Original subtitles

(narrator) The Bermuda Triangle, an ocean full of secrets.

It's something which even in this world of science, we cannot fully explain.

Ships disappear without trace.

There's a shipwreck there, and there, and there. That's just strange.

Airplanes mysteriously go missing.

(man over radio) Mayday, Mayday. We can see a strange object in our course.

(narrator) Stories of sea monsters and strange sightings.

When I entered the tunnel these strange lines instantly formed.

The Bermuda Triangle. What's really going on there?

The great myths of mankind.

Mysteries passed on over thousands of years.

Inexplicable events,

places shrouded in legend, and superhuman heroes:

even scientists are fascinated.

Is there any truth to these ancient legends?

Researchers across the globe are working hard to solve

the greatest mysteries of our time.

(mysterious melody)

Bruce Gernon contributed a lot to the myth of the Bermuda Triangle.

To this day he cannot explain

what happened to the US pilot almost 50 years ago.

On December 4, 1970,

my father and I were in Andros Island in the Bahamas.

We were leaving in the morning to return to Palm Beach International Airport.

Bruce, who was 29 at the time, and his father often take this route.

(engine starts)

Perfect visibility. No wind.

The two men don't have any idea of what's to come.

(Gernon) When I lifted off, I looked at my watch and I remember the second hand

actually struck 12 and it was exactly three o'clock.

In his Beechcraft Bonanza A36, Bruce takes off from Andros,

the largest archipelago in the Bahamas,

where he is headed northwest via Bimini to Palm Beach.

The flight is supposed to take 80 minutes. ETA: 4.20pm.

(Gernon) I reached the shoreline of Andros in ten minutes.

And I could see that the storms weren't over the ocean of the Great Bahama Bank,

so that looked good.

A sense of deception.

Then we noticed this strange cloud right in front of our flightpath.

(man over radio) What is that in front of us?

It was about a mile long,

half mile wide, and about a thousand feet thick.

Clouds like this are extremely unusual at such low altitudes.

Bruce pulls back the control wheel to veer.

So, we went ahead and climbed up over it.

150 meters above the clouds, they lull themselves into a sense of security.

I didn't realize that

this small, lenticular-shaped cloud

had expanded tremendously and it was right below our airplane.

I kept climbing. I'm on a direct flight to Bimini now.

I'm at, say, 5,000.

I'm inside the cloud and then I break free.

And I get maybe 200 feet above it

and then the airplane wasn't climbing fast enough and I go back inside it.

Bruce climbs higher to escape the surprising weather conditions.

When we got to 10,000 feet, that's about five times I'd gone in and out of it...

and my dad said to me,

"We better turn around and go back to Andros."

With over 600 flight hours under his belt,

Bruce had never experienced anything like this: a force of nature.

(Gernon) Visibility inside the storm was only maybe 50 feet.

We thought maybe we could keep going until these flashes start to appear.

The deeper we went, the more intense these flashes became

and it almost got to the point where it was... pure black.

My dad was the expert navigator, so I asked him for a position fix.

-(Dad) Something's up. -(Gernon) He goes, "Somethings up."

-(Dad) I don't know where we are. -He didn't know where we were.

Then I noticed the magnetic compass was slowly spinning all by itself.

What happened to Bruce Gernon that day?

What forces are at play in the Bermuda Triangle?

The Bermuda Triangle myth is special because it's a modern myth,

which even in this world of science

cannot be explained and therefore we are curious about it.

It's is not the first report of this kind.

Charles Lindbergh, the legendary transatlantic aviator,

experienced something similar.

On February 13, 1928, he takes off on a non-stop flight

from Havana, Cuba, to his home, St. Louis, Missouri.

In his logbook, Lindbergh notes:

"Both compasses malfunctioned over Florida Strait.

"The liquid compass card rotated without stopping.

"Could recognize no stars through heavy haze.

"Liquid compass card kept rotating until the Spirit of St. Louis

"reached the Florida coast."

So we know the compass spun around uncontrollably.

He wasn't able to navigate by the stars

and when he finally found out where he was, he was 300 miles off course

near Bahama Island.

It's the same mysterious phenomenon Gernon would describe 40 years later.

The waters between Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Bermuda Islands

have been shrouded in legend for centuries.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus was the first European to cross this sea area

with a surface of 1.3 million square kilometers.

He reports of strange natural occurrences, and unusual light phenomena.

Christopher Columbus certainly saw a strange light.

With our understanding of science, we can say perhaps it was a meteorite,

perhaps bioluminescence from fish.

But Columbus didn't have that knowledge.

To him, it certainly was a mystery.

In the following centuries, many Spanish and Portuguese ships,

often laden with gold, go missing.

In the 19th century, the number of reports about ships disappearing skyrockets.

Later, these reports also include airplanes.

Sailors call the region the Devil's Triangle or the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

It was not until the second half of the 20th century

that the waters north of the Caribbean,

between Miami, Puerto Rico, and the Bermuda archipelago

were famously dubbed the Bermuda Triangle.

Over the last 100 years, more than 50 ships and 20 airplanes

are said to have vanished here without a trace.

The exact numbers are a matter of debate.

The Bermuda Triangle is a mystery,

because of the scale of the stories associated with it.

A thousand lives have vanished in mysterious circumstances,

and many questions remain unanswered.

The Bermuda Islands.

This is where the myth begins.

Philippe Rouja knows the underwater world like no other.

The archaeologist is in charge of the observation and conservation

of historic shipwreck sites surrounding the islands.

(Rouja) We think of shipwrecks romantically today,

but a shipwreck is a tragedy.

Some of which we know a lot about, some very little.

And there are still many more to discover.

Finding shipwrecks, mapping sites, and analyzing remains:

For over 16 years, Philippe Rouja has been studying sunken ships.

(Rouja) Every shipwreck is a mystery.

For all the ones we know about in Bermuda, there's another hundred we haven't found.

Along busy sea routes, it's not uncommon to have areas with many shipwrecks.

Oftentimes dozens of wrecks are found next to each other.

But there's no place in the world

with as many shipwrecks per square kilometer as the Bermuda region.

Experts know of more than 100 sunken ships that have been plotted,

but believe there could be more than 300.

You can see we're in the middle of nowhere.

There's a shipwreck there. There's one there.

There's another one there. And that's just kind of strange.

Today, Philippe Rouja and his team are exploring two well-known wrecks.

You never really get a full picture of what's down there.

And when you dive on a day like this,

when the water is clear and calm, that's special.

About eight kilometers off the coast, Philippe prepares for his dive.

His research helps scientists gain insights

into the causes of the naval accidents.

Ten meters down: the Montana, a wreck dating back to the Civil War era.

The ship carried weapons for the Confederates.

(Rouja) There is a concentration of ships here.

That speaks to something about Bermuda that's quite curious.

Directly nearby are the remains of the Constellation, a 1940s cargo ship,

transporting cement bags.

Today, they serve as an artificial reef, and are a breeding place for fish.

(Rouja) If there is a mystery, it's why does everything happen in the same spots?

The large coral reef surrounding the archipelago

provides a very natural explanation.

It's easy to make out from the air, but not from the water.

Since the 17th century, a busy trade route has brought thousands of ships to Bermuda.

During this time, seafarers saw the island as a landmark,

or used it as a stop-over on their way to the New World.

A dangerous waterway.

(Rouja) What makes Bermuda's reef dangerous is what we call breakers.

They come up to the surface, but on a day like this, they sit just below.

By the time you see it, you're hitting the reef.

Hundreds of ships were likely doomed by the razor-sharp reefs.

But this doesn't explain why there are also ships that sank far off the reef.

(Rouja) The main question about the triangle is what is the mystery?

The mystery here is solved. We know what happened.

But there are many others where we don't.

The USS Cyclops is one of the unresolved cases.

March 3, 1918. World War I continues to rage on.

It's the last time the large US Navy supply vessel is seen:

in the harbor of the Caribbean island of Barbados.

The collier is carrying 10,000 tons of manganese ore

to be used in munition manufactories along the US east coast.

More than 300 crew and passengers are on board.

In the evening hours, the Cyclops weighs anchor and disappears into the night.

She will never reach her port of destination, Baltimore.

To this day, there is still no trace

of what was once the US Navy's largest ship and crew.

No radio messages.

No distress signals.

No signs of life.

The USS Cyclops became important,

because she was such a big ship and she was also a new ship.

Because of this the real mystery was: where did she go?

Over 100 years later, author Marvin Barrash

is still intrigued by the disaster, not least for personal reasons.

I remember when I was a young boy

my father used to tell me about his uncle

who was lost on a Navy ship in the First World War.

So I began to get into family history research.

I started peeling back the layers of the onion

and started finding a lot more then I ever thought I would.

What happened to the USS Cyclops?

Construction plans, freight reports, pictures.

Marvin Barrash collects any piece of information he can find.

Following the war, the US Navy published a document

listing all the ships that were lost.

The Cyclops was the only ship that right across the page

was listed as "mysteriously disappeared."

In their official report, the US Navy concludes:

"There has been no more baffling mystery in the annals of the Navy

than the disappearance of the USS Cyclops.

It seems unlikely that the ship was sunk by German submarines.

The disappearance of the USS Cyclops makes headlines.

How can a ship this massive simply vanish into thin air?

Part of the fame to do with the event was also associated with the war.

There was a great deal

of fear over what the Germans might be doing with their U-boats.

The Cyclops was not in waters that should have been fought over,

but perhaps the Germans were operating U-boats there.

There's fear associated with the war which made this myth powerful.

Suddenly, everyone starts talking about the insidious waters.

Rumors linked German saboteurs, supernatural forces,

and even giant sea monsters to its disappearance.

Marvin Barrash is convinced there's a much simpler explanation

for the fate of the Cyclops.

The main business of the USS Cyclops was this: coal.

Tons of this coal.

On the final voyage the business was a lot heavier: manganese.

Lifting the two side by side,

this is like a feather, this is business.

10,000 tons of manganese ore in the hold

and the freight report reveals they had exceeded this amount by over 85 tons.

The ship was well documented as having a stability issue.

You have a lot of cargo on board

that nobody had experience with.

And was it loaded correctly?

Did the people that loaded the cargo take into consideration the balance?

It's just like a formula for a disaster. They're just waiting for the right time.

The ship's structural engineering was probably not the only problem.

Marvin Barrash has discovered another lead in the documents.

(Barrash) The USS Cyclops had two engines, a port and starboard engine.

The starboard engine broke.

This is probably a significant factor as to why the ship was lost.

Not having the power maybe to fight off storms or other sea conditions.

(thunderclap)

During hurricane season, the Bermuda Triangle is often subject

to major weather changes, dangerous for even the most experienced seafarers.

There is this US Weather Bureau chart that indicates

that there is a large weather system on the east coast of the United States

that could have indeed traveled with this large low system

into the area where the Cyclops was on her way home.

So, weather was probably a major factor in her disappearance.

But if the Cyclops were in distress, why didn't she call for help?

And why has no wreckage been found?

I suspect a rogue wave.

The type of thing that would not have been anticipated.

Without warning, no time to prepare.

And I suspect likely at night.

Could one single, huge wave really swallow a mighty cargo vessel?

For centuries, sailors spoke about waves as high as mountains,

coming out of nowhere, dragging ships under.

For a long time, their reports were dismissed

as being nothing more than a sailor's yarn.

But today's scientists are sure they exist.

Waves up to 30 meters high, known to seafarers as rogue or monster waves.

Big fish and big wave myths have been told for as long as humans have been at sea.

Scientists have long wanted to dismiss the possibility of these gargantuan waves

that are talked about at fishing ports.

But recent science has confirmed the existence of these rogue waves.

The Coastal Research Center in Hannover, Germany.

Here, scientists take a closer look at the destructive power of the rogue waves

from inside a wave channel, 310 meters long, the largest of its kind.

(in German)

(dubbed in English) I wanted to see which one's the right wave length

when placing the boat in the water.

Can one single wave sink a large ship like the USS Cyclops,

or even a modern container ship?

When you make short waves, the boat would respond similarly:

plunge into the trough of the wave.

Stefan hopes an experiment will lead to answers.

(in German)

(dubbed in English) Our wave machine can produce any wave,

like single waves to simulate tsunamis,

or rogue waves, as in this case.

Monster waves develop when several swells of different lengths overlap.

Long waves travel faster and can overtake shorter waves.

As the wave heights combine, they become a rogue wave.

Rogue waves can occur very suddenly.

This means they can basically form at any place, at any time, by pure chance.

And they vanish just as rapidly as they came.

Using a model ship, the researchers demonstrate the impact of a rogue wave.

The team simulates rough sea conditions, using the hydraulic wave machine.

While the waves cause the ship to bob up and down, it's not in any danger yet.

The waves were 40cm high.

In nature, this would equal a wave height of 12 meters.

That's quite a storm.

Now, they will conduct the rogue wave test.

Monster waves are defined as being extremely high

and extremely short at the same time.

Matthias, you can start the wave now.

OK, wave coming up.

Within seconds, a deadly wall of water has built up.

By the time the ship's crew have spotted the wave, it's already too late.

What we could see here was how the ship

first got sucked into that deep trough preceding the wave...

and then it got pushed up...

after essentially being capsized by the wave crashing down.

The crew had no chance to send out a distress signal.

If this had happened in real life,

there probably wouldn't have been any survivors.

Did the USS Cyclops fall victim to a similar rogue wave?

The sunken ship falls into oblivion.

But in 1941, during World War II,

the sister ships of the USS Cyclops, Proteus and Nereus, disappear.

Both were carrying ore.

Wild speculations are spreading. Newspapers talk about the "sea of doom."

Experts disagree on what happened to the two sister ships.

One thing is certain:

The freighters' design made them potentially dangerous

for the crew at rough sea anywhere, not just in the Bermuda Triangle.

Just four years later,

yet another tragedy draws public attention to the mysterious waters.

An entire squadron disappears, for no apparent reason.

Around noon on December 5, 1945...

five US torpedo bombers take off from their base in Florida.

The weather is good.

It's a routine training flight.

Targeted bombing and navigating above open water.

Halfway into it, the flight leader reports difficulties with his compass.

(radio crackles)

The pilots lose orientation.

Soon after, their radio transmissions end.

(radio crackles drown out voices)

To this day, all 14 crew members and their bombers have yet to be found.

Flight 19 became so famous,

because it wasn't just one plane or ship,

it was five planes.

It was an entire squadron who were never found.

Sylvia Wrigley, pilot and author,

investigates the mysterious disappearance of Flight 19.

Back in the 1940s, navigating a plane was much more of a challenge than it is today.

We can see all the instruments here that they were looking at.

You got the compass up top.

You've then got the directional indicator, which you set in line with your compass.

You've got a clock there that you use to time each leg.

You can see your indicated air speed,

so you are using the time that you're flying

and the speed that you're flying

and you multiply them to get the distance.

and that's how you work out your location.

Berlin. Sylvia Wrigley sets out to re-enact the military training operation

using a flight simulator.

Foxtrot Tango 28 departing.

We are now departing from Fort Lauderdale, heading straight to the east.

We'll just take-off

and start climbing.

Flaps up.

Now we are heading straight out over the Atlantic.

Because we're in an Airbus A320,

I'm able to set the power to go automatically

and the autopilot on and the autopilot is now doing almost everything for me.

If you were in a 1940s plane, you would have none of this.

You are flying by dead reckoning.

Wrigley turns off the electronic instruments

to simulate the squadron's flight conditions 75 years ago.

There's all these alarms going off and tones and I have lost my map.

OK, the pilots of the flight also didn't have a map

or the different gadgets that we've turned off here.

So this is similar to the situation they were in,

but they were probably better than I am at it.

Flight 19 got in trouble when the compass stopped working,

and then the weather deteriorated, too.

Wrigley simulates the situation.

The wind is worsening, so a magnetic compass bounces around.

It's not easy to use.

Even with that still working,

it would be hard to know whether I was going due north or not.

If I'm worried my compass isn't working it's nerve-wracking.

At this point, I have no idea where we are.

The brewing storm makes it impossible for the pilots of Flight 19

to know where they're going.

The sun is setting, so I'm hoping that that is west,

but because of this weather it's difficult to really feel confident about that

and it's just impossible to really know where I am.

The machines have been up for four hours.

They're running out of fuel. There's no land in sight.

Sylvia Wrigley ends up in the same situation.

-(beeping) -I'm out of fuel. I can't climb.

All I can do is try to come down gently,

but there are high waves and a thunderstorm.

There's no way I'll land on this water. I'd freeze to death.

I crashed.

That was so realistic, it was frightening.

I am so relieved that this is a simulation.

I never want to have to go through that in real life.

This was such a high stress situation,

using every bit of my mental power just to try and keep a plane in the air.

How much worse, when you know not only your life,

but the life of 14 people are dependent on you making the right decision right now.

Navy flying boats try to localize the missing squadron.

After searching for hours, they give up.

One of the machines calls in a radio message.

Moments later, it disappears without a trace.

The 14 young men of Flight 19 and their bombers are missing to this day.

Sylvia Wrigley has a theory on what exactly happened.

A fateful decision by flight leader Charles Taylor may have caused the men

to fly further and further out to sea.

(Wrigley) The Navy investigation is very useful.

So, we've got the original transcript here.

We have exactly what Foxtrot Tango 28

said whilst in the air to his other pilots.

He is continuously modifying the instructions for the squadron

to head towards the east,

when the entire time they needed to go west.

As they run out of fuel, the pilots are left with one option:

an emergency landing on the water.

At rough sea, this is a death sentence.

No wreckage from Flight 19 has ever been found.

(in German)

(dubbed in English) Even today we don't always find plane wreckages.

There are explanations for this, such as they've sunk down to the sea bed

and been covered by sand,

or they have broken to small pieces that can no longer be identified as wreckage.

But there are unanswered questions to this day.

Why did the flight leader become so disoriented?

And why didn't his compass work?

There are only a few true mysteries that are connected to the Bermuda Triangle.

Flight 19 is absolutely one of them.

I find it amazing that with so many people interested with the...

the mystery that started the Bermuda Triangle

and from which so many of our Bermuda Triangle myths are created

that we don't know what happened, and there's no way to find out.

And I find that bewildering, but also fascinating.

The report from the Navy's final investigation states:

"The disappearance of Flight 19 is one of the greatest mysteries

of the Bermuda Triangle."

A legend is born.

Flight 19 is a powerful part of the myth,

partly because it was the loss of a group of young men,

who mythically become heroes.

They are the main characters in this saga.

As a consequence, they have huge power.

Hollywood capitalizes on the story.

Author Charles Berlitz writes a bestseller.

The whole world is captivated by the enigmatic events

taking place in the "sea of doom."

The Bermuda Triangle first became popular

when American Charles Berlitz wrote a book in the 1970s.

Some 20 million copies were sold. It was translated into 30 languages.

He identified a number of alleged incidents

which happened in the Bermuda Triangle.

The problem was, however, that a lot of Charles Berlitz's evidence was wrong.

And indeed, many of Charles Berlitz's examples are fake news.

Statistics show there are as many accidents in the Bermuda Triangle

as in any other highly frequented maritime area.

But the myth takes on a life of its own.

Soon, rumors spread, saying aliens

or the crystal energy from the lost city of Atlantis

are responsible for the sinking of countless planes and ships.

Many people don't want to believe in a world without miracles,

because this means that it's a world without soul or free will.

And so we project our desire for there to be a soul or free will

onto a desire for there to be miracles and odd events.

If this strange stuff can't happen there, maybe it can't happen anywhere.

But the compass anomalies experienced in the Bermuda Triangle are not a myth.

They're real.

But what causes these interferences?

For decades, scientists were in the dark about this.

Today, they've found a plausible explanation

at the bottom of the sea.

The Bermuda Islands are the remnants of an ancient volcano

that formed more than 30 million years ago.

Witnesses of an apocalyptic moment in the history of our planet.

Nick Hutchings explores this region.

If we were standing at this exact spot 33 million years ago,

we would be under 3,000 feet of lava.

This was a big volcanic island then.

Over millions of years, the volcanic rock is eroded by wind and weather

and washed into the sea.

It probably took 19 million years to erode away down to nothing,

down to sea level.

Most of that is now spread out around Bermuda.

Today, a layer of lava sand 150 meters thick

covers the ocean floor around the islands.

Hutchings believes the volcanic floor could explain some of the phenomena

observed in the Bermuda Triangle.

You can see clearly here, this black sand.

This is the volcanic remains of the old volcanic island.

This is really the only place we can see this up on dry land.

The rest is washed into the sea and is in a big layer.

And in that layer is about 500 billion tons of magnetite.

And magnetite is the most magnetic naturally-occurring mineral on Earth.

With the magnetite in these heavy minerals here,

this is enough to affect a compass.

Just this little bit here.

And as you can see, as we move the compass over here...

it moves.

It's not a lot, three or four degrees,

but enough to cause a disaster.

You can imagine what 500 billion tons might do.

Official nautical charts warn seafarers of compass anomalies

with deviations of up to 14 degrees.

Essentially Bermuda is a huge magnet sitting in the middle of the ocean.

Conventional compasses have been known

to suddenly point in a different direction.

This can cause ships and planes to go off course or accidently fly into storms.

This likely explains many disasters.

Yet the myth of the Bermuda Triangle lives on.

For some, it's more about believing than knowing.

The Bermuda Triangle myth persists partly because scientists haven't explained

what happens in the triangle,

so it's fulfilling the function of all myths

and that is to explain the inexplicable.

Like the experience of Bruce Gernon and his dad,

on their flight from the Bahamas to Palm Beach on December 4, 1970.

At 3,500 meters altitude, the aircraft is suddenly surrounded by a mysterious cloud.

And then I see this horizontal tunnel.

I thought it would be the only way

to escape the inside of the storm.

When I entered the tunnel these strange lines instantly formed.

And then I noticed the lines were slowly rotating counterclockwise

and went all the way to the other end of the tunnel.

The navigational instruments weren't working.

Even the compass was slowly spinning all by itself.

The plane disappears from air traffic control radars.

Miami Radio couldn't find our location, so my dad got on the radio and he said:

"What do you mean you can't find our location?"

He started cussing the guy, something he's never done before.

Trying to get out of the tunnel, Bruce pushes the 300 HP machine to its limits.

When I looked back after we got out of the tunnel...

I watched it collapse right behind us

And at the same time,

I felt this incredible sensation of zero gravity...

combined with the feeling of hydroplaning,

like skidding forward at zero gravity.

The air traffic controller comes back on the radio and he's really excited.

And he says he's got an airplane directly over Miami Beach.

I look at my watch and I've been flying just over 33 minutes.

I told him, "No, that's not us."

Then my eyes started to focus.

I look below and there's Miami Beach right below us and we're at 10,000 feet.

Once Gernon reaches Palm Beach as planned and checks the time,

he realizes that only 47 minutes have passed since take-off.

I'd made that identical flight at least a dozen times on a direct course.

It took an hour and 20 minutes.

This was an indirect course, maybe 50 miles longer,

and it took only 47 minutes.

I didn't understand what had happened,

but I realized that something amazing had happened.

Bruce Gernon believes he got sucked into a time tunnel.

To this day, there is still no evidence corroborating his theory.

But he's not the only one who believes in mysterious, unknown forces.

Gian Quasar has investigated mysterious events in the Bermuda Triangle

for over 30 years.

He was the first to systematically study the accident reports

of the US Transportation Safety Board.

This is the entire computer database printout

at the National Transportation Safety Board from 30 years ago

when I made a request for them to give me a database search

of all aircraft listed as missing or not recovered.

Nowadays, the records are available in digital form.

The database lists every incident that took place in US air space since 1964.

What's important is to compare cases

and data over a long period of time,

instead of just one incident and speculating on it.

I discovered aircraft that had vanished while coming in for landing on radar,

that had eyewitnesses and vanished close to shore,

that vanished over shallow water and left no wreckage.

Quasar claims he has identified 75 mysterious events in the database

that happened in the Bermuda Triangle.

It's not subjective, like sighting Big Foot

or flying saucers or the Lochness Monster.

These were real aircraft and real ships.

They're in the records. People were aboard them, and they vanished.

Like Flight NH3808, a light-sport aircraft flown by Maldonado Torres

and his friend José Pagán Santos.

One of the most interesting cases is the documented case

of the encounter with a UFO.

This one was on June 28, 1980.

This was an Ercoupe, a twin engine, small light aircraft

owned by the passenger's father.

That's the passenger.

The aircraft is presumed ditched at sea and both occupants deceased.

And the transcript was completely preserved.

And here it is.

Quasar has the radio messages.

(man) Mayday, Mayday.

We can see a strange object in our course.

We are lost, Mayday, Mayday.

This is José Maldonado Torres and Pagán Santos' last words

as they transposed into mystery.

This is the mayday he sent off Puerto Rico.

(radio crackles)

June 28, 1980. The two men are on their way from Santo Domingo to San Juan

in a small sports aircraft

when they suddenly see an unidentified flying object.

(man on radio)

The pilot tries repeatedly to get away from the object, but to no avail.

(man on radio) Mayday, mayday, this is Ercoupe three eight zero.

You're listening to a man die basically....

Or rather transpose into mystery.

(man on radio)

(narrator) It's the last time anyone heard from the men.

After that message, their aircraft vanishes from the radar.

Nobody knows what the two men encountered.

The ultimate fate of flight NH3808 remains unknown to this day.

Time and again, reports and videos surface,

allegedly documenting similar encounters with UFOs.

An amateur video, taken on a cruise ship in the Bermuda Triangle in 2009.

(man on recording) Two UFOs on the... Damn, what ship are we on?

-(woman on recording) Carnival Sensation. -(man) What's the date?

-(woman) Today is October 1. -(man) October 1, 2009.

Two UFOs, one of them moving to the left. Look, come here.

The left one is moving. Are you watching?

(inaudible)

There is a helicopter, there is an airplane in the cloud up to the right.

For perspective, to see how low they are.

Look at the right one. It disappeared.

It's very commonplace what they are reporting.

Lights floating on the horizon.

He mentions that they're pacing the ship.

(man on video) Look at the one on the right moving. It disappeared.

The one on the left is still here.

(woman on video) Oh my God.

It's impossible to prove the authenticity of the footage,

just as it remains unclear what it really shows.

But to Quasar, online findings like this support his theories.

They put this up on YouTube,

and so it, er, seems authentic.

It's reporting things that are commonly known.

It's reported since the earliest UFO investigations

that when aircraft approach these, they'll wink out or zip away.

That's the case here.

An aircraft is approaching on the right of the screen

and then the one closest to it zips out.

Ufologists like Quasar can now even refer to official US government releases.

(man on recording) Echo, six, one...

(pilot) Oh golly!

(narrator) The US Navy has declassified footage supposedly documenting encounters

between UFOs and their fighter jets.

(pilot on video) Oh my gosh, dude. Wow, what is that, man?

Look at it fly. (he laughs)

Remarkably, the Pentagon released the footage of all this.

Another sighting that the Pentagon is refreshingly admitting to.

People have tried to explain UFO sightings like these.

Theories range from weather balloons, to hang gliders,

and secret weapon systems.

Gian Quasar doesn't have a logical explanation for the events either.

But he doesn't believe in "little green men."

Ships and planes do vanish and that obviously has a cause.

So if you uncover real mystery, it should be considered more unnerving,

because there's a real cause behind it to deal with.

A dark cloud, malfunctioning instruments,

and a mysterious time tunnel.

Now, Bruce Gernon thinks he knows what happened to him

50 years ago above the Bermuda Triangle.

It took me 30 years of researching this

thinking about it every day

before I finally came up with the theory:

that this fog, and I call it electronic fog, connects to the aircraft.

If it attaches to you, you can...

become disorientated and it can induce spatial disorientation into your mind.

A theory without evidence.

But Gernon is convinced it will be proven one day.

It's been tough sometimes when people try to debunk me.

But I'm always willing to talk to anybody that wants to challenge me about it,

because I know exactly what happened.

So this is an incredible event that happened.

It's going to take incredible proof to prove it.

I know it'll be proven in the future.

It may be another 50 years or so.

The Bermuda Triangle, a place for speculation of every kind.

The Bermuda Triangle doesn't stand out statistically, but in our imaginations.

It becomes a place where we project whatever our myth is.

If you're myth is everything's explainable,

you project that on the Bermuda Triangle.

If your myth is aliens or Atlantis,

that also will be what you project onto the Bermuda Triangle.

Whether it's a dark force, or a force of nature,

paranormal activity, or physical forces,

people won't stop trying to solve the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle,

and the myth is sure to be the subject

of wild speculations and extraordinary theories

in the years to come.

(narrator) The most prosperous city of all time.

Suddenly destroyed by an enormous catastrophe.

Atlantis. The lost paradise of the antiquity?

Atlantis is like an end-of-the-world story that happened at the beginning.

Researchers are looking for the legendary city.

(dramatic music)

I do think that Atlantis existed.

Where was this mythical island located?

Are there any traces of the Atlanteans?

Will Atlantis ever be found?

(bubbles)

(suspenseful music)

The great myths of mankind.

Mysteries passed on over thousands of years.

Inexplicable events, places shrouded in legend,

and superhuman heroes.

Even scientists are fascinated.

Is there any truth to these ancient legends?

Researchers across the globe

are working hard to solve the greatest mysteries of our time.

(mysterious melody)

Greece. The island of Santorini.

Some researchers believe

this is the former site of Atlantis.

Geologist Evi Nomikou

first heard about Atlantis when she was a child.

But how to tell truth from legend?

(Gulls mewing)

When I was a child, the grandfathers were always

telling us stories about the myth of Atlantis.

They told us about a brilliant city

that was decorated with high buildings

and all the people were very rich.

And that city was just in the middle of a volcano.

Santorini is an island in the southern Aegean Sea.

Its ring-like structure points to a volcanic inferno.

The crater island Nea Kameni at its heart,

the caldera is surrounded by land emerging from the sea.

The legendary city of Atlantis is said to have consisted of three aquatic

and two terrestrial rings encircling the main island.

That's why many believe that Santorini must be where Atlantis was.

(atmospheric music)

Could Atlantis be buried underneath the rugged volcanic landscape?

(suspenseful music)

(drumming music)

Geologist Evi Nomikou specialises in volcanos.

She grew up here.

Could the city of Atlantis that her grandfathers told her about

really be on this volcanic island?

Before three thousand six hundred years

at this place, there was a small island

with the same geometry, with the same lava composition.

And at the top of this volcano, a city was built.

Was it truly Atlantis?

Had it been annihilated by a massive eruption?

The Santorini volcano has erupted several times

over the past 3,000 years.

But the first lead points us 200 kilometres northwest.

(suspenseful music)

To Athens.

In 360 BC,

philosopher Plato describes Atlantis as a splendid island nation,

which had ruled over the entire Mediterranean region 9,000 years earlier,

with a commanding fleet, untold wealth and unparalleled power.

The capital has a large commercial port.

The Atlantean battleships are even said to have defied the Athenian naval power.

Navigable canals run through the entire city.

In the centre there's an acropolis with a temple for Poseidon, the god of the seas.

The buildings and streets are embellished with gold,

silver and a fiery-toned metal,

bearing testimony of their once glamourous population.

According to the Greek myths the gods divided up the world,

and appropriately for Poseidon,

as god of the sea, he was given an island.

He then had many children, five sets of twins,

and he gave the most beautiful part of his island

to his first-born son, Atlas.

And in Greek, Atlantis literally means Atlas's island.

According to Plato, the land is particularly fertile

and home to a rich flora and fauna, including exotic elephants.

But one day, the thriving metropolis falls victim to a natural catastrophe.

(thunder claps)

According to Plato,

the earthquakes and floods are the gods' way

of punishing the Atlanteans for their sinful lifestyle.

(screams of panic)

The myth of Atlantis is important to us today,

because it's the story of a once highly developed culture

which was lost, which has utterly disappeared.

It's a story of hubris. It's a story of punishment. And in the modern world,

in which we think we know so much, we celebrate our achievements.

Well, it serves as a pretty powerful warning.

But is Atlantis completely buried?

Or can we still find traces of the legendary city today?

Sunken cities are not rare.

Baiae, off the Neapolitan coast, is a paradise for divers.

Places like this keep the hope alive that Atlantis will also be discovered,

one day.

(scuba breathing)

The extent of the volcano's destruction is visible on Santorini to this day.

The volcanic sediments reach high into the sky in this former quarry.

A 30-metre layer of pumice has buried all traces of life.

So we are the central part of Santorini volcano in an old quarry.

For us, it is a geological monument.

And you can admire the soil,

the landscape before the Minoan eruption.

So you need to imagine that the people were walking on this landscape.

(dramatic music)

According to Plato, the Atlanteans are progressive and hungry for knowledge,

but also arrogant, autocratic and bellicose.

The gods punish them for their insolence and lifestyle.

We can see the thin layer of the precursory explosion.

Only 10 centimetres or less.

We don't know the exact time,

but lots of earthquakes occur during this first explosion.

(sound of explosion)

Then the main eruption started,

and the first phase is the Plinian column,

with ash up to 39 kilometres in the air.

(roaring sound)

Commercial aircraft only fly at 10 km altitude, for comparison.

The ash column that Santorini volcano shot into the air in 1600 BC

was 39 km high.

Plato could have been inspired

by all sorts of natural events. Tsunamis and floods.

One of them might have been the Minoan eruption.

It was a cataclysmic event and we know it was felt right across the Mediterranean

from Greece to Egypt.

(dramatic music)

(cries of distress)

The volcano buries the entire island, wreaking havoc.

Temples, roads and ships are torn up,

destroyed and swallowed by the lava.

(cries of panic)

The eruption was extremely powerful.

This is because the mass of rocks didn't melt and move.

The crater just became clogged with boulders, and eventually it exploded.

(sound of explosion)

In 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington, USA, faced the same fate.

The volcano erupted with destructive power.

(deep rumbling)

Was Atlantis wiped out by a volcanic catastrophe?

One thing we know for sure is that the legend of pride and fall

has impressed generations worldwide.

(bubbling sound)

The myth of Atlantis enthrals many.

Pondering about what the legendary empire might have looked like

has led to countless books, films and computer games.

Many people are not only looking for the location,

but also to experience the superhuman force that Atlantis is said to emit.

(piano music)

In Germany, the search for Atlantis has been popular

since as early as the 1920s.

In Bremen, an entire new building was dedicated, exploring the past.

The "Atlantis House" is home to a heritage centre

meant to bring light into the alleged history of Germanic peoples,

as the descendants of Atlantis.

On its facade: the tree of life,

a prominent feature in Nordic mythology.

The modern use of forms in the Art Deco staircase

and the "sky room" are meant to give the viewer a glimpse

into the myth of Atlantis.

(German dubbed into English)

In the 19th century, many people searched for Atlantis.

Spiritists, occultists and psychics

believed they could find Atlantis, or it would re-emerge.

Later, the Nazis evidently put a great deal of effort

into pursuing anything that fit into their ideology,

which also included finding Atlantis.

(echoing tone)

Atlantis House was built by an SS patron member

who shared SS chief Heinrich Himmler's firm belief

in the supremacy of the Nordic race.

Himmler invests large sums trying to prove

that the Teutons descend from the Atlanteans.

He hopes archaeologists will find evidence of ancient Aryans in Atlantis.

Their search took them as far as Tibet.

Ernst Schäfer was the head of the expedition.

He believed the survivors of Atlantis found shelter on the Tibetan Plateau.

He left empty-handed.

The belief in Atlantis is also fuelled by the discovery

of another city shrouded in legend.

For centuries,

Troy was thought to be a myth described in the Iliad by the Greek poet, Homer.

In 1870, Heinrich Schliemann finds the ancient city of Troy in today's Turkey.

The myth becomes a reality.

Can Atlantis be found too?

We have so many stories about Atlantis. It is a magical undersea world.

If you were the archaeologist to discover that,

like the discovery of Troy, you'd go down in history.

US researcher Richard Freund

is convinced that he'll be able to unearth Atlantis.

He's an expert on the archaeology of mythical cities

and firmly believes that Atlantis did exist.

He is basing his search on descriptions by Greek philosopher Plato.

But Richard Freund isn't looking in Greece.

He's got his eyes set on southern Spain,

not far from the Straits of Gibraltar.

(rhythmic music)

He believes the remains of Atlantis are hidden in the sand dunes

of the Doñana National Park.

(car engine starting)

(rhythmic music)

We are at ground zero for Atlantis.

Freund has a theory.

He believes the stretches of land now covered in sand

were once a thriving island state.

Until Atlantis was destroyed

by a devastating tsunami.

Plato says in one fateful night,

the entire city sunk

and was located in impassable mud

and disappeared.

Meaning it's not something that happened over a long period of time.

He's talking about a cataclysmic, catastrophic end to the city.

To Freund, it's just a matter of time

until he finds the first piece of evidence here in southern Spain.

(breaking waves)

And indeed, the location of Doñana National Park

matches Plato's description astonishingly well.

Plato says it's located by the Pillars of Hercules.

The Pillars of Hercules were known by ancient mariners

as being a very specific spot.

So it's not located in Africa

or India or Asia.

It's located by the Pillars of Hercules, which today

we call the Strait of Gibraltar.

Doñana National Park is about 80 km northwest of Gibraltar.

During the antiquity, the prominent rocks on the European and African side

mark the end of the known world.

In the antiquity, this whole area of the Doñana

was an open bay.

You had this big, massive,

open bay, where ships could come in

and ships could go out to the Atlantic

and into the Mediterranean.

This was the end of the earth

for almost every single ancient mariner.

Freund believes that ships used to be able to navigate

through what we know today as marshland.

If you imagine it with canals and ring-shaped islands,

it looks just like Plato's descriptions of Atlantis.

So this really is the place.

You're looking at ground zero in these dunes,

the ocean, the dunes and the location of the city.

Atlantis could be very real, in fact,

there could be multiple Atlantises.

Plato places it where the Atlantic opens out into the Mediterranean

and typically huge cities with lots of wealth grow up in places

that controlled this kind of strait. We think of Troy or Constantinople.

So in some ways, it's hard to imagine

there wouldn't have been a great city there.

Plato claims he received his information

from an ancestor who described the Atlanteans

as a superior civilisation with vast expertise

in weapons technology and metal work.

Not far from the national park

there's a place that could reveal more about Atlantis.

(suspenseful music)

A building, 5,000 years old, made of massive stones.

(reverberating tone)

The unusual monument is discovered and excavated

during construction works in the 1920s.

It's a Neolithic tomb site and provides a glimpse

into a fascinating culture.

Archaeologist Claudio Lozano is keen on finding out more

about the people who once lived here.

(electronic music)

The finds from the dolmen bring up many questions.

In the stone there are engravings and incisions.

Could these maybe be star maps like the ones used by seafarers?

How the weapons were depicted, which were most likely made of metal,

is even more intriguing.

(Spanish dubbed into English)

What makes this dolmen special is that most of the stone pillars

were decorated with pictograms.

And here we see they depict weapons.

Metal weapons.

(reverberating tones)

Do these pictures date back to the time

when the burial site was built?

Or were they added to the stones at a later date?

Plato did mention a rare metal in Atlantis.

Is the dolmen the Atlantean survivors' claim to immortality?

The dolmen is proof of a highly functional

and progressive settlement in southern Spain

dating back more than 5,000 years.

Early civilisations almost exclusively settled near water.

Archaeological finds are particularly common along coastlines and rivers.

Water is the source of life. Humans need water to drink.

They need water to cook, to farm, and water also provides transport.

It's why water really is the cradle of civilisation.

And most successful civilisations sprang up near sources of water.

To find traces of ancient civilisations,

you have to know where rivers used to run.

(echoing tones)

(piano music)

Huelva port, early morning.

A research catamaran is waiting for Claudio Lozano and his team.

They want to have a closer look

at the sea floor in front of the Doñana National Park.

Over thousands of years, the coastline has changed dramatically.

Water covers what once was land with rivers running through it.

Is this the location of Plato's Atlantis,

the city beyond the Pillars of Hercules?

(drumming music)

(Spanish dubbed into English)

We're now following the coastline

towards a stretch of sea across from Rio Piedras.

The place we're headed to used to be the estuary of this river,

somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 BC.

10,000 years ago, the coastline was about 125 metres further west.

Claudio Lozano hopes his search for old river channels

will help him find former settlements,

or ideally the ruins of Atlantis.

We've been here a couple of times,

but we want to take a closer look at this particular spot.

And this time, we're using a high-precision sonar.

This spot is perpendicular to the coastline

and is exactly where the estuary was.

(pulsing electro music)

Maritime archaeologist Claudio Lozano and soil investigation expert Miguel Gonzales

hope to finally come up with solid evidence.

Their sensitive sonar device

picks up even the slightest elevations on the ocean floor.

This also allows them to find river channels that are thousands of years old.

This is where we choose the frequency.

(speaks in Spanish)

If they find proof of these former estuaries,

it could point to an ancient civilisation.

Advanced civilisations like Atlantis always built their cities close to water.

(speaks in Spanish)

This broad perspective on the sea floor

shows us exactly what it looks like,

and where there are shapes pointing to a former estuary.

This case is a perfect example.

It's obvious that this used to be a riverbed.

Now it's covered by ocean floor. It's filled with sediments,

but the sonar allows us to detect the riverbed below the ocean floor.

Examining these riverbeds is key.

Getting closer to the riverbeds

means we're getting closer to where people built their settlements.

(speaks in Spanish)

(device beeps)

(rhythmic music)

The site they're looking for

is almost two kilometres off the coast.

Does the sea floor have something to show us?

Diving is the only way to find out.

They're looking for an ancient riverbed,

hoping to maybe even find the remains of a settlement.

(dramatic music)

(hissing air)

(diver splashes)

The researchers look for geological clues.

Nature leaves its marks, even after 10,000 years.

(beeping sound)

(underwater bubbling)

The divers find pebbles on the ocean floor that were clearly brought there by rivers.

(strings music)

Showing that this floor wasn't always covered by the sea.

A success for Claudio Lozano and his team.

They've found the estuary of a long-forgotten river,

and therefore maybe also a first glimpse into a human settlement.

But they're still a long way from finding actual proof

that Atlantis existed in southern Spain.

The searchers won't give up.

(pulsing music)

Richard Freund's hypothesis that Atlantis was a powerful harbour city near Gibraltar

remains one of several possibilities.

Atlantis has become a repository in our imagination

for all these lost lands that were before a flood

or some ancient, forgotten place.

And there are very real cities that were lost

to coastlines and the flooding that happened there.

It's possible that Atlantis is a kind of combination of real lost places

and some mythical notion of a time before time.

Santorini, an island in the Aegean Sea,

has been of interest to those looking for Atlantis for a while now.

Over 3,600 years ago,

a devastating eruption shook the island.

Nea Kameni is in the centre of the caldera.

To geologist Evi Nomikou, this is the epicentre of the catastrophe

that sealed the fate of all living beings for kilometres around,

an event that left its traces on history.

Nea Kameni has been created

due to the fact that it has

many different volcanic centres

that give lava.

(explosion)

We don't know of any other eruption more destructive

than the one in the 16th century BC.

It affected all civilisations across the eastern Mediterranean

and even destroyed the Minoan culture on Crete,

some 200 km away.

Some believe that Atlantis actually is Crete.

Two great civilisations existed around the Greek islands of Crete and Santorini,

the Cycladic and the Minoan cultures.

They were related to each other

and they shared some similarities with the Atlanteans,

as described by Plato.

So there's every chance that they were actually related to those people.

The volcanic eruption on Santorini triggers a tsunami,

wiping out all inhabited coastal regions in the eastern Mediterranean.

The northern hemisphere faces several years of winter.

The Minoan empire on Crete ceases to exist.

An actual natural catastrophe.

Is this the origin of the legend of Atlantis?

Evi Nomikou is looking for traces of a lost, advanced civilisation on Santorini.

She's heading to the Akrotiri excavation site.

Together with Joannis Bitis, an architect,

Evi visits the remains of a settlement

once covered by volcanic ash.

These cultural artefacts were hidden for thousands of years,

and weren't discovered until 1967.

Archaeologists are staggered by what they find here:

buildings, several stories high,

with sophisticated details.

This level of advancement can only be attributed to the Atlanteans,

according to Plato.

The special thing is that we have the chance to have

a very good preservation of the artefacts

and of the architecture of a pre-historic city.

The ash that covered all the entire city

helped all the materials and the buildings to survive

until our times.

The architectural style in Akrotiri is not typical for antiquity.

Large windows and up to three stories high.

Toilets inside buildings.

These must have been the homes of affluent people.

The lavatory is quite... a surprise for the archaeologist,

because usually we found these kind of...

places outside of the houses.

Instead, here we have already, 3,000 years ago,

the mentality of placing the lavatory inside the building.

They also find beautiful murals

showing women with precious jewels.

What happened to these people?

Were the residents of Akrotiri able to escape on boats?

By the time the eruption hits the city, everyone has already gone.

Here we can see a building, only one floor,

that has been covered completely by the huge volume of pumice.

So just in front of us,

at the bottom, you can distinguish the first layer of the Minoan eruption.

Up to now we didn't find any bodies, so we do believe

that the people escaped

before the last phase, before the main eruption started to be very destructive.

(blasting sound)

No dead bodies and no signs of survivors.

Just impressive evidence of a lost civilisation.

The finds are preserved in the pre-historic museum

in the island's capital Fira.

Kostas Sakavaras might be the greatest expert when it comes to these artefacts

and their history. Proudly he presents a table.

So this is the plaster cast of a very elaborate piece of furniture.

It shows us the sophistication level of this ancient society,

because it's a piece that very much reminds us also of modern pieces.

(dramatic drumming)

The wood of the table burned in the heat of the eruption.

All that remains is a detailed cast.

Thousands of objects tell the story

of an incredibly rich city that disappeared.

(Kostas) This is foreign pottery found in Akrotiri.

-(Evi) Okay. -So we have Aegina, we have...

Greek mainland. We have also islands, nearby islands like Kea or Naxos.

-Okay. -Or even a bit farther islands, Kos.

-Dodecanese region. -Yeah.

And definitely Crete, which was a superpower of its time.

The collection even contains objects from the Middle East and Egypt.

Little boxes for perfumes, jewellery and artistic vases.

It tells us that this is an affluent society

that had covered its very basic survival needs,

and had an appetite also for some luxury-ware,

exotic stuff that was brought from other places.

So it seems to be that the place in Akrotiri or the Atladic City,

was the centre of that civilisation.

So it seems to be a commercial centre of the eastern Mediterranean.

A fresco that was well preserved also points to the importance of trade.

The image has scientists' heads turning.

Does it depict Atlantis?

Many details match: a large fleet,

the capital surrounded by water and red rocks, just as Plato describes it.

Red rocks can be seen on Santorini to this day.

Are they leading us to Atlantis?

All these rocks are very old rocks, and they

have not been covered by the Minoan deposits.

You can see that the red is the red scoria, full of iron. Okay?

And from the frescoes, you can imagine

that the port, a separate port, was also located in this area.

(suspenseful music)

Astonishing parallels.

Did the heart of the story of Atlantis take place here on Santorini?

A port from which residents escaped when the volcano erupted?

I do think that Atlantis existed.

Yes, it's a very good story. But all great stories

do have an element of truth deep down inside them.

But one thing doesn't add up in the Santorini theory.

According to Plato, Atlantis is located

beyond the Pillars of Hercules, behind Gibraltar.

Researchers and explorers are looking for Atlantis almost everywhere in the world.

In the Bahamas, in Brazil, in the Canary Islands,

in the North Sea, or on Sri Lanka.

Central America is among the top candidates.

The founding myth of the Aztecs is said to contain clues.

It refers to a mythical place called Aztlán.

And it's not just the name that bears a striking resemblance to Atlantis.

Aztlán is also said to have been located on an island.

In the 14th century, the Aztecs build

their huge capital, Tenochtitlan, in a lake in Mexico.

Are they reminiscing about their sunken hometown of Atlantis?

But how would Greek philosopher Plato have come to hear about a story

from Central America almost 2,000 years before Columbus?

One of the reasons why Atlantis is so curious and fascinating

has to do with the way it may or may not play into ancient civilizations.

If it does play a role, it's probably as this

seafaring culture that's extended across a kind of nodal network.

The other thing about Atlantis is that it represents a time

before the flood, just like Eden.

So it's kind of this mythic memory of an ancient past.

Michael Oettel thinks he knows where Atlantis is located.

On his YouTube channel, he spends his time investigating great myths.

Oettel believes Atlantis was discovered a long time ago,

in a place that's now far away from the sea.

(German dubbed into English) Hello and welcome to a new episode on my channel.

Today, we're looking into the theory of Atlantis

and whether this city really existed.

Or is it just a legend?

Today we're going to get to the bottom of this question.

It's been investigated many times, and some believe this ancient civilisation

was based in Santorini, or somewhere along the Spanish coast.

But today we want to talk about a structure first discovered in 1965

during the Gemini 4 mission.

It can only really be seen from space

and is located in western Africa.

It is called the "Eye of the Sahara", or the "Richat Structure".

There's a rock formation in Mauritania, in western Africa,

that really looks like an eye.

Or like the island city of Atlantis?

In the beginning, experts believed this structure was a crater from a meteor.

But nothing points to an impact.

Michael Oettel sees another parallel to Atlantis.

In his works, Plato writes that Atlantis consisted of three rings of water

and two rings of land, and we can actually see this here.

The central island, the first and second rings of land,

separated by rings of water.

So in total there are three aquatic rings and two terrestrial rings.

Of course, we're still left wondering

whether this is a natural structure, or one that is man-made.

An island city without any water?

But this area wasn't always a desert.

In the last ice age, there were rivers and freshwater lakes in northern Africa.

Oettel shows us footage from an expedition to the Eye of the Sahara.

If you're standing inside the rings, they look like mountain ranges.

Only once you're far away

are you able to imagine this area was once inhabited.

An important discovery: a well.

To this day, caravans take a break in the Eye of the Sahara

to fill up on their water supply.

Could a well like this also have been the Atlanteans' freshwater source?

And how is it possible that this structure in the Sahara

points to the home of a once-great naval power?

Michael Oettel subscribes to the theory

that the sea level was much higher 10,000 years ago

and only dropped after the last ice age.

Simulating the sea level over time, Oettel notices something.

If you raise the sea level to 425 metres,

you can see clearly that this structure, as Plato described,

has a natural opening in the south, so boats could go in and out.

Atlantis in the Sahara? Geologists debunk the theory.

The ring-shaped mountains were caused by volcanic forces.

They were not man-made.

There are a lot of supernatural theories out there that you have to locate.

Atlantis serves as a kind of blank screen

onto which we can project these ideas, these stories

of fallen civilizations, aliens, you name it.

Atlantis fuels people's imagination and ambition.

If someone were to find Plato's city,

they would be famous around the world.

Dieter Bremer is captivated by a completely new theory.

If you read Plato's original text correctly,

he says, you shouldn't look for Atlantis on Earth.

(German dubbed into English)

Well, I would look for Atlantis where Plato said it was.

(speaks in German)

One often wonders, what is the Atlantean Sea?

It reminds me of the titan Atlas who carried the sky.

So following this logic,

the Atlantean Sea could also be considered the celestial sea.

(speaks in German)

The former chemical engineer is looking for Atlantis

from the perspective of technology.

He believes that the Atlanteans

were far more progressive than any other ancient civilisation.

Literally supernatural.

(German dubbed into English)

Based on my findings, Atlantis was a concentric ring system in the sky

revolving around itself.

This means it was a generational space craft,

a mother ship, a huge space station that was home to a civilisation.

(speaks in German)

And these people visited Earth,

astronauts that were so technologically advanced

that they must have seemed like gods to the Stone Age humans on Earth.

(speaks in German)

(orchestra plays Beethoven Symphony No. 9)

Atlantis... a circular space station in orbit?

(orchestra plays Beethoven Symphony No. 9)

Bremer's hypothesis builds on the idea of ancient astronauts,

which was made famous by writer Erich von Däniken.

According to this theory, there were astronaut gods

who gave knowledge and technology to humanity,

namely in the form of crystal energy.

(mysterious tones)

Some believe that this also explains the Egyptian pyramids and hieroglyphs.

(mysterious tones)

(German dubbed into English)

The theory involving ancient astronauts is popular among esoterics.

This is where Atlantis fits in.

These people claim that Atlantis, just like the pyramids or the Nazca Lines,

has been created by extraterrestrials,

as they simply cannot fathom that ancient people

were able to create such advanced things.

(mysterious tones)

Dieter Bremer thinks

he's found evidence corroborating his theory in various ancient civilisations.

Are they depicting space stations?

(German dubbed into English)

I can see elements of Atlantis in many concentric ring systems,

or systems consisting of a ring and a cross.

You can find similar traditions everywhere in the world.

Atlantis in space?

We likely won't find any artefacts out there.

A critical interpretation of Plato's text could also be worthwhile.

Is the author even trying to describe a real place?

He's writing about a war between Atlantis and Athens.

Plato creates Atlantis

as the arrogant, overconfident monarchy which threatens the survival

of his ideal state, represented by ancient Athens.

It's an allegory which contrasts

the arrogance and overbearing state of the monarchy

with the ideal nation-state, democracy as described by Plato.

In a way, Plato's asking us to think about our ideas about power and government.

(dramatic music)

That means Atlantis is only an allegory

used to illustrate the victory of democracy over monarchy.

(German dubbed into English)

If the battles between Athens and Atlantis did take place,

there would be more testimonies than just Plato's,

because unlike Troy and Delphi, Atlantis is not featured in any recorded history.

(blasting sound)

Could it be that Atlantis is just pure fiction?

A tale from ancient Greece?

Many researchers think

Plato's descriptions are too realistic for that to be true.

Richard Freund believes

in the existence of an ancient superpower destroyed by a natural catastrophe.

He says a tsunami in Doñana National Park in southern Spain

put an end to the capital's brilliant presence.

According to his theory, the tsunami washed away the city.

A picture taken from space reinforces his theory.

Satellite images seem to show strange patterns.

Do they point to Atlantis?

Plato describes a harbour city with three circular basins,

even providing exact measurements.

Do they match the structures in the satellite images?

Is the rectangular shape in the centre the foundation of Poseidon's Atlantean temple?

(pulsing music)

A local inspection in the mostly uninhabited Doñana National Park.

At the very highest point, the Cerro del Trigo,

Richard Freund describes how the search for Atlantis here in Spain

became his mission in life.

Now what's interesting about all the years we did this work

is that it all started with this...

space photography, from the 1980s.

You could see rectangles, circles, straight lines.

And all these don't occur in nature.

(dramatic music)

We need evidence of massive building

inside the park.

Then together with the textual information,

together with the photography,

maybe we could say that this is the best location.

Excavations started in the middle of the park in 1920, but were never finished.

Today the area is protected.

New excavations... impossible.

(engine turns off)

(suspenseful music)

The site looks just as archaeologists left it 100 years ago.

Richard Freund and his son, Ethan, are looking for clues.

A rock is sticking out of the ground.

Or is it a piece of masonry,

maybe dating back to the Bronze Age?

It would be the first real piece of evidence

Richard Freund can use to support his Atlantis theory.

Will years of work finally pay off?

(rhythmic music)

We're going to measure this this edge.

Then I want to measure this edge.

This is a right angle. There are no right angles in nature.

This is something that was man-made.

Five metres long.

Almost a perfect right angle.

Freund hopes to have found the outer walls

of a large building.

So we have one clear section of the wall.

What's very specific about this

is this stone looks like it's been cut.

It reflects human activity because it has right angles.

Right angles only appear in human activity, not in nature.

(dramatic music)

A stone that looks like a wall.

A single, but valuable piece of evidence?

Freund wants to believe it.

So you can see the same kinds of shells

that we saw out on the beach.

And they're embedded in this marl that's attached to the rock,

which is not indigenous to this area.

So this was all brought in and you could see that it's all...

part of a massive rock,

that, with the marl on top,

that was embedded in the earth right here.

Atlantis, buried beneath the Spanish swamp.

To Freund this is more than a theory.

This is the last piece of the puzzle.

You look at that and you say to yourself, what is it?

Well, sometimes big things come in small packages.

And this is a massive wall

that is embedded in the sand.

It's unlike anything else. And for all intents and purposes,

there should be no major stone like that

in this entire area, and yet it's there.

Spain or Santorini?

Evi Nomikou is able to provide solid evidence of a big city

on the island during antiquity.

And that a volcanic explosion destroyed everything.

Using a glove, she demonstrates how the explosion went down.

So imagine that this is the magmatic chamber of Santorini.

It's full of magma and it's beneath Santorini volcano.

So what we are going to do, we will show how Atlantis...

disappeared.

Hundreds of metres underneath the surface,

the pressure inside the magma chamber continues to rise.

So this is Atlantis, just at the top of the volcanic cone

of the Pre-Kameni island.

(dramatic music)

The eruption empties the chamber.

It collapses and brings everything down with it.

There's a huge caldera. But Atlantis has disappeared

under the very many layers of sediments.

Is the ancient city on Santorini really Atlantis?

The evidence is still too scant.

(rhythmic music)

Evi Nomikou and her colleague, Othonas Vlasopoulos,

want to take a closer look at the mega-crater.

The volcano is largely immersed in the sea.

(sound of swells)

(rhythmic music)

So this is a small robot.

This is a small ROV. We call it Jason.

And we will explore the sea floor

very close to Nea Kameni just to see the morphology of the lava

that is cooling down on the sea floor.

Eight engines and three cameras.

You cannot... I'm doing it slowly, slowly.

The robot takes over for the divers

and provides high-resolution images.

(indistinct radio chatter)

Jason passes by lava solidified quite some time ago.

The sea floor has been shaped by a powerful volcanic event.

(indistinct comments)

(strings music)

And at last!

-A discovery. -Evi! Evi, come. Come and see something.

(Evi) Okay.

-Be extra-careful. Okay, show me. -Look at this.

Wow! What are these?

-It feels like steps. -Yes, definitely. These are steps.

(Evi) But can you move towards this side?

Underwater stairs?

Could they belong to a former harbour?

To Evi Nomikou, these images are another step on the way to finding Atlantis.

But they will need to conduct more dives

to find out whether these steps are man-made

or a product of nature.

I believe that

there was a magic city just in the middle of the caldera,

and that city has been destroyed completely.

But we need to search more and explore more.

And when we find some evidence from the sea floor,

not something that we will find on land,

then I will be completely sure that Santorini was Atlantis.

(dramatic music)

Was Plato describing a real city

and an actual catastrophe after all?

Is there at least some truth to his story?

If there is, there must be traces.

No culture, no civilisation the size of Atlantis

could ever be totally destroyed.

So we question what happened to the survivors.

Are the descendants of the Atlanteans still living among us?

Will we ever find real proof?

One thing is certain.

So advanced is modern historical research and modern archaeology

that if it did exist, we'd definitely be able to find it.

So we just need to keep looking and to keep digging.

Or does it turn out that Atlantis is nothing but a myth?

A message from Plato warning us not to be too greedy and arrogant?

We are still fascinated by the myth of Atlantis

because it's about the destruction of an advanced civilisation.

Today we think we're at the peak of civilisation,

but what Atlantis shows us is that even we are vulnerable.

It's a terrifying story, but one that we are actually attracted to.

An allegory for a downfall...

or an echo of a real civilisation?

Atlantis remains an unsolved mystery.

(Narrator) Pharaohs - rulers of ancient Egypt.

And one of them has long been forgotten.

His tomb holds countless secrets: Tutankhamun.

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

unleashed the curse.

After the tomb was opened, 17 people who were either directly

or indirectly involved die.

Has a deadly curse been placed upon this grave?

What is behind these mysterious deaths?

We give curses such great power simply because we cannot control them.

Are all these incidents linked to something that happened more than 3,000 years ago?

Does the mummy provide any clues?

(German dubbed in English)

Howard Carter cut off its entire head,

damaging it in the process.

The curse of the pharaoh. Can this be backed up by science?

(dramatic music)

The great myths of mankind.

Mysteries passed on over thousands of years.

Inexplicable events, places shrouded in legend,

and superhuman heroes.

Even scientists are fascinated.

Is there any truth to these ancient legends?

Researchers across the globe are working hard

to solve the greatest mysteries of our time.

Egypt.

The oldest advanced civilization in history.

Superpower of the ancient world.

Powerful pharaohs ruled the country for over 3,000 years.

Feared by their enemies and worshipped as gods

by their loyal subjects.

All trying to expand their power

while also solidifying their legacy

for future generations.

The key to making their mark on history:

unique structures like temples, tombs and the pyramids.

Structures made to immortalize the pharaohs,

shrouded in mystery to this very day.

Thebes, in southern Egypt. Home to the Valley of the Kings.

Unlike the famous pyramids, the tombs in this region remain hidden at first glance.

The idea is to make it harder for tomb raiders to find the treasures.

Ali Reda is Inspector of Antiquities of Upper Egypt.

He knows everything about all the tombs and their stories.

(Arabic dubbed in English)

What makes the Valley of the Kings special is that it's an arid region.

Everything the ancient Egyptians placed in their tombs

was able to stay intact and in good shape.

In 1922, the valley is the scene of a global sensation.

Archaeologist Howard Carter conducts large excavation works.

He wants to find treasures, gold, grave offerings, mummies.

Ten years on, his financier, Lord Carnarvon,

no longer believes that anything great will be found

and signals his desire to cut off funding.

Carter convinces him to give him one last chance.

The explorer sets off on his last dig in the Valley of the Kings.

And he's lucky.

One of his workers comes across a secret opening with a stairway.

On November 4th, 1922, Carter sends a telegram to England:

"At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley. Stop.

A magnificent tomb with seals intact. Stop.

Recovered same for your arrival. Stop.

Carter."

Two weeks later, Lord Carnarvon travels to the Valley of the Kings.

It would be his last journey.

On this occasion, the men find Tutankhamun's tomb by pure chance.

Other tombs were actually built over the top of Tutankhamun's tomb

and the rubble from that construction fell down in front of the entrance,

which means that his grave was perfectly preserved and perfectly hidden

until Carter came along and created a real Egyptian hype with his discovery.

Howard Carter breaks open the first door and lets Lord Carnarvon go first.

The men have to clear the way leading down an 8-metre-long hallway.

The find was such a big sensation because the grave was untouched,

and that was very rare indeed.

Most Egyptian graves had long been robbed by grave robbers.

But this one was absolutely perfect

and it created a wave of interest in all things Egyptian.

The news about the untouched tomb belonging to a pharaoh

makes international headlines.

Egyptomania swept the globe in the 1920s.

The nobility liked to collect Egyptian treasures and have Egyptian-themed parties

where they would wear extravagant tunics and be fanned with palm fronds.

And at the end of the party they would unwrap a mummy.

(piano music)

Since the beginning of the 19th century, mummies were unwrapped for fun

and sometimes ground for their questionable medicinal properties.

The Egyptian theme is picked up in theatres, literature and cinemas.

Howard Carter's spectacular find adds to the hysteria.

Films often feature tombs, living mummies, explorers and purported curses.

In the Valley of the Kings,

Carter uncovers hieroglyphs

revealing the name of the deceased:

Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Up until then, he was just a completely anonymous Egyptian king.

The objects Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter find behind a stone wall

exceed all expectations.

Treasures, gold, furniture, grave offerings

all piled on top of each other in a seemingly careless heap.

Pots full of food, chariots, god figurines.

Carnarvon and Carter are looking at one of the greatest archaeological finds ever.

But soon, inexplicable events start to unfold.

With every piece they take out of the pharaoh's vault,

the ire of the golden king seems to grow.

A first casualty sends shockwaves through the excavation team.

Lord Carnarvon, the financier, dies.

His son, the 6th Earl of Carnarvon,

recalls the strange events of the night of his father's death.

The lights went out in the hotel.

I didn't know they'd gone out all over Cairo, but they did,

in point of fact. Every light went out.

(mysterious tones)

Was the lord sentenced to death because he entered the pharaoh's tomb first?

Some people thought he died of the curse.

Well, I can tell you a great deal about that, as I was there at the time.

He happened to be bitten by a mosquito, and what did he do?

He cut the pimple off his face in the night,

or in the morning when he shaved,

and he said at lunch, "I feel awful."

Supposedly, at the very hour of Carnarvon's death,

his dog Susie dropped dead in faraway England.

After the death of Lord Carnarvon,

the story of the pharaoh's curse really gained international momentum,

also because of various other bizarre events associated with it,

the death of his dog and also the power cut at the time of his death.

But at the time power cuts really were very common in Cairo

and it did have nothing to do with his death.

Yet another sensation making global headlines:

First the discovery of the tomb

and now the deadly curse of the pharaoh.

The curse gave the press a juicy story. It led to serious mystery,

which excited not just the journalists, but their audiences.

Now if you want a story to be well-known, make it a secret.

17 people die, allegedly from the curse of the pharaoh.

Among the dead include X-ray expert Archibald Douglas Reid,

Lord Carnarvon's half-brother Aubrey Herbert,

Arthur Mace, Carter's right hand,

Lady Almina, Carnarvon's wife,

and Prince Ali Fahmy Bey,

who claims to be a descendant of Tutankhamun.

Is the tomb really the cause of all these deaths?

Ali Reda, Inspector of Antiquities of Upper Egypt,

enters KV62.

That's the official name of the legendary vault.

The treasures have been removed from the tomb,

but the original mummy of King Tutankhamun is on display.

Does the ancient corpse have sinister powers that haunt us in the present?

(Arabic dubbed in English)

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb unleashed the curse.

The facts surrounding the tomb are somewhat obscure.

The young king was very mysterious.

He took the throne when he was eight or nine years old, and died at 18 or 19.

A child really.

Who was this mysterious pharaoh?

Why do people live in fear of his curse to this day?

Young Tutankhamun grew up in the royal palace.

He was the son of Akhenaton, a revolutionary pharaoh.

(suspenseful music)

When Akhenaton ascended to the throne, he ordered all temples to be closed

and banned the old gods.

The people were only allowed to worship the sun.

He and his spouse, the beautiful Nefertiti,

were also to be treated like gods.

After Akhenaton's death,

his young son Tutankhamun succeeded him.

Ten years later, he too died

Tutankhamun completely disappeared from the history books after his death.

So without finding his tomb,

we'd probably still not know about this pharaoh to this very day.

This is what makes Carter's excavations so spectacular.

His team uncovers almost 6,000 objects in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun,

a king previously unknown to the modern world.

Gold, furniture, everyday objects

all helping to expand our knowledge about the ancient Egyptians.

The Egyptians believe that life did not end with death.

In fact, that a better life followed.

So Egyptians were buried with everything they could possibly need,

with drinks, with food, with games, with furniture, even with servants.

The world is amazed by the splendor of the pharaoh's tomb.

Carter empties the grave.

Meanwhile, a growing number of people close to him die.

Is the pharaoh taking revenge for the desecration his grave?

(suspenseful music)

Excavations are still being carried out in the Valley of the Kings to this day.

Just 200 meters away from Tutankhamun's tomb,

a Dutch team is examining layers of rock.

(pulsating music)

Egyptologist Carina van den Hoven is heading the mission.

She and her team recently found this skull.

Time and again, the rocks reveal human remains.

Van den Hoven hopes to learn more about the tomb and those who were buried there.

The mysterious deaths that occurred

following Carter's excavation don't bother her.

(Dutch dubbed in English)

People sometimes ask me about the curse of the pharaoh,

and if those working with these human remains could be haunted by the curse.

But I think the man buried here

would be quite pleased if he knew what we were doing in this tomb.

Still, the alleged curse of the pharaoh

continues to strike fear into the hearts of many.

We give curses such great power simply because we cannot control them.

They can introduce such uncertainty and devastation into our lives

that we cannot control.

But we want to try and protect ourselves from that.

The idea that someone can actually impact our lives in a negative sense

from beyond the grave is disturbing.

Carter is unfazed by the headlines about the curse.

He wants to get a hold of the last and greatest treasure: the pharaoh's mummy.

And so he sets out to access the coffin's secret chamber,

knocking down ancient walls in his path.

(mysterious tones)

At long last, he arrives.

He finds himself in a small room with murals.

Carter has reached his goal.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Objects of great value taken from Tutankhamun's tomb

have found a new home here, including these large wooden shrines.

(Arabic dubbed in English)

This shrine was located within the three other shrines, behind a wall in the tomb.

Inside, they found four sarcophagi, placed one inside the other,

just like the Russian Matryoshka dolls, placed one inside another.

The same principle was applied here. Four large rooms, one built into the next,

home to those four sarcophagi. The last one contained the four coffins,

and was in the shrine back there. Come on, I'll show you!

This shrine was inside this one,

which was inside that one.

And this last shrine is the largest. It contained all the others.

Attila, king of the Huns, is said to have been buried in three coffins,

the outer one made of iron, the next made of silver, and the last one gold.

Napoleon, whose Egyptian expedition paved the way

that led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs, is buried in four coffins.

(Arabic dubbed in English)

Why four shrines and four coffins?

According to ancient Egyptian teachings, four pillars held up the firmament.

Burying the king between four pillars

meant his body would contain the four corners of the universe,

over which he'd rule from the afterlife.

For Howard Carter, the days following the opening of the final chamber

are agonizingly long.

The wooden shrines need to be disassembled and removed from the site.

Rumor has it that Carter's actions only served to strengthen the curse's grip.

Did ancient Egyptians really put a curse on their tombs?

One trace leads us to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.

Here, thousands of texts bear witness to the mysterious knowledge

of times long past.

Egyptologist Verena Lepper is researching the curses

from the time of the pharaohs.

Magic played a prominent role in ancient Egyptian religious tradition.

They believed in higher beings, in a higher power,

which is why they worshipped nature.

Magic and spells were an integral part of ancient Egyptian life.

It was also popular to make predictions about the future.

Many of the spells were meant to help their love lives.

Others, however, were intended to hurt or kill their enemies.

(German dubbed in English)

This one is about punishing an unfaithful wife.

They threw a wax crocodile into some water,

and the crocodile came to life.

It turned into a large, real crocodile

that snatched the adulterer as a punishment.

There's magic for every sphere of life and every budget.

Professional magicians and priests offer it as a service.

(mysterious melody)

Even graves are cursed.

Grave robbers beware. If they continue, they will die an agonizing death.

(Lepper speaks German)

The ancient Egyptians would write spells on pottery or pieces of it.

And then they destroyed them,

threw them onto the ground,

releasing the spell.

Did Howard Carter destroy such a piece of pottery when he entered the tomb,

essentially pulling the trigger on the curse without ever realizing it?

A pottery tablet engraved with the words,

"Death shall come on swift wings to him that touched the tomb of the pharaoh",

was reportedly found inside the tomb.

But it has since disappeared, never to be found again.

More than 3,300 years after the pharaoh died,

Carter and his crew made their way to Tutankhamun's tomb.

It was the beginning of a mysterious series of deaths.

Why did they not listen to the warnings about the curse?

(Arabic dubbed in English)

The tomb is surrounded by four patron goddesses.

They're said to protect the coffin and mummy of King Tutankhamun to this day.

All treasures have been retrieved from the grave

and are now in museums and private collections across the world.

Only the massive stone sarcophagus is still exactly where it was placed.

(in Arabic)

There was a general warning regarding all tombs in the Valley of Kings:

(in Arabic)

All those who get near them will be punished.

(in Arabic))

To the pharaohs, tomb raiders presented the greatest threat

to their eternal life in the afterworld.

Is that why they cursed their graves?

(suspenseful music)

In the tomb of Ramses VI, the warning to the tomb robbers is very clear.

(Reda speaks Arabic)

Decapitated people, bound at their hands behind their back.

That's a warning.

Anyone who dares enter the King's burial chamber

will have their head cut off and will be bound from behind.

They will have to spend the rest of their lives that way.

(in Arabic)

We know all of the finds were meticulously recorded and photographed,

and there's no mention of it in Howard Carter's notes.

However, there's every chance it was actually not spoken of

for fear of arousing superstition from the local workers,

and also, Carter was rumored to be embezzling finds.

So perhaps he made that tablet disappear.

(suspenseful music)

An ancient curse causing deaths in the 20th century?

For decades, this mystery keeps scientists on their toes,

until one day, disturbing reports from Krakow, Poland, make headlines,

events with striking resemblance to series of deaths in the Valley of the Kings.

On Friday the 13th April 1973,

researchers opened the grave of King Casimir IV.

Shortly thereafter, five of them die.

Whispers about the "curse of the king" are quick to circulate.

Wiesław Barabasz was there in Krakow when the tomb was opened.

The former microbiology professor, who was then a young research assistant,

was allowed to assist in the exhumation of the king.

(Polish dubbed in English)

Five people died within two years.

That's when the case took a really fascinating turn.

(in Polish)

People suddenly remembered all the warnings about opening tombs

and letting the kings rest in peace.

(in Polish)

Casimir IV ruled over Poland for 45 years

in the 15th century.

The economy and the culture of the country flourished.

It was a golden era.

To this day, Casimir is highly respected in Poland.

But that's not why the opening of his tomb makes headlines.

Ten of the workers and researchers involved die within years.

A parallel to the curse of the pharaoh?

They die of heart attacks, strokes and pneumonia.

Could these causes all be linked to the grave

that they opened in Krakow?

Casimir's burial chamber had been sealed for centuries, like the pharaoh's tomb,

and with equally dangerous consequences.

(speaks Polish)

We grew the different bacteria and fungi in petri dishes.

And then we saw it:

Aspergillus flavus fungus.

It turns out it's one of the most dangerous and toxic fungi.

(mysterious melody)

If the spores of the toxic mycelium are inhaled,

secretions and blood cells from the blood vessels enter the alveoli,

leaving behind protein deposits.

As a result, the oxygen intake capacity of the lungs is reduced.

This can be life-threatening, especially for people with pre-existing conditions.

The researchers in Krakow didn't wear protective masks in the centuries-old tomb

which, unlike the Valley of the Kings, was quite humid.

The perfect environment for the Aspergillus flavus fungus.

Its spores kill the scientists.

But could the highly toxic fungus also be behind the so-called curse of the pharaoh?

Lord Carnarvon was first to enter the recently opened tomb of the pharaoh

and the first to die.

Protective gear like masks or gloves? None.

To make matters worse, Carnarvon also suffered from lung problems.

Eventually researchers give the all-clear.

The Aspergillus mycelium cannot thrive in the dry Egyptian air.

The Krakow lead is a dead end.

The curse of the pharaoh remains a mystery.

The Zurich Institute of Evolutionary Medicine.

Professor Rühli knows mummies have to be handled with much care.

He's examined Tutankhamun various times. He's not too fond of Howard Carter

(German dubbed in English)

When Howard Carter and his team discovered the grave in 1922,

and examined the mummy in 1925,

his team had little to no background in medicine.

Evidently the main focus was on the artefacts, and you can tell.

They didn't handle the mummy the way we would today from a medical perspective.

I'm not judging. It was a different time,

a different question, a different approach.

(drumming music)

What did Howard Carter do to the mummy to get his hands on the gold?

(drumming continues)

For days, his team was trying to open the huge stone sarcophagus.

Inside, they found coffin

after coffin

after coffin.

All tightly placed one in the other, with barely an inch of wiggle room.

Carter needed to build special tools

so they wouldn't destroy the wooden coffins or the intarsia.

Eventually they discovered the golden mask.

Howard Carter is overwhelmed by what he's found

and wants to present the golden mask as soon as possible.

He desperately tries to lift the mummy from the sarcophagus.

But due to the resin used to embalm the mummy, it sticks to the coffin.

Carter ends up putting the wooden coffin in the blistering sun for two days.

He hopes the resin will soften so he can finally be able to see the pharaoh's face.

Howard Carter cut off its entire head, damaging it in the process.

Howard Carter disassembles the mummy into individual parts.

He thinks this is the best way to display the treasures.

Only later does Carter realize that he has gone too far.

(Rühli) Some of the parts that were severed have been put back together,

so the damage is only visible to a certain extent.

They wanted to make it look like they left the body more or less intact

to future generations.

Professor Rühli has not only examined Tutankhamun, but also Ötzi,

the most famous and oldest natural mummy in the world.

The Iceman was found in 1991 by mountaineers in an alpine glacier.

His body has been mummified over thousands of years by the frigid temperatures

and is amazingly well preserved.

But once again, some of those involved in the excavation of Ötzi

died within years.

The case was soon labeled "Ötzi's curse",

and maybe the way the mummy was handled was the reason behind it once again.

Like Tutankhamun, people touched and examined the mummy with their bare hands.

The only difference: gold and treasures

don't play a role in Ötzi's case,

researchers are only after the insights the mummy can provide.

To better control these factors in the future,

the Swiss researcher wants to examine mummies directly on site.

(indistinct voices)

With his colleague Patrick Eppenberger,

Prof. Rühli is currently working on a 3,000-year-old foot.

It is crucial that their DNA

not be mixed with the mummy's.

It can't be touched without gloves.

The special thing about this technique is

we have the option of using 3D imaging.

We obtain an image that isn't like X-ray but rather a CT,

allowing us to view the object in 3D form.

Modern technology could have saved Tutankhamun's mummy a lot of trouble.

But after more than 3,300 years, and despite state-of-the-art research methods,

the mummy of the pharaoh still keeps its secret.

(indistinct voices)

(German dubbed in English)

This machine is still a prototype. We developed it ourselves.

It can be taken apart completely, and it actually fits into two small boxes,

so it can be transported on a plane.

It allows us to examine the individual layers of mummies' body parts very well.

Ötzi's cause of death is clear.

It also reveals a lot of information about the life of Europe's most famous mummy.

From a medical perspective, we always try to make diagnoses

when examining ancient Egyptian mummies.

The same applies to mummies like Ötzi.

We want to see if things have changed

as a result of the different lifestyle we live today, or because of other pathogens.

We're always trying to learn something about these dynamics

and how we interact with our environment.

Every mummy can contribute to this quest.

While Ötzi was murdered, the researchers

and alpinists who died after his find were not cursed,

but rather died of old age,

had a lifestyle prone to risk,

or pre-existing conditions.

We really want to understand this new knowledge excavating the tomb can give us.

But in our minds, even possibly unconsciously,

we know it's wrong to disturb the dead,

to not respect them.

And because of this we undergo this ethical dilemma,

which results in a curse.

Thus the key to the Tutankhamun case does not lie in parallels to other famous cases.

But what makes the pharaoh so unique?

Does his short life hold any clues?

Why did the Egyptian king die?

Was he killed?

X-rays from 1969 show splintered bones on the mummy's skull.

Again, some are quick to bring up the curse of the pharaoh.

The Valley of the Kings, 2005.

Zahi Hawass was chief Egyptologist at the time

and wanted to examine the pharaoh on-site,

using state-of-the-art technology.

The scientists don't believe in a curse and simply want

to retrieve information from the mummy.

Today a team of Egyptian archeologists and technicians

examine the mummy for the first time by CT scanning.

And the purpose of this examination is really to look inside King Tut.

To find out the cause of his death.

Once more, the Golden King is not left to rest in peace.

Once more, strange things start to happen.

While examining the mummy, the technological equipment goes haywire.

The computer starts malfunctioning.

But eventually the scan works

and the researchers receive 1,700 images of the mummy. The verdict:

Tutankhamun wasn't killed.

But still, there's something odd about the mummy.

The puzzling thing about Tutankhamun's body is that it appears burned.

Now that's a very strange thing to do to a body if you want it to last for centuries.

But maybe it was the natural result of the embalming process the body went through.

In ancient Egypt, pharaohs were embalmed before the funeral

in an elaborate process lasting up to 70 days.

This was meant to make sure the soul would recognize the body in the otherworld.

The body was thoroughly cleansed.

The inner organs and the brain were removed.

The body was covered in sodium bicarbonate, dehydrating it completely

to prevent decomposition.

(mysterious tones)

Back in Zurich at the Institute for Evolutionary Medicine,

Professor Rühli is using animal organs

to conduct research on historical mummification techniques.

The mummification process in ancient Egypt likely lasted several weeks.

It's hard to reconstruct because we've only got limited knowledge

about how the Egyptians carried out this sacred process.

We're trying to simulate the process

using substances similar to those available in Egypt at the time.

We're using fresh pig organs from the slaughterhouse.

We used them to reconstruct the different steps of the mummification process.

The art of mummification was only passed on orally, from father to son,

or from master to apprentice.

Professor Rühli can only guess the exact details.

But the researcher has an explanation

as to why Tutankhamun's mummy is dark-colored.

(Rühli speaks German)

Tutankhamun's mummy is quite dark, black-tinted.

Some think the mummy also looks burnt. But I'm rather skeptical about that.

I think it has more to do with the fact that the embalming fluids had properties

that caused the skin to change color.

Similar to the embalmed pig's liver that has almost turned black.

(Rühli speaks German)

We're looking at a pig's liver

which has already changed after several weeks.

We first dried it in sodium bicarbonate,

treated it in oils and beeswax, and at the end,

we covered it with bitumen, this tar-like substance.

The liver has flattened. It's become thin.

But it's got the typical look and texture of mummified organs

that one could also find in an ancient Egyptian mummy.

(speaks German)

(mysterious tones)

At the end of the procedure, the mummified heart is placed back into the body.

Usually.

But Tutankhamun's heart is missing from his mummy. Why?

Without a heart, the Egyptians believe a pharaoh cannot live on in the afterlife.

(traditional music)

Eternal life after death plays a pivotal role for ancient Egyptians.

The soul has to live on.

But certain steps need to be taken.

And this is where magic comes into play once again,

because the dead pharaoh has to face the judgment of the deceased.

(mysterious tones)

In this scene of the Book of the Dead,

the principles of justice and truth are weighed against the heart,

the person's life achievements, so to speak.

You can see the hieroglyph for heart here,

and this one is ma'at: justice, truth.

If they're in balance, the person is allowed to pass into the afterlife

for eternity.

The heart mustn't lie.

The monster is this primordial creature, which will devour the deceased

if the trial doesn't end with a ruling in their favor.

(speaks German)

Is the heartless mummy cursed?

Or did the sudden death, fast mummification

and hasty funeral lead to some embalming errors?

It remains unclear when Tutankhamun's heart was lost.

Based on their research, scientists agree

that Tutankhamun died when he was 19,

and apparently wasn't killed.

So what did kill the pharaoh?

(Rühli) There are various theories

saying he was run over by a chariot

and got injured in the process.

Based on current findings, however, I believe most of these injuries

are unfortunately the result of handling that took place in the 1920s.

But we're unable to prove that.

Many of the deaths in Carter's team are just as mysterious

as the pharaoh's fate.

Carter's assistant, Arthur Mace, dies at 53 for some inexplicable reason.

Unlike Howard Carter,

he's said to have believed in the curse of the pharaoh and even feared it.

Can curses really bring about bad luck?

(dramatic music)

At least to those who believe in them.

(creepy tones)

Görres Holst claims to be a magician.

He is convinced about the power that thoughts have

over the purely physical world.

Holst wants to demonstrate this in an experiment.

(speaks German)

A curse can also have a long-lasting effect if you design it that way.

You also have to keep in mind that curses aren't just for the living.

They also exist in the spiritual world where time ceases to exist as we know it.

Personally, I would assume a curse could still be in place after 1,000 years

if that was how it was intended to be.

Görres Holst sets the scene for a curse.

He asks invisible forces for assistance,

forces that exist only for those who believe in them.

I myself worship demons and underworld gods.

They allow me to access my powers.

The magician wants to place a curse

on the arrows of the archers.

The aim of the experiment is to make the cursed arrows less accurate.

Our three archers don't know what's coming.

They are simply told to prepare and warm up

as they would for a competition,

while the magician's task

is to curse the arrows to affect the archers' accuracy.

(dramatic music)

(arrows being fired and striking target)

I will once again center the arrows using my energy, so they don't hit the target.

Magician Görres Holst tries to cast a spell on the arrows

in order to alter the accuracy of our shooters.

(creepy tones)

(synth music)

Nicole Engel is a psychologist and behavioral therapist.

She's monitoring the experiment

and gets a first impression of the participants' mental strength.

Does the archers' psyche factor in

once they learn about the cursed arrows?

At this distance, hitting the target with this equipment shouldn't be an issue.

It's going to be fun.

First, the participants shoot three regular arrows.

This way can be determined how well the archers perform

without pressure or competition stress.

(arrows firing)

(arrows striking target)

(speaks German)

If I have seen that a curse or magic has worked for someone,

whether it's really true or not,

it might be more likely that I'm experiencing a nocebo effect,

meaning I believe a curse or cursed arrows could negatively affect my performance.

(speaks German)

Marek has a harder time than the others,

even with arrows that haven't been cursed.

Next, we start our experiment with the cursed arrows.

The archers have only been informed that the arrows have been manipulated,

and nothing more.

There you go.

There you go.

(speaks German)

Is there a noticeable difference?

(Camilo in German dubbed into English)

I tried to see if they're heavier and I checked the stiffness,

but I don't notice any differences.

(ominous tones)

Does the alleged curse affect the accuracy of the archers?

Does it really have an effect on the arrows,

or rather on the confidence of the archers?

(suspenseful music)

(arrows flying and striking target)

Olympian athlete Oleksander has

full control over the cursed arrows.

His performance is unaltered: he shoots accurately, as always.

It's a bit worse, but I would expect it to be in the range of variance.

It's typical for my shooting.

(Camilo) I had as many hits as in the first round.

Of course, in my mind, I was like,

"What has changed?" I don't know.

While Camilo thinks he feels something

but still hits the target, Marek struggles more.

I didn't notice anything unusual or different about the arrows,

so it was definitely more of a mental challenge for me.

I noticed I got nervous. That affected my technique a bit.

Mindset or real magic?

Did the curse work?

(Engel in German dubbed in English)

Two of the participants are able to control their mindsets rather well.

One of the pros, the one who's also been to the Olympic Games, said

"Of course I thought about it." But still, he managed to shoot well.

The other participant wasn't able to do that, because he let it get into his head.

Thoughts, feelings and our physiology or physical reactions are always connected.

If I can't get my thoughts under control,

things don't seem to work the way they usually do.

This is known as the nocebo effect.

Suggestion can affect our mind and body.

The nocebo effect is the bad big brother of the placebo effect.

Where the placebo effect suggests in your brain

there are positive outcomes to a particular sham treatment

and therefore you feel positive effects in your body or in your mind,

the nocebo effect does the exact opposite.

So by believing you'll have a negative outcome,

that manifests itself in you.

Subconscious processes in our brain. The power of imagination?

It was a test, but I think I had some influence on the outcome.

And please remember, I didn't want to harm them.

If I had crammed in more, if I had placed a real curse on these arrows,

it could've swept the guys off their feet

and it would have been irresponsible to send them out there.

I only cursed the arrows, nothing more.

The effect is different for each archer.

Those who believe in curses can feel the nocebo effect.

To scientists, there is only facts.

Also when it comes to the pharaoh.

DNA analysis and other examinations have shown

The beautiful golden mask hides a deformed face, marked by disease.

Tutankhamun's body shows clear signs of incest.

The young pharaoh was probably ill from birth.

He had a club foot.

This explains why there were about 130 canes in his tomb.

He also had an acute case of malaria.

His premature death might have been the result of disease,

incest, and a potential accident.

No murder took place.

But what was behind all those deaths, in Poland,

and after Ötzi's discovery, or in the Valley of the Kings?

It was no fungus and it was no curse.

These were explicable, natural causes of death.

Most of the deceased were old and had pre-existing conditions.

But again, the power of suggestion plays a role.

It was only after journalists linked the cases

that the myth of the curse of the pharaoh emerged.

The pharaoh died unexpectedly,

so his funeral in the Valley of the Kings had to be organized in haste.

The tomb required for his burial

hadn't been made yet,

so the young king had to make do with a tomb that didn't reflect his status.

Usually pharaohs had their tombs built while they were still alive.

Today, science has shown that Egyptian graves

were often used more than once.

Dr. Carina van den Hoven and her team

are currently looking into this topic in the Valley of the Kings.

(Hoven in Dutch dubbed n English)

This tomb was built for its owner in 1,400 BC.

His name was Djehuty and he's depicted here alongside his mother.

(speaks Dutch)

(speaks Dutch)

A couple of hundred years later,

the tomb was used by another family member, who we can also see here.

(speaks Dutch)

Scientists will continue conducting research on this grave for many years.

Whether their takeaways can be transferred to the young pharaoh Tutankhamun

is impossible to tell.

Even more so since scientists also have to go back and correct previous hypotheses.

We previously thought they re-used the tombs

out of convenience, for economic reasons,

because it was cheaper to use someone else's tomb.

But that's not true. Our research has shown

the act of re-using a tomb meant so much more.

(speaks Dutch)

The two deceased people had a lot in common. They were both called Djehuty.

They had the same profession, managing the Karnak Temple.

That indicates that the tomb wasn't re-used for practical purposes,

but rather for deeper reasons.

People were actually trying to reconnect with the past.

(mysterious tones)

Tutankhamun was a modest pharaoh.

Tutankhamun's story is so fascinating to us for several reasons,

partly because he was such an incredibly young king who died as a very young age,

but also because we are fascinated by Egyptian life,

by this amazing civilization that existed thousands of years ago

and has practically disappeared into the dust.

We love to hear these magical stories of kings and their adventures.

Associate that with the curse,

and you have an amazing story to hand down the generations.

Tutankhamun's death

marks the end of the 18th dynasty of pharaohs.

New dynasties take over.

The curse of the pharaoh remains a myth,

a media phenomenon,

a story that many just want to believe in.

And yet many mysteries about Tutankhamun himself remain, about his missing heart

or whether his unusual tomb

can also be explained by the theory that he,

like his father Akhenaton,

was to be erased from the history of the Pharaonic Empire.