Original subtitles

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Worldwide, 27 billion cameras are watching us --

on our streets, at work, and in our homes.

They capture things that seem impossible.

It defies the laws of physics.

Man: This is unbelievable, man.

Narrator: Experts carry out analysis of these unusual events.

Now, that's an explosion.

[ screaming ]

there's got to be something we're missing in this video...

Something we're not seeing, right?

What else is going on here?

Narrator: Coming up, nashville rocks

as bizarre blasts come from below.

Oh, my god! What on earth was that?

Narrator: A restaurant where the meat is on the move.

How did food just crawl its way off the plate?

Narrator: And a mutant the size of a school bus...

Oh, man! Oh, man! Oh, man!

What is this monstrous creature?

Narrator: Bizarre phenomenon.

Whoa.

Narrator: Mysteries caught on camera.

What's the truth behind this strange evidence?

-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by discovery communications

now nashville becomes flashville.

Oh, my god! What on earth was that?

Narrator: City streets descend into panic

as explosions blast up from below.

If we see it happening on this street,

it can happen on anyone's street, and that's terrifying.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Nashville, tennessee,

the country-music capital of the world.

Beyond the honky-tonk bars and the grand ole opry

is a city of over 600,000 people.

August 2014, the suburb of sulfur springs --

a foul stench fills the air.

Then, a bizarre and terrifying explosion.

Fireballs leap from below the ground

blasting a 300-pound manhole cover skyward.

I don't know what it is.

Is it a natural disaster that's happening?

Whoa!

Well, this is terrifying

'cause this out in front of someone's house.

Narrator: Fireballs shoot up from the ground.

This isn't normal. Streets don't just blow up.

Something's going on here,

and we need to know what's happening.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: The cause of the explosion is a mystery.

There are no natural-gas pipes nearby,

so it can't be a gas leak,

and no normal amount of sewage methane could do this.

Science journalist athena brensburger believes

there could be some secret, highly combustible substance

hidden under this quiet suburb.

Now, there could be some type of explosive events

happening underneath the surface that we don't see just yet,

and as a result, that could be what produced the flames

and the smoke that we see.

Narrator: Military historian marty morgan

considers that the explosion and flashes of flame from below

are linked to ancient tunnels said to lie beneath nashville.

Morgan: Nashville is well-known

for having a tunnel complex beneath it.

There are rumors about what these tunnels are

and what they were, and the rumors range --

everything from big tunnels

built during the era of the underground railroad,

when slaves were being smuggled out of the southern states

to freedom in northern states.

And then there's another one still that's underneath

what was effectively nashville's red-light district,

called printer's alley.

And that invites speculation about nefarious purposes.

Narrator: Historian tony mcmahon wonders

if the explosion was caused by mobsters

who used the old, underground tunnels

to conceal their activity.

Over 80 years ago, nashville and everywhere else in the u.S.

Was under prohibition.

Alcohol was illegal,

and of course, gangsters stashed illegal hooch, as it was known,

in tunnels away from the prying eyes of the police.

Narrator: Between 1920 and 1933,

prohibition created a $3 billion black market for drink

and fueled the rise of brutal mobsters

like al capone and lucky luciano.

Nashville had its own gangsters, who distilled illegal booze

and are said to have used the tunnels

to store and transport it.

Many were gunned down

before they were able to move their product.

Maybe what we're seeing here is

that alcohol that's been there for decades

has been giving off alcoholic vapors,

and the whole thing has ignited.

Narrator: In the english town of boston in 2011

and illegal vodka distillery

exploded after one of the moonshiners

discarded a lit cigarette.

The blast killed five men at the scene.

A forgotten bootlegger's stash under nashville

could explode with the same kind of force and produce fireballs.

We know alcohol is really flammable.

One spark -- boom, off it goes.

Narrator: But when engineer mike sansom

looks at underground plans of this suburban street,

he finds no tunnels --

only evidence of a large network of waste pipes.

This is a sewer system, and it's flooded out all the time,

so that moonshine wouldn't have stayed there for many years.

Somebody would've found it,

or it would've gone with the floods.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Tony mcmahon finds news reports from the day of the blast

that may be a clue to the origin of the fireballs.

It turns out that emergency services

were called to an incident down the street

from where those explosions happened.

So, that might indicate the cause of those explosions.

Tv news reports showed an oil tanker that had crashed,

and it had leaked an enormous amount of fuel

into the sewer system.

Narrator: Pyrotechnics expert matt kutcher

has worked with explosions in hollywood movies

for over 20 years.

You think your sewer's blowing up around you,

you certainly wouldn't want to be around that.

Narrator: Kutcher sets up an experiment

to test the theory that spilt fuel from an oil tanker

flooded the sewer, setting off block-wide blasts.

Nice.

Kutcher's scaled-down copy of the nashville sewer

is filled with water and replicas of other things

you'd find in a waste pipe.

Kutcher: When I got into the movie business,

I never imagined I'd be working this closely to poo.

Narrator: With the pipe full of sewage,

kutcher and his team carefully prepare the explosive

and detonators.

Kutcher: So, that's contact cement.

Basically, it's glue.

It's a thicker, more viscous gasoline.

So, this is the proverbial cherry on the top, right?

The actual manhole that, hopefully, will blow off.

What we wouldn't normally see under the ground, we will today.

It's all above ground now.

Okey-dokey.

Narrator: To simulate the explosion,

kutcher will ignite the fuel with a small spark of the type

that could come from a faulty underground wire

or discarded cigarette butt.

All right, gentlemen, watch your eyes.

All clear.

In three, two, one.

[ camera whirs ]

coming up, can matt kutcher reproduce

the nashville fireballs?

Kutcher: That was one big sewer blast-off.

[ camera whirs ]

woman: Aah!

Narrator: And terror is on the menu in a downtown restaurant.

Is it really possible for a piece of meat

to come back to life, like a zombie?

Narrator: In nashville, tennessee, a weird smell

and then explosions that shoot up from below the ground.

Pyrotechnics expert matt kutcher

wants to test his theory that a fuel leak

got into the city sewer system, causing a catastrophic blast.

He fills a replica sewer with fuel and water

and wants to find out if a tiny spark

could make it erupt like the fireball in the footage.

All clear.

In three, two, one.

Hit it.

♪

as the simulated manhole cover is blown skyward by the blast,

gasoline fumes ignite just as they did in the street sewer.

Kutcher: That was one big sewer blast-off.

Did you see the top of it?

It looked just like the footage.

We have sewage. We have flame.

Our manhole cover.

It's still recording...

In the poo.

[ tapping ]

clean up on aisle six.

Narrator: Kutcher's experiment proves

the spill from the tanker caused the manhole covers to explode.

With the amount of explosive potential

caused by this tanker spill, it's amazing that nobody died.

Narrator: It's a scary thought.

With a hundred thousand oil trucks on america's streets,

our underground waste pipes

could funnel death directly into our homes.

Brensberger: It's quite terrifying to think

that something as simple as an oil spill

could essentially create a bomb beneath our feet.

Who's to say it can't happen on your street or my street?

Narrator: Now, a meal where the meat is on the move.

That piece of meat looks like it's coming back from the dead.

Narrator: It can't be alive.

There's no brain, there's no spinal chord,

there's organs of any kind.

Narrator: Is this a kentucky-fried zombie?

If my food were walking,

I'd be walking too -- out of the restaurant.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Man has been eating meat

for more than two and half million years.

Its calorie punch allowed our brains to grow,

giving us enough intelligence to start cooking it

around 800,000 b.C.,

and finally, from the 18th century,

start serving it in fancy restaurants.

But in 2019, one customer, to her horror,

discovers her meal is still alive.

First, it jerks into life.

Woman: Aah!

Then, it jumps off the table.

There's just this hunk of meat.

It looks like a piece of chicken,

and all of a sudden it starts moving,

and it crawls off the plate.

Narrator: Experts are baffled by this raw piece of mystery meat.

How does a plate of food just crawl its way off the plate?

Is it really possible for a piece of meat

to come back to life, like a zombie?

Narrator: Biologist leslie samuel believes this meat is chicken.

An animal that's usually resilient,

even when clinically dead.

You know, everyone's heard the saying,

"running around like a headless chicken."

basically, when a chicken is slaughtered

and the head is removed,

it can actually still continue running around

even though the brain is no longer sending signals.

Narrator: Unlike in humans,

where the frontal lobe of the brain

is essential for daily functions,

in birds, this part of the brain

is much smaller and largely redundant.

Most of the important stuff for running around

happens in the chicken's brain stem

which is actually further down in the neck.

Narrator: Normally, after decapitation, a brainless chicken

gets only a few extra minutes of life.

Headless chickens don't run around forever.

Usually, they'll stop running around after 10, 15 minutes.

They're not still gonna be running around

by the time you see them on your dinner plate --

that's for sure.

Narrator: However, in one extraordinary case,

a chicken named mike

seemed to overcome the immutable laws of death.

So, there's this one story

about mike, the headless chicken,

back in 1945 in colorado.

He got decapitated, but he continued to live.

Narrator: Mike's owner, farmer lloyd olsen,

is stunned by his chicken's survival.

He takes mike on tour around the country,

where thousands of curiosity seekers flock to see him.

Olsen keeps mike alive by feeding him a liquid diet

through an eye-dropper

and keeps his throat clear of mucus using a syringe.

But after touring the u.S. For 18 months,

olsen makes a grave mistake.

Tragically, farmer olsen misplaced the syringe

and little mike choked on his own mucus.

Narrator: If olsen had been less clumsy,

mike could've been undead to a ripe, old age.

As long as there is still oxygen in the blood

and the cells haven't broken down,

it can still continue to move around

because the spinal chord is still telling it to.

Is that what we're seeing here?

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Coming up, is this mysterious meat

the victim of a gruesome culinary craze?

This is way too fresh for me to be eating.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: And a mutant from the deep.

Oh, man! Oh, man! Oh, man!

Narrator: In an asian restaurant,

a suspected piece of chicken crawls off the plate

and jumps off the table.

Biologist greg szulgit studies the footage and suspects

this moving meat may not be chicken after all

but flesh from a different type of animal.

If you look carefully at it,

you can see that the body is long and slender at the back,

and it doesn't look like chicken.

If this was such fresh chicken meat

that it could still move around, where's the chicken bones?

Where's the chicken blood? I don't see either of these.

Narrator: Szulgit suspects this could be an amphibian that's still alive.

I think this might be frog meat, and if it is, it's frog meat

that's prepared in one of the most horrific ways possible.

Narrator: Sashimi is a popular dish

in restaurants all over the world --

raw meat served fresh.

But a disturbing new gastronomic trend is emerging.

In japanese, it's known as ikizukuri,

which means "prepared alive."

the creature is dismembered for you at your table

and served to you alive.

It would seem that sashimi, while served up fresh,

isn't fresh enough for some.

Narrator: But the practice of eating live animals

comes with a potentially huge risk.

Cooking meat kills harmful bacteria.

Raw meat can contain e.Coli, salmonella, and listeria.

This is the perfect example of why I decided

to be a vegetarian.

Narrator: But a live frog is perhaps the most disturbing meal

ever created.

That's live frog served up before it's even croaked.

This takes it to a whole other level.

Narrator: Greg szulgit discovers footage

that could prove this is frog meat,

but it's not an easy film to watch.

I would feel much better if the frog's brain

had been pithed first so that it wouldn't feel pain.

Oh, gosh! Oh, whoa, oh!

He skinned it.

Wise: Now he's, like, flailing and waving his arms

and trying to escape, and he's only half a frog.

Oh, it's looking right at -- oh, it winked!

That's just brutal.

Narrator: Szulgit is sure that the freaky frog footage

solves the mystery of the moving meat.

Looking at the actual footage of a frog

being slaughtered at the table, I'm now convinced

that that's probably what's going on here.

Narrator: Even though the amphibian's leg

is no longer connected to it's brain stem,

it's so fresh that muscle cells themselves

are still living and contracting.

This is genuinely a frog from beyond the grave.

This is way too fresh for me to be eating.

It's so fresh that it's literally complaining

to you, that you killed it.

[ croaks ]

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Now, has a deep-ocean camera caught a prehistoric predator?

Holy smoke, it's like a winnebago going by.

Oh, man! Oh, man! Oh, man!

What is this monstrous creature?

This is a huge animal.

Narrator: An ancient killer seems to have returned.

For a megalodon to still exist, is that a possibility?

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Japan, land of monsters.

Atomic bombs spawned the idea of godzilla,

a relic of the jurassic era brought back

and made far, far bigger

by the effects of massive radiation.

Suruga bay in the shadow of mount fuji --

there are real giant monsters here.

In December 2012, fisherman landed

the largest japanese spider crab ever caught.

Crabzilla is 13 feet long, the size of a sedan

and over four times bigger than its normal-sized relatives.

But nothing found off the coast of japan

is as weird as footage from the same area captured in 1989.

A 10-foot-long bait cage is lowered to the ocean floor.

Everything seems normal, when something comes into view

so gigantic and strange, no one can believe their eyes.

What the heck is that thing?

It's huge!

Have we unearthed the godzilla of the sea?

This thing is enormous.

Narrator: It's a vast sea creature of some kind,

but it's not one that's ever been seen before by human eyes.

Mccourt: Those kind of bait cages are about ten feet long.

That would make this shark at least 60 feet long.

That's the length of a bowling lane.

Narrator: This mega creature of the deep is ten times longer than a man

and as huge as a humpback whale.

But marine biologist danni washington

doesn't think that's what we're looking at here.

Most marine mammals in the ocean are very large.

But when I take a closer look, I see certain features

that clearly say this is not a whale.

There are gills on the sides

which means that this is some type of fish.

And then as I look closer at the pectoral fins,

it reminds me of a shark.

Narrator: There have been reports of a super-sized shark

from fishermen in the pacific.

Off the coast of california,

fishermen claimed to have seen the biggest shark ever,

and they nicknamed it the demon shark.

It's huge, and it's similar to what we see in the video.

Narrator: The demon shark is reported to be bigger than a school bus

and to be able to attack

and eat an entire group of seals with one bite.

There are always reports out there of mega-sharks

that may be hard to believe, but in this case, you wonder,

is this one that might be true?

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Marine biologist eric hovland

considers if a prehistoric monster has returned.

Hovland: There is one shark that comes to mind

that fits these proportions -- the megalodon,

a prehistoric shark that could've reached lengths

up to 60 feet, with a huge set of teeth

that dwarfs any shark species on earth.

Narrator: Megalodon was king of the ocean for over 20 million years.

It ate other sharks for breakfast

puncturing lungs with one titanic bite.

Its name comes right from "mega tooth," "megalodon."

like, it's all about those big teeth.

Narrator: The meg's mouth was over 20 feet wide,

the size of a double-garage --

a jaw containing 276 teeth, some over 7 inches long.

When they were first discovered in the 16th century,

fossil hunters thought they were the tongues of dragons.

It was the apex predator of earth's warm seas.

If a megalodon decides that you're on the menu,

that megalodon's gonna win, and with a biting force ten times

that of the great white shark, that's what I call "jaws."

narrator: The meg only seemed to vanish around three million years ago,

as it faced increased competition for food

from killer whales and great white sharks.

The footage could be proof

megalodons aren't as extinct as scientists believed.

This is real life. It's not the movies

so, there's real-life consequences to unearthing,

so to speak, a creature of this size and magnitude.

Narrator: There is other compelling evidence

for an enormous, undiscovered predator swimming in our oceans.

In 2019, off the coast of south australia,

a fisherman hauled in the disembodied head

of a mako shark,

a brutal apex predator that can grow up to 14 feet long

and weigh 1300 pounds.

Even a great white could not have wreaked such devastation.

The thought that the megalodon shark

could possibly still exist in the ocean is terrifying.

Narrator: Seas and oceans cover 136 million square miles

of the earth's surface,

but 90% of them remain unexplored.

At a depth where you could bury mount everest

live creatures that are being discovered

with each new exploration --

all able to withstand pressures

1,000 times greater than on land --

pressures that would instantly kill a human.

The more we explore the depths,

the more we find giant creatures.

Narrator: For decades, giant squid were thought to be a myth of the sea.

It wasn't until 2006 that one was caught on camera

and definitively proved to exist.

So, could it be that there's a giant shark down there

that we've never found?

Narrator: But biologist danni washington

believes the footage shows another mysterious creature

thought to live over a mile below the waves.

Washington: What I can see is that it has a short, rounded snout.

It moves gracefully, but very slow through the water.

And that grayish-black color on its skin --

that's clearly marking that this is a pacific sleeper shark.

Narrator: These ravenously hungry monsters terrorize the ocean floor.

They're bottom dwellers,

and they generally scavenge for their food.

They're almost like the garbage cans of the ocean.

Sleeper sharks will eat anything they can.

They'll go for these rotting carcasses at the bottom,

but they've also been found

with giant jellyfish-like creatures in them.

Narrator: But while the morphology of the creature in the film

matches the pacific sleeper shark,

there's a problem, and it's a big one.

Szulgit: The sheer size of this thing

doesn't match up with what we know.

No one has come across a sleeper shark that's this big.

Narrator: Sleeper sharks grow to 23 feet as adults.

This thing is 60 feet.

If it is a sleeper shark, it's almost three times bigger

than the biggest one ever spotted.

Szulgit: That would be like a human who's 18 feet tall.

It just doesn't seem right.

Narrator: Coming up, did japanese seawater mutate sharks

into monsters?

It's terrifying that is this giant mega-toothed monster

just off the coastline.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: And in hong kong, the sea parts like a scene from the bible.

The ocean doesn't crack open, so this is weird.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Underwater cameras near a popular tourist beach

capture images of a shark

three times bigger than any previously discovered.

It seems too big to be a sleeper shark,

but its similarities are hard to ignore.

Is there any way a pacific sleeper shark

could triple in size?

Narrator: Science journalist steve potvin

thinks this could be a mutation

that occurs at great depths in the ocean.

Nature does find ways of making super-sized versions of animals.

We call it gigantism.

One theory that might explain the size of this shark

in the deep ocean is that it's cold,

and animals tend to get bigger in colder environments.

So, maybe that explains why, in the very cold, deep ocean

you could have a giant shark.

If we're witnessing a shark experiencing gigantism,

that means that we've got some massive animals

down beneath the ocean's surface

that we have yet to really understand.

Narrator: If there is a 60-foot-long mutant shark

off the coast of suruga bay,

vacationers need to be wary before they enter the water.

It's terrifying that there is this giant mega-toothed monster

just off the coastline.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Now, it's holiday season in new york.

Suddenly, there's something weird in the sky,

and it isn't santa claus.

The air over queens flashes an eerie neon blue,

freaking out locals.

I'm a new yorker. I've seen everything.

But I'd never seen something like this.

Narrator: Locals ask if the military is fighting a battle

against an aggressive secret weapon.

Terrorism -- it's a real and present danger.

Something has gone seriously wrong.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: New york at christmas --

skating in central park,

santa land at macy's,

the rockefeller christmas display,

and on December, 27th, 2018, an apocalyptic flash.

New yorker peg samuels is having a quiet evening watching tv,

when something catches her attention.

Samuels: I looked out the window,

and I saw this light that I'd never seen before.

Narrator: All over the city, residents are stunned

as the pulsating blue glow turns night as bright as day,

but it's like no daylight new yorkers have ever seen.

I thought, "should I even be standing by the window?

What is this?"

there's eight million people in new york

and we're world news on the daily about anything,

so it definitely makes us a target for terrorists.

I thought, "am I an idiot for just taking footage of it?

Should I be in the stairwell right now?

I mean, is this it?

Like death? Is this it?"

narrator: The city erupts in panic.

You look outside. It's glowing blue.

You don't know what's going on.

There's nothing on the news yet.

All you have is social media going wild.

Given the track record of terrorism in new york city,

this had to be extremely alarming.

I would be terrified.

Teitel: This is unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

Whatever this thing is,

it definitely looks like it's coming from above the city.

But where from above?

Narrator: Physicist steven granade

examines the flash's color signature

and believes it could be ultraviolet light,

a signal that new york is under attack from terrorists

with a deadly weapon.

One of the things that u.V. Light is used for

is dealing with biological contaminants,

you basically pump enough ultraviolet light into it

that it breaks it down, and it neutralizes it.

This does raise my suspicion that we're maybe seeing

a biological attack against manhattan.

Narrator: But when rocket scientist nick householder

looks at the flashes,

he calculates a u.V. Light of this magnitude

would cause more devastation than it would cure.

Householder: If this was a u.V. Light this bright,

it would be like staring into a sun

four inches from your face.

We're talking blindness, cancer, skin burns.

I don't think that this is a giant u.V. Light.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Ex-cia operative lindsay moran

studies the footage

and considers if the flashing blue light

could be from one of the navy's latest weapons, a laser gun.

The u.S. Navy has developed a directed-energy weapon

which can be used to eliminate threats from uavs

and also small boats.

These types of weapons

are intended to be mounted on warships.

The benefit is that there's no ammo.

This thing can shoot anything in its sight without reloading.

Was this an accidental firing of an experimental weapon?

It is certainly something with which we need to be concerned.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Coming up, can david wallace recreate

the terrifying blue light seen in the skies of new york?

Wallace: We're gonna get up to around 100,000 volts,

so if something goes wrong here,

you'll find me laying on the ground.

Narrator: And a sight last seen in the old testament.

This means that the story of exodus could be true.

Narrator: It's holiday horror in new york,

as a weird, blue flash looms

over manhattan's christmas skyline.

Civil engineer brian wolshon looks at a map of new york city

and believes he knows the source of the blue light.

There's over a hundred and thirty thousand miles

of electrical lines running throughout the area.

That's enough to reach more than halfway to the moon.

And in the new york area alone,

there's 24 high-voltage substations.

Narrator: The terrifying light that lit up new york

came from the direction of a power plant

and the next day, city officials reported

that a substation generator had suffered a catastrophic failure.

♪

electrical engineer david wallace

sets up an experiment

at mississippi state university's high voltage lab

to find out if an exploding transformer

could create the lights seen over manhattan.

So, when we talk about an arc flash, what you're looking at

is basically an electrical explosion.

We're gonna be generating approximately 100,000

to 120,000 volts to create the arc.

Now, when you put this into perspective,

it only takes 25 volts to really kill a human being,

so this is gonna be a rather interesting time here.

Hopefully everything goes right, and I'll walk away.

Narrator: In new york, every minute, 272 million watts of electricity

is flowing through skyscrapers and suburban homes.

If that power were to be unleashed in just one hour,

it's enough electrical currant

to electrocute over a million people.

To mimic the conditions in new york,

wallace uses an insulator used in high-voltage power lines.

Wallace: We're really gonna have to amp up the voltage on this

to try to get that color blue that we're looking for.

Narrator: A smoke machine will recreate the smog-filled skies.

Wallace: Let's see if we get that nice glow that we see in the video.

We're gonna get up to around 100,000 volts,

so if something goes wrong here,

you'll find me laying on the ground.

All right, jason, shoot it.

All right, we're at a hundred k.V.

[ electricity crackles ]

[ electricity blares ]

all right, so, we saw as the arc formed,

we had a nice reflection coming around in the smoke there --

sort of illuminating the area around it.

Narrator: The light effect is close,

even if it doesn't exactly match the vast blue sky

seen in the footage.

For that, we'd need to explode a sub-station,

and unfortunately I don't have one around here.

[ electricity blares ]

narrator: City officials reported

that a sub-station generator had blown that day,

but locals aren't convinced.

Most new yorkers that I spoke to about this

thought this was the end.

[ cameras whir ]

narrator: Now, a sight not seen since the time of the bible.

The ocean doesn't crack open, so this is weird.

This defies everything we know about the laws of physics.

Narrator: The sea seems to be parting, as a terrified sailor looks on.

Are we capturing the beginning of a miraculous event?

It looks like the parting of the red sea.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: Victoria harbor, hong kong.

Over 350,000 vessels

enter this normally safe haven on the south china sea

every year for business and pleasure.

But for one sailor, the fun turns to horror

as a bizarre chasm opens in the sea before him.

Oh, my goodness! That is not natural.

The water is splitting.

What could cause that?

Narrator: The ocean appears to be parting.

As the chasm widens,

a wall of water seems to cascade down inside it.

Mother nature can do some incredible stuff,

but this is too weird, and I don't like it.

Narrator: Author patrick tomlinson studies the footage

and sees echoes of the most famous miracle

in the old testament.

Many people would look at this

and be reminded of the biblical story

of the parting of the red sea in exodus.

It would take some incredible force to part water in this way.

Narrator: In the old testament's book of exodus,

egyptian pharaoh's chariots pursued

moses and the israelites,

who find themselves trapped in front of the red sea.

Moses parts the waters, allowing the jews to pass to safety.

As the egyptians follow, god closes the water and they drown.

No archaeological evidence has ever been found

to confirm this miraculous event,

but new research suggests

that it may not be entirely the stuff of myth

and could explain what we see in hong kong harbor.

Most people assume that the parting happened

at the red sea in egypt.

However, recently it turns out

that it may have been a mistranslation of the reed sea.

Narrator: The sea of reeds is believed to have been a marshy lagoon.

The bible says god used a mighty east wind

to part the water,

and scientists have seen a 60-mile-per-hour wind,

called a wind set-down

doing just that to shallow lakes and lagoons.

A wind set-down drains an entire area

as if it was hit by a very low tide.

Narrator: When the wind stops, the water floods back in,

drowning anything in its path.

But when kiki sanford analyzes the footage,

she doubts it shows the water in victoria harbor

beginning to parted by a wind set-down event.

A wind set-down will move a body of water

as if there's a low tide,

but it doesn't create walls in the water,

especially not in a large body of water

like we're seeing in this video.

So there has to be another explanation.

Narrator: Coming up, do parting waters reveal chinese aggression?

Chinese president xi jinping has said that

any attempt to divide china would result in bodies smashed

and bones ground into powder.

Narrator: A hong kong sailor is astonished,

as the sea appears to part like a biblical miracle

before his very eyes.

Military expert carlo muñoz

thinks the apparent parting of the water

could be linked to chinese military aggression.

Looking at the video and kind of trying to get an idea

of exactly what is going on,

whatever it is, you're gonna need a lot of resources

and a lot of manpower to get it done.

There's only a few organizations

that can really pull something like this off --

one of them being the military.

Now, take that into account

from where this video was actually filmed,

which is near hong kong,

which is an incredible flash-point now

for the chinese government.

Narrator: Hong kong became a british colony in 1842

after china lost a war against the europeans

over the control of the drug opium.

The colony went back to the chinese in 1997,

but the modern population

doesn't like china's draconian rule.

March 2019 -- the people of hong kong

start fighting back against communist china.

Violent street clashes escalate, and protesters are killed

by an increasingly ruthless police force,

clearly under the direct orders of the chinese government.

Chinese president xi jinping has said

that any attempt to divide china

would result in bodies smashed and bones ground into powder.

Narrator: The chinese are determined to hold onto hong kong,

which has an economy worth over $362 billion a year.

To protect their interests, it's believed

they built 3,000 miles of secret underground passages

to store a military arsenal

five times longer than the u.S. Pacific coast highway.

It could be that these tunnels have been extended

under hong kong harbor

and that an accidental firing of a missile

could cause a tunnel to collapse,

leading water rushing down.

[ camera whirs ]

but geologist devin dennie

suspects the weird phenomenon in the video

could be a terrifying natural geological fault line

opening beneath the bay.

One possible explanation for what we're seeing

is the earth below the ocean on the sea floor

could be moving in some way.

If the earth below is ripping apart,

causing this parting to happen,

then something crazy's going on.

Narrator: Around the globe,

the plates of the earth's surface are moving,

tearing huge cracks wide open.

An excellent example of plates being ripped apart

is in iceland.

You can actually go there

and see the north american plate on one side

and the eurasian plate on the other side

and walk the crack between them.

Narrator: Called the mid-atlantic ridge,

the giant scar extends for 10,000 miles.

Along its entire length, the earth's crust

is quite literally being ripped apart,

unleashing from the planet's interior

a seething, molten mass.

Proctor: When that magma's coming up to the surface,

the temperature can be up to 2,000 degrees fahrenheit.

That is deadly.

Narrator: Hong kong lies on the ring of fire,

a chain of fearsome volcanoes that circle the pacific.

If a rift is happening in hong kong bay,

it could have devastating consequences

for the seven million inhabitants there.

Narrator: An underwater earthquake caused the indian ocean tsunami

that killed over 220,000 people

and it was a deep sea mega-thrust earthquake

that led to the tsunami waves that devastated japan in 2011.

[ indistinct exclamations in japanese ]

20,000 people died.

And the force of the quake shifted japan's honchu island

eight feet east.

If this footage shows a geological fault

opening up in the sea near hong kong harbor

it could be a warning of worse to come.

A wall of water would smash skyscrapers

and swamp the packed streets.

Like a modern-day atlantis, it would be utterly destroyed.

If this really is a rift and the earth is thinning here,

we should expect not only earthquakes, but possibly gases

or even volcanoes forming in this area.

[ camera whirs ]

narrator: But whatever is causing

the bizarre parting of the waves in the footage,

it vanishes as quickly as it appears,

and nothing like it has been reported

in victoria harbor since.

So, whatever this was,

it's gonna have to remain a mystery for now.