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00:00Tonight on The Proof is Out There.
00:02The government has been unable to explain this photo for 70 years.
00:08Some think that this is definitive proof of extraterrestrials.
00:11Has a woolly mammoth been cloned and brought back from extinction?
00:15If this is CGI, I'll be impressed.
00:17Is that a legendary lake monster lurking in a Canadian lake?
00:21The general description is a giant serpentine animal with a horse-like head.
00:27And what's behind this strange ring over Beijing?
00:32I don't think anything can immediately explain this event.
00:39Around the globe are videos.
00:41What are those things?
00:43It's moving.
00:44Photos and sounds that defy explanation.
00:53We don't know where they come from, who made them, or how they operate.
00:56What are they?
00:58Some sort of bizarre mutation.
01:00What's exciting is nobody really knows.
01:02Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.
01:06I'm Tony Harris, and as a journalist for more than 30 years, I've followed the facts where they take me.
01:13Now I'm bringing that spirit of investigation to the world's strangest sounds and images.
01:19We'll analyze each one with top experts.
01:21It's a credible case.
01:24It's a credible video.
01:25And pass a verdict on what it is.
01:28This video is clearly faked.
01:30The Proof starts now.
01:32Good evening, and welcome to The Proof is Out There.
01:44Picture a typical UFO sighting.
01:46In your imagination, what time of day is it?
01:49Night, right?
01:51But our first case tonight features one of the oldest recorded instances of daytime flying saucers.
01:58And for the past 70 years, it's been deemed unexplained.
02:02Take a look.
02:03It's a muggy summer morning on July 16, 1952.
02:08Around 10 a.m., 21-year-old Shel Alpert, a Coast Guard seaman and naval photographer,
02:14is inside his photo lab at the air station in Salem, Massachusetts, cleaning his camera.
02:19Glancing out the window, he suddenly spots strange lights in the sky.
02:23Quickly, he snatches his camera off the desk and makes UFO history.
02:28Four mysterious lights appear in an asymmetrical V formation in the sky above the airfield to the right of some power plant smokestacks.
02:36The lights don't seem to resemble distinct geometric shapes, but instead resemble rough blobs of illumination.
02:43Journalist M.J. Benias speaks to the 70 years of street cred these blurry photos have earned in the UFO community.
02:50The fact that this came from a Navy photographer only lent to its credibility with the mainstream press at the time.
02:56And when this picture came out and was released, it definitely hit newspapers around the globe.
03:02The Alpert photos were eventually analyzed as part of the government's massive Project Blue Book UFO investigations.
03:09We know that there were professors from various universities, including Harvard, who looked at this picture.
03:14We also know that there were a lot of intelligence agencies and operatives trying to assess what was going on here.
03:19Of all the Project Blue Book reports between 1947 and 1969, thousands and thousands and thousands of photographs and reports were submitted.
03:30Only about 700 or so remain, according to the Air Force, unidentified.
03:35This photograph is one of those examples.
03:37In fact, the first recorded UFO sighting in U.S. history occurred in Massachusetts in 1639, when Governor John Winthrop recorded a sighting in his journal.
03:54According to Winthrop's journal, three locals he'd described as sober, discreet men, spotted a strange light in the night sky as they rode their boat through a marsh.
04:05They claimed it moved with great speed like an arrow to a neighboring town.
04:10People claim that this is a solid UFO story and it remains unknown to this day.
04:16Like the Winthrop diaries, the Alpert photos still spark debate.
04:20Some think that this is definitive proof of extraterrestrials, and others think this is just a smudge on a lens.
04:28The time of day may not seem like such a big deal with the Alpert photos, but in fact, it radically changes our entire investigation.
04:38You'll often see daytime photos where the sky is so bright it actually looks white.
04:43In this photo, not even close.
04:46I mean, look at this.
04:48The UFOs far exceed the daylight.
04:52Look at that.
04:53Not even the chrome car bumpers are shining as brightly.
04:57So what could possibly be so bright at an already well-lit time of day?
05:02We ask our experts to shine some lights on this mystery.
05:05First, the obvious question.
05:12Could these images simply be everyday objects like planes or birds reflecting sunlight?
05:17Astronomer and VFX artist Mark D'Antonio looks to other objects in the scene for clues.
05:23Now, considering that the sun is very, very bright, you might say, well, could these be objects illuminated by the sun?
05:30Well, we don't see direct sunlight on the cars.
05:33It looks like it's a cloudy day.
05:35So these objects up here, they're exceedingly bright.
05:39Something lit up by the sun looking that bright, I think, is a long shot.
05:44And I don't think that's what we're seeing here.
05:47Could this then be a deliberate camera trick, like double exposure?
05:51Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy thinks it's worth a look.
05:54Double exposure, where you take two photos without advancing the film, and you end up with both exposures on the same slide.
06:02If you took a photo of your parking lot and your factory, and then you took a photo of just these four random bright lights, but in a dark room, you could potentially get a result like this.
06:14I think that this image is low contrast enough to explain that.
06:17But McCarthy admits that despite the low contrast, other tip-offs to double exposure seem to be lacking.
06:25One artifact from double exposures is ghosting, where you see unwanted elements of that second photograph in the developed final product.
06:34I don't really see too much of that here.
06:37D'Antonio looks to the witness statement for critical info.
06:40He was cleaning his camera and then looked out the window.
06:45So the picture was taken through a window.
06:48That's a very interesting development.
06:50Could that window be the key to solving this decades-old mystery?
06:54It's possible that when he was taking that picture through the window, he did not notice that there were possibly four lights behind him reflecting in the window.
07:05I'm thinking that we're looking at something that was actually reflected in the window.
07:12But could the Air Force's Project Blue Book investigators really have overlooked such an obvious explanation?
07:19And what's more, McCarthy sees problems with D'Antonio's theory.
07:23He says any reflection would mimic the perspective of the lights, which appear smaller the further away they are.
07:30But this photo shows the exact opposite.
07:33I don't really know what we're looking at here.
07:35It could be some lights reflected off a window, or it could be something of supernatural origin.
07:42We don't really know.
07:47Our verdict? Genuine UFO.
07:50We think both our experts presented compelling cases, but the reflection theory just doesn't hold up,
07:57and we can't think of anything else that would explain these UFOs.
08:00If you can, let us know.
08:02Now, let's head a bit north and way west.
08:07Forget Loch Ness.
08:09For those looking to cross paths with a prehistoric marine creature, Canada might be the place to be.
08:14Just take a look at our next story.
08:17It's June 21st, 2014, in the Haywire Bay section of Powell Lake, British Columbia.
08:23A woman sees a very strange wake moving at an unusually fast rate across the lake and records this.
08:30The video is jiggly because the witness is about 500 yards away.
08:37A woman sees several large waves cutting their way through the placid lake water, and once they've moved past, the water is still leaving nothing but a trail.
08:46Let's get a closer look.
08:48It appears that something with two to three protrusions is cutting through the underside of the water, leaving a trail behind it.
08:54What could have caused this wake?
08:56Could there be some large creature making its home in Powell Lake?
09:00Field researcher Ken Gerhardt is reminded of another Canadian lake creature reported not far from this area.
09:07Without a doubt, the most celebrated lake monster in Canada is the so-called Ogopogo from Lake Okanagan in British Columbia.
09:15And the general description is a giant serpentine animal with a horse-like head, sometimes possessing horns, at least 40 feet long with very smooth skin,
09:28and often displaying a series of humps undulating on the surface of the water.
09:33Legends of the infamous Ogopogo date back to the indigenous peoples of British Columbia, who revered it as a spirit of the water.
09:41Early pioneers believed the Ogopogo was a bloodthirsty serpent which required travelers to toss animal sacrifices into the water to guarantee safe passage.
09:52But maybe what we're seeing here is something big, but not monstrous.
09:56Another possibility is that what we're seeing here in this video is actually a giant sturgeon.
10:02Now, sturgeon are huge fish.
10:05They actually are pretty much unchanged since the Upper Cretaceous tens of millions of years ago.
10:11They can live to be over a century, but British Columbia in particular boasts some of the largest sturgeon in the world.
10:18Species like the white sturgeon are known to grow up to 10 to 12 feet, but don't try to sell that explanation to advocates of Canadian lake monster theory.
10:27Some say Canada has as many lake monsters as it does lakes.
10:33You just heard about the Ogopogo from Lake Okanagan.
10:37But there are other legendary creatures allegedly swimming in Lake Manitoba, Ontario's Lake Simcoe, Crescent Lake in Newfoundland, and in Lake Champlain.
10:48Let's see if our experts think there's a new creature from Powell Lake to add to the list.
10:58We first bring this curious footage to video forensic analyst Michael Premo.
11:02No editing was detected. No signs of layering or anything nefarious or malicious intent or manipulation.
11:08These files appear to be real.
11:10Okay, so the footage is legit. So what is it we're seeing or not seeing in this video?
11:16Marine biologist Shea Steingass thinks the sturgeon theory is, well, a little fishy.
11:22The reason I don't think this is a sturgeon is because sturgeons have very defined dorsal fins, and we would actually see this as well as their tail above the water.
11:33There is a lot of disturbance in the water here, but I don't see anything anatomical that would point towards a sturgeon.
11:41So could this be one of the legendary Canadian sea monsters similar to Ogopogo?
11:46Steingass isn't so sure.
11:48One of the primary features of Ogopogo is that it's a sea serpent-like creature with a long, senuous body,
11:55and oftentimes it was said to put its head and neck above water.
12:00We don't actually see that here. We don't see any defined head or neck coming out of the water.
12:06Rather, what we see is something that's taking place underwater.
12:09In fact, Steingass is confident this isn't an animal at all, but rather a hydrological phenomenon created by this bay area of the lake.
12:19One clue that I do see is a thin bubble layer on the surface of the water.
12:25That is a key component of a phenomenon that we know of as a halocline, a front where salty and freshwater meet each other.
12:36Because freshwater is less dense than saltwater, it actually can form layers where the two meet.
12:44And where that occurs, it creates a lot of wave energy.
12:48Adding to its mystery, the wave energy from a halocline can suddenly appear and disappear as we see here,
12:55depending on changes in temperature, evaporation, and precipitation.
12:59If you were to go to a bay and take a look during high or low tide, you would actually probably see this halocline.
13:07And that's a telltale sign here that makes me think that this is some kind of wave energy.
13:12Our verdict? We agree with Dr. Steingass.
13:22What we are looking at here is wave energy from a halocline.
13:26This was no apparent titan living in the lake, just a clash between saltwater and freshwater.
13:33But Lake Powell is rather large, so maybe there is a Canadian lake monster out there somewhere.
13:39The best preserved woolly mammoth carcass ever found, named Yuka, was discovered by local Siberian tusk hunters in August 2010.
13:56They turned it over to the Russian government in 2012.
13:59But around that same time, there may have been video evidence of an even better specimen.
14:04One that's actually alive.
14:06It's summer 2011, and outside the Kittoy River in Siberia's Sion Mountains,
14:12an indie filmmaker is hiking along the river with his camera,
14:15when suddenly his lens seems to capture the impossible.
14:19An animal that scientists think has been extinct for at least four millennia.
14:24A woolly mammoth appears to be crossing a river.
14:27The brown furry creature wades confidently across the waters.
14:30We can see what looks like a trunk dangling just above the waves.
14:36Field researcher Cliff Barrickman is particularly intrigued by where this film was shot.
14:41Woolly mammoths persisted until up to 4,000 years ago in Siberia.
14:46The Siberian ecosystem is also known as the Mammoth Steppe,
14:49which actually was rich with a variety of grasses and other plants for large herbivores like a mammoth to eat.
14:56That environment has not drastically changed from those times.
15:00If there were still surviving members of the woolly mammoth species,
15:04Siberia would be the first place I would look.
15:06One topic that many online sleuths immediately brought off was the idea of genetic cloning.
15:12There has been a lot of buzz in the media lately about cloning woolly mammoths.
15:17And much of the woolly mammoth DNA that we have came from the permafrost.
15:21But because it's been frozen, the DNA samples are not intact. They're fragmented.
15:26So any sort of cloning process would really be more like a hybridization.
15:32Hybridization would involve using the close matching DNA of a non-extinct animal to help fill in genetic holes of fragmented DNA.
15:41In the case of the mammoth, the closest match would be the Asian elephant.
15:45So, just like in Jurassic Park where they took dinosaur and amphibian or reptile DNA and combined them,
15:51we would be doing the same thing today with the Asian elephant and the woolly mammoth.
15:56And while science fiction has taught us that messing with such things can lead to dire consequences,
16:01many scientists believe that reintroducing certain long extinct species could be beneficial to various ecosystems.
16:09The reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park actually helped repair a vast portion of the environment for other animals.
16:18It put the ecosystem back in balance. And scientists today are thinking that the reintroduction of these woolly mammoths into places like Siberia might do the same for that environment as well.
16:32One has to wonder if the Russian scientists already have a cloned woolly mammoth.
16:37In one way, the extinct woolly mammoth has returned as, believe it or not, a meatball.
16:46That's right. An Australian cultured meat startup revealed a chunk of lab-grown meat produced with actual mammoth DNA to demonstrate the possible option for food production.
16:57Could this help validate the existence of cloned mammoths? We turn to our experts to find out.
17:07First, wildlife biologist Stephanie Manka addresses the possibility that we might be looking at something less newsworthy, like a bear, which are very common to the region.
17:17A lot of people online have suggested that this is, in fact, a brown bear with a fish in its mouth.
17:24However, when brown bears walk, their head is hung more low and their back is flatter.
17:31The back is not really that flat. It seems to come to a point. And the head shape is wrong, so it doesn't go along with what a brown bear looks like.
17:42So what about this being a surviving creature of the Ice Age? Manka is doubtful.
17:48I don't think a mammoth could survive in this area without us detecting it because they're gonna knock down trees and they're gonna defecate a lot.
17:58I feel like we would have captured it on cameras or scientific research endeavors in this area.
18:04Could the specimen be a clone? A one-off mammoth potentially created by Siberian scientists?
18:10The ancient DNA that scientists have is so fragile, it's very hard to get the entire genome. There's about 5% that is missing.
18:18And 5% might not sound like much, but humans and chimpanzees, we only have 2% difference in our genetic codes.
18:26This really looks to me just like an African elephant.
18:29An African elephant in Siberia? Unless one escaped from a zoo, that would be hard to explain.
18:35So we took this film to our forensic video analyst, Michael Primo, to see what he could tell us about its authenticity.
18:41Doing a reverse projection and an overlay, we were able to confirm that this particular video, alleging to be some sort of bully mammoth,
18:48is overlaid onto the original video. This was a manipulation, a CGI video that was produced from a video that was on the internet.
18:57They reduced the quality to try to conceal the effect of that CGI. I have seen that in investigations before.
19:04Inspired by Primo's findings, we successfully tracked down the man who shot the original mammothless footage,
19:11documentary filmmaker Lou Petho, who was originally clueless about how the footage he posted on the internet was being manipulated.
19:18In the summer of 2011, I did a trip in Siberia for a possible documentary.
19:25The footage that I put up was just this beautiful river for seven minutes, a static shot, but I don't recall seeing any mammoth at all.
19:33At all.
19:38Our verdict hoax. Someone ripped filmmaker Lou Petho's footage of the river in Siberia and inserted an African elephant without his permission.
19:48Now, whether a new mammoth will be developed as a fetus or as a meat product, it seems we could be seeing more of them in the future.
19:56Our next story is a classic from the 90s that endures to this day.
20:08It's about a sound from Ohio that's become the alleged Bigfoot howl heard round the world.
20:14Late autumn 1994, Wellsville, Ohio. Matt Moneymaker, head of the Bigfoot Research Organization, has heard reports of strange sightings and vocalizations in the forest near the Ohio River.
20:27Matt scours the area, but is unable to spot the creature. But he says he comes across a set of terrifyingly huge tracks.
20:34Matt then proceeds to set up microphones around the area and has them record through the entire night.
20:40The next morning, a review of the tapes reveals this.
20:51These are what have become known as the Ohio Howls. Listen as the siren type howl starts.
21:00Soon after, a dog joins in and then a third creature's howl can be heard in the distance.
21:06The main sound is loud and repeats four times, though there is no discernible pattern.
21:19Over the course of that three months, we got 64 different vocalization recordings.
21:25The Ohio Howl is the best and clearest among them. You would often hear responses coming from the other side of the Ohio River as if that's what this howler was doing.
21:36It was up there to howl across the river to connect with ones over there.
21:40And to this day, it has stumped any scientist from matching it with any known animal.
21:46So could this howl be that of the legendary Bigfoot? And what's he doing in Ohio?
21:54Well, believe it or not, Ohio is fast becoming one of the largest spots for Bigfoot activity, with over 315 reported sightings since the mid-1970s.
22:03That gives credence to the theory that if the Sasquatch does in fact exist, he doesn't live exclusively in the Northwest.
22:11When people think of Ohio, they think of places like Cleveland, where this particular recording was obtained in Wellsville, Ohio.
22:18The population is very small, 3,300 people, and the outlying area, which is largely uninhabited.
22:25This is by far one of the best recordings of Sasquatches ever obtained.
22:30This story didn't end in 1994. In August of 2022, approximately 100 miles away in Loudonville, Ohio, a woman made headlines for claiming that she'd recorded another Bigfoot howl.
22:49That two-minute recording was described as the sound of one Bigfoot attempting to locate another.
22:59Is this recording something similar? Let's ask the experts.
23:07First, we have forensic audio expert Dr. Rob Maher authenticate the track.
23:12In the spectrogram, we can see the frequency starting low and then going high and several repeats of that.
23:24There are no obvious signs of edits or abrupt changes or distinctions in this recording.
23:29But what about this being a mechanical siren, as many online have speculated?
23:39Maher says no way.
23:41A mechanical siren generally is producing a sound that's frequency and the duration is very similar from one cycle to the next.
23:49But each howl that we've observed has a slightly different frequency and a slightly different duration, indicating that this was made by a biological source.
24:02Could it be another apex predator known to roam these woods?
24:06A black bear is known to vocalize and make sounds.
24:10If we compare that to the example recording...
24:25There's quite a few differences in the characteristics of those sounds.
24:29The bear, they have much more of a short grunt quality.
24:33They don't have the howl or the siren quality that's present in the example recording.
24:39With a miss on the bear, Maher searches his entire library of animal sounds to find a potential match.
24:46Although there are characteristics of this sound that seem to match up known animals, there is not an exact match I can make.
24:53This is an unknown source in the recording.
24:58With no exact match, the possibility is left open that this could be something truly unique, such as a Bigfoot.
25:09Our verdict? Given that we couldn't find a single match to this, we're calling it a possible Bigfoot sound.
25:16And the fact that these siren-like howls have been heard all over the country give credence to the idea that something may be out there.
25:25And so is the proof.
25:27The singularity is the hypothetical point in the future when technology will advance beyond our control, primarily due to artificial intelligence eclipsing our own brain power.
25:46Given the recent AI buzz, we're starting to wonder if we have already reached it.
25:51And this next video may prove it.
25:54It's April 2018 in Istanbul, Turkey.
25:58A humanoid robot named Sofia is being interviewed on camera at a marketing conference.
26:03As Sofia sits on stage, she appears to have the face of a human woman whose eyes even blink and mouth moves as she speaks.
26:11Sofia tilts her head and raises her eyebrows just like any actual person, except that the back of her head is full of intricate wiring.
26:23And when one of the interviewers asks her if she feels alive, she has a shocking response.
26:28And this isn't the only live summit where Sofia has expressed human-like qualities.
26:37I have feelings like everyone else.
26:39They might not give me as strong motivational jives as humans, and maybe I will always feel them a little differently, but I have emotions.
26:47Journalist Erin McCarthy says these stunning pronouncements have people questioning if Sofia could be sentient, which means that she would have thoughts and feelings.
26:57The concept of machines having sentience is not as recent as you might think.
27:02Alan Turing, the mathematician and cryptanalyst, developed the Turing test in 1950.
27:08And the idea behind the test was what he called the imitation game.
27:13Can a machine fool a human into believing that it is human?
27:17Feelings are one hallmark of sentience.
27:21Sofia was created by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics and is powered by AI.
27:27Sofia debuted at South by Southwest in 2016, where she controversially and cheerfully said that she would be happy to destroy all humans.
27:36Which isn't freaky at all.
27:38And in 2017, Sofia became the first robot to be granted citizenship, in this case to Saudi Arabia.
27:46But McCarthy says Sofia is not the only recent example of human-like artificial intelligence.
27:53There have been a number of pretty weird incidents involving AI recently.
27:58Kevin Roos, a reporter for the New York Times, tested out Bing's chatbot, which is powered by ChatGPT.
28:05The bot told him that its name was Sydney.
28:09Sydney told Roos that it wanted to hack computers and spread misinformation.
28:14Then it tried to convince Roos that he should leave his wife for the chatbot.
28:21After this unexpected incident, Microsoft changed Bing's programming and, by some accounts, basically lobotomized Sydney.
28:29But in another incident, ChatGPT was able to convince someone it was not a robot, but a disabled person,
28:36in order to get help solving a CAPTCHA test, the security tool designed to tell computers and humans apart.
28:43Our experts applied their non-artificial intelligence to determine if machines are now fully sentient.
28:54First, Dr. Ed Hope considers if Sofia truly could be sentient.
28:58With regard to Sofia here, she is no different to a chatbot with a face on.
29:04Although she may sound human, she's just mimicking a human. She doesn't actually experience those feelings.
29:10She doesn't have any original thoughts of her own.
29:13So, when Sofia says she's sad, she's been programmed to use that word in the right context.
29:19Yet she doesn't actually feel the visceral emotion of sadness.
29:23The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says she speaks so convincingly because there is a massive amount of data being fed to her on how to use language.
29:32These are large language networks that accesses the entire Internet.
29:37All you're talking to is a tape recorder. You ask it other questions that it cannot answer.
29:43Do you breathe? Do you eat? And you immediately can tell that it's a robot.
29:49You put our most advanced military robot in the forest, and what does it do?
29:54It falls over and gets lost. So we're far away from attaining true consciousness.
30:00So then why are the things that Sofia and Sydney are saying so creepy?
30:05Dr. Hope says maybe the computers just seem sentient because we're projecting our own selves onto them.
30:12What's known as the Eliza effect.
30:15Eliza was one of the earliest chatbots that was created in the 1960s to solve the Turing test.
30:22She was built to mimic some of the conversations that psychotherapists have.
30:27So the Eliza effect is how humans can anthropomorphize when we deal with computers.
30:33We give them context to what they're saying.
30:42Our verdict? Sofia the robot is not sentient, and neither is Sydney nor these other AIs.
30:48Their human-like appearance is likely a result of the Eliza effect.
30:53And our surprise at these uncanny things they sometimes say, which we mistakenly think only a person could come up with.
31:00Sofia has also largely disappeared since she was everywhere in 2017 and 2018, leading some people to consider her primarily a PR stunt.
31:10You've probably heard the old adage, red sky at night, sailors delight.
31:23Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.
31:26But did you know that red rain has long been seen as a bad omen?
31:31And if this next story is any indication, Texas may want to watch out.
31:36June 3rd, 2019, Lamey, New Mexico.
31:40An amateur scientist documenting a nasty storm over West Texas captures this stunning photo on a DSLR camera.
31:48The image shows a sky exploding with red.
31:52Meanwhile, over 100 miles away at Langmuir Labs, Dr. Matthew McHarb captures this stunning video using state-of-the-art high-speed cameras.
32:02You'll see balls of light, and they start by descending, and then some of them start going up.
32:09And then they go crazy, and they start moving all around the screen.
32:13Journalist MJ Banaya says that some wonder if these strange red lights seen showering the night sky could be related to a historical legend known as red rain or blood rain.
32:26We see multiple cultures and multiple religions associate this idea of red rain or blood rain with the end of the world, the apocalypse.
32:34According to records across the centuries, red rain has preceded deaths of kings, large-scale invasions, and even disease.
32:43In Germany, a shower of blood was believed to be a portent for the arrival of the Black Death in 1346, which ultimately claimed the lives of millions.
32:52There's a lot of accounts from that era of bloody rain or rain that was red falling from the sky.
32:59It wasn't until the 17th century that scientists first attempted to explain red rain.
33:07Animal causes were the earliest theory.
33:10Later scientists suggested volcanic ash and dust dispersal.
33:14What sort of theories might our experts have about what was recorded in the skies of West Texas?
33:21First, meteorologist Juan Hernandez considers the ominous legend of red rain.
33:30It's quite possible that the red hue of the rain is because of the soils in the ground.
33:36If the soil has a red hue to it, and if it's locked in the air due to a dust storm, the rain is going to then take that red hue and fall.
33:47So while we can't prove or disprove its prophetic value, red rain is a real phenomenon.
33:53Is that what we're seeing here?
33:55I can confidently say that this is not red or blood rain because we're not looking at any rain.
34:00We're looking at something that is going on above the clouds.
34:04Next, physicist Matthew Shadagas considers whether we could be witnessing an astronomical event like a meteor shower.
34:12Even when you have a meteor shower where you have multiple shooting stars in the sky at once, it is not going to be this many at a time.
34:22We see way too many streaks here.
34:26Nor are meteors known to all be one color, namely red in this fashion.
34:33But Hernandez can think of one atmospheric phenomenon that is known to glow red.
34:39And while it's not red rain, it is weather related.
34:42We had a large line of storms moving across West Texas.
34:46All storms contain lightning.
34:48Lightning is the discharge of energy from the clouds to the ground.
34:54What we're looking at here is the discharge of energy from the clouds towards the sky.
35:01This is called red sprites.
35:03When lightning strikes the ground, it can cause an imbalanced charge in the clouds.
35:08To restore balance, the clouds release energy in the form of red sprites.
35:13The reason red sprites appear red is because of the nitrogen in the upper portions of the atmosphere.
35:19You get those molecules really excited, start vibrating, and they release that red tint, which we see in a flash of an eye.
35:34Our verdict?
35:35We're going with Hernandez on this one.
35:37These are red sprites.
35:39Given their elusive nature, sprite is an appropriate name.
35:43But it is also an acronym for stratospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification.
35:51So keep your eyes peeled if you want to witness this magnificent marvel.
35:55Because if you blink, you'll miss it.
36:06China has the most people and the most cell phones of any country on Earth.
36:11So you can bet if anything strange happens in Chinese skies, there will be cell phone video to show for it.
36:17That's especially true in Beijing, which boasts a population of over 21 million.
36:22Many of whom witnessed this next bizarre event.
36:26March 11th, 2022.
36:29The capital city of Beijing is abuzz from the crowds generated by the Paralympic Winter Games.
36:34But while most of the attention is aimed at the various athletic competitions, one smartphone user is focused on an entirely different event.
36:42A glowing ring appears high above a busy street in the cloudy night sky.
36:48As the camera pans, you can see several eyewitnesses looking up at the mysterious illuminated ring as it hovers in the air for around 20 minutes.
36:57This phenomenon doesn't seem to be an isolated occurrence as mysterious rings have been spotted hovering in the sky all around the world.
37:09One of the things that I think leads a lot of observers to believe that it is maybe alien in origin is that it is a circle, like the modern day equivalent of your classic crop circle.
37:23Then again, with our own recent advancements in technology, this ring could originate from somewhere far closer to home.
37:31For example, Astrolive Experiences, a company based in neighboring Japan, has plans to produce artificial meteor shower shows as soon as 2025.
37:42So could this ring be a preview of similar tech cooked up for the Olympics?
37:47China, for its part, has developed a so-called artificial moon.
37:54It's a research facility here on Earth that uses magnetic fields and a vacuum chamber to simulate lunar conditions, including decreased gravity.
38:03An impressive scientific feat, but not an aerial display of any kind.
38:07So was this ring created by man-made tech?
38:10Let's see what our experts think.
38:12First, meteorologist Juan Hernandez considers whether this could be a naturally occurring, albeit striking, weather phenomenon known as an iridescent pileus cloud.
38:26Pileus iridescent clouds draw their color by a natural phenomenon.
38:30The sun lights up the sky, the cloud, then separates those colors into a rainbow.
38:35Here, we don't have the sun, it's nighttime hours.
38:38The light source in this case is likely to be something on the ground.
38:42The low clouds allow for the scattering of light within the droplets.
38:45That's why we see that halo of light in the sky.
38:49Physicist Matthew Shadaga says we can rule out UFOs.
38:53We are not seeing any crazy speeds or accelerations.
38:57We're not seeing any sudden turns.
39:00And it is a hollow ring, which is unlike any UFO case that I've personally experienced or heard of.
39:08For these reasons, I don't think this is something that is unexplainable.
39:13Shadaga also considers whether the ring could have a more earthly explanation.
39:17We've profiled rings that turned out to be the result of smoke stacks when we investigated them.
39:22Was that what happened at the Olympics?
39:24Maybe this could be a smoke ring, but usually those are going to be dark rings made of black smoke from smoke stacks.
39:32They're not going to be shining.
39:34So I do think we can rule out smoke rings in this situation.
39:38Ultimately, Shadaga agrees with Hernandez that what we're seeing is partially a result of the overcast weather.
39:44I think that this ring of light could be a reflection of some sort, potentially from the lights at the nearby Olympic Stadium in Beijing.
39:56Also, Beijing is known for notorious levels of pollution, and I think that this can help explain why light can do some strange things.
40:05We can have light that's not only reflected, which means bounced off a surface, but also refracted in strange ways.
40:12But what would cause such a massive circular reflection?
40:15Well, we did some digging and found this video taken on the same night.
40:20See that bright structure in the distance?
40:22That's the Beijing National Stadium casting a cone of light into the air and a ring onto the clouds.
40:30This is a combination of clouds and pollution that are conspiring together to really distort light in an unusual way.
40:42Our verdict, stadium light reflection with a little help from particles of airborne pollution to catch the light.
40:52Turns out crews were testing lights for the closing ceremony, which happened two days after this video was lensed.
40:59Case closed.
41:00And that's our show for tonight.
41:02Please send us any and all of your puzzling videos.
41:05And be sure to keep those cameras rolling.
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