Original subtitles

This is Monster Week.

Only on Animal Planet.

As a scientist, I was never a believer of conspiracy theories.

I believe al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

I believe we've landed on the moon.

And I believe Oswald shot JFK.

Okay.

Yeah, to believe our government covered up these events requires proof.

A conspiracy theory, like any theory, needs proof.

So that's the first question I�d ask me. "Where�s your proof?"

In 1997, scientists from NOAA recorded a sound in the deep pacific.

It's thought to be organic in nature and has never been identified.

It's called the bloop.

In the early 2000s, it was proved that the navy...

beached whales while testing sonar weapons.

For years, the navy denied that they...

were responsible for these beachings.

These are facts.

And in some of the incidents, there were reports of...

something else washing up with the whales.

In 2004, two boys were the first to arrive...

on a mass whale beaching in Washington state.

They captured it on a cellphone.

The boys claim they saw something that day.

They, they claim they saw a body.

And they went on record claiming that they saw a body.

That official record was later changed,

and the navy took the remains of what the boys found.

I know this because I was part of the team investigating...

that beaching and what the navy did that day,

and I believe I know what it is that they took.

Moclips beach, Washington state, April 4, 2004.

The site of the largest mass whale beaching in united states history.

A Seattle-based research team from the National...

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration...

is quickly on the scene to investigate the cause of the mass beaching.

Heading the research was respected Marine Biologist Dr. Brian McCormick.

In 2000, McCormick had published a landmark study that linked...

mass whale beachings to experimental navy sonar-weapons testing.

It led to the program's suspension that same year.

Dr. McCormick and his team suspected that the navy...

had begun operating their sonar once more.

Now two members of that team have agreed...

to speak on camera for the first time...

about what they claim the navy discovered but has never disclosed.

I remember looking out over the dunes, and the scale was incredible.

I'd never seen anything like it.

My name's Paul Robertson. I was a research assistant with Dr. McCormick,

working at NOAA for several years by then.

By the time we got there, the wind was so bad...

that it had driven everyone else off the beach,

and a storm was coming in, so it was just us and the navy.

They'd cordoned off a section of beach, and there were guys in hazmat suits.

It could have been biologists or medical staff.

We weren't sure, but that got our attention.

Brian was one of the first scientists to draw a connection...

between the mass beachings and navy sonar use.

He was the most experienced in these events,

but even he had never seen anything like this before.

I'm Rebecca Davis. I was a field biologist at NOAA.

I was working in the marine-mammals division...

before I joined Dr. McCormick�s lab in 1999.

Blood was visible coming from the ears of the whales.

We had never seen that before,

where every whale was bleeding from the ears.

This meant that they had all suffered some kind of major internal trauma.

We took multiple organ tissue samples and we were going...

to study those under the microscope to determine cause of death.

We packed up as quickly as we could. but Brian wouldn't leave.

He wanted to get as many samples as he could because...

he wanted to know what the Navy was doing out there.

After the Navy left, we went down to where they'd been working,

and none of the animals had been cut open.

They hadn't been autopsied.

We had no idea what they would be doing down there.

In prior beachings where the navy was implicated,

the NOAA team found whales that had died from suffocation injuries.

It is believed the loud sound of the navy's...

sonar scared the whales into the shallows,

where they stranded themselves.

Without water to support their massive weight,

the whales' internal organs collapsed, slowly suffocating them.

That's what the NOAA team expected to find in the autopsy remains.

Signs of internal-organ collapse.

They found something else instead.

When we looked at the samples, We expected to see evidence of trauma.

The bleeding from the ears indicated as much.

What we were not prepared for was the extent.

The internal organs hadn't collapsed.

What we were seeing was consistent with blunt force trauma.

There were circular lesions on the samples.

Clear evidence of damage.

And these were in every sample that we'd taken.

Brian had an immediate theory... infrasound.

Very powerful ultra-low-frequency sound waves that could...

theoretically be weaponized and potentially be used to devastating effect.

They would slam into living tissue with incredible speed and incredible force.

Those slides showed evidence of catastrophic impact injury.

Impact injury that we believed was caused by a new kind of navy sonar,

a sonic blast that did more than just scare whales into the shallows.

This sonar seemed to kill them.

Well, Brian realized that we didn't need the tissue to test our theory.

We have... NOAA has... these arrays that record audio,

marine life, seismic activity.

And one of these buoys was very close by.

So we know it was likely that we had recorded the whole event.

The sonar blast, the whale reactions, everything.

Well, first there was the sound of the whale vocalizations,

which we expected.

And then there was what we now understand...

to be the priming of the sonar weapon.

And then there was a moment of silence.

And this proved to be the calm before the storm,

because then it was "bam!"

It was pretty awful to listen to.

Brian was so preoccupied with cataloging this sonic...

blast that he almost missed what else was there.

There was another sound on the recording, an animal call,

and we realized that this was a bloop signature,

the same creature that NOAA had recorded back in 1997.

But in this case, our recording was much longer.

It was the most complex, intricate animal call I�d ever heard.

And we had no idea what had made the sound.

All we knew was that a creature that had only been...

Heard once in human history had just resurfaced.

I've seen the footage that was supposedly taken in Beaufort.

I don't know if that particular video is real or not.

It doesn't really matter.

The navy keeps a tight grip on all classified information.

But even they've come to realize that no matter what they do to prevent it,

there will be occasional leaks.

And when there is a leak, they've learned how to control it.

It's no surprise that the Beaufort video was immediately branded a fake.

The navy tells us it's not real, so it's not real.

Whenever a leak happens, the military has a way of using its influence...

to make the general public believe what they want them to believe.

What I can tell you is that I�ve seen a creature in the navy's possession.

We took it after the first test in Washington state.

I was on the beach that day, but we weren't the first ones there.

In the months following the stranding in Washington state,

the NOAA team responded to a sharp increase...

in mass beachings along both American coasts.

Similar mass-beaching events were being reported all over the globe.

Rescuers are racing against the clock, trying to save nearly...

200 pilot whales that beached themselves in southern Australia Monday.

(Speaking Japanese)

Six bottlenose dolphins also beached themselves,

something scientists say is very uncommon.

This is the fourth incident of its kind in recent months in the same...

part of southern Australia, and scientists really don't know why it's happening.

This was happening all over the world.

So now we're following beachings elsewhere.

We alerted marine agencies to what we discovered with the sonar blasts.

And we begin hearing about other things...

reports of bodies washing up with the whales,

rumors of something else washing up with them.

And in every case, there was always authorities on hand to control the scene.

But at the time, we just wanted to stop the beachings from ever happening again.

In some of these events, not only were there...

reports of bodies being found, but something else.

These had been reported before.

Not bodies... but spears.

For years, deep-sea fishermen all over the world have found them.

Found them in fish. Caught in the open ocean.

German news archives contain an interview with a fisherman�

who had his own experience with this strange phenomenon.

We petitioned the department of defense for information,

and we sought injunctions against the navy, but it didn't get us anywhere.

The navy claimed that they were merely studying the anomalies,

that they weren't the cause of them.

We continued to build profiles of these events,

and we went over the one thing we did have, which was the recording.

We listened to and analyzed this recording i don't know how many times.

And we made comparisons with whales and dolphins.

But this thing, to our ears,

sounded much more intricate, much more advanced.

And we thought we had a reasonable chance to crack the code.

But it was still beyond us. We needed help.

My name is Dr. Rodney Webster.

I�m currently at the university of south Florida.

I specialize in animal communications.

I focus mainly on the field of cetacean vocalizations... dolphins and whales.

A lot of what i do in my work is I search for signifiers,

which are, you know, particular sounds to which you can attach meaning or a mood.

You and I would refer to them as words.

So they're words for dolphins.

What�s so interesting about the 2004 recording is that I could identify�

literally hundreds of signifiers and arrange these into recognizable patterns.

We had not gathered this kind of information in the...

previous 30 years of studying dolphins and whales.

But that wasn't all that Dr. Webster found in their recording.

I noticed that there were some pitch changes...

in the bloop at certain parts of the recording,

so I ran a spectrogram analysis of the data and in...

the frequencies that were above the range of human hearing...

and this is what I found.

This is it at original speed with the whale sounds removed.

I then slowed the recording down into the range of human hearing.

Here it is at 1/3 of its original speed.

Multiple individuals, literally thousands of different signifiers.

At least a half-dozen individual voice prints.

So...what you see here is language.

They're talking to one another.

What animal could possibly have a language so complex, so sophisticated?

Our theory was this was a new species of dolphin.

But there's another theory we should have considered sooner�

the aquatic ape theory.

It�s a theory about us, really, about where we come from.

And I know it's always been controversial,

but now I think there's really something to it.

Why are we so different from other terrestrial animals?

According to the theory, it's because there was a time�

when early humans spent much of their lives in the sea.

And the traits that make us so different from...

other land animals are a legacy from this period.

We can control our breathing, like marine mammals,

and hold our breath longer than any other land animal.

The human record for breath holding is nearly 20 minutes.

That�s almost as long as a dolphin can dive.

Compared to our closest relatives, the apes, we have a much more flexible spine.

And we have partial webbing between our fingers and toes that they don't have.

These are features for an aquatic environment.

Why have them unless to help us swim?

And human babies hold their breath underwater automatically.

They instinctively know how to swim, whereas a baby chimp or gorilla would drown.

And unlike other apes, we shed our hair.

Hair creates drag in water.

And we have a thick layer of insulating fat that keeps us warm in water.

The only other animals born with as thick...

a fat layer are exclusively marine mammals.

Some humans are so well-adapted for life underwater...

that they still hunt at the bottom of the sea,

walking across the ocean floor.

The Moken people of Southeast Asia...

can contract their pupils at will to control for water distortion.

They actually see underwater as clearly as if they were wearing a mask.

And in some places in the world,

humans are still so proficient in the water.

That they can catch fish without hooks or nets.

All these adaptations for life in the water,

but we lack adaptations that are commonplace in other land animals.

We shed salty tears and sweat.

Salt and water are valuable resources.

Other land animals have efficient ways of conserving them.

We don't. Why?

Because part of our evolution took place in the sea.

Now, this is all theoretical,

but the land-to-sea transition has happened before.

It�s documented science.

Orcas have evolved from a wolf-like ancestor millions of years ago,

and there are more recent examples.

150,000 years ago, a fractional amount of evolutionary time,

a group of brown bears split from the rest of their line.

They evolved into a new species.

They became polar bears.

Polar bears are capable of holding their breath...

for minutes at a time underwater.

They've even developed webbing in their front paws to help them swim.

They are currently, before our eyes, evolving into marine mammals.

And if this is happening to polar bears now,

why couldn't this have happened to the human...

line at some point in our evolution?

Could we be descended from a group of apes...

that were once becoming marine mammals?

Some scientists believe our ancestors left the forest for the sea.

But what pulled them here?

What drew them to the water's edge?

It was food.

It is even thought our ability to walk fully upright first evolved here,

wading in the shallows where food was easily found.

The trees had been our cradle, but now we would be shaped by the sea.

Over time, more human ancestors collected along the shoreline.

It is even thought that this is where our advanced intelligence began to develop.

Brain-building nutrients like iodine and fatty acids...

were abundant in the crustaceans and shellfish that could be gathered here.

We were beginning to change, and so was the environment.

Earthquakes, volcanic activity along the coast.

The east African coast would soon be flooded over by a rising sea.

Some of our ancestors pulled inland,

retaining some of the features they'd adapted...

during this aquatic period of their evolution.

Others went in a different direction.

If our distant ancestors spent time living in the sea,

is it possible that one group split off from the rest?

And rather than retreating from the water,

did they go deeper in?

We detailed every stranding that followed the Washington state event,

trying to establish a pattern of naval involvement.

If we could prove that this was a new species being affected,

we figured that this might give us leverage,

that we could compel the navy to divulge what they're doing and possibly stop it.

We had strong circumstantial evidence, but we would need more.

And that's what the South African beaching gave us.

What made this beaching stand out was that our...

South African colleagues had made a recording of their own.

Well, we, of course, had heard of the work of Dr. McCormick.

we'd heard the reports linking large-scale beachings to sonic events.

And we'd also heard the rumors that such an event...

may have affected a species as yet unidentified to science.

And, of course, we heard of the bloop recording.

My name is Dr. Gavin Dittmar.

I am the head of acoustic research at the marine biology�

Research Center at the University of Cape Town.

We had an underwater array just about a kilometer off the tip of Cape Town.

And this was part of a research program...

to monitor whale populations at certain times of the year.

That's why we contacted Dr. McCormick.

We now believed that we had found the same thing.

When we heard that recording, we immediately...

accepted an invitation to make a research visit.

We arrived about 40 hours after the event. And, again, we weren't the first.

Other... official investigators had already come and gone.

The South African beaching was the biggest since the Washington state event.

And here again, we were seeing the exact same patterns of sonic trauma.

What was different in South Africa was the recording itself.

Here we had another bloop signature,

the same mystery creature that we recorded.

We had the same low-frequency sonic blast.

But here, it was what happened before the blast that was revealing.

Here was a bloop call similar to the one we recorded.

It was obviously the same kind of creature.

And this time, there was dolphin chatter on the recording.

Not surprising� dolphins are in these waters,

and they get stranded in these events as well.

But here, there was communication, back-and-forth communication

between our bloop creatures and the dolphins,

which made us think, is it a dolphin?

Is it some new species of dolphin?

And from that point on, that's what we thought we were looking for.

To that point, we only had acoustic evidence.

But physical evidence.

That was the breakthrough that Dr. Dittmar gave us.

It's a great white shark.

It's not the shark. It's what's in the shark.

It� It was a mess.

And it smelled pretty terrible.

There were parts that looked like they might have been from a dolphin,

parts that looked like they're from a seal,

but no seal or dolphin we'd ever encountered.

And there were other body parts, too.

We had no idea what we were looking at, but we thought, right away, "jackpot."

This was something new. This was a new species.

There were puncture marks around the shark's gills and mouth.

And I initially thought these might have been injuries...

sustained when it was gaffed to the side of the boat.

but I probed one of them,

and I found a stingray barb inside.

Now, this could have come from a stingray defending itself.

Sharks eat stingrays. Hammerheads do. Tigers do.

But not great whites.

So I kept the barb.

I thought it might be something I could publish in a journal or something.

I just thought it was interesting.

A million years after entering the sea,

the aquatic apes would now be better adapted to their new world.

They�ve lost most of their hair and can...

hold their breath for minutes at a time.

They are still learning how to hunt.

They're learning by observation.

Unexpectedly, the dolphins scatter.

For now, the aquatic apes must hide,

but eventually, they will learn to defend themselves

against the dangers present in their new world.

You're watching Monster Week.

Only on Animal Planet.

The first time the weapon was tested off the coast of Washington, it was a disaster.

We were caught off guard completely by the aftermath.

The beach hadn't been secured.

It was left wide open to anyone who passed by that morning.

Those boys happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

At first, it looked like they were going to be a problem.

They refused to recant their initial statement about what they saw.

Finally we convinced one of the boys' mothers...

that they hadn't seen what they thought they'd seen.

People usually don't want any trouble when the military is involved.

The mother was smart enough to make the boys change their statements.

We kept surveillance on the boys,

but they weren't telling their story to anyone.

They kept quiet about the entire event.

After that first test, we didn't leave any beaches unsecured again.

We weren't going to let anyone else find anything.

We got the body back to the lab, and the condition of the remains was poor.

We recovered about 30% of the body.

So it was gonna be difficult to piece together.

The first thing we did was to take DNA samples...

to try and establish the genetic makeup.

We started by looking at the rib cage, and it appeared to be hinged.

A collapsible rib cage is a feature...

of marine mammals who have evolved to dive.

The tail fluke was the best preserved.

And it looked a lot like a manatee's.

We wondered if maybe that's what this could be,

some relic population or undiscovered relative of this animal.

We took an x-ray.

There were bones in the tail fluke.

Manatees don't have that.

So we're thinking, "what on earth is this?"

The skull was severely damaged.

Half of it was missing.

But one important piece that we did have was a partial forehead plate.

This contained a hole that was not part of the damage.

We presumed it was a blowhole.

We made resin casts of the skull fragments and sent them to a forensic expert.

Then we looked at the pelvis.

There were remains of leg bones.

Seals have leg bones, but their thigh bones are short.

We could tell that the ones in our specimen were long.

So, this thing is not a seal. It�s not a manatee.

And although it talks to dolphins,

It�s not a dolphin, at least not from what we were seeing.

So, what else on earth would be smart enough to communicate with dolphins?

What else is out there?

A creature that once hid in shadows now swims in open sea.

They are not alone here.

They are bonded with another intelligent being.

It is a bond of friendship.

For now, they play together.

In time, they will hunt together.

Their ancestors slept in trees.

They now swim through them.

Soon their transition would be complete.

Like the dolphins, they would belong to the sea.

Brian and I tried to make sense of the rest of the parts.

we had found a bone that wasn't part of this animal.

It had markings along it,

and at the top, it had a little notch carved out.

we had no idea what to make of this, so we set it aside for further study.

So, I started working on the phalanges.

Those are the bones that support the fin or...

flipper structure in a seal or dolphin.

It was clear that these bones couldn't be...

configured into either of those arrangements.

We found something else.

This animal had been affected by the naval sonar.

The NOAA team was now certain the navy was not only affecting whales with their tests,

They were also affecting a new species.

The creature's physiology gave deeper insights into its behavior.

Although it was damaged in the shark attack, they discovered a large spleen.

Large spleens are common features to marine mammals.

It stores oxygen during deep dives.

It�s like having a built-in scuba tank inside them.

The only reason to have this adaptation is to dive deep,

to hunt for food.

Every time we found something new, a dozen more questions would pop up.

Dr. McCormick invited someone else to take a look.

The South Africans were taking so long getting the permitting to get the�

material out of the country that Brian flew him in.

My specialty is in biomechanics,

how animals have adapted different means of locomotion.

My name is Dr. Stephen Pearsall.

But when I got there, I thought,

"Well, what the heck am I doing here, because this is clearly a marine mammal?"

The tail looked like the tail on an animal that you find in the ocean.

And it was only when we got the remains under the scanners.

That I realized that this was like no tail we had ever seen before.

Looking at the hip structure,

Dr. Pearsall recognizes something strikingly familiar.

With humans, if you look at the top of your hips here,

they have this high ridge.

and these are called the iliac crests, and they're designed to support weight.

I looked at this creature, and it had similar crests on its hips,

and that didn't make any sense, until I realized...

that we were looking at the scans the wrong way.

We were looking at them this way,

when, in fact, what we had to do is rotate them.

That is when it became clear that this creature once walked on two legs.

and there is only one animal that walks upright on two legs,

that walks on two feet.

And if this thing once stood on two feet, we realized.

Hands!

They were hands.

Becky�s discovery that this creature had hands,

the discovery that this creature...

once walked upright on land like us,

because it was one of us that changed everything.

That bone had been worked on.

It had been carved by hand.

At the top, where the notch was, that was meant to hold something,

and we found fibrous plant material wrapped around it,

which would have been designed to hold it in place.

And then I remembered.

The stingray barb.

This thing fit perfectly in the top of the bone.

This was a tool.

All those tales of fish found with spears in them,

all the fishermen stories of spears found in the open ocean,

this is what made them.

We have something that makes tools.

This thing has figured out how to disarm a stingray,

use its spine to kill fish.

So they are intelligent hunters, but are they hunted?

How would these creatures have evolved to survive alongside�

the most formidable predators in the ocean?

Land covered in glaciers.

Land must seem a cold and foreign place to them now.

A lone scout swims ahead of his pod before they make an open-water crossing.

The drop-offs that chasm down into dark water are feeding grounds.

Whales gather here.

And so does the shark that preys on them.

Megalodon, a shark as big as a whale, a shark that ate whales.

A million and a half years ago,

the creatures would have confronted the greatest monster to ever rule the seas.

The pod travels with young.

They must be protected at all costs.

The body was one of the most important anthropological finds,

possibly one of the most important scientific discoveries in human history.

This was an intelligent toolmaker with grasping hands...

evolved from a primate ancestor, one that walked upright on land like us.

If this creature is part of the human family tree, how human is it?

I remember on the drive out to see the complete skull mold,

I remember thinking how perfect it was.

Here we were, driving through some of the very land...

where our oldest ancestors had been discovered.

And now we were about to meet a new one,

only this wasn't an ancestor.

This was somebody still out there.

My name is Dr. Leanne Visser.

I�m a forensic anthropologist

in the department of human evolution.

I reconstruct the appearance of an individual...

based on fragments of skull and other bones.

A few characteristics immediately stood out.

The skull had very large orbits,

bigger than any fossil or modern human that I�d ever reconstructed.

The eyes would be quite big.

And large eyes are found in animals operating in low light.

The next thing I noticed was evidence of a skull ridge.

Such skull crests are found in some of our relatives,

but not in modern humans.

Apes have them.

And they are also found in some of our early ancestors.

Scanning the reconstructed skull enabled Dr. Visser...

to map the inside of the brain cavity.

She discovered that the parts which in humans correspond to...

sound interpretation were greatly enlarged.

The opening on the frontal skull fragment

Was connected to an extensive series of sinus cavities.

The shape and features of the skull...

revealed to us just how elaborate...

the creature's acoustic capacities really were.

The concave shape in the front of the skull indicated that it had a melon.

The specialized mass of fatty tissue that...

enables dolphins and other whales to echolocate.

It wasn't a blowhole.

This wasn't used for breathing. It was used to channel sound.

The skull reconstruction proved it could do this,

that this creature could echolocate.

This was the creature that had made the sound.

The calls that had never been identified.

Echolocation, a form of bio sonar.

The ability to emit high-frequency sounds...

that bounce off objects and give the animal...

a mental map of its environment.

Sound used to locate food, sound used to...

communicate in the deep blue of the vast ocean.

We now had no doubt that this was the animal that had made the bloop.

This was the same animal that was on the 1997 bloop recording.

This was the same animal that was on the 2004 Washington state recording.

And it was the same animal that was on the south African recording,

the one that talked to the dolphins.

The creatures and the dolphins call to one another,

call one another to the hunt, the sardine run.

Almost every predator in the ocean will converge...

in a miles-long caravan of migrating fish.

But only two will work together.

We had... we had just found a creature of fable.

That's what we were looking at.

All of us had been wanting to say it for days, probably weeks.

but it...

scientists aren't supposed to believe in fairy tales.

And what we were looking at...

was a mermaid.

Monster Week continuous next.

Only on Animal Planet.

If the Beaufort footage is real,

then it's not the one we took off the beach in Washington.

That one was in no condition to be transported.

I saw what those boys saw.

I know what they reported to the navy was accurate.

How do you think people would respond...

if they knew we were killing an unknown species that...

was most likely the only surviving relative to humans?

Look at how they continue to react to beached whales.

If the public ever saw this creature, there would be an uproar.

So I asked myself, how could this thing stay hidden so long?

Then you realize that the surface of the moon...

has been explored more than the deep oceans.

And you look at the fact that even to this day,

there are still large animals being discovered.

There have been two new species of whales discovered in just the past decade.

These are 30-foot, 40-foot-long animals.

That have never been seen before, never been recorded.

Giant animals found for the first time ever in just the past 10 years.

So, yeah, it's possible. It�s still possible to stay hidden.

But, of course, this animal we found had been recorded before.

We have no record. We have no scientific record of them.

But there's another record.

We know them.

We�ve known them all along.

The accounts have been told by sailors the world over.

The seafaring Greeks described them,

as did the Vikings,

as did the Chinese during their great period of maritime exploration.

They were recorded in medieval manuscripts and even into the 19th century...

when captains of whaling vessels spotted them swimming with pods of whales.

Cultures from different continents, people that had no contact with one another,

but all of them have stories describing the same mythic creature.

Could it be these stories are more than myth?

They were recorded in the logs of the voyages...

of both Christopher Columbus and henry Hudson,

who witnessed humanoid creatures with pale, speckled bellies,

dark-blue backs, and paddle-shaped tails.

Could these be accurate descriptions of what they saw?

Could other historical evidence provide new insight,

like these 16th-century Italian drawings.

Once thought to be depictions of a human medical anomaly?

These sketches may now tell a very different story.

Even today, accounts still emerge,

like this hastily shot video captured in 2005 off the Adriatic coast.

This most recent sighting comes from deep-sea fishermen.

The most ancient can be found...

in a desert left behind by a departed sea.

These sandstone caves once looked out over a tidal bay some 30,000 years ago.

The water has receded,

but the memory of the people who lived there remains,

recorded in ancient paintings that cover the cave walls.

Archeologists believe these may be among...

the oldest mythic images ever made by man.

Are they the projected dreams of early fishermen,

imagining themselves with tails,

swimming out to catch fish with spears and nets?

Or are they something else?

Early humans fought savagely over hunting and fishing grounds.

Force was used against rival tribes and against any...

other competitive threat to a valuable food source.

Could that be what these paintings depict?

Could these paintings be a record of mankind's conflict

with creatures that are now relegated to myth?

Did we drive them into extinction?

Or did we drive them into hiding?

If they persisted... if they survived...

they must have hidden somewhere.

But where?

We knew what they had.

We knew what they had before they knew what they had.

We'd been trailing McCormick's NOAA team since 2004.

We followed them to South Africa.

We knew what they found was the same species we'd taken off that beach.

They had evidence that would bring down the operation.

They had physical evidence that could stop us.

Do you think we were gonna let that happen?

But they were advancing our research,

so we let them continue...

for a while.

By that point, we had. We had concluded in South Africa,

and we were preparing the evidence to travel back to the states.

But the permitting...

once again, the South Africans were being difficult about...

getting permits to get the evidence out of the country.

We should have known, at that point, what was gonna happen.

It�s hard to remember it all now.

It�s hard to remember how excited we were.

But the reason I've agreed to do this is because I think It'll help.

Becky and I believe that.

Brian, however, is a bit more cynical.

I think he doesn't have that kind of faith.

And I don't blame him, certainly not after what happened.

What the hell's going on here?

Where did you get this from?

Get your hands off me! You can't do this!

I tried to restrain Brian.

Then after that, I tried to pick him up for weeks.

But he was just devastated.

We all were.

The police confiscated everything.

All the lab tests, all of the files.

The skull reconstruction we'd brought back,

and they took the body.

Well, I�ve certainly never seen anything like it before,

and I�ve worked here for 20 years.

This was unprecedented.

This was not some normal police raid.

This was a slick operation.

They came early in the morning, when I knew no one would be around.

They had all the rights documentation.

"Confiscation of a discovery...

of national importance".

I mean, I've never heard of that before.

We knew who did it.

I mean, we all know who was really behind it.

The tests, the sonar tests.

We prove this, and they have to stop the testing.

They have to acknowledge that they have a sonar weapon.

And who knows what else they'd have to acknowledge?

All that we had left,

the only thing that we had left that they...

hadn't seized were the bloop recordings.

They couldn't take those.

Those were already a matter of public record.

We were so focused on everything that we'd lost,

that the government had taken, that we didn't realize...

that everything we needed was in those recordings.

The recordings would prove to be everything.

A shallow coastal lagoon in the southern hemisphere,

where the creatures retreat to warm, protected waters,

Where a species in decline still clings on.

When we got back to the states, we were in shock.

We couldn't stay in South Africa.

We had our visas revoked.

And when we got back to Washington,

we lodged several protests with the American and South African governments.

The South Africans eventually did respond.

The DNA samples that they had confiscated...

from the university lab where they were being processed.

They shared those with us.

Because the DNA readings that came back were so close to human DNA,

the lab that did the tests claimed that...

they had been contaminated with human DNA.

"How else," they said,

"could the genetic profiles have been so similar?"

They discredited the results... and they destroyed the samples.

The feeling was like something out of Orwell.

This was big brother.

They were rewriting history,

Basically writing this creature out of existence.

And the question I ask myself is why?

Are they protecting their testing?

Are they... are they keeping the creatures for themselves?

Are they testing the creatures?

We don't know. We still don't know.

All we had now was time. We just kept poring over it.

The beachings with reports of bodies washing up on shore...

where local officials had closed off areas,

and in some cases, reportedly,

with the help of American officers in civilian clothes.

We kept thinking back to the beaching that happened...

right here in Washington, that naval medical team.

We had thought they were analyzing their tests on whales,

but now we had a slightly different theory.

We tracked down the kids that had made the original report,

and the navy had spent a lot of time with these kids.

They had even visited them at home. and they had convinced the kids...

that what they had seen was actually a seal,

a seal that had decomposed, and that's why it looked strange.

The boy had drawn a picture of what he saw.

Now, nobody outside of the scientists we work with or the...

government officials that had confiscated our materials...

could have known what the skull reconstruction looked like.

But this kid had a drawing of what he had seen.

And it was a match.

He had seen the same thing.

And that's not all we saw.

The boys' mom agreed to show it to us.

They hadn't shown it to anybody.

The navy had not thought to check the kid's camera phone.

Now, that's not the first time the...

military's gotten caught by a camera phone,

but back then, most people didn't even have them.

I doubt the investigating officer even bothered to check it.

This kid had kept it. He'd kept it all that time.

The first time I watched the video, I remember feeling a chill,

and not from the shock of seeing it alive,

But I remember thinking about the moments before the sonar blast,

that this creature didn't stand a chance.

The mermaids travel with whales.

They migrate from warm southern waters,

where, like the whales, they give birth to their young.

Now they make their way to the northern feeding grounds.

Whales offer protection from orcas and open-ocean sharks,

and females with young can draft off them,

Conserving energy as they swim up the long length of the pacific coast.

The deep ocean has been their last hiding place,

but now, even here, there's no refuge.

And whales cannot protect them from the new threats that are gathering.

They swim through a stretch of water in the Pacific Northwest.

U.S. navy ships were also there that day.

What happened to them next, was captured on NOAA audio recordings.

We never found another living one�

at least, not during my tenure with the navy.

When I resigned, we weren't even sure if there were any left to be found.

The creature we pulled off the beach in Washington state died in 2007.

We kept it alive as long as we could.

I know what I did was wrong.

I knew it was wrong while I was doing it,

and I have to live with that.

My only hope now is that, by coming forward,

it might help protect any of them that are still out there.

We knew that they were washing up with the whales.

What we found was that the beachings were happening along migratory routes.

They didn't just associate with the whales.

They migrated with them.

We were gonna try to make contact.

We knew we were in the right vicinity when we saw the whales.

And we started the recording,

and we waited to see if there was anything out there.

There was something out there.

Brian was certain he saw something.

And I�m pretty sure I saw something, too.

We... our activities were being observed.

I mean, this was big brother.

And anything we would have recorded that day...

we weren't gonna be able to keep.

We were not gonna get the story out that way.

Brian was the first to leave the Agency.

Paul and I left NOAA not long after that.

I haven't spoken to Brian since he left.

I believe he thinks that the only way to save them is to find them.

But I don't think that anymore. And I don't think Paul does, either.

Brian had become consumed, and he'll...

follow that call to the ends of the earth.

And he may very well find them. I know he's still looking.

After that day, for me, I�m not sure I can help.

And I�m not even so sure we should try.

I started thinking of them as fellow beings.

And the last time We lived alongside a...

fellow human species was Neanderthals.

We displaced them.

Some scientists think we actively hunted them,

that we devoured their very existence.

It�s the same thing.

What we did on land to one of our own,

We�ll do in the sea.

We�re not so good at coexistence.

Sometimes other responsibilities supersede science.

My only goal is that the Navy stop their sonar testing,

that court inquiries open into their activities...

that then lead to court orders to stop it.

Mermaids have persisted only because they can hide.

And I hope they stay that way. I hope they stay hidden.

I don't want to hunt them anymore because...

they don't want to be found.

Well, forget what we're claiming, forget the recordings that remain,

forget the sworn affidavits from other scientists,

and forget our own cultural references of mermaids.

There is another culture that remembers them.

Nature doesn't lie, so look to nature.

There are a few places left on earth where...

wild dolphins will hunt with fishermen.

They�ll actually help humans catch fish. This happens...

in Brazil, in coastal west Africa, in Southeast Asia.

Fishermen go down to the edge of the water and into the shallows.

They�re calling them.

They call in the dolphins, wild dolphins from the sea.

And the dolphins answer the call...

by driving in schools of fish towards shore.

Then the fishermen encircle the fish schools...

and all the dolphins with their nets.

The dolphins don't panic. They stay entirely calm.

They know that the fishermen will let them out...

as they pull the nets tight.

They let the dolphins out before they pull the fish ashore.

And then the dolphins wait in the shallows,

bobbing with anticipation in the water as the fishermen give them their share.

They toss fish to the dolphins to eat.

They divide the catch, essentially.

Dolphins and people split the spoils.

They share the fish they caught together.

Cooperation between two animals of two different environments.

There is nothing else like this on earth.

And nobody knows how it began, how this partnership started.

It�s one of the great mysteries of the oceans.

How this partnership between people and dolphins evolved.

How could people teach dolphins to do this?

Well, We didn't.

We didn't teach dolphins to do this. They taught us.

And I think that they learned it from someone else.

We are not the only culture with a memory of mermaids.

Subtitles - Kilo