Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: Glowing objects that hovered in the night sky.

Determined homesteaders who disappeared without a trace.

And an engineering marvel

that may have triggered

a deadly curse.

If you've ever traveled around the United States,

you surely have seen some of the vast landscapes

that make the country so unique.

From desert mesas and towering mountain ranges

to winding rivers and dense forests,

the land is covered

with open spaces that are a sight to behold.

But amidst the majesty

of these beautiful places

are some surprisingly haunting mysteries,

frightening tales of lost civilizations,

deadly curses,

and legends of giant creatures that once roamed the plains.

What dark secrets do the remote regions of America hold?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

At 6:55 p.m.,

police in this small desert city

receive reports of a massive V-shaped

unidentified flying object in the night sky.

Over the next three hours,

the craft is witnessed by thousands of people

as it journeys southeast into the state of Arizona.

Because most of the sightings were reported

by the residents of Phoenix,

the incident is known

as the Phoenix Lights.

For me, it was just another night.

I was at home.

I was upstairs in our bedroom.

And I'm lying in bed.

I see three lights pop up.

I grab my video camera.

I run outside on the balcony.

And I did capture video of formations of these lights

or actual craft arranged in a "V" or triangle.

We're talking mile to eight miles wide,

gliding silently,

some at a distance but most at rooftop level.

Some people said they could've thrown a rock at it--

it was that close.

NICK POPE: Phoenix is a city of about five million people.

And here they are,

looking up and seeing this immense UFO

flying at fairly low altitude quite slowly.

This was a sighting on an almost unprecedented scale.

SHATNER: The giant V-shaped object reportedly hovered above Phoenix

for three hours

before it finally disappeared over the horizon.

The Phoenix Lights incident

made headlines across the country.

Many eyewitnesses were convinced that what they saw

was not a man-made airplane

but rather an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Lots of people saw this.

You have a lot of general consistency

with how this was reported.

But you had, uh, skeptics saying,

"Well, the thing that people saw going down the state

was actually just aircraft."

And then a spokesperson from the National Guard

made an announcement and said,

"Yeah, those lights that people saw over the city,

"that was actually flares that we dropped

by A-10 Warthog aircraft."

Not if you talk to the witnesses.

There were a number of witnesses who were quite adamant

that this was extraterrestrial.

And one of the witnesses, turns out,

was actually the governor of the state, Fife Symington.

As a pilot and a former Air Force officer,

uh, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble

any man-made object that I'd ever seen.

KITEI: With the Phoenix Lights phenomena,

what's really exciting is that more and more credible people

have come forward.

All I knew is that it was so beyond anything I ever imagined

being here on this Earth.

To date, the Phoenix Lights phenomena

has never been recreated

or explained.

SHATNER: While the Phoenix Lights is one

of the most extraordinary UFO encounters in history,

it is just one of many mysterious sightings

that have taken place in the state of Arizona.

According to the National UFO Reporting Center,

there have been approximately 5,000

UFO reports in Arizona,

going all the way back to the 1940s.

On July 7, 1947,

William A. Rhodes, an amateur photographer,

saw an elliptical metallic object.

He managed to capture two excellent photographs

of this object at very low altitude,

and he sent them in to The Arizona Republic newspaper,

which published them on the front page.

And if you look at these photographs,

you can see that they show a very solid-looking

metallic gray object at low altitude.

These photographs have never been debunked.

So this is a very important case.

DOLAN: There was, what I believe is, a genuine UFO crash

that occurred in Kingman, Arizona, in May of 1953.

This was apparently the recovery of a-a virtually intact

downed flying saucer.

Witnesses came out.

And, uh, this was quite a significant case.

And then probably the most famous

of the many UFO sightings Arizona has had

is the Travis Walton abduction experience

from 1975

that took place in November of that year

and made national news.

And so Arizona has its own long history

of anomalous,

uh, activity, for sure.

SHATNER: According to researchers,

Arizona is one of several locations around the globe

where UFO sightings are reported far more often than normal.

These places are referred to as UFO hot spots.

DOLAN: There do seem to be certain areas

where these unusual or unknown things

are seen more than others.

So, for example, Catalina Island off the coast of L.A.

has an incredible high-density number of very bizarre things.

It's definitely a place

where there has been documented

and recorded high level of UFO activity.

What we see in these areas is

a disproportionately large amount of UFO activity.

That's absolutely what we're seeing here in Arizona.

Arizona has played a very powerful role

in our understanding of the UFO phenomenon.

KITEI: There is a vast history in Arizona

of UFO anomalous sightings.

And people ask me, "Do you believe in UFOs?"

For someone who has had

an unexplained phenomena experience,

it isn't a belief.

It's a knowing.

SHATNER: Could Phoenix

and other areas of the American Southwest

be hot spots for unexplained phenomena?

The possibility seems even more likely

when you consider the strange tale

of a mysterious visitor

who may have had a hand

in causing a Native civilization

to simply vanish.

SHATNER: Set into the high cliffs of Mesa Verde National Park

in Southwestern Colorado

is what many consider to be America's biggest mystery.

A mystery carved in solid rock.

Cliff Palace,

as it has come to be known,

contains more than 150 chambers

connected by extensive ramps and stairways.

According to most archaeologists and historians,

it was constructed almost a thousand years ago

by a tribe of Ancestral Puebloans

known as the Anasazi.

BARNHART: The Ancestral Pueblo are a people

that grew up in the Four Corners area

of the United States.

They're actually in an area called the San Juan Basin,

where they spent most of their culture's history,

all the way into Paleo-Indian times,

which is about 12,000 years ago.

They're a culture we call Basket Makers,

and they did most of their cooking and gathering

in pit houses in weaved baskets.

I think one of the things that's the most admirable

about the Ancestral Pueblo is their ability to live

in such a resource-poor environment.

It was highland desert.

There were not many natural plants to eat.

It was very difficult to grow corn.

There were not a whole lot of animals to hunt.

And yet they found a way to live

in that niche and survive.

SHATNER: Starting in the ninth century,

the Anasazi expanded their civilization

by building massive structures throughout the Southwest--

first in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon

and later in the cliffs of Mesa Verde.

There was a big explosion

in the kind of architecture they were making

and its scale and its sophistication.

There were already

tens of thousands of little communities,

but now they started building these gigantic buildings.

We call them "great houses,"

and they were apartment complexes,

but on a scale that the Pueblo had never made.

Hundreds of individual rooms would make up

these great houses,

and they could be upwards of five stories tall.

SHATNER: For years,

people studying the Anasazi

have wondered how a simple group of people

developed into an advanced civilization so quickly.

But perhaps an even more intriguing question is

why would those same people go to such great lengths

to build incredible structures,

only to abandon them?

TOK THOMPSON: And then, during the 1200s,

very mysteriously, suddenly, it disappeared.

When archaeologists looked at these remains

at the time of the civilization disappearance,

it was very sudden, as if people just grabbed what they could

and took off.

The people just up and left.

They left behind all of their belongings.

And there is evidence that this activity

occurred very quickly.

It was almost as if they left behind ghost towns.

So what really happened to the Anasazi?

We know that drought must have been a factor,

because there were periods when there was virtually no rain.

BARNHART: We can say they left for drought reasons.

But if these perfectly good places

were good again after the drought,

why didn't they come back?

It had to be more than just a practical

"well, we can't plant here anymore."

SHATNER: If it wasn't drought that forced the Anasazi

to leave their cliff dwellings,

then what was it?

According to some anthropologists,

the answer may lie in their own mythology--

in a tale about a shadowy, supernatural figure

known as the Gambler.

ROB WEINER: The story of the Gambler tells of a very powerful figure.

He challenges all the people of the Four Corners region

to these gambling matches,

and he always wins.

And in these stories,

the people give away their goods.

Eventually, they're giving away even their homes and their food

and eventually themselves as slaves

to this powerful gambler figure.

And in their mythology,

they say the Gambler is the one who taught them

how to build these great houses

and asked them to do it, basically,

in terms of slavery.

They were then his to command.

WEINER: Eventually in the story,

the gods decide that the Gambler has overstepped.

He has become full of hubris.

He's behaving in a way he shouldn't.

So he's eventually defeated and banished from Chaco Canyon.

So when the Gambler was finally defeated,

it's said that he laid some kind of curse on the land.

He said, "I will kill you with lightning,

"and I will send war and disease among you.

"May the cold freeze you,

"may the fire burn you,

may the waters drown you."

Some groups say he opened up some kind of vortex.

And because there was so much badness and so much suffering,

everyone made the decision to leave

and never go there again.

SHATNER: Many cultures have tales of a wily trickster,

someone who cheats people out of hearth and home

before laying a curse on their village

and vanishing in a puff of smoke.

But could the Anasazi's legend of the Gambler

have actually been based on a real-life event?

I went into museum collections,

and I found hundreds of gambling pieces

excavated from Pueblo Bonito

and the other buildings in the canyon.

Things like dice or pieces used in different guessing games.

There's a lot of archaeological evidence for gambling

at Chaco Canyon.

And I do think the stories are literal

in the sense that it was a major aspect of the society.

It has to do with actual people, historical events.

SHATNER: Does archaeological evidence of gambling mean

the Anasazi legend of the Gambler

is simply a parable about the dangers of unchecked vice?

Or were the Anasazi forced to flee from their homes

after being tormented by some sort

of dark, supernatural force?

Very often, abandoned villages or abandoned sites

are held to be haunted by the ghosts.

This is probably a very widespread notion--

that when a civilization collapses,

very often, something went wrong.

And it's not purely physical-- it's something spiritual.

Today, Pueblo people will go to Chaco

and they will honor their ancestors there.

But some groups of them say

that there was a very bad thing that happened there

and that their ancestors, for a long period of time,

didn't go there and they wanted nothing to do with it.

SHATNER: Inside a narrow cave,

two miners are searching for bat guano,

a key ingredient in making fertilizer.

But as they head deeper into the darkness,

they make an unexpected discovery.

They find more than 40 human skeletons,

some of which are abnormally large.

WEATHERLY: In 1911,

giant bones were found in Lovelock Cave.

Large human skulls

and skeletons that measured between seven and eight feet

in height,

which, for ancient man,

would have been rather significant.

HUGH NEWMAN: This caused a sensation.

And one of the strange things about the discoveries

in Lovelock Cave is that the skeletons

were often found with red hair.

So it does seem like they're a different kind of people

than the Native Americans from the area.

SHATNER: Although many of the large bones found in Lovelock Cave

were unfortunately lost to time,

for decades,

a number of skulls were preserved at a local museum.

NEWMAN: Until about ten years ago,

there were four very large skulls on display

inside the museum.

These were then removed and ceremonially buried.

What's also interesting is that over 100,000 artifacts

were excavated from Lovelock Cave.

The strange thing is that many of the artifacts were huge.

Like, you have giant-sized sandals.

Like, a 15-inch-long shoe,

which is size 29 U.S.,

which would fit someone who's about nine feet tall.

And even pieces of clothing which were so big,

looked as though they were worn by giants.

SHATNER: The idea that giant bones were actually found

in a cave in Nevada

may sound far-fetched to some.

But the truth is that there were many such discoveries reported

during the Wild West.

THOMPSON: In the Southwestern United States,

there's, uh, several very strange stories

of these, um, dead corpses or skeletons

being found regularly.

In terms of the reports of giants,

this is a compelling motif.

People were fascinated by this idea

of a giant race that had lived here previously.

And this connects to a lot of biblical belief

that tended to be fairly literal back in the day.

The Bible talks about back when there was a race of giants

that lived on the Earth.

And so, for many people in the Wild West,

when you see, um, some skeletons dug out of the earth

that seem to corroborate this,

this was a-an affirmation

of literal biblical beliefs as well.

SHATNER: Is it really possible that a race of giants

once inhabited the Old West,

as the numerous discoveries

reported throughout the 1800s suggest?

And if so,

was evidence of these giants recovered in Lovelock Cave?

Perhaps a clue can be found by examining the history

of the indigenous Paiute people,

who have inhabited the Nevada desert for centuries.

WEATHERLY: A woman named Sarah Winnemucca,

who was a descendant of Chief Winnemucca of the Paiutes,

wrote a book in the 1800s and recounted her people's battle

with this race of giants,

the Si-Te-Cah.

Now, what's fascinating about this is that

she says that it was an actual battle--

not part of tribal lore or mythology

but something that actually occurred.

The Si-Te-Cah were red-haired

and lived in the mountains near the Paiute nation

and they were cannibals.

According to the Paiutes,

they naturally grew tired of being cannibalized,

and they confronted these giants.

CHAD LEWIS: A war was started between the giants

and the Paiute people.

For three years, they battled one another.

The last of the giants

holed themselves up in the Lovelock Cave.

And the Paiute people stuffed the openings

with a bunch of brush and firewood

and lit the place on fire.

And that was the end of the red-haired giant cannibals.

NEWMAN: What's also interesting is that,

when the discovery was made in 1911 at Lovelock Cave,

they also found evidence of extreme burning

which took place near the entrance to the cave.

So this matches the story almost precisely.

And, again, we have evidence of red hair,

because Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

actually saved some of the hair

and sewed it into a mourning dress,

which she used when she gave lectures.

And so the story of the Paiutes

defeating the giants then suddenly became a reality.

SHATNER: For many, the evidence in support of the Paiute story

about the red-headed giants is compelling,

not only because of what was found in Lovelock Cave

but also because there have been reports

of giant bones being discovered in other places

throughout the Western Nevada desert.

NEWMAN: If you go back and look

through the records, you can find numerous accounts

of bones, skeletons and giant-sized artifacts

that have been found in this area.

In 1904, it was reported

that an 11-foot-tall skeleton was found,

and then we have accounts in 1931

of an eight-and-a-half-foot skeleton that was reported.

And so, the fact is, you have the stories,

you have the skeletal evidence

and you have the artifacts

and even the legends that prove this was a real story

of giants in this area.

THOMPSON: To be sure, the Paiutes believed this to be a historical truth.

People might dismiss them as just folklore.

But again, who's to say that it didn't happen?

Of course, there were ethnic conflicts.

So, this has been a real important part

of many, many peoples' historical beliefs

and how they think about their own history.

The thought of red-haired, man-eating giants

roaming the American Southwest is a bit unnerving.

But there's another, more recent story

from the deserts of Nevada that is also unsettling,

because some believe that an attempt to harness

the raging waters of the Colorado River

may have awakened a deadly curse.

NARRATOR: With the country in the grips of the Great Depression,

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

presides over the dedication ceremony

of one of the most extraordinary engineering projects

in United Sates history:

the Hoover Dam.

McBRIDE: There were thousands of people.

And at that time,

the people who came to listen to the president dedicate it

understood that it was more than just a dam.

They were standing on a structure

that they had built with their own blood and sweat and tears.

We are here to celebrate the completion

of the greatest dam in the world.

SHATNER: Named for President Herbert Hoover,

who was in office when construction began in 1931,

the Hoover Dam is located in the Black Canyon region

of the Colorado River.

Officials believed that a dam in this area

could help manage flooding of the Colorado River,

provide a much-needed reservoir of fresh water

and be a source of hydroelectric power.

There was just one problem.

In order to tame the Colorado River,

the engineers would have to construct

a more ambitious dam

than had ever been created before.

McBRIDE: Here you have the Colorado River,

one of the wildest and most untamed waterways in the world,

and you want to tame it, you want to control it

so that you can provide dependable water storage,

hydroelectric power, irrigation.

MICHAEL DENNIN: Well, when I think of the Hoover Dam,

I'm impressed that we actually moved the river

to build the dam.

And they had to divert the river through tunnels,

through the mountainsides on either side.

So, you have a dry bed that you can build the dam on,

and then bringing the river back just amazes me.

SHATNER: Built in just five years,

two years ahead of schedule,

the Hoover Dam is a staggering

726 feet tall.

At the time of its construction,

it was the tallest dam ever built,

the costliest water project ever undertaken

and home to the largest hydroelectric power plant

in the world.

McBRIDE: Never before, ever in history,

had there been that much concrete placed

and poured in one spot.

And enough concrete went into the construction of the dam

that you could build a two-lane highway

from San Francisco to New York.

SHATNER: The Hoover Dam changed the face of the nation,

allowing for the explosive growth

of cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles,

and fueling the country's recovery

from the Great Depression.

But some have suggested that the Hoover Dam represents

not just an engineering success story

but also humanity's desire

to bend the forces of nature to our will.

McBRIDE: The construction engineer Walker Young

was widely quoted at one time as saying,

"The Lord put that canyon there,

all we had to do was find it."

That speaks to a very, kind of,

Judeo-Christian philosophy

that human beings

were the paramount creatures

and so, we're going to impose our needs on nature

and we're going to control nature.

LYNNE McNEILL: The flooding power of rivers

is something that humankind has been contending with

since there has been humankind.

And, in a lot of ways,

the more we're able to restrain

what have often been understood

as the unrestrainable forces of nature,

the more we suspect that maybe something superhuman

is taking place there.

SHATNER: Was the construction of the Hoover Dam

motivated by our need to harness,

control and ultimately have power over Mother Nature?

There are many who believe that to be the case,

and as evidence, they point to a curious memorial

that was placed next to the dam:

an intricate celestial star map,

intended to send a message to future generations.

McBRIDE: The celestial star map

is an amazing piece of art deco

where, laid into the ground, is a star map

with brass discs named after certain stars.

And the purpose of that was really just one thing.

It was to fix,

in astrological time,

the very moment--

the month, the day, the minute, the second--

that Hoover Dam was-was dedicated.

SHATNER: The builders of the Hoover Dam certainly believed

that their creation would be an everlasting testament

to their triumph over the Colorado River.

But what happens when the forces of nature defy

our attempts to control them

in ways that we can't foresee?

Lake Mead is the man-made body of water

created by the Hoover Dam,

and what's interesting is that Lake Mead

is actually one of the most deadly

recreational areas that we have in this country.

People drown mysteriously.

So many people end up dying there.

One of the fascinating things about Lake Mead

are these methane or gas pits.

And methane basically comes when vegetation decomposes.

Now, one of the things that Lake Mead did

is cover up a lot of vegetation,

because you make a lake where there wasn't a lake before

and what you had before was stuff growing.

So you can get these periodic releases

of the methane gas

that's been generated under the water

from the vegetation decomposing.

BARA: When the methane bubbles up to the surface,

what can happen is if a boat is over that methane bubble,

it basically will lose all buoyancy

and just sink like a rock to the bottom of the lake.

So, by building the lake over this land,

we may, in fact, have created a very dangerous situation,

and sort of set up the lake itself

to basically be a death trap.

I think if you reflect back to when the engineers

were making the Hoover Dam,

it's often portrayed as trying to control nature.

The focus was on the dam,

and we probably weren't even asking questions

about the larger impact on nature

'cause it would have been too hard

to calculate or worry about.

The challenge with engineering and science

is always the unintended consequences.

For the most part, people are driven by this desire

to make things better.

SHATNER: Did the ambitious plan to create the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead

overlook the possible consequences

of messing with Mother Nature?

The same might be said for a group

of ill-prepared English settlers

whose pioneering spirit

may have cost them their lives.

SHATNER: More than 400 years ago,

this was the site of a colony called Roanoke,

the first English settlement in North America.

Roanoke is known as the Lost Colony

because it was mysteriously abandoned in 1590,

and the colonists vanished without a trace.

The Lost Colony remains this mystery

that's at the very heart of the origin of our nation.

People remain fascinated by Roanoke

because we know so little about the place.

We know what happened at Jamestown.

We know what happened at Plymouth.

But Roanoke is this mystery

because we don't know what happened.

When we think about the founding of the United States of America,

we think of it in this fairly linear way,

that colonists showed up,

they settled, they move West: America.

And really, it turns out that there were a number

of false starts in how this country got started.

And one of those was the colony at Roanoke.

This was a group of people who showed up

and were ready to settle.

But what happened to that colony

is one of the big unanswered questions of American history.

SHATNER: What happened to the Roanoke colonists?

Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the events

in the late 16th century

that led to their fateful disappearance.

LAWLER: In the 1580s, England was a very small,

poor, struggling island

that really wanted to get in

on the game of colonizing the Americas,

'cause that's where the money was.

GABRIEL-POWELL: The English were looking at the Spanish ships

coming back laden with gold and various commodities from

their empire, if you like, in Mexico,

South America, Florida,

and of course, that was making the Spanish very powerful.

Essentially, it was a case of,

"If we don't find our own source of wealth in this new world,

we could be, sort of, overrun by our enemies."

SHATNER: In 1587, an English mapmaker named John White

was commissioned to found a new colony on Roanoke Island,

which had been claimed by a British expedition

to the New World two years earlier.

After an arduous two-month voyage

across the Atlantic Ocean,

White and 117 colonists

landed on Roanoke Island.

LAWLER: The people who chose to come along

on this ill-fated expedition

were middle-class people from London.

So, they were eager to find new lands,

because to have land in England meant everything.

That's what gave you status.

But they knew they needed more supplies

and more colonists in order to succeed, in order to thrive.

So, John White decided to return to England

in order to get those needed supplies and colonists.

SHATNER: On August 25th, 1587,

only three months after first arriving on Roanoke,

John White set sail for England.

He planned to return with aid in less than six months,

but a series of conflicts with the Spanish navy

would delay White's return mission

for three long years.

In August of 1590, John White returns to Roanoke Island.

They anchor offshore.

And when they arrive, it's dark,

and it's too late for them to go ashore,

but John White is happy

because he sees a fire in the distance

and he assumes that the settlers are there waiting for him,

maybe even have seen his ship

and have lit a bonfire in order to guide him in.

SHATNER: The next morning, White came ashore,

expecting to find the colonists there to welcome him back.

But to his surprise, there was no sign of them.

The entire settlement was completely abandoned.

GABRIEL-POWELL: John White gets back to Roanoke,

but there's no sign of anyone,

and he finds all the houses have been taken down.

And in their place is a very, very well-built,

defensible fort, so a little bit of a mystery.

You've got this new fort that wasn't there in 1587

when he last saw them,

and the place is deserted.

Where have they gone?

SHATNER: Eventually, John White came across

a cryptic clue as to the whereabouts of the colonists.

He found the word "Croatoan"

mysteriously carved into a wooden post.

John White told the colonists when he left in 1587

that if they were to abandon the settlement, that they should

leave a secret token, as he called it, behind

so that he would know where to find them,

and this seemed to be the answer.

Here was "Croatoan" carved onto the post.

"Croatoan" was what we call Hatteras today,

an island about 50 miles to the south.

It's also the name of the tribe of Native Americans

who lived on the island.

SHATNER: But when John White prepared to set sail

to search for the colonists,

a storm blew in and damaged his ship,

and he was forced to return to England.

Unfortunately, John White

was never able to return to the New World to search

for the lost colonists.

But in recent years, archaeologists have carried out

extensive excavations to try and solve

this 400-year-old mystery.

Archaeologists have been digging on Hatteras,

what was called Croatoan,

and they have come up with some remarkable evidence.

The first, most important piece of evidence found

was a gold ring that was made in Elizabethan times.

This was big news, because it seemed

to indicate the possibility that at least one of the colonists

had been on Croatoan Island.

And then another competing team was digging on Hatteras Island,

and what they found was really intriguing.

They actually discovered the hilt

of an Elizabethan-era sword

that was found in a Native American village.

Now, whether or not this is something that belonged

to a lost colonist remains to be seen.

GABRIEL-POWELL: It's possible some did survive long enough

to have a family and that there would have been assimilation

with the Croatoans.

And yet, considering how much archaeology

that's been done, we have no skeletons.

Where are they?

That is a mystery.

McNEILL: If we had found dead bodies scattered

or obvious signs of a siege or an attack,

that would be the answer that we need.

We get this word, "Croatoan."

But did people actually make it there?

Where did they go?

What happened to this group of settlers?

It's the ambiguity

that really keeps this legend alive.

SHATNER: Contractors begin uncovering

a series of strange artifacts

while renovating a string of 18th-century houses in the area.

Mummified animals,

dismembered dolls, broken knife blades,

strange bottles filled with human hair,

bent nails and silver pins,

and all concealed within hidden nooks and voids

throughout the old homes.

The artifacts are so unnerving that many began to wonder

who had placed them throughout the homes,

and perhaps more importantly, why?

After looking at a-a number of instances of,

of these either intentional deposits

or objects that were located in strange places--

uh, shoes, um, animal parts,

bottles with, um, unusual contents in them--

certain patterns that seem to be prevalent

throughout the area, uh, became apparent.

We see them in England and in the Netherlands

and in Germany where a lot of the people

who settled in New York State originally came from.

And so, it's clear that people brought their folk beliefs

and folk religion with them

when they moved across the Atlantic Ocean.

Evidently, in all these cases, there was a very strong belief

in, uh, the agency of evil

to affect people's everyday lives,

particularly in a number of stories

that related to fears of illness

or of the potential for curses

to access houses through openings,

uh, particularly, uh, through fireplaces,

doors, windows, that kind of thing.

Yeah, the more you look, the more you find these objects,

and it becomes increasingly clear

that the numbers of objects that we have found,

which go into the thousands,

is really just the tip of the iceberg.

SHATNER: But were these strange objects carefully collected and hidden

in order to invoke a deadly curse

or as a means of preventing one?

I think what people were really focused on

was finding ways of turning that harmful magic around

and either repelling it or trapping it

or thwarting it in some way from getting into their houses.

So, the local, sort of, white witch or wizard

could be paid to produce a charm for you,

and the charm would eventually be concealed on your property

as a trap, essentially, to impale any negative energies

coming into the house looking to attack you

and stop it from going further into the house

where it might do you harm.

SHATNER: While such arcane practices

may seem like the stuff of fairy tales and fantasy,

is it possible that mystical talisman and other charms

can actually protect people

from the deadly effects of curses?

JONATHAN YOUNG: Things that are mysterious,

if we put it in the right narrative,

then we have a semblance of control or understanding,

even though we made up the story.

The explanations may not be very sound,

but they still give us some comfort.

WHITEHEAD: Maybe these curses are created by us, by our imagination,

by us trying to deal with the mystery of nature,

and then it actually comes to life

because we bring the curse to life

by attaching our mind to it, collectively.

So, just what should we make

of these odd and unsettling tales?

Could the strange lights hovering over Phoenix, Arizona,

be aliens or simply aircraft?

Are the massive bones found in the Nevada desert

evidence that a race of giants is more than just a legend?

And how can we explain the disappearance

of not one but two groups of people

who seemed to vanish without a trace?

Well, for now, these mysteries from all across America

will remain unexplained.

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