Original subtitles

Narrator: Dead or alive,

did Adolf Hitler escape Berlin?

Hard evidence is seemingly missing.

Diehard fascists are saying,

"he's still alive. He's escaped."

Narrator: Gangster cover-up.

Did the FBI kill an innocent man?

Gough: Dillinger had blue eyes.

The body in the morgue had brown.

They're trying to keep this under wraps.

Narrator: Extraterrestrial origins.

Is Tutankhamun's dagger out of this world?

The iron age begins 200 to 300 years

after the burial of Tutankhamun.

Gough: The Egyptian culture was a bronze age civilization.

So how does it possibly exist?

♪♪

Narrator: Expert analysis

combined with 21st century forensic science

uncovers groundbreaking new evidence

to reveal the truth

behind the world's darkest conspiracies.

[ Speaking German ]

Adolf Hitler... Evil personified.

I don't know that there is

a more hated man in human history.

Narrator: Hitler disappears from the eyes of the world in April 1945.

There are reports that he died

in his underground command post, the fuhrerbunker,

in the last days of world war ii.

But there are other theories.

There's huge numbers of stories that he actually escaped

after world war ii.

Narrator: Now new evidence may reveal the truth behind his fate.

Can a jawbone said to be the remains of the fuhrer

prove that he died in 1945?

Having actual hard, physical evidence

is what we need if we want to have proof

that Hitler did, in fact, die in the bunker

in the way that history tells us.

♪♪

Narrator: The last days of April 1945...

♪♪

...as the battle for the city rages overhead,

Hitler issues orders from his bunker

beneath the Reich chancellery.

Everyone is wondering what Hitler's last moves

are going to be.

Narrator: But German state radio suddenly announces his death,

has fallen in battle at the head of his troops.

Many are not convinced.

Where's the evidence? Where's the body?

So, there's a big question Mark.

[ Gunfire ]

Narrator: Soviet forces are determined to find him,

dead or alive.

They are literally turning over bodies,

trying to determine if that's the body of Adolf Hitler.

Narrator: They take over Hitler's headquarters,

the Reich chancellery,

and comb every inch for evidence.

The Russians capture Hitler's staff in the bunker,

and all of them tell pretty much the same story.

Hitler's committed suicide about a week ago

along with Eva Braun,

and that they have cremated his body.

Narrator: Russian troops find two burned corpses

in the bombed-out garden behind the Reich chancellery.

The Russians tell the Americans

that they have disinterred a couple of bodies.

They've done an autopsy, and they have Hitler's remains.

Narrator: But within weeks,

the Russians changed their story.

What Stalin's media machine starts to do is say,

"where's Hitler? We don't have him.

We don't know."

Which just fuels the mystery

about where Hitler is at the end of the war.

The hard evidence is seemingly missing.

Narrator: Rumors begin to circulate.

The diehard fascists are saying,

"he's still alive. He's escaped.

He's going to lead us on to final victory."

Narrator: After the war, there are even claims

Hitler is spotted in South America.

So, did he survive the war or not?

♪♪

In 1968, new evidence comes to light.

The Soviet union releases an autopsy report from 1945.

They claim it's Hitler's.

It contains an official account of his death.

Pavelec: The bunker staff at the end of the war

insist that Hitler and Eva Braun both took cyanide,

and then, while the cyanide was working,

Hitler also does the double duty of shooting himself in the head.

[ Gunshot ]

At that point, his staff take his body up to ground level,

put him in a small, shallow pit,

pour gasoline on him, and cremate the body.

♪♪

Narrator: The autopsy report partially confirms

the original account of Hitler's death.

It reports that the body purportedly of Hitler

is burned beyond recognition.

Narrator: But there are discrepancies.

There are no indications of a lethal wound,

which is odd, given that the official account

is he shot himself.

Are the Soviets lying again

or do they have incomplete evidence?

It's unclear what they're trying to argue.

♪♪

Narrator: The autopsy report causes confusion.

The only way to confirm

the body found by the Russians is Hitler's

is to examine the remains.

This seems a possibility in 2000

when a special exhibition

celebrating the end of world war ii

is held in Moscow.

Historians across the world

hope it will clarify Hitler's fate once and for all.

The Russians, again, dangle a carrot,

opening up the mystery.

They say that here's a picture of Hitler's jawbone

and that skull fragment

showing what they purport is a bullet wound.

Narrator: The Russians reveal hard evidence for the first time,

but they refuse to allow the bones to be examined.

They say they are to delicate to handle.

♪♪

17 years after the exhibition, the Russians reconsider.

They give French scientists from the Université Paris-Saclay

access to the skull and jaw bone fragments,

skulls are a very, very useful tool.

Not only can we find out about, you know, the sex,

we can also look at whether someone was an adult or a child.

Narrator: But the French team don't have a full skull,

only a three by four inch piece of cranium.

What we'd want to see would be the forehead,

the neck, down by the ears,

because those are the features that we'd look at

that would be really male or really female.

It's actually quite difficult to make a call

on just an isolated part of the cranial vault.

Narrator: It's not enough to determine even the sex of the body,

but the fragment does hold one vital clue.

The most noticeable thing about this skull

is that there is a bullet hole in it,

more specifically, there is an exit wound.

King: Hitler apparently shot himself, and there is a bullet hole

on the skull on the left parietal bone.

But it's in a bit of an unusual place.

So, there's a bit of a question there.

Narrator: The accounts from Hitler's staff

say he shot himself through the temple.

The fragment of bone suggests something else.

One of the ways that you're going to get

an exit wound in your left parietal

would be if someone had shot themselves

through the roof of their mouth.

[ Gunshot ]

Narrator: Did Hitler's staff get it wrong?

Are these the fuhrer's remains?

The skull alone is not enough

to make a positive identification.

♪♪

The French team use a scanning electron microscope

to examine the jaw bone fragment.

They spot something that could be significant.

Teeth are incredibly useful in a forensic context.

Everything you've done with them...

Lose bits of them,

knock some of them sideways, chip them,

all leads to a very identifiable,

individual sort of bite print.

Narrator: Incredibly, a record of Hitler's teeth survives.

His dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke, was interrogated after the war

and gave a full description of Hitler's dental health.

Could this record confirm once and for all

whether Hitler survived the war?

♪♪

Narrator: The Russians claim to have the bones of Adolf Hitler.

A French forensic team

compares the jaw bone to Hitler's dental records

to see if the Russians are right.

We know that Hitler is supposed to have had bad teeth,

and what we see in this particular jaw fragment

is evidence of a really bad oral health.

Parts of the jaw bone have actually started rotting away

from the front teeth.

These are bad, bad teeth.

Narrator: The dental remains include false teeth

and complicated bridgework.

The scientists attempt to match these remains

to an X-ray of Hitler's skull and teeth

dating from 1944.

We can see that various parts of the X-ray

are basically all white

because they're reflecting something really, really heavy,

which is metal, and that metal looks a lot like

the metal we're finding on the jaw fragment.

This is the identifying clue that you need.

♪♪

Narrator: Finally, the mystery regarding Hitler's fate is solved.

Thanks to forensic archeology,

the remains found in the Reich chancellery

have been identified.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt,

those teeth are the teeth of Adolf Hitler.

And from that, we draw the incontrovertible conclusion

that he died in 1945.

He never emigrated to Argentina.

He didn't escape to any other place,

and there's no dodging that conclusion.

♪♪

Narrator: John Dillinger, a notorious gangster in 1930s America.

Gunned down by the FBI,

but rumors persist that the body in the morgue is not his

and that he escaped.

Narrator: Using new technology to reexamine the evidence

could solve an alleged conspiracy

that reaches to the heart of the establishment.

The big question is, did we get the right guy?

♪♪

Narrator: Chicago, 1934...

Gangster John Dillinger is making a name for himself.

Davis-Hayes: John Dillinger is a celebrity.

He's depression era America’s favorite bank robber.

But to the FBI, he's public enemy number-one.

♪♪

Narrator: After a year long manhunt,

the FBI finally corners Dillinger.

Gough: He's watching a film in the Chicago biograph theater

when they raid the theater, and there's a massive shootout.

Narrator: Bullets ring into the night,

and the infamous gangster lies dead in an alleyway.

He's lying in a pool of blood.

There's chaos. There's disorder.

And do they have the right man? Is that John Dillinger?

Well, when they roll him over and look at him,

some people said, "yes, it is him,"

and others said no.

Narrator: The FBI brings in Dillinger's family to identify the body.

The family looks at the body,

and they feel something ain't right.

He doesn't look the way that they know him to look.

Narrator: His face appears different.

Something about him has changed.

Gough: Dillinger had blue eyes.

The body in the morgue had brown,

and thus, the conspiracy

of whether or not that was Dillinger

and if he actually escaped

is spawned.

The papers are printing

that the FBI got the wrong guy,

that Dillinger has escaped, and all of it is a cover-up.

So, you have to ask yourself, "did the FBI fake his death,

and if so, why?"

♪♪

Narrator: If the FBI did shoot the wrong man,

why wouldn't they admit it?

By the summer of 1934,

John Dillinger was the most wanted man in America.

It makes the white house sit up and take notice.

President Roosevelt has directed

the head of the FBI, j. Edgar hoover,

to get Dillinger.

Narrator: Hoover is hired to turn the FBI

into a professional organization,

but in 1934, Dillinger makes the bureau look like amateurs.

While the FBI has been trying to track Dillinger down,

there have been mistakes.

Bystanders have been shot and killed,

and F.D.R. Told J. Edgar Hoover

that if they didn't catch Dillinger,

they would be shut down.

Baker: And hoover, nothing if not a egomaniac,

completely focused on his own reputation.

So he's smart enough to understand

we've got some problems here with the bureau.

We've got to do something to improve the image.

Narrator: Hoover's orders to his agents are simple.

The goal is shoot him.

The FBI is going to get its man.

♪♪

Narrator: But did the FBI get their man?

Or were they forced to cover up another mistake

to help hoover keep his job?

The problem we have is that this all happened about 80 years ago.

We don't have a body.

How can we possibly solve this crime without it?

♪♪

Narrator: In 2016, new evidence emerges that may reveal

whether the FBI shot John Dillinger dead.

♪♪

A plaster cast of the face

of the man the FBI claim is Dillinger

made as his body was on the morgue table,

♪♪

Death masks are very common in the 1930s.

They made the death mask for forensic evidence

and to prove the death of criminals.

Narrator: Can modern forensic science

prove this mask really is the face of Dillinger?

This could be the final missing piece of the puzzle

that we've been looking for.

We need to take this mask and ask the question,

does it fit? Is this John Dillinger?

♪♪

Narrator: When Dillinger's family see the body in the morgue,

they can't confirm it's their son.

Can the death mask explain why?

When I study the mask

and compare it to photos taken by the FBI,

there's some pretty impressive similarities.

Narrator: The chin dimple, the eyebrows,

and the nose all match,

but the death mask reveals some key differences.

A mole between his eyes is missing,

another mole near his left eye has vanished,

and a scar on his upper lip is gone.

♪♪

Not only that,

a series of photographs taken by the FBI

when Dillinger was alive

reveals his face changes considerably

over a relatively short period of time.

How is this possible?

This man is public enemy number-one.

Everyone knows what he looks like.

His face has been splashed

on the front page of every newspaper.

What is the best way to disappear?

When you have that notoriety,

you don't want to go live in the mountains.

You still want to be in the towns, the Chicagos,

the new Yorks, the big areas.

But you don't want to be recognized.

And one way to solve that dilemma

is through plastic surgery.

♪♪

Narrator: Modern plastic surgery techniques

could explain Dillinger's change in appearance,

but was the plastic surgery of the 1930s

capable of such a transformation?

Plastic surgery goes back to world war one

by the end of the war,

numbers of soldiers were coming back,

and they needed reconstructive surgery.

Narrator: Although still in its infancy,

the plastic surgery techniques of the 1930s

could alter Dillinger's features,

perhaps enough to fool his own family.

♪♪

But there is another inconsistency

in the FBI's account.

Hamilton: It is a matter of record

that John Dillinger had blue eyes.

It is a fact.

Where we come into some difficulty

is that when we read the autopsy report,

the eyes are clearly described as brown.

It obviously raises questions.

Could it have been because he had contact lenses?

Narrator: Colored contact lenses did exist in the 1930s,

but they would have been spotted during the autopsy.

They can't be the reason,

but there is another possibility.

♪♪

Hamilton: Decomposition is a process

that happens to every body after someone dies.

♪♪

The bacteria that live inside you

that help you with your daily life

will turn on you,

and it affects all the parts of the body.

One of those is the Iris of the eyes.

Could decomposition have an impact

on the color of somebody's eyes?

Narrator: In 2008, new research on pigs by scientists in Canada

reveals decomposition breaks down the eye

within 48 hours of death with surprising results.

Decomposition will affect all sorts of things

that you can see on a body.

So, even a blue eye, as it breaks down, may change color.

It may become brown.

♪♪

Narrator: The death mask can also help reveal

the state of decomposition of the body.

As the body begins to rot,

bacteria create gases, causing tissues to swell.

Dillinger's mask appears rounder than his face in life.

We are potentially at the point

where decomposition is starting to set in and altering his face.

♪♪

Narrator: If the FBI recorded details about the body

at the same time the mask was made,

decomposition could explain the brown eyes,

but the autopsy report seems to contradict this.

It was performed on July 23rd,

within 24 hours of Dillinger's death.

Had the body decomposed enough by then to change eye color?

It is a mystery that may never be solved,

but perhaps there is a simpler way to I.D. a body.

If you truly want to identify someone, you don't use the face.

You use something much more exact...

Fingerprints.

♪♪

Hamilton: Everyone has them. They are unique,

and that means that even identical twins

will have different fingerprints.

Narrator: In the FBI database

is a set of Dillinger's fingerprints

made when he was still alive.

Do they match those of the body on the slab?

♪♪

We look at his fingerprints.

There's something not right.

There's whole spots that are missing.

Narrator: If the real John Dillinger was trying to hide his identity.

There could be an explanation.

You have to imagine John Dillinger

sitting around in a hotel room,

talking to a cohort of his,

brainstorming about possibilities

of how they can change their identity.

And the first thing that they come up with,

I am sure, is to get rid of fingerprints.

Narrator: And it looks like that's just what has happened.

Gough: It would appear that he's taken

the top layer of the skin, the epidermis, off

and had his fingerprints coated with acid.

Could you imagine how painful that must have been?

Narrator: But Dillinger was only partially successful.

There are gaps,

but enough of the prints remain to get a positive match

between Dillinger and the body in the morgue.

♪♪

The evidence suggesting an FBI cover-up

is starting to look thin.

But there's one test that can close the case.

♪♪

The only way to finally answer the question

is to have a DNA sample from the body.

♪♪

Narrator: In 2019, relatives of the gangster

secure permission to exhume Dillinger's body

from crown hill cemetery

in Marion county, Indianapolis.

In 2019, John Dillinger's body was set to be exhumed,

however, it was canceled.

That leads to more questions.

Narrator: The cemetery refuses to allow an exhumation,

they say to protect the site from disturbance.

Many suspect a cover-up.

It is another twist and the Dillinger tale.

I mean, if I'm believing the conspiracy

that the bureau faked his death, got the wrong man,

then this is just another piece of evidence that proves,

yes, they're trying to keep this under wraps.

♪♪

Narrator: So, did the FBI get its man?

The weight of evidence suggests it did.

While the change in eye color remains a mystery,

the altered features and the strange fingerprints

can be explained.

But until DNA testing is allowed,

certainty will remain elusive.

♪♪

In the midst of an ancient Egyptian kings tomb

lies a simple artifact that baffles scientists.

There's one object,

and that's his dagger.

This iron blade is thousands of years old

but hasn't even rusted,

it's in perfect, pristine condition.

♪♪

Narrator: A dagger that defies explanation.

Can cutting-edge technology help explain this artifact?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: In the valley of the kings, Egypt,

British archeologist Howard Carter

discovers the entrance to the tomb of king Tutankhamun.

The artifacts discovered in Tutankhamun's tomb are amongst

the greatest archeological discovery of all time.

There's more gold coming out of that tomb

than archeologists would expect to see in a lifetime.

Narrator: King Tutankhamun is a pharaoh of the 18th dynasty

in the 14th century B.C.E. Egypt.

The boy king reigns for 10 years before dying at the age of 18.

It was the first time that a royal, pharaonic tomb

had been discovered,

largely unrobbed with all its material

and literally thousands of preserved objects.

Narrator: King Tutankhamun takes valuable objects with him

into the afterlife...

A solid gold coffin,

an exquisite funerary mask,

precious jewels,

but there's something else.

♪♪

This very simple-looking object, a very plain iron dagger,

is, perhaps, the greatest treasure of all.

♪♪

Narrator: Archeologists can't explain why a simple iron dagger

would be buried with king tut amid all the gold and jewels.

♪♪

Until they realize it was a piece of the future,

the Egyptian culture was a bronze age civilization.

They didn't have iron.

Horton: They were making their artifacts their tools out of stone

and out of bronze and copper.

These were soft-metal artifacts.

The iron age begins maybe 200 to 300 years

after the burial of Tutankhamun.

So, how does it possibly exist?

Narrator: And why hasn't the dagger aged and over 3000 years?

Unlike gold, iron should corrode over time.

Think of it this way...

An iron nail,

if it's left outside rusts and breaks.

So, something 3,000 years old

to be in pristine, perfect condition

is mind-boggling.

♪♪

Narrator: When iron is mixed with other elements,

it forms alloys.

Alloys behave differently to pure iron.

In 2015, Italian and Egyptian scientists

test the dagger's composition to find out

if the blade contains anything that stops it from rusting.

We have a technology known as X-ray fluorescence

that can measure not just the iron content,

but also the other elements contained within it,

and that gives us a fingerprint

to reconstruct the origin of the iron

from which the dagger has been made.

Narrator: The results are out of this world.

Gough: It looks like iron. It feels like iron,

but chemical analysis suggests that there's another explanation

for why it just looks so pristine after 3,000 years.

What's interesting about this dagger

is the amount of nickel in it.

Regular iron ore has about 3%,

the dagger has 11% nickel in it.

That high of a nickel content

actually reduces rust dramatically

and explains the absolute

pristine condition of this dagger.

Narrator: There are no sources of iron on our planet

with such a high nickel content.

The discovery forces scientist

to consider an incredible possibility.

Could the dagger be alien?

Conspiracy theories claim extraterrestrials

helped build the pyramids.

But there might be a simpler explanation

for the kings king's dagger.

♪♪

Narrator: King Tutankhamun's dagger

contains an alloy not found on earth.

The extra terrestrial iron alloy must have come from space.

Horton: It might have come from a meteorite.

Meteorites often have very heavy concentrations

of iron contained within them.

Narrator: Hieroglyphs found on tomb walls and in ancient texts

provide some clues.

The ancient Egyptian texts talk about "iron from the sky."

And while that sounds poetic,

what if it was absolutely literal?

I.e... A meteorite from the sky?

It makes perfect sense.

In fact, Egyptian inscriptions support this interpretation,

the Egyptian word that can be translated literally,

"iron coming from the sky."

Narrator: Investigators are convinced the metal in the dagger

is from a meteorite.

Now they want to identify which one.

This is a huge task.

Egypt is a giant kingdom,

and now you're looking for the meteorite.

That's more than just looking for a needle in a haystack.

That's near impossible.

Narrator: Evidence of ancient meteorites can still be found

on earth today.

Egyptian and Italian scientists analyze craters

and fragments of space debris around Egypt

and find a likely candidate.

♪♪

We have a meteorite that landed 160 miles from Alexandria.

The khargo meteorite crashed to earth thousands of years ago.

Saini: The Egyptian and Italian teams analyze the nickel content.

The percentage of nickel,

which is around 11% in this meteorite,

almost exactly matches the percentage found

in the dagger that belonged to Tutankhamun.

♪♪

Narrator: It's a match.

The iron in the kharga meteorite

appears to be the source of the iron in king tut's dagger.

It's hard to be certain when it comes to something

that's 3,000 years old,

but the kharga meteorite and the dagger

have the same amount of nickel, so that's pretty convincing.

♪♪

Narrator: But that's not the only thing from the impact site

that ended up in the boy king's tomb.

What's exciting about this meteorite site

is it contains fragments of yellow glass

that form with the meteor hit the ground.

♪♪

What happens is in the heat of the impact

as the meteorite hits the earth,

the sand fuses and forms this beautiful yellow glass.

And lo and behold, what did we find

in king Tutankhamun's tomb?

Saini: This little glass yellow scarab beetle.

So it's possible that glass

was used to make that very beautiful scarab.

Narrator: Glass formed in the heat of a meteorite impact

and a dagger made from iron from outer space.

In the hands of earthly king Tutankhamun,

hidden from the world for over 3,000 years.

Not every king gets to have

an extraterrestrial dagger in the afterlife.

♪♪

Narrator: When radioactivity monitoring stations across Europe

sound the alarm in the fall of 2017,

experts fear the worst.

All of a sudden, we have a radioactive cloud.

What the heck's going on here?

Narrator: The last time this happened was in 1986,

when Chernobyl spread a deadly radioactive cloud across Europe.

You can't see it. You can't taste it.

You can't smell it. You can't stop it.

Narrator: Yet again, the Russians deny responsibility,

but new scientific evidence suggests another cover-up.

Have we got another Chernobyl on our hands?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Scientists from an Italian laboratory issue an alert.

Their instruments are showing bursts of radioactive isotopes

in the air over Milan, there are so many possibilities.

It could be some kind of incident

at a nuclear power plant

or a nuclear waste facility, even a nuclear weapon.

Narrator: Data pours in from monitoring stations across Europe.

It's in the eastern part of Europe,

but it's spreading,

it's showing up in Austria and Sweden and Norway.

Narrator: Experts worry lives could be in danger.

They need to identify the source of the radioactive cloud

and where it's heading.

It's one thing to have this invisible cloud of radioactivity

spreading across an area,

but if the weather gets bad and it starts to rain or snow,

that can actually pull the radiation

from high up in the sky right down to earth.

♪♪

Narrator: The situation becomes clearer

when scientists identify

a particular isotope in the cloud.

Ruthenium-106

is a very specific radioactive nucleotide

because it doesn't occur naturally.

It's really rare,

and the fact that it's so prevalent in this... in the air,

means that has to be a nuclear incident.

Narrator: Ruthenium-106 forms by the splitting of uranium-235.

This process, nuclear fission,

is used to generate nuclear power.

So ruthenium-106 is often found in spent nuclear fuel.

Ruthenium-106 can be enormously damaging,

but in this case, the levels appear just low enough

that they're not going to be dangerous yet.

It depends on how long it lingers

and if more of it appears.

Narrator: The last time scientists saw spikes of ruthenium-106

was in 1986 when Chernobyl blew.

If you're looking at a cloud drifting over the European Union

on the heels of an incident as serious

and devastating as Chernobyl,

that's exactly what you have to think about.

♪♪

Narrator: Scientists race to find out

where this radioactive cloud originated.

We have sophisticated computer models,

we have weather radar,

and we even have orbiting satellites

that can track the passage of clouds over time.

Baker: They pinpoint the cloud very quickly

as an origin somewhere south,

the Ural mountains, likely Russia.

♪♪

Narrator: The world turns to the Kremlin for an explanation

and gets a denial.

This, of course, brings to mind

the longstanding Russian tradition of maskirovka,

which means deception or concealment.

When you're blamed for something,

you instantly deny it.

♪♪

Narrator: Western authorities ignore the denial.

In 1985, Russia denied there was a problem at Chernobyl, too.

The Chernobyl incident released 50 million curie's of radiation

into the atmosphere.

That is 100 times Hiroshima.

Caddick-Adams: Their first reaction was to deny

that anything had happened at all,

despite radiation monitors

right across Europe going absolutely crazy.

♪♪

Narrator: But the sheer scale of the Chernobyl incident

means it soon becomes undeniable.

Over 100,000 people are evacuated

from an 18-mile exclusion zone.

♪♪

Kourounis: It is an eerie, scary place, like something post-apocalyptic.

Everything is radioactive,

and you don't want to touch a thing.

♪♪

Narrator: In 2017, as reports of the suspected leak persist,

Russian authorities are forced to issue an official statement.

They start to release information,

which is actually disinformation.

First of all, they blame the Romanians.

Well, that makes no sense

because censors all over Romania

track this cloud of radioactivity

all at the same time.

So it's got to have originated outside Romania.

And then the Russians say, "well, actually,

this is a satellite that's come out of orbit

and has crashed and released radioactivity at the same time."

Narrator: Satellites do contain ruthenium-106,

but is this the cause of the cloud?

It's highly unlikely that one satellite is going to cause

the levels of ruthenium-106 that we're picking up.

They only carry a trace amount of ruthenium in the batteries.

So, the Russian excuses fall down in every single case.

What are they hiding? What are they covering up?

♪♪

Narrator: Advance meteorological modeling

pinpoints the origin of the toxic cloud.

All the arrows are pointing straight towards

the Mayak nuclear processing facility

in the southern Ural mountains.

♪♪

Narrator: The Mayak nuclear facility is over 800 miles east of Moscow

in a remote region of the country

Kourounis: Built shortly after world war ii,

this place wasn't even on the map for years,

it was that top secret.

Narrator: The location is a concern,

declassified documents from Russian

and U.S. intelligence archives

reveal that the Mayak facility

has a disturbing history of nuclear leaks.

In 1957, it suffered what is now

the third largest nuclear incident of its kind

anywhere in the world.

Caddick-Adams: It contaminated the entire terrain

for hundreds of square miles around,

and it affected, perhaps,

a quarter of a million Russian civilians

living in the neighborhood.

Kourounis: There are high rates of birth defects and cancer rates

10 times higher than the national average,

but even after years of industrial accidents,

this facility is still operational today.

Narrator: The Mayak facility is a reprocessing plant.

Reprocessing involves treating spent nuclear fuel

to recover some of the radioactive material.

It's a dangerous process that generates

specific radioactive by-products

like highly-toxic ruthenium-106.

Saini: One of the issues that could have happened here

is in the process to filter out

different kind of radioactive isotopes

from spent nuclear fuel, something went wrong,

and that's what allowed the ruthenium-106 to escape.

Narrator: But there's not enough evidence to clarify

what went wrong at Mayak...

♪♪

...until a Russian activist exposes issues at the plant

relating to the newly-installed electric furnace,

part of the vitrification,

or glass-making section of the facility.

They find a host of different problems here,

in terms of construction and safety.

The electric furnace vitrification system

can't handle the amount of work it's receiving.

Narrator: Russia has been using vitrification technology

on nuclear waste since 1987.

It turns liquid nuclear waste into solid glass,

which can be stored more safely.

It may sound simple to turn waste material into glass.

Actually, this is an incredibly complex thing to do.

If there's any issues with the vitrification process there,

that can have serious repercussions.

♪♪

Narrator: Poor quality equipment or mistakes made

during the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel

could lead to some kind of explosion or leak,

releasing a cloud of radioactive material.

Western nuclear experts believe this is what has caused

the ruthenium spike in the atmosphere,

but the discovery raises a more serious question...

What would happen if a much deadlier amount of ruthenium-106

were to be released?

If we're looking ahead to the future

based on the past record,

there are probably more incidents to come.

Baker: The Russian leadership is paranoid.

Their authoritarian.

They are singularly focused on maintaining power.

So, the idea that somehow they're going to come out,

reach out to the world community,

and say, "we need your help,"

we know they're not going to do that.

They haven't done it in the past.

They're not going to do it now.

♪♪