00:00There's a park in Montreal that feels like stepping onto an alien planet,
00:05and it changes before your very eyes.
00:20When it comes to parks, Montreal is up there with New York City as having the most
00:24amount of green spaces in any city in North America.
00:28And while a lot of them are really nice for a picnic or a stroll,
00:31there's one park in Montreal that stands out in a very strange way.
00:35It's not exactly the first thing you'd expect to see.
00:39If anything, it feels like stepping on another planet.
00:43And it's got some secrets to discover.
00:45To find this otherworldly place, we'll have to head out of the downtown core and head towards the north.
00:51Here it is, Park Frederic Bach.
00:54Looks pretty normal, right?
00:56Guess again.
00:58These massive heads with hollowed out brains staring up at the heavens are definitely a strange sight.
01:04Now get this.
01:05The empty space within each head is big enough that you could actually fit an entire human being
01:10in there.
01:11And the way they're facing up at the heavens is very alien-like, for sure.
01:15Though they look like they belong on a different world, they're the creation of sculptor Simon Guggen.
01:20Guggen says the idea for the statue came to him as he stood on a 240-million-year-old mountain in Africa
01:28and watched the 4.6-billion-year-old sun descend below the horizon.
01:33But these sculptures are just the beginning of what this park has to offer.
01:38This whole place is one big science lab.
01:44White pods spread out as far as the eye can see.
01:48What are these things?
01:51They're unlike any other structure in the area.
01:54Weird machine-looking things, like something out of Interstellar or Star Wars.
02:00These things are called biogas wells.
02:04And just like a regular well, they're hollow on the inside.
02:07The only difference is, instead of water, over time this fills up with gases from inside of the earth.
02:14You can actually hear the gases being collected.
02:16Listen.
02:21Montreal-based architecture firms LeMay and Morelli built 250 of these spheres here,
02:28all part of the park's own renewable energy system.
02:32But why build all of these pods here, in this park specifically?
02:36This is where things get really interesting.
02:39Millions of years ago, this whole place was underwater.
02:42And it's got the fossils to prove it.
02:44And as the oceans disappeared, all the leftover dino carcasses ended up in the ground.
02:50Then, in the 1950s, it was a city dump, filled to the brim with garbage for over 30 years.
03:00So the ground here has all the decomposing goodness needed for a biogas buffet.
03:06The pods swallow up all the organic matter left behind from the trash in the 1950s,
03:11and the dinosaurs that swam in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago.
03:16From a landfill to sustainable energy, this is one of the most ambitious environmental
03:22rehabilitation projects in North America.
03:26And just as we think we have this place figured out, it starts to change.
03:30As the sun sets, something starts happening.
03:34The pods begin to light up.
03:37There is almost no light pollution coming in from the city, so it's really hard to see them on video.
03:42Now a picture, on the other hand, captures just how it looks to the naked eye.
03:48That glowing green light you're seeing inside of each pod is the biogas collected from the ground.
03:54And suddenly, an already strange park just went supernova.
04:00There are tons of green spaces spread out across Montreal,
04:03but none anywhere near as strange or interesting as Frederick Bach Park.
04:08That's it for this episode, but I'll see you next week with another hidden place in Montreal
04:13that you're going to want to know about.
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