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Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo Season 2 Episode 8
Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo
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Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo
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00:00Mysteries can be buried anywhere, under the earth, beneath the sea, or even right under
00:17our own feet.
00:20And when we stumble upon them, sometimes what we find can change history.
00:26Tonight, secrets from the skies, like a flying predator that dealt death from above.
00:36This was a massive killer.
00:39They've never seen anything like this.
00:41To a mysterious rock that fell from the stars.
00:46It turns out to be really heavy.
00:49He's shocked, and he thinks that maybe this stone is full of gold.
00:53But this is not made of gold.
00:54There's something even better and more rare.
00:58To a strange skull found in a cave.
01:01It's abnormally large and bulbous.
01:04The eyes seem to be set far apart.
01:06I mean, this is right out of a horror movie.
01:10Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.
01:14It's 2014 in Cincinnati, and a widow named Carol Knight is going through her late husband's
01:32belongings in his office.
01:33Much of what she's finding is exactly what you would expect.
01:37Some papers, an old, well-worn pair of sneakers, that kind of thing.
01:41And as she's looking in the back of the closet, she comes upon this white bag.
01:46She lifts it up, and she can hear it make a loud clank.
01:49She opens it, and inside, it's loaded with this technical equipment.
01:54There are these metal coils that run to these odd-looking sensors.
01:58There's, like, straps and tools and a small 1960s film camera.
02:04Usually stuff like this might just get tossed in the trash, or maybe donated to Goodwill or something.
02:11But these aren't just random items.
02:13They belong to Carol's late husband, legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong.
02:18Obviously, in the astronaut hierarchy, Neil Armstrong sits at the very top.
02:26He's the first person to set foot on the moon.
02:29And in July 1969, 650 million people huddled around their television sets to watch that moment happen.
02:36Obviously, any artifact associated with him or the Apollo 11 mission is going to be extremely valuable.
02:51After he dies in 2012, Carol gives curators from the National Air and Space Museum access to his office.
02:58They come in, and they collect anything that they think might be important for the museum.
03:03Two years later, when Carol finds this bag in the closet, she doesn't know what to make of it.
03:09So before throwing it all away, Carol calls the museum again and sends curator Alan E. Dale a photograph of the contents of the bag.
03:19When Alan sees the photos, he can't believe his eyes.
03:23This looks like stuff from the Apollo 11 mission.
03:27And this means that these items have been to the moon.
03:33That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
03:40Everybody knows the Westinghouse TV camera that took this famous shot.
03:45But there was a second camera, a 16 millimeter, mounted on top of the lunar module.
03:52Armstrong and Aldrin used this camera to film themselves while they're tearing around the moon,
03:58taking samples of moon dust and moon rocks and planting the American flag.
04:02So how did this priceless piece of history end up buried in a closet for more than 40 years?
04:09It seems that nobody but Armstrong knew that this camera was in the closet
04:14because it wasn't supposed to even come back to Earth in the first place.
04:18When it comes to space travel, there is no more valuable commodity than mass.
04:23They even have a saying, every ounce matters.
04:27When Apollo 11 returns to Earth, they come back with 50 pounds of moon rocks that they didn't leave Cape Canaveral with.
04:34So they had to leave an equivalent weight of items behind to compensate for the rocks.
04:39But Armstrong didn't want to leave the prized camera on the moon.
04:43It seems that Armstrong makes an executive decision to take the 16 millimeter film camera back.
04:51And he keeps this secret.
04:53He doesn't tell NASA.
04:54He doesn't even tell his wife for decades.
04:57And now Armstrong's secret camera could turn out to be worth a fortune.
05:02Buzz Aldrin's Apollo 11 jacket sells for $2.8 million in 2022.
05:07And bags used to collect rock samples sell for $2 million at auction.
05:13And they don't even have moon rock in them anymore.
05:16So can you imagine what this camera would sell for?
05:19Carol Knight, however, does not cash in.
05:22Instead, she donates the camera to the Space Museum for public display.
05:28You can still go see it today.
05:30And it helps to ensure that Armstrong's legacy will carry on.
05:34Uncovering a priceless NASA relic in a closet is one thing.
05:40But imagine literally stumbling over something even more valuable that fell from the sky.
05:48The Maryborough Park in Melbourne, Australia, is right in the middle of the Goldfields region,
05:55which is where the 19th century gold rush boomed.
05:58It's golden age is over, but amateur gold rushers and tourists still try their luck, hoping to get the odd nugget.
06:07In 2015, David Hole is walking around the park, not expecting to find much.
06:13He digs here and there for fun, but as he's walking through some thick red clay,
06:19he practically trips over a medium-sized rock.
06:22He wonders if something might be under it.
06:25He tries to move it out of the way, but it turns out to be really heavy.
06:30He's shocked, and he thinks that maybe this stone is full of gold.
06:35David excitedly lugs the stone back home, and once he's there,
06:39he breaks out his angle grinder to crack it open and get to the prize inside.
06:45But as he goes to cut it open, the angle grinder can't even make a dent.
06:51Then he tries smashing it with a sledgehammer, but the sledge just bounces right back off.
06:58He tries acid, but again, no dice.
07:02He's never seen anything like it.
07:04This thing has not a scratch on it.
07:06Whatever it actually is, it's clearly no gold nugget.
07:10Unlike the rock itself, David's dreams of a big payday are shattered.
07:14So, he brings it to the Melbourne Museum to see if anyone can figure out what exactly it is.
07:22Museum scientists examine the indestructible lump and have both good and bad news for David.
07:28The bad news is that, as David suspected, this is not made of gold.
07:33But the good news is that it's something even better and more rare.
07:37It's a meteorite.
07:41Over the last 37 years, this museum curator has examined thousands of rocks people thought were meteorites.
07:49But so far, only two had delivered on that promise.
07:53So, finding a meteorite is extremely rare.
07:56To unlock the secrets inside, scientists need to look deeper.
08:00Carbon dating puts the rock's arrival on Earth somewhere between about 100 to 1,000 years ago.
08:08But to get the full story, the lab has to crack this rock open, which is easier said than done.
08:15The outer shells of meteorites are hardened by their passage through the Earth's atmosphere,
08:22which generates an enormous amount of heat.
08:24It's like putting them in a super forge, the same way we would harden steel.
08:30To crack it open, they need the hardest tool they have.
08:34It takes a diamond blade saw to finely cut into the rock.
08:38And what they find inside is a blend of rare minerals and a high concentration of iron.
08:45Based on its makeup, experts believe that it came from the huge asteroid belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter
08:52and may have even been part of a core of a planet that failed to form.
08:58Incredibly, David's rock turns out to be far more valuable than gold.
09:05Because they're so rare, meteorites can be worth anywhere between $10,000 to $1,000 per gram.
09:12This one weighs 37 pounds or about 17,000 grams.
09:18So it could be worth millions.
09:20For now, David's meteorite is on display at the Melbourne Museum.
09:25Time will tell if David decides to finally cash in on his find or keep it in the museum as the world's most indestructible nest egg.
09:33The Bermuda Triangle is famous for swallowing ships and pulling planes from the sky.
09:43But when treasure hunters dig up planes lost in World War II, they uncover a mystery no one expected.
09:51In the spring of 1991, explorers from the scientific search project of New York City are scouring the ocean floor off Fort Lauderdale looking for gold from old Spanish galleons.
10:08Graham Hawks is leading a search using a small submarine with a remote camera.
10:13But as he patrols the seafloor, he sees something that distracts him.
10:20What Hawks and his team have just found is the wreckage of a World War II-era TBM Avenger torpedo bomber.
10:28And it's not alone.
10:29They find not two, not three, but five Avenger bombers all on the bottom of the Atlantic and all within about a mile of each other.
10:38They seem too close together for it to be a coincidence.
10:41The only logical conclusion seems to be that they were flying together and then all went down at the same time.
10:49To the cruise historians, the clues point to a single infamous case, the disappearance of Flight 19.
10:59In December 1945, three months after the end of World War II, five Avenger bombers take off from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Base on a routine training mission.
11:10The lead plane starts experiencing compass trouble and the pack gets disoriented.
11:18Radio contact with the naval base in Fort Lauderdale becomes fainter and fainter.
11:24The base is struggling to track the position of the planes.
11:28It's almost as if something is interrupting or interfering with the signal.
11:33Eventually, radio contact with all five planes is lost.
11:44Night falls and the pilots and planes of Flight 19 are never heard from again.
11:49The planes vanish without a trace in a vast, merciless area of ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle.
11:58No other incident fuels the mystique of the Bermuda Triangle more than the loss of Flight 19.
12:05So solving that mystery while looking for Spanish gold could be the only thing luckier than actually finding Spanish gold.
12:12The find is too compelling to ignore, so Hawks' team takes a closer look at the planes.
12:19They need to look for identifying markers.
12:22So they comb through the videos and first they make out the letters F and T, which means that these planes did take off from Fort Lauderdale, just like Flight 19.
12:33They also make out the number 28 on the tail of one plane, which partially matches up to one of the missing Flight 19 planes.
12:42So at this point, they're very excited.
12:44Then they find more tail numbers, but these do not line up with Flight 19.
12:50And at least some of these planes are underarmed, which suggests that they're actually older planes than the ones who flew in Flight 19.
12:58As Hawks and his team uncover more evidence, it starts to tell a different story, one that only deepens the mystery.
13:07So it turns out that not only is this not the Flight 19 group, but these planes, which crashed basically on top of each other, didn't even crash at the same time.
13:17These crashes span years, going back to 1943.
13:20So now, instead of solving one Bermuda Triangle mystery, researchers now have two unsolved mysteries.
13:31The Bermuda Triangle isn't the only place famous aircraft vanish.
13:37Sometimes they turn up in the last place you'd expect.
13:40It's the fall of 2023, and business partners Dustin Riach and Jason Revis have just popped the lock on a storage unit in Van Nuys, California.
13:54They want an online auction for the contents of the unit, sight unseen.
13:59Revis calls the gamble shooting dice in the dark.
14:02These storage units can come packed with old clothes or holiday decorations or sometimes even hazardous materials.
14:09On occasion, though, they might actually have something valuable.
14:13They pop open some boxes, and they find some nitrate film rolls from the 1800s and the 1900s, which might be worth a couple of bucks, but it's really not anything of profound value.
14:25Then they start opening some garbage bags, and Jason pulls out a model of a spaceship.
14:32They realize that this is a model of the USS Enterprise and figure that it might have some value to Star Trek fans.
14:39Dustin and Jason decide to list it on eBay to see how much they can get for it.
14:45As soon as the auction goes live, people start freaking out because the base of this model has a business card with the name of the model maker, Richard C. Dayton.
14:55Richard C. Dayton is nothing short of a legend in the Star Trek community.
15:00In fact, he built the original model of the Starship Enterprise in 1966.
15:07He built the one that goes soaring across the screen in the opening credits of Gene Roddenberry's series.
15:14But that original piece of Trekkie treasure has been missing for decades, and fans online think this could be the original prototype.
15:23Back in 1979, the makers of Star Trek The Motion Picture borrowed the model from Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator, and never gave it back, even though Gene would send letter after letter begging for its return.
15:39Dustin and Jason pull the item from eBay and bring it to the Heritage Auction House for verification.
15:45Sure enough, this is the original Enterprise model.
15:49To this day, nobody knows how the model ended up in the storage unit, but the discovery sends shockwaves through the Star Trek universe, and it doesn't take long for the original creator's family to step in.
16:11Now, even though the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry, died in 1991, his son, Gene Jr., hears about the model, and he wants it back.
16:19I mean, his dad didn't give it away.
16:21His dad loaned it out.
16:22He feels it should definitely be part of his estate.
16:26Rivas and Riyak strike a deal to return the model to Roddenberry's son in exchange for $500,000.
16:32It's not $800,000, but it's a lot more than they expected to get out of the model when they posted it on eBay.
16:42Exploring the ocean can reveal strange things.
16:46In 2022, divers uncovered a tragic piece of space history.
16:52It's 2022, and underwater explorer Mike Barnett and rec specialist Jimmy Godomsky are diving off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
17:06They're part of a documentary crew searching for a downed rescue plane that went missing in the 1940s.
17:13The particular aircraft that they're looking for is a PBM Mariner flying boat.
17:19It's got a large superstructure, and it'll be easily recognizable because of its top-mounted inverted gull wings.
17:26On the ocean floor, Mike spots a shape that's buried under coral sand,
17:30and his gut is leading him to believe that it's part of a wing of that PBM Mariner plane, so he decides to check it out.
17:38They use blowers to delicately remove sand and coral fragments from the object.
17:46But as the sand blows off, they see something that doesn't make sense.
17:51They uncover what appears to be a series of white bricks or cobblestones mounted to the object.
17:58Now, even though it appears to have been buried for a long time,
18:01these bricks are still very white with no signs of any rust or oxidation.
18:06They seem to be made of a composite that neither of them recognize.
18:11Mike realizes this isn't a World War II plane, but the location of the wreck gives him another idea.
18:20They're just offshore from Cape Canaveral, which launches rockets all the time.
18:25And parts of rockets like boosters are designed to fall back into the ocean from 50 miles up.
18:31But this thing is flat and wide, and so it can't be a rocket booster.
18:36As he heads back to shore, Mike calls a former astronaut friend named Bruce Melnick to look at the video.
18:43It takes Melnick all of two seconds to recognize those white bricks.
18:48These are heat tiles of the type that were used on the space shuttle to protect it from heat during reentry.
18:54Then Melnick says something that stops everyone in their tracks.
18:59Melnick is sure that if there's a big piece of a space shuttle just off the coast of Florida, it belonged to Challenger.
19:12Challenger, go with throttle up.
19:14When Space Shuttle Challenger detonates in the skies above Cape Canaveral in January 1986, it sends the entire country into mourning.
19:29It kills all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Krista McAuliffe, who was supposed to be the first civilian in space.
19:37Obviously, there's a scramble to see what caused this horrific tragedy, so the Navy undertakes the biggest salvage operation in history.
19:45But it's an incredibly difficult mission because debris is spread across 500 square miles of ocean.
19:53They collect over 100 tons of wreckage.
19:56And that wreckage, combined with film footage, reveals that the fault is an O-ring, a little rubber gasket in a rocket booster that was responsible for triggering the explosion.
20:10Mike brings footage from his dive to NASA program director Mike Cinelli, hoping to confirm that what they found truly is a piece of the Challenger shuttle.
20:21And I'm always a little cautious because, as you know, we've launched rockets for over 70 years, so there's a lot of objects out there.
20:28But after looking at the object in greater detail, you've discovered Challenger.
20:38I certainly can't thank you enough for showing me this.
20:42Yeah, it's powerful.
20:45Everyone who was alive and conscious at the time remembers where they were when it happened.
20:51Seeing this artifact is enough to bring you right back to that moment in history.
21:00Lots of deadly things can descend from above, but few are as frightening as one giant predator that once ruled over Canada's skies.
21:10In 1992, a professional nature photographer explores the snow-covered terrain in Alberta, Canada.
21:19As she scans the blank white canvas and contemplates her next shot, she spots something odd on the ground.
21:26And as she gets up close, she realizes it could be a fossil.
21:29She's curious.
21:31She gently chips away at the frozen soil all around this object.
21:36And sure enough, she begins to see a massive form take shape.
21:41It looks like a long neck, gigantic wing bones, and a rib cage.
21:46Now, she's no dinosaur expert, but she does feel like she stumbled onto something special.
21:52She calls the Royal Tyrell Museum, and once their paleontologists look at the specimen,
21:58they determine it's a kind of pterosaur known as Quetzalcoatlus,
22:02a giant flying reptile that once ruled the skies 77 million years ago.
22:08It's a magnificent find.
22:10But in the fossil world, this is old news,
22:13since the species was already discovered in Texas back in 1972.
22:17So the fossils are exhumed and basically forgotten about.
22:21Sometimes, however, even the experts can miss something.
22:25In 2019, another team of paleontologists pulls the fossils out of mothballs to take a second look.
22:31But this time, looking at the morphology, they see something doesn't add up.
22:36The neck on this specimen is shorter and wider than the Quetzalcoatlus from Texas.
22:42They've never seen anything like this.
22:44This is a new, badass species of a super predator.
22:48Like her Texas cousin, this was a massive killer.
22:53We're talking a 32-foot wingspan, which is equivalent to a four-seater Cessna plane.
22:59The head was huge, about three times longer than the actual length of its body.
23:04In fact, one expert described it as a giant flying murder head.
23:08This ancient flying eating machine is dubbed Cryodrachon boreus, Greek for frozen dragon of the north wind.
23:17But around the lab and in the press, it becomes known as the ice dragon.
23:22It likely fed on a diet of lizards and baby dinos.
23:27But because this ice dragon had no teeth, it would swallow prey whole using its powerful neck muscles.
23:34But for this particular ice dragon, dinner didn't go as planned.
23:38The Alberta specimen is covered in battle scars.
23:43In fact, one of the leg fossils has a velociraptor tooth embedded into it.
23:49Experts can't tell if this is what killed the ice dragon, but what they can tell is that it died young.
23:55Probably a teenager.
23:56It's the first of its kind ever found in Canada.
24:00And one of the best preserved flying reptiles ever discovered on the continent.
24:05Taken out before it had realized its full terrifying potential.
24:14For centuries, people have looked to the skies for answers.
24:17But in Mexico, one teenager finds something buried underground that seems to come from the stars.
24:24It's the 1930s, and somewhere in Copper Canyon, about 100 miles south of Chihuahua, Mexico,
24:32a teenage girl on vacation stumbles across an abandoned mine.
24:38This area is littered with these old abandoned mine shafts,
24:41and the girl's parents tell her to stay away from them because they could be dangerous.
24:45Naturally, her curiosity gets the best of her, and she goes in and she's crawling through the dust and the dirt,
24:50even though the ceiling of one of these mines could collapse in on her at any moment.
24:54At the end of one tunnel, she comes across something that stops her in her tracks.
25:00In the corner of this dark, dusty cavern, she makes out what looks like a body.
25:07And as she gets closer to it, she sees it is an adult skeleton.
25:13As she continues looking around, she notices something chilling.
25:18Next to that skeleton is a mound of dirt, and sticking out from it is this small, misshapen skeleton hand.
25:26And that little hand is holding hands with the first skeleton.
25:31I mean, this is right out of a horror movie.
25:33Still unafraid, this 13-year-old girl starts uncovering the second skeleton.
25:42The first thing she notices is the body is the size of a child.
25:46But when she gets to the skull, she can tell that it looks strange.
25:51Compared to the rest of the body, the skull is unnaturally large and bulbous with wide, sad eyes.
26:00It's so strange that she just has to have it.
26:04She winds up taking both skulls home with her and tucks them away in a storage area where they stay undisturbed for decades.
26:12After the girl passes away, the skulls end up in the hands of family friends who turn over the specimens to a researcher named Lloyd Pye.
26:24Pye is not your typical biologist or researcher.
26:28He's an author and proponent of what's called the intervention theory,
26:31which basically argues that aliens visited the Earth and, among other things, genetically contributed to modern humans.
26:39As Pye studies the skull, he gets very excited.
26:42He remarks that the bulbous head and offset eyes are consistent with alleged eyewitness accounts of so-called gray aliens.
26:52Gray aliens are those stereotypical big-headed, big-eyed aliens often depicted in science fiction.
27:01Pye is convinced that the skull is not human and names it the Starchild Skull.
27:08He looks at the skull and wonders now if this might be evidence of an alien-human hybrid,
27:15essentially the missing link that he's been looking for.
27:18He raises money to do carbon dating and DNA testing of the skull.
27:22When his test results come back, Pye claims that they show the skull dates back to 900 years ago.
27:30The sample shows lots of human DNA, but Pye claims that there are elements that the lab can't account for.
27:38And Pye argues that these holes in the DNA sample must be where the alien contributions are.
27:44Eventually, mainstream scientists are able to retest samples from the skull and fill in some of those previous gaps in the skull's DNA.
27:53Turns out, they disagree with Lloyd.
27:56They argue that the Starchild Skull is not evidence of a gray-alien-human hybrid.
28:01Instead, they say that it's a male human with a birth defect probably like hydrocephalus,
28:07informally known as water on the brain, which can cause the kinds of features that appear in this skull.
28:12But Pye and his followers are not backing down,
28:15and no scientist or evidence is going to dissuade them from their beliefs.
28:21Lloyd fights this battle right until he dies in 2013,
28:24eight decades after the Starchild Skull is pulled from that abandoned mineshaft outside Chihuahua.
28:30As for his followers, they believe the truth is still out there.
28:38Almost a century later, another teenager makes an incredible find,
28:43one that lies far beyond our solar system.
28:48It's 2019, and 17-year-old aspiring astrophysicist and Star Wars superfan Wolf Kukir
28:56has landed his dream job as a NASA intern.
28:59In addition to standard intern duties, like fetching coffee and making copies,
29:06he's tasked with analyzing data of variations in star brightness using NASA's TESS satellite.
29:14TESS stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite,
29:19which is a fancy acronym for a very powerful space telescope
29:22that is shot into orbit in 2018 to look for planets outside our solar system.
29:27He's asked to comb through brightness data, also known as a star's light curve,
29:33which is essentially its brightness versus time.
29:36These aren't pretty pictures of stars.
29:38These are pretty much just dots on a page.
29:41If the brightness doesn't change, the dot stays in the same place.
29:44If it gets dimmer, the dot goes down.
29:46For the scientists, this is kind of like grunt work.
29:49But for Wolf, as an intern, he is in heaven.
29:53On day three of his internship, Wolf stumbles upon a light curve that gets his blood pumping.
30:01It's a two-star system that sits in the Pictor constellation.
30:06As he's looking at this light curve, he sees a dip that comes in intervals.
30:11This represents the star dimming and then coming back to full brightness.
30:15That suggests a third object orbiting both of these stars.
30:20An excited Wolf leaps to his feet, straightens his name tag,
30:25and in his most confident intern voice tells his NASA supervisor
30:29he thinks he's got something worth looking at.
30:32When Wolf's boss looks at the computer screen, he is absolutely stunned.
30:37This intern, on his third day of the job, somehow, in the cold expanse of space 1,300 light years away,
30:47has stumbled across a previously undiscovered planet orbiting two stars at once.
30:54Now, if you're a Star Wars fan like Wolf, you know that Luke Skywalker's home planet had two suns.
31:01And just like Tatooine in Star Wars, if you were to look up at the sky from the surface of this newly discovered planet,
31:10you would see two sunsets.
31:12But in this case, the planet is so hot, you would also be vaporized.
31:17This is a remarkable discovery because this is the first time the test satellite
31:22was able to discover a planet orbiting a double star system.
31:27And it was found by a high school student.
31:30The astronomers leading this study published their results in a major international science journal,
31:36and they do a very classy thing.
31:38They include 17-year-old high school intern Wolf as a co-author.
31:43But it's not all good news for Wolf,
31:46because even though he's the guy who discovered the planet,
31:50he's not allowed to name it.
31:52NASA names it TOI-1338B,
31:55which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
31:58Some reporters ask Wolf if he's disappointed by the name,
32:02and he says his brother suggested they call it Wolf-topia,
32:05which, let's face it, is far more awesome.
32:12High in the Andes, two climbers reach the summit of a frozen peak.
32:16But instead of a breathtaking view,
32:19they discovered a clue from an old mystery.
32:25It's a cool day in January of 1998 on the Chilean-Argentinian border.
32:31Mountain climbers Pablo Reguera and Fernando Germandia
32:34are summiting one of the highest peaks in the area,
32:37Mount Tupangada.
32:38As they cross the 15,000-foot mark,
32:42they notice something in the distance.
32:44As they get closer, it becomes obvious
32:46that what they're looking at is some sort of engine.
32:50And a quick wipe of the valve cover on top
32:53reveals the words Rolls-Royce.
32:57Now, obviously, nobody has taken their luxury automobile
33:00three miles up a mountain in Argentina,
33:02so the two conclude that what they must be looking at
33:04is an airplane engine.
33:05There are no recent reports of crashes
33:09or missing airplanes anywhere in the area.
33:11And while the engine looks pretty banged up,
33:14it's tough to tell just how long it's been there.
33:17A quick search of the area reveals
33:19what appears to be a damaged fuselage,
33:21as well as some strips of sun-bleached clothing.
33:25At this point, the mountain climbers realize
33:27that this is definitely a crash site.
33:29The question is, from when?
33:33They snap a few photos,
33:34and they head back down the mountain and report it.
33:38This is enough to raise interest
33:39in mounting a full expedition.
33:41And so volunteers from the Argentinian army
33:44form a caravan, trucks, men, even mules,
33:48to try to get to places where the trucks can't go on the mountain.
33:50When the team reaches the crash site,
33:52they spread out and comb over the area.
33:55Then the search takes a gruesome turn.
33:58They find human body parts scattered across the crash site.
34:04Parts of five different bodies are ultimately discovered,
34:08all preserved atop this frozen mountain.
34:10The team then turns over their findings to Argentinian scientists.
34:16Over the next two years, they conduct DNA testing
34:19and eventually confirm the identities of all five individuals.
34:23As they notify the families,
34:25they realize these victims are all linked by one thing.
34:28They were all on a plane that vanished nearly 50 years ago.
34:32On August 2nd, 1947,
34:36a decommissioned World War II bomber,
34:39now converted into a passenger plane called the Stardust,
34:42takes off from Buenos Aires with 11 people on board,
34:45bound for Santiago.
34:47There's a snowstorm that day,
34:49as well as a strong headwind.
34:51Then, just four minutes before the aircraft
34:53is scheduled to land in Santiago,
34:56the pilot sends a Morse code message
34:58announcing his estimated time of arrival,
35:00followed by a cryptic message,
35:04Stendek.
35:05The radio man in Santiago has never heard this phrase.
35:09He asks for the message to be repeated,
35:11and it comes back the same twice more.
35:14Stendek, Stendek.
35:16The signal cuts off without warning,
35:19and the plane simply disappears.
35:24The Argentine and Chilean air forces send up aircraft
35:28searching for wreckage of Stardust,
35:30and yet they find nothing.
35:32It's like it simply disappeared off the face of the Earth.
35:36For 50 years,
35:37the fate of Stardust remained an aviation cold case.
35:40But now there's a chance to solve it all
35:42because some mountain climbers tripped over its engine.
35:46From what investigators can tell,
35:48the plane crashed into the side of the mountain
35:51during a controlled descent.
35:52The visibility would have been bad,
35:54and if the crew hadn't accounted for the strong headwinds,
35:58they may have thought they were past the Andes
36:00when they began their descent.
36:02Under whiteout conditions,
36:04they may never have even seen the mountain
36:05before they collided with it.
36:07And if the collision was violent enough,
36:10it may have triggered an avalanche
36:14that buried Stardust,
36:16obscuring it from the view
36:17of the search and rescue aircraft
36:19that were looking for it.
36:20With the fate of the people aboard figured out,
36:24one question remains.
36:26What does Stendek mean?
36:28Some think that it might be
36:30some sort of abbreviated distress message,
36:32like, severe turbulence encountered,
36:35now descending, expect crash.
36:38But there's no proof of this.
36:39And why tag a routine arrival message
36:43with this complicated acronym?
36:45We may never crack the code of Stendek,
36:49but at least the families of the passengers
36:52and crew of the Stardust
36:53now know the fate of their loved ones.
36:55And this 50-year-old aviation cold case
36:58is, at least partly, closed.
37:00Sometimes mysteries about the heavens
37:09aren't found above us,
37:10but instead are buried deep in the ground,
37:14like one ancient object discovered in Germany.
37:20In 1999, in a remote part of Nebra, Germany,
37:24metal detectorists Henry Westfall and Mario Renner
37:27are on the hunt for coins and other trinkets
37:30that they can pawn to subsidize their hobby.
37:33As they swing their metal detector over the ground,
37:35they hear that high-pitched whine,
37:39and that gets them really excited
37:41because this is what they're here for.
37:44They start digging with small shovels
37:46and then pickaxes.
37:48And as they dig,
37:49their signal gets stronger and stronger.
37:51And soon they uncover something large and flat.
37:58It's a bronze sword.
38:00And it's old, possibly ancient.
38:04They wave the metal detector over the now-empty hole,
38:08and to their amazement,
38:10they still have a signal.
38:13Finally, one of them gets their hands
38:14wrapped around a particularly stubborn piece.
38:17Whatever this is,
38:18it's wide and round and much tougher to free.
38:22They use the pickaxe to jostle a little bit,
38:25and finally,
38:26this strange object emerges from the ground.
38:30This piece is kind of disc-shaped,
38:33and it has the image of a golden crescent moon and stars.
38:38They don't know what to make of it,
38:39but they think that it's got to be worth something.
38:43To the finders,
38:44it looks like treasure,
38:45but in the eyes of the law,
38:48it's contraband.
38:49In Germany,
38:50this kind of stuff is considered state property.
38:53You're not allowed to keep it,
38:54and you're supposed to have a license
38:56just to hunt for it.
38:57Let's just say Henry and Mario
38:59haven't exactly filled out the proper paperwork.
39:02So they're in a pickle here.
39:04They want to make some money,
39:05but they don't want to get caught,
39:07so they got to move fast.
39:10The next day,
39:10they race to a dealer in Cologne
39:12who gives them 31,000 Deutschmarks.
39:15That's equivalent to about $17,000 today.
39:19As the men disappear to count their money,
39:22their strange disc creates a buzz
39:25in the underground collector world.
39:27For years,
39:28the disc passes from collector to collector,
39:31rising in value to over half a million bucks.
39:34But still,
39:35nobody knows exactly what it is.
39:37Experts dated to the Bronze Age
39:41around 1600 BCE,
39:43but it's the markings
39:45that actually fuel speculation.
39:47Some astronomers note
39:48that a cluster of stars on the disc
39:51seems to correspond
39:52to the constellation Pleiades.
39:55And on the side of the disc,
39:57there is a long arc
39:58with a very precise measurement
40:00of 82.5 degrees.
40:03This corresponds
40:04to the difference
40:06between sunsets
40:07at winter and summer solstice.
40:10Soon, experts start to think
40:12maybe this strange disc
40:14is the oldest graphical representation
40:17of astronomical phenomena
40:19ever discovered.
40:22It's dubbed the Nebra Sky Disc,
40:25and German officials
40:26are eager to get their hands on it.
40:28One seller,
40:29who's looking to unload it
40:31for a cool million,
40:32gets busted in a sting operation.
40:34And the government
40:35is getting ready
40:36to throw the book at them
40:37for selling black market antiques.
40:39Looking for leniency,
40:41they provide information
40:42that leads authorities back
40:43to Henry Westfall
40:45and Mario Renner.
40:46Henry and Mario
40:47get arrested
40:48on the grounds
40:49of treasure hunting
40:50without a license
40:51and stealing state property.
40:53So now,
40:54it looks like
40:54they're gonna have to spend
40:55that 31,000 Deutschmarks
40:56they got
40:57to pay for some lawyers.
40:58After a short trial,
41:01Henry and Mario
41:02are sentenced
41:03to four to ten months
41:04in jail.
41:06As for the Sky Disc,
41:07well,
41:08it's now kept
41:08in a state museum
41:09where people can visit
41:11and continue to speculate
41:12about whether it is,
41:13indeed,
41:14the first depiction
41:15of the cosmos.
41:17Cameras on the moon,
41:20wreckage in the sea,
41:21and treasures
41:22pointing towards the stars.
41:24Some mysteries
41:25from the skies
41:26go far beyond
41:28anything we expect.
41:30I'm Danny Troyo.
41:31Thanks for watching
41:32Mysteries on Earth.
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