Original subtitles

(mysterious music)

- You know I've been around for a while.

Met some interesting people.

Done some crazy things.

So you just might think that there's

not much that can take me by surprise.

You'd be wrong.

The world is full of stories, science and

things that amaze and confound me every single day.

Incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

Some I can answer; others just defy logic.

Are we living on a hostile planet?

In Newfoundland, a small community is devastated

by a mysterious explosion.

(explosion)

- It really looked like a bomb had gone off.

- [William] Was it a secret weapon

or a freak of nature?

On Lake Michigan, a yacht vanishes into thin air.

- This is the most extraordinary thing

I have ever, ever witnessed.

- [William] Was it swallowed by an evil fog?

And in the Indian Ocean, two giant flashes of light

send a nation into panic.

- Everybody knew for sure this was something

to be very concerned about.

Ah! (sighs)

It's a weird world, and I love it.

(intense symphonic music)

Listen. (birds chirping)

Nature, isn't it wonderful?

You know, Mother Earth, she's all we have.

Over six billion of us occupy possibly

the only planet in the universe that sustains life,

but yet we take everything from her,

and give very little back.

Is she getting mad at us?

Are killer tsunamis, quakes and tornadoes

the Earth's way of saying enough is enough?

Maybe, but there's something else going on with our planet.

Freaks of nature that are impossible to explain

and can strike you out of the blue.

(bird poop splats)

Sunday, April 2, 1978.

12-year-old Darin Bickford was making his way home

on Bell Island, a small community in Newfoundland,

on the East coast of Canada.

- I was outside riding my pedal bike,

and I knew one of my favorite shows

came on television at 11, so I was pedaling back home.

- [William] But Darin wouldn't get to watch TV that morning.

Instead, he would witness one of the world's

greatest unsolved mysteries.

- As I approached the end of our driveway,

all the birds stopped chirping,

all the dogs stopped barking,

it just went so still.

And then it was boom, (explosion) like a shotgun blast

followed immediately by another boom (explosion),

and then followed immediately after the second boom,

the ground shook underneath me.

It was the biggest noise I have ever heard in my life.

- [William] Suddenly, something unbelievable appears

right in front of Darin, a glowing ball of light.

- It was hovering off the ground when it

appeared out of thin air, and the beautiful colors

of blue made up most of the center of the ball,

and outside the blue it was orange and yellow

mixing together, and then just like that,

the ball of light just disappeared into thin air.

This is without a doubt the strangest,

most terrifying thing I've ever seen,

but I was terrified, but I was transfixed by it.

It was so beautiful looking, this ball of light

and the colors and the way it swirled around,

you couldn't help but stare at it

even though I was scared, I was shaken,

but I loved it, and I've never seen anything like it,

and I guess I will probably never see nothing like it

again in my life.

It was all over in four or five seconds,

but those four or five seconds are burnt into my brain

just like a roll of film.

- [William] The massive explosion was heard

over 60 kilometers away.

Its impact wreaked havoc.

People reported exploding TV sets, blue flames shooting

from electrical outlets, and a strange beam of light

coming from the sky.

This bizarre event was dubbed the Bell Island Boom.

- After this happened, everyone was in bewilderment.

- [William] One house seemed to catch the brunt of the boom.

It belonged to Darin's grandfather, James Bickford.

- Fuses in his fuse panel were glass fuses

that were screwed into the panel.

These had come out like bullets,

and went about 20 odd feet, the length of their hallway,

and buried theirselves in the wall.

- [William] Grandpa's chicken coop is demolished.

The chickens inside killed instantly.

- It really looked like a bomb had gone off in his shed.

- [William] It's a bizarre scene,

but even more baffling are three large holes

blown into the ground.

- There was a cone-shaped hole

going three or four feet down.

We didn't know what it was.

- [William] This weird and mysterious incident

soon generates massive interest around the world.

- A lot of people came, the media came.

The television news crew had me

describe to them what I had seen.

- Myself I thought was something happened to the world

or someone dropping bombs or something.

- Now this is really weird or what.

Little kid is riding his bike,

minding his own business, when boom!

His town is suddenly smashed by some

mysterious explosion, turning fuses

into lethal weapons, exploding TV, and what about

those poor chickens, awful.

What could have caused something like that?

(electricity zaps)

Was that me?

Jim Farrell was a local fire investigator

and one of the first to the scene.

After being asked to investigate, he sends his report

to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The RCMP officially concludes that it was lightning.

(thunder booms)

Farrell begs to differ.

I said I don't believe it's lightning.

I've never encountered anything so great as this force.

- [William] But Jim isn't the only one who wants answers.

Soon Darin gets a surprise visit.

- There were these strange men.

I was told they were scientists from Los Alamos, New Mexico.

- [William] The Los Alamos National Laboratory

built and tested the first atomic bombs.

(atomic bomb explodes) Could there be a connection?

The men interview everyone involved,

including Darin and Jim.

- I told them everything I knew,

and next thing I was more or less ordered

to turn over my exhibits to the gentlemen.

- 33 years later, and I would still like to know to this day

what was the ball of light that I saw?

If it was lightning,

how did it remain stationary and motionless in the air?

How did it appear out of thin air?

And then disappear into thin air?

Those things aren't supposed to happen,

but they do happen.

I saw it happen.

- [William] The three strangers leave without giving

any concrete answers.

What were they looking for?

What did Darin Bickford and the

residents of Bell Island witness?

And what could have created the Bell Island Boom?

Science journalist Brian Dunning believes the answer

isn't so earth-shattering after all.

- There's actually about 600 booms between

starting in late 1977 going through mid-1978.

Nobody could really localize exactly what was happening,

but it was heard from South Carolina

all the way up through Canada.

- [William] Could the Bell Island Boom

be part of a bigger phenomenon?

What could be responsible for this rash of strange booms?

- As so often happens when you have a mystery,

all kinds of people started coming up

with crazy explanations for what these might be.

And the most common one was

people thought it was some kind of a military test

of a new super weapon, something like

maybe that Nikola Tesla might have envisioned.

Tesla, when he was in his later years

and was getting kind of crazy, he was coming up

with all kinds of proposals for ideas.

He never built them or anything,

but one of his ideas was a giant atmospheric super weapon

that would move a large chunk of the atmosphere

over a city and destroy it, and some people were saying

that this might be a test, an actual test,

maybe someone actually built this weapon

and were trying it out.

We don't know any super weapons that are consistent

with what happened at Bell Island.

It's purely conjecture, it's purely just hypotheses

that you make up.

There's no evidence supporting that.

Maybe it is the explanation, but we don't

have any reason to think so.

What started happening in December of 1977

is that the Concorde was flying over.

It was making its supersonic flights

between New York and Europe, and that created

sonic booms coming over the land.

- [William] When planes fly through the air,

they make waves just like a boat on the water.

The faster you fly, the closer the waves build up

at the tip of the airplane.

And when a plane actually goes faster

than the soundwaves can move, they pile up

into one big sonic shockwave that can cause

damage to the areas on land below it.

Could the Bell Island Boom just have been the effect of a

sonic boom from the world's first supersonic passenger jet?

- Because it was a sonic aircraft and made a big sonic boom,

it was supposed to go way out to sea.

However, on hot days, because of fuel expansion issues,

it would have to take a shortcut route,

and it would go over Nova Scotia.

For all the 600 mystery booms that we heard,

most of them were correlated with sonic booms

from the Concorde and other aircraft.

- [William] Could the world's fastest passenger jet

have caused the tumult on Bell Island?

Or was it something far more deadly?

- It may be something that science doesn't know about yet.

- [William] A small Newfoundland community is thrown

into chaos by an earth-shattering boom. (explosion)

Was it caused by a supersonic airliner?

Karl Stephan is a professor of engineering.

His theory is very electric.

- What I've read of the Bell Island Boom

sounds consistent with a super lightning bolt.

- [William] Super lightning bolts are extremely rare

but freakishly powerful bolts of lightning.

- Most lightning has a negative charge.

However, about 10% or less of lightning bolts

are positively charged.

Positive lightning also tends to travel farther.

It can go several miles from cloud to cloud, for example.

So the eyewitness reports of the Bell Island Boom

that said the sound was heard for many miles around,

that's consistent with a long, positive lightning bolt

that was going through several clouds

and several miles distance before it hit the ground

and did all that damage.

The current is about 10 times what your

typical lightning bolt would have, so it would make

a much louder boom.

- [William] Super bolts almost always occur

in the upper atmosphere over oceans.

Very rarely do they hit land.

But do they explain the weird things

seen that day on Bell Island,

like glass fuses acting like bullets?

- Strange things happen when very large currents

flow through wires that aren't designed to carry them.

Tremendous forces are set up, magnetic forces

that can cause (mumbles) objects to fly like projectiles.

- [William] Ok, but what about the poor chickens

that were roasted in their coop?

- Chickens are susceptible of being electrocuted.

What can happen with any kind of animal

that are in a place where lightning hits the ground

is the current running along the ground

can actually run up through the legs

and through the body and kill the animal.

- [William] Stephan's super bolt theory seems to help

answer some of the mysterious incidents on Bell Island.

But does it explain the weird glowing ball of light

witnessed by Darin Bickford?

Stephan believes the answer lies in an incredibly rare

natural phenomenon.

- The ball of light hovering sounds a whole lot

like ball lightning.

Ball lightning is sometimes seen to form

right after a lightning strike.

And it either disappears silently, or it can explode.

(explosion)

We suspect that it is an electrical phenomenon.

It may be something that science doesn't know about yet.

- [William] Did lightning make fuses explode

and act like bullets?

Did it roast those chickens?

Questions persist.

If scientists don't even know what ball lightning is,

how can they think that that's what Darin saw?

(thunder booms) If it was a super bolt,

why did high-level personnel from a top secret lab

show up to investigate?

And finally, what caused the three craters

at James Bickford's place?

Lee Tizzard is an electromagnetic weapons researcher.

He thinks Mother Nature shouldn't take the rap for this one.

- I believe the evidence indicates that

it was caused by something man made,

and not something by nature.

It was an accident. (explosion)

- [William] But what could cause an accident on this scale?

What kind of accident blows holes in islands?

- During that time frame the Russians

were pounding North America with a very powerful

and disruptive signal called the Woodpecker signal.

- [William] The Woodpecker signal was a radio signal

used by the Soviets in the 1970s

to provide early warning of an enemy weapons launch.

By bouncing radio waves off the Earth's upper atmosphere,

the ionosphere, they could analyze the returning waves

for disruptions, indicating a missile attack.

- It was a 10 Hertz signal, 10 vibrations per second,

and it sounded like this (makes vibrating signal sound).

It was just extremely powerful.

It was so disruptive that the UN and

a number of countries banded together with the UN

and protested to the Soviet Union when they found out

that it was originating from Gomel in the Soviet Union,

and they protested and demanded it be stopped,

but it really didn't stop for a long time.

I think it stopped in like the mid-80s, but it went on

for at least 10 years, the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

- [William] According to Tizzard, the Woodpecker signal

was a ticking time bomb.

He believes its use accidentally created

a column of electromagnetic energy known as a

standing columnar wave over North America.

Despite being invisible to the eye,

this huge energy field had the potential to be disastrous.

- I believe that the standing columnar wave

that was established, collapsed.

And when a standing columnar wave collapses,

it creates these vortices of electromagnetic energy

that have to dissipate.

It sent down three spinning vortices

of electromagnetic energy, and that's what we believe

struck, explaining the three holes.

- [William] Did a Russian radio signal

create an electromagnetic column over North America

which accidentally collapsed?

If so, why did it happen on a remote island

off the coast of Canada?

And does it explain the glowing ball of light?

- It's believed that the standing columnar wave

that was created by the Woodpecker signal

was attracted to Bell Island because of

the iron ore content.

It was a former iron ore mine.

- [William] Did the iron-rich Bell Island

act as a giant magnet for a massive burst

of electromagnetic energy caused by the Soviets?

Or was it struck by a super bolt

with a side dish of ball lightning?

Whatever the truth, Darin Bickford and the other survivors

of the Bell Island Boom may never know.

Weird or what?

(fire crackling)

A mysterious deadly fog haunts Lake Michigan,

swallowing ships and planes and bending time.

Is this a true freak of nature?

Is it weird or what?

- [Voiceover] In three meters, turn right.

- You know, modern technology is amazing.

- [Voiceover] Turn right.

- I mean, with nothing but this tiny gadget

I can navigate to within an inch

of wherever I want to go, look!

- [Voiceover] Prepare to turn left.

(William laughing)

Turn left, go straight ahead.

- It even talks to you!

What a nice lady, and it's so accurate.

- [Voiceover] Turn right.

Turn right.

Turn right.

- I can't turn right you stupid thing.

There's a wall here.

- [Voiceover] Go straight ahead.

- Ah!

- [Voiceover] Go straight ahead.

Calculating route.

- Have you ever felt yourself

disoriented like you're lost in the woods?

Well I am!

- [Voiceover] Go straight ahead.

- No!

It's not a pleasant experience, I can assure you.

The Great Lakes of North America hold a fifth

of the world's fresh water.

They're also one of the most popular areas

for sailing in the world, but on a summer night

nearly two decades ago, Kathy Door

discovered these gentle waters aren't quite what they seem.

- The events of that night challenged

my conventional view of reality.

- [William] It's a warm, July evening

when Kathy sets off for a leisurely sail.

- Clear sky, light chop.

It was beautiful out, and it was hot.

- [William] Just around nightfall, her calm journey

is upended by something mysterious and alarming.

- Very abruptly we encountered fog,

a very strange fog.

It just descended on us.

Poof, just like that.

- [William] In minutes, the fog engulfs the boat.

- We feared that we might have a crash.

At that point, I became very, very, very cold.

In fact, I was freezing.

- [William] Blinded and cold, Kathy and her yacht

have seemingly disappeared into a void.

- The boat began a strange aquatic dance.

It began to turn, almost as if

it were pirouetting on its axis.

There was no movement of the sea.

This was not a whirlpool.

I looked at the captain

and I said, "Who's steering the vessel?"

And he said, "Nobody, it's steering itself."

- [William] Amazingly, the vessel does

three complete 360 degree turns.

Then as quickly as it appeared, the fog suddenly vanishes.

They regain control of the boat and head for home,

but when Kathy looks at her watch,

she makes a startling discovery.

- I've gone over this 100 times.

We should've been back by 10 p.m. and it was after midnight.

We cannot count for two hours.

I don't know what happened to that time.

- [William] Kathy's pleasure cruise had somehow

become a nightmare.

- I just remember thinking, "This is the most

"extraordinary thing I have ever, ever witnessed."

- [William] What happened to Kathy and her yacht?

Remarkably, her experience isn't the only weird event

to occur on Lake Michigan.

Numerous, unexplained mysteries have occurred here.

Passenger airplanes vanishing without a trace.

Legends of ghost ships appearing out of nowhere.

And thousands of UFO sighting.

Could the mysterious fog Kathy encountered

be linked to these strange events?

Was it a natural phenomenon, or something unknown?

Pilot Bruce Gernon believes he has the answer.

- When I first heard Kathy's story,

I immediately realized that she had experienced

what I call electronic fog.

- [William] Bruce believes that sometimes,

different magnetic fields from the Earth collide

in powerful freak thunderstorms over remote bodies of water,

such as Lake Michigan.

The result is a nautalic, highly-charged fog.

- It's been known to actually chase

vessels, and try to capture them.

And once it captures them,

it clings to them, and the people become disoriented

because it doesn't make sense to them.

No one has ever realized that it's attached to them.

Everyone always thinks that they're moving inside this fog.

They don't realize that the fog is moving with them.

- [William] Once formed, the electronic fog

is magnetically attracted to metal objects like ships

and airplanes, wreaking havoc on their navigational controls

and displaying other incredible properties.

- It has an electromagnetic energy within it

that can become so powerful

that it can affect the fabric of time itself.

- [William] Time warping fog?

An interesting notion, but is there any science

that can back it up?

- NASA has just recently announced

that they have discovered something new

in certain types of thunderstorms.

And it appears at the top of the storm,

emitting antimatter.

- [William] Created by massive lightning within a storm,

antimatter produces 10,000 times more power

than nuclear energy.

Some scientists speculate that this sort of power

could open doors to new dimensions of time and space.

- And this is a critical discovery

that relates to the electronic fog.

- [William] Incredibly, Gernon says he knows

what it's like to be enveloped by the electronic fog.

He claims one of them captured his plane

over the Bermuda Triangle, and that he travelled

300 miles in only 10 minutes.

- And that would be impossible

to do in a small plane like this.

You'd have to be going close to 2,000 miles an hour.

And when I landed back at Palm Beach International,

we always topped off the fuel tanks,

and on this particular trip,

we used 10 gallons less fuel than we've ever used before,

and I had made this trip a dozen times,

and I saved that receipt, and I have the original.

- [William] Could a mystery fog

have sucked Kathy Door forward in time?

Do we need to rewrite our science books?

- This is a very real phenomenon.

- [William] A woman and her yacht

suddenly disappear while sailing on Lake Michigan.

Were they taken by a freak of nature

known as electronic fog?

Dr. Donadrian Rice doesn't think so.

- Human beings are not always reliable witnesses

to our own experiences.

- [William] For him, the explanation

is far more straightforward.

- I think what the person was experiencing

was sensory deprivation.

- [William] When our senses are deprived,

say with a blindfold, our brains try to fill in the gaps,

often with strange results.

- Typically, they begin to either hallucinate visually,

they could have auditory hallucinations,

or they could have kinesthetic hallucinations with the body.

- [William] Could a regular fog cause Kathy Door

to hallucinate, and mistake an ordinary event

for something fantastical?

Maybe, but how could it explain those two missing hours?

- You're having a great time at a party or some place,

time seems to go by very quickly.

If you're sitting in a meeting (laughs),

time goes very slowly, and of course objectively,

the clocks are moving exactly the same,

but that's not your experience of it.

- [William] Dr. Rice is so convinced

that sensory deprivation is the culprit,

he's offered to recreate the weird events

of an electronic fog in his lab.

All he needs are headphones, a set of goggles,

and ping pong balls.

That's right, ping pong balls.

- The experiment itself is one where an individual

is deprived of visual information

by having goggles with ping pong balls cut out,

placed over the eyes, which lets in a little light,

but otherwise the person is deprived.

And at the same time, we'll have them listen

to white noise sound.

- [William] The participants are not told

how long their senses will be deprived.

- Tell me a little bit about what you experienced.

- I was seeing sort of outlines of things,

almost like looking at clouds and you see

shapes in them a little bit.

Sort of like the outline of an eye or a mask at some times.

Maybe that sort of shape of house.

- A sensation almost as though

I was sinking down a little bit.

- I started feeling a little bit uneasy,

a bit nauseous as it felt like things

were moving around a little bit.

- The darkness around my eyes

was growing as though one was being lowered

into the ground.

An interesting experience.

A little bit unsettling.

- [William] Dr. Rice proved that depriving the senses

affects perception, but did they also lose track of time?

- I was thinking about five minutes.

I wouldn't have been surprised

if it was actually two minutes.

- I was thinking probably somewhere between five and 10,

like closer to 10.

- It didn't feel like very long.

Maybe, I don't know, five minutes?

- [William] Incredibly the experiment lasted for 20 minutes.

- I think the most interesting thing for all three

was the time distortion

because this lasted for 20 minutes,

and they experienced it from five to 10 minutes.

So again, that's consistent with the experience

that the person had in the fog,

or others who have been in these kinds of situations

where they experienced time distortion.

So in this short experiment here,

if that were to be generalized to a larger situation,

a person may experience themselves as losing

even more hours, so that would be very possible.

But what you can actually see here

is how our brain works, and how our brain

tries to make sense out of

a situation where the senses are deprived.

So your brain continues to do that.

- I guess it is pretty powerful what your mind decides to do

in a situation like that.

It sort of goes where it wants to go.

- It's a bit peculiar that your mind

can sort of play tricks on you like that.

- I don't know where that time went.

- Wow, that's an incredible theory.

The fog caused a severe case of sensory deprivation,

which made Kathy hallucinate.

But you know what?

I'm sick of watching all these wonderful experiments.

I want to try this and see for myself!

Right, hellooo?

Hellooo, okay, here we go.

Just wait, wait a minute.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm definitely seeing something.

I think Dr. Rice might be really onto something here.

Yeah, yeah!

I can see

white, I can definitely see white.

And I am very disoriented.

But I have to ask, can this explain

how an entire yacht

could get swallowed up by a fog?

Hellooo?

Hello, are you there?

(glass crashing and breaking)

Can someone call a doctor?

American author David Childress disagrees

these strange occurrences are simply tricks of the mind

- This is a very real phenomenon.

It's not just something that's a psychological aberration

or hallucination on their part.

- [William] For Childress, the answer lies in Ley lines.

A matrix of magnetic pathways criss-crossing the Earth,

connected by ancient, ceremonial sites.

He believes they can create vortexes of energy

and manifest as the paranormal fog.

- Other people call these Ley lines different things.

The ancient Chinese called them dragon lines.

We might call them Earth currents or, in Australia,

the aboriginals there call them dreaming tracks.

The Earth itself is like a giant magnet.

And it has a north pole and a south pole

of magnetic energy, and that energy is created

by the rotating, swirling

magma inside the Earth.

It too is magnetic.

And with this ball

that's the planet Earth

with the magnetic lines running all through it,

it has its own special energy.

And it's where these magnetic lines cross

and come together in certain powerful areas,

geometrically scattered around our planet,

that these vortex hyperspace spots occur.

And it's my view that these vortexes of energy

occasionally are activated and become alive and become

portals or doorways to other time space dimensions.

And this is what people get caught up

in the Bermuda Triangle or in the Great Lakes Triangle.

- [William] Incredible, but does it explain

what happened to Kathy and her yacht?

- What may have happened to Kathy on Lake Michigan

was that she was in one of these vortexes

when it became activated.

And suddenly a mist or fog starts to come in

and surround you.

You're not in the same place that you were.

You feel you're in another dimension.

- [William] If, as Childress believes, Kathy really

travelled to a new dimension, how in the world

did she get back?

- Many of the people who have gone through

these bizarre vortex areas and survived

are probably very lucky.

We'll never know how many people

have been in these same vortex areas and situations

and they never came back.

- [William] Does this solve the mystery?

Did Kathy Door sail into a patch of fog,

or into another dimension?

Was she merely hallucinating as a result

of sensory deprivation, or had she entered

a time vortex created by Ley lines?

Whatever the answer, it's most definitely

weird or what.

(fire crackling)

A blinding double flash of light is detected

over the Indian Ocean.

Did it nearly cause World War III?

- Everybody knew for sure this was something

to be very concerned about.

- When it comes to the mysteries of Mother Nature,

there's a lot of things that aren't quite as they seem.

It's all a matter of perspective.

On one hand it could look perfectly normal.

On another

it could look like the end of the world.

That's exactly what happened in 1979.

Jeffrey Richelson is a U.S. security analyst.

He knows lots of secrets, but he's yet to solve

one of the biggest, the truth behind the mysterious event

known as the Vela Incident.

- It's a fascinating anomaly.

It's a mystery that reads like a techno-thriller.

- [William] The tiny Crozet Islands lie in the Indian Ocean

over 1,000 miles south of Africa.

Around 3 a.m. on September 22, 1979,

something extraordinary happened there.

Without warning, two giant blinding flashes of light

lit up the sky.

- Everybody knew for sure this was something

to be very concerned about.

- [William] Incredibly, 70,000 miles away,

the flashes were also detected by a U.S. satellite

called Vela 6911.

- That triggered a very high level of alerts,

and from there word went to the White House

that something might have happened.

They started calling in advisors.

- [William] They took it very seriously,

rushing CIA agents to the area in military planes.

But what triggered this extreme response?

- In 1979, the United States had concluded

a series of arms control treaties with the Soviet Union.

- [William] The Cold War rivals had just agreed

to stop nuclear tests, but the flash detected by Vela 6911

could mean the Soviets were just playing games.

- The Vela satellite's prime purpose

was to detect nuclear detonations.

What they saw was something that's very indicative

of a nuclear explosion. (explosion)

- [William] Had the Soviets broken faith?

Had they really violated the new treaty

and set off a nuclear bomb?

Each side had thousands of nuclear warheads

pointed at the other.

The stakes couldn't be higher.

- At first the adminstration tried

to keep wraps on the story, and it was full-court press of

intelligence activities to try to determine

what was actually going on.

(plane zooms by)

- [William] With a potential global crisis on its hands,

the U.S. tries to confirm its suspicions

by sending CIA sniffer planes to the Indian Ocean.

(RADAR pings)

Equipped with sensitive radiation detectors,

they get an unsettling surprise.

- There was no radiation detected.

It was a mystery.

They even sent people, CIA officers,

into West Africa to get the leaves off trees

to see if there was a residue from a nuclear explosion.

- [William] So what had Vela really seen?

- They didn't know what actually happened.

It's been such a mystery for so many years.

In terms of strange events, I think it's

at the top of the list.

- [William] What happened over the Indian Ocean?

What could cause a giant flash of light so powerful

it could be seen 70,000 miles away?

Tom Reed is an expert in nuclear weapons.

- I've fired them, I've built them, I've seen them go off.

- [William] He believes there is only explanation.

- I believe it was a nuclear test. (explosion)

A nuclear detonation is kind of hard to hide.

I mean, it's not some pin drop in the night.

It's a very major event.

- [William] But if no one witnessed the explosion,

how can he be sure that Vela detected a nuclear blast?

- A nuclear explosion has this sort of fingerprint.

It is unmistakable.

- [William] This fingerprint is caused

by the way a nuclear bomb explodes.

First it blasts out deadly gamma radiation

at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second.

- Technically it's a flash, but to the human eye, uh uh,

it's this ball of fire and the sun has come to Earth.

(explosion)

- [William] Then as the explosion grows,

the shock wave produces a second flash.

(explosion)

- It's very mind-boggling, and it's very frightening.

- [William] Does the data from Vela confirm the signature

double flash of a nuclear bomb? (explosion)

The recorded flashes are shown as curves on a graph.

- These curves, those are like fingerprints.

This first peak is the device going off.

As the bubble expands, the energy releases again,

and so you get this second rise.

- [William] But if Vela really saw a nuclear blast,

where was the other fingerprint?

The radioactivity?

- They decided to put it in a part of the world

that's mostly water.

They then pick a weather condition like a typhoon.

A really serious typhoon could wash

all the radioactive debris right back into the ocean.

The best solution to pollution is dilution.

- [William] Incredibly, weather records confirm

a typhoon was in the area just before the flash.

But who would take such elaborate precautions

to conceal a nuclear test?

- People don't develop nuclear weapons

just because it's Thursday.

There has to be some reason.

Every nation that has gone nuclear has gone

in response to a very clear and present threat.

- [William] Did some nation

have a reason to feel threatened in 1979?

Reed believes the answer is obvious.

- Israel has very clear and present dangers on its borders.

The Israelis have technology, they know weapons,

but they didn't have uranium.

- [William] Israel could only make the bomb

if it had a supplier, but who else was threatened enough

to upend the test-banned apple cart?

- At the same time, the Soviets

were pouring coops into Africa.

South Africans mine uranium as a byproduct to gold.

They've got so much of it,

they don't know what to do with it.

- [William] With Soviet forces in nearby Angola,

did South Africa have reason to partner with Israel

and build a nuclear bomb? (explosion)

Does this explain why a flash

occurred in the remote regions of the Indian Ocean?

- It is quite clear to me

that this was a test by the Israelis

with logistical support by the South Africans.

- Why is it that whenever someone sees something weird,

they always assume the worst?

I mean, honestly, is the world so paranoid?

Are we really looking at a massive Cold War coverup?

Was the Vela Incident nothing more

than a crazy conspiracy theory, or is there another way

to solve this mystery?

Nuclear testing is a plausible theory,

but not everyone agrees.

- Vela never recorded a secret nuclear test.

- [William] Giant flash of light over the Indian Ocean

puts the world on nuclear alert.

Was it a freak of nature, or something more sinister?

Professor Richard Muller is a physicist.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter appointed him

to investigate the Vela Incident.

- It was an important international issue

with diplomatic consequences, and they needed

good scientific review of the data.

- [William] Muller has analyzed the same information

as the nuclear experts, but he's come

to an entirely different conclusion.

When we began our study, we were all convinced

this really looks like it was a nuclear explosion.

Next step though is to check ourselves.

We're all scientists, we're all scientists who have

discovered things, we know the process of discovery

consists of coming up with an idea with a hypothesis,

and then really checking and double-checking yourself

in every possible way, so we had a long list of questions

that we wanted to have investigated.

Next step was to have these teams look at these questions,

get back answers to us, but after that first day,

I was pretty convinced this wasn't a nuclear bomb.

With one week of the scientific review of the data,

there was something new and different.

- [William] They discovered that Vela had connected its data

with two light sensors called bhangmeters.

- Bhangmeter was a relatively simple device

designed to detect flashes of light.

It's spelled B-H-A-N-G.

It's actually named after a drug

using an Indian term,

a drug that if you take it gives you hallucinations,

has you see flashes of light,

so someone with a sense of humor named these bhangmeters.

- [William] But remarkably, the double flash recorded

by each of the two bhangmeters was different.

- The two pulses from the two bhangmeters

didn't match each other.

That was a real mystery, but it indicated

that this thing just didn't look right. (explosion)

- [William] But if there was no blast, what could've caused

a signal that almost caused a nuclear crisis?

The experts are mystified until

Muller has a flash of insight.

What if it wasn't anything on Earth at all?

- The Vela satellite is at a medium Earth orbit.

It's far away in space.

- [William] 70,000 miles above the planet,

Vela wasn't protected by Earth's atmosphere.

It was bombarbed by tiny bits of rock

and metal called micrometeorites.

- These micrometeorites don't reach the ground

because the atmosphere slows them down

and absorbs their energy.

A satellite such as the Vela satellite

is frequently hit by micrometeorites.

- [William] But even if micrometeorites smacked into Vela,

how could specks of space dust replicate

a massive double-hump shock wave of a nuclear explosion?

- If a micrometeorite hits the surface of the satellite,

it knocks off dust.

Dust reflects sunlight differently into the two bhangmeters.

This could be the signal.

- [William] Is it possible the whole world

was freaked out by a fleck of space dust

knocked loose by a microscopic space pebble?

After running more tests,

Muller and his team finally reached a conclusion.

- What we thought was a bright flash thousands of miles away

was actually just a dim flash that's only a few inches away.

They were never recording a secret nuclear test.

It was micrometeorites.

That's almost certainly what we saw

back on September 22, 1979.

- [William] Could this whole mystery be solved

by something as simple as space dust?

After all, no one actually ever saw the flash.

Muller's theory became the official explanation

of the U.S. government.

But not everyone is convinced.

- Clearly to me from a political point of view, you had

every reason in the world to try to not talk about this,

form a commitee and kick it downstream.

- [William] Incredibly in 2010,

declassified South African documents revealed

nuclear discussions with Israel

in the years leading up to the Vela incident.

Could the space dust explanation just be a cover up?

- The mystery was basically solved back in 1979.

The people who understood the arguments

understood them and realized we were right.

There's no issue here, but there are people

who refuse to give up.

There are people who argue

we never landed on the moon,

it was all video taped in the New Mexico desert.

There are people who believe that

the Kennedy assassination had gunmen

behind the grassy knoll.

There are conspiracy theorists

who keep these things alive despite the fact that

they were pretty much settled by people

who understood the arguments at the time.

- [William] In the end, we're left with a mystery.

Was the Vela incident proof of a secret nuclear weapons test

or was it merely some space dust that barely

took the world to the brink of disaster? (explosion)

Weird or what?

(fire crackling)

So there we have it.

The stories of mysterious freaks of nature

from all over the world.

On the East coast of Canada, an earth-shattering boom

stuns a community and leaves scientists

scratching their heads.

On Lake Michigan, a mysterious fog

terrorizes a sailor

and alters the very fabric of time.

And over the Indian Ocean, a blinding double flash of light

creates a nuclear crisis. (explosion)

Are these stories evidence of mysterious forces

at work within the world?

Do we dismiss those who claim they are true?

You decide.

Join me again next time for more stories

that will undoubtedly be weird or what.

(intense symphonic music)