Original subtitles

[tense music]

- [Danny] Mysteries can be buried anywhere.

Under the earth,

[volcano blasts]

[sonar beeps] beneath the sea,

[plane whooshing]

or even right under our own feet.

[coins jingling]

And when we stumble upon them,

sometimes what we find can change history.

Tonight, secrets from the skies,

like a flying predator that dealt death from above.

- This was a massive killer.

- They've never seen anything like this.

[pterosaur caws]

- [Danny] To a mysterious rock that fell from the stars.

- It turns out to be really heavy.

He's shocked,

and he thinks that maybe this stone is full of gold.

- But this is not made of gold.

It's something even better and more rare.

- [Danny] To a strange skull found in a cave

- It's abnormally large and bulbous.

The eyes seem to be set far apart.

I mean, this is right out of a horror movie.

- Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.

[mysterious music]

[tense music]

- It's 2014 in Cincinnati, and a widow named Carol Knight

is going through her late husband's belongings

in his office.

Much of what she's finding is exactly what you would expect.

Some papers, an old, well-worn pair of sneakers,

that kind of thing.

- And as she's looking in the back of the closet,

she comes upon this white bag.

She lifts it up, and she can hear it make a loud clank.

- She opens it,

and inside, it's loaded with this technical equipment.

There are these metal coils

that run to these odd-looking sensors.

There's like straps, tools, and a small, 1960s film camera.

Usually, stuff like this might just get tossed in the trash

or maybe donated to Goodwill or something.

- [Danny] But these aren't just random items.

They belong to Carol's late husband,

legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong.

- Obviously, in the astronaut hierarchy,

Neil Armstrong sits at the very top.

He's the first person to set foot on the Moon,

and in July 1969, 650 million people

huddled around their television sets

to watch that moment happen.

[people cheering] [intense music]

- Obviously, any artifact associated with him

or the Apollo 11 mission is going to be extremely valuable.

- [Hakeem] After he dies in 2012, Carol gives curators

from the National Air and Space Museum access to his office.

They come in and they collect anything

that they think might be important for the museum.

- [Martin] Two years later,

when Carol finds this bag in the closet,

she doesn't know what to make of it.

So before throwing it all away,

Carol calls the museum again

and sends curator Alan Needell

a photograph of the contents of the bag.

- [Danny] When Alan sees the photos,

he can't believe his eyes.

- [Hakeem] This looks like stuff from the Apollo 11 mission,

and this means that these items

have been to the Moon.

- [Neil] That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

- Everybody knows the Westinghouse TV camera

that took this famous shot.

- [Danny] But there was a second camera,

a 16mm mounted on top of the lunar module.

- [Martin] Armstrong and Aldrin used this camera to

film themselves while they're tearing around the Moon,

taking samples of Moon dust and Moon rocks,

and planting the American flag.

- [Danny] So how did this priceless piece of history

end up buried in a closet for more than 40 years?

- [Paul] It seems that nobody but Armstrong

knew that this camera was in the closet,

because it wasn't supposed

to even come back to Earth in the first place.

- [Hakeem] When it comes to space travel,

there is no more valuable commodity than mass.

They even have a saying: "Every ounce matters."

- [Martin] When Apollo 11 returns to Earth,

they come back with 50 pounds of Moon rocks

that they didn't leave Cape Canaveral with.

So, they had to leave an equivalent weight

of items behind to compensate for the rocks.

- [Danny] But Armstrong didn't want to leave

the prized camera on the Moon.

[crowd cheering]

- [Paul] It seems that Armstrong makes an executive decision

to take the 16mm film camera back,

and he keeps this secret.

He doesn't tell NASA,

he doesn't even tell his wife for decades.

- [Danny] And now, Armstrong's secret camera

could turn out to be worth a fortune.

- [Geoffrey] Buzz Aldrin's Apollo 11 jacket

sells for $2.8 million in 2022,

[gavel slams]

and bags used to collect rock samples

sell for $2 million at auction,

and they don't even have moon rock in them anymore.

So, can you imagine what this camera would sell for?

[camera shutter clicking]

- [Hakeem] Carol Knight, however, does not cash it in.

Instead, she donates the camera

to the Space Museum for public display.

You can still go see it today,

and it helps to ensure that Armstrong's legacy

will carry on.

- Uncovering a priceless NASA relic in a closet is one thing,

but imagine literally stumbling over something

even more valuable that fell from the sky.

[tense music]

- The Maryborough Park in Melbourne, Australia,

is right in the middle of the Goldfields region,

which is where the 19th century gold rush boomed.

Its golden age is over, but amateur gold rushers

and tourists still try their luck,

hoping to get the odd nugget.

- In 2015, David Hole is walking around the park,

not expecting to find much.

He digs here and there for fun,

but as he's walking through some thick, red clay,

he practically trips over a medium-sized rock.

- He wonders if something might be under it.

He tries to move it out of the way,

but it turns out to be really heavy.

He's shocked,

and he thinks that maybe this stone is full of gold.

- David excitedly lugs the stone back home,

and once he's there, he breaks out his angle grinder

to crack it open and get to the prize inside.

[grinder screeching]

But as he goes to cut it open,

the angle grinder can't even make a dent.

- [Hugo] Then he tries smashing it with a sledgehammer,

[sledgehammer slams]

but the sledge just bounces right back off.

He tries acid, but again, no dice.

[acid sizzling]

- He's never seen anything like it.

This thing has not a scratch on it.

Whatever it actually is, it's clearly no gold nugget.

- Unlike the rock itself,

David's dreams of a big payday are shattered.

So he brings it to the Melbourne Museum

to see if anyone can figure out what exactly it is.

- [Danny] Museum scientists examine the indestructible lump

and have both good and bad news for David.

- [Paul] The bad news is that, as David suspected,

this is not made of gold.

But the good news

is that it's something even better and more rare.

It's a meteorite.

- Over the last 37 years, this museum curator

has examined thousands of rocks

people thought were meteorites,

but so far, only two had delivered on that promise.

So finding a meteorite is extremely rare.

- [Danny] To unlock the secrets inside,

scientists need to look deeper.

- [Hugo] Carbon dating puts the rock's arrival on Earth

somewhere between about 100 to 1,000 years ago.

But to get the full story,

the lab has to crack this rock open,

which is easier said than done.

- [Paul] The outer shells of meteorites are hardened

by their passage through the Earth's atmosphere,

which generates an enormous amount of heat.

It's like putting them in a super forge,

the same way we would harden steel.

- To crack it open, they need the hardest tool they have.

It takes a diamond blade saw to finally cut into the rock.

- [Paul] What they find inside is a blend of rare minerals

and a high concentration of iron.

Based on its makeup,

experts believe that it came from the huge asteroid belt

that sits between Mars and Jupiter

and may have even been part of a core

of a planet that failed to form.

- [Danny] Incredibly, David's rock turns out to be

far more valuable than gold.

- [Hugo] Because they're so rare, meteorites can be worth

anywhere between $10 to $1,000 per gram.

This one weighs 37 pounds, or about 17,000 grams,

so it could be worth millions.

- [Kavitha] For now, David's meteorite is on display

at the Melbourne Museum.

Time will tell if David decides

to finally cash in on his find or keep it in the museum

as the world's most indestructible nest egg.

lost in World War II,

they uncover a mystery no one expected.

[tense music]

- In the spring of 1991,

explorers from the Scientific Search Project

of New York City are scouring the ocean floor

off Fort Lauderdale,

looking for gold from old Spanish galleons.

- Graham Hawkes is leading a search

using a small submarine with a remote camera,

[lens whirring]

but as he patrols the sea floor,

he sees something that distracts him.

- What Hawkes and his team have just found

is the wreckage of a World War II-era,

TBM Avenger torpedo bomber,

and it's not alone.

- They find not two, not three, but five Avenger bombers

all on the bottom of the Atlantic

and all within about a mile of each other.

They seem too close together for it to be a coincidence.

The only logical conclusion seems to be

that they were flying together

and then all went down at the same time.

[water splashing]

- [Danny] To the crew's historians,

the clues point to a single infamous case,

the disappearance of Flight 19.

- [John] In December 1945,

three months after the end of World War II,

five Avenger bombers take off

from the Fort Lauderdale naval base

on a routine training mission.

The lead plane starts experiencing compass trouble,

and the pack gets disoriented.

[switches clicking] [radar beeping]

- [Andrew] Radio contact with the naval base

in Fort Lauderdale becomes fainter and fainter.

The base is struggling

to track the position of the planes.

It's almost as if something is interrupting

or interfering with the signal.

- Eventually, radio contact with all five planes is lost.

[airplane engines whirring] [intense music]

Night falls, and the pilots and planes of Flight 19

are never heard from again.

- [Danny] The planes vanish without a trace in a vast,

merciless area of ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle.

- [Martin] No other incident

fuels the mystique of the Bermuda Triangle

more than the loss of Flight 19.

So, solving that mystery while looking for Spanish gold

could be the only thing luckier

than actually finding Spanish gold.

- [Danny] The find is too compelling to ignore,

so Hawkes' team takes a closer look at the planes.

- They need to look for identifying markers,

so they comb through the videos,

and first, they make out the letters F and T,

which means that these planes did take off

from Fort Lauderdale, just like Flight 19.

- [Andrew] They also make out the number 28 on the tail

of one plane, which partially matches up

to one of the missing Flight 19 planes.

So at this point, they're very excited.

- [John] Then they find more tail numbers,

but these do not line up with Flight 19,

and at least some of these planes are under-armed,

which suggests that they're actually older planes

than the ones who flew Flight 19.

- [Danny] As Hawkes and his team uncover more evidence,

it starts to tell a different story,

one that only deepens the mystery.

- [Geoffrey] It turns out that not only is this not

the Flight 19 group, but these planes, which crashed

basically on top of each other,

didn't even crash at the same time.

- [Andrew] These crashes span years, going back to 1943.

So now, instead of solving one Bermuda Triangle mystery,

researchers now have two unsolved mysteries.

[water bubbling]

- The Bermuda Triangle isn't the only place

famous aircraft vanish.

Sometimes, they turn up in the last place you'd expect.

[tense music]

- [John] It's the fall of 2023, and business partners

Dustin Riach and Jason Rivas

have just popped the lock on a storage unit

in Van Nuys, California.

They won an online auction

for the contents of the unit, sight unseen.

- Rivas calls the gamble, "shooting dice in the dark."

These storage units can come packed with old clothes

or holiday decorations,

or sometimes even hazardous materials.

On occasion, though,

they might actually have something valuable.

- They pop open some boxes,

and they find some nitrate film rolls from the 1800s

and the 1900s, which might be worth a couple of bucks,

but it's really not anything of profound value.

- [Paul] Then they start opening some garbage bags,

and Jason pulls out a model of a spaceship.

- They realize that this is a model of the USS Enterprise

and figure that it might have some value to Star Trek fans.

- [Danny] Dustin and Jason decide to list it on eBay

to see how much they can get for it.

- [Paul] As soon as the auction goes live,

people start freaking out because the base of this model

has a business card with the name of the model maker,

Richard C. Datin.

- Richard C. Datin is nothing short

of a legend in the Star Trek community.

In fact, he built the original model

of the Starship Enterprise in 1966.

He built the one that goes soaring across the screen

in the opening credits of Gene Roddenberry's series.

- [Danny] But that original piece of Trekkie treasure

has been missing for decades,

and fans online think this could be the original prototype.

- Back in 1979,

the makers of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"

borrowed the model from Gene Roddenberry,

the show's creator, and never gave it back,

even though Gene would send letter after letter,

begging for its return.

- Dustin and Jason pull the item from eBay

and bring it to the Heritage Auction House for verification.

Sure enough, this is the original Enterprise model

that's been missing for over 40 years,

and its value is estimated at $800,000.

- [Danny] To this day, nobody knows

how the model ended up in the storage unit,

but the discovery sends shockwaves

through the Star Trek universe, and it doesn't take long

for the original creator's family to step in.

- [Adam] Now, even though the show's creator,

Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, his son, Gene Jr.,

hears about the model, and he wants it back.

I mean, his dad didn't give it away.

His dad loaned it out.

He feels it should definitely be part of his estate.

- [Martin] Rivas and Riach strike a deal to return

the model to Roddenberry's son

in exchange for $500,000.

It's not $800,000,

but it's a lot more than they expected to get

out of the model when they posted it on eBay.

- [Danny] Exploring the ocean can reveal strange things.

In 2022, divers uncovered a tragic piece of space history.

[tense music]

- It's 2022 and underwater explorer Mike Barnette

and wreck specialist Jimmy Gadomski

are diving off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

[water splashing]

They're part of a documentary crew

searching for a downed rescue plane

that went missing in the 1940s.

- The particular aircraft that they're looking for

is a PBM Mariner flying boat.

It's got a large superstructure,

and it'll be easily recognizable

because of its top-mounted inverted gull wings.

- On the ocean floor,

Mike spots a shape that's buried under coral sand,

and his gut is leading him to believe that

it's part of a wing of that PBM Mariner plane.

So he decides to check it out.

- [Paul] They use blowers to delicately remove sand

and coral fragments from the object,

but as the sand blows off,

they see something that doesn't make sense.

- They uncover what appears to be a series of white bricks

or cobblestones mounted to the object.

- Even though it appears to have been buried for a long time,

these bricks are still very white

with no signs of any rust or oxidation.

They seem to be made of a composite

that neither of them recognize.

- [Danny] Mike realizes this isn't a World War II plane,

but the location of the wreck gives him another idea.

- [Paul] They're just offshore from Cape Canaveral,

which launches rockets all the time,

and parts of rockets, like boosters,

are designed to fall back into the ocean from 50 miles up.

But this thing is flat and wide,

and so it can't be a rocket booster.

- [Kavitha] As he heads back to shore,

Mike calls a former astronaut friend

named Bruce Melnick to look at the video.

It takes Melnick all of two seconds

to recognize those white bricks.

- [Martin] These are heat tiles

of the type that were used on the Space Shuttle

to protect it from heat during reentry.

- [Danny] Then, Melnick says something

that stops everyone in their tracks.

- Melnick is sure that if there's a big piece

of a Space Shuttle just off the coast of Florida,

it belonged to Challenger.

[rocket whooshing] [pensive music]

- [Mission Control] Challenger, go with throttle up.

[crowd cheering]

[explosion blasts]

- [Martin] When Space Shuttle Challenger detonates

in the skies above Cape Canaveral in January 1986,

it sends the entire country into mourning.

It kills all seven crew members,

including school teacher Christa McAuliffe,

who was supposed to be the first civilian in space.

- Obviously, there's a scramble

to see what caused this horrific tragedy.

So the Navy undertakes

the biggest salvage operation in history,

but it's an incredibly difficult mission

because debris is spread across 500 square miles of ocean.

- [Paul] They collect over 100 tons of wreckage,

and that wreckage, combined with film footage,

reveals that the fault is an O-ring,

a little rubber gasket in a rocket booster

that was responsible for triggering the explosion.

- [Danny] Mike brings footage from his dive

to NASA Program Director Mike Ciannilli,

hoping to confirm that what they found

truly is a piece of the Challenger Shuttle.

- And I'm always a little cautious

because, as you know, we've launched rockets

for over 70 years, so there's a lot of objects out there,

but, you know, after looking at

the object in greater detail,

you've discovered Challenger.

[sighs] I certainly can't thank you enough

for showing me this.

It's powerful.

- [Martin] Everyone who was alive and conscious at the time

remembers where they were when it happened.

Seeing this artifact

is enough to bring you right back to that moment in history.

- Lots of deadly things can descend from above,

but few are as frightening as one giant predator

that once ruled over Canada's skies.

[tense music]

- In 1992, a professional nature photographer

explores the snow-covered terrain in Alberta, Canada.

As she scans the blank, white canvas

and contemplates her next shot,

she spots something odd on the ground.

And as she gets up close,

she realizes it could be a fossil.

- She's curious.

She gently chips away at the frozen soil

all around this object,

and sure enough, she begins to see

a massive form take shape.

- It looks like a long neck, gigantic wing bones,

and a rib cage.

Now, she's no dinosaur expert,

but she does feel like she's stumbled

onto something special.

- [Micha] She calls the Royal Tyrrell Museum,

and once their paleontologists look at the specimen,

they determine it's a kind of pterosaur

known as Quetzalcoatlus, a giant, flying reptile

that once ruled the skies 77 million years ago.

- It's a magnificent find,

but in the fossil world, this is old news

since the species was already discovered in Texas

back in 1972.

So the fossils are exhumed and basically forgotten about.

- [Danny] Sometimes, however,

even the experts can miss something.

- In 2019, another team of paleontologists

pulls the fossils out of mothballs to take a second look.

But this time, looking at the morphology,

they see something doesn't add up.

- [Don] The neck on this specimen is shorter

and wider than the Quetzalcoatlus from Texas.

They've never seen anything like this.

This is a new, badass species of a super predator.

- [Sami] Like her Texas cousin, this was a massive killer.

We're talking a 32-foot wingspan,

which is equivalent to a four-seater Cessna plane.

The head was huge,

about three times longer than the actual length of its body.

In fact, one expert described it as

a giant, flying murder head.

[pterosaur caws]

- [Micah] This ancient, flying eating machine

is dubbed Cryodrakon boreas,

Greek for frozen dragon of the north wind.

- [Danny] But around the lab and in the press,

it becomes known as the Ice Dragon.

- [Don] It likely fed on a diet of lizards and baby dinos,

but because this Ice Dragon had no teeth,

it would swallow prey whole using its powerful neck muscles.

- [Danny] But for this particular Ice Dragon,

dinner didn't go as planned.

- [Sami] The Alberta specimen is covered in battle scars.

In fact, one of the leg fossils

has a velociraptor tooth embedded into it.

Experts can't tell if this is what killed the Ice Dragon,

but what they can tell is that it died young,

probably a teenager.

- [Don] It's the first of its kind ever found in Canada

and one of the best-preserved flying reptiles

ever discovered on the continent,

taken out before it had realized

its full, terrifying potential.

- [Danny] For centuries,

people have looked to the skies for answers.

But in Mexico,

one teenager finds something buried underground

that seems to come from the stars.

[tense music]

- It's the 1930s, and somewhere in Copper Canyon,

about 100 miles south of Chihuahua, Mexico,

a teenage girl on vacation

stumbles across an abandoned mine.

- This area is littered

with these old abandoned mine shafts,

and the girl's parents tell her to stay away from them

'cause they could be dangerous.

Naturally, her curiosity gets the best of her.

She goes in, and she's crawling through the dust

and the dirt, even though the ceiling of one of these mines

could collapse in on her at any moment.

- At the end of one tunnel,

she comes across something that stops her in her tracks.

In the corner of this dark, dusty cavern,

she makes out what looks like a body.

- And as she gets closer to it,

she sees it is an adult skeleton.

[dramatic music]

- [Danny] As she continues looking around,

she notices something chilling.

- Next to that skeleton is a mound of dirt,

and sticking out from it is this small,

misshapen skeleton hand,

and that little hand is holding hands

with the first skeleton.

I mean, this is right out of a horror movie.

- [Don] Still unafraid, this 13-year-old girl

starts uncovering the second skeleton.

The first thing she notices

is the body is the size of a child.

- But when she gets to the skull,

she can tell that it looks strange.

Compared to the rest of the body,

the skull is unnaturally large and bulbous,

with wide-set eyes.

It's so strange that she just has to have it.

- [Don] She winds up taking both skulls home with her

and tucks them away in a storage area

where they stay undisturbed for decades.

- [Danny] After the girl passes away,

the skulls end up in the hands

of family friends who turn over the specimens

to a researcher named Lloyd Pye.

- [Don] Pye is not your typical biologist or researcher.

He's an author and proponent of what's called

the intervention theory, which basically argues

that aliens visited the Earth and, among other things,

genetically contributed to modern humans.

- [Paul] As Pye studies the skull, he gets very excited.

He remarks that the bulbous head and offset eyes

are consistent with alleged eyewitness accounts

of so-called gray aliens.

Gray aliens are those stereotypical, big-headed,

big-eyed aliens often depicted in science fiction.

- [Danny] Pye is convinced that the skull is not human

and names it the Starchild Skull.

- [Micah] He looks at the skull and wonders now

if this might be evidence of an alien-human hybrid,

essentially the missing link that he's been looking for.

He raises money to do carbon dating

and DNA testing of the skull.

- [Hakeem] When his test results come back,

Pye claims that they show the skull

dates back to 900 years ago.

The sample shows lots of human DNA,

but Pye claims that there are elements

that the lab can't account for,

and Pye argues that these holes in the DNA sample

must be where the alien contributions are.

- [Don] Eventually, mainstream scientists

are able to retest samples from the skull

and fill in some of those previous gaps

in the skull's DNA.

Turns out, they disagree with Lloyd.

- [Micah] They argue that the Starchild Skull

is not evidence of a gray alien-human hybrid.

Instead, they say that it's a male human

with a birth defect,

probably like hydrocephalus,

informerly known as water on the brain,

which can cause the kinds of features

that appear in this skull.

- But Pye and his followers are not backing down,

and no scientist or evidence

is going to dissuade them from their beliefs.

- [Don] Lloyd fights this battle right until he dies in 2013,

eight decades after the Starchild Skull is pulled

from that abandoned mineshaft outside Chihuahua.

As for his followers,

they believe the truth is still out there.

- Almost a century later,

another teenager makes an incredible find,

one that lies far beyond our solar system.

[tense music]

- [Paul] It's 2019,

and 17-year-old, aspiring astrophysicist

and Star Wars superfan, Wolf Cukier,

has landed his dream job as a NASA intern.

In addition to standard intern duties

like fetching coffee and making copies,

he's tasked with analyzing data of variations

in star brightness using NASA's TESS satellite.

- [Don] TESS stands for

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite,

which is a fancy acronym for a very powerful space telescope

that is shot into orbit in 2018

to look for planets outside our solar system.

- [Hakeem] He's asked to comb through brightness data,

also known as a star's light curve,

which is essentially its brightness versus time.

These aren't pretty pictures of stars.

These are pretty much just dots on the page.

If the brightness doesn't change,

the dot stays in the same place.

If it gets dimmer, the dot goes down.

For the scientists, this is kind of like grunt work,

but for Wolf, as an intern,

he is in heaven.

- [Paul] On day three of his internship,

Wolf stumbles upon a light curve

that gets his blood pumping.

- [Hakeem] It's a two-star system

that sits in the Pictor constellation.

As he's looking at this light curve,

he sees a dip that comes in intervals.

This represents the star dimming

and then coming back to full brightness.

That suggests a third object orbiting both of these stars.

- [Don] An excited Wolf leaps to his feet,

straightens his name tag,

and, in his most confident intern voice,

tells his NASA supervisor

he thinks he's got something worth looking at.

- [Danny] When Wolf's boss looks at the computer screen,

he is absolutely stunned.

- [Paul] This intern, on his third day of the job,

somehow, in the cold, expansive space,

1,300 light-years away,

has stumbled across a previously undiscovered planet,

orbiting two stars at once.

- [Don] Now, if you're a Star Wars fan like Wolf,

you know that Luke Skywalker's home planet had two suns,

and just like Tatooine in Star Wars,

if you were to look up at the sky

from the surface of this newly discovered planet,

you would see two sunsets.

But in this case, the planet is so hot,

you would also be vaporized.

- [Hakeem] This is a remarkable discovery

because this is the first time the test satellite

was able to discover a planet orbiting a double star system,

and it was found by a high school student.

- [Paul] The astronomers leading the study published

their results in a major international science journal,

and they do a very classy thing.

They include 17-year-old high school intern Wolf

as a co-author.

- [Hakeem] But it's not all good news for Wolf,

'cause even though he's the guy who discovered the planet,

he's not allowed to name it.

NASA names it TOI-1338 b,

which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

- Some reporters ask Wolf if he's disappointed by the name,

and he says his brother suggested

they call it Wolftopia,

which, let's face it, is far more awesome.

- [Danny] High in the Andes,

two climbers reached the summit of a frozen peak,

but instead of a breathtaking view,

they discovered a clue from an old mystery.

[tense music]

- It's a cool day in January of 1998,

on the Chilean-Argentinian border.

Mountain climbers Pablo Reguera and Fernando Garmendia

are summiting one of the highest peaks in the area,

Mount Tupungato.

As they cross the 15,000-foot mark,

they notice something in the distance.

- As they get closer, it becomes obvious

that what they're looking at is some sort of engine,

and a quick wipe of the valve cover on top

reveals the words "Rolls-Royce."

- Now, obviously, nobody has taken their luxury automobile

three miles up a mountain in Argentina,

so the two conclude that what they must be looking at

is an airplane engine.

- [Kavitha] There are no recent reports of crashes

or missing airplanes anywhere in the area,

and while the engine looks pretty banged up,

it's tough to tell just how long it's been there.

- [Martin] A quick search of the area reveals what appears to be

a damaged fuselage

as well as some strips of sun-bleached clothing.

At this point, the mountain climbers realize

that this is definitely a crash site.

- [Danny] The question is, from when?

[camera shutter clicks]

- [Martin] They snap a few photos,

and they head back down the mountain and report it.

- [Andrew] This is enough to raise interest

in mounting a full expedition.

And so volunteers from the Argentinian Army

form a caravan:

trucks, men, even mules, to try to get to places

where the trucks can't go on the mountain.

- [Kavitha] When the team reaches the crash site,

they spread out and comb over the area.

- [Danny] Then the search takes a gruesome turn.

- They find human body parts scattered across the crash site.

[dramatic music]

Parts of five different bodies are ultimately discovered,

all preserved atop this frozen mount.

- [Martin] The team then turns over their findings

to Argentine scientists.

Over the next two years, they conduct DNA testing

and eventually confirm the identities

of all five individuals.

- As they notify the families,

they realize these victims are all linked by one thing:

they were all on a plane that vanished nearly 50 years ago.

[tense music]

- [Andrew] On August 2nd, 1947,

a decommissioned World War II bomber,

now converted into a passenger plane called the Stardust,

takes off from Buenos Aires with 11 people on board,

bound for Santiago.

- [Martin] There's a snowstorm that day

as well as a strong headwind.

Then, just four minutes

before the aircraft is scheduled to land in Santiago,

the pilot sends a Morse code message

announcing his estimated time of arrival,

followed by a cryptic message: "STENDEC."

- [Kavitha] The radio man in Santiago

has never heard this phrase.

He asks for the message to be repeated,

and it comes back the same twice more: "STENDEC, STENDEC."

- [Danny] The signal cuts off without warning,

and the plane simply disappears.

- [Martin] The Argentine and Chilean air forces

send up aircraft searching for wreckage of Stardust,

and yet they find nothing.

It's like it simply disappeared off the face of the Earth.

- [Kavitha] For 50 years, the fate of Stardust

remained an aviation cold case,

but now, there's a chance to solve it all

because some mountain climbers tripped over its engine.

- From what investigators can tell,

the plane crashed into the side of the mountain

during a controlled descent.

The visibility would've been bad

and if the crew hadn't accounted for the strong headwinds,

they may have thought they were past the Andes

when they began their descent.

- [Martin] Under whiteout conditions,

they may never have even seen the mountain

before they collided with it.

And if the collision was violent enough,

[airplane slams]

it may have triggered an avalanche that buried Stardust,

obscuring it from the view of the search and rescue aircraft

that were looking for it.

- [Danny] With the fate of the people aboard figured out,

one question remains: what does "STENDEC" mean?

- [Martin] Some think that it might be some sort of

abbreviated distress message

like "Severe turbulence encountered.

Now descending, expect crash."

But there's no proof of this.

And why tag a routine arrival message

with this complicated acronym?

- We may never crack the code of "STENDEC,"

but at least the families of the passengers

and crew of the Stardust

now know the fate of their loved ones.

And this 50-year-old aviation cold case

is, at least partly, closed.

- [Danny] Sometimes, mysteries about the heavens

aren't found above us,

but instead are buried deep in the ground,

like one ancient object discovered in Germany.

[tense music]

- In 1999, in a remote part of Nebra, Germany,

metal detectorists Henry Westphal and Mario Renner

are on the hunt for coins and other trinkets

that they can pawn to subsidize their hobby.

- As they swing their metal detector over the ground,

[metal detector whining]

they hear that high-pitched whine,

and that gets them really excited,

'cause this is what they're here for.

[shovels scraping]

- They start digging with small shovels, and then pickaxes,

and as they dig, their signal gets stronger and stronger.

[metal detector whining]

Soon, they uncover something large and flat.

It's a bronze sword,

and it's old, possibly ancient.

- [Danny] They wave the metal detector

over the now-empty hole, and to their amazement,

[metal detector whining]

they still have a signal.

- [Micah] Finally, one of them gets their hands wrapped around

a particularly stubborn piece.

Whatever this is, it's wide and round

and much tougher to free.

They use the pickax to jostle a little bit,

and finally, this strange object emerges from the ground.

[intense music]

- [Hakeem] This piece is kind of disc-shaped,

and it has the image of a golden crescent moon and stars.

They don't know what to make of it,

but they think that it's got to be worth something.

- [Danny] To the finders, it looks like treasure,

but in the eyes of the law, it's contraband.

- [Hakeem] In Germany,

this kind of stuff is considered state property.

You're not allowed to keep it,

and you're supposed to have a license just to hunt for it.

- Let's just say Henry and Mario haven't exactly

filled out the proper paperwork.

So they're in a pickle here.

They want to make some money,

but they don't want to get caught, so they gotta move fast.

- [Micah] The next day, they race to a dealer in Cologne

who gives them 31,000 Deutsche Marks.

That's equivalent to about $17,000 today.

- [Danny] As the men disappear to count their money,

their strange disc creates a buzz

in the underground collector world.

- [Hakeem] For years, the disc passes

from collector to collector,

rising in value to over 1/2 a million bucks.

But still, nobody knows exactly what it is.

- Experts date it to the Bronze Age around 1,600 BCE,

but it's the markings that actually fuel speculation.

- Some astronomers note that a cluster of stars on the disc

seems to correspond to the constellation Pleiades,

and on the side of the disc, there is a long arc

with a very precise measurement of 82.5 degrees.

This corresponds to the difference between sunsets

at winter and summer solstice.

- [Hakeem] Soon, experts start to think,

maybe this strange disc

is the oldest graphical representation

of astronomical phenomena ever discovered.

- [Danny] It's dubbed the Nebra sky disc,

and German officials are eager to get their hands on it.

- One seller, who's looking to unload it for a cool million,

gets busted in a sting operation,

and the government is getting ready

to throw the book at them for selling black market antiques.

- Looking for leniency, they provide information

that leads authorities back

to Henry Westphal and Mario Renner.

- [Hakeem] Henry and Mario get arrested

on the grounds of treasure hunting without a license

and stealing state property.

So now, it looks like they're gonna have to spend

that 31,000 Deutsche Marks they got to pay for some lawyers.

- [Danny] After a short trial,

Henry and Mario are sentenced to four to ten months in jail.

- [Micah] As for the sky disc,

well, it's now kept in a state museum

where people can visit and continue to speculate

about whether it is indeed the first depiction

of the cosmos.

- Cameras on the Moon, wreckage in the sea,

and treasures pointing towards the stars.

Some mysteries from the skies

go far beyond anything we expect.

I'm Danny Trejo.

Thanks for watching Mysteries Unearthed.