Original subtitles

- Tonight, on "The Proof is Out There".

Are we being watched by mysterious orbs in our skies?

- People just look at it and immediately think,

wow, that's pretty weird.

What the heck is that?

- [Tony] The mystery sighting

behind a terrified 911 call.

- [Tony] Could secret photos taken

aboard a US nuclear submarine rewrite UFO history?

- I think that the images in the collection could be real.

- [Tony] Did this massive eyeball belong

to a creature of legend?

- If the Kraken actually exists,

could this be one of its eyes?

- [Tony] And footage of an alien autopsy

that's been circulating on the dark web.

- The US government is and was

in possession of biological specimens that are not human.

- [Tony] Around the globe are videos.

- [Witness] Oh, there he goes.

- [Tony] Photos and sounds that defy explanation.

[eelctric whirring]

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

who made them, or how they operate.

- [Tony] What are they?

- [Expert] Some sort of bizarre mutation.

- [Expert] What's exciting is nobody really knows.

- Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.

- I'm Tony Harris, and as a journalist

for more than 30 years,

I follow the facts where they take me.

Now I'm bringing that spirit of investigation

to the world's strangest sounds and images.

- [Witness] It's coming towards us.

- [Tony] We'll analyze each one with top experts.

- It's a credible case.

It's a credible video.

- [Tony] And pass a verdict on what it is.

- This video was clearly faked.

- The proof starts now.

[dramatic music]

Good evening everyone,

and welcome to "The Proof Is Out There".

Mysterious flying orbs have been spotted

all around the world.

That's why orb spotters are submitting their sightings

to a fast-growing UFO reporting app known as Enigma.

It's July 3rd, 2022,

in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania,

and Independence Day festivities have already begun.

- This witness was outside,

kind of filming the lights from fireworks

that were going on down the street.

But as he's filming,

you see this very apparent orb

kind of fly in to the screen.

- It almost seems to be, well,

maybe enjoying the fireworks show itself a little bit.

- [Alejandro] The other thing that it has is this light,

this kind of spotlight that it shines

down onto the ground over the fireworks.

It's kind of visually shocking.

- And then when the fireworks show is over,

it goes right back to where it came from,

which to me is rather perplexing.

- [Tony] Just a month later,

a similar sight pops up on a rooftop camera in Texas.

- [Alejandro] It's just kind of an erratically moving orb,

moving across the sky.

It's pretty bright.

It doesn't seem to be too far,

at least within a mile or two of the home.

This is another one where people just look at it

and immediately think,

wow, that's pretty weird.

What the heck is that?

- [Tony] Finally, as if completing a survey

of the continental United States,

a third orb appears over Hoquiam, Washington

in February, 2024.

- [Alejandro] It appears to be a security camera

that is filming, you know,

towards this harbor,

and you see this erratically moving ball of light.

That's just another one that's shocking to watch

because it's highly mysterious.

- [Tony] So what are these things doing?

One theory says they have

a very specific purpose:

alien intel.

- I would say they're probably some sort of reconnaissance.

Like look, we sent unmanned vehicle to Mars

to do certain things.

Is it possible that the UAP or phenomenon have

probes that they use themselves to conduct

reconnaissance and information collection?

- If aliens are sending probing orbs to Earth,

it could be proof of the laboratory hypothesis.

This is the idea that aliens use

Earth as a self-contained research subject,

running tests on human behavior while remaining hidden.

But is that what we're seeing in these videos?

[tense music]

- In this video of an orb in Pennsylvania

at a fireworks show,

it appears to be either in the smoke or beyond the smoke,

and that's why we get that light cone.

So I think there really is

a real object in the sky that is emitting light.

- You've got an event that's going on.

In this case, it's a fireworks display.

And I've personally seen

drones hanging around the fireworks display

and they're broadcasting it.

And so I believe that in this case,

what you have is a drone that is

basically watching the fireworks.

- [Tony] Of course, that doesn't explain

these other orbs which weren't sighted

alongside fireworks shows,

but we have a hunch about the one in Washington.

- [Rich] First off, this is a surveillance camera.

They shoot out an infrared light

our human eyes won't see,

but it will look like a light

when it reflects off something.

And so in this case,

what you have is a surveillance camera

that is capturing insects

and you'll get spiderwebs and spiders

and various other things that are

forming around your camera lens.

- [Hakeem] It could be a fly caught in a web

and the wind just moves it back and forth a little bit.

But because it's close to the camera,

those small motions

look like big motions in the camera's field of view.

- [Tony] And as for that orb out of Texas...

- [Hakeem] That does not look like

any airplane I've ever seen.

You know, it has both the signatures

of being close to the camera

and being far away from the camera.

It does look like something crawling

and then it gets to the very end and it just jets off.

So I could see that being, say,

a bug nearby crawling across the field of view on a web,

but then that last final motion,

hey, I don't know what the heck happened there.

- Our verdict, these Enigma orbs can be explained,

but only partially.

We have a drone, a bug,

and an unidentified object.

We just don't have enough information to make

a confident call on that Texas orb.

We hope Enigma app users continue to log their sightings.

After all, if these orbs are watching us,

isn't it about time we watch them back?

This next story comes to us from The Black Vault,

a massive online repository

of declassified government documents.

Now, a series of photos posted there is in the spotlight.

Have a look for yourself.

It's March 1971,

and a nuclear submarine, the USS Trepang,

is on a mission inside the Arctic Circle.

- The Trepang is

somewhere deep in the far north of the Atlantic Ocean

between Iceland and Jan Mayen Island.

One officer peers through the periscope

and he sees this strange object right above the water.

He starts using the onboard camera and snaps nine photos.

- [Tony] Each photo shows an airborne object

in various positions over the open ocean,

floating horizontally, tilting,

balancing vertically,

splashing down,

half submerged,

and even smoking.

- The most famous of the nine photos is

the one depicting what looks to be

an oblong-shaped object

that seems to be coming out of the water.

- [Tony] We don't know the order in which the photos were taken,

or even if it's the same object in all of them,

but we do know how they ended up

on The Black Vault in 2015.

- A UFO researcher by the name of Alex Mistretta comes

forward claiming that they were

leaked to him anonymously from someone in Europe.

- [Tony] We also know the Arctic was

indeed a hotspot of military activity

back in the Cold War days.

- [MJ] This was a central route during the Cold War.

The United States famously set up a camp in Greenland

called Camp Century,

and this was a very complex

scientific and military research project

to not only study how a nuclear reactor could be

used to power a military base,

but also to engage in active military monitoring

of Soviet weaponry in the region.

- [Tony] So the photos could show

some top-secret weaponry or military exercise.

Some even speculate

that one or more of the photos might be

fakes for the express purpose

of disguising classified information.

- There is a theory out there

that some of the Trepang photos are doctored or fake

for the purpose of hiding

a real military weapon or a real military test

that the government does not want out there.

- [Tony] There's also a theory they captured

a specific kind of UFO.

- Within UFO circles,

a transmedium vehicle is

an object or an aircraft that can go

through both domains easily,

so underwater and in the sky.

And so some people think that the Trepang is

one of the earliest examples of that.

- After doing some digging,

Alex Mistretta was able to track down

two crew members from the USS Trepang.

Both denied seeing anything anomalous on their voyage

to the Arctic,

but they couldn't explain the photos either.

So what are we seeing here?

Our experts take a deeper dive.

[tense music]

- It's kind of an ominous image.

At first glance, we're looking at something

that dare I say looks like a saucer

that's coming out of the ocean into a giant fog and mist.

- [Tony] Online sleuths zeroed in

on the fog or mist and found something suspicious.

See the mist down here and the mist up here?

Compare them and they look almost identical.

Skeptics say it's proof of forgery.

- Kind of like a copy paste.

I ran a clone detection test

to try to discern if any of those pixels were duplicated,

but the tool did not detect any evidence of that.

- [Tony] Weird, right?

Or maybe not.

What if it's not mist, but smoke?

- Smoke clouds will rise because they're inherent heat.

They will always follow the laws of physics.

If the wind is light,

they're going to rise at exactly the same ascent rate.

They're going to create the same billows

and they're going to look identical.

- I think that the images in the collection

most certainly could be real.

Now, do they really show a UFO?

It's hard to tell from just a still photo.

At least some of the images do appear

consistent with balloons,

elongated, kind of a Zeppelin-type shape.

- [Tony] The Navy did use balloons

mainly for anti-submarine warfare

and early warnings in the event of an airborne attack,

but that program ended before these photos were taken,

and that's not the only issue with the balloon theory.

- They don't all seem to show the same object.

At least one or two appear to have

a flying saucer-type shape to them.

I'm not aware of any balloons that are saucer-shaped.

- Our verdict, we're going with balloons

for the oblong objects

and unexplained on the saucer-shaped one.

In February 2026,

The Black Vault's archives mysteriously vanished.

Luckily, a backup archive survived,

but the cause of the deletion remains a mystery.

- Next, we want to investigate

a video of an alleged alien autopsy

that's been circulating in dark corners of the internet

for quite some time.

It's never been officially verified,

and some say that's because the government doesn't want

you to know the truth.

It's March of 2008.

As internet users probe strange corners of the web,

they come upon a bizarre and gruesome video.

What's on it?

Well, see for yourself.

A small corpse is lying on what looks like a surgical table.

Gloved hands begin to cut

the creature apart

and peel back its skin,

seemingly revealing a blood-red rib cage

and deep purple tubular intestines.

- Whatever it is, it looks like

a really small,

fleshy, humanoid organism.

This video was just dropped out of nowhere

onto the internet.

We don't know who posted it,

where it came from,

or what intention, if any,

was behind uploading it.

- [Tony] Many link this video

to former US intelligence officers' testimony claiming

the military has not only recovered alien craft,

but also non-human entities

going back as far as the famous Roswell incident.

- [Luis] I still maintain my security clearance,

so I can't say anything that is deemed classified,

but what I can say is

that the US government is and was

in possession of biological specimens, samples,

that are not human in origin.

- [Tony] And there are allegations

the government studies these remains at top-secret labs.

- If you ever wanted to squirrel something away in secret,

the best place to do it would be where?

A secure US army base.

It has the ability to conduct

actual autopsies away from the peering eyes of the press,

like Fort Detrick, Maryland.

- Fort Detrick has a long, documented history

with biological weapons,

one reason that some people suspect

that something unusual may be

happening behind its closed doors.

- [Tony] Could this video be evidence?

- [Mitch] The installation also houses

a hundreds of millions of dollars biodefense facility

that became operational in 2008,

the very same year our video was released.

- [Tony] So let's let our experts dissect this mystery.

We can tell pretty quickly

that if this procedure was performed

at an official medical facility,

it did not follow official procedure.

- Generally, when we perform procedures,

we keep everything very sterile,

and so right off the bat,

you see the gloves that he's going to perform

the procedure with touching the camera,

which is such a big no-no

in the medical field because it's just contamination

and really, you know,

the last thing you would expect a medical professional to do.

Also, it looks like they're using

what looks like an X-Acto knife to do the dissection,

which you would never see that in a medical facility.

- [Tony] The methods of the procedure itself

also seem questionable.

- So what's really interesting here is

that you could see he's making an incision

in the shape of a T.

Traditionally, what we like to do is

a Y-shaped incision so that it's easier to pull back

the flaps and expose the internal thoracic contents.

- [Tony] So there are questions about the how

of the cutting,

and also about the what.

- It should have blood vessels and arteries,

whereas in this,

the person cuts down the body

and then the skin just easily is already detached.

It's kind of like the bones and organs are

floating in a skin bag.

This appears to be a fake,

but it's a well-done one.

Somebody with the right materials

and know-how could produce something like this.

- Our verdict, this is a hoax,

but one executed by someone

with an admirable mastery of practical effects.

It may have been fooling web surfers for years,

but not us.

Now let's go back in time.

What if a highly advanced civilization existed

before the Ice Age,

and what if they tried to survive

by building a vast city underground?

It's 1963 in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu.

During a home renovation,

a local man takes a sledgehammer

to one of his basement walls,

revealing a tunnel that leads to this.

- Essentially, it's an underground city.

There's no other way to put it.

It is full of passages and hallways

and these large, open, vacant areas

that would have held people.

It's big enough to hold

about 20,000 people if it ever needed to.

- This discovery may point

to a civilization far more advanced

than we typically associate with the ancient world.

Beyond the sheer scale of this habitat,

the support structures were built so efficiently

that none of the floors have ever collapsed.

Some archeologists speculate

that this site could date as far back as the Bronze Age,

while others believe it may stretch

even further into the past.

- [Tony] But how far into the past?

Most archeologists date

the beginning of civilization to about 3,500 BCE

in Mesopotamia,

but journalist and author, Graham Hancock,

believes the roots of civilization stretch

back a lot farther.

- [MJ] He believes that there once existed

a highly advanced human group

that lived before the Ice Age.

Essentially, they were incredibly advanced,

had amazing technology,

and there was a global cataclysm

that essentially ended their civilization,

and all that's left are

these sort of traces of what they've built.

- [Tony] Hancock believes that cataclysm was

connected to the last Ice Age.

That was more than 12,000 years ago.

Perhaps these caves were an attempt to stay safe

from that disaster.

Speaking of staying safe underground,

in 2025, an official

in President George H. W. Bush's administration claimed

the U.S. government maintained

its own vast network of tunnels,

complete with transportation systems

and living quarters in case of disaster.

They offered no proof.

But how about these ancient tunnels?

Were they a safe harbor too?

[tense music]

Now, recent discoveries indicate

early humans were using stone tools 700,000 years ago.

Could Derinkuyu have been built that long ago?

- The vast majority of archeological evidence says

the tunnels were begun during much later periods,

where we have clear evidence

of the expansion of these tunnels

and the community in general.

- [Tony] Could they have been made

in response to an ancient apocalypse

in the most recent Ice Age?

- [Ed] There was indeed 12,000 years ago

a major climactic event that led

to a resurgence of a kind of Ice Age

that affected humanity all across the planet.

There are people who say that Derinkuyu is

evidence of humans having to take shelter

during those times,

but things found inside,

the kind of tools we believe that were used to dig them out,

none of it indicates a very, very ancient origin.

Instead, we see elements of sophistication.

Some people credit the Phrygians

with creating the first of these tunnels.

They were in the region

in the seventh and eighth centuries BCE.

- During this time, there were

a lot of violent groups of people

all fighting among themselves,

and so this was most likely just protection

from armies that were coming through.

When you go out through the tunnels,

you'll see very heavy stones built into the rock.

And so what happens, you could roll these things out

and literally block a tunnel off that nobody could get to.

So most likely these were defensive,

a sanctuary to protect the people from war above.

- Our verdict, we agree with our experts

that what we have here is an Iron Age refuge from invasion.

Although we don't know for sure

which armies these people were hiding from,

historically, this region was

repeatedly threatened by invasion,

raids and persecution.

- 911 dispatchers are used to hearing

all sorts of crazy things,

but nothing could prepare them

for a caller that describes

something creepy colliding with his truck.

It's July 2021 in Pender County, North Carolina

on State Highway 210 near the Black River.

Just after 11:00 PM, a driver calls in an accident.

- [Tony] But about a minute into the call,

after he's driven further down the road,

the caller suddenly runs into something

even scarier than a bloody man.

[loud thunk]

- [Tony] The dispatcher asks if the man has hit

a turkey or a deer.

- [Tony] The caller knocks the creature out of his truck

by slamming on the brakes

and then drives off out of fear.

Once it's safe, he pulls over

and claims to find scratch marks on his roof,

hood, and truck bed.

He didn't want to talk to us,

but paranormal researcher Matt Knicl has

looked into the case.

- I don't want to speak to the caller's state of mind.

They do seem panicked, they do seem elevated.

They thought it was the skinwalker,

which is what they later stated it looked like

to the police officers.

- [Tony] Skinwalkers are shapeshifters

from Navajo legend.

They are said to take various forms

and move in unnatural ways.

They are typically linked with America's Southwest,

but there is a similar being

that's been reported in North Carolina.

It even has a local name.

- [Cliff] The Carolina Crawler or the Pale Crawler,

the origins of which are in the early 2000s on the internet,

this kind of a long, lanky, Gollum-esque sort of critter.

Some speculate that this story is

actually associated somehow with this very video,

supposedly taken by security cameras

in Deep Run, North Carolina.

- [Tony] Take another look at the footage

from that separate incident.

The creature looks pale,

and while it's crawling,

its limbs look too long and spindly to be

any four-legged creature we can identify.

Could this be what the terrified caller saw?

- After taking the caller's statement,

deputies searched the area,

even sending up a drone,

but didn't see any creature.

So could this actually be a legend come to life?

Let's see what our experts think.

[tense music]

First, is this security camera footage

actually connected with the 911 call

from the same area?

And if so, what does it really show?

- You've got these almost like distortedly long limbs,

this odd sort of back and no neck,

so maybe it's a deer,

but that's not the way that a deer's legs bend.

The proportions could even be

more accurately fitting for a human,

but humans walk on two legs

and it would be incredibly difficult

for a human to be able to,

for that amount of time, run on all fours.

We're just not built anatomically that way.

- [Tony] So could this indeed be the Pale Crawler?

- This fits that description perfectly.

But night vision footage distorts

limb proportion and depth,

so even the arm to leg limb ratio seems off.

- [Tony] And maybe the image was distorted on purpose.

- The thing that strikes me about the video is

just how low resolution it is.

It's actually difficult to make a camera

that's this low resolution nowadays.

I think it's just a bit odd the way they've cut it.

So this is something that has been cropped

and we don't have the original video.

We have a very downgraded copy,

which makes it very suspicious.

- [Tony] Okay, perhaps we can question

the authenticity of a video,

but that still leaves us with the strange 911 call.

- [Tony] Is it authentic?

- From a forensic standpoint,

this recording has very continuous quality to it,

and so there's nothing that would raise

a concern that there had been an insertion of material.

So the authenticity seems very good

based on that type of interpretation.

- [Tony] It's also noteworthy that the caller,

an army vet who should be used to intense situations,

does sound legitimately scared.

- With this higher frequency of the fundamental,

that is an indication that the individual is

under some stress or excitement.

- So it seems consistent

with the sound of this thunk causing some alarm on his part.

- People respond different way to different things,

but the fact is that he stuck around

for the police to show up.

That would indicate to me that this is not a prank,

because if it was, they would have arrested him.

[loud thunk]

- I think it's fairly clear that he probably saw

something that evening,

and I think just because he might have been

perhaps primed to interpret it a certain way,

it doesn't mean he's making things up.

- The verdict, we think the video's fake,

but the 911 call remains unexplained.

We still aren't sure exactly what the caller encountered,

and though our experts won't confirm

it was the Pale Crawler,

you never know what you might come across

on a rural highway late at night.

- [Tony] We brought you plenty of tales

of strange objects washing up on the beach,

but have a look at this.

It's October 2012 in Pompano Beach, Florida.

A man is walking along the shore

when he makes a shocking discovery

that prompts him to call the local authorities.

Yes, it is what it looks like,

a softball-sized glassy, blue eyeball.

It's so large, it almost fills

both hands of the researcher in the photo.

- [Ken] There are certainly eyes as large as this in nature,

although they are very rare.

Usually when animals die,

the soft tissues like eyes are

actually some of the first things to go

either due to scavengers

or just natural process of decay.

- [Tony] What's also very odd is

this eyeball is encased in a hard, bony structure.

It's sent to scientists at Florida Fish and Wildlife

to run tests in hopes of identifying it.

- Considering that this object was

found on a beach in Florida,

some commenters have wondered

could it be related to a Caribbean cryptid

known as the Lusca,

which is essentially a half shark, half octopus

type of creature.

It's described as being about 75 feet long

with kind of a head shaped like a mako shark,

very pointy,

but tentacles like an octopus.

- [Tony] According to the legend,

the monster lives deep in the Caribbean Sea and the Bahamas.

- The legendary Lusca is often connected

with these so-called blue holes,

which are kind of circular sink holes that are very deep,

but there's a very prevalent belief

that if you swim into one of these blue holes,

you could be at risk of being eaten by the Lusca.

- [Tony] In 2016, a fisherman from Andros Island

in the Bahamas even said he saw one.

- [Ken] He saw this animal approaching him

while he was fishing, and at first he thought it was

about the size of a whale shark.

But as it got closer,

he noticed that it had a very pointy snout or rostrum,

very similar to a mako shark,

and that it seemed to also be displaying tentacles.

So, a really weird sea creature

that very much fit the physical description of the Lusca.

- [Tony] Others wondered if the eyeball came from a Kraken,

a squid-like creature reported for centuries,

allegedly big enough to pull down ships.

- [Ken] One of the most famous documented encounters

with a possible Kraken involved the USS Stein,

which was a naval ship which was

deployed for the first time in 1978.

And on its very first mission,

some unknown creature from below

actually attacked the rubber sonar dome.

And when they returned to port,

they actually saw these scratch marks

across the rubber dome,

and left behind were these kind of claw

or teeth-like structures,

very similar to those that can be found

on the suckers of giant squids.

- A biologist who examined

the Stein's damaged dome concluded

that these marks were indeed left by a giant squid,

leading some to calculate

that it could have been 150 feet long,

almost half the height of the Statue of Liberty.

Could this eye belong to such a massive creature?

[tense music]

The eyeball is large,

but is it big enough to come from a Kraken, if they exist?

- The legend of the Kraken is believed to actually

have come from sightings of giant squid.

So a giant squid eyeball, I mean,

that's essentially the size of a dinner plate already.

So I would think this is way too small to be

the eyeball of the notorious Kraken.

- [Tony] And there's another disqualifier.

- When a researcher actually examined

this eyeball in person,

he was quoted as saying it had an extremely fishy smell,

which would make me lean away from, you know,

a squid or octopus or anything of that nature.

- [Tony] Fresh squid has a mild seawater scent

and only starts to smell fishy

once it's getting really rotten.

So, a giant squid is out.

Then how about the legendary Lusca

described as half shark, half octopus?

- If you look closely around this eyeball,

it seems to have kind of a hard encasing structure,

and that's probably what protected

the eyeball so far to keep it so intact.

So this would rule out anything like a shark,

which is obviously comprised of cartilage and not bones.

- [Tony] Turns out it's that bone that breaks the case.

- This reminds me of something called an orbital cup,

and that is only found in a select number of species

in our oceans.

This eyeball is brilliantly blue

and it appears to be surrounded by a bony structure.

For that reason and because of the size,

I strongly believe that this looks like a swordfish eye.

- [Rosie] Swordfish are a more pelagic deep sea species,

so when people are processing the meat

or cutting up the bodies,

it's probably either further offshore

or within a controlled area like a fish market.

As part of the processing process,

they'll actually remove the eyeball

and throw it out because it's just not needed.

- The verdict?

This massive eyeball is from a swordfish.

Genetic testing has since confirmed

that this was the right guess.

The eye was probably one of the few discarded

closer to shore,

so it managed to wash up intact

before disintegrating or being eaten.

- The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is

about as off the grid as you can get.

Nearly 90% is covered by forest.

And for decades, people there have seen

mysterious lights in the woods they can't explain.

2016, the Upper Peninsula in Paulding, Michigan.

Cars line a remote stretch of highway.

One family gets out hoping to see

a strange phenomenon known as the Paulding Lights.

This is their video.

A ghostly orb materializes a few miles away.

It seems to hover, then fade away,

and there's a lot of other videos just like it.

- [Tony] This one shows it changing color and splitting.

- [Tony] Turns out, these lights have been seen

nearly every night for over 50 years.

- The first known sighting of the light is 1966.

Like many great stories,

it starts with a group of teenagers

hanging out where they shouldn't be in the woods.

The teenagers saw it

and they were so shocked that they reported it

to the local sheriff.

- [Tony] Is it a UFO?

Some believe the area is a UFO hotspot.

- It goes back to 1953,

when an unknown blip showed up

on Air Force radar over Lake Superior.

A jet was scrambled to investigate,

and all we know from that point is

that the two blips moved toward one another,

appeared to merge, and then vanished.

This is one of the unexplained

UFO narratives of the modern era,

and the Michigan Peninsula has a central place in it.

- [Tony] Or could we be seeing

visitors from the spirit world?

- [MJ] Some say ghosts haunt these remote and isolated lands

that once were home to booming and bustling mining towns

during the copper boom of the 1800s.

- [Mitch] People report seeing

ghostly figures through window frames,

strange noises ringing through the air,

footsteps, all kinds of lights

and oddities that shouldn't be there.

- [Tony] One local ghost story is

tied directly to the appearance of these strange lights.

- A highway marker tells the tale

of a railway brakeman who died here.

The light is said to be his lantern,

which he still waves at passing visitors.

[tense music]

- [Tony] Could the lights be a ghost?

We looked into that story

of the railway brakeman who died here,

and it turns out there's no evidence

of a railroad ever existing in this area.

- The railroad brakeman legend is exactly that, a legend.

There are other stories of mysterious lights,

and they happen all over the country,

and quite often people invoke

these sort of spiritual explanations for them.

- [Tony] So is it possible that this could be

some kind of UFO

potentially connected to that mysterious aerial encounter

from 1953?

Physicist Matthew Szydagis was so intrigued,

he visited the site himself.

I think the UFO theory is an interesting one

since we have an unexplained light that appears to be

in the sky.

However, it's not a UFO, it's not ghosts,

it's car headlights in the distance.

It turns out that this mystery was

very well tested by Michigan Tech University.

They were able to create

the light on cue

by driving at the right spot

on a flat stretch of road in the distance,

where all the optics and line of sight all work out.

And in fact, on nights where the light is

really exciting and you have blues and reds flashing,

that's somebody getting pulled over by the police.

- Our verdict, headlights.

We've solved this puzzle,

but the Upper Peninsula still has its share of secrets,

like the decades-old disappearance

of that jet over Lake Superior,

which remains an unsolved mystery.

- We have new developments in a story

we first brought you in a previous season.

It was October 16th, 1957,

in Alamogordo, New Mexico,

when an unsuspected nurse who worked

on a nearby Native American reservation snapped

this bizarre photograph.

The image showed a glowing, elongated,

oval-shaped object floating

over the nearby Northern Test Range

at Holloman Air Force Base.

- This photo is a classic in the UFO community.

I think most people consider the photo to be

a genuine photograph that was not hoaxed.

- [Tony] This photo also ties into

one of the most astonishing and durable stories

in UFO history,

that Holloman Air Force Base was

once the site of an uncanny interstellar summit.

- There's a story that circulates

within UFO circles that President Dwight D. Eisenhower

secretly met with aliens.

This alien gets shuffled into a back room

and the president has flown in to specifically meet

with this creature.

So we have a lot of strange stories out there

of secret meetings between presidents and aliens

from other planets.

- [Tony] When our analyst first looked

at this historic photo,

they didn't quite know what to make of it.

Could this have been some type of balloon?

- Definitely appears to be extremely bright,

and so it would have to have some type of light source.

It wouldn't make sense for the balloon.

- [Tony] Maybe a cloud?

- It doesn't match what you would expect

with these upper band cirrus clouds.

So I don't see this as a cloud whatsoever.

- [Tony] It was the location of the sighting

that provided the biggest clue.

- The vast majority of this area you're looking at

is White Sands Missile Range.

- [Tim] The United States at the time was

engaged in significant rocket testing

in especially the height of the Space Race

between the United States and the Soviet Union.

- [Rich] That would probably make it very likely

that it's a missile test of some sort.

- [Tony] While our experts presented interesting points,

one important question remained.

How could a civilian eyewitness have

enough time to grab her camera and snap

a clear shot of a fast-moving missile?

Our original verdict was unidentified object.

In other words, who knows?

But if one part of a weird story is true,

maybe the rest is.

With that logic in mind,

there is a new piece of the puzzle.

Did an important source confirm

that the US government met with aliens?

- A new documentary has come out

which alleges that another US president was

aware of a secret meeting

between alleged extraterrestrials

and human beings.

A man named Eric Davis,

who's an astrophysicist,

as well as one of the advisors

of the Pentagon's AATIP program,

alleges that President George H. W. Bush told him

that there had been a secret meeting

between the U.S. military and an alleged

alien creature at Holloman Air Force Base.

- [Tony] According to the story, President Bush,

a former Naval aviator and CIA director,

was informed about this secret meeting after his presidency.

- Davis claims in the documentary that

he and President Bush in 2003 had

several secret conversations about this topic.

According to Davis,

President Bush told him that three ships

from outer space landed

at Holloman Air Force Base

and an interstellar creature exited

that ship and spoke to officials

from the US military and the CIA.

It does add another layer of unique speculation

to what happened at Holloman Air Force Base

and its long UFO history

that tied all the way back to this famous photo.

- So does the new information make us change our verdict?

Well, not without corroboration

from someone who can verify

that story about the first President Bush.

If that someone is you, please let us know.

And that's our show for tonight.

Thank you so much for watching,

and as always, keep those cameras rolling.

[dramatic music]