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(SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)

JOHN CALAMBOKIDIS: (ON RADIO) ...I have that position.

Uh, we have a good deployment.

Thirty-four degrees. 11.92.

One-twenty degrees. 35.15.

JOHN HILDEBRAND: Okay. The whale we're tracking down

is to the east of us.

We're gonna move two miles in that direction

and we'll probably put in a buoy over there.

JOSHUA ZEMAN: In 1992,

a top secret program of the US Navy

discovered a mysterious sound in the Pacific

at a frequency of 52 hertz.

A marine biologist named Dr. William Watkins

surmised this sound was coming

from a solitary whale,

broadcasting at a frequency

that no other whale could understand.

(HIGH-PITCHED WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

It's been said that this whale has spent

its entire life swimming through the oceans,

calling out and never once receiving a response.

No one has heard from this whale

since the Navy stopped listening

over ten years ago.

No one has ever seen this whale.

No one knows if he's the first of his kind or the last.

While many have nicknamed this creature

the Loneliest Whale in the World...

(WHALE SPOUTS)

...there are those that call him 52.

(TRANQUIL MUSIC PLAYING)

ZEMAN: So it all started with this article

about 52, this lonely whale.

This whale with this mysterious call

that just couldn't communicate.

It couldn't be heard.

And I remember having this reaction.

You know, the hairs on my arm just stood up.

For some reason, this story, it just spoke to me.

So I went online to search for more information,

and as it turns out,

it wasn't just me.

WOMAN 1: A really sad story from the animal kingdom.

MAN 1: Legend has it that 52 has been

roaming the ocean for decades

entirely alone.

MAN 2: 52 Hertz has been nicknamed...

WOMAN 2: The Loneliest Whale in the World.

WOMAN 3: It was on a different migratory path

from other whales.

WOMAN 4: How do we know the whale is a he?

MAN 3: Only the males sing.

WOMAN 5: Is it a higher or lower frequency?

MAN 4: Higher.

MAN 5: What is it about this whale

that has really moved so many people?

(WOMAN 6 SPEAKING SPANISH)

MAN 6: It's artists, it's filmmakers,

it's scientists.

What do you think it says about us as people?

(MAN 7 SPEAKS KOREAN)

WOMAN 7: His isolation from the incredibly social world

of his fellow whales speaks to so many right now.

MAN 8: ...the loneliest creature on Earth.

(WOMAN 8 SPEAKS SPANISH)

WOMAN 9: Absolutely, how could it not be lonely?

ZEMAN: 52 had become this global phenomenon.

This whale who embodied the fascination

we all have for these gentle giants.

You never forget your first time seeing a whale.

For me, I was a kid working on a sailing ship.

And the moment I saw this whale

leap out of the water,

I felt like I was in the presence

of something greater than myself.

But this mysterious fascination

has always been there.

We've always sought the great whale,

whether to slaughter it, or now to save it.

From Jonah, who found redemption

in the belly of a whale,

to Captain Ahab, who found the ultimate adversary

in his hunt for a whale.

These epic stories are ingrained in our culture,

in our consciousness.

But what about this new story of the lonely whale?

Why did so many connect with this one creature?

Was it just this notion of loneliness?

Hmm... I don't know.

All we know is what he sounds like

and where he's possibly going.

ZEMAN: And is that his signature

over there on the wall? That's his signature.

Wow.

When we first detected 52 was back in '89.

He is just like a regular blue or fin whale,

but the frequency he was, you know,

vocalizing at was at the 52 hertz level,

not, you know, down around 20 hertz.

(WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

Now, we'd seen that signal a couple times

and we dismissed it as being another source.

ZEMAN: So what did you think it was

before you realized it was a whale?

That I can't tell you.

ZEMAN: 30, something classified?

Something mechanical, that's it.

(AIRCRAFT TAKES OFF)

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING)

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It was the beginnings

of the Cold War in the 19503.

The American Navy was doing everything possible

to be one step ahead of the Russians.

And they decided they wanted to listen underwater

for what those Russian submarines were up to.

So we developed this secret array

of underwater microphones

to listen to all the sounds in the ocean.

(MICROPHONE FEEDBACK)

GEORGE: It was called Sound Surveillance System.

“SOSUS.“

This was a 24-hour job, 365 days of the year.

There is always someone watching.

ROTHENBERG: And they heard all kinds of sounds.

(CLICKING)

It turned out most of them came from whales.

(WHALE VOCALIZING)

CHRISTOPHER W. CLARK: In those early days,

we needed to understand the difference

between the sound of a submarine

and the voice print of a whale.

Most of the knowledge we have about “whale song"

is focused on humpback whales.

(WHALE CALLING IN HIGH PITCH)

But then we have blue whales and fin whales.

They're infrasonic,

below the auditory threshold of human beings.

(LOW, VIBRATING WHALE CALL)

ROTHENBERG: Blue whales sing a very soft simple melody,

but all around 100 hertz.

(LOW, VIBRATING WHALE CALL)

Just a few low phrases, like, “Mmm. Mmm.“ That's it.

No more variety or structure than that.

And here is the sound of the fin whale.

(LOW, VIBRATING WHALE CALL)

One sound, “Mmm,“

then several minutes later, again, “Mmm,“

and exactly the same amount of time later, “Mmm.”

It's an exact, regular rhythm.

We have no idea how such a whale could be so regular.

(LOW-PITCHED RHYTHMIC WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

CLARK: They sound like a submarine.

(LOW-PITCHED WHALE CALL CONTINUES PLAYING)

So this is where people like Bill Watkins

were asked by the Navy

to catalogue what it is we're listening to.

DR. WILLIAM WATKINS: The Navy would have a question

about what they were hearing,

what they were calling noise.

And I was asked to look at it.

And I think that it's the same rationale that I have today,

is that if you're going to be working

with underwater sound in the ocean,

well, you ought a know what's there.

GEORGE: It was Bill Watkins

who looked at this one signature,

and he says, “This looks biologic."

That's how we found it. The 52 Hertz.

So, we were able to track him for 12 years.

ZEMAN: And how did the rest of the community react to 52?

The rest of the community, uh...

There's a lot of skepticism in it.

Some people discredit it as not being a whale.

You know, why is he vocalizing at this frequency

and there's not another one out there?

A lot of skepticism in that as to what this was.

But, I think, to Bill Watkins,

it was something unknown, something to explore.

He passed away in 2004.

So, we went forth and published a paper on it.

We have never seen another signature like that.

And, you know,

going through it, I've looked all the time

just seeing if there's another one, at all.

To see if, uh, you know...

Just to see if he's not the only one.

And never seen another one like it.

ZEMAN: Did you guys ever think about going out

to actually try and visually locate him?

We'll say, I thought about it,

but I know Bill didn't,

because he knew that, uh,

it was a needle in a haystack.

For me, it was kind of, like, a dream

to go out there and search for him,

but also, reality hitting in,

knowing that the odds of that are very slim.

(HIGH-PITCHED WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

GEORGE: We haven't looked for him since 2003.

ZEMAN: And what if somebody went and looked for him now?

Oh, my God, that would be...

Wow, (CHUCKLES) I mean, couldn't even explain it,

how great that would be.

We have no idea what it is, because we haven't seen it.

And once you do that,

you could solve the mystery of the 52.

(GENTLE MUSIC PLAYING)

ZEMAN: Bill Watkins helped solve

some of the ocean's greatest mysteries.

He was a man who knew that what we can hear

is sometimes more powerful than what we can see.

Yet, tragically, he left this one work unfinished.

That of 52.

This whale that we knew so little about.

And now 11 years later, the myth has taken over.

(HIGH-PITCHED WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

You know, we call him “the loneliest whale in the world,“

but was it really true?

We invented this legend,

because we didn't have the truth.

But what if we could set the record straight?

What if we can discover whether this whale

was really an anomaly, or even a new species?

No one has ever seen 52, but what if we could?

What if this was a mystery we could solve?

It's curiosity. It's adventure.

And it's a crazy idea.

But this was a chance to do something epic.

To find one whale in an entire ocean.

To find 52.

(PHONE LINE RINGING)

Hey, Bruce, my name is Josh Zeman.

I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to talk to you

about mounting an expedition to find the 52 Hertz Whale.

(BRUCE SPEAKING)

(BRUCE LAUGHING)

There's 3,600 square miles in this square.

Three thousand miles within one of these squares?

Yeah. And the animals are moving

maybe 125 miles a day.

Yeah. I mean, they're going somewhere.

(LAUGHS)

I mean, Daniel and I are used to looking

at the things that are stereotypical.

We expected atypical baleen whale

to be going south for the winter,

and instead, if we look at all the Joe George information,

it went up into the Gulf of Alaska.

ZEMAN: What does an expedition like this look like,

in terms of details?

We need to justify the science, time, and money

being spent on this kind of a mission.

That's why we need to have more assurance

that 52 Hertz is not only still on schedule...

ZEMAN: Mm-hmm.

...but just that it even lives.

If we don't have that, we're sort of shooting in the dark.

And I wouldn't say we have much of a chance.

Maybe even as recently as this year,

the animal's passed away.

ZEMAN: While these large whales

live on average 60 to 70 years,

the only way to prove 52 is still alive

is to hear him calling out,

which means gaining access to the classified SOSUS system.

(LINE RINGING)

Yet, after a year of back and forth with the Navy,

they refused to participate...

(NAVAL OFFICER SPEAKING)

ZEMAN: ...leading us to Bob Dziak,

a government scientist who uses the SOSUS

to study underwater volcanoes.

(LOUD RUMBLING)

Bob and his team have agreed to help.

(LOW, VIBRATING WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKERS)

DZIAK: It's like you're in the mouth of the whale.

ASSISTANT: Yes.

ZEMAN: Doesn't really sound like

we would think a whale calls, right?

Whale calls often times are sped up

because they're below our threshold of hearing.

DR. ANA SIROVIC: Do you want to hear

this one sped up ten times?

SARA HEIMLICH: Yeah. SIROVIC: Okay.

(HIGHER-PITCHED RHYTHMIC WHALE CALL PLAYING)

That's ten times. ZEMAN: Wow.

DZIAK: If that isn't a call for mama,

I don't know what is.

(WHALE CALL CONTINUES PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

HEIMLICH: This is from 1993.

ZEMAN: That is 52 right there? HEIMLICH: Yeah.

ZEMAN: It's so difficult to actually figure that out.

HEIMLICH: That's the challenge.

ZEMAN: Yeah. HEIMLICH: Right there.

There's sort of an art to listening to sound

in the sea and being able to pick it apart.

Mechanical noise seems to be just really consistent

and very, uh, what we call stereotypical.

And so, biological sound, sort of,

has an unevenness to it, in a way.

But if there is a lot of noise going around,

it can be hard to pull out.

WOMAN: Mm-hmm. MAN: Yes.

HEIMLICH: So, one of the issues is that this part here

looks to us like what a 52 hertz whale call could be,

but we're not getting clean data.

There's other whale calls going on,

and so, it's hard to find the 52 Hertz Whale

in data that has lots of other things going on in it.

It will give me a time when it thinks it's actually found...

ZEMAN: False positives? Yeah. False positives.

And then I actually have to go

and look at each false positive.

ZEMAN: How many false positives?

Uh, on one phone, I got 67,000 hits.

ZEMAN: I'll be honest, I was not going to go

trying to do the film until I could prove 100 percent

that 52 is still alive. Right.

'Cause it's been ten years... Right.

ZEMAN: ...since you last listened to him.

Who knows what can happen in ten years.

So what's your gut tell you?

Uh...

I don't think we're gonna find it

in contemporary data, to be honest.

What does that mean?

I'm not sure that that means that it's not there.

I think it's...

I think you need to go out and look for it.

If that's what you really wanna do.

(WHALE CALLING IN HIGH PITCH)

ROTHENBERG: It's just one of those things that's too hard to figure out.

Till now, no one's bothered to delve deeper

into the mystery of the 52 Hertz Whale.

(HIGH-PITCHED WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

The mere fact that a mystery like this can still be around

just shows how wild and crazy mysterious nature still is.

We're still coming up with things we can't explain.

CLARK: The ocean is the last great universe of exploration.

It is the origin of life.

How do we explore the ocean? How do we understand it?

CHRISTINA CONNETT: There's that thrill.

The thrill of discovery.

The thrill of the exploration itself.

The thrill of the journey.

To be a true explorer,

you have to be willing to put yourself at risk.

And that has to be thrilling,

or you're not going to succeed with that.

ROTHENBERG: Almost every project involving whales

has a little bit of this aspect of Moby Dick.

This, kind of, relentless obsession

that's going to go nowhere, towards disaster.

Even contemplating whales is to dare to,

you know, to reach toward greatness.

To think about something far more vast

than humans could ever be.

We should be going after all great mysteries like this.

(RHYTHMIC WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

ZEMAN: We're all chasing something.

We all have our own white whale.

And mine was 52.

(WHALE CALL CONTINUES PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

This whale who refused to stop calling,

who refused to stop trying to connect.

I guess that's why I couldn't let it go.

Not when there was still some chance that he was out there.

So I would keep listening,

for however long it took.

(PHONE LINE RINGING)

HILDEBRAND: Hello?

ZEMAN: Hey, John, this is Josh Zeman.

You left me a message about

the 52 Hertz Whale documentary.

HILDEBRAND: Yeah, thanks for calling me back.

So, we have a series of recording sites

that are off the West Coast.

Pretty coastal in close to Southern California.

And so, you know, having heard

about the 52 Hertz Whale for a long time,

I was kind of interested in going through

some of our recordings

and seeing if we could locate

the 52 Hertz Whale. Mm-hmm.

Well, so I just wanted to let you know

that we found it.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, when was this?

This is all recent.

The last couple years OI" SO.

In the Gulf of Alaska?

No, we found it

along the coast here in California.

So, it's... 30, it's still alive?

Yup. It's out there.

(TRANQUIL MUSIC PLAYING)

(SQUAWKING)

ZEMAN: After more than four years

of planning and preparation,

we launched our expedition in search of the 52 Hertz Whale.

While we only had enough support

for a seven-day mission,

we still had some of the best scientists in the world

to help us.

HILDEBRAND: My name is John Hildebrand.

I'm a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

at University of California, San Diego.

I'm gonna be leading the acoustics effort

on our search for the 52 Hertz Whale.

ZEMAN: What's in the box?

HILDEBRAND: Sonobuoys. ZEMAN: Wow, they're heavy.

Yeah, the box is about 1,000 pounds.

So, these will basically listen

for the 52 hertz signal

and kind of tell you where

the direction of that... where that is?

Well, if you have two of 'em. Yeah.

From this one, it has this direction

and this one has this direction,

you can cross the bearings and you know where it is.

Triangulate instantly. Right.

ZEMAN: And they used to use these to look for submarines,

and now we're using it to find a whale.

Yes. They've been retired from the Navy,

and now we're using them for working on whales.

So it's kind of a nice gift.

We want to find it,

one whale, but it's a big ocean,

so if we're gonna find it, we need help.

Hello. Hello.

Hey, Ana. Hi.

JOHN CALAMBOKIDIS: I'm John Calambokidis. I'm a research biologist

and I've been studying blue whales

for about 35 years.

Here we are.

CALAMBOKIDIS: I kind of recognized

it was a huge challenge to do this.

I mean, I go out and try to find blue whales

and there are 2,000 of 'em on the West Coast,

and sometimes that's a challenge.

Now we're talking about finding maybe one.

But any scientist would be captivated

by the opportunity to solve that mystery.

So, John Hildebrand called me six months ago and he said,

“I can't think of anyone better than you

“that could do this.

“I could do the acoustics,

“you got all the boat experience.

“We could do this together and maybe learn a few things."

...around this area. Yeah.

And that's when I said, "I'm in."

HILDEBRAND: It's more than just curiosity.

People assume that we know more than we actually do.

There's the bit we can see,

whatever's happening on the surface.

But then there's the 95 percent that we can't see.

There's just so much we don't know.

In 2004, we came right out here, off San Miguel,

and we encountered a big group of blue and fin whales,

and in amongst them, paired with a blue whale,

was this whale that looked in between the two.

So we got a skin sample,

we had that genetically analyzed.

Fifty-fifty hybrid between blue and fin whales.

Could that have been the 52 Hertz Whale?

It could have been. It could have been that whale.

Wow. That's...

And at that time, we weren't linking

any of that in any way.

MAN: Yeah, that'd be awesome.

(STATIC HISSING)

CAPTAIN DAVEY: So, talk to me about the back.

If it looks good, I'll keep going.

MAN: You're good, yeah. All right, here we go.

All right, guys, coming down.

ZEMAN: That crane's coin operated?

It is coin operated.

It has begun.

So we had, just purely out of curiosity,

we assigned an intern

to look for what we're going to refer to as Watkins' whale.

And there are four sites

where she can pick out this unusual call.

At Hoke Sea mount, which is far offshore,

which is where Watkins described it before.

ZEMAN: Mm-hmm. HILDEBRAND: But she found it

at Point Conception,

she found it at Palos Verdes,

and she found it off of La Jolla.

So, these are relatively coastal.

ZEMAN: But how come we wouldn't

have known this before?

Well, it's just that there's a new dimension,

beyond what Bill knew,

that the whale actually does come in coastally. Right?

And here we are in the Santa Barbara Channel,

and the whale is there.

We find, pretty consistently,

both at site C and site B,

that there are these calls in October.

ZEMAN: So, if we have any chance

of finding this animal, it's right now?

Yep, we're in the right time and the right place.

Right.

ZEMAN: So, where is it?

(BOTH LAUGH)

(MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

ZEMAN: While 52 may be alone, according to our scientists,

he wasn't as isolated as the legend suggested.

Chances are he was following other whales

migrating up and down the West Coast.

And stopping along Point Conception

to forage for food.

And it wasn't that other whales couldn't hear 52,

they just couldn't understand what he was saying,

leaving this whale the perennial outsider.

(LOW-PITCHED WHALE CALL)

Yet, it was also the uniqueness of 52's call

that just may lead us right to him.

(WHALE SPOUTS)

HILDEBRAND: So, if you want to find the 52 Hertz Whale,

there are two parts to this.

First, we have a bio acoustic team,

real-time listening using the sonobuoys.

So when we hear the 52 hertz sound,

we can say, “This is the spot where that sound came from.

“Let's go over and investigate."

Then we're going to have to have a small boat

that approaches the animal. That's John C.

(CAMERA CLICKING)

He'll take their picture,

get a skin sample, attach a tag.

So, that's the plan.

Bridge, do we have a go-ahead to deploy?

(CAPTAIN DAVEY SPEAKING)

SIROVIC: Kind of, uh, northeasterly course.

(CAPTAIN DAVEY SPEAKING)

(VESSELS CLANKING)

HILDEBRAND: Okay, I'm going to go deep.

SIROVIC: Roger that.

(BEEPING)

HILDEBRAND: You ready for this?

They say, uh, you know you're doing oceanography

when what you have is too heavy to lift,

and too expensive to lose,

and then you throw it in the ocean anyways.

(HILDEBRAND SPEAKING)

(PLAYING NOTES)

(MUFFLED CLARINET PLAYING)

(HIGH-PITCHED WHALE CALL)

(WHALE VOCALIZING IN HIGH PITCH)

ROTHENBERG: I first heard about the 52 Hertz Whale

in an article in The New York Times.

The idea that there's a species of whale

making a sound that no one has ever heard before.

It's an amazing tale of craziness.

(CLARINET MELODY)

(WHALE VOCALIZING)

I've traveled around the world making music,

trying to jam together with whales.

'Cause I really believe you can use music

to get in touch with other species,

to communicate in a way where language fails.

(CLARINET AND WHALE'S SOUNDS PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

There he really seems to respond to me,

and now he almost matches my note.

(CLARINET AND WHALE'S SOUNDS CONTINUE PLAYING)

Right there.

To play along with whale song,

the sense that humans really can touch

upon something very mysterious that we barely understand.

We're in awe of what happens in the sea.

The idea that there's a mystery noise underwater.

52 hertz. It's a sound

that's not like anything else we know.

It's amazing and fascinating

to think that even in this day,

we're listening all over the ocean,

we're still hearing things that we cannot explain.

(HIGH-PITCHED WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

DR. ROGER PAYNE: When you look at the sea,

you're looking at a vast mystery.

(WHALE CALL CONTINUES PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

What we have to learn to do is to listen.

Sound in the ocean travels huge distances.

It is propagated much better

through water than through air.

(LOW, VIBRATING WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

The sounds of fin and blue whales

could travel about 13,000 miles.

In fact, if you were listening,

and you had a proper ear, as whales do,

you would be able to hear things

that are completely across oceans.

CLARK: Water is dense,

so sound travels almost five times faster.

And the lower the pitch of your voice,

the more efficiently it travels.

Think of this,

the song of a whale, the wavelength of that song,

stretches one football field.

A note, by the time it's finished,

has traveled 30 miles,

so everything is expanded.

You have to take your mind and just stretch it.

PAYNE: The whole ocean is illuminated

by the sounds of the whale,

shining its flashlight around,

figuring out what's all around it.

It just happens to be sound, not light, that it's using.

(WHALES CALLING)

CLARK: This is a long-range social network.

Humpback whales, for example,

they have notes, they have phrases,

they have themes, they have songs,

like a musical composition.

(WHALE CALLING RHYTHMICAL LY)

PAYNE: They're beautiful,

but it turns out that these whales,

after about 10 minutes,

start repeating themselves.

(RHYTHMIC WHALE CALL CONTINUES)

The first thought you have, of course, is,

“Oh, my gosh, what do they mean?“

That's what you want to know.

CLARK: They have dialects.

A social mechanism for identifying who they are.

(WHALES CALLING)

When you watch and you listen to these animals

communicating or moving as a herd

over hundreds of... thousands of square miles.

They move often in a very coordinated fashion.

All mediated through their voices.

These animals are in sync

with huge areas of time and space.

We are just scratching the surface

in terms of the complexity of their communications system.

(LOW-PITCHED RHYTHMIC WHALE CALL)

So you can imagine.

Here's this whale, it makes a very strange sound

and if there's nothing out there...

I mean, blue whales are not going to respond

to this 52 hertz sound,

and fin whales aren't going to respond,

so who does respond?

(MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

MAN: ...first deployment. WOMAN: Roger that.

WOMAN 2: We'll give you some feedback in a second.

HILDEBRAND: So, we're looking

for an animal that's really rare.

And we think that the 52 Hertz,

it's a lot like a blue whale.

It's probably not a blue whale,

but it's a lot like a blue whale,

so if we go out and find concentrations of blue whales,

that's a pretty good place to start.

CALAMBOKIDIS: It's been kind of a question

kicking around among whale researchers

ever since first described by Bill Watkins.

Was this some new type of whale?

We didn't really know.

But I've been very interested in the question of hybrids

between blue and fin whales.

So, the interesting question has been,

“Could the 52 Hertz Whale

“be some hybrid of the two species?“

I heard about 52 Hertz from Watkins.

But he wasn't willing to speculate much

on what the whale was.

I remember when I reviewed the paper, I said,

“Well, you know, you should describe,

“how is it similar to blue whales,

“how is it similar to fin whales,

“maybe it's some combination."

I was trying to get him to push a little bit

on the theory of “What is this?“

But he wouldn't go there.

CALAMBOKIDIS: I think if we can tag this whale,

and photograph, collect samples,

maybe we can figure out an answer

to identify the 52 Hertz Whale.

This is step one.

ZEMAN: Outside of hearing 52, our best chance of finding him

was to look for concentrations of whales,

all feeding together.

Which meant tagging as many fin whales, blue whales,

and even humpbacks as possible,

in hopes one will lead us to these large groups,

all feasting in these nutrient-rich waters

where we might hear, or even see 52 among them.

MAN: You wanna tag five again? CALAMBOKIDIS: Uh, yeah.

Some of the tags that we're talking about

have never been deployed before.

We are miniaturizing the cameras

that go on these small instruments,

adding these high sampling rate accelerometers

that can detect if the call is coming

from the animal it's attached to.

These are brand-new pieces of technology

we're bringing to bear.

Yep, sounds good.

(ZEMAN SPEAKING)

We're hearing them.

There you 90. That's a nice one.

SIROVIC: It's a blue whale call.

MAN ON RADIO: Truth boat preparing to launch drone.

Drone is in the air.

CALAMBOKIDIS: Okay, let's go.

There they are.

(WHALE SPOUTING)

(CAMERA CLICKING)

Not really totally sure what this animal's doing.

It's been alternating, seemingly holding

a little bit of a westerly traveling course.

Uh, starting to get just a little nervous.

Maybe we've lost this whale.

Maybe we should spread our boats out a little bit more

to guard against a change of direction.

MAN ON RADIO: We got a visual.

Downwind.

CALAMBOKIDIS: What's our range?

MAN: 150 meters.

(ENGINE ACCELERATES)

(ENGINE STOPS)

Damn, that was so close. Yeah, that was really close.

Yeah.

(LOW MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

(THUNDER RUMBLING)

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

MAN: Good ship's on its way.

What I'm able to do is pull data

from the copter while it's flying,

and it will tell you the GPS location

as that down to the second.

Time stamp...

Time wise, which is synced with your GPS.

CALAMBOKIDIS: It is. Okay.

And can you keep playing it ahead?

Because my recollection, too, is he did a series of breaths.

MAN: Here we go.

(LOW-PITCHED RHYTHMIC WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

I think this is the first time that you guys have caught,

on a drone from the air, a blue whale

in the act of calling and known it.

You're usually not combining these two mediums.

And we know they call not right at the surface,

but slightly submerged.

So, this is totally consistent

with the behavior of them calling.

ZEMAN: If 52 was with other large groups of whales,

our drones could now help us single him out from the crowd.

Yet, despite having all this new technology,

we still hadn't heard 52's mysterious call.

A call that could be echoing through the ocean depths

right at this very moment.

Just waiting to be heard.

(TRANQUIL MUSIC PLAYING)

ROTHENBERG: So imagine yourself in the 16th century

on a big sailing boat crossing the ocean.

And you're in a bunk below the water line

and your head is on a wooden board

connected to the hull of that ship.

You would hear the voices of whales.

(WHALES CALLING)

You would hear singing humpbacks.

(WHALE VOCALIZING IN HIGH PITCH)

You would hear the “click, click“ clicking

of sperm whales.

(MUFFLED CLICKING)

And it was probably a little terrifying,

because you had no idea

what it was that you were listening to.

Those stories exist.

The siren song of the ocean exists

from the earliest historical musings of mankind.

And then suddenly, we are immersed in a world

where we decided to kill whales.

(MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

You know, whales were important to human beings

in the 19th century,

when whale oil was lighting up

all of the industrial revolution.

And whales used to be the main source of oil.

For all lamps. For all lubrication.

It was big business killing whales.

And even as petroleum was discovered,

we didn't really need all of this whale oil,

but we kept on killing them.

The momentum was there.

We kept on killing, kept on killing.

GRAHAM BURNETT: We're not talking about the heroic guy

in the front of a boat with a spear, no.

We're talking about

the floating factory vessels with that stern slipway

that could draw an entire whale up

into the body of the ship.

And not only are they using

explosive ordnance in those harpoon darts...

Before it can sink, they pierce the animal

with a hypodermic tube

that's attached to an air compressor,

inflate the animal so it's turned

into a kind of corpse buoy.

And it's not an assembly line, it's a disassembly line

for the rendering of corpse after corpse.

Those ships could process

dozens of animals in a matter of hours.

(GUNSHOT)

(WHALE GROANING)

ROTHENBERG: By the 19605, almost all the large whales,

the blue whales, the fin whales, the humpbacks,

almost all of them were gone.

And this all began to change

after a young biologist named Roger Payne

started listening to the song of the humpback whale.

PAYNE: The public knew nothing about whales at the time.

I mean, scientists knew that they made sounds.

...20 seconds time...

We'd heard, you know, a few sounds from a few whales

and they were interesting and, sort of, groovy.

But I was in Bermuda listening for whales

and what we heard was completely different.

(WHALE CALLING IN HIGH PITCH)

(WHALE BELLOWING)

(WHALES CALLING IN HIGH PITCH)

(BELLOWING LOWLY)

(HIGH-PITCHED CALLING CONTINUES)

(WHALE CALLING IN LOWER PITCH)

(HIGH AND LOWER-PITCHED CALLS CONTINUE IN SUCCESSION)

(BELLOWING)

(WHALES CALLING IN HIGH PITCH)

PAYNE: It was an extremely emotional experience.

I thought, “My God, if that won't get the world

“interested in whales, nothing will.“

So, I had a close friend who was making records.

And I said, (LAUGHING) “How would you like to make

“a record of humpback whales singing?"

And he said, “Sure!"

ROTHENBERG: And it just became amazingly popular.

Everyone had to have a copy.

It was a multi-platinum record.

Bestselling nature recording of all time.

And then National Geographic said,

“We want 10 and a half million copies.“

Which is the largest single print order

in the history of the recording industry.

The world realized...

(WHALE CALL PLAYING ON SPEAKER)

...they sing,

and when you found out that they sing,

everything changed.

The world changed around them.

BURNETT: Whale song reads as the presence of intelligence.

We'd met our inhuman others

that were nevertheless a kind of mirror for us.

ROTHENBERG: Everyone was touched by it.

It really had that effect.

Even the Partridge Family

had a whole episode on saving the whales.

I Sing me a song of times that you knew

♪ Through a sky that was clear from the sea to the land

♪ Free from the fear and destruction of man ♪

(BAND VOCALIZES)

MAN: (ON SPEAKER) The peace movement lives in America.

PAYNE: Of course, the time we're talking about here

is the time of protests and getting some interest

in trying to change some of the problems in the world.

I mean, it was a perfect storm of circumstances,

that's what you can say about it.

I think the way to start any movement

is you gotta fall in love first with the species.

We were killing, at the time I started,

about 33,000 whales a year.

And then a lot of other groups took off, like Greenpeace.

MAN: (ON BLOWHORN) Please stop killing the whales.

Without them, the oceans begin to die

and if the oceans begin to die,

we all begin to die.

PAYNE: And we got it, eventually,

down to 330 whales a year.

That's 1%.

You know, we probably never would've saved whales

unless we heard them sing.

It made people care.

And when people care...

they can change the world.

CLARK: Peace and love was a very different age.

You listen to what was the dialogue

that was going on then.

And it was much more about all of us.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

And now we're in a situation

where we've, through one way or another,

consciously isolated ourselves.

BURNETT: So if the promise of the early '60$

was communication with ourselves

in new ways and with animals...

The lonely whale may be saying, uh,

the... the...

the wire's been cut.

(PLEASANT MUSIC PLAYING)

SIROVIC: 97, 8 hours, D3, DIFAR.

HILDEBRAND: Awesome. SIROVIC: Yeah?

Let's do it.

Permission to launch sonobuoy.

MAN ON RADIO: Yeah. Permission granted.

All right.

CALAMBOKIDIS: We're on a mission of discovery.

We want to learn something,

an answer to a question

no one else knows the answer to,

and this is an opportunity to do that.

HILDEBRAND: There you 90. See it?

Boom.

MAN: It's like you can see the glow coming up right now!

WOMAN: Yeah, you...

MAN: It's just kinda sitting there,

they're kind of watching it.

They're basically getting ready to push this.

DR. ANN ALLEN: If he were a singer,

there should be another one showing up.

I mean, he's not letting us down yet.

John, up right.

(CAMERA CLICKING)

(WHALE SPOUTING) CADE: Boom.

That's some back!

CALAMBOKIDIS: My preference would be to trail in a pair.

ALLEN: This may be a really easy on!

CADE: Yeah, he's not moving very fast.

Okay, getting ready.

CALAMBOKIDIS: Coming up!

Too far behind.

I thought they were right in position.

Like, right up swell from him, ready to go down.

CALAMBOKIDIS: I didn't quite have a good read.

When you said, “Coming up," I thought, “Go,"

but I shouldn't have gone.

Another one up right here.

JAMES: There's another one just behind it, John.

There's another whale. This is our pair.

(CAMERA CLICKING)

CALAMBOKIDIS: Okay, we want trail.

JAMES: Trail.

(WHALE SPOUTING)

ZEMAN: Looks like they're gonna try and go for it?

CADE: Right there. There he is.

They're going for it. This is it.

JAMES: John, we're closing on him.

We're closing.

Coming up.

Boom.

(MAN SPEAKING)

Now we'll track the animal for as long as we can

so that even if we can't see the animal,

we can actually get a good idea

of where it's at and track it down.

(UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC PLAYING ON SPEAKERS)

(ENGINE ACCELERATING)

CADE: Yeah, baby!

(UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC CONTINUES ON SPEAKERS)

(SEAGULLS SQUAWKING)

(SINGING ALONG) ♪ Love will find... ♪

Music for 52. 52, lost love music.

(UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC CONTINUES ON SPEAKERS)

(MUFFLED MUSIC CONTINUES)

(LOW, VIBRATING WHALE CALL)

♪ There was a whale so sad and lonely

♪ Was out at sea all on her only

♪ Because she sang so baratonely

♪ Too low for other whales to hear it

♪ So no other whales came near it

♪ Still they sang out full of spirit

♪ She sang

(IN DEEPER VOICE) ♪ “I'm Doreen, the baleen whale

♪ “Who wouldn't mind meeting a male

♪ “Who likes krill and swimmin'

♪ “And low-voiced whale women

♪ “My heart will find no love“ ♪

KATE MICUCCI: It kinda hurts a little bit.

You feel for the whale.

I feel like people can relate to it

in a way that you just hear about this one whale

who's never made any friends,

and I think that really, really resonates with people.

They understand it.

Everybody feels like an outsider

at some point in their life.

I think that's why so many people care about it.

About him. Or Doreen, her, as in the song.

But really, what's his name?

I guess it's the 52 Hertz Whale?

Does he have a name?

ZEMAN: The scientists have called him “52.“

52.

Huh, he doesn't even have a real name, he has a number.

(TRANQUIL MUSIC PLAYING)

ZEMAN: While many had been inspired

by the notion of a lonely whale,

where does the myth of this story meet the science?

In other words, could 52 even feel

that so-called human emotion?

Is this whale really lonely?

Whales, at least from a biological perspective,

as much as we can tell, have complex behaviors,

they have a lot of parental care,

they have large brains.

So I think this loneliness idea

is interesting in that context.

On the other hand,

I really wouldn't want to hazard a guess

of whether this creature's

actually emotionally lonely or not.

VINT VIRGA: Whales are social beings.

Period.

The fact that nobody is responding to him

absolutely, without a doubt, this whale is lonely,

and that's not being anthropomorphic.

Yeah, remarkably, if you say things often enough,

it turns into fact.

But we don't have very much information

to make these broad, general statements.

PAYNE: Any feeling that we have

that we call “feeling lonely“

must be shared with other animals.

The chances that we invented these emotions

are basically somewhere between zero and minus one.

Patrick R HOP. We have a good idea of what sentient is.

The sense of awareness, the sense of self.

A sense of how yourself can relate to others.

In human beings,

we discovered this particular cell type

known as spindle cells.

These are cells that have to do

with self-awareness and emotions.

We found that these cells

did not exist only in the human.

We found plenty of these neurons in the large whales.

So whether another species is sentient...

it is possible.

ZEMAN: While we may never know for sure

whether 52 has ever felt alone,

he was still a symbol of connection for so many.

As he was for me.

Growing up, I found my connections

in stories about the sea.

In quest to explore these underwater worlds

and the mysterious creatures that lived deep within it.

But now, on this real-life expedition,

on this quest to find 52,

can I see the truth behind this legend?

Only out here on the open ocean,

have I come to realize

we're not just looking for a lonely whale,

but for the most elusive creature of them all.

(ZEMAN SPEAKING)

Usually, I'll do a lot of singing.

I talk to the whales a little more

than if anyone is around.

I really enjoy being out on the ocean,

I really enjoy the adventure,

but the excitement is over

trying to learn, or see something

that no one's been able to describe before.

It's kind of, like, your claim to meaningfulness

and the sea of humanity we have.

(TRANQUIL MUSIC PLAYING)

ZEMAN: Looking for clues as to where

whales may be congregating in the area,

our scientists attempt to locate a tag...

(DEVICE BEEPING) ...that's dislodged

from one of the animals.

CALAMBOKIDIS I don't think it can be terribly far,

because I got beeps online on the whale.

(MAN SPEAKING)

CALAMBOKIDIS: Okay, if you've got a good read on it,

(WATER SPLASHING)

(DEVICE CONTINUES BEEPING)

(CALAMBOKIDIS SPEAKING)

Copy all. I just entered those numbers,

so we're 7.6 off of those.

I think we're gonna have a fair stab at it.

(CADE SPEAKING)

(DEVICE BEEPING RAPIDLY)

Yeah!

Still recording, good stuff.

Tag number three is back in possession.

CALAMBOKIDIS: Okay, we're going to move again.

Okay, John.

CAPTAIN DAVEY: So here's our position

indicated by that blue boat.

And we're about to cross the shipping lane

almost at a right angle.

And these green marks are other vessels,

so he's getting in pretty close company.

ZEMAN: What kind of container ship do you think that is?

CALAMBOKIDIS: That's a car carrier going to LA,

filled with cars, likely Taiwan, China, or Japan.

And unfortunate, through chance,

this shipping lane goes right along

one of the most common areas for blue whales.

CALAMBOKIDIS: We've had numerous ship strikes

of these animals in Southern California

because there's so much shipping traffic

that comes into that area.

(CAMERA CLICKING)

We know from some of our tags

that these whales do very little response

to ships in terms of knowing how to avoid them.

They'll make very little lateral movement

away from the track of a ship.

So, these huge ships sometimes,

traveling at 25 or more knots,

it's clear they're not adapted to deal with that threat.

ZEMAN: The Santa Barbara shipping lane

leads directly to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach,

the busiest shipping hub in the United States.

It accounts for close to half of all goods

coming into this country.

9070 of everything we consume, everything we eat,

everything we wear, everything we live in,

comes to us from someplace else.

And it comes by sea.

(SHIP HORN BLOWS)

HILDEBRAND: This is chronic.

Always present, there's noise.

That's what the ships do.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

So, the container ship will come along,

and it will absolutely wipe us out.

'Cause it'll be so much noise,

and you just... There's nothing you can do.

You just wait for the ship to go by.

You get mad,

you get grumpy.

There are other noises from explosions to look for oil.

We set up sonar to hunt for submarines.

But the most ubiquitous are the ships.

CLARK: The acoustic footprint from a ship going 30 knots...

There are rings of energy radiating out from that ship

that go for 200, 300 miles.

Sixty years ago, ship noise didn't exist.

Today, when we think of all the shipping traffic,

fifty thousand ships moving over the surface of the ocean,

and we think of a really big place,

such as the environment off Southern California,

Seattle, Philadelphia, vancouver

New York, on and on and on.

(SHIP'S ENGINE CLANGING)

The noise levels are a thousand times,

ten thousand times greater

than they would be under natural conditions.

(WHALES SPOUTING)

So, imagine you're a whale.

Your eyes can only see your tail, maybe 30 feet away.

Your ears are what you're going to pay attention to.

(MUFFLED WAVES CRASHING)

You can hear the waves of the shore to your left,

which indicate the coastline.

You can hear the voices of other whales...

(WHALES CALLING IN HIGH PITCH)

...from hundreds of miles away.

(WHALE CALL CONTINUES)

And in the distance,

the noise of ships approaching.

You can actually hear the propellers churning.

And the noise rises and rises and rises and rises.

(MUFFLED ENGINE CLANGING)

This massive acoustic smog.

And then, out of the distance...

(MUFFLED GUNSHOTS)

...the sounds of a seismic air gun array,

prospecting for oil and gas beneath the seafloor.

(SEISMIC AIR GUN CONTINUES BLASTING)

It drowns out everything

you could possibly be listening to.

(MUFFLED GUN BLASTING CONTINUES)

Humans, naturally, we are social beings.

We are intensely social beings,

and we do all kinds of things in order to be social beings.

The greatest joys one can feel

is actually in the connectivity with life.

You know perfectly well the difference between

being in a room with your friends

and laughing and singing and conversing

and knowing that you are connected with each other.

As opposed to going to dinner in a restaurant

and it's so noisy, you can't hear anything.

We're depriving these animals of their abilities

to maintain their social systems.

ZEMAN: What would it feel like

to have your whole world drowned out,

unable to communicate?

By suffocating these creatures with noise,

we were creating a whole ocean of lonely whales.

It was a scourge we witnessed every day on this expedition,

as it jeopardized our chances of finding 52

and we were running out of time.

We had only one day left

and our best option for locating

large groups of whales,

and possibly 52,

was the evidence retrieved from one of our tags.

CADE: So here's our deployment from yesterday.

Really good stuff.

You know, we were lucky to even recover this tag,

because this animal traveled to the west.

Basically, I think we made assumptions that were wrong.

My main strategy was to proceed to the east.

Now we know that 12, 13 miles to the west

are a bunch of whales.

(SEAGULL SQUAWKS)

There's actually a beer in there.

One lonely beer.

CALAMBOKIDIS: Okay, plan for the day.

Uh, we can already see white caps out here,

but we're still gonna go out and try to head west.

So if we get to this concentration,

obviously it's gonna be good to have a sonobuoy out

and listen for 52.

(CHAIN CLANKING)

MAN: Yeah, baby!

(WIND RUMBLING)

This is the spot.

Probably one of the windiest stretches

in Southern California,

really hard to get to,

uh, and totally exposed to the prevailing conditions.

(WIND HOWLING)

(WAVES SPLASHING)

(SPEAKING)

Here we go.

(BEEPS)

(INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER)

Copy that. Go ahead.

(CALAMBOKIDIS ON RADIO) 34 degrees,

11.92, 120 degrees,

35.15.

(MAN SPEAKS)

Let's see. I don't see anything just yet.

(CADE SPEAKING)

Stop boat! Stop boat, stop boat, stop boat!

Whale up!

(ENGINE STOPS)

(ON RADIO) Okay, we're gonna hang out around these guys

until we get a couple good IDs.

Oh, my God.

(WHALES SPOUTING)

(ON RADIO) These guys until we get a couple good IDs.

Okay, we're here.

(SPEAKING)

(MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

(ENGINE WHIRRING)

(WHALES CONTINUE SPOUTING)

I've never seen anything like this.

We've both been down in this area for two years now

and we've had a hard time finding blue whales at all.

And when we have, it's been

single individuals or pairs usually.

We've never seen an aggregation

this big in this area. MAN: This one, this one. That one

(INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER)

ALLEN: Yeah, there's a lot of animals out there,

I don't know if you guys have looked outside.

HILDEBRAND: Yeah, everywhere.

We're surrounded. (CHUCKLES)

HILDEBRAND: Yeah, it's a good day.

(WHALE SPOUTING)

CADE: Whoa, what was that?

What was that? What was on its dorsal fin?

(CADE SPEAKING OVER RADIO)

(CAMERA CLICKING)

If you look out the front...

ZEMAN: Oh, my God! HILDEBRAND: ...it's just in front of us.

You see the footprint?

See where the water is kind of smooth? ZEMAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's right there. HILDEBRAND: That's where they surface.

He's headed to the left there.

ZEMAN: That's amazing.

ALLEN: What'd he say, Dave?

CADE: He said, “Yeah, hang tight"

If we have one that's a potential hybrid,

like, hang tight, let's go check that out.

Is he gonna come over? He's coming over.

(ENGINE WHIRRING)

The second one... The sensor isn't as deep.

channel" Right.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

HILDEBRAND: How come there's nothing here?

(RADIO STATIC HISSING)

HILDEBRAND: We're just waiting for the whales to speak to us.

There's nobody at the surface right now.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

HILDEBRAND: This is really bad.

Really bad, bad, bad.

(ZEMAN SPEAKS)

(SHIP HORN BLOWS)

(CALAMBOKIDIS ON RADIO) It's a ship coming down the channel.

(SIGHS)

(MELANCHOLY MUSIC PLAYING)

(SHIP HORN BLOWS)

CALAMBOKIDIS: I mean, if there is any opportunity

to come back here,

looking for the 52 Hertz Whale,

I would say this is our highest priority area to work.

Between what we've observed before and what we saw today,

makes it very intriguing to work here.

(SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)

(SQUAWKING)

ZEMAN: We all fear risk.

The risk of believing in something

that just may not come true.

I truly believed I was going to find 52...

And I won't say it didn't matter,

because it did.

I was gonna be the one to solve this mystery,

to find that answer.

But I was wrong.

(CELL PHONE RINGING)

CALAMBOKIDIS: Hey, Scott. Is Bruce on as well?

MATE: I am. BAKER: Yes.

(MATE SPEAKING)

(BAKER SPEAKING)

In 2004, Mm-hm.

We came right out here off San Miguel... Mm-hmm.

...and we encountered a big group of blue and fin whales,

and in amongst them, paired with a blue whale,

was this whale that looked in between the two.

(BAKER SPEAKING)

Hey, Bruce. Remember we were saying

how hard it would be to find this whale

and here we are, like, four years later,

and we've, kind of, almost,

extremely close to finding this whale.

(MATE SPEAKING)

Well, if you put together Bruce's data that tells us

where the whale is at a particular time,

with the underwater sound data

from the site that we've maintained,

you could make some sort of correspondence

to say when the whale was near the sensor,

what sort of song did we hear?

When do you think you'll be able to look

at the data from this HARP?

It usually takes a couple of weeks.

Before Thanksgiving we should know.

(MATE SPEAKING)

It's an amazing set of events.

Yeah. We couldn't have planned it this way.

CALAMBOKIDIS: What are the chances of this happening?

ZEMAN: We now had one last opportunity

to prove our expedition hadn't been in vain.

To finish the work Watkins had started.

And to prove all these years of searching

have been worth it.

Every story has an ending,

even if it wasn't the one you expected.

(SEAGULL SQUAWKS)

ZEMAN: So you're saying

that you know when the whale went over this HARP?

That whale that they tagged?

HILDEBRAND: So we have a station

off of Point Conception,

and it's that station

where the tagged whale from Bruce

passed right over the top of our sensor.

He only had it tagged for a few weeks

and we looked at those time periods really carefully.

The times that Bruce's whale swam over our instrument,

it was not singing.

Okay. You're sure?

HILDEBRAND: The absence of those calls doesn't mean that,

you know, the whale wasn't there.

It just wasn't calling.

We had an opportunity.

But, you know, all the stars did not align.

So, this was the bad news.

What do you mean?

HILDEBRAND: We do have some good news.

SIROVIC: We were looking at the data from the other sites

and we saw the 52 Hertz Whale calling.

This is off of Los Angeles.

Now, at the same time, off of San Diego,

we have here, similar image,

again, several minutes of data,

and you see these same little marks.

And this is within ten minutes of each other

that we hear the Watkins Whale

in two locations that are about 90 miles apart.

These are completely different sequences

at the same time. At the same time.

HILDEBRAND: It's a culture.

You could say whale sounds are a language,

but they also have to listen to each other and synchronize.

And so, who is the 52 Hertz Whale synchronizing with?

It's not just one.

There's at least two.

Two 52 Hertz Whales.

There are two.

Probably more.

ZEMAN: We might never have known

there was more than one 52 Hertz Whale

had we not heard this one call out.

(WHALE CALLING)

With a voice that cut through the noise,

that demanded to be heard.

A voice that reminded us

the ocean is not a lonely place.

(WHALE CALLING IN HIGH PITCH)

Our discovery only proves

that Watkins was right all along.

In the ocean, what we can hear

is truly far more powerful than what we can see.

And it resonates with a mysterious beauty

that we are only just beginning to understand.

(MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

HILDEBRAND: The 52 Hertz still is a mystery,

but I think it's important to do things

where you don't know what the answer's going to be,

because that's where you really learn something.

CALAMBOKIDIS: You have billions of people

on this planet.

Where can you carve out a unique,

meaningful role for yourself

where you can kind of find this thing out and share it.

It may take a long time,

but we're going to find this animal.

(WHALE CALLING)

ZEMAN: After years of endless searching,

after years of calling out,

52 finally had his answer

and I had mine.

(ZEMAN SPEAKING)

(CLICKS TONGUE)

That's the... That's the ultimate question, isn't it?

It's not about biology and it's not about science.

It's about ourselves.

It's about our own ability to communicate

and our own isolation.

It's a human experience,

a reflection of who we are.

This whale isn't lonely.

This story is about all of us.

ZEMAN: To some, this whale was a hybrid.

To others, he was an outsider,

or even a legend.

Yet, in our search, we found a new story,

not just one of connection, but more so interconnection.

We used to call this creature

“the loneliest whale in the world,“

but after today,

he's better known as 52.

And if you ever want to find him,

all you have to do is listen.

(WHALE SPOUTS)

(CAPTIVATING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)

(WHALE SPOUTS)

CALAMBOKIDIS: I have at least 20 blue whales

feeding in this area.

Animals present in all directions around us.

(WHALE SPOUTS)

Mother and calf blue whale.

Can't tell if that's him yet or not.

MAN: Yeah, I don't know.

CALAMBOKIDIS: Pretty light colored,

I don't think that's him.

Oh, maybe.

Any visual underwater? (WHALE SPOUTS)

MAN: Definitely him. CALAMBOKIDIS: That's him.

That's our hybrid surfacing right there.

(SPOUTING)

That's our blue-fin hybrid in the foreground.

That's him.

(INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC RESUMES)

(WHALE CALLING RHYTHMICALLY)