Original subtitles

This program contains images of mummified remains

that may disturb some viewers.

Viewer discretion is advised.

[narrator] A mysterious tower harbors evidence of a fatal polar expedition.

The wind picked up the six crew members still on board.

It carried them out into the Arctic, and never to be seen again.

[narrator] The discovery of a Siberian Tomb unearths an ancient mystery.

If this is a giant grave, where is the body?

[narrator] When a wooden carving is removed from its Arctic home,

the area is plagued by disastrous events.

Some of the researchers got sick. The roof of the lab collapsed.

They believed these incidents were the results of a curse.

[narrator] These are the strangest mysteries trapped in the coldest places.

Lost relics... forgotten treasures...

dark secrets...

locked in their icy tombs for ages.

But now, as ice melts around the world,

their stories will finally be exposed.

A rugged wind-torn collection of islands

lies midway between Norway and the North Pole.

The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

Svalbard is not just remote. It's completely isolated.

There are no trees. And it's covered in snow and ice most of the year.

These islands are home to the northernmost settlement on the planet,

only a few hundred miles away from the North Pole.

The largest island in the chain is Spitsbergen,

which harbors the small inlet of Kings Bay

known for its raw and untouched beauty.

Intrepid tourists love to make the journey there by boat or by plane.

[narrator] Just off the Rocky Beach,

visitors to Kings Bay are greeted by a strange sight.

Looming over the grassland behind the beach

stands a solitary metal tower balanced on three legs.

It's about ten stories tall and tapered at the top, like a mini Eiffel Tower.

On this windswept snowy beach, a metal tower feels oddly out of place.

What is it doing here?

[narrator] It's a 115 feet tall and 20 feet wide at the base,

running straight up the middle is a large ladder

leading to a circular rail platform at the top.

The extreme climate and remote location

suggests that it could have been an old weather tower, but who would have built it?

[narrator] Historically, Denmark and Norway controlled Svalbard.

But by 1941, the islands had fallen to Nazi Germany.

During World War II, the Svalbard archipelago became a strategic stronghold.

Weather stations on the island were critical to planning flights and convoys.

Whoever controlled the region would have a significant advantage in the war.

The Nazis had set up a number of manned and unmanned weather stations

all across the Arctic,

ensuring that they had access to the most accurate weather forecasts.

Could this structure in Kings Bay be a forgotten Nazi weather tower?

These weather stations were normally powered by multiple enormous batteries

and huge metal canisters.

But here in Kings Bay, it's just the tower.

There's no enormous batteries or monitoring equipment of any kind.

[narrator] At first glance, the tower appears to be a simple structure.

But looking closely at the design,

certain details show that the engineering is actually quite complex.

The most stable kind of shape is a triangle. They can hold a lot of weight.

So the iron triangles holding up this structure would be incredibly strong.

They'd be able to hold up exceptionally heavy loads.

The base is an equilateral triangle. Each side is 20 feet wide.

For a tower this tall that design plus the tripod structure

makes this much more resistant to tipping.

That's critical in such a windy stormy place.

[narrator] The legs of the tower are deeply cemented into a 40-ton concrete block

fixing them firmly into the frozen ground.

Whatever this tower is, it was built to withstand a lot of weight and a lot of movement.

Interestingly, the top part of the tower

has a large rotating mechanism with a socket hole running through it.

This suggests that something would have been attached to the top

that could rotate around the tower.

This type of rotating fastening system

looks remarkably similar to those used for mooring airships.

Those huge floating machines like the Goodyear Blimp or the Hindenburg.

Hangar One at Moffett Field, California and a Hangar at RAF Cardington in England,

both had these mechanisms on their airship mooring masts.

[narrator] Thick ropes attached to the nose cone of an airship

would fasten to a socket on the tower.

The airship was then secured in one place

and could rotate with the direction of the wind,

like a flag or weather vane.

Airships had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.

But they were difficult to maneuver even in the best conditions

and could be very dangerous.

If this is a mooring mast,

what was an airship doing in the freezing climate of the Arctic?

The 20s were the tail end of the heroic age of exploration.

This was a period of worldwide excitement.

New technologies had made reaching the furthest parts of the earth suddenly possible.

Explorers desperately wanted to cement their legacies

and be the first to plant their flags in the world's most remote places.

[narrator] By 1911, the South Pole had already been reached

by a charismatic Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen.

But in the mid-1920s, the North Pole was still anyone's game.

Hundred years ago, the Sea Ice near the North Pole was completely impenetrable.

No ships could even get close to it and making the trek on foot,

with the equipment they had at the time was impossible.

Explorer Roald Amundsen tried and failed on two separate occasions

to reach the North Pole by airplane.

To this guy, this was just a minor setback.

And by 1926, he hatched another plan for an expedition.

He was going to go by airship.

Unlike planes, airships seemed like the perfect vehicle for Arctic travel.

They could stay in the air for days

and you could do repairs in the air

without having to attempt a potentially fatal landing on the cracked and dangerous ice.

For the expedition, Amundsen bought a state-of-the-art airship.

It was designed specifically for Arctic travel

by an eccentric Italian engineer named Umberto Nobile.

[narrator] The airship was almost 350 feet long and 65 feet wide.

It was powered by three 245 horsepower engines with a top speed of 49 miles an hour.

The lift was provided by almost 70,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas.

But this new technology carried a risk.

While airships could travel long distances,

the flammable gas and powerful Arctic winds

meant any journey could still end in disaster.

Amundsen called it Norge after his home country.

The plan was to leave from Northern Norway,

fly across the ocean Svalbard,

refuel and wait for the perfect conditions to begin his polar adventure.

Could this tower in Kings Bay be the exact spot

where Amundsen began his expedition in 1926?

[narrator] Historic photographs of the expedition

reveal images of the Norge

somewhere in Svalbard attached to a giant tower just like the one in Kings Bay.

But in the photographs, beside the tower,

there's a colossal structure even larger than the airship itself.

What was it for?

The Norge needed a space for protection against the Arctic weather.

So Amundsen had a huge Hangar built to house the airship.

It was an incredible architectural achievement

and one of the largest hangars of its kind.

Building in the Arctic is challenging at the best of times.

But completing this in the 1920s during winter is an incredible feat.

[narrator] Over 16 miles of wooden beams were used in the construction of the Hangar.

And parts and supplies for the 100 foot high walls

were imported from as far away as Rome.

To complete the Hangar in time for the Norge's arrival,

32 builders worked in extreme Arctic winter conditions

and blanketed in 24-hour total darkness.

If this tower in Kings Bay was the mooring mast for the Norge.

You'd expect to see at least some remnants of this impressive Hangar.

But the mooring tower seems to be the only thing here,

a building that enormous couldn't just vanish without a trace.

What happened to it?

[narrator] Photographs of the coast of an Arctic island

show that a mysterious metal tower and an airship Hangar

may be the only remaining evidence of the first flight over the North Pole.

But on the island, the entire Hangar appears to be missing.

The mooring tower seems to be the only thing here.

[narrator] A broader sweep of the Barren Island

reveals the remains of several concrete pads in the snow just beyond the tower.

Each embedded with a number of large iron rings.

The concrete pads are spread across an area the size of a football field.

These look like the foundations of an absolutely enormous structure.

The exterior of the Norge's Hanger was covered in thousands of feet of canvas

tied to the frames and fastened to the foundations using these iron rings.

The solitary mooring tower and the evidence of the foundation,

both indicate that this is in fact the place

Amundsen began his epic flight to the North Pole.

[narrator] In mid-May, 1926,

the Norge was transferred from the Hangar to a mooring tower,

where final preparations were made before its flight across the North Pole,

on board along with the crew were Roald Amundsen,

his American financer and the ship's pilot and designer Umberto Nobile.

After a 16-hour flight, the Norge floated across the North Pole.

Norwegian, American and Italian flags were dropped in celebration

before the giant airship completed its journey.

But as they left, Amundsen noticed something on the ice below.

The Italian flag that Nobile dropped was bigger than the other two flags.

And Amundsen was furious with the Italian pilot.

Despite the expedition's success

and Amundsen cementing his status as a legendary explorer,

he just couldn't let that detail go.

In his autobiography released the following year,

Amundsen called Nobile a vain arrogant and boastful man

who had no business being in the Arctic.

Because he couldn't even ski.

This was an intense and bitter rivalry

fueled at least in part by Amundsen's arrogance.

Nobile was no better. He needed to prove his own worth as an explorer

and be the first to set foot at, not just fly over the North Pole.

[narrator] Umberto Nobile returned to Kings Bay in 1928

with a nearly identical airship to the Norge.

His new ship was called the Italia.

But it was a total disaster.

Nobile did reach the North Pole,

but ended up crashing the Italia on the remote sea ice on their return.

The Gondola was crushed and ripped off the airship.

Nobile and eight of the other men on board managed to escape the crash and await rescue.

But as they did, the wind picked up the Italia

along with the six crew members still on board.

And tragically, it carried them and the airship out into the Arctic

never to be seen again.

The remaining crew had to wait for a potential rescue out on the ice

surviving only on what little resources had been left from the crash.

Search parties were sent out to look for them

and who did they call out of retirement to aid in the search and rescue operation,

the world's greatest Arctic Pilot, Roald Amundsen.

But during the search and rescue mission, tragedy struck once again.

Amundsen's plane crashed and vanished somewhere in the Arctic.

[narrator] While Nobile was rescued by another plane

and survived the humiliating ordeal,

Amundsen's body and plane have never been found.

This titan of polar exploration lies permanently below the ice

somewhere near the North Pole.

Over the years, the giant timber Hangar was dismantled

and salvaged for parts in local projects, like bridges and railways.

And it left almost no trace of the history of this place.

This metal tower and the Hangar foundations are the only remaining evidence

of an incredibly vibrant time in exploring the Arctic.

Silently commemorating one of the great legends of the heroic age of exploration.

[narrator] The rugged all-time mountains run for hundreds of miles

along the border between Kazakhstan and Outer Mongolia.

This place is beautiful, but it's incredibly remote

and winters can get down to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

And in some places, the ground can be frozen all year round.

The Bolshoi Ulagan River runs through the mountains

creating a breathtaking valley.

And it's surrounded on all sides by stunning alpine meadows.

[narrator] At a plateau in the mountains over 5,000 feet above sea level,

archaeologists working in the remote area come across an unusual formation.

In the middle of a field in the valley,

they discovered an enormous pile of boulders and stones stacked on top of each other.

The circular pile is about ten feet high and stretches over 100 feet in diameter.

It's definitely man-made and it's been built deliberately.

The archaeologists believe that the rocks must be covering something underneath.

So slowly and carefully, they begin to remove the stones.

They bring in cranes to dig out the biggest boulders.

And after weeks of painstaking work, they unearth what's been buried underneath.

[narrator] The remains of what appears to be an entire log cabin

are found frozen into the permafrost below.

It's perfectly preserved

and it looks like the kind of place a lumberjack would call home.

It's possible that someone was living here.

There are examples of people living in underground dwellings

all around the world.

But this place is completely covered up with rocks and would have been inaccessible.

[narrator] To better understand the structure's purpose,

the archaeologists excavate each log and bring them up to the surface.

The team recovers at least 40 logs.

And when they examine them, they make another astonishing find.

[narrator] Each log is notched with its own very specific mark,

almost like roman numerals.

It looks like these marks are actually symbols

that describe which log goes where in the structure.

[narrator] Using the markings as a guide,

the archaeologists meticulously reconstruct

the cabin in the field exactly as it had stood underground.

Each of the attachment points between the logs

were precisely carved into the wood.

And they were perfectly preserved by the cold earth.

The cabin is about 23 feet wide by 13 feet long.

And when it was all put together, the angles were off by less than half an inch.

[narrator] The wood is carbon dated.

And they determine the cabin has been under the permafrost for over 2300 years.

For the structure to be preserved in the ice so long

and still be so stable means it was exceptionally engineered.

Whoever built this knew what they were doing.

By analyzing the wood, they determined that this cabin is made of larch,

a tree that doesn't grow in this exact area of the valley.

They see that the trees had come from further down the mountain

and had been felled during the early spring season

just before they would have started growing again in the warm weather.

[narrator] The archaeologists now believe the structure had been built elsewhere.

The logs were marked and then piece-by-piece relocated

to this specific site in the valley.

The cabin was then reconstructed inside a deep pit

and buried for the next 2,000 years.

But why bury an entire cabin underground?

If it's not a house to live in,

it's possible that it was built to house the dead.

Many cultures bury their dead in large elaborate tombs

and create substantial resting places for their lost loved ones.

Depending on a culture's beliefs,

offerings of important objects may be placed in the grave with the deceased.

Sometimes, entire structures are built for the dead to inhabit in the afterlife.

But if this is a giant grave, where is the body?

[narrator] A log cabin buried in a Siberian permafrost

leads archaeologists to believe they may have uncovered an ancient tomb.

The only catch is they can't find a body.

Grave robbers are notorious for stealing artifacts from tombs and grave sites.

And at 2,300 years old,

there have been plenty of opportunities for someone to raid this cabin.

Though, usually grave robbers only take things of value like weapons,

clothing and jewelry. Not the bodies.

[narrator] Records show that the site had previously been excavated, 70 years earlier.

This dig had uncovered two bodies.

A man and a woman in their 50s resting together in a single large coffin

made from a hollowed-out tree.

The coffin had been buried inside the log cabin.

The bodies were transported to the hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg for further study.

Incredibly, their bodies have been perfectly preserved.

Their skin was still intact

and the researchers could even see the color and texture of their hair.

But that's not all. Both of their bodies are covered in elaborate tattoos.

This male has what appears to be a huge tiger tattoo

running from his chest and shoulders around to his back.

And horses, birds and seemingly mythical creatures

along his shoulders arms and legs.

The woman is also tattooed down both her arms though in a slightly different style.

[narrator] Looking closer, the archaeologists make a grim discovery.

The brains of both bodies have been removed from their skulls.

And disturbingly, most of the muscles from their bodies have been taken out

and replaced with straw.

Their skin was reshaped and sewn up again with cord

made of horse hair and animal tendons.

This is a really elaborate burial tradition.

Treating the bodies like this after death and burying them in a huge grave

shows that they must have been very important.

Taking out the vital organs and preserving the bodies

suggests that perhaps there was a long period of time

between when they died and when they were buried.

If they died in the winter, the ground would have been frozen solid.

So the community would have had to wait for the ground to thaw

before they could prepare the burial chamber.

So who are these people?

And who would have gone through all this effort 2,300 years ago?

[narrator] Between 900 and 200 BC,

the Scythians had controlled this area of Southern Siberia.

A ferocious nomadic people,

they dominated lands all across Central Asia

from China all the way to the black sea.

Led by fierce warlords and chieftains.

They were known for their excellent horse riding

and horrific treatment of their enemies.

Could this be the grave of a Scythian leader?

Along with the tattooed bodies,

archaeologists uncovered nine other skeletons in the grave.

The remains of nine horses fully equipped with their reins and saddles

had been buried outside the cabin.

The horse's skull show a traumatic smashing injury,

indicating that they'd been killed intentionally

with a sharp blow to the forehead

for the purpose of being buried in this grave along with these bodies.

The Scythians revered their horses.

They would have been some of their most valuable possessions.

So sacrificing nine of them at once would have been a huge deal.

The ornate tattoos reveal a mix of Chinese and Persian influence.

The Scythians ran an area that span the distance between these two cultures.

So this artwork and the sacrificed horses suggest that this is a Scythian grave.

[Dr. Alison] This couple must have been of great importance for them

to have received such a burial.

Not only had they been preserved until they could be buried.

But they were also sent to the afterlife with their horses

and their most prized possessions.

So it's highly likely that they were leaders in their community.

[narrator] The archaeologists believe

the log cabin is a smaller version of the houses built by these Scythian people.

And it was placed inside the grave as an offering

and as a place for the deceased to inhabit in their afterlife.

Today, the reconstructed log cabin rests at a museum in the area,

and both the cabin and the bodies are being preserved for future study.

[narrator] High in the Russian Arctic

nestled between the Freezing Cara and Barents Sea

lies an isolated snow-covered island.

Part of a small rocky archipelago,

Vaygach Island is completely treeless.

Its main inhabitants are rare Arctic birds, walruses and hungry polar bears.

The weather is so extreme. It's often impossible for humans to get there.

Storms come out of nowhere and can last for days

making travel by boat incredibly dangerous.

At first glance,

Vaygach Island appears to be nothing more than a tiny white dot on the map.

But in the local language, the name for the island is Vayhops,

which means territory of death.

[narrator] In 1997, researchers conducting field work on the remote island

come across a bizarre object jutting out above the rocks and ice.

On top of a large rock in the middle of the tundra,

they find an unusual wooden carving.

It's about five feet long with a central wooden pole

with six smaller spikes attached across the top.

Curiously, each of the pieces appears to have a human like face carved

into the decaying wood.

It gives off a really eerie vibe,

just standing alone out there in the center of this wild untouched landscape.

What is this strange object? What is it doing there?

[narrator] On an Arctic island known as the territory of death,

the discovery of an eerie, wooden carving

has sparked researcher's curiosity.

Searching the island further,

they discover other smaller pieces of wood with faces carved into them.

Some are lying on the ground and some are still planted upright.

As there are no trees on Vaygach,

these strange wooden carvings would have had to have been brought here by someone,

but by who?

A few miles away from the carving are some battered old timbers

and the remains of an old mine shaft.

Someone brought all this lumber over to the island.

So it's possible that whoever built this mine was also responsible for the carvings.

In Russia, between 1929 and 1953

about 18 million men and women were transported to Soviet Labor Camps

in Siberia and other areas.

Zinc and lead had been discovered on Vaygach Island.

And in the 1930s, over 1,000 political prisoners were sent there to work as minors.

It would have been back-breaking, nearly impossible work.

Their pickaxes would break on the hard rocks.

They had to pull all the carts by hand as there were no animals or machinery to help.

Perhaps the miners built this seven-faced object.

It could have been built as an act of rebellion

or maybe as a symbol of hope and comfort

to help them get through their terrible ordeal.

[Dr. Alison] But in Stalin's Russia,

all religion and symbolic totems were outlawed.

There's no way the prisoners on this remote island would have been able to get away

with building a five-foot wooden carving and leaving it out in the open.

[narrator] After six years, the mines were flooded by seawater and closed.

Any surviving prisoners were sent to other camps on the mainland.

And the island was totally deserted.

The wood the sculpture is made of is old and weather beaten.

It's possible that it could pre-date the Soviet Work Camps altogether.

Before the 20th century, there were no permanent settlements on this island.

But someone went to a lot of trouble to create this carving

and bring it to the island.

[narrator] The first mention of Vaygach

by Western European explorers was in the mid-1500s.

Sailors were searching for a potential route across the Arctic

to India and China.

And a number of ships passed by the island on their journeys.

[Jill] Maybe these European sailors were responsible for erecting this strange figure.

The Europeans at the time would have been practicing Christianity.

And the form does seem to resemble a cross.

But looking at the records of their journeys,

European sailors described seeing hundreds of similar

carved figures already on the island.

[narrator] One sailor wrote in his diary,

"The number of figures was more than 300.

They had a crudely made appearance of men, women and children.

And many of them had eyes and mouths smeared with blood.

While some sailors were exploring the Arctic in Vaygach Island,

another European sailor in the South Pacific Ocean

came across Easter Island with nearly 1,000 enormous statues of heads

presiding over its shoreline.

This strange wooden carving is the last one standing

out of hundreds of similar carvings.

Then this is almost like an Arctic Easter Island.

But why are the carvings there? What are they for?

As an archaeologist, anytime you find new sculptures

or carvings of human figures or faces, it's absolutely fascinating.

The representation of the human form in a piece of art

can tell us a lot about the beliefs of the specific culture that made it.

[narrator] Idols or totems depicting human figures

have been created by different cultures for thousands of years

often for religious purposes.

Researchers believe that the findings on Vaygach

resemble something they've seen before. The Shigir Idol.

It's a nine foot long piece of wooden carving

that was found hundreds of miles away in Russia's Ural Mountains.

The Shigir Idol would have stood over 17-feet high,

much taller than the carvings on Vaygach Island.

But it has a similar main face.

And further down the pole, they find numerous other faces carved into the wood.

[Dr. Alison] The Shigir Idol is over 12,000 years old.

That's more than twice as old as the Egyptian Pyramids.

It's the earliest example of human art that appears to have ritual significance.

[Jill] Archaeologists think that the faces may depict references

to the culture's creation myths.

So it's possible that the object on Vaygach Island

is ritualistic in significance too.

[narrator] Scattered on the ground around the pole

are a series of small objects,

carvings of reindeer, bones, parts of axes

and even some coins that appear to be more contemporary.

Objects presented like this are usually religious offerings.

So could the carving be a shrine of some kind?

[narrator] Researchers take the carving back to Moscow

with them to study and better preserve it.

But bad things started to happen to their team.

Some of the researchers became sick.

The roof of the lab collapsed.

And Vaygach Island suffered terrible weather and horrific storms.

The local indigenous population, the Nenets, become worried.

They believe these incidents were the results of a curse.

[narrator] The removal of a mysterious wooden object

from a secluded Russian Island

coincides with a string of disasters and bad luck.

The indigenous Nenets population believe

the incidents are the result of a curse.

Nenets elders from the mainland reveal that the wooden object is an idol

named Vesako or the old man.

And it is a very important ritualistic site in their culture.

[narrator] The Nenets practice a shamanistic religion,

worshiping idols that depict Gods and spirits.

[Dr. Anthony] Vesako is the father of Gods and seen as the patron of hunters.

The other faces carved into the wooden pole are his spirits.

The Nenets believed that removing the idol from the island had angered the Gods,

and the bad luck, the terrible weather was the spirits getting back.

[narrator] According to legend,

Vaygach Island rose out of the sea and became the home of the Gods.

The old man had children and grandchildren.

The smaller wooden pieces the archaeologists found

are idols dedicated to these gods and scattered throughout the island.

The Nenets consider Vaygach Island to be a holy place.

And it's taboo to live there.

Only the Gods can inhabit such a revered location.

It was a cultural rite of passage.

Every Nenets person was required to visit the island

at least once in their lifetime to worship and make an offering,

just like other religious pilgrimages.

The Nenets would pray to the Gods,

offer precious goods and animal sacrifices at the feet of the wooden idols.

[narrator] A few years after it had been taken by the researchers,

the idol was finally returned,

repaired by a local craftsman

and placed on a more protected smaller island off the shore of Vaygach.

The Nenets believe that since its return,

the bad luck has ceased and the curse has been lifted.

While the Vesako carving is one of the few that remains on the island.

The Nenets believe that the spirits have never left

and the island remains a holy place.

[narrator] In the wilderness surrounding the remote village

of Saariselka in Northern Finland,

a scientist and a few friends are out in the quiet forest

enjoying the beauty of an Arctic winter night.

This area is famous for its idyllic pine forest and its picture perfect snowy winters.

[narrator] The stunning northern lights,

one of the most beautiful phenomena in the world dance across the night sky.

Then all of a sudden, a strange noise pierces the silence.

And then again, this same mysterious sound rings out in the cold night.

The group was deep in the forest with nothing else around them

that could have made this noise.

And there were no other humans to be seen.

The scientists had never heard anything like it.

What was making this bizarre noise?

At first, they thought it might have been thunder, the sound of a lightning strike.

But usually, lightning needs warm air to form,

which is why thunderstorms are so rare in the Arctic.

There were no storms in the area that even could have made thunder.

It was a still and clear night.

All they could see were the northern lights.

[narrator] The northern lights, also known as the aurora borealis

are streaks of colorful light in the sky.

They can be seen best within a 1,500 mile radius

of the magnetic North Pole.

Solar winds cause high-speed particles from the sun

to rush towards earth's magnetic field in the upper atmosphere

creating intense geomagnetic storms.

When the particles from the sun collide with the particles in earth's atmosphere,

they create energy producing the iconic bright colors in the sky.

The closest that auroras even get is about 50 miles above the surface.

That's really high up

in comparison jetliners fly about six miles above the earth.

As sound waves move further away from the source, they get weaker.

In a quiet rural setting, you can hear thunder up to 15 miles away.

[narrator] The scientist concludes that the likelihood a sound could travel

more than 50 miles to earth and still be heard by the human ear is very low.

Maybe because he saw an incredible sight.

He assumed that he heard one too.

It's a winter's night deep in a remote forest.

That can be pretty spooky. What if the scientist was imagining it?

[narrator] A Finnish scientist is on the hunt

to prove that the northern lights created the strange sounds he heard in the forest.

But are these mystifying noises coming from the skies above?

Or are they all in his head?

Doctors have come across unusual occurrences like this before.

A unique condition known as synesthesia.

Synesthesia literally means joined perception.

It's a condition where a stimulus in one sense

will produce a perception in another.

So like when you taste colors or you see sounds.

But then the scientists and all his friends would have had to have synesthesia.

And that's pretty much impossible because it's a very rare condition.

[narrator] The scientist speculates

that maybe the sounds aren't coming from the auroras themselves.

But perhaps they are related to the phenomena that causes the lights in the first place.

The geomagnetic storms that affect the auroras in the sky

also affect things on earth.

The storms cause a massive buildup of opposing electrical charges at ground level.

Meaning, some things are charged positively and others negatively.

If you've ever tried shuffling your feet across a carpet

and then touching a metal doorknob,

the electricity that builds up on the surface of your body

is discharged into that door knob

and, you know, pow, electric shock.

A similar thing happens here on the earth during these storms.

It's thought that as electrical charges build up in the ground.

They can get discharged through pointy things like pine cones and leaves.

This can create these sorts of crackling and clapping sounds.

But the scientist was certain that the unusual sounds he heard

were coming from high above and not from the trees around them.

[narrator] Looking through the archives,

the scientists discover stories of other people

who have also heard inexplicable sounds

while observing the northern lights.

Accounts from the early 19th century

described French-Canadian fur traders traveling through the northern wilderness

hearing strange clapping noises when they saw the auroras.

They were so afraid, they started praying.

Thinking they were going to die.

In early 2021, a man from British Columbia, Canada

was out photographing the northern lights

when he heard what he described as a clicking or a sizzling sound

coming out of the air.

And he isn't the only one who's heard these sounds.

[narrator] The indigenous people of Northern Scandinavia, the Sámi,

have been watching the auroras for thousands of years.

In their language, they define the northern lights by sound, not by light.

The Sámi word for the northern lights is Gulf Sahas,

which means the light that can be heard.

If this word for the northern lights is defined by sound,

and so many people believe they've heard something,

could it actually be that the auroras are making these noises?

[narrator] The Finnish scientist attempts to record the sounds

to study their origin.

He sets up three microphones and recording equipment in the forest on a night

when the conditions are as similar as possible to his first eerie encounter.

The air was perfectly still and the temperature was well below freezing.

So sure enough the auroras were out.

Eventually, he heard one loud clap. Then another and another.

[narrator] Over the course of his recordings,

the scientist captures dozens of different individual sounds.

He discovers that the sounds measure approximately 80 decibels.

Sounds above 85 decibels are classified as dangerous to the human eardrum.

That's pretty loud.

[narrator] Further analysis of the data,

allows him to estimate approximately where the sounds are coming from.

Incredibly, it turns out with the sounds are coming from only 200 to 230 feet up.

That is really surprising.

The northern lights are happening 50 miles or more above the ground.

But the sound's origin is much lower down.

So what's going on 200 feet up in the air?

[narrator] The atmosphere is usually made up of layers

that go from warmer to colder.

But on extremely cold, still nights,

the frozen ground cools the air directly above it,

creating a layer of warm air that traps the cold air closer to earth.

The cold air in the higher part of the atmosphere

sits on a warmer pocket in the middle.

And this gives us kind of a temperature sandwich.

This effect is known as a temperature inversion.

[narrator] The scientist realizes that the lower cold layer

is filled with negatively charged particles.

And the higher warmer layer is filled with positively charged particles.

Opposite charges are naturally attracted to each other.

But due to the difference in temperatures,

the particles in each layer are prevented from meeting.

This creates an incredible amount of tension

and electric potential between each layer.

And what happens when they do connect?

You get an electric reaction.

The geomagnetic storms that create the auroras

actually break that tension between the layers.

This causes the particles to collide

and the resulting energy makes these astonishing sounds.

But the conditions have to be just right.

The air has to be cold enough and still enough

for this temperature inversion to occur.

With this new information, scientists have finally been able to prove

what these indigenous people have long been saying.

The Northern lights are in fact the lights that can be heard.