Original subtitles

♪♪

Narrator: Wichita, Kansas.

A mysterious, silent craft is recorded

gliding through the sky.

As some are sure it was a UFO.

Mike Marler [on video]: What is it?

Ashley Kircher: No wings, no windows,

no exhaust coming out of it or anything like that.

Mike Marler: It really opened up a little bit further down.

This is not an illusion.

It would be hard to fake this kind of thing.

And I had to take a second and think, .Am I hallucinating /"

He was observing it, and then it suddenly vanished.

Mike [on video]: Shit.

And then it was gone.

And that itself seems a bit spooky.

Narrator: Fear springs from ignorance.

Are they malevolent, here to conquer--

♪♪

Narrator:--or are they here to save us from the mistakes

that they may have made?

These questions can be explained from the UFO POV.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Chris Rutkowski: Wichita is in America's heartland,

but Wichita itself is in a very interesting location.

It's a typical, average day in 2021--

♪♪

Chris:--when Mike Marler is going home for lunch

from his job.

You have to let out the dogs.

Mike: March 14, 2021.

Yeah, it was your average day.

Nice weather,

nothing really going on.

I remember it being pretty clear outside, pretty hot.

Typical day.

Ashley: And he's on a highway.

He comes up to a stop sign and notices something

unusual in the sky.

Mike: I didn't really think nothing of it at first,

until I had a better view of it.

Then I knew something was different.

This was definitely something different.

It was silver.

It was a weird shape.

It was almost like something you would see on Fantastic Four,

you know, futuristic.

It wasn't very detailed, as far as, you know,

.I can see the wings.

I can see this. /

It was almost like a long silver tube almost.

But it was very bright.

But there wasn't no detail to it.

I couldn't make out any engines.

I couldn't make out any wings, cockpit, you know,

anything like that.

It was wild.

I mean, even thinking back now.

Chris: It seems to be a white cylinder of some sort,

stationary, not really moving that quickly,

but it's definitely out of place.

He sees that this object also seems to be moving

generally south.

♪♪

Chris: And he can't see any wings,

he can't see any windows.

He can't see anything that would suggest it was something normal.

Woman [on video]: What in the hell is that?

Chris: Another interesting factor about this case

is that it was not a single witness case.

Other people also reported seeing unusual objects

in the sky around about the same time.

And this was brought to the attention

of a local news outlet.

Reporter: Hundreds of Wichita residents shocked

by this sight Thursday,

saying they saw what appeared to be a UFO.

Narrator: Mike Marler and many others

witnessed this oddity.

So many, that it grabbed national attention in 2021.

It left everyone wondering what could have been happening?

- [sparks snap] - ♪♪

Back in the early 60s,

all the way through the late 80s,

a lot of the airplanes were built here.

You had Boeing had a huge presence here,

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon.

So this city was built off of the backs

of the aviation industry.

- [plane cuts air] - ♪♪

On the east side of Wichita is McConnell Air Force Base,

one of the larger

and more significant Air Force bases

in the United States.

So when one thinks of, you know, wide open skies in Kansas,

well, that means you have a good view of what's really up there.

You can see the stars and planets really easily.

At night, the sky can get fairly dark if you're outside the city.

So the fact that people have been seeing UFOs

and UAP in the area, not that surprising.

Well, there's a lot of activity in that area

in terms of aircraft and other things

seen in the sky,

not just airplanes themselves, but there are blimps.

Narrator: Kansas has long been a quiet crossroads

in the mystery of unidentified aerial phenomena,

stretching back to 1897,

with strange craft seen in the night sky,

even landing at times.

Since 1995, there have been over 1,200 UFO sightings

in this one state alone.

Once again, draws eyes upward

with questions that still linger.

Ashley: There was a couple of sightings in the past

where witnesses would see a red orange light

moving around in the sky.

Now, that was years before.

And in 1971, a person saw a mushroom-shaped craft

was hovering in a field,

and the sheep became very disturbed

and they jumped fences and ran away.

So that's very telling when animals react to things as well,

that there's something going on that they can feel or see.

♪♪

Narrator: What is it about this sighting

that grabs our attention?

Ashley: There's no exhaust coming out of it

or anything like that.

And he follows it for a while, gets off a couple of photos,

and then he says it accelerates and just disappears.

Murray Toews: The video of him and his experience of it

was very, very sincere.

And he was like visibly kind of shaken by the experience.

But his description of it was sufficient to help us figure out

maybe what was going on,

or at least again wildly speculate

what was going on, which is more likely.

Mike: So I started filming at the stop sign

and then I'm heading eastbound all down this street right here

and I just froze.

It was shocking to me.

I really couldn't believe what I was seeing.

And then I followed it south for about two blocks

before it just disappeared.

It just disappeared on me so fast.

Yeah, it was crazy.

And I could get a really, really good visual on it.

When I first saw it, it looked more like an aluminum,

more like a silver metallic.

It was very reflective, but also bright,

if that makes any sense at all.

But it was definitely a silver metallic colour.

And I knew that McConnell Air Force Base

was roughly 15 miles to the south of us,

right where the object was kind of heading.

And I thought, .Okay, so I'm going to see the object

start to descend at any minute now, /

and it never did.

As a matter of fact.

Not only did it never descend,

it accelerated to out of my view.

And then it was gone.

It was gone.

Chris: There's a number of interesting things

about this particular video that sets it apart

from a lot of other UAP videos.

Number one, it's not zoomed in.

This is something with reference points

that you can see houses and trees.

It's also during the day, which is also quite rare

in terms of UAP videos.

Usually, we get lights and things that are zoomed

to infinity that distort what we're actually seeing.

But this is actually something that seems concrete.

This is not an illusion.

It would be hard to fake this kind of thing.

Ashley: And it wasn't just him that saw it.

Like, there was other people that did see it.

He was so excited.

He actually got a friend of his to charter a small plane

later that day after work.

And they went up and they were kind of flying around

looking for this object.

Mike: Was up in the air for about 45 minutes.

Several reports of them seeing something very similar.

Big story, big story for here, locally.

♪♪

Narrator: If not a UAP, what was it?

A small engine airplane towing an advertisement,

banner or a kite perhaps?

The profile and movement of the object rules those out.

♪♪

Narrator: What about a NASA Super Guppy?

Ashley: I saw pictures of the Super Guppy,

and it's definitely a great big, huge monster plane

with a very rounded nose like you would see on a Guppy.

I'm assuming it makes quite a bit of noise.

It wouldn't be a silent craft.

♪♪

Chris: And had been said that this Super Guppy

was perhaps what was being seen

because there was one around the Wichita area as well.

But after some checking,

it was found that the Super Guppy

was not in the area at the time

and that the blimp advertising whatever

was not flying over that area at the time either.

There's not really any other explanation other than a blimp

or an aircraft.

It wasn't a series of small objects strung together.

It wasn't a group of lights.

So as best it was a good attempt to try and debunk this,

those particular explanations didn't necessarily hold water.

♪♪

Narrator: Something that large gliding so low

in a clear, cloudless sky, should have made a sound,

but there was nothing.

No hum, no wind, no echo,

just the uneasy quiet of daylight holding still.

We used artificial intelligence to analyze Mike's footage

to see if it could show us anything not readily apparent

in his video.

What at a glance looked like an airplane is clearly not.

When we look at the inverted colour,

there appears to be an atmospheric curl

akin to a field surrounding it.

Is this why it's so silent?

We can only speculate.

So I'm still trying to figure it out.

So when I first started filming, I kind of thought it was a joke.

I thought it was gonna be funny, right?

I'm gonna send this to my friend.

I might get some content for my social media

or something like that.

Roughly, about 30 seconds into filming,

when I got about a block in, I knew that it was different.

And then when I got to the stop sign,

it was still there,

and I can still identify it as moving.

It wasn't stationary, it wasn't a kite

or something like that.

That's when the anxiety kind of set in.

Neil Lavoie: That would be a non-human thing, again.

Could be when something violates characteristics, like

if something's travelling to the speed of sound

or above the speed of sound and there's no sonic boom,

there's another piece.

And the other one would be noise.

If you have something

with no noise characteristics whatsoever,

I can't think of anything that's aviation

or aerospace-based that makes no noise.

Narrator: A silent craft.

Stealth aircraft use technologies

like engine placement and shielded exhausts

to reduce their acoustic signature.

But they cannot be perfectly silent due to the physics

of jet engines and high-speed flight.

So what technology could explain this encounter?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Wichita, Kansas, March 2021.

A silent silver craft is spotted high in the sky,

silently making its way across the country's airspace

before vanishing as rapidly and stealthily as it appeared.

Murray: Silent, quiet, hyper efficiency.

♪♪

Now that lends itself to this idea that,

why would you even bother being that efficient?

And often, as it's true for most UFO sightings

that were witnessed by credible witnesses,

this idea of stealth and to be discreet

and quiet is very, very important

to who's ever visiting us.

If we go to the Kardashev scale,

talking about different civilizations,

acquire more energy from the planet

than the star and then the galaxy,

and as that happens, technology increases

and their ability to manipulate that energy increases.

Narrator: Could this have been a test of that manipulation

by one entity or another?

Perhaps a test of their stealth capabilities?

If so, the lack of response from the air force base

suggests it worked.

Murray: There's some standard ways to describe

how UFOs might operate.

One of them is that they just use a field drive

which takes available, say, things like even

quantum vacuum energy from surrounding the ship

and using that as energy to cause lift.

So one way we can look at it is that a ship like that may

in fact create a gravitational field around it that acts

as a form of repellent that pushes up against

Earth's gravity and can glide along quietly

and seamlessly, which is an example

of incredible amounts of energy usage.

Narrator: To us, it's science fiction,

but to them, things like quantum drives

might be a normal way of life.

We once thought that talking computers

were science fiction.

Now we talk to computers all the time,

and they talk back.

Could someone have been testing new technologies

in active camouflage?

Murray: Would move through the air very easily,

and also radar would be hard to get any features

or detail on it.

It would be hard to paint an image

of what that is you're looking at exactly,

all in the theme of stealth and efficiency.

So well-thought-out technology,

if in fact it was created by aliens.

♪♪

Narrator: The Tic-Tac shape could have been some sort

of technology to mask its true silhouette,

something alien visitors might employ to keep us guessing

and accomplish their mission without detection.

Without delving into the conspiratorial parts of it,

perhaps another example of, .Let's see what they've got.

Let's just check it out.

Let's check out the adjacent population

to the military facility. /

Going to McConnell or anything like that

would give any extra information,

especially if it was something that they didn't want known.

Maybe it was some sort of secret thing they were testing.

People that do this for a job could definitely take that video

and get some better information from it.

Narrator: We did just that with our AI technicians.

This second angle reveals an object even more improbable.

Its wedged front cuts the air, and the inverted colours fail

to show us anything seen from Earth.

The only anomaly is a kind of ripple on its surface.

But again, its purpose and the object in general

is baffling.

Why would aliens have some interest

in the middle of Kansas?

Well, why not?

If you have to land for repairs

or you want to have a good observation

without any unobstructed view, it's possible that this would be

a good place to investigate.

Maybe there's some testing of crops,

maybe trying to understand how our crops are doing,

how the moisture content of our soil is.

Are we really destroying our environment

as fast as everyone claims to be?

♪♪

Chris: And if the aliens are benevolent,

they have some concerns about this.

♪♪

Narrator: Agricultural or geological,

the Wichita area has some interest--

♪♪

Narrator:--not only for our own futures,

but for potential aliens as well.

It's actually geologically surprisingly complex.

It's a relatively flat-lying area.

However, that's just like what we see on the surface.

So there's the river system, and along that river system

is a number of, I call them, zones of weaknesses.

The sighting was actually along the Arkansas River.

There's a number of faults.

Some of these faults, they're active today.

So there's like, microseismicity happening that can be monitored.

And the river system has aquifers,

and that brings us to

some of the interesting geology underneath.

Under those glacial deposits on the surface that form

like the river valley transected by ongoing faulting,

we have sedimentary rocks.

Those are mostly Devonian in age,

young from a geological point of view.

And it's very diverse in terms of its composition.

And we have very extensive beds of gypsum,

salt deposits within these sedimentary rocks,

up to, like, 100 meters thick.

♪♪

Narrator: Beneath those ancient seas,

strange minerals took shape.

Layers of salt, gypsum, and crystalline stone

formed over eons,

but within those silent deposits,

there lies something unexpected, a natural conductivity.

The same formations geologists scan for,

rendered visible in wavelengths we cannot see.

♪♪

Christian Bohm: It's a dynamic environment that we live in.

- [thunder rumbles] - ♪♪

Christian: Very special, maybe unique.

And that's part of the attraction,

we like to think so.

♪♪

Narrator: Amazingly, the direction

of the geological pattern is what was described

as the flight line of the object

heading toward the military in the southeast.

If these visitors are looking for specific minerals

or investigating a military base,

why have all our searches come up with nothing?

♪♪

♪♪

Nathalie Ouellette: So it's this paradox

where we should be finding signs of alien life,

but we are not.

So there's a few ways to try to figure out a solution

to this paradox.

All of them are kind of existentially terrifying.

One example is called the Great Filter.

So the Great Filter is this idea that there's some large event

that happens in the history of every civilization,

and it basically kills off the majority of those civilizations.

So we look at ourselves, humans here on Earth,

and we think, are we ahead of the filter,

or are we behind it?

And both are kind of terrifying.

So if we're behind the filter, we haven't had the event yet.

That means that there's some unforeseeable thing

that's gonna happen at some point in the future--

- [explosion] - ♪♪

Nathalie:--that's gonna kill us off,

and we don't know what that is.

If that thing has already happened,

be it an asteroid impact or something,

and it's behind us,

maybe we're the one lucky civilization

who passed through the filter,

and that's why we're not finding anyone else.

And so we're actually very lonely.

So it's an interesting paradox.

It's a thought experiment to try to figure out,

are we alone?

And if we're not, why is everyone being so quiet?

Narrator: As we form a picture based on the evidence

available to us about how this craft in Wichita

may have been operating

and what it might have been looking for,

our search to where they came from comes into view.

Producers have asked our experts

to consider the exoplanet Kepler-186f as a possible home.

Dr. Michael P. Masters: Kepler-186f

is a really important planet in the sense

that it's the first

exoplanet discovered in the habitable zone

of its star ever.

Nathalie: We have to use very special imaging techniques

and tools like coronagraphs, for example.

Narrator: We found Kepler-186f

located 580 light years from Earth,

using the Kepler Space Telescope,

a mission that transformed our view of distant worlds.

♪♪

Narrator: But now, with the next generation

of observatories coming online,

we're poised to unlock new secrets

as we explore atmospheric signatures,

surface details,

and perhaps signs of life that Kepler could only hint at.

♪♪

Nathalie: So the James Webb Space Telescope can do that

and can do it really well,

but we've been able to do this for about 15 years now.

So there have been a few candidate exoplanets

that people think might be outside the Milky Way

in our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda,

but they're not confirmed, and they need to use

very odd techniques in order to even detect them.

♪♪

Nathalie: There are plenty of exoplanets

within our own Milky Way that we haven't been able to detect

just because they're too far away.

♪♪

Dr. Masters: I remember studying and following this closely

because we always knew there were planets.

We just couldn't find them.

And all of these methods were developed,

and our technology got better,

and our space telescopes got better.

Narrator: Many exoplanets are studied by astronomers

using the TRANSIT method, which is studying

and determining many aspects of the planet

based on when the planet passes between

their star and us here on Earth.

Nathalie: But it's sort of a logistical

requirement right now,

because the farther they are from their star,

the less frequent they're going to be passing

in front of their star and making that transit.

That means that instead of being able to study them

every six days when it's passing in front,

we have to wait every 100 days.

Or imagine if something was like the Earth,

we'd have to wait a whole year

in order for it to pass.

So we're getting fewer and fewer signals.

So that's why a lot of the exoplanets

we study are so close in.

They're easier to detect because they're passing

in front of their star so often.

So when we're looking at these exoplanets,

the detection method that we use the most

is the TRANSIT method.

♪♪

♪♪

Nathalie: We're looking for a periodic dimming in these stars,

indicating that something is passing in front of the star,

blocking the light.

So when we're looking at that dip,

the frequency with which the dip comes back,

that's the period of the orbit.

But how deep the dip is, also tells us

how big the exoplanet is.

So if you have lots of these signals, you can get, like,

a really robust idea of the period,

the size of these exoplanets.

And so when you have something close in,

you get more and more of those signals.

We continue to develop better technology.

Our space telescopes are continuing to accelerate

in their capabilities.

So we start to learn more and more

about these exoplanets.

It's not just radius, it's not just mass,

it's not just gravity.

But considering those aspects of this exoplanet

and the others in the Kepler system,

that's very important to pay attention to this

as our technology evolves, because it might be one

that isn't just the first to be discovered

in the habitable zone,

but potentially the first that harbours life.

♪♪

Nathalie: Habitable zone doesn't mean alien life

or even liquid water,

but it means that potentially it could have water

in its liquid form there.

So the system has five exoplanets in total.

It's about 600 light-years away.

That makes it more difficult to study.

♪♪

Nathalie: The light-year is a measure of distance,

not of time.

So light is the fastest thing in the universe,

and it travels a certain distance over a year.

That's what we call "a light-year."

So distances in astronomy are so huge

that we need to construct these new units

to measure these distances.

That means when the sun shines, it takes eight minutes

for that sunshine to go from the sun to the Earth.

That means if the sun were to, poof,

disappear all of a sudden,

we wouldn't know for eight whole minutes.

♪♪

Narrator: Kepler-186f is 600 light-years from Earth.

Being that far away means that what we are looking

at now happened 600 years ago.

A lot can happen in 600 light years.

Just look at our own scientific history.

Science as we know it today, didn't yet exist

in the modern sense.

600 years ago, we still believed in an Earth-centered universe.

♪♪

Narrator: Today, we plan on putting a human on Mars,

600 light years away, a different star,

different conditions.

As we begin to speculate on what visitors from Kepler-186f

might be like, we know one thing for sure.

It evolved in ways we can only begin to understand.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: We can only begin to imagine worlds that, like Earth,

have the potential for life to exist.

♪♪

Narrator: They scanned for planets that lay within

a narrow band across their star known as the Goldilocks,

or habitable zone.

So it's not a guarantee that there's alien life

or that it's habitable,

or even that there's water at all.

It's really just the right region for water to exist

in liquid form, if there was water.

♪♪

Nathalie: It's very historically important.

It sort of started us down this path of finding

these habitable zone planets.

So Kepler-186, the star, is a red dwarf,

so it's going to be longer lived.

Kepler-186f takes about 130 days for it to go around its star.

So a little bit more than one third of a year,

but that's a lot longer than a lot of the other exoplanets

which are orbiting around these stars

in a matter of a week, for example.

♪♪

And it's not tidally locked.

So that means that its rotation around itself

would be slower than on Earth.

So the days would last longer because it's closer in

and the gravitational pull of the star

is slowing down the rotation.

But you would still have a day-night cycle.

So that would potentially help with the temperature

sort of equalizing on both sides.

So in that sense it is quite a bit closer

to what we have here on Earth.

So the equilibrium temperature is -85,

but that's without an atmosphere.

With an atmosphere, it could be quite a bit warmer.

Narrator: With no guarantees on this front,

there are other aspects of Kepler-186f

that make it an appealing target for analysis

of whether it might be able to sustain forms of life.

Nathalie: We know that it is probably Earth-like,

either a rocky planet or potentially an ocean world.

So a rocky core with an ocean around it.

It's about an Earth radius in size,

but the mass has quite a large span

of possibilities, which makes it hard

to pin down exactly its composition.

♪♪

Dr. Masters: And then finally with Kepler-186f,

we're able to say definitively

there's a planet and it may harbour life.

It's within this Goldilocks zone, as we say.

Narrator: Kepler-186f is a relatively calm red dwarf star

who emits far less radiation than other stars

of this classification.

This coupled with Kepler-186f being at the outer edge

of the habitable zone, may have accelerated how fast life

could evolve on this distant planet.

So you have the benefit of a longer lifetime

for the system for life to develop,

but you don't have all of that stellar activity

and the flares that could potentially erode away

an atmosphere that's there.

It's in the Cygnus constellation,

about 600 light-years away.

And a quite Earth-like gravity would be stronger there.

There's a total of five planets in the system,

so you'd be able to see these planets

in the sky as well.

Dr. Masters: And that obviously raises questions

about whether or not life could arise there.

And whether or not life could be similar to what we have

here on this planet.

Narrator: In the Goldilocks zone,

near equal to Earth in radius and mass.

A sun that is not as violent as ours,

it sounds like Kepler-186f

is potentially a life-evolving paradise.

How can we find out more?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Many aspects of Kepler-186f suggest

it should be relatively fertile.

We've seen the data.

We know the rhythm of its sun

and can surmise the seasons of its alien year.

Everything about Kepler-186f suggests it should be alive--

♪♪

Narrator:--and yet in all our listening,

all our watching, there's only silence.

No signals, no signatures,

no sense of intelligence reaching back.

♪♪

Narrator: If life can emerge there,

then the question becomes unavoidable:

Why haven't we heard from it?

Let's assume life did develop on Kepler-186f

and that they are intelligent.

What obstacles did they overcome to reach an evolutionary era

for star travel?

The red dwarf of Kepler-186f is relatively calm--

♪♪

Narrator:--with few major flares or radiation storms emitting.

♪♪

Narrator: This means that life on its surrounding planets

would have a long time to develop.

In a relatively stable environment,

one could imagine that an intelligent species

evolving on Kepler-186f might develop vision

quite different from our own.

In the dim light of a red dwarf sun

at wavelengths beyond the register of the human eye,

vision as we know it would be useless.

♪♪

Narrator: But life adapts.

Beings there may see in layers,

infrared bleeding through darkness,

electromagnetic fields rippling like weather,

ultraviolet traces invisible to us.

Their sight might not capture solid forms at all,

but atmospheres, energies, the shimmer of heat and charge.

What they perceive could be less like looking at objects

and more like reading the air itself.

Nathalie: If there's a solid surface for life to take foot,

and if the sort of chemical components required for life

are there as well,

we can't simply point a telescope and say,

.This is the material that the exoplanet is made of. /

We have to use modelling

when we know the density of the planet to say,

.Okay, this different combination of elements

could give us that density."

♪♪

Narrator: Our sun, a G-type main-sequence star,

is 4.6 billion years old,

meaning both it and Kepler-186

formed around the same broad galactic era.

Though Kepler-186 might be slightly older,

giving it more time to develop life than Earth.

As our technology has exponentially grown,

so could theirs.

Murray: And as that happens, technology increases

and their ability to manipulate that energy increases.

They can start to do things

like manipulate field energy around them.

The very vacuum of spacetime itself can be manipulated,

used as a form of energy.

♪♪

Murray: They could take electrical fields

and manipulate them and suspend objects

with that level of power.

That again, is consistent with the idea

that it's got some kind of a field

surrounding it that allows it to do the magic that it does,

the technological magic, which is to hover

and move either by manipulating gravity

or some kind of electric field and that kind of thing.

Narrator: What do they see when they look at us?

A curiosity to observe, a rival to fear,

or perhaps a fleeting species unaware it's being studied,

and relatively primitive or unexceptional.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: For decades, UFO investigations

have been asking the wrong questions,

the who, what, and wheres.

But the real mystery isn't what they are.

It's how they see us.

If these visitors evolved on a world nothing like ours,

orbiting a star nothing like our own,

then everything about their perception

could be fundamentally different from ours.

To understand what happened over Kansas on March 14, 2021,

we need to stop thinking like humans.

We need to see through their eyes.

And I had to take a second and think, .Am I hallucinating?

Did I have a bad lunch?

Did I eat something bad? /

You know, I had no idea.

But as soon as I got to this stop sign in this location

that we're at right now, I mean, it was clear as day to me.

And then that's when reality set in that, .Oh my gosh,

I'm looking at something that's not normal. /

Murray: It was Isaac Asimov.

Technology eventually will resemble magic

because from our perspective, it would be.

It's so incredible and so unbelievable,

it may as well be magic from our perspective now.

And because we are living in a technological world,

we're not as easily fooled by that.

We can see behind the curtain a little bit more

and realize there's a machine back there

or someone has built something, we still don't understand it.

Narrator: What if Mike wasn't hallucinating?

What if he was simply seeing something human neurology

wasn't designed to process?

Human eyes detect less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We see a narrow band we call visible light.

But what if these visitors evolved under a different star

with different sensory requirements?

♪♪

Narrator: What if they perceive what we cannot?

♪♪

Narrator: Red dwarf stars are cool and dim

in visible light,

but they flare violently in ultraviolet radiation.

♪♪

Narrator: If complex life evolved on Kepler-186f,

it would face a simple evolutionary pressure.

Perhaps detect UV or perish during stellar flares.

♪♪

Narrator: Organisms that couldn't sense

incoming UV radiation might not survive to reproduce.

Over millions of years,

UV vision wouldn't be an advantage,

it could be essential.

♪♪

Narrator: Their eyes may have evolved to see what their star

demanded they see.

♪♪

Narrator: To beings with UV vision,

Earth might not look like our photographs.

Our atmosphere scatters UV light differently

than visible wavelengths.

The ionosphere glows with charged particles.

♪♪

Narrator: Lightning creates UV afterglows

that could last for seconds.

Even our oceans might reflect UV signatures

based on plankton density and mineral content.

They wouldn't see our world as we do.

They could be seeing a completely different

version of it,

written in frequencies we're blind to.

And potentially that could be the view of Earth

from the craft over Wichita.

♪♪

Murray: Some interesting footage because it's consistent

with his description, although it's far away.

So this object was 200 to 300 feet across

and had kind of a plasma glow to it.

That right there, in fact is an indication

it's interacting with something.

Our atmosphere would be the best example.

Slight ionization.

There's some kind of an energy exchange that's going on,

or a reaction to the surrounding environment.

And when you witness it really close,

it had a uniform brightness to it.

♪♪

Narrator: Witness Mike Marler described the craft

as having a plasma glow, a bright, uniform luminescence.

Plasma emits strongly in ultraviolet.

If the craft generates an electromagnetic field

for propulsion, that field would ionize surrounding air molecules

to humanize a bright metallic object.

To UV sensitive eyes, perhaps a blazing beacon

lighting up the atmosphere in every direction,

creating a three dimensional signature

of electromagnetic interaction potentially visible for miles.

Mike: This, there was no answers for it.

And it was so bright.

It was so bright that it forced your attention, really.

♪♪

Narrator: March 14, 2021, clear skies over Kansas.

From their perspective, approaching from the south,

the otherworldly visitors might see McConnell Air Force Base's

radar sweeping the sky, each pulse perhaps

creating electromagnetic signatures.

Christian: When we think of sending a signal down there,

like a magnetic signal or so,

those tend to be good conductors.

Narrator: The Arkansas river

cutting through sedimentary rock,

possibly reflecting mineral content in UV bands.

And beneath the surface, something unusual.

Massive deposits of gypsum and salt up to 100 metres thick,

electrically conductive,

potentially creating detectable distortions in the ionosphere

directly above them.

Perhaps this is what they saw, a three-dimensional map

written in ultraviolet.

Their own craft's plasma field glowing

as it ionizes atmosphere, creating a visible trail.

McConnell Air Force Base's radar,

each sweep possibly a pulse of electromagnetic energy

visible as rhythmic flashes.

The Arkansas River, not blue water,

but perhaps a flowing signature

of minerals fluorescing in UV bands.

♪♪

Narrator: And beneath the surface,

those massive gypsum deposits,

potentially affecting the ionosphere above them,

creating electromagnetic patterns

that could reveal the geology below.

They might not have been looking at Kansas.

They might have been reading it.

Atmospheric chemistry, electromagnetic activity,

geological structures all simultaneously,

all in frequencies invisible to human eyes.

Perhaps a world within our world that we can never see.

This is not something we see every day.

This is something I can't describe to my friends.

You see a yellow school bus on the road, you can say,

.Hey, hey buddy, that's a yellow school bus."

You see this and you don't know what the heck you're looking at.

I grew up here, there's airplanes all the time.

I could not describe.

I could not tell you what this was.

And then a little anxiety, curiosity more than anything.

And that's why I began to follow it.

I could have easily stopped recording, went back to work

and just continued on with my day.

But I knew I had something different.

Narrator: If their home world orbits a red dwarf

surrounded by ancient evaporated seas,

they might recognize Kansas instantly.

Not because it's valuable, but because it's familiar.

Perhaps the same conductive mineral deposits,

the same geological signatures.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Kepler-186f is 600 light-years away.

But geology follows universal rules.

Ancient seas that evaporated under arid conditions

can leave behind thick beds of salt and gypsum.

They might recognize this place the way we'd recognize

a river delta on another planet,

different, but fundamentally similar.

Christian: When we think of sending a signal down there,

like a magnetic signal or so,

those tend to be good conductors.

There's a very heterogeneous subsurface composition

that itself can be potentially of interest,

because where we have heterogeneities,

where we have some deflections of signals

or so it can also go hand-in-hand

with energy creations.

Narrator: Why Kansas?

Perhaps because everything converged here.

Military installation

broadcasting electromagnetic signatures.

Unique geological formations creating a detectable

subsurface fingerprint.

Clear skies over flat terrain,

potentially perfect observation conditions.

This might not have been random.

This location could have offered them everything they needed

in a single flyover,

and Mike Marler happened to be in exactly the right place

at exactly the right time with a camera to capture

what may be the clearest documentation

of their presence we have.

I'm always cautious to point it towards the conspiratorial,

military, industrial complex thing,

because in Canada, actually we're more open about UFOs

than the United States.

The United States is very, very paranoid.

You don't want to interfere with the inhabitants.

I'm more on the camp that we're potentially dangerous to them

because we are, in fact, dangerous to them

if we got our hands on them, we might have.

It's possible.

So they're doing everything they can

to be as stealth as possible.

And that isn't just for our benefit,

the galaxy at large might be like that.

It might be a very dangerous place.

♪♪

So they just made a habit of being very stealth,

very hard to detect, get in, get out,

do the reconnaissance they need to do.

Whatever they are doing, they're doing it

very, very discreetly.

So my thought is that the imperative is to survive.

And I think that pervades the universe.

They've survived, they got here,

they want to see how we're doing.

They may perceive us as competition or a threat,

or they just want to keep tabs on us.

Mike: What did I see?

Until this day, nobody's ever came with anything conclusive,

anything that could tell me what it was that I saw.

So I'm still trying to figure it out.

Narrator: Whatever it was, it may hold the key

to the enduring mystery of whether Earth is unique

or whether there are other planets in other galaxies

sustaining species every bit as sophisticated,

if not much more so, as humankind.

♪♪

♪♪

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