Original subtitles

A city where the forecast

calls for blood rain.

A lake where lightning strikes for days on end.

And a cave filled with giant crystals

that are as beautiful as they are deadly.

All around us are stunning displays of

natural phenomena that are so spectacular

and at times so strange

they defy conventional wisdom.

Can science explain Earth's mysteries?

Or does our knowledge of the world we inhabit

only scratch the surface?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

This body of water, near the mouth

of the Catatumbo River, has been called

the lightning capital of the world.

Because almost every night it's a place where

the lightning never stops.

Three hundred days out of a year

we see this lightning, it's called Catatumbo lightning.

It's like sheets of lightning constantly

for hours and hours and hours and it goes on and on,

and it lights up everything around it.

And it's not like any other lightning

anywhere else on the planet.

It's amazing. You have to wonder why is there

not lightning like this everywhere else in the world?

There's an old expression that says lightning

doesn't strike twice in the same place.

But at Lake Maracaibo, not only does it strike

at the same place, it does so over and over.

But why?

There are some areas of the Earth which seem to

be like lightning valleys.

Areas that are just inundated with lightning bolts

on a given storm, and why?

Well, we're not sure.

When you look at Venezuela, you can take some guesses

as to what's going on.

Maybe it's the water.

But it also could be things like

the altitude or the general atmospheric conditions.

So it's very hard to pin down exactly what's going on

in that place, and why that place is special.

There's a thing called chaos theory, and in chaos theory

there are these places that are called attractors.

They are regions that just occur sort of randomly

that cause a vortex.

Things occur there. Things collect there.

Perhaps the Earth has an attractor over this lake

in Venezuela that's causing the Catatumbo lightning.

One thing about lightning is there is

a tremendous amount of energy involved,

but that's not the most exciting piece.

It's the power.

It's how quickly the energy is released.

Lightning represents one of the most powerful,

high-power phenomena in nature.

So lightning's really exciting because

there's pieces we do understand,

but there's still a lot of pieces we don't understand.

For example, recently it was revealed

that the energy of a lightning bolt is so great that even

antimatter can be formed.

To create antimatter you need a particle accelerator, you need

an atom smasher to create antimatter in the laboratory.

But it turns out an ordinary lightning bolt will also create

minute quantities of this exotic form of matter.

The lightning in Lake Maracaibo is an interesting case of

scientists trying to figure out an unusual phenomenon.

This region had been identified for many years

as a hotspot of lightning,

and it turns out, with a detailed NASA study,

it is indeed the greatest lightning hotspot in the world.

Lightning hotspots?

Are there really places on Earth that act like lightning rods?

Perhaps further clues can be found by examining

not only places that are repeatedly struck by lightning

but the story of one woman who has been struck twice

and has lived to tell the tale.

Army specialist Beth Peterson

is working at an ammunition point

when storm clouds begin to gather over the base.

I saw lightning strike and hit the concertina wire

on the fence going around the ammunition point.

And then I watched lightning strike a tree across from me.

And next thing you know, lightning struck again.

It entered my feet, it exited my mouth,

it grounded on top of my head.

It felt like my body exploded.

And it just lifted me as it launched me.

And everything just felt, like, burnt.

I felt like it took my head off.

Beth was rushed to the infirmary

and incredibly, she survived.

But after months of recovery,

Beth realized that something was different.

She had been changed.

Not enough people get hit by lightning and survive,

like the strike that I survived the first time.

And so there isn't a lot of research for my doctors

to understand, to be able to say,

"You've been hit by lightning and this is the end result."

In my case, they say, "You've been hit by lightning

"and we have to help you figure out a way

to cope with it."

Because there are things that happen

that are unexplained.

I really believe in the electro- magnetic changes in the body.

Because the first ten years of having, with my children,

having the Christmas tree up and putting maybe tinsel on it.

The tinsel would jump six feet off the Christmas tree onto me.

I couldn't get it to stay on the tree.

Turning on lights, touching things,

I'm very staticky, my hair likes to get very floaty.

I can feel it in my body.

After such a harrowing experience, Beth took solace

both in the fact that she had survived

and that her near-fatal encounter with lightning

was over.

Or was it?

July 19th of 1993,

I was struck by lightning again.

I had a psychologist tell me that I was a soldier,

I needed to get over it,

I needed to carry on and soldier on,

and that I should go home and watch the storm.

And that's what I told myself as I drove home

and took off my boots and opened the French doors

and was struck again.

It threw me approximately eight to nine feet

back into the house.

No one has ever come forward and told me why this has happened.

I have had a team of incredible doctors,

and they have tried and tried and tried

through the years to medically

have some explanation.

Because when a person's going through

what I've gone through, you want a answer.

And the answer just always keeps coming back

to "You've been struck by lightning."

Was it merely a coincidence

that Beth was struck a second time

or could there have been something larger at play?

Is it possible that, like Lake Maracaibo,

some people attract lightning?

They say that being hit by a lightning bolt

is similar to winning the lottery.

And yet some people are hit by lightning bolts more than once.

And what's the reason? Is it just bad luck?

As people, we do have a certain composition

and we're mostly water.

And water is a great conductor of electricity.

But the exact details and specifics of how each person

is set up is gonna vary enough, so you can imagine some

people are greater or lesser lightning rods.

So if you think about the whole electrical system

and how they fit into the electrical system of

the Earth and the atmosphere,

some people are more likely to be hit by lightning than others.

I always have a heightened awareness.

I know where the storms are coming.

I can feel it by the hair on my arms standing up,

the hair on the back of my neck, my static in

my own hair... it floats.

I can tell when the changes in the weather are happening

by the response of what I feel in my body.

I do not necessarily think it was

a coincidence that I was struck a second time.

I think the changes in my body made it more attractive.

Why are certain places and certain people

repeatedly struck by lightning?

Is it possible that what we perceive

as random weather events are actually

not so random after all,

like in the case of a devastating tornado

that leveled everything in its path,

yet somehow left a single house untouched?

Scientists at Florida State University

publish the results of a study on

the destructive power of tornadoes.

Tornadoes, which are already capable of

generating 200-miles-per-hour winds,

are getting five percent more powerful every year.

And there doesn't appear to be a limit as to how strong

they will become in the future.

Tornadoes have so much energy in them.

The energy in a large tornado, like an EF4 or 5

is more energy than is in a nuclear weapon.

The base of these things are sometimes

a mile wide and they go all

the way up to 30, 40,

50,000 feet high.

This is a very large structure.

A skyscraper is teeny-tiny in comparison to a tornado.

If scientists are correct, and tornadoes are getting

even stronger, how are we supposed to

keep ourselves safe from their awesome power?

Especially considering we still have no idea how

to predict when and where they'll appear.

The thing that's hardest to explain about tornadoes

is why the tornado forms and when is it triggered

to come to the surface?

The problem with tracking tornadoes is

they're only for just a very few minutes.

They form, a warning goes out.

Only 13 minutes elapses

before, most times, the tornado was on the ground.

So, we don't have a whole lot of research

as far as looking at those.

There is almost an infinite number

of moving parts in a tornado. There's atmospheric turbulence,

there's moisture, there's pressure changes.

There's electromagnetic

discharges and charging going on.

There's so many phenomena that you can't even

make the list complete.

When we think of the laws of physics,

we think of firing a bullet.

Moves in a straight line, never deviates.

But the weather... What a headache for a physicist.

Remember the butterfly effect?

That is, even the flapping of

the wings of a butterfly can cause a ripple effect,

which will lead to a tipping point initiating a thunderstorm.

So even small vibrations here can cause

massive distortions to the weather over there.

That's why predicting the path of a tornado

is virtually impossible.

After a long, hard week, the Coffelt family

is looking forward to spending a Sunday

relaxing in the comfort of their home.

But it isn't long before they realize

their plans are going to be interrupted.

We, uh, started getting all these notifications

on our phones, like, "tornado warning."

And then we started getting

a little bit concerned.

We looked outside, see the weather's getting kind of bad.

It was like dark clouds.

It's-it's hard to describe because it was just, like,

coming toward the house.

It was, it was getting really dark.

I started walking towards the door and it just

almost went pitch black.

My wife yelled, "Go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom!"

All of us, my wife and two daughters, went in the bathroom.

A minute or two went by, and you heard the tornado coming in.

It started with a small whistle, and it got louder and louder.

And then it kind of sounded like

a train coming in, like...

And it just... Boom, hit the house.

When we were in there, it was so confusing because

you didn't know what was gonna happen.

Especially when we started hearing stuff happen around us

and, you know, we're all just in that tight space.

And I was screaming.

Everything started shaking.

You could hear the little snaps going on outside.

And then it stopped.

And then it happened again.

When the violent shaking finally subsides,

the frightened family cautiously leaves the safety of

the bathroom to assess the damage to their house.

But to their shock and disbelief, there's none.

We came out, we walked out the front door

and looked and saw everything.

It was overwhelming.

F4 tornado comes across and destroys everything

around you, except for your house and

you and your family still, still standing.

We were just completely overwhelmed,

we could barely breathe and just couldn't believe

the destruction that was out there.

It was just breathtaking. It can't be explained.

The emotions and the feelings that go through,

it's really just, uh...

it's mind-blowing.

Despite sitting directly in the tornado's savage path,

the Coffelt house was somehow spared

when nearly everything else in sight was leveled.

Aside from some minor superficial damage,

barely a shingle had been knocked out of place.

But how?

There's so many variables with a tornado,

and why it hits this house and not that one,

it's really hard to say.

There could be little pockets of pressure,

little pockets of temperature, little pockets of moisture.

Who knows what it is.

But it could be little pockets that change

the statistics of the debris field

such that it just happens to miss that spot.

Tornadoes never travel in very straight, regular paths.

When you picture the video,

it's an interesting path to avoid the house.

But you could imagine a tornado circling back on itself.

That is not inconceivable.

This house could have been lucky to have the tornado

come down the right side, turn around, destroy the forest

on the other side, turn around again and then go off.

Could it be that the Coffelts and their house

survived simply because of luck?

Or was it the result of some kind of

deliberate intervention?

After all, from Zeus, the Greek god of thunder,

to Set, the Egyptian god of storms, ancient cultures

believed weather was not a random force of nature

but a power wielded by the gods.

Major ancient cultures saw the Earth itself

as a god, more accurately a goddess.

Gaia. The ancient Hindu tradition also

saw the planet as a feminine divinity,

so we are in relationship with the planet.

There are weather patterns that are caused

by planetary energies.

And this is a living relationship which can

help our way of looking at our relationship

to the ground we live on,

all stemming back to some of the most ancient cultures and

religious practices that have been with us on this planet.

A living, conscious planet?

If this is true, does it mean that the Coffelt's house

was deliberately spared by some act of divine mercy?

Or was it left standing to serve as a warning

that nature must be respected?

As far as the Coffelts are concerned,

the answers hardly matter.

If there is some miracle about all this...

'Cause it's not a miracle.

'Cause getting hit by a tornado... that... that sucks.

And I probably shouldn't be sitting here today.

I definitely do have a new respect for the weather.

It really can, it can take everything

away from you in a blink of an eye.

Even with all the technology

we use to track weather patterns,

when it comes to predicting the path of a tornado,

scientists are simply baffled.

And that was also the case when a city in India was besieged

for months by a bizarre phenomenon that is known as

blood rain.

In the skies above this forested region of

rolling hills in the southwestern state

of Kerala, storm clouds begin to gather.

Not so unusual in this part of the country.

But when the rain starts, no one is prepared for

what falls from the sky.

Something that appears to be blood.

And it lasts not for hours or days or even weeks,

but for months.

If I put myself in the shoes of these people that experienced

this blood rain coming from the sky, I can only imagine

how terrifying that must be, and how that must make

those people question their own existence,

question the forces of nature that are at work in the world.

That must be earth-shattering for these people.

You have to think that that's sent from the heavens.

For some reason, some mystical reason

this happened because it's sent from the gods.

It's sending out a signal or a message for some reason.

After months of wondering whether the apocalypse

was at hand, residents sighed in relief

as, suddenly, the scarlet deluge stopped.

And just like every other time this strange phenomenon happened

throughout history, the skies returned to normal.

Similar stories of red rain have essentially

spanned history over thousands of years.

It's been repeatedly reported, first in mythology,

and then in historical accounts.

It goes back maybe to the sixth century B.C.

We have stories in our theology and mythologies

that see this phenomenon happening, so it must be

one of the signs of the coming apocalypse.

But it's a phenomenon that occurs in weather

around the planet all the time.

You never know where red rain is going to occur,

it's all depending on weather systems.

All over the world

there's been rain like this,

even in the United States.

Even in the Ukraine and Russia, this has taken place.

It's not surprising that ancient people regarded blood

falling from the sky as a sign of impending doom.

But today, we tend not to believe

in such far-fetched nonsense.

Especially because, as I'm sure you'll be relieved to know,

blood rain isn't actually made of blood.

Scientists did analysis of this red rain and did not find

things like copper or iron, things that we think of as red,

that would cause this water to be red.

So why was it red?

What else could have been in the water

that made a blood red rain?

What scientists thought is that it is caused by spores

that are on trees, grassy areas, rocks,

all over the terrain there in India.

And those spores blast all of that into the atmosphere.

And that's carried up into the clouds,

and it kind of hangs there.

Oftentimes spores are produced prolifically, you know,

billions of millions of spores, right, go all over the place.

And so you can imagine that it would be transported

up in the atmosphere, associate with rain and then

come down as a red color as well.

The theory that red algae spores can and do create red rain

is believed by most scientists to be a sound one.

But believe it or not, there's another theory.

One which proposes that blood rain is caused

by something extraterrestrial.

If you look at the red rain under the microscope,

what we found was absolutely staggering,

because we found that there were red living cells dispersed

in the rain that was the cause of the red color in the rain.

And these cells were in the process

of actually reproducing.

And when examined under the highest magnification,

these cells didn't look like anything that we had seen

on the Earth.

Life unlike any on Earth?

Could it be that the real cause of blood rain is far more

profound than previously thought?

Coincidentally, there was also a meteor explosion in the area.

So the question is, could those two events be linked?

What I think happened was that a fragment of a comet

exploded in the high stratosphere,

and this comet had living entities,

alien life in the form of these red cells.

And they became the seeds,

the nuclei of raindrops.

We found plankton organisms

on the solar panels of the International Space Station.

So it's possible that this meteor

that exploded over India had some sort of

red organic material in it that came from space.

If the source of blood rain is, in fact, extraterrestrial,

might it help explain

how life could have started here on Earth?

One theory of how life can propagate from one planet

to another and even one star system to another is panspermia.

Panspermia is the idea that life on the Earth

started in outer space.

And sure enough, when we look at meteorites

on the Earth, we find some from Mars,

some from the Moon and maybe even some from Venus.

And so if meteors can go back

and forth, why not DNA?

We tend to think of ourselves as something that grew out of some

primordial soup from a random one-time accident that took

place on this planet millions and millions of years ago.

But could it be that we actually, us humans,

are the aliens on this planet?

Blood rain. It's a weather phenomenon so unusual

that it calls into question everything we know

about our planet,

as well as what might be coming to Earth from outer space.

Just like a curious natural rock formation located

in the plains of Wyoming that, according to experts,

has no Earthly reason for being there.

It rises from the Earth like a giant fist

stretching out to strike the sky.

A colossal 900-foot shaft of rugged rock.

One whose very name conjures notions

of both awe and dread:

Devils Tower.

Devils Tower is remarkable because you can

drive across the sedimentary plains,

see nothing but flat ground for miles and miles.

And then this tall, dark tower emerges

as you drive towards it.

There is nothing like it in the surrounding area.

The rock has a grayish, even a greenish-gray color.

And so, as you approach Devils Tower, it's a distinct,

stark contrast to the sort of tans and

browns of the surrounding sedimentary rocks.

Located in northeastern Wyoming,

Devils Tower was declared

America's very first National Monument in 1906

by President Theodore Roosevelt, who sought to protect it

it as an object of scientific interest.

Since then, many have asked what could have caused

this massive tower to form?

There are many theories about it, but there's no agreement on

what it was that produced this miracle of nature.

And it's made of volcanic-type materials,

but there's no other volcanic activity around it.

So, what caused this thing?

We don't know the answer to that question.

It's a really interesting conundrum.

Is Devils Tower really a miracle of nature?

Something that simply cannot be explained

by natural and scientific laws?

Sorry but that explanation is simply not good enough.

As much as we like to walk around with the confidence

that we know this planet

and we understand the planet we live on,

there seems to be nothing but mystery on this planet.

We don't understand how to predict earthquakes.

We don't understand how lightning travels.

There's so many questions that we have

about what produces the forces of nature.

Some have suggested that the key to understanding Devils Tower

is to think of it the way many Native Americans do.

Not as a natural formation,

but as an unnatural one.

The Native peoples of the area have worshiped

this tower as an altar of sorts,

and many feel like they can climb to the top of this place

and get divine inspiration, become empowered.

And the question is is there some truth to this

Native legend... that this place is a sacred place

on the planet, and it is a sort of altar

that allows humans to communicate to the spirits

or to the universe or to the gods that they believe in?

To view Devils Tower, if you want to call it that...

Mato Thipila is what we call it... it's a sacred place.

And when you see it from a certain distance, even then

you start to feel the wonder of it,

the sacredness of it.

And as you get closer and closer, the positive,

sacred energy starts to build, and you feel it even more

when you get to the base of the tower.

I think in the case of Devils Tower, it is so unusual,

it is so anomalous that it is easy

to ascribe a mystical or spiritual attribute to it.

It's not surprising that Hollywood directors

would choose this as the place

that aliens would land from outer space.

In the mid 1970s,

one of the most important events in history of

Devils Tower took place, and that was the filming of

the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

In that movie by Steven Spielberg, the tower

is a spot that many people are drawn to,

and they don't know why they're drawn to it.

They're drawn to it from all over the country.

It turns out, as the movie goes on, that they're drawn here

because they'd been abducted sometime

during their life by aliens.

A UFO lands on top of the tower

and Richard Dreyfuss and several other people climb into the UFO

and fly off into space.

The number of visitors that came to the tower doubled

the year after that movie came out,

and it stayed at that level every year ever since.

I don't know if it's a landing site for UFOs,

as Spielberg had in his movie, or what it might be.

I mean, the more we look at it, the more baffled we are.

We are going to find things as we continue to observe

and search and study the Earth that we had no idea

how they got there, what type of physical process

created them, and we're gonna learn new things all the time.

Is Devils Tower really an anomaly?

Or is it yet another example of how little we know

about Earth's evolution?

Perhaps the answer can be found by examining another

natural formation that is even more perplexing.

It's a magnificent cavern,

located in Northern Mexico, that is

full of giant crystals.

Crystals that are both beautiful

and deadly.

In the mineral-rich town of Naica,

more than 1,000 feet below the surface of the earth,

a group of miners drilling

through a cave wall, make a remarkable discovery.

Not of precious metals,

but something far more wonderous and mysterious.

A glittering cavern, untouched for half a million years,

filled with the largest crystals ever found.

It's amazing. There are crystals that are

huge, so big you can actually walk across them.

And for these crystals to have gotten

as big as they are, they had to have been growing

for hundreds of thousands of years.

It's a fascinating location.

This is something you would think would only

exist in the world of science fiction and fantasy,

but the fact is it's all too real.

Measuring up to an astonishing 40 feet in length

and weighing as much as 55 tons, the giant beams

are the purest form of selenite crystal in the world.

Crystals are the most orderly structure in nature,

and they have the ability to absorb frequency

and energy from objects around them.

Now, it is my theory

that these giant pylons

have the ability to transmit

and receive information and light.

Only a few months after its discovery,

a team of scientists was sent in

to study this geological anomaly.

They soon learned that Naica's crystal cave

may be not only beautiful

but deadly.

It's 90 to 100% relative humidity inside this cave.

And it's always over 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

You might think, well, 113 degrees isn't that bad.

It gets 140 degrees

in the deserts in Iraq all the time, and people live there.

But the relative humidity in those deserts is ten percent.

In this cave, there's so much humidity

you can't sweat and cool your body off.

I received an invitation to go on an expedition

and exploration of these giant crystals.

I was aware of the heat and humidity, but nothing

prepared me for what hit me when I entered those caves.

I felt like I was hit by a tsunami

of tremendous heat and humidity.

I started shaking, I was scared.

These are near-fatal conditions.

Due to the Crystal Cave's lethal atmosphere,

the research team was restricted

to ten-minute exposures to avoid being cooked alive.

For gemologist Leela Hutchinson,

the most unexpected discovery wasn't

something she saw, but something she heard.

One of the things that I realized, as I had to

focus so intensely to keep my wits about me,

was this ability to hear a low hum.

And I thought that was very strange.

Nikola Tesla was quoted as once saying that we may not

understand the growth of a crystal,

but nonetheless, it is a living being.

Energy from living,

giant crystals?

In an attempt to navigate the unusual properties

of the crystals within the Naica cave,

NASA developed special cooling equipment,

allowing scientists to withstand

the cave's lethal conditions for as much as 30 minutes at a time.

And according to their research, the hum

emanating from the Crystal Cave may not be

because its crystals are storing energy

but because they're harboring something even more unexpected:

life.

In the 2008 expedition,

the NASA scientists went into caves

and drew out fluid inclusions

in the largest crystals

and found microbes

that are considered to be extremophiles.

Microbes that are living organisms.

They're single-celled, and they have the ability

to survive and thrive in extreme environments.

One of the interesting things about the extremophiles

was there is nothing in our genetic database

that comes close to what these extremophiles are.

Microbes unlike anything seen on Earth?

NASA's astrobiology report suggests that these

extremophiles are up to 50,000 years old

and could survive on other planets.

But many wonder is there a risk involved

in handling these never-before-seen organisms?

The Cave of the Crystals can be a dangerous place.

For example, not long after it was found,

one of the workers actually snuck back into the cave.

Not surprisingly, he passed out and died.

Now, it's unclear if he died from the air quality,

the heat, the humidity, or could it have been

the extremophile micro-organisms that were in there?

The Crystal Cave is one of Earth's

magnificent mysteries that is simply

too dangerous to explore.

But there are other even more dangerous places

on this planet that require a lot less effort to get to.

For example, there's a geyser in Yellowstone National Park

known as Old Faithful.

And it was only recently that scientists

discovered that Old Faithful

is located on top of a massive volcano

that could wipe out all of humanity.

Each year, more than four million people travel

from all over the world to experience its canyons,

hot springs

and other natural wonders.

But the most wondrous sight of all is a geyser that shoots

a jet of superheated water more than 150 feet into the air.

And it does so at such regular intervals

that you can practically set your watch by it.

Which is why they call this geyser

Old Faithful.

If you visit Yellowstone, it's spectacular.

There are geysers all over the place.

Some erupt every few minutes.

Some erupt every few hours.

But what is remarkable about Old Faithful

is you can go there with a stopwatch

and you can time, almost to the minute,

when the next eruption of Old Faithful will occur.

Most of nature is radical and unpredictable,

but the really surprising feature of Old Faithful

is not that it's periodic and regular, because that also

happens in many places in nature.

It's that it's been periodic and regular for so long.

That is something that really shows us there's a lot we don't

understand about nature, and a lot more we need to learn.

Old Faithful.

For centuries, we have thought of it

as a mere tourist attraction.

A quaint example of Mother Nature

at her most punctual.

But what if we're wrong?

What if it is really providing a geological countdown

to mankind's ultimate extinction?

Yellowstone is famous for bears, it is famous for

magnificent geysers, but underneath your feet

is a super volcano,

and it's at least 44 miles across.

It's a whole network of magma pools that could

one day blow up

and cause tremendous havoc.

A super volcano, if it were to erupt,

is so massive amount of energy being released that it would

destroy half of the continental United States.

And it would be more devastating

to the entire planet than the asteroid

that hit that we think killed the dinosaurs.

This gigantic eruption has happened three times...

Three times in the recorded history...

And we are due for another one, who knows when?

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe a hundred,

maybe 200,000 years from now.

But it will happen.

Whether it's super volcanoes that are hidden underground

or never-ending lightning storms

or caves full of massive crystals,

it seems that in spite of everything we've learned,

our planet is still full of surprises.

Perhaps we just have to face the fact that,

for the foreseeable future, the natural forces on Earth

will continue to be unpredictable and...

unexplained.

Repair and Synchronization by Easy Subtitles Synchronizer 1.0.0.0