Original subtitles

- [Rudy] The following program contains footage

of military operations.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Tonight, on The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries.

Film of a top secret base.

What was it hiding and should we be worried?

- The vision for Camp Century was enormous.

- [Rudy] Video of a decimated plane.

Were its passengers sacrificed in a mission to target Saddam?

- The government deliberately landed them

in a war zone to get the secret team on the ground.

- [Rudy] Who were the mystery pilots

who terrified the Nazis in World War II?

- You wouldn't know where they were

or what they were targeting until you heard the explosion.

- [Rudy] And if this photo doesn't show

the world's strangest secret weapon,

somebody tell us what is.

- Historians are really struggling to figure out

how and why the Nazis would've even tried

to build this thing in the first place.

[dramatic music] [artillery booming]

- [Rudy] In the modern history of war, there are films.

- Shazam.

- [Rudy] Photos,

recordings,

and documents that raise questions.

- So everything about this story is one big mystery.

- This particular footage has caused a lot of controversy.

- [Rudy] What's really happening?

- [Expert] There's so little information.

- Nothing like this has been attempted before.

- [Rudy] That's where we come in.

Our mission:

Investigate the battlefield's strangest images,

sounds, and more.

- [Expert] This photo blows my mind.

- [Amy] You can imagine how terrifying it would be.

- [Rudy] We'll analyze each with military experts

and try to come up with answers.

- I'm Ronnie Adkins, former U.S. Army intelligence analyst.

- I'm Rudy Reyes, recon Marine war veteran.

The proof starts now.

[dramatic music]

Hello everyone, I'm Rudy.

He's Ronnie.

And we are locked and loaded

to take on some of the wildest stories

ever to come out of the world of warfare.

- Let's get to it. Picture this.

In 1995 in a remote area of Greenland,

a Danish team comes across a huge abandoned ice base.

- You had me at ice base.

The mystery.

What was the base used for?

And today, is it a ticking time bomb?

[tense music]

It's 1960.

This is footage of a U.S. military facility being built

in Greenland into a glacier.

The U.S. had made a deal with Denmark,

which administers Greenland.

The facility's 150 miles inland

and just 800 miles from the North Pole.

It's called Camp Century

and built as a nuclear-powered research center,

supposedly to study the Earth's climate.

The trenches average 26 feet in height and width

and are topped with a steel arch,

using the cut and cover technique.

- The vision for Camp Century was enormous.

53,000 square miles planned for this base.

11,000 troops planned to be stationed and working there.

2,500 miles of tunnel.

- [Rudy] For an ice base, there are plenty of amenities.

The Army Corps of Engineers chiseled out a chapel,

a library, and even a movie theater.

- I think the best way to probably describe it

is building a complete city in ice.

- [Rudy] But within six years of the initial groundbreaking,

the massive camp is abandoned.

The soldiers are gone,

but plenty of diesel fuel and construction materials

of wood and iron are left behind.

So when the Danish team arrived in 1995,

they could see that something went seriously wrong here.

As you can see from this government footage,

the American soldiers who built the base worked

in extreme cold.

Is that why the base was abandoned?

Or did it have to do with something the base was hiding?

If you're not properly protected,

your core temperature can go down.

You start to become delirious.

You actually feel like you're getting hot.

You can rip off your clothes and now you've got hypothermia.

Once you've got hypothermia, death follows.

- That's right, man. It's also hell on the gear.

When temps hit 20 below, engine oil freezes

and your whole logistics train can be derailed.

- So what the hell happened at Camp Century?

[tense music]

First things first, Camp Century was just a cover, a lie,

to conceal something called Project Iceworm.

- The purpose of Iceworm was

to build a strategic nuclear missile facility and site

that could launch over the Arctic Circle

and strike targets in mainland Russia.

- [Rudy] Those miles of deep tunnels

were really designed to shuttle

and protect 600 Iceman nuclear missiles,

modified versions of the Minuteman ICBM.

Designed as a two-stage rocket with a range of 3,300 miles,

Iceman had the ability to hit most targets

in the Soviet Union.

- This seemed like a perfect plan for us

where we could have this hidden in plain sight

and only using the medium-range missiles,

as compared to the long-range.

- [Rudy] Okay, so that answers the question

of what the base was really for.

How about what happened to it?

The first thing we found out

was that all was going according to plan

until the middle of 1962,

when a frightening discovery was made.

The ceiling of this chamber,

housing the research facility's nuclear reactor,

had lowered by five full feet.

Journalist MJ Banias explains

that repairs were ordered immediately.

- All of a sudden, they're in serious jeopardy.

You have a nuclear reactor.

You could have meltdowns.

You could have a catastrophic event occur

if this reactor suddenly shuts down or breaks down.

- [Rudy] Why did the ceiling collapse?

Turns out it was due to a big mistake.

The Defense Department miscalculated

how fast the glaciers were moving.

It was only when scientists took ice core samples,

lo and behold, they realized within two years,

all the tunnels would be destroyed by the ice's movement,

nuclear missiles and all.

The U.S. carted off its nuclear reactor

and the missiles, of course,

but it left behind the nuclear waste

produced by the reactor.

The thinking was the ice would keep the material safe.

- There's some some ego there that kinda says,

well, nobody's gonna find this stuff this far underground.

It's gonna be buried in ice.

It's not going to hurt anyone.

- [Rudy] Unfortunately, global warming

messed up their plans.

- What no one was predicting in the 1960s

was that the temperature of the planet is increasing

and Greenland itself is becoming much more green.

- [Rudy] That leaves us with a two-sided problem.

- First part is the scientific

and technology part of the problem

in terms of how to clean this stuff up effectively

before it becomes a larger issue in 2090.

- [Rudy] Climate predictions

from the American Geophysical Union

suggest that by 2090, there will be enough ice melt

to unleash the toxic chemicals buried within.

- The second part of the problem is kind of a diplomatic problem

because this is a mess that the United States left

in a ally's backyard, essentially.

- For now, both the nuclear mess and the diplomatic mess remain.

Unbelievable!

We have a word for that, buddy.

SNAFU.

Situation normal, all fouled up.

- SNAFU 2090.

Mark your calendar.

- The next story is about one

of the biggest military controversies in recent years.

It happened during the opening shots of the first Gulf War.

- The big question.

Did the British government sacrifice a plane full of people

to smuggle special operators into Kuwait?

It's 1991.

A Boeing 747 has been reduced to rubble

on the ground at Kuwait International Airport.

- The body of the plane is definitely destroyed,

twisted metal,

parts thrown all over the airfield.

- [Ronnie] This was no crash and it's not just any plane.

- Everything about this story is one big mystery.

- [Ronnie] Let's rewind.

[tape rewinding]

On August 1st, 1990,

the plane, British Airways Flight 149,

takes off from London.

Its first stop is Kuwait City.

Deborah Saloom and her husband George

are among the 367 passengers on board.

- We were in first class

and it's quite separated on the British Airways flights

from the regular passengers.

We got our seats and everything was really nice.

- [Ronnie] But when Flight 149 lands in Kuwait,

all hell breaks loose.

While it's refueling,

the cabin door opens to let in an unexpected visitor

who reportedly speaks with a British accent.

- He was not in uniform.

He had on very nondescript clothes,

like a khaki colored light blazer, khaki pants.

No insignias, no anything.

- [Ronnie] Suddenly, a group of nine men

who'd been passengers

and have a military look stand up to meet the guy.

- They were young men.

They were fit and muscular.

They had crew cuts.

The officer said, "You're late, you're really late."

And while all the passengers waited,

this group of young men went to the front

and got off the plane.

- [Ronnie] While the passengers don't know it yet,

Iraqi strongman, Saddam Hussein,

and his forces have begun their invasion of Kuwait.

As Flight 149 sits on the tarmac,

Iraqi forces seize the airport.

The passengers and crew

are taken hostage by Saddam's troops.

- They became human shields of Saddam Hussein.

- [Ronnie] Saddam moves the hostages to strategic locations,

making them human shields.

- He somehow thought that if he put allied prisoners

in these locations, the allies wouldn't bomb there.

- [Ronnie] The prisoners were then transferred

to detention centers in cities like Basra and Baghdad.

There they were subjected to starvation,

mock executions, and more.

Luckily, the Salooms survived.

Nine months later,

after the allies have driven Saddam out of Kuwait,

their family is reunited back in America.

- We just made it out because of the grace of God.

It was not our time to leave this earth,

and we were very blessed

that we were able to get back to our family.

- [Ronnie] And while the other passengers made it home too,

the plane, as we've seen, was destroyed.

A detail some believe is no coincidence.

- With a spectacular victory

and the safe return of the hostages,

it looks like case closed.

But not exactly.

- As the dust settles, people start wondering,

who were those guys that got off the plane

when it first landed?

And how'd the plane end up like this?

It doesn't look like this thing went up

in an explosion to me.

It looks a whole lot like fire and the reason is,

we can see almost an entire fuselage.

The parts to this plane look contained,

rather than spread out.

We don't see any evidence of a blast crater.

- For our answers, we'll go to our experts.

[tense music]

- [Ronnie] Author Stephen Davis claims the wreckage

is a clue that Flight 149 was a pawn in a secret operation.

In Davis's opinion,

it's suspicious the British government

didn't warn the aircraft that the Iraqis were invading,

since other countries did contact their planes.

- What we now know is that

approximately three hours flying time from Kuwait City,

Iraqi troops crossed the border

and began the invasion of Kuwait.

I have a defense intelligence agency flash message

distributed to all agencies, including NATO.

So all the allies got it straightaway.

- [Ronnie] The DIA flash was sent hours earlier.

- The Kuwaiti air traffic control

were turning away other aircraft,

so it could have been alerted at any time.

But it wasn't.

The government has lied about this constantly

and the government deliberately landed them in a war zone

to get the secret team on the ground.

- [Ronnie] A secret team? Yes.

That's what Davis believes those nine mystery men were.

- They were part of a group which is known

in the British special forces community

and intelligence services as the Increment.

- [Ronnie] The Increment, aka the Inc,

have a literal license to kill.

They're rumored to have been involved

with many top-secret operations

on behalf of the British government,

including secretly monitoring Gaddafi's inner circle

ahead of the 2011 Libyan uprising,

working undercover in Northern Ireland

during the height of the Troubles,

and carrying out high-value assassinations

during the Bosnian War.

Former Army Ranger sniper Nick Irving agrees

with the Trojan Horse theory.

He believes the original plan was

to get the Increment team in before the invasion started.

But once Saddam moved early,

the British decided to proceed regardless.

- Having been in this special operations community,

flying in on a commercial jet, having special privileges,

deboarding the aircraft,

all the key traits of what a clandestine operation

would look like.

And I think they were there to gather intel,

maybe to scout out enemy locations

to be bombed or targeted.

Key individuals, high-ranking individuals

within Saddam Hussein's army, government.

- [Ronnie] Ex-CIA officer, Joseph Assad, isn't so sure.

He's worked extensively in the Middle East.

And Assad thinks Flight 149 landed in Kuwait due

to old-fashioned bureaucratic bungling.

- There were no obligations

for the British Front Home Office

or the embassy to warn them of a pending invasion,

particularly when nobody knew what was happening.

It was utter chaos.

- [Ronnie] As for those nine mystery men,

Assad says when it comes to eyewitness testimony,

the facts can get muddled over time.

- It's not plausible.

People under trauma, they see things,

they conclude things.

How did you know he is British or otherwise?

And particularly if that was part of a covert mission,

you probably don't want to reveal your own identity.

- [Ronnie] Wait up.

What about the destruction of the airplane?

- Saddam set Kuwait ablaze.

So it was not uncommon at the time

for the Iraqis to destroy property.

We're gonna destroy this.

We're not gonna allow them to leave.

We're not gonna allow this aircraft to leave.

- [Ronnie] But advocates of the Trojan Horse theory

believe the plane was actually targeted by the allies

trying to cover up evidence of the secret operation.

That lack of a blast crater, for instance.

To me, it suggests a fire from a source

other than a bomb planted inside.

And Davis believes that source

was an explosive dropped from above.

- The plane was destroyed by the U.S. Air Force

on a request from the British government.

A pilot zipped in, bombed it, and destroyed it.

Of course, they did not want the plane examined closely.

[tense music]

- [Ronnie] Due to that lack of physical evidence,

we may never know the whole story.

And to this day,

many passengers from Flight 149 say

they're still suffering.

And not only because of what Saddam did.

- We had not received any apologies

from the British government.

Deborah and myself and my son

and the other passengers were expendable.

And we were basically on a Trojan Horse.

[tense music]

- Since the incident, some people have come forward

to say that they were involved in the op,

but the British government

has always denied it ever happened.

- But just last year,

the Brits admitted they did make a mistake.

They now say they knew about the invasion,

but failed to tell British Airways.

Warning, the imagery may be disturbing.

- It shows the death of an American hero

in the U.S. Navy SEALAB program.

The big mystery: was it an accident or murder?

February 17, 1969.

We're in the Pacific Ocean off the coast

of San Clemente Island, California.

It's zero dark 30, and US Navy aquanauts,

Bob Barth and Berry Cannon,

are tasked with a critical mission.

Fix a helium gas leak on SEALAB III,

an incredible research facility 600 feet underwater.

- Everybody was a little agitated

and there'd been a lot of delays so far already.

A couple of the aquanauts volunteered

to resolve the issue underwater.

- [Rudy] Like much of SEALAB's work,

the tragic incident that follows is captured on film.

You can see that, suddenly, Cannon's mouthpiece,

also called a regulator, comes loose

and he's left convulsing on the ocean floor.

Barth tries desperately to save Cannon's life,

but he's too late.

Our country loses a great aquanaut

when Berry Cannon is pronounced dead.

[melancholy music]

- Shortly after Cannon's death,

the whole SEALAB program was shut down.

- [Rudy] Hang on now. Really?

Cannon's death is a devastating loss,

but the reality of experimental military programs

is that fatal accidents do happen.

Just two years earlier,

three NASA astronauts died during a pre-launch test

for the Apollo 1 mission.

Nobody suggested shutting down the space program.

Rumors swirl that maybe SEALAB was scrapped

because Cannon's death wasn't an accident.

- Rudy, you've got some experience diving, right?

Does this death seem suspicious to you?

- I've been diving over 20 years.

And at these depths,

there's many things that can go wrong.

First and foremost is decompression sickness.

We call it the bends.

As you see here,

as the diver ascends the water column, the gas expands.

If you don't do a safety stop or you ascend too fast,

it comes out of your joints and into your nervous system,

bends you over in pain.

Now, how do you take care of that?

First, you do some personal maintenance on your regulator.

The regulator brings compressed air through the tube

in your mouth so that you can breathe.

For that reason,

something about this story seems a bit odd to me.

[tense music]

Was Cannon's regulator not properly checked?

Retired U.S. Navy submariner and author, Ken Sewell,

admits it's possible this

or other human errors could have been the blame.

- There are always gonna be problems

whenever you're developing a new system.

Some of the conditions from breathing these compressed gases

could cause some cognitive impairment.

And so it could have been the fact

that these men made mistakes.

This was really dangerous.

- [Rudy] But another theory soon emerged

after an investigation into Cannon's death.

- What they found was that his system was missing a chemical

that pulled the carbon monoxide out of his air supply.

And it wasn't that it was short or that it was damaged,

it just wasn't there at all.

So that led some to believe

that it could have been sabotage.

Somebody tried to kill these divers

when they were below water.

- [Rudy] U.S. Army vet and military journalist,

Chris Capelluto, says Cannon's death

was part of a pattern of suspicious events.

- There was no shortage of sketchy problems happening.

The transport capsule that brings the divers all the way

down to the bottom of the ocean was tampered with,

mysteriously flooded.

And that caused a two-month delay.

There was accusations that the oxygen valves

in the decompression chamber

had been tampered with multiple times.

All the evidence suggested

that there was a saboteur working behind the scenes.

- [Rudy] Not much info on the investigation's been released.

But what has is chilling.

- A potentially unstable suspect was identified

by the Navy mental health officials.

- [Rudy] But oddly, that suspect

was never publicly named or charged.

Maybe the Navy didn't think he was guilty,

despite the fact that life in SEALAB

could be triggering for a troubled person.

- They're in this cramped environment.

It's not crazy to think

that it may have altered their mindset.

I don't know that it would alter somebody

to the point of sabotaging one of their crewmates,

but it's entirely possible.

- [Rudy] Another theory is that the Navy didn't wanna

draw attention to SEALAB

because of the types of experiments they were doing.

- It was a military program from the very beginning.

SEALAB was strictly to develop the technology

to tap the Soviet cables.

The Soviet Union sent most

of their military messages via cable.

It was heavy, it was armor plated,

it was buried in the sand,

and it was well within their territorial waters.

The cables were at depths where the technology derived

from the SEALAB project could be utilized.

- [Rudy] In other words,

SEALAB may have been a deep-sea proving ground

for testing tools to sabotage Russian communications.

So could this unnamed suspect have been a spy?

Consider this:

at the exact time of the SEALAB disaster,

the KGB had infiltrated the Navy thanks to this man,

Chief Warrant Officer John Walker,

a traitor who fed the Soviets intelligence

for a whopping 18 years.

- Ironically, at this time,

the Soviet Union was also listening to us.

So we were listening to each other.

- [Rudy] Did the Soviets penetrate SEALAB?

There's no hard evidence.

But there's one final theory about how SEALAB ended.

It didn't.

- It never really did go away.

It kinda went to the next level

into a world of covert operations.

So what better way to just kinda pull the plug?

I think it was a convenient point

to transfer that program from the light of day

into the shadows of a covert operation.

[tense music]

- Okay, so Rudy, where do you come out on this,

accident or murder?

- The circumstances seem suspicious to me,

but there are a million things that can go wrong underwater.

And I doubt there was a spy involved

given the high security in the program.

- Operation Barbarossa was the code name

for Adolf Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.

He assumed it would be another win

for his Blitzkrieg machine, but he was dead wrong.

- One of the ways the Russians fought back

was with a squadron of mystery pilots.

Now at the time, the Nazis were wondering

who were the mystery pilots

and why were they so deadly?

June 28th, 1942.

After its initial invasion of Russia

has bogged down in a war of attrition,

the Nazis are launching a summer offensive

and making some significant advances in the south.

But on this evening, outside the city of Stavropol,

a brand new threat is preparing to strike.

Silent, deadly, and unlike anything the Nazis

have ever faced before.

- It's nighttime, the Germans are resting.

Suddenly they hear this very unique sound,

like branches whistling in the wind.

[wind whooshing]

And before they know it,

their base just lights up in a series of explosions.

[explosions booming]

- [Ronnie] It's an air raid by the Russians,

and it's not just one.

Night after night,

the Germans are attacked from above

by pilots who seem to have incredible aim

and whose planes make this weird sound.

To the Germans, it's a mystery.

Who are these guys?

- You can imagine how terrifying it would be

to be out at night minding your business, doing your job,

and you hear this whistling in the distance.

You can't see it.

You can't protect yourself.

You have no idea if you're safe.

- Many soldiers will tell you

they can identify different aircraft from afar

just by the sounds they make.

- That's right.

You can easily tell the difference

between a Little Bird

[helicopter whirring]

and a Chinook.

[helicopter whirring]

- But in this case,

the Germans couldn't hear much of anything.

It slowed down their reaction speed.

They had no time to duck and cover.

- We asked our experts what's behind all this.

[tense music]

Former naval aviator, Ward Carroll,

says the Germans figured out the identity

of the pilots when they shot a few down.

- The Germans were shocked to realize

that all of the pilots were female.

- [Ronnie] Here's some photos of these mystery pilots.

Dictator Joseph Stalin had formed

this all-female combat air squadron,

officially known as the 588th Regiment,

at the behest of female aviator Marina Raskova.

- 400 women were put through an accelerated flight program.

- [Ronnie] But why were they so deadly?

That tied back to the strange sound their planes made.

Turns out these top-notch women

were given bargain-basement gear,

outdated wooden planes better suited

for crop dusting than bombing raids.

- [Ward] So the Po-2, the Mule,

was a early 20th-century technology biplane.

It would've been more at home in World War I

than World War II.

Canvas, wooden, very basic, very rudimentary.

- [Ronnie] Even so, these women figured out a way

to use these planes

that would provide that element of surprise.

- And once they got close to their bombing area,

they'd idle their engines

and glide down towards their target.

This meant that they were effectively silent.

All anyone could hear

was the sound of the wind going over and under their wings.

So it would've created this really eerie,

almost otherworldly sounding sound.

You wouldn't know where they were

or what they were targeting until you heard the explosion.

[tense music]

- [Ronnie] The Germans would create a name

for these unique attackers,

Die Nachthexen, AKA the Night Witches.

- The type of plane actually plays into the nickname

that these pilots had.

These wooden planes were akin to broomsticks.

And the fact that you couldn't hear the plane coming,

you just heard this whistling sound,

was like a witch flying a broom through the night sky.

- [Ronnie] So, why haven't we heard more

about these deadly pilots?

Sadly, although the Night Witches

were the most highly-decorated unit in the Soviet Air Force,

they were disbanded after the war

and excluded from the big victory day parade in Moscow,

leaving history the same way they arrived,

as a shadowy, secret legend.

[tense music]

By the end of World War II,

the Soviet Night Witches had flown 30,000 combat missions.

That's a huge number.

- You know, over here in the U.S.,

we had an all-female air group called the WASPs,

the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

They tested planes

and they helped train male fighter pilots.

But unlike their Russian counterparts,

they never saw a day of combat.

It's time for this week's secret weapon piece.

And in this case, the weapon is so secret,

there are hardly any photos of it.

- Yeah, this was over 80 years ago

and we think it might be a tank,

but it doesn't look like anything I've ever seen.

It actually looks a little bit dorky looking.

The question is, what was the Kugelpanzer?

[tense music]

- [Rudy] Manchuria, 1945.

It's the tail end of the Second World War

and the Russian Red Army is on the march

for the largest campaign of the Soviet-Japanese War.

In just over one week, the Red Army is victorious.

But when the smoke clears,

Russian soldiers are left standing perplexed

over a small, strange alien-like piece of machinery

that's been left behind,

wondering what the heck is this?

- Compared to a lot of the weapons

that we saw being developed during the Second World War,

this is definitely one of the stranger ones.

- [Rudy] We can see it's a sphere made of metal,

just under five feet tall and weighing over 4,000 pounds.

The only clue to this oddity's origin

is the Iron Cross painted on its sides.

That means it's Nazi tech.

While it may not have a known purpose, it does have a name.

- So what we have here

in this picture is a mysterious Second World War vehicle

known as the Kugelpanzer.

- [Rudy] The Nazis used nearly 100 different types

of combat vehicles.

And while some of them,

like the Panzer V Panther or the Panzer VI Tiger,

became infamous legends,

the Kugelpanzer barely left the development stage

and remained a strange curiosity.

- They never made it to the assembly line.

So it was just one thing and one thing only.

So, even if it was useful in actual battlefield situation,

with only one thing,

there's only so much you can accomplish.

- [Rudy] With barely any historical records to go on,

we have to look deeper

to determine more about this mystery machine.

What was the Kugelpanzer's actual purpose

and how did it end up in Japan?

- The Kugelpanzer actually joins a long list

of other bizarre combat contraptions

that never quite made it to the assembly line.

- Right here's the Big Bob from New Zealand.

This is the Treffas-Wagen from Germany.

And last but not least, from the bad idea factory,

the Praying Mantis from the UK.

- Yeah, I don't know what's weirder,

the Kugelpanzer itself

or the fact that other people had this same strange idea.

Let's check in with our experts

and see what they have to say about this odd bit of tech.

[intense music]

- Obviously, it's much smaller

than a full-sized World War II tank.

It can get into a lot of places

that a full-size battle tank's not gonna get into.

- A few characteristics here is the exterior

was made up of a thick kind of metal construction,

designed to keep out bullets and other small arms fire.

On the back side of the ball

was an entryway for the operator to be able to crawl in

and access the driving mechanism inside.

- If it only has an engine the size of a motorcycle engine,

it's not gonna be the fastest thing on the battlefield.

It's gonna be limited in its speed.

It's probably also gonna be limited

in terms of how far you can go

on a single tank of gas before it needs to refuel.

- [Rudy] World War II historian, Sayuri Shimizu,

adds another observation.

- This can only be used for reconnaissance

or some kind of a moving things over for long distance.

That kind of transport or reconnaissance purpose.

- [Rudy] Maybe the biggest mystery is

how this one-of-a-kind Nazi weapon ended up

in Japan to begin with.

- Some experts believed that it was given by the Germans

to Japan as a sort of a gift of good will.

And then nobody was really expecting

to really do any actual military purpose.

- [Rudy] But by that point in the war,

the Japanese were so desperate,

they were willing to send this oddity

to the front lines to fight the Soviets.

- This looks kind of very science fictiony.

And maybe in the movies, like "Star Wars,"

it would play a valuable role in combat.

But I think in the battlefield of Europe

in the Second World War,

this is probably not your best choice of vehicle.

- So some people might theorize

that this was designed to work as a reconnaissance platform

or for use by scouts,

but all of the other drawbacks of it

make that less likely

just based on the problems with the scale,

the problems with the visibility.

- [Rudy] The idea for a rolling ball tank

first presented itself

as a way to traverse no man's land in the First World War,

where the Kugelpanzer could have possibly had some success

as a one-man combat vehicle.

But, as our experts have pointed out,

this design would've been completely ineffective

against the more advanced weapons

and divergent landscapes of World War II.

- Once you start trying

to get this object through heavily forested areas

or through cities

or through sort of real life battlefields,

I think the theory of how successful this machine would be

sort of quickly falls apart.

- [Rudy] And while we all can make our best guesses

about the Kugelpanzer,

it remains to be seen if we will ever figure out the truth

behind this strange, little vehicle.

- We need to understand there's very few photos

of this object, even today.

We're ultimately just left to speculate.

[tense music]

- I still think it's dorky looking,

but our best guess of what it was for

is the Kugelpanzer's some sort of recon vehicle

presented to the Japanese in the final days of the war.

- But this we do know.

You can see the artifact in all of its ridiculous glory

at the Kubinka Tank Museum in Moscow, Russia.

- The fog of war is a real thing.

I've been lit up a couple of times by friendly forces.

Now, that's people that you know are your friends,

and then you know who the enemies are as well.

But imagine fighting someone or some force

that's completely anonymous.

- And that's exactly what happened a few years back.

A bunch of randos on the battlefield,

nicknamed little green men.

And the mystery, who were they?

[suspenseful music]

[citizens cheering]

Eight years prior to Russia's infamous invasion of Ukraine,

a conflict erupted between loyal Ukrainians

and Russian stalwarts,

who intended to annex

the strategically important peninsula of Crimea.

[camera shutter clicking]

You can see in this video some mysterious armed men.

They're wearing face masks and plain green uniforms

with no identifying insignia.

Historian Martin KA Morgan

says they immediately make their presence felt.

- The fact that their clad from head to toe

in this contemporary green camouflage

leads to them being called the green men,

the way that Americans referred to aliens back in the day.

- Who were these guys?

Were they Russian intelligence?

Were they Russian special forces?

Were they Russian military?

Were they Ukrainian separatists?

Were they contractors brought in?

Were they warlords from another country?

- [Ronnie] These mysterious little green men

seized the local airports and military bases.

President Vladimir Putin denies that they're Russian troops.

Instead, he claims that they're local self-defense forces.

- In other words, these are people

living within the borders of Ukraine,

who because of their fondness

and their admiration for Russia and the Russian people,

wish to secede

and wish to become a part of the Russian Federation.

- [Ronnie] Military historian Anand Toprani

says under that pretext,

Russia seizes Crimea from Ukraine weeks later.

- People are sort of thinking to themselves,

"Well, what if they actually are pro-Russian groups?"

[citizens chanting]

- [Anand] "What if actually people in Crimea

want to stay part of Russia?

Who are we to say

that they shouldn't remain part of Russia?"

[citizens chanting]

And by the time that whole process

had worked its way out,

the Russians have already taken over the whole thing

and it's au fait accompli.

- We know that historically,

the Crimea has been of strategic importance to Russia.

The Port of Sevastopol

is one of the few deep-water ports

available to Russia in the area.

So the Crimea is a key hold for maritime routes

from the Black Sea,

to the Mediterranean Sea,

and all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean.

- We also know that the little green men

caught the Pentagon by surprise,

thanks to their cyber tactics,

hacking, spoofing, and phishing,

to disable Ukrainian defenses and pinpoint targets.

But who were they exactly?

[tense music]

- [Ronnie] Morgan believes the key

to identifying the little green men

is their gear.

- You can clearly see they're armed

with the AK-74M assault rifle.

- [Ronnie] The AK-74

is a gas-operated, selective fire weapon.

Many militaries use it, including, guess who?

The Russians.

And that's not all.

- They're carrying the PKM machine gun.

They're carrying the GP-25 40-millimeter grenade launcher.

They're carrying the SVD-63 sniper rifle.

- [Ronnie] This weapon system is extremely effective,

all the way out to 800 meters.

It's seen action everywhere from Vietnam to Nicaragua.

- They're carrying all of the small arms

that arm the armed forces of the Russian Federation.

- [Ronnie] Putin claimed that anyone

could buy those weapons.

And while that didn't pass the smell test,

it did raise an interesting possibility,

that these men were not just any regular Russian troops,

but members of a shadowy organization.

- There's also the possibility

that these were Wagner Group mercenaries

and that the Russian Federation was

employing mercenaries through a private security firm.

- [Ronnie] The Wagner Group was once called

Putin's shadow army,

regularly doing Putin's dirty work,

while providing the Kremlin with plausible deniability.

Since the Wagner Group's first appearance in 2014,

two men have claimed founding it.

The late Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin,

and Dmitry Utkin, a retired Russian special forces officer.

They've gone on to operating conflicts all over the world,

and they were blamed for taking part in a vicious massacre

that killed over 200 people

in the West African nation of Mali.

- This firm, it works at the behest

of whatever state is sort of paying its bills.

But you have the plausible deniability

because these are private, sort of contractors,

they don't have sort of the rights

or obligations of ordinary soldiers.

- [Ronnie] Although once considered

Putin's secret weapon, in June of 2023,

Yevgeniy Prigozhin led the Wagner Group

in an attempted rebellion against Putin

and Russia's Ministry of Defense

due to his increased frustration

with Russia's top military brass.

However, the attempted coup failed,

and Prigozhin would die in a plane crash

just two months later,

leaving the current status of the Wagner Group unclear.

While some believe members of the group

have rejoined the war within different Russian units,

there's never been any confirmation

that they were the little green man of Crimea.

- The whole idea was that no one really knew who to blame.

And as long as there was a mystery about their identity,

they could push forward with their goals bit by bit

and destabilize the entire system.

- [Ronnie] One other possibility,

the little green men were Russian special forces,

or Spetsnaz.

But they typically wear camouflage

or the uniforms of airborne troops, including berets,

and they typically handle smaller commando operations,

like anti-terrorism.

The mystery raged until the most unlikely person solved it,

Putin.

After Crimea was conquered,

Putin, without a reason to lie anymore,

admitted the little green men were plain old Russian soldiers.

There's even a monument to them in Russia now.

The soldier in this statue is not wearing a mask.

Strangely though, he is saving a cat.

You can't make this stuff up.

[tense music]

- In fact, in February of 2018,

American Special Operations Forces

engaged the Wagner Group in Syria,

and they got spanked.

- They absolutely did.

And when it was all over,

its estimated 100 of them were dead,

and none of us.

- And that's our show for tonight.

I'm Rudy Reyes.

- And I'm Ronnie Adkins.

Until next time, keep your powder dry.

- And your head on a swivel, good night.

[dramatic music]