Original subtitles

[Narrator] Was this ancient glass scarab in Tutankhamun's tomb

created by forces from beyond our world.

So really, the question becomes, what is it?

[Rebecca] Where did it come from?

It's a real mystery.

[Narrator] Is this 4,000 year old clay tablet

the original instruction manual for Noah's ark?

Sell your possessions, build a boat, fill it with animals.

[Narrator] And how can this bizarre red moon rock contain signs of life?

As you start to look closer, things just get even more weird.

[Narrator] These are the most remarkable and mysterious objects on Earth.

Hidden away in museums, laboratories and storage units.

Now, new research and technology can get under their skin like never before.

We can rebuild them, pull them apart...

and zoom in... to reveal the unbelievable,

the ancient and the truly bizarre.

These are the world's Strangest Things.

In the grand Egyptian museum in Giza

is one of the greatest treasures of the pharaohs.

The pectoral of Tutankhamun.

This stunning piece of jewelry was worn on the front of the king's garments

and it was meant to keep the boy King's body whole

on its journey to the afterlife.

This item is extraordinarily beautiful.

[Narrator] Now, using the latest technology

we can finally solve an ancient mystery.

Nearly six inches tall.

The 3,000 year old royal ornament

is made of silver and gold

and covered in expertly crafted decorations.

[Rebecca] This pectoral was really laden with meaning.

There are lots of hieroglyphs in there and it's inlaid with precious jewels.

[Narrator] At its heart lies an object, both eye catching and unexplained.

[Rebecca] In the very center, there's a scarab beetle

with the wings of a falcon.

And this represents the God, Ra. The sun God.

[Narrator] This scarab is carved from a single piece of stunning glass.

[Rebecca] It's yellowy green.

It's incredibly clear, translucent.

But really is a perfect piece of glass.

[Narrator] Too perfect.

Across the entire planet,

no other glass artifact this ancient is so flawless.

Now,

new research can reveal the secrets of Tutankhamun's scarab.

Where did it come from?

How was it formed?

What makes this scarab so unique?

The ancient civilization of Egypt.

Buried in the sand and rock here, are thousands of years of history,

culture and massive ancient monuments.

And 100 years ago, English archaeologist Howard Carter,

hits the mother lode.

Carter famously said when he was peering into the tomb,

he had seen wonderful things.

[Narrator] Carter has unearthed the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun,

the boy king of Egypt's eighteenth dynasty.

He died over 3,000 years ago.

His tomb contains unimaginable treasures.

[Rebecca] There were about 5,000 items

in the tomb, so it really was a fantastic moment in history.

[Narrator] Statues, gold, jewelry, chariots, model animals

and, of course, the famous sarcophagus and mask of Tutankhamun himself.

It is one of the most important discoveries in the history of archaeology.

Hidden amongst these treasures,

Carter finds the most extraordinary object.

Tutankhamun's pectoral.

At its heart, sits the scarab beetle made of a glass

unlike anything else from ancient Egypt.

[Rebecca] The scarab was extremely symbolic and important

for the ancient Egyptians,

it represented amongst other things, transformation,

um, and part of this reason is because the scarab beetle

stood for something that helps the sun

to go across the sky every day and was therefore also

associated with regeneration and rebirth.

[Narrator] Tutankhamun clearly has access to unimaginable wealth.

So, if the scarab beetle is so important, why on Earth make it from glass?

Glass is a pretty easy material to make.

All you need is sand and a source of heat.

You melt sand at very high temperatures and then you can add other materials,

like metallic oxides, which give the glass color.

[Narrator] But glass is rare in ancient Egypt

and the Egyptians are fascinated by it.

Even the blue stripes on Tutankhamun's iconic death mask

are made of glass.

Glass had almost magical qualities to it.

[Narrator] But all Egyptian glass is flawed.

[Anna] Ancient Egyptian glass doesn't look like modern glass does today.

It's not that beautifully transparent material.

It's got all these bits and inclusions and bubbles in it

and that's because their furnaces weren't able to

get up to hot enough temperatures

in order to properly melt the glass

into a really runny material.

[Narrator] The glass in the scarab lack such imperfections.

It is flawless,

which means the scarab glass can't have been made

by the ancient Egyptians

or any other humans from that time.

[Rebecca] So really, the question becomes, what is it?

Where did it come from?

It's a real mystery.

[Narrator] For years, archaeologists have no explanation

for the origins of the scarab glass.

The first clue is uncovered on an expedition

into the largest desert on the planet,

the Sahara.

In the 1930s, there were a group of treasure hunters.

He went to the Egyptian-Libyan border

to look for a mythical ancient city called Zerzura.

One of the party was a British surveyor, Patrick Clayton,

and as he was whizzing across the desert.

In his vehicle, he heard a crunch.

[Narrator] To his amazement, the desert floor is littered

with chunks of clear green-yellow glance.

He brings them back to the UK, where he takes them to the Natural History Museum.

But they really have no idea what these are.

[Narrator] It's almost 50 years,

before an Italian team of scientists

follows up Clayton's discovery with some hard science.

[Dougal] The Italian team go in to the desert

and collect bits of the Libyan desert glass.

And they also look at the glass in the scarab.

And they analyze it and demonstrate

that they're geo-chemically identical.

The fingerprint is identical.

[Narrator] It is definitive proof, the scarab is made of glass

found in the sands of the Libyan desert.

But that leaves an even bigger mystery.

How does this perfect, flawless glass

end up in the middle of the Sahara in the first place?

Scientists have identified the source

of the strange glass

in Tutankhamun's scarab.

The Sahara Desert.

The bigger mystery, how it got there?

The answer may lie, 7,500 miles away

in the Jornada del Muerto Desert.

There is glass on the sand here that forms a circle 1,000 feet across.

The pattern is so perfect, it looks almost manmade...

because it is.

[distant explosion]

July 16th, 1945.

The Trinity Test

and the first successful atomic explosion happens.

This was the first product of the Manhattan Project

and they needed to find out if it worked.

They set up this bomb to sort of perch on a platform in the desert.

[Narrator] A ball of fire, tears through the sky,

reaching temperatures three times hotter

than the surface of the sun,

a giant mushroom cloud surges

seven miles into the atmosphere.

[Sascha] The world will never be the same again.

It detonated with a force of

around 20,000 tons of T.N.T.

[Narrator] The test produces an unexpected by-product.

When scientists went back to investigate the site,

there were these little blobs of what looked like glass.

They were given the name Trinitite.

[Narrator] Some of it looked very similar to the scarab glass.

But surely they cannot have the same origins.

Clearly, that's not where that glass came from.

There weren't any nuclear bombs in ancient Egypt.

[Narrator] There's no natural force on Earth that can produce

the concentrated power of an atomic blast.

So, where could the immense energy needed to create

the scarab glass have come from?

Could Tutankhamun's tomb hold a clue?

Another object that has stirred some controversy

and encouraged us to all ask questions, um, is a dagger.

It was found inside Tutankhamun's sarcophagus

which in itself is not particularly unusual.

But the dagger is made of iron.

[Narrator] Which is a problem because

ancient Egypt is still in the Bronze Age.

There's no evidence of iron smelting in ancient Egypt

until 800 years after Tutankhamun died.

So there's no way that this dagger blade

could have been made by the ancient Egyptians.

[Narrator] Like the glass in the scarab,

the iron in the dagger is a mystery.

Scientists did X-ray chemical analysis

on the metal blade.

And what they found was quite a lot of nickel inside.

[Narrator] Eleven percent of the blade is nickel.

No naturally occurring iron on the Earth has a nickel content close to that level.

Only one natural source of iron does.

The heart of a meteorite.

Meteorites are hitting the Earth all the time.

Most of them, um, are almost too small to detect.

But every so often, something a lot bigger comes along.

[Narrator] February 13th 2013, Chelyabinsk, Russia.

A meteor the size of a six story building

slams into the atmosphere.

This meteor traveled through the Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 miles per hour.

It actually exploded 15 miles above the Earth's surface.

The energy released was 22 times that of the Trinity bomb.

If it had struck the Earth's surface.

It would have been powerful enough to turn sand into glass.

[Narrator] Could the scarab glass in Tutankhamun's pectoral,

have been produced by a meteor impact in the Sahara Desert?

In 2019, a couple of geologists were looking in detail

at the structure within the desert glass.

And they found that one of the impurities they could measure was Zircon.

[Narrator] They recognized an unusual arrangement of atoms in this mineral.

It's a crystalline signature only seen in Zircon,

that has formed from the decay of a very unstable,

very rare crystal called Readite.

Readite only formed when high temperatures and high pressures

squashed the atoms together into a certain formation.

On Earth you only really get these high temperatures

and high pressures in one place.

The glass from the scarab must have formed

in a catastrophic meteor strike.

We think that it formed 29 million years ago,

when a meteor struck The Great Sand Sea.

[Narrator] That leaves one last mystery.

If it is a meteor strike that creates the scarab glass,

where is the crater?

The glass in the scarab of Tutankhamun's breastplate

formed when a meteorite struck the Earth 29 million years ago.

[explosion]

But this theory has one enormous hole in it.

Or rather, it doesn't.

[Maggie] A meteorite with enough energy to turn sand into glass.

Would have left an impact crater of about 20 miles in diameter.

[Narrator] The problem is, nobody can find the crater.

Unfortunately, you probably couldn't pick a worse place to look.

[Dougal] A desert system is dynamic.

It constantly keeps retracing itself.

You imagine walking up a sand dune and coming back two days later.

The wind will have erased your footprints.

[Narrator] Could that be what happened to the crater?

It's quite possible

that the structure's there beneath

the Saharan Desert Sand Sea.

But we haven't found it yet.

[Narrator] The ancient Egyptians may not have grasped

the astonishing extraterrestrial origins

of the scarab.

But they clearly knew they had something very, very special.

While it's fair to say that the ancient Egyptians probably didn't know

where this glass had come from,

What they did recognize,

was the fact that it was rare, particularly beautiful.

I mean, really flawless.

And therefore really only fit for a king.

[Narrator] This perfect piece of glass created by a meteorite

is literally out of this world.

Over 100,000 of these ancient clay Mesopotamian tablets

have been found across the Middle East.

They're the work of one of the oldest civilizations on Earth.

But in the last decade,

one of them has rocked the world of archaeology.

This tiny ancient tablet.

Made from sun baked clay,

it measures just 4.5 by 2.5 inches.

The surface of this 4,000 year old tablet is covered

in the oldest writing system on Earth,

Cuneiform.

[Mark] It has about 60 lines, so it's quite small,

very compressed kind of writing on it.

[Narrator] When the tablet is translated in 2009,

it turns out to be an astonishing instruction manual.

The tablet features a set of instructions

for building a boat, a large boat

About half the length of a football field

[Narrator] And it explains what this boat is for.

What we have here is...

the appeal of a God to a man

and the instructions of what to do to save his family and his flocks.

[Narrator] It sounds like a familiar biblical story,

but there's one very big catch.

This tablet was written a thousand years before

the Old Testament story of Noah.

How is this possible?

The tablets, wedge shaped Cuneiform writing

tells a great tale.

[Kevin] The story in the Ark tablet,

is a message from the God Enki

to a man called Atra-Hasis

saying, "Sell your possessions build a boat, fill it with animals."

[Narrator] It gives astonishingly detailed building instructions.

The tablet tells you to make what is effectively a reed rope corical

In other words, a boat using reeds from swamp land,

bonding them together with ropes

and then waterproofing them with bitumen.

Modern day Iraq is known for its oil

and, uh, pitch is a by-product of oil.

So, if you were an ancient Mesopotamia, you can grab your pitch,

something resembling modern asphalt.

Um, and put it on your boats

and seal your boat and make it waterproof.

And you can basically traverse the ocean,

which we know the ancient Mesopotamians did with these reed boats.

[Narrator] The fundamental design of these boats

hasn't changed for thousands of years

and they're still in use today.

But according to the tablet,

this is no ordinary boat design.

This boat that's described in the tablet

is effectively to the scale of a football pitch.

[Narrator] One line of text reads,

"Let her floor area be one field."

A field is an ancient measurement of roughly

39,000 square feet,

giving the boat a diameter of 220 feet.

If you dropped it in Yankee Stadium,

it would cover more than half the playing surface.

And the scale of the boat is not the only striking similarity

to the story of Noah and his ark.

The tablet says that the animals should be put in the boat,

[speaking foreign language]

Or, in other words, two by two.

[Mark] The poor story of a flood

and a person with his family

being saved by a God has remained.

And of course, we would immediately recognize

that this is like our Genesis flood story.

[Narrator] It seems unlikely that there have been two identical great floods.

Is it possible that the story of Noah

has just been adopted from a more ancient culture?

A strange ancient tablet written 1000 years before the Bible,

appears to tell the story of Noah's Ark.

So who wrote it?

The markings on the clay are written in the ancient language of Akkadian.

It was the language of Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia covers modern day Iraq parts of southern Turkey,

a little bit of western Iran, uh, as well as eastern Syria.

[Narrator] Mesopotamia, along the edges of the Euphrates River,

is considered by many the origin of human civilization.

[Mark] They developed all kinds of innovations,

everything from the first canals and irrigation networks

to the first laws,

to the first idea of governments, to a whole host of firsts.

[Narrator] One of the greatest of those firsts is the invention of writing.

[Mark] The point when writing's invented is the time when cities were

beginning to arise for the first time.

That meant a lot of goods had to come and feed these people

to bring the kind of things that we need to survive

but also, of course, to thrive.

[Narrator] Early Cuneiform develops as a way

to keep track of goods and maintain records.

[Kevin] If I've given you a certain quantity of grain to store for me,

it is useful to have a way of proving that.

[Narrator] Which leads to one inescapable conclusion.

Effectively, writing is invented by accountants

[Narrator] By around the third millennium B.C.

Cuneiform has evolved into the sophisticated writing

found on the art tablet.

Including this story,

describing a giant boat with animals entering two by two.

Almost 1,000 years before the first Judaic texts about Noah.

Could this ancient Babylonian story

be the origin of the one in the Jewish Bible?

The Babylonian...

civilization was at war on several occasions

with Judaic civilization.

Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem on two occasions

and he enslaved people and carried them back to Babylon.

[Narrator] The Book of Daniel describes

the story of the Jewish peoples in Babylon

in some detail.

They would have encountered the Babylonian traditions,

the stories that heart back

to the ancient Mesopotamian stories such as the flood

and they would have incorporate these stories

into their own text.

[narrator] So, is the story of Noah and the flood,

just a Mesopotamian tall tale?

Or could it be real?

The flood story is surprisingly common

in Cuneiform writings.

While the Ark tablet does not describe the flood.

There at least three other instances on cuneiform tablets

where such floods are described.

[narrator] The Era Do Genesis Tablet

tells an almost 4000 year old Samarian story,

of a king being told by God that mankind will be destroyed by a great flood.

It describes a huge storm and rain that lasts for seven days and seven nights.

[thunder rumbling]

Some recent theories believe all these stories could be explained

by a massive flood in the Black Sea.

The Black Sea is linked to the Mediterranean

through a fairly narrow channel, the Bosporus Channel.

In 1997, a couple of marine geologist

suggests that a great flood could have happened

through the Bosporus Channel about 7000 years ago.

[narrator] The theory is that the flood is caused by the end of the last ice age.

There's a lot of water craft and sea levels have really lowered,

but as you melt that ice, you dramatically rise the sea level.

[narrator] Eventually, sea levels in the Mediterranean rise

high enough to breach the Bosporus channel.

A huge wall of water cascades into the Black Sea.

They suggested that this was actually

200 times the flow rate of Niagara Falls.

This could've cataclysmically flooded,

in a very, very short period of time in the Black Sea.

[narrator] They estimate 39,000 square miles of land

could have been by this flood.

But this theory remains controversial with some scientists.

However, there is another idea that would also explain the story of a huge flood.

And it fits in right where the Ark tablet is found.

Around the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers.

There's lots of flood plains,

and all of the river catchment areas

feed into those flood plains.

So if you actually have extreme weather events,

extreme storms, massive snow melts, they could cause localized flooding.

And if you're in the middle of a flood plain with flat land,

as far as you can see and that gets flooded,

all of a sudden you're in the middle of what appears to be a Sikh.

[narrator] Scientists have actually found flood deposits 11 feet deep,

dating back to around 5000 years ago,

just before the Ark tablet is written.

Right at the center of the big flood deposit,

is the city of Surabaya, and that's the place that

always features in all of the message

Mesopotamian's stories about this Noah like character.

[narrator] So, we know that a great flood is possible.

But despite the impressive technical instructions

for building a giant boat written on the Ark tablet,

it's impossible to know if it is ever really constructive.

Or is it?

Could another tablet one that we have already found,

hold the answers we're looking for?

The ark tablet tells the story of Noah and his boat

a thousand years before the Bible was written.

But is there another ancient tablet

that proves Noah's Ark was more than just a story?

It's possible we already have it.

There are over 1,30,000 stored at the British Museum alone.

So, it's important to remember that we have only read

a very small fragment of what exists.

[narrator] Most of these tablets remain untranslated.

This is a body of literature that's fast.

There certainly will never be enough experts

to really translate all the written material

that derived from ancient native form.

[narrator] To overcome this problem,

researchers are turning to artificial intelligence.

You basically feed in pictures of cuneiform,

and they can reconstruct what the meaning is.

Sometimes directly read the actual symbols,

but also guess what symbols might be.

Oftentimes you get a tablet and it's broke, so for instance,

machine learning techniques can also reconstruct

what symbols may have been missing.

[Mark] You can read vast archives of cuneiform, literally in minutes.

If this works, who knows what new things we might learn in the coming years?

[narrator] Perhaps the full story of the Ark tablets boat

is lying in one of these untranslated texts

just waiting to be read by a computer.

Stored in a European museum,

this unassuming chunk of rock was once valued at half a million dollars.

Because it comes from the Moon.

Or does it?

It weighs just over three ounces

and measures roughly two inches by one inch,

which is awfully big for a Moon rock.

It's huge.

Everything about it look strange.

[narrator] That's because it is.

When you look in detail things are not quite right.

[narrator] Scientists are deeply confused by this strange thing.

As you start to look closer,

things just get even more weird.

[narrator] Close up,

it shows strange cell like structures

that no other Moon rock has.

And it's red, which is unique.

That's not the only strange thing about it.

Because this rock isn't in a NASA lab

or part of a scientific research project.

It's in an art gallery in the Netherlands.

When the scientists finally get to look at it,

it leads to controversy and questions about its authenticity.

There's good reasons to suspect when you encounter an alleged Moon rock

that there's a strong potential that there's something shady going on.

[narrator] Now, new research is making us

fundamentally rethink what we consider Moon Rock.

So how does this chunk of the Moon end up in a Dutch art gallery?

Well, we do at least know how we got hold

of most of our Moon rocks in the first place.

The U. S. Apollo missions.

But picking up bits of rock isn't really the point of Apollo.

America is desperate to get to the Moon

because they want to get there before the Soviets do.

It's a space race.

You've got to get there, you got to plant your flag.

And even though there's no real strategic victory,

it's sort of like the first person who gets there, kind of owns the Moon.

[narrator] On July 20th, 1969,

America wins the race.

[man] For every American,

it has to be the proudest day of our lives.

[narrator] NASA wants people to know that they got more for their

25 billion than simply getting won over on the Russians.

They want to show that the mission has scientific value as well.

Armstrong and Aldrin were there for just 21 hours.

Now, in that time, they did use some of the things we've seen,

you know, like, planting the American flag.

But they also very critically gathered some samples of the Moon rock.

[narrator] Scientists are queuing up to get their hands on the rocks

to answer some pretty major questions about the Moon.

The two big ones were...

What was the Moon made of and how it was formed.

[narrator] And that's the first strange thing about this rock.

If these Moon rocks are so scientifically important,

how does this one end up in a Dutch art gallery?

The Apollo astronauts are the global heroes.

With a PR bonanza on his hands,

US President Richard Nixon wants to really drive home

the scale of America's technological superiority across the globe.

The idea that they come up with is a whistle stop tour.

24 different countries send the astronauts around.

It's like a tour by The Beatles, right?

Everyone knows who they are and really excited to meet them.

They are meeting dignitaries, kings and queens,

presidents and prime ministers.

Everyone wants to get a piece of the Apollo program,

and some are lucky enough to literally get a piece of the Apollo program.

[narrator] It's a massive PR coup for the United States.

Fragments of Apollo 11 Moon Rock are gifted to every U.S. State,

and 135 countries around the world.

And that's where the connection to the Rijksmuseum comes in.

In 1991. it receives a collection of artifacts

donated from the estate of Dutch former prime minister Willem Drees.

Amongst the collection is the Moon Rock.

Drees claims that,

the US ambassador gave it to him

to commemorate the visit

to the Netherlands of the Apollo 11 astronauts.

[narrator] That explains how a piece of the Moon ends up in an art gallery.

But why does this particular Moon rock

cause scientists so much alarm when they finally catch sight of it?

The Drees Moon rock lies forgotten in storage

at the Rijksmuseum for 15 years until a new space exhibition

brings its center stage for the public to view.

The museum ensures it for five hundred thousand dollars.

While on display, it grabs the attention of a scientist visiting the exhibit.

But for all the wrong reasons.

[man] As he look closer,

it really just doesn't quite sit right.

[narrator] For a start, there's its impressive size.

This fist size piece of rock is about 89 grams in weight,

and that's clearly way too big for a piece of Moon rock.

The Apollo missions only brought back a really tiny amount of samples.

In fact, Apollo eleven is total haul of samples is just 22 kilos.

So when the Americans went around the world

giving gifts of Moon rocks to all the other countries,

they gave a few grams, little rocks, no bigger than a grain of rice.

But this is a massive rock.

[narrator] And size isn't the only thing that bothers scientists

about this rock.

From the Apollo samples,

they have learned something really important about the Moon.

It's grey.

Rijksmuseum Museum Rock is red.

No Moon rock that we know is red in color it all.

It tends to be sort of dark grey,

sometimes a bit lighter grey,

sometimes, almost black in color.

Occasionally you can see bits of green in it,

but there's no red at all.

[narrator] And there's a very good reason for that.

Most rocks in the world have a lot of iron in them.

And that iron reacts with the atmosphere

and with water, and it rusts.

And you don't get down on the Moon.

There's almost no atmosphere.

There's very little water.

There's nothing that's going to react to make the iron in the rock rust.

[narrator] And in 2009, when scientists put the Dutch rock,

under the microscope, things go from bad to worse.

They found lots of small holes filled with quartz.

Now that's the problem.

[narrator] Quartz is abundant on the Earth

because it takes heat and liquid water to form.

The problem is neither of those are found on the Moon.

And there is something else about the rocks.

Something even more extraordinary than quartz...

Life.

[birds chirping]

The Drees Moon Rock is said to have been brought to the Earth

by the Apollo 11 astronauts.

But the more scientists look at it,

the odder, it seems.

The elephant in the room was the fact that they could identify structures

which were clearly organic, cell like structures.

[Dougal] This looked like structurally finding wood.

[narrator] The Moon rock, isn't a rock at all.

It is fossilized wood.

So, in short, this strange sort of fist size red rock that was insured

for half a million dollars,

turned out to be a very, very old piece of tree.

[narrator] And that's a big problem for a Moon rock.

[Andrew] The Moon is an arid, desolate rock.

There's almost no water up there that we know of.

There's almost no atmosphere, and that means that

two of the fundamental things that plants need air and water

simply aren't present.

[narrator] So, the Moon can't support plant life.

Or can it?

In 2019, a Chinese mission called Chang,

touched down on the surface of the Moon.

[Andrew] And on board was an experiment.

Tiny miniature biosphere.

They were hoping with Germany

a number of different kinds of seeds.

There's no fruit flies in there, they were hoping would awaken

and started buzz around and live and

also, some yeast for those fruit flies

The flies in the east would have made it.

But one of the seeds germinated.

We got single cotton ceiling with just two tiny leaves.

[narrator] The Drees Moon rock was once a plant,

and the experiment suggested a plant could exist on the Moon.

Or maybe not.

[Andrew] It's fair to say this experiment wasn't an unmitigated success.

That cotton ceiling died in the freezing in night,

with temperatures falling as low as minus 170 degrees,

which is gonna cause of air frost damage.

The idea of trees growing up that is completely implausible.

Maybe once upon a time there was some tiny microscopic life,

all be it very briefly,

but the idea of a fully-fledged forest,

no way.

[narrator] The Drees rock isn't from the Moon.

So is the whole thing a fake?

Is this criminal fraud?

It wouldn't be the first time.

The theft or seeking through legal means

of these Moon rocks has been a problem

from the very beginning, and the main reason is,

is that they're extraordinarily valuable.

I mean, there's God knows how many diamonds in this world,

but there's only a couple hundred pieces of the Moon,

and each one of them is absolutely unique and absolutely precious.

[narrator] Over the past 60 years,

some of the goodwill rocks have been stolen and sold.

The value of these things keeps going up.

So, in 1998,

US Customs officials seized the Honduran Goodwill rock,

which had been stolen, and this is the size of a fingernail.

But allegedly it was going to fetch a price of five million dollars.

[narrator] Could this explain the Drees rock?

There's certainly strong motivation to sell fake ones

because the real ones are worth so much.

[narrator] But nothing about this Moon rock suggests it was meant to defraud anyone.

[man] The construction of the plaque doesn't look like the construction

of the other Goodwill Rock plaques.

Even the spelling is wrong.

The word center appears on the trees plaque and have spelled

in the British Way C and TR E rather than in the American way.

Center.

[narrator] A mistake, this obvious simply doesn't fit with the idea that

there's some kind of space fraud going on.

It looks more like what it probably is.

Some kind of miscommunication.

Even more importantly, there's no motive.

We do have to remember that Drees clearly had the best of intentions, you know,

bequeathing his belongings to the museum.

It's not like he was trying to sell it

for five million dollars or anything like that.

He was giving everything away.

And it was probably just a misunderstanding,

you know, or misremembering.

But there's no evidence that there's any intent to deceive

or certainly to profit off of it.

[narrator] One thing is crystal clear.

The Drees Moon Rock is from Earth.

Case closed.

You don't find Earth rock on the Moon.

Or at least that's what people thought.

But astonishing new research suggests that this isn't true.

In 1971, Apollo 14,

brings back a particularly sizable chunk of Moon rock,

nicknamed Big Bertha.

Big Bertha was a Moon rock returned by the Apollo programs,

and we analyzed in 2019.

[narrator] Inside it, the scientists find a fragment of rock, weighing

one fifteenth of an ounce, dated it around four billion years old.

But it isn't the age that shocks scientists.

Embedded within Big Bertha was bits of granite and quartz.

Now granite, of course, occur widely across the earth.

But very, very, very, rarely on the Moon.

[narrator] It has led the scientists to a shocking conclusion.

What we have here is a piece of the earth that's sitting on the Moon.

How did it get there?

The common idea behind this,

is that in the very early solar system,

and a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment,

things were thinking about all over the place.

A meteorite was hit here.

[man] The idea is that giant meteor impact on the Earth spewed up a load of daubery.

And gave some of it enough energy that it was able to fly all of the earth's gravity

in down to space. And one of those bits of rock,

obviously crash landed on the surface of the Moon.

It was then retrieved by the Apollo astronauts.

[man] Given that we managed to stumble across them,

Earth Rock on only a 3rd expedition on the surface of the Moon,

seems to me like there might be more of that stuff up.

[narrator] The Drees Moon Rock was declared a fake

because it must have come from Earth.

There's no doubt that the Drees rock itself,

was never on the Moon. But Big Bertha has turned

the scientific arguments on their heads.

So petrified trees may be a stretch, but it turns out

that you can find Earth Rock on the Moon.