feet,

which is an important clue.

- If we go back to the start of the video,

go by one frame at a time,

something you notice is that this portion

of the roof here is actually starting to bend,

which indicates to me

that it's not the cow hitting the roof.

It would indicate to me that the cow is already

on the roof, and the roof is just starting to give way.

- [Tony] And the orb in the background?

That's likely just the flashlight

of a worried farmer checking

on his livestock after spotting the bull on the roof.

But what was it doing up there in the first place?

- What may have happened is that part

of the roof was low enough to the ground

that the cow could climb on it,

or perhaps it was close to a hillside,

and the cow could get on the roof by climbing

onto the hill first.

But a cow, just like a lot of other animals,

is probably just curious.

And why not go on the roof?

- Our verdict? Roof collapse.

We don't know whether or not other cows

have had secret liaisons with extraterrestrials,

but the idea that this guy was abducted by aliens is just

a bunch of bull.

- Seeing the aurora borealis,

or the Northern Lights, is certainly on my bucket list,

and Canada is a great place for it.

In certain parts of the country,

they appear up to 300 nights a year.

But one Canadian family says they recently saw something

just as amazing, and a lot more unexpected.

May 10th, 2024.

It's between 10 and 11 PM in Kelowna, British Columbia.

Bobby Vandenhorn and his family are gathered

on his rooftop patio,

hoping to catch a glimpse of the aurora borealis.

- The aurora borealis

is a beautiful natural phenomenon.

Essentially, as the sun is giving off solar energy,

it's flying through space and it slams

into the Earth's atmosphere.

All of those charged particles interact

with the various molecules

that make up Earth's atmosphere and burn up into light,

and we get this spectacular,

beautiful light show as a result.

- [Tony] But as the Vandenhorn family waits

for the lights to appear overhead,

something else catches their attention.

- What is that? - Bobby records a cluster

of five bright white orbs twinkling in the distance.

- [Tony] And that's just the start.

As the night goes on,

Bobby takes several more videos

of strange light formations,

and he says the footage doesn't capture the half of it.

- I probably saw about 20 plus groups

of those orbs, and each group

had anywhere from, you know, two to three,

all the way up to 25 to 30 of them.

- [Tony] Bobby posts the video online

and even submits it to the local news,

where it draws thousands of eyes.

- I couldn't help but think, like,

maybe there's a link between what's going on

with the aurora borealis,

whatever energy comes into the atmosphere from that,

perhaps those little orbs use that energy to fly.

- It turns out the northern lights

have been especially active lately.

In 2024, they were even visible as far south as Florida.

Scientists say that's because the sun

is in its solar maximum, the peak of its 11-year cycle.

Can solar activity explain Bobby's unusual encounter,

or will our experts find another source for his sighting?

[tense music]

At times, the lights form a V-shape,

so we have to consider if they could just be

a V-shaped aircraft.

- There's a number of aircraft

that could match the V-shape that we see.

The B-2 bomber has a V-shape to it,

but what they don't have is independent lighting

that moves relative to the other lights on board.

These lights are actually moving independently,

so this is why I think there are five independent objects.

- [Tony] What are those five independent objects?

- The way these lights are moving,

it almost seems like a choreographed movement.

I think there is a high probability

that what we're looking at are drones.

This particular day was one

of the largest geomagnetic storms to ever hit the Earth.

We know that there are a lot of people with their eyes

on the sky, and given

that the aurora borealis hasn't started yet,

these drones could be the pre-show.

- But if this is a drone show,

it's not a particularly visible one.

- He had to zoom in to be able to show them better.

That's because they were at a relatively high altitude.

They might have been at 3,000 feet or 4,000 feet.

Drone shows don't occur high up in the sky.

They generally occur down low to the ground,

and we're not seeing that here.

- [Tony] Instead, like the aurora itself,

these flying objects may have a natural explanation.

- If you watch Canada Geese,

you'll see something really impressive.

You'll see that the leader is in front during the brunt

of the forces hitting him.

When the leader gets tired and drops back

into the V, another leader will emerge,

and we could be seeing these two coming up to the lead.

- [Tony] Now, we've seen reflective birds mistaken

for UFOs before.

However, those had

an obvious light source beneath them, a greenhouse.

But these don't.

- Birds don't produce their own light.

If we were looking at birds,

there would have to be some sort

of light hitting those birds and reflecting back

to the Earth.

We don't see that here.

- Our verdict? Unexplained objects.

Between our two experts,

we can't make a call one way or the other.

We'll have to wait and see if any more UFOs emerge

from this intense solar activity.

- Poltergeists are known to haunt houses

in a variety of ways.

Slamming doors, moving furniture.

But can they also take over kitchen appliances?

Before you answer, take a listen

to what this microwave oven was serving up.

It's July 2024 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Cecilia and Aaron Hill are home alone

when their circuit breaker trips.

But when the power returns, something strange happens.

- We hear this talking noise and we think

it's just one of the kids' toys.

So I walk into our kitchen and I don't see anything there.

My wife kind of met back in the kitchen and then

we looked at each other and we realized that sound

was coming from the microwave.

- [Voice] Don't do this to me. Don't do this to me.

- [Tony] There's a strange gasp

and deep breathing along

with a psychotic voice quickly mumbling the chorus

to two hit pop songs.

Listen again.

- [Voice] Don't do this to me. Don't do this to me.

♪ I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man ♪

♪ Yes I am, yes I am, yes I am

- It did send chill down my spine

where I was like, this sounds very, very weird.

We had no idea what it was.

- [Tony] This crazy story went crazy viral.

Many suggested that this microwave was either haunted

by a poltergeist or accidentally picking up some type

of encoded secret message broadcast

from a clandestine number station.

- Number stations are pirate shortwave radio stations

that send out coded messages to intelligence agents

that were used beginning in World War One

and most famously during the Cold War.

Typically, they'd start with something like

a short melody and then there would be a string

of letters and numbers for whoever the recipient

was to decipher.

- [Tony] Using shortwave radio,

a spy could beam signals off the ionosphere

to agents almost anywhere on Earth.

But since anyone could listen in,

the message had to be decoded from numbers

to letters using a special key called a one-time pad.

One broadcast called the Lincolnshire Poacher is believed

to have aired for decades from an MI6 site in Cyprus.

This technique is still considered effective today since

it can't be jammed or traced like a digital signal.

- This message is really difficult

to understand and maybe

that's because it's a secret message.

♪ I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man ♪

- Back in 2022,

media around the globe profiled a British man

who was trying to give away a refrigerator

that he believed was haunted by his stepmother.

Sick and tired

of the ghost criticizing his cheese intake,

the man said the pristine appliance was free

to anyone willing to come get it.

Could this microwave be the perfect companion piece?

Let's go to the experts.

[tense music]

Could this microwave be projecting something ghostly?

- [Voice] Don't do this to me.

- I think we've been brainwashed by Hollywood

that ghosts communicate at a higher frequency than us

with different kinds of gizmos and electronics...

But when I was a kid in elementary school,

we used to play with diode radios.

The diode converts AC into DC and you can use

that to pick up radio signals.

So you're not picking up ghosts.

You could be picking up a radio station.

- [Voice] Don't do this to me.

- [Tony] Then is it possible that these frequencies

are the mysterious transmissions

of a top secret numbers station?

- So we would expect it

with a numbers station that there would be a sequence

of words or codes or numbers that would be uttered

as part of the message.

And in this case,

since it just seems to be somebody humming

a pop song, doesn't have the qualities that would lead us

to believe that this was a numbers station.

♪ I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man ♪

- [Tony] In fact, our expert did some digging

and discovered that this particular model

of microwave comes

with a feature where you can record a message.

♪ Yes I am, yes I am, yes I am

- It seems clear this is an example

of the function of that microwave

to have this memo recording and playback feature.

- [Voice] Don't do this to me.

- [Tony] And it turns out the microwave

in question came with the house.

- It is conceivable

that there might be recordings left in the memory

of the device.

Even the most logical explanation here leaves us

with some mystery.

♪ I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man ♪

- Our verdict, we're calling this one a lost recording.

Kind of just came with the house. Who made it and why?

We don't know. And maybe we don't wanna know.

- Have you read much H.P. Lovecraft? Well, you should.

His stories are nearly 100 years old,

but they continue to inspire sci-fi nerds

and occultists all over the world.

But is it possible that cosmic monsters like

the ones you'll find here are actually real?

And could they be returning?

April 10th, 2024, Pilsen, the Czech Republic.

The meteorological mapping company, Ventusky,

provides accessible global weather maps

to clients around the world.

And the Internet goes absolutely wild

when this giant ominous image appears on the screen.

A huge dark mass moves north through the water,

heading past the southern tip of Africa.

It's an area larger than Texas, spanning 2000 miles.

And according to the reference key,

the waves created by this object are over 80 feet high.

The shape and movement of this void had many comparing it

to one of science fiction's most famous deities.

- When this video first appeared,

there were many who declared, it's Cthulhu!

Cthulhu is an ancient God that was created

by the great horror author H.P. Lovecraft

back in the year 1928.

It's described as a mountain-sized entity with the

head of an octopus, tentacle, clawed

hands and bat -like wings. - [Tony] According to the story,

Cthulhu had been trapped underwater

in a forgotten city named R'lyeh,

waiting to resurface one day and unleash terror on the land.

- Due to Cthulhu's immense size,

it's easy to see how people compared it to this mass

on this particular map.

There are some who think that Lovecraft was some type

of savant who was able to look into other realities

and draw that information into our world.

And so that the idea of Cthulhu was actually real.

- [Tony] One such group, the Typhonian Order,

believes that the monsters

from Lovecraft's writings were representations

of actual beings and extraterrestrials.

- One of the common themes

throughout Lovecraft's writings is this idea

of the great old ones,

which were often depicted as ancient deities.

They had somehow fallen by the wayside,

but they were in a constant struggle to return to power.

So were the works of H.P. Lovecraft

actually more fact than fiction?

- While Lovecraft himself always insisted

that the stories of his elder gods were no more

than fiction, some fans believe he only did so

because both of his parents were committed

to psychiatric institutions, and he was fearful of sharing

a similar fate if he told what he really knew.

Could there be some truth behind these cosmic horrors,

and are they connected to this map image?

Our experts are ready

to share their latest work of non-fiction.

Even if you accept that Lovecraft's writings were based

on truth, is this even the right place for Cthulhu?

- H.P. Lovecraft was an incredibly specific writer.

We have an extreme amount of details of Cthulhu.

We know where Cthulhu was supposed to live,

including the exact coordinates in the middle

of the Pacific Ocean,

kind of rules this out because what we're seeing

is coming from the eastern Atlantic.

- [Tony] And if something this large was rising

from the ocean, wouldn't we certainly know about it?

- When I looked at the scale,

we've got over 70-80 feet of wave heights.

The wave heights that are being represented

are nearly impossible in the natural world.

Now, they would happen if there was a volcanic eruption

that displaces hundreds and hundreds of tons of rock,

but there was nothing happening.

So my first thought was there has to be an error

in the model.

- [Tony] So we tracked down Pavel Rehulic,

who worked for the Ventusky Weather Forecasting Service.

- Faulty data got into the system.

Within a couple of days,

they were able to sort of patch the prediction model,

and we thought that was it.

But within the time,

many of those conspiracy theories arrived

on social networks, and we were flooded with comments

and various theories.

- Our verdict?

This is a simple modeling error

within the Ventusky weather map system.

Surprisingly enough, the number one suspect

on the site's comments section wasn't Cthulhu.

That honor went to Godzilla.

- In ancient Egypt, the process of embalming

and preparing a mummy took 70 days.

Special priests removed organs, supplied salt,

and wrapped it in linen.

But in 2023, when a dead body seemed

to have magically mummified much faster,

without any of these procedures,

we knew there was a mystery to unwrap.

September 3rd, 2023. Sofia, Bulgaria.

The body of a 34-year-old man

is found near some train tracks.

Police learned that he matches the description

of a person missing for 16 days wearing exactly

the same clothes.

But it's not just the attire that grabs their attention.

It's this.

Even though he only died sometime in the last 16 days,

his skin looks hard and leathery as though

it's been dried out on purpose.

In short, he looks like an ancient mummy.

Take a closer look at this photograph of his leg.

The skin has a parchment-like texture,

while the inner organs

have dissolved into dark, shapeless masses.

- They find that the internal organs

have dried out, the fat has disappeared.

Coroners were baffled by this body

because it didn't decay in a normal way.

- [Tony] But if he's become a mummy, how?

Mummification.

Preserving a body by drying it doesn't happen quickly.

In fact, in ancient Egypt,

mummification was a multi-step process that took 70 days.

First, the body was washed with water from the Nile.

Then the brain was removed,

followed by the rest of the internal organs.

Next, embalmers packed the body in natron,

a naturally occurring salt that dries the body

of all moisture and fat.

Finally, the body was wrapped,

adorned with amulets and placed in a sarcophagus.

- So no one can quite figure out

how this person was mummified within 16 days.

- This isn't the first modern mummy mystery.

In 2016, a German sailor was found mummified

on a yacht drifting in the Philippine Sea.

Investigators believe he died of a heart attack

or stroke and was preserved in the warm, salty ocean air.

But that process likely took weeks or even months,

not just 16 days.

So what happened in Bulgaria? Let's ask the experts.

[tense music]

According to the coroners,

the deceased man had consumed a lot of alcohol.

And some wonder if this might have caused

what we're seeing here.

- It is unlikely and doubtful that alcohol

in the cells and in the bloodstream would help

with the mummification process.

Alcohol in the body would damage the organs

at a cellular level,

but it would not help in the preservation

of the tissue once the body dies.

- [Tony] Alcohol is out.

But could we be seeing cult activity?

A bizarre thought, sure.

But in 2021, a Colorado cult managed

to mummify its deceased leader.

- If this guy was mummified by a cult

or by some other person,

we would see the traditional methods of mummification.

We would see something on his skin to help

with that skin drying out.

We would see other signs that he was purposely mummified.

And we don't see this at all.

- [Tony] So how did

this man's corpse mummify just 16 days after

he was last seen alive?

- Investigators discovered

that in the 16 days where this man was missing in Sofia,

the conditions were exactly the conditions

that would be required for precocious mummification,

which is a really rare phenomenon where conditions

of temperature, solar radiation, humidity,

and airspeed accelerate the mummification process.

These conditions include

a 24-hour daytime temperature greater than 86 degrees,

a solar radiation greater

than 600 watts per meter squared,

a humidity of less than 50 percent with wind speeds up

to 20 to 30 miles per hour.

- And because he ended up next

to the rail station,

the hot air from the train driving consistently past him

dried his skin out,

and then the rest of the process just continued to go on.

In only 16 days,

this gentleman went from being alive to being a mummy.

- Our verdict? Precocious mummification.

This was an entirely natural, if extremely rare process.

We're just glad the poor guy wasn't the victim

of some strange cult.

But modern mummies still don't have anything

on the ancient Egyptians.

Some estimates say in addition to people,

the Egyptians also mummified 70 million animals.

- The Nazca lines of Peru are world famous

for their strange geometric shapes.

But on the other side of the world,

we found another set of impressive and mysterious

markings. The question is, who made them and why?

Wadi Wisad, Jordan.

In this swath of the Black Desert

is an ancient site local Bedouins call the

works of old men. It was discovered by Westerners in the

1920s when pilots flying over the desert looked down and saw

this. A series of dark circles on the desert floor,

they look like enormous wheels.

A closer look reveals the circles are made

of arranged rocks.

Some of the circles are bisected by winding strips

of stone, while others seem to have lines resembling spokes.

Aerial archeologist Dr. Robert Bewley recalls the moment

he first laid eyes on this majestic site.

- It was a wonderful experience to just fly

from one to the other to try and understand

what they were because they are unique

in this particular landscape.

None of them, as far as I'm aware, have been excavated.

They're a fascinating, but as yet,

completely unrevealed in terms of their function.

- [Tony] It's that mystery which has led some

to an extraterrestrial explanation.

- In the 1968 book "Chariots of the Gods,"

it was speculated

that the Nazca Lines were actually built as landing sites

or as a way for people to communicate

with extraterrestrials, which has led others

to speculate that perhaps the black wheels of the desert

in Jordan are built for the same purpose.

- The theory that extraterrestrials might

have been present in antiquity isn't new.

Sumerian texts speak of a group of godlike beings known

as the Anunnaki, who some say were alien visitors.

But do we see anything here that suggests

an alien influence?

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First, were one of this area's ancient civilizations

behind this?

- Jordan has fantastic archeology,

like Petra is the most amazing example.

Petra was made by the Nabataeans somewhere in the 3rd

or 4th century BCE.

- [Tony] The Nabataeans were highly resourceful engineers

who managed to build an empire in the desert,

constructing dams, canals, and reservoirs.

Problem is, these circles are way older

than the Nabataean culture.

So digging some of these up,

we can get a date based on the rock itself,

and those dates are coming back very, very early.

The earliest of these wheels date back 8,500 years.

- [Tony] We know there were nomadic tribes in the area

at the time, so could these be the remains of camps?

- Nomadic people, oftentimes they want

to band together for safety, and they want to be close,

but they also need to subdivide that area practically.

So another theory of these areas between the spokes

is that they are subdivisions of where various clans

are living within the property.

- [Tony] Another theory suggests that the wheels may

have had the same purpose proposed for another ancient

and mysterious rock structure, Stonehenge.

- If you go with the idea of Stonehenge being

an astronomical clock or an astronomical calendar,

then this could be an astronomical calendar

that we see from other indigenous people here on Earth.

Another hypothesis is that it was actually

a compass helping the ancient people navigate

through these regions during this time.

- [Tony] But we admit, these are just best guesses.

Who knows?

Perhaps they were made to communicate

with extraterrestrials, real or imagined.

- If you look at the unconformity

of the structure, it really makes it very difficult

to figure out what it initially was designed for.

So in the end, when you look at these kinds

of structures, all you have is speculation

of what actually they were used for and who used them.

- Our verdict, unexplained structures.

These circles were clearly made by ancient people

of the Middle East, but we don't know who,

let alone their purpose.

The secrets of these structures may have died

with the unknown old men the Bedouins credit

for their construction.

And that's our show for tonight.

Thank you so much for watching.

And as always, please keep those cameras rolling.

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