Original subtitles

Tonight on "The Proof is Out There:

Unexplained Edition."

A trucker spots unusual lights in the sky.

What's happening?

One of the leading theories

was that this pink cloud is evidence of chemtrails.

What's behind North Carolina's

mysterious Brown Mountain lights?

Actually, there's claims that soldiers

from the Civil War were killed,

and what we see are their ghosts carrying lanterns at night.

And what about these glowing orbs seen

in Texas for at least 150 years?

The Marfa lights fall into a broader category

of light phenomena we often refer to as ghost lights.

Around the world,

people are collecting evidence of the unexplained.

Tonight's focus, unidentified lights.

It's some sort of natural phenomenon

in the atmosphere or related to the Earth

that we've not yet fully understood and explained.

Our experts will analyze the evidence

and then pass a verdict.

What's exciting is nobody really knows.

That's cool. - "The Proof" starts now.

Good evening and welcome to "The Proof is Out There."

Recently, one of our dedicated viewers saw something strange

and glowing in one of his home security cameras.

So he did what you're supposed to do.

He sent the footage to this email address to see

if we could shed some light on the situation.

July 2023, Baltimore County, Maryland.

After waking up in the morning,

66-year-old John Parsons checks his security camera

to see if anything notable happened overnight,

and he's shocked by what he sees.

There was something floating.

I'd seen on your shows before pictures of orbs,

and that's the first thing that crossed my mind.

And then I started seeing a few more,

and they seemed

to come out of nowhere and disappear just as fast.

Some of them even seemed to have like

a ghostly trail behind.

It was kind of weirding me out,

so I didn't know what it was.

Then John remembers something his late wife,

Sheila, told him before she passed away.

I lost my wife back in 2020.

She died of cancer.

She told me she would be watching over me.

It could be her watching over me.

Orbs like these are balls of light

that are said

to be manifestations of energy connected to spirits.

Journalist Alexis Brooks says they've been captured

in other photos and footage

and are sometimes called angel or spirit orbs.

Spirit orbs are loosely considered the souls

of deceased loved ones.

Some argue that the spirits

of the deceased can only show up as orbs

because they don't have the energy

to manifest themselves physically.

In 2013, Janice Whitmer of Nashville,

Tennessee allegedly captured several potential spirit orbs

on her cell phone. - She was actually

in her mother's hospital room as she was passing away.

And Janice saw images of what she refers to as angel orbs.

I know it has to be angels.

She clearly said

that she felt that those orbs as angels

of light had shown up to help her mother cross over.

But will we be able to solve the case

of the moving orbs in John Parsons' front yard?

Let's have our experts round this up.

First, an authenticity check.

I began with analyzing

the structural data using Medex forensics.

This is a pretty common type of surveillance technology

and there are no concerns with the source of the file,

we can trace that structural data back to that application.

Okay, so is it just something mundane like

an insect flying right in front of the lens?

This object that's airborne in front

of the camera may actually be very,

very small but when it's directly in front

of the camera it appears very large and out of focus.

I don't think that these circles

are insects because they're moving far too slowly

and I don't see any evidence of anatomical features

that insects should have like wings

for these whitish grayish spots we're looking at.

Specs of dust are also commonly found

on camera lenses so is that what we're seeing instead?

We're looking at objects that have more of

a flat shape whereas a piece

of dust actually makes something look more spherical.

The shape is a clue as well as the trails,

which I wouldn't expect from dust particles.

Szydagis says the direction the orbs

are moving is leading him to something else.

Perhaps there are drops of moisture.

The path of each appears to be very subtly

curved, and I believe that that curvature is the curvature

of the lens.

Some of them go the opposite direction or side to side

but tiny droplets of water could be light enough

to be blown by wind or affected by heat.

It's possible, but Primeau isn't so sure.

Something that would be dripping out

of the lens would demonstrate a gravity,

it may actually take over the entirety of the lens.

We're not seeing drops of water

that are covering up and blurring out the whole lens,

so what are these white orbs showing up

on John's security camera?

Could they actually be the spirit of his wife?

It's tough to say what it

is and where it came from without at least an inspection

of the device.

The identification is inconclusive.

Our verdict, we can't seem to find

a convincing explanation for this footage

so we have

to call it an unidentified light phenomenon for now.

There's also no surefire scientific way to prove

it's a ghost.

So in the absence of evidence, that's for you to decide.

Well, this next story concerns a light

that has had people scratching their heads

for almost 150 years.

January, 2011, Joplin, Missouri.

Lisa Livingston-Martin is driving

on the aptly named Devil's Promenade Road

right off Route 66.

Spotting something eerie in the distance,

she comes to a stop and pulls out her camera.

Over the red glow of her car's brake lights,

she captures this.

In the distance, an orange orb of light hovers

over the road.

It's bigger and brighter

than a star and too low to be the moon.

Lisa says it is a well-known sight among locals.

They even have a moniker for it.

It's gone by several different names

and there's reason for that.

Originally, it was seen around the hamlet

of Hornet, Missouri and so that's where it got its name

as the Hornet Spook Life.

People have even taken videos,

like this one from 2022.

All of the attention has spawned plenty of theories.

The Hornet Spooklight has actually quite a long history.

It's been reported

as early as 1836 along the Trail of Tears.

One of the stories was that there was a Quapaw maiden

who was in love with a warrior.

He died in battle,

so she drowned herself and that this spook light

is her spirit

or her soul as an orb looking for this warrior.

But this mystery didn't

just inspire local folk tales.

At one point, it even drew the attention

of the federal government.

The Army Corps of Engineers went there

in 1946 to try to figure out what it was and declared

this the mysterious light of unknown origin.

They couldn't figure out what it was.

Let's see what our experts think we're looking at.

One of the ideas that people think about

this glowing ball at the end of the street is that it

has something to do

with swamp gas that has been ionized or ignited.

Swamp gas occurs naturally

when organic matter like mud

and sediment decomposes, releasing flammable methane.

If swamp gas is exposed to a spark, it can burst

into colorful flames. - But if you look

at the geology in the region where that light is appearing,

you don't see any indication of swamps like we see

in Florida or in England and those areas where you get

a lot of swamp gases and stuff.

Could these lights actually be connected

to Native American folk tales?

What I always kind of find

a little troubling is whenever you have something

that's a mystery, you try to explain it away

with an Indian myth.

The Quapaw elders dispute this story that it

was a maiden who drowned herself because this area

is not their homelands.

And so they say that this light is not her.

Is it possible that this is all just a trick

of the light from cars in the distance?

I don't subscribe to the hypothesis

that we're seeing an optical illusion from car headlights.

First of all, car headlights come in pairs.

So maybe the car headlights are too far away

and they've merged.

But then, again, a lot of individuals over the years

have reported this light being very close to them

and yet without them hearing a sound like a car engine.

So I really don't think that these are car lights.

Ultimately, these lights might remain

a mystery, at least for now.

It's some sort of natural phenomenon

in the atmosphere or related to the earth

that we've not yet fully understood and explained.

Our verdict, unexplained phenomenon.

Stray headlights might explain some of the sightings

of the Hornet Spooklight,

but definitely not those that predate the invention

of the automobile.

There might not be an answer to this mystery yet,

but we'll keep our eyes on the road.

Around the world, we've been seeing a strange phenomenon

that so far science has been unable to explain definitively.

Well, it's here again, this time in the Lone Star State.

We all know Texas is probably best known for its cowboys

and cattle, but wait until you see this.

June 5th, 2019.

It's dusk in the West Texas desert outside the town

of Marfa, about 400 miles from the capital of Austin.

Margaret Collier is with her family on the side

of the road hoping to see something

that has been reported for well over a hundred years.

And just as the sun begins to go down, she captures this.

Bright glowing orbs appear on the horizon that begin

to twinkle and then disappear.

I think the big like surprise moment for me

was when they really started, you know,

lighting up and splitting off and all

the different colors showing up.

That was the most exciting for me.

Then as night falls,

Margaret continues to film the lights dancing

over the desert plains.

I was just so mesmerized by it.

It would be really cool if it was something paranormal

or alien related.

What are these strange balls of energy?

The Marfa lights fall into a broader category

of light phenomena we often refer to as ghost lights.

Ghost lights are these anomalous sources of light

that appear and disappear at random in a given area.

People have no idea where they come from.

The local indigenous group in the area, the Apache,

believe that these lights are the ghost

of a long dead chief named Alsate.

According to the legend,

Alsate was killed by a Mexican firing squad in 1882.

And what people are seeing is his ghost roaming

through the territory for some unfinished business.

But while many experts believe there must be

a more scientific explanation,

Banias says exactly what they could be is up for debate.

They would say

that this is some sort of other light phenomenon,

whether it's some sort of electromagnetic phenomenon,

you know, humidity mixing with electricity

in the air causing sparks,

but between these different theories,

supernatural versus natural, we still don't really know

what causes the Marfa lights.

It still remains a mystery to this day.

So what do we have here?

It has been said that if you ask 100 different people

what the Marfa lights are,

you will get 100 different answers.

In fact, many come together each summer

for the Marfa Lights Festival.

But admittedly, that's more of a party

than a scientific conference.

For that angle, we'll need to ask our experts

what they think.

Is there a logical explanation?

Is this simply car lights in the distance?

I don't think so.

What we watch here,

these lights are pretty stationary and the Marfa lights

have been seen for over 100 years and we didn't

have cars and highways back then.

Could this then be a natural event?

Maybe it could be static discharge,

lights generated by the planet

because of static charge,

current being generated by rushing water

and through a particular rock strata.

So is this an atmospheric event?

When light is created by the atmosphere,

it comes from electrical charges, such as lightning.

It's a very big flash,

something that is very quick to happen and then disappears.

But to get storms, we need moisture,

we need plenty of shear,

we need something to move across the region

to create those storms.

In this case, it's a clear day,

which would rule out the possibility

of an atmospheric phenomenon causing these lights.

The theory is that lights that are generated

by some type of electrical energy,

coupled with some magnetic influences, perhaps underground,

that ends up becoming visible in the air as some type

of lit phenomenon.

Certainly something is glowing.

Tectonic activity is unlikely

to have caused these lights because in reality,

there is no significant tectonic movement

in the Marfa region.

It all is associated across the West Coast

and some portions of the East Coast.

What's exciting is nobody really knows, that's cool.

And so I think the Marfa lights are really

a true modern mystery that we don't have answers to.

Our verdict, we're going with unexplained phenomenon.

Like we've seen

before with similar mysterious unexplained lights around

the world, there are too many theories to settle

on just one.

But that doesn't mean we're gonna stop trying.

So the next time you're traveling through Marfa, Texas,

be sure to stop on the side of the road

and get us more footage to investigate.

For more than a century,

people have reported seeing mysterious lights

over North Carolina's Brown Mountain.

But despite thousands of sightings and at least

a dozen theories on the possible cause, to this day,

no one has figured out

what they are or if they're even real.

Our next video may finally provide the proof

we've been seeking.

It's July, 2016 in the Pisgah National Forest

in Western North Carolina.

Two astronomy grade cameras have been installed

by Appalachian State University astrophysicist,

Dr. Dan Caton, to observe

the Brown Mountain Ridge every night.

And now they seem to have captured something inexplicable.

Anomalous white lights blink on sporadically

in the night sky high above the ridge

and over the street lights down in the town.

In the span of about 20 minutes,

they appear at least four times.

Dan says when he played back this footage, he was amazed.

This video stood out and then it

had something that was obviously different.

But we had a light here that persisted over 20 minutes,

came and went, had no lateral motion sideways,

had no up-down motion.

These claims are paranormal. They deserve investigation.

Although accounts

of the mysterious lights go back many years,

the first published article

about them only came out in 1912.

Around this time, there were frequent reports

of sightings from a spot near a local hotel

in the mountains.

The US Geological Survey decided to investigate.

People claim that what we're seeing here

is a phenomenon known as ball lightning.

You have static electricity,

just like you do with a regular lightning strike,

except instead of it arcing into a sort of line,

it balls up and it sort of hovers temporarily.

Others, though, believe

the Brown Mountain Lights have a spookier source.

There's a school of belief

that the Brown Mountain Lights

are actually some sort of manifestation

of spirits or ghosts.

There's claims that soldiers

from the Civil War were killed during a battle near

the mountains, and what we see

are their ghosts carrying lanterns at night.

Another theory that's been floated

is train headlights.

In 1913, a USGS investigator found

that Southern Railway trains could be seen

from Brown Mountain,

and that many reported sightings lined up

with the train schedule.

But this idea was flushed out

after the tracks washed away in a 1916 flood,

and the sightings continued.

So will our experts finally be the ones to get

to the bottom of this centuries-old mystery?

We don't understand, from a scientific perspective,

how ball lightning could form.

We have a series of equations in physics known

as Maxwell's equations.

Maxwell's equations tell us how to make predictions

for how electrical phenomena behave.

Unfortunately, Maxwell's equations

don't give us something

that look like ball lightning.

These four complex equations are named

after Scottish physicist

and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell,

who came up with an early version of them in the 1860s.

Based on the equations,

the size of ball lightning's electric charge would be too

great for it to move as observed here.

So could the lights just be coming from a plane?

When the light shows up,

it looks sort of like a floating, hovering ball,

you know it's not a plane.

A plane that has blinking lights,

is traveling through the frame, is gonna make

a long, drawn-out line.

But what if it could be a reflection

of a light on the ground?

The Fata Morgana phenomenon occurs when the temperature

of the air below the line of sight is colder

than the air above.

This causes light rays passing through to bend down,

making the image of the object appear higher than it is.

This is an illusion that occurs near the horizon.

And we see lights that are significantly above the horizon.

The high altitude of the lights doesn't seem

to make much sense for the Fata Morgana theory

and the conditions need

to be just right to create such an illusion.

This is seen with such frequency,

we're going to rule that explanation out.

Therefore, our verdict

is that the Brown Mountain lights remain unexplained.

Hopefully, with continuing research,

we will someday crack the code.

The great Jim Morrison once advised all motorists

to keep your eyes on the road

and your hands up on the wheel.

But that's easier said than done when what's coming

at you on the highway is breaking on

through the doors of perception.

It's a November night in 2019

and long-haul trucker James Cole is passing

through Stevensville, Wisconsin.

After hours of plain highway,

he comes around a turn and sees this.

A fuchsia light glows over the road,

a stark contrast to the dark night sky.

And it doesn't go away either.

As James drives, it appears to get bigger and closer.

I was talking on the CD radio

as I was passing other trucks to say, hey,

do you guys see this?

What is this thing? What is that?

No one was calling back. But it's most unusual.

James is perplexed by why his shout-outs

to his fellow truckers are met with radio silence.

I had posted it to my YouTube channel.

It got an uproar.

But no one could really pinpoint exactly what it was.

And I couldn't either.

So imagine you're the driver in this truck.

You glance up to the skies and you see this.

The first thing you notice, obviously, is the color.

It's pink, and then you notice the shape.

Right? Not a sunset that I've ever seen.

Not something tied to the aurora borealis.

Not a beacon of any kind.

This driver continued on his journey for miles.

It never left the sky. It didn't appear to move.

If I saw this on the road, I'd be pretty freaked out.

One of the leading theories

was that this pink cloud is evidence of chemtrails.

Chemtrails are a theory that the government

is releasing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere

by plane for a variety of reasons,

ranging from mind control to weather control.

Another theory is that this pink cloud

is some kind of electromagnetic field or radiation,

which is reminiscent

of the famous Zona del Silencio in Mexico.

This is a region in the Mapimí desert

where allegedly no cell phone

or radio signals can get through.

It is a complete dead silence zone.

An electromagnetic field

is a force field produced

by stationary electrical charges being combined

with moving magnetic currents.

This force could become entangled

with CB radio waves throwing off their signal

or causing them to stop completely.

Perhaps this is why James' CB radio couldn't reach anyone.

What else could be at play here?

Rumors about La Zona del Silencio began in 1970

when a U.S. military base fired a test missile toward

the White Sand Missile Range and the rocket ended up

in the Mapimí desert 400 miles south of its target.

This secret operation remains a mystery.

Could similar forces be at play in Wisconsin?

Hopefully our experts can hit the mark.

Could this be evidence of the fabled chemtrail?

We have actually two satellites that cover

the whole western hemisphere.

We would be able to detect if there

was some sort of chemical being released

into the atmosphere.

In reality, what people call chemtrails

are actually water vapor from the engines

of the airplane, usually in a line.

In this case, we don't have a line.

It's more like a circular or a blob of light.

I do find it intriguing

that the truck driver claims to be unable

to contact others

because that would hint towards something electromagnetic

in nature, but that doesn't necessarily correspond

with a light in the sky.

There are many different ways to create dead zones

with cellular signals, but they're not gonna produce

a visible effect that you can see in the sky.

So what are we looking at?

I looked at the exit sign

where in Wisconsin this video took place.

And it turns out that very nearby there

is an organization that runs an aquaponics facility

that uses purple LEDs to grow their plants.

Aquaponics is a food production system

that combines aquaculture

of fish with hydroponics of plants.

Nutrient-rich water and proper lighting

for photosynthesis are key.

So that kind of fits what James saw,

but he started recording that footage miles away.

So how could James see this from such a long distance?

Colors that are towards the end

of the rainbow tend to scatter more easily

in the atmosphere.

That could explain why we see such a large purple mass

in this video because the lights

from the LumiGrow LEDs can really scatter very easily

through the atmosphere and create an eerie paranormal glow.

The clouds could be reflecting light or refracting,

which means bending the light,

making it look much larger than it actually is.

But it's just some botanists growing some plants

and vegetation for us.

So it looks like we've solved this one,

at least partly.

We don't know why the radio went silent,

but the strange purple light was coming

from an aquaponic farm.

Who knows, maybe James will find himself transporting some

of the produce being grown there to a store near you.

In the meantime, brother, keep on truckin'.

You may have heard or said

the famous phrase, the sky is falling,

which comes from a fable about a chicken who believes

the sky is collapsing when an acorn hits him on the head.

But can the sky actually fall? Watch this before you answer.

December 2018, it's a hot day

in the Western Australian town of Kalgoorlie.

As storm clouds begin to gather on the horizon,

Lee Stevens aims his camera

at the menacing skies before him.

Then, suddenly out of nowhere, he sees this.

An eerie green specter appears in the clouds.

It's slightly curved, almost like a crescent moon

with a small spike towards one end.

One thing is for sure,

it's nothing like Lee has ever seen before.

But while many would assume lights

in the sky during a storm is the work

of Mother Nature, according to writer Erin McCarthy,

its odd shape and pointed edges lead many to believe

it's a glitch in the matrix.

It's a very old idea that perhaps reality

is not reality.

That we are actually living in a computer simulation

that's run by a more advanced civilization than our own.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder

of Intel, postulated that the speed and capability

of computers can be expected to double every two years.

Now picture human civilization millions of years

in the future with computer processing power

beyond anything we can imagine.

What if they created a massive simulation to study

their ancestors and that sim is us?

Our now is actually far in the future

and we are simply pixels in a program.

Well, as with our own computer programs today,

sometimes there's a bug.

Could this strange anomaly in the sky be proof

of a glitch in a future civilization simulation?

The idea that the world is actually an illusion

has been discussed in philosophy and in cultures

throughout history from ancient Greece to India

to the Aztecs.

In fact, it turns out some scientists actually put

the probability that we are in a simulation at around 50-50.

So is this mysterious green anomaly evidence

of a computer sim gone wrong

or could there be other factors at play?

Our experts investigate.

Is it possible the weather that day is responsible

for this ominous green light?

The weather conditions

during the thunderstorms, they were quite chaotic.

We had wind speeds in excess of about 70 miles an hour

when these thunderstorms were coming through.

Now this here is fairly static.

We don't see any wiggle or any flashes.

So then are we looking at

a different kind of atmospheric phenomenon?

Could this be the Southern Hemisphere's version

of the aurora borealis?

When looking at

the Southern Lights, everything is moving.

It's not stationary.

It looks like flying ribbons in the sky

and that's just not what we see here.

This is a static light or a static net.

If natural explanations can be discounted,

then could we really be living

in an advanced computer simulation?

Well, to be fair, we can't discount any theory.

However, I believe that applications

of science can tell us what we're seeing.

Instead of computers controlling

a simulation, D'Antonio begins by exploring the idea

of computers controlling light.

Early in my analysis,

I thought could this be a green laser pointing

into the sky and playing back and forth?

Trouble was, the projection

of the laser isn't gonna work that way on these soft clouds.

And you won't get these hard edges.

You'll get more of a diffuse glow.

But as D'Antonio digs deeper,

he does find a very telling clue in the footage.

I noticed that like this tree and everything,

if you watch, boom,

goes out of focus right there just as soon as that shows up.

To me, the evidence takes us more toward

an ordinary water drop on the camera.

We're looking at a hot spot point source

that's refracting light off of the water drop on the camera.

And that's what we see here.

In this reflection, the camera is saturated

by this bright light out here.

And so we're getting a reflection.

I think that he was really excited by the thunderstorm

that he was recording.

And then he saw the object in the sky

and said, whoa, look at that.

That's cool. You know?

Probably didn't realize that he had water on his lens.

Our verdict?

We're going with a water droplet on the lens.

We think D'Antonio's observation that the bottom

of the picture loses focus at the same time

the anomaly occurs is the key.

But hey, it's not every day

that a simple explanation leads to such spectacular video.

Imagine you're driving down a country road when off

to your right-hand side what looks like

a giant snow globe suddenly appears.

Well, our next video certainly had one driver baffled

by this winter wonderland.

It's winter 2017 in Russia's Leningrad Oblast.

A local man is driving through the snowy landscape

when something strange catches his eye.

He quickly takes out his cell phone while navigating

the icy roads and captures a sight that sends

the internet into a tizzy.

His footage shows glimpses through the trees

of a far-off orb glowing in the middle

of a snow-covered field.

From a distance, the luminous ball looks enormous

and seems to be changing colors from light blue to pink.

Cyrillic writing scrolls across its translucent surface.

When he drives away a few moments later,

you can see him pass a mile marker on the side of the road.

What's really weird about it

is that there's nothing else around.

You can't see a village.

It doesn't look like

this is some kind of observatory or something.

It looks like there's nothing near it

but this giant glowing orb.

Since the days of the Cold War,

new weapons systems have often been tested

in remote locations to keep secret advancements

in technology from prying eyes.

So Teitel says we may be witnessing a covert arms test.

The Russians developed a host

of new technologies during the Cold War,

many of which were extremely futuristic

and far-fetched feeling at the time.

Things like ape men or two-headed dogs.

So some people wonder

if this isn't some kind of new-fangled Russian experiment

that's just too big to be in a lab.

Some speculate

this video could even be evidence that Russia

or some other unknown group is developing one

of the most dangerous theoretical technologies of all,

the Dyson Sphere.

A Dyson Sphere is a theoretical way

of gaining power from a star.

The idea of finding a Dyson Sphere

is theoretically finding an alien life form

or an alien race that's using the power from a star

to generate itself.

So some people wonder

if this isn't some kind of man-made Dyson Sphere

and around it is this swarm of Russian-made craft

that is using that energy source as power.

So some suggest this glowing orb could be

the secret prototype of a Dyson Sphere-like technology.

But the fact that we see Russian writing

and other imagery flashing across its surface does seem

to be a bit suspicious.

It's a truly bizarre object

that the driver doesn't seem to recognize.

So what exactly is this? And where do they come from?

Let's let our experts investigate.

If you go through frame by frame,

whenever the scene moves,

the object seems to move in the exact same way.

When they zoom in,

it seems to be the same size or the same rate

as the foreground and the background.

Other than it being low resolution,

there's no actual indications that it's fake.

So since this video is authentic,

could it actually be revealing some powerful new technology

or Dyson Sphere-like weapon?

By definition, a Dyson Sphere is something

that is hundreds of millions of miles across.

The only energy source I can think

of that would be worth putting a sphere around

at this small of a scale is a small-scale black hole.

Black holes can theoretically be created

on Earth, though most scientists think we'll never

have the tech to achieve this.

And there's a hitch.

A black hole that would be the size necessary

to make this sphere so small would be harmless

because it would just evaporate through a process known

as Hawking Radiation.

Hawking Radiation

is a theoretical thermal radiation emitted

by a black hole that reduces the mass and energy

at which the black hole rotates.

The smaller the black hole,

the hotter it glows and the more radiation it releases.

So if we eliminate that theory,

could this be some other sort of weapons system?

If this was some kind of testing ground

for secret military weapons,

you wouldn't expect it to see an empty field.

You would see things like towers, you would see security,

you would see fences.

So it seems

this isn't some sort of covert weapons test.

Then could this simply be an elaborate art installation?

It could be that someone had just built

a work of art and they thought, oh,

I'll stick it in this field.

But when he zooms in, we see some kind of text.

It's in Cyrillic, it's in Russian, we see it says, bank.

So this is actually the Bank of Russia.

What we're looking at here is actually not

an art installation, but a commercial installation.

This appears to be a billboard.

However, what we see here is the sign on the road,

which tells us that the individual is 54 kilometers

from St. Petersburg.

Guess what happens to be 54 kilometers from St. Petersburg?

The Igora Sports Complex,

which just so happens to be a giant glowing ball.

This is a sports complex primarily for car racing.

Our verdict,

this is a man-made multimedia sphere project

at the Igora resort outside St. Petersburg.

Further research reveals it was installed

by a Chinese facade lighting company in September 2016

and features 100,000 LED pixel lights.

China has the most people

and the most cell phones of any country on Earth.

So you can bet if anything strange happens

in Chinese skies, there will be cell phone video

to show for it.

That's especially true in Beijing,

which boasts a population of over 21 million,

many of whom witnessed this next bizarre event.

March 11th, 2022.

The capital city of Beijing is abuzz

from the crowds generated by the Paralympic Winter Games.

Most of the attention is aimed

at the various athletic competitions.

One smartphone user is focused on

an entirely different event.

A glowing ring appears high above a busy street

in the cloudy night sky.

As the camera pans,

you can see several eyewitnesses looking up

at the mysterious illuminated ring as it hovers

in the air for around 20 minutes.

This phenomenon doesn't seem to be an isolated occurrence

as mysterious rings have been spotted hovering

in the sky all around the world.

One of the things that I think leads a lot

of observers to believe that it is maybe alien in origin

is that it is a circle,

like the modern day equivalent of your classic crop circle.

Then again, with our own recent advancements

in technology, this ring could originate

from somewhere far closer to home.

So could this ring be a preview

of similar tech cooked up for the Olympics?

China, for its part,

has developed a so-called artificial moon.

It's a research facility here on Earth

that uses magnetic fields in a vacuum chamber

to simulate lunar conditions, including decreased gravity.

An impressive scientific feat,

but not an aerial display of any kind.

So was this ring created by man-made tech?

Let's see what our experts think.

Pileus iridescent clouds draw their color

by a natural phenomenon.

The sun lights up the sky.

The cloud then separates those colors into a rainbow.

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

The light source in this case is likely to be something

on the ground.

The low clouds allow for a scattering of light

within the droplets.

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

Matthew Szydagis says we can rule out UFOs.

We are not seeing

any crazy speeds or accelerations.

We're not seeing any sudden turns and it

is a hollow ring,

which is unlike any UFO case

that I've personally experienced or heard of.

We've profiled rings that turned out to be

the result of smokestacks when we investigated them.

Was that what happened at the Olympics?

Maybe this could be a smoke ring,

but usually those are gonna be dark rings made

of black smoke from smokestacks.

They're not going to be shining.

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

Ultimately, Szydagis agrees with Hernandez

that what we're seeing is partially a result

of the overcast weather.

I think that this ring of light could be

a reflection of some sort,

potentially from the lights

at the nearby Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

Also, Beijing is known for notorious levels of pollution.

And I think that this can help explain

why light can do some strange things.

We can have light that's not only reflected,

which means bounced off a surface,

but also refracted in strange ways.

But what would cause such

a massive circular reflection?

Well, we did some digging and found this video taken

on the same night.

See that bright structure in the distance?

That's the Beijing National Stadium casting a cone

of light into the air and a ring onto the clouds.

This is a combination of clouds

and pollution that are conspiring together

to really distort light in an unusual way.

Our verdict, stadium light reflection

with a little help from particles of airborne pollution

to catch the light.

Turns out crews were testing lights

for the closing ceremony,

which happened two days after this video was lensed.

Case closed, that's our show for tonight.

From glowing orbs to mysterious lights appearing

across our skies, we continue searching for answers to

phenomena we still don't fully understand.

And who knows what the next light in the sky might reveal?

Thank you so much for watching this special edition

of "The Proof is Out There."

Please send us any video,

images or sound that you think we should investigate.

And remember to keep those cameras rolling.