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00:00Among the quiet towns and bustling epicenters around the world, reports pour in of unusual aerial phenomena.
00:14It shoots high into the air. It's moving in an erratic way. This is not a terrestrial craft.
00:22Flying disks, hovering orbs, strange biological substances falling from the sky.
00:28To determine what it might have been, you'd have to eliminate all the other possibilities.
00:34The sensational becomes credible once it's crowdsourced.
00:37Thousands of people claim to see these orbs.
00:41UFO hotspots light up on the map. What's made these places the target of otherworldly attention?
00:47This might be the location of the vortex.
00:50As vessels reappear in the same locations, can we use the earthly to guess at otherworldly motives?
00:57Are these mysterious visitors friends or foe? And should we fear their return?
01:02All over the world, repeat sightings of UFOs baffle researchers.
01:07UAP are in our airspace, but they are grossly underreported.
01:10A pattern begins to emerge.
01:12These sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine.
01:15What is the meaning behind these hotspots?
01:17I can't go beyond what I've already stated publicly.
01:20The government is not prepared.
01:22Are we being mapped?
01:26In Yelm, Washington, something strange is happening.
01:31On July 29th, 2017, at 9.58pm, an off-duty pilot is standing at his living room window.
01:39He has spent thousands of hours flying through the skies here, but he has never seen anything like this.
01:52An impossibly bright, silvery-white light streaks across the horizon at mind-bending speed.
02:00Had the pilot been in the air, he would have been able to confirm the strange object with the ground crew.
02:06But now there is only one place he can report to.
02:09In Davenport, an operator stationed inside an abandoned missile site tries to understand the pilot's description of the impossible object.
02:22It sounds like a meteor. The pilot protests. He's seen meteors before.
02:30This light is steady, more like a missile, but far faster, crossing the sky at an estimated speed of 12,000 km per hour.
02:42The Davenport operator has worked for the National UFO Reporting Center for more than three decades.
02:48Descriptions of the impossible are all too familiar.
02:54On this night alone, he will receive 12 other reports about the strange light in Yelm.
03:01It will be recorded and filed as one in thousands of unidentified objects that have confounded scientists and citizens in the region for more than 70 years.
03:11June 24th, 1947.
03:21Amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold flies his single-seater plane high above Washington State,
03:26carefully observing the vast Cascade mountain range below.
03:30He decides to take a detour to try and find a military plane that has downed recently with several potential fatalities.
03:43A $5,000 reward is being offered for news of the plane, which had disappeared seven months earlier with 32 marines aboard.
03:51Looking for a downed aircraft in a mountainous area is probably one of the toughest search and rescue tasks there is.
03:59It's the proverbial needle in a haystack.
04:01The aircraft could be snow-covered.
04:03It could be buried in amongst the foliage of the forest.
04:06It could be hidden up in some valley.
04:08Shortly before 3 p.m., Arnold Banks left, 32 kilometers from the Cascade's highest peak, Mount Rainier.
04:20Suddenly, a bright flash to the northeast catches his eye.
04:26At first, he thinks the flash is just a reflection from another aircraft, but the reality is far stranger.
04:33What he encounters is something that appears to be a group of alien aircraft.
04:41In fact, nine of them in total.
04:44Arnold said that these aircraft were weaving and dipping and that they appeared to be disc-shaped.
04:54Astonished at the speed of the objects, Arnold times the fleet between Mount Rainier and nearby Mount Adams.
05:00He estimates that they are flying between 1900 and 2700 kilometers per hour.
05:08This is in 1947, at the dawn of the jet age.
05:12We really don't have any aircraft at that point in time that can approach anywhere near those speeds.
05:19And if they were going that fast, they would certainly leave one heck of a sonic boom.
05:24Unless they were defying the laws of physics and aerodynamics, then what he saw was not what he thought he saw.
05:30The whole Kenneth Arnold episode basically unleashes a kind of UFO mania in the United States throughout the late 1940s and into the 1950s.
05:44And we even see for the first time the term flying saucer arising.
05:48All these other reports pop up and in some cases, having one story come out means that the other people who might have had something odd happen now feel more comfortable sharing theirs.
06:00Now for others, it could be that some people crave attention.
06:04It's kind of a me too. I can have a sighting and I can do it.
06:06But then there's another side, a bit more negative. They're being quite nasty towards him. Maybe he's making it all up. Is he crazy?
06:16There's obviously a huge amount of skepticism whether or not he's experienced a hallucination or whether or not it's a kind of a trick of the light that he is mistaken for a series of UFOs.
06:28One suggested explanation is an unusual type of cloud formation known as lenticular clouds.
06:37Lenticular clouds are a wild looking cloud because most of the time we sort of associate big puffy cauliflower shapes as to what clouds look like.
06:49But lenticular clouds can be very smooth sided on all sides.
06:52If you've never seen this before, it absolutely will cause you to go, I have no idea what I'm looking at and this is the wildest thing ever and it must be a UFO.
07:05Another possibility is a medical condition called hypoxia.
07:08And that is a physiological state where you're breathing but the oxygen is not under enough pressure to get into your bloodstream and feed the brain.
07:17And when that starts to happen, you can experience sometimes hallucinations of a sort.
07:25Arnold dismisses his skeptics and sticks to his story.
07:28As news of his strange encounter spreads, media outlets and US military agents alike search for evidence to corroborate the story.
07:39And they find it.
07:40At 2.30pm, a man in Richland, Washington reports several silver discs flying rapidly westward towards Mount Rainier.
07:53At 3pm, a member of the Washington Forest Service on Firewatch reports sudden flashes above the mountain, moving in perfect formation.
08:02And as Arnold flies over with his aircraft just after 3pm, prospector Fred Johnson spots the mysterious discs from the base of Mount Adams.
08:16Even stranger, Johnson soon discovers that his compass is swaying wildly.
08:22Could that be down to the mountains, so the environment, or was it due to the occurrence of a UFO sighting?
08:28The obvious question is, if there are UFOs in this area, what are they doing there?
08:35What is it that makes extraterrestrials want to come to that spot?
08:47Extending more than 1,100 kilometres over three US states and into Canada,
08:53the Cascade Mountain Range is Washington's most striking geological feature.
08:59The effect of the Cascade Mountain Range is quite dramatic on the landscape.
09:04Western side, it's subtropical.
09:06But then if you go to the eastern side, you get this really arid, more desert-like landscape.
09:12While many of the peaks here reach well over 3,000 metres,
09:16none are as tall as Mount Rainier, ascending more than 4,300 metres.
09:21As beautiful as the Cascades are, it comes with its dangers.
09:25There can be unpredictable weather, there can be air currents that cause turbulence,
09:29and this is especially to the detriment of pilots in the region.
09:33Mount Rainier isn't just a mountain.
09:38It's an active, very dangerous volcano that's sitting very close to a large urban metropolis.
09:47The entire Pacific Northwest is very geologically active, and that's because it sits right on the border of two tectonic plates.
09:58So a mountain like Rainier is always in motion because magma is moving underneath that mountain at all times.
10:07The activity at Mount Rainier started about a million years ago, with the most recent significant eruption being about a thousand years ago.
10:17And in the lifespan of volcanoes, a thousand years is nothing.
10:22So while the volcano isn't active in the sense that it's erupting, it really does have the potential to erupt again.
10:29The many volcanic peaks in the Cascades leave local communities in near constant fear of a possible eruption.
10:41In the spring of 1980, these nightmares become a reality.
10:46144 kilometres south of Mount Rainier, on Mount St. Helens.
10:50For a couple of months prior to the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, there were some pretty dramatic effects.
10:59When magma is moving and it begins to increase in pressure because it's forcing its way to the surface,
11:07you're going to get earthquakes, you're going to have steam vents happening,
11:11you're going to have all kinds of indications that something is about to happen.
11:15On the morning of May 18th, with no apparent warning, a magnitude 5 earthquake strikes Mount St. Helens.
11:25The entire side of Mount St. Helens slid down.
11:31One of the largest landslides in recorded history.
11:35What happened then was all the pressure blasted out sideways instead of straight up.
11:41The landslide sends 2.5 billion cubic metres of debris, equivalent to the volume of one million Olympic swimming pools flowing downwards.
12:00While a stream of ash and rock blows out of the nearly formed crater, reaching a height of 24 kilometres within 15 minutes.
12:08Underneath it, it must have looked like the end of the world.
12:15The sunlight can't get through at all, so it goes day to night. It's unbelievable.
12:23Hundreds of homes were destroyed. Bridges and roads and miles of railroad infrastructure were just wiped away.
12:32Fifty-seven people died. There, of course, was the vast ecological damage. Wildlife were killed and huge swaths of land were just left barren after.
12:44The activity on Mount St. Helens continues into October, with five more eruptions rocking the volcano.
12:54But after months of chaos, life around the mountain finally begins to return to normal.
13:01Until nearly one year later, on March 17th, 1981, in the small town of St. Helens on the border of Washington and Oregon, famous for its view of the volcano.
13:15Shortly after 4am, Sgt. Russell Yoakum drives his usual patrol route along Highway 30, west of the Columbia River.
13:31Suddenly, a strange light appears, surrounded by a thick fog.
13:36The light is moving towards the nearby Portland Airport.
13:43Sgt. Yoakum dismisses the light as a passing plane.
13:47It's very easy to mistake a UFO for something conventional.
13:52Especially for a conventional craft, an airplane.
13:55And this is especially so if you're driving in a car.
13:58Just the speed at which you're driving, looking out your windshield and seeing something else moving will cause all kinds of optical illusions.
14:07The strange light grows brighter, lighting up the Columbia River like a sunrise.
14:12This is no ordinary aircraft.
14:15Most aircraft wouldn't be a yellow light.
14:19They don't have the intensity and the brightness and they don't illuminate things so we can see detail as well.
14:25But when you have a really bright white light and you shine it through water vapor, it actually removes the blue spectrum.
14:32It shifts towards the yellow end of the spectrum and has more of an appearance of a sunrise type color rather than being the original white intense light.
14:43A lot of attention gets paid to the light and the light source itself, but for me the most interesting part is the fog.
14:50I can't think of many conventional aircrafts that can produce this kind of fog that surrounds the aircraft.
15:01Sergeant Yoakam radios police headquarters before joining two other officers on the banks of the Columbia River to investigate.
15:08St. Helens PD promptly contacts Portland International Airport to report the strange sight.
15:17Staff at the airport confirm that their radar has detected the object.
15:22Shortly after making the call, the police officers receive a call back from the airport and they've done the classic confirm and then quickly deny what they said.
15:34They backtrack and said in fact they didn't see anything on the radar at all.
15:38By the banks of the Columbia River, the light is shining as brightly as ever.
15:43Then the UFO starts to do something strange in that it starts making a sound.
15:51And it's odd because that's actually not typical for UFO sightings.
15:54In my experience, UFOs don't make any sounds at all.
16:00Then, at 4.43 a.m., the light vanishes.
16:04The thick fog that had accompanied it disappears, leaving behind an eerily blue sky.
16:10This incident takes place over a 45-minute time period, which is actually a long period of time, if you think about it.
16:19And it really gives an opportunity for those involved to take stock of what they're actually seeing,
16:25getting over the initial shock and beginning to process what it is that's in front of them.
16:31The police officers were able to record the sound of the UFO and send the recording to sound analysts hoping for answers, but to no avail.
16:44Nothing on record can seemingly explain the strange apparition in St. Helens.
16:49But could there be a connection between the massive volcanic eruption of May 1980 and the appearance of a UFO nearly a year later?
17:00While the eruption of Mount St. Helens makes history as the most destructive volcano ever recorded in the United States,
17:14experts fear that an eruption of the larger Mount Rainier could be far worse.
17:19When you're dealing with a mountain that size, it goes off with gigatons of force and ash.
17:29Given where Seattle is in relation to Mount Rainier, the devastation could be beyond anything we have ever seen in North America.
17:38One technology instrumental in tracking the potential timeline for the next disastrous eruption is satellites.
17:48The spacecraft that we have, for example, orbiting Earth or beyond to look out to space,
17:54can also be used to look towards Earth, capturing things like volcanic eruptions.
17:59And this is incredibly important because satellite imaging can give us a unique perspective on what's happening on Earth.
18:05When it comes to volcanoes, these satellites are really, really important because what they allow us to do is overlay images of the shape of mountains day to day or month to month or year to year.
18:20And we can start seeing changes in the shape of the mountain, whether magma chambers are filling and domes are forming within the craters of volcanoes.
18:30And it can give us a lot of data about how and when volcanoes may erupt.
18:36In 1980, the 24-kilometer column of ash and debris erupting from Mount St. Helens was captured by satellites orbiting the Earth.
18:46And not surprisingly, it could have been viewed from space, not just by our technology, but also potentially by alien technology.
18:56When you look at the images from space, it actually, frankly, looks like an atomic bomb blast.
19:00This is the scale of this and the terrifying nature of it.
19:05Maybe aliens might have thought this was the first outbreak of a war going on, and they would have wanted to know exactly what it was.
19:13Anyone in space observing volcanic activity on Earth would learn a great deal about the planet's structure.
19:19Humans love to draw lines on things, and we have all sorts of different countries with little lines, but we can also map our planet through looking at things like geology.
19:30Like geology, the Ring of Fire that runs around the entire Pacific Basin is a great way to map things out.
19:40The Ring of Fire is a 40,000-kilometer-long stretch where the Pacific Plate meets the other tectonic plates around it.
19:47So that entire area is extremely geologically active, and that's where we find a vast majority of volcanoes on planet Earth.
19:57Could the sightings over the Cascades be an alien intelligence monitoring geologic activity along shifting tectonic plates to map our world?
20:06The Ring of Fire runs along the perimeter of the largest body of water in the world, the Pacific Ocean.
20:18Washington's Pacific Coastline is another of the state's most iconic landscapes, and another hotbed of unexplained activity.
20:27There's a long history in UFO lore of UFO interest in bodies of water, and particularly large bodies of water, and so there's lots of sightings along coastlines.
20:40It does raise questions as to whether UFOs are attracted to the water, or are they even emanating out of the water?
20:50Are they coming from underwater bases somewhere?
20:54A really common form of UFO reported along coastlines is that of the orb, and they're described as spherical often, and particular colors as well.
21:05The really common colors are just white, yellow, or orange.
21:09There's a lot of optical illusions that happen on the horizon or across bodies of water, so that could be one reason why you're seeing more there.
21:17At the same time when the stories start talking about underwater bases or other things happening with it, it is a bit unknown. We haven't explored it all.
21:27The Pacific Ocean is twice the size, twice the volume of the Atlantic, and it really is an uncharted, underexplored mass of water with trenches and mountains on the seabed, a huge amount of things still yet to discover.
21:45The unexplained lights seen flitting along the Washington coastline have baffled locals and scientists for decades.
22:03And several kilometers inland, even stranger phenomena materialize when residents of the small town of Oakville endure a surreal experience during the summer of 1994.
22:18So we can imagine a very typical rainy, overcast Pacific Northwest day, but there were multiple witnesses who described the rain quite differently.
22:30Initially, people were not quite able to make out what is odd about it until a police officer operating his windscreen wipers notices that it's like jello.
22:43I mean, it's the most bizarre gelatinous substance. This is not regular rainfall.
22:49Shortly after this, people start to feel sick with really unexplained symptoms. And so there's a lot of suspicion about what's going on here.
22:58Five more strange gelatinous showers follow the first.
23:02Rumors start to spread very quickly. And one of the more extreme theories or claims about this was that the gelatinous mass falling actually contained white blood cells.
23:12Suspecting the link between the mysterious rains and the rash of sudden illness, one local resident collects a sample.
23:22Analysis of the sample disproves the white blood cell theory, but scientists from the hazardous material unit at the State Department of Ecology are nevertheless confounded by the results.
23:34Tests showed up cells of different sizes and two previously unidentified forms of bacteria, but really experts struggled to try and understand what the hell this substance was.
23:51Without a clear explanation for the odd showers over Oakville, several theories begin to emerge, each one stranger than the next.
23:59Was it industrial waste? Has the government experiment gone wrong? And then of course, is it something from another world?
24:10Some think that the blobs were fluid waste from a passing airplane toilet, but this theory was quickly disproved.
24:18Another small but vocal group believes that these are actually parts of jellyfish dispersed into rain clouds after bomb tests by the military over the Pacific.
24:29Others speculate that it's a mysterious star jelly reported as far back as the 14th century, thought to have rained down from passing meteor showers.
24:41As far as we have ever found, that is not a thing.
24:47We do not see any sort of gelatinous anything on meteors, especially after they've entered our atmosphere, because they are entering at ludicrous speeds and anything organic on the surface is going to be vaporized fairly quickly.
25:08The Oakville blobs remain an enduring mystery, leading some to wonder whether this mysterious shower is connected to the UFO sightings along the nearby coast.
25:18Certainly there are going to be people who suggest that it's of extraterrestrial origin, but we don't have any evidence of past events happening that are similar where we could say this would be an example of what could reproduce this phenomena.
25:32You know, the sad bit is that the samples weren't kept. And we've got better techniques to analyze it now. And I think that's something that is changing, that we're making sure that we keep things because we know that we're going to get better at looking into things and figure out what's happening.
25:48As unanswered questions continue to plague Washington's coastal areas, still more sightings occur along the shores of the state's Pacific Inlet, Puget Sound.
26:05Puget Sound is a vast, complex system of estuaries with a shoreline spanning well over 160 kilometers.
26:15The waters run more than 270 meters deep and powerful storms regularly roll across the water to batter the state's largest city, Seattle.
26:25When you look further into the reports, you'll actually notice that it's like a hub of activity in Seattle. There seems to be the most sightings there.
26:36Now, of course, the obvious explanation is more people live there, but there is also that element of the water at Puget Sound. Could it be that UFOs are attracted there in the same way that they are attracted over the Pacific?
26:49The description of the sightings in Seattle is similar to those described along the coast. Often they're described as these shining or flashing orbs in the sky, sometimes flying in formation.
27:04It's always striking when there's a conformity to the sightings. It tends to lend some more credence that something's going on here. At the very least, people seem to be seeing much the same thing.
27:15Puget Sound is also home to some of the most important military bases in the United States.
27:21There is a kind of contradictory, intense relationship between the UFO community and the military. On occasion, the military might actually deem to validate some of the claims coming from the UFO community.
27:40But more often than not, they shut down. Everything's top secret. They stymie any investigations. Although, of course, that in turn fuels even more speculation.
27:53They can be secretive, but there's usually a very good reason. The military does things, knows things, has things that the population does not.
28:01They may have technology that they don't want the quote unquote bad guys to get their hands on.
28:07If we look at the concentration of UFO sightings in Washington State, then map against that the location of military installations, it's uncannily similar.
28:20I mean, the two things sit on top of each other, which raises the whole question about alien interest in human military activity.
28:31After Kenneth Arnold's sighting in 1947, many turned to the military for an explanation.
28:37Over many decades, the US has experimented with a lot of different types of aircraft. And one of the interesting ones is the Flying Pancake.
28:46In 1942, the United States Air Force introduces a new one man experimental aircraft, the Vought V 173 Flying Pancake.
28:58And this really is a flying wing. And one of the interesting things about flying wings is they have a huge surface area. And that means that they can actually fly really, really slow.
29:09They almost have the ability to hover. So these aircraft could potentially be misinterpreted as being UFOs.
29:17To a civilian, this is just literally outer space. They would say, hey, that's not normal. That's something that I've never seen before. It's bound to happen.
29:26The Flying Pancake's top speed, however, is only 222 kilometers per hour, around one-tenth of the speed of the objects Kenneth Arnold claims to have seen.
29:39The Vought Flying Pancake retires in 1947, leaving little explanation for the constant stream of reports in the following decades.
29:50But could this plane be responsible for the notorious Puget Sound sighting of June 1947, that would lead to one of the most influential mysteries in the history of unidentified aerial phenomena?
30:03And this is the story of Harold Dahl, who's out on the water one day in a boat with his son and his dog.
30:10Now, they claim to see six UFOs, donut-shaped craft, hovering above them that then rained down an enormous amount of what could best be described as scrap metal out of the skies.
30:25This is something very strange. It doesn't happen very often, even in UFO stories. And this is actually cause for concern and some danger because he claims that one of these pieces of metallic material actually strikes and kills his dog right in the boat.
30:40Dahl then explains that when he brought his supervisor, Fred Chrisman, back to the same spot, one of the craft reappeared. A story borne out by Chrisman himself.
30:53Following the incident itself, it gets in some ways even stranger. Dahl and Chrisman are later visited by a man in black who warned them off of the whole matter altogether.
31:07The Maury Island incident really kickstarts the men in black phenomenon and it is one of the most iconic aspects of UFO history.
31:16Even if there is very little evidence for their existence, it nevertheless has exploded in the popular imagination.
31:26After two Air Force officers investigating the sighting are killed in a seemingly coincidental plane crash,
31:33the FBI opens its own inquiry into Dahl and Chrisman's claims.
31:38And now Harold Dahl does the most extraordinary thing. He takes back everything.
31:45He says, guys, this was a hoax. I made the whole thing up. Forget I ever said any of it.
31:53But of course, some people had theories to denounce this, saying that he was forced to say it was a hoax. Maybe he feared for his life.
32:02It's hard to underestimate the impact of the idea of unidentified, very serious men in black knocking on your door, warning you to keep your mouth shut and not make any waves.
32:14The FBI eventually accepts Dahl's confession of a hoax, but doubt continues to this day, particularly in light of the many sightings that have occurred since.
32:26The search for answers about UFOs has led to even greater scrutiny towards Washington's military bases, not least to those housing nuclear technology.
32:43As with military bases, radioactivity seems to correlate with increased reports of unknown objects in the sky around sites with a nuclear presence.
32:56There have been claims that there was a UFO or alien presence at the Chernobyl disaster in the 1980s and also the Fukushima power plant disaster in Japan.
33:10If UFOs are interested in energy sources, this is one of the things that they might be interested in as a huge display of power.
33:18Nuclear energy is really an amazing thing because it can produce a lot of energy out of a very small area.
33:25For every kilogram of uranium, I get a million times the same amount of energy I can get out of fossil fuels.
33:34UFO sightings have been reported at nuclear bases across the United States, like Puget Sound's naval base Kitsap, the third largest in the United States, and an infamous UFO hotspot.
33:48In 1978, an 1800 litre radioactive coolants bill is just the latest in a series of accidents at the site.
33:58The naval base's infrastructure is highly specialized, which has led some people to speculate that maybe this was the reason for some UFO interest.
34:08It's home to both a nuclear weapons facility and a shipyard offering support services to the US's fleet of nuclear powered vessels.
34:21The concrete in the area of the spill registers high radiation levels.
34:27It is broken up, packed into steel drums, and sent to one of the most dangerous places in America.
34:34The Hanford site looks from the air like an industrial installation, but it's what surrounds it that's particularly striking.
34:44It is a really suspiciously desolate landscape.
34:48This is somewhere that is incredibly eerie.
34:52I mean, one can't help feeling that it's not a place that you want to stick around in.
34:59The Hanford site was once home to the largest nuclear reactors in the world.
35:05Deserted since the late 1980s, the 1600 square kilometer site is notorious amongst locals for its mysterious apparitions and for its unidentified aerial activity.
35:18The sightings on the coast are very uniform in nature.
35:23There's great conformity to them.
35:25People are generally seeing the same thing.
35:27It's quite the opposite at the Hanford site.
35:30There's a great variety of different types of sightings and different shapes and colors and movements of the UFOs reported there.
35:39In 2001, a silver sphere shoots above the site in broad daylight.
35:45Months later, fireballs are spotted falling towards the old buildings.
35:52In 2008, a silent black low-flying cylinder floats ominously over the area.
35:59In 2014, a neon blue object rockets towards the abandoned site.
36:06Then, in 2022, another witness describes a cigar-shaped object similar to the cylinder from over a decade earlier.
36:16When you hear about these UFO sightings occurring over these alleged abandoned areas, it makes you question, is something drawing them there?
36:26Those looking for answers to these mysterious sightings might well turn to Hanford's haunting history.
36:33The Hanford site is particularly significant historically because it was one of the main nodes for the Manhattan Project,
36:41which was the crash program to build the atomic bomb.
36:44It was important because the plutonium necessary for the bomb was produced at the site.
36:49The plutonium produced in Hanford was crucial to the Manhattan Project.
36:54It was used in the first atomic bomb test and was later used in the atomic bomb that was detonated in Nagasaki.
37:01Hanford was built on a truly impressive scale and there are 50,000 people working there.
37:09So this is an enormous industrial complex and in fact it's basically a city.
37:18At the Hanford site they had a large number of nuclear reactors and the whole goal of these reactors is to produce plutonium.
37:25Plutonium is extremely radioactive and a very dangerous compound.
37:32You really need to separate your facility over a very large area so that you're not having such intense radiation that it would be harmful to the workers that are there.
37:44Following the end of the Second World War, the Hanford site continues to produce plutonium for more than 30 years until in 1987 operations shut down completely.
37:57But once the gates close, the real trouble begins.
38:02When we have huge nuclear facilities, we have a lot of radioactive material around that's potentially going to cause site contamination.
38:14When we're talking about radioactive waste, we're not just talking about the fuel, we're talking about all the equipment used to process that material.
38:23So it makes these sites relatively highly radioactive.
38:27The Hanford site has 200 million litres of radioactive waste just sitting in underground storage tanks by the Columbia River.
38:36It's hard to even imagine that amount of nuclear waste just sitting there and all the risks that it could pose.
38:46Even despite the amazing advance in science and technology,
38:51what a price we're paying for having that enormous amount of deadly substance just buried there at Hanford.
39:01With radioactive materials, as the material is concentrated enough, it can take thousands of years for it to get to a safe radiation level.
39:08Depending on the element that's present, it may never become safe to deal with.
39:14A clean-up operation at Hanford, begun in the mid-1990s, is expected to take 50 years and cost more than $100 billion.
39:25But some living around the nuclear dump have already experienced irreparable damages,
39:30including unusually high rates of cancer, thyroid disorders, and breathing problems.
39:37The scale of the environmental disaster at Hanford has attracted international attention.
39:45And some wonder if visitors have been coming from even further afield to monitor the surges in nuclear energy.
39:52There's been a lot of theorising about why aliens might be interested in nuclear power plants and nuclear installations and even nuclear bombs.
40:06If you want the most advanced technology that the human race has, it's also its most potentially destructive.
40:15Now, would aliens be interested in that because they want to tap into it, encourage it, protect us from it?
40:25But even at its most potent, this human-made technology pales in comparison to the destructive power of nature.
40:35The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 resulted in a blast eight times more powerful than the largest nuclear device ever detonated.
40:46The eruption of Mount St. Helens might simply be lumped together with human-created explosions and the whole thing seen as this is an explosive place.
41:00There's one theory that perhaps aliens are quite literally mapping, surveying our world for one purpose or another and using disasters to do so.
41:11And there's plenty to choose from. Volcanoes erupting, plenty of earthquakes, lots of natural disasters abounding, especially these days.
41:20And then we've created our own fair share of them, from the atomic bomb to even something like the Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean.
41:29Maybe aliens are doing a kind of cost-benefit analysis of planet Earth.
41:35They're looking at human beings, the impact they're having on the planet, and they're taking a view.
41:41One thing that's really interesting to think about is what would happen if aliens did detect us? What would they choose to do?
41:49In 2011, two academics from the University of Pennsylvania and an experienced NASA researcher published a paper.
41:59In it, scientists examine what could happen if activity on Earth caught the attention of an alien civilization.
42:07The first option is that the outcome would just simply be neutral. They would decide that maybe that's of interest, but not enough, frankly, and so we'll just ignore them.
42:17Perhaps they're far more evolved than we are, and they don't want to mess with our evolution, technologically speaking.
42:24Maybe they're out there watching and determining we're just not quite ready yet.
42:28Another option would be a very positive one, that they would take a very active, benevolent approach to us, that they would see that we are a lesser civilization that could use some of the technology that they have, for instance, some of the advanced knowledge and help us to better ourselves.
42:45And that would be fantastic. But then, of course, the one that everybody worries about would be the more negative option, that they would take a look at us and really not like what they see.
42:55One reason for that is because of how we behave as a species throughout human history, the way that humans have interacted with one another, the way that we've treated our planet in more recent history.
43:10It's possible that there is an alien species out there that has strong feelings about how living things should operate within the universe.
43:21In the negative scenarios, you have the very obvious one that the aliens would just decide to conquer us outright and become our new overlords.
43:31But there's a more intriguing negative scenario, which is sometimes described as the universalist option, and that is that the aliens would decide that we pose an enormous threat to the rest of the universe.
43:47And we are a problem that needs to be destroyed, snuffed out.
43:52The exact reason behind the strange incidents in Washington state remain a mystery.
43:59They may or may not be aliens, and their intentions are unknown.
44:04But we do know that it is more than likely that we are not alone in the universe.
44:10We have trillions and trillions and trillions of planets in the universe.
44:15The likelihood that there is life is becoming more and more likely because it's becoming so unlikely that there isn't conditions elsewhere that leads to life.
44:26I'm really sympathetic with theories that propose that aliens are very interested in us for our benefit.
44:34I think that that story, that narrative, has a lot of power for us.
44:38Aliens helping us, maybe mapping disasters so that we can avoid those disasters in the future.
44:44You don't have to believe in aliens to believe that this story can be powerful for the future of humanity.
45:04oof!
45:05You don't have to believe that this story can be powerful for us.
45:10Absolutely.
45:11Thank you so much.
45:13You may have to believe in aliens.
45:16We will be in aliens.
45:27You may have to believe it in aliens.
45:30You may be in aliens and aliens.
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