Original subtitles

- [Rudy] The following program contains footage

of military operations.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Tonight, on The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries,

a 747 takes off in a war zone and lands in a fireball.

Whoa, who's responsible?

The enemy, or us?

- To see one of our aircraft destroyed in such a manner

is something I've never seen before.

- [Rudy] Haunting voices from Vietnam.

Was this how the Army got in the enemy's head?

- Mysterious sounds that you've never heard before.

This is a sound that a ghost might make.

(ghostly voices)

- [Rudy] Photos of a recently rediscovered

Nazi mountain tunnel complex.

Why was it built?

To hide Hitler's stolen gold?

- Somewhere within these tunnels,

this gold is there waiting to be discovered

to this very day.

- [Rudy] And our secret weapon.

Who built this homemade renegade sub?

- The technology employed is pretty high tech.

This is a serious submarine.

(Guardsmen shouting in foreign language)

(film reel clicking) (dramatic music)

- [Rudy] In the modern history of war, there are films.

- Shazam.

- [Rudy] Photos, recordings, and documents

that raise questions.

- So everything about this story is one big mystery.

- This particular footage has caused a lot of controversy.

- [Rudy] What's really happening?

- [Joe] There's so little information.

- Nothing like this has been attempted before.

- [Rudy] That's where we come in.

Our mission: investigate the battlefield's strangest images,

sounds, and more.

- [Tim] This photo blows my mind.

- [Amy] You can imagine how terrifying it would be.

- [Rudy] We'll analyze each with military experts

and try to come up with answers.

- I'm Ronnie Adkins, former US Army Intelligence Analyst.

- I'm Rudy Reyes, Recon Marine war veteran.

The proof starts now.

- Good evening everybody, I'm Ronnie.

He's Rudy.

And we are primed and psyched to bring you some of the most

compelling stories from the world of warfare.

- You know, Ronnie,

sometimes in wartime when things seem calm-

- Something's about to hit the fan.

- Exactly.

Let's go to Afghanistan,

Bagram, in particular, a place we both know well,

to find out why a routine flight ended in a fiery disaster.

The question: why did a 747 fall from the sky?

It's just before 3:30 p.m. on April 29th, 2013

at Bagram Airbase, the U.S. military's nerve center

for its fight against the Taliban.

An Army vehicle with a dash cam

is approaching the perimeter of the airbase.

And on the right side of the frame we can see a massive 747,

National Airlines Flight 102, specifically,

taking off at a steep angle of ascent,

executing a special procedure

called a maximum performance takeoff.

This is where the pilot puts the nose up as far as possible

to quickly reach high altitudes

and avoid the threat of ground fire.

But now, look closely at the video.

Within seconds, the giant plane falls out of the sky,

taking the heroes on board to a fiery and tragic death.

- The 747 can carry about 65,000 gallons of fuel.

It explains the massive black cloud.

That's an aircraft full of fuel burning on the ground.

- [Rudy] Preston Stewart is a military historian

and former Army lieutenant.

- It's difficult to watch because you can't do anything,

and if you were on the plane you couldn't do anything,

and that's hard to see play out.

- [Rudy] Former sniper Nick Irving spent two years

in Afghanistan and knows Bagram as well as we do.

- I've seen a lot of devastating things,

especially in Afghanistan,

but to see one of our aircraft go down and destroyed

in such a manner is something I've never seen before.

- [Rudy] After the crash, the dash cam footage goes viral

and viewers ask the question,

what caused this state-of-the-art plane

to fall from the sky?

The good news, if we can call it that,

is that normally you think of a 747 as a passenger plane.

This particular aircraft was reconfigured for cargo.

- That's right, man.

Using what's called a two-deck configuration,

a typical 747 can carry anywhere from 400 to 500 passengers.

but this 747-400 was reconfigured

as kind of a cargo truck for the sky.

There are only six passengers on board,

but it had over 200 tons of cargo on board.

- That's a major cargo haul for sure,

but wide body jets don't just crash.

And 747's in particular have a strong safety record.

Only 4% have ever been involved

in an incident with hull loss.

So let's check in with our experts

and see what exactly happened here.

(tense music)

Former CIA officer Joseph Assad says

we first have to eliminate some kind of ground fire.

- We saw a lot of Taliban activity,

mortars and rockets constantly being lobbed at the airport.

- It's one of the Taliban's target to-do list

is to destroy an American aircraft.

- [Rudy] And as soon as the word spread of the incident,

the Taliban took credit.

- They thought that this is an easy win,

that they can claim this.

However, the value of having a video like this

is incredible.

- [Rudy] Reviewing the footage,

former Army Lieutenant Preston Stewart

shoots down the shoot-down theory.

- [Preston] In this case, when you're watching the plane,

you don't actually see any explosions.

You don't see anything strike the aircraft,

and the first time you see any sort of detonation

is when the aircraft strikes the ground.

- [Rudy] So the plane wasn't shot down,

but in a post 9/11 world, we have to consider terrorism.

Remember, Afghanistan was Al-Qaeda's home base.

That's why we were there in the first place.

- It could have been a hijacked scenario in which people

stormed the cockpit, took over,

and basically diverted the plane and forced it into a crash.

- [Rudy] But Assad also says that the video leaves him

doubting that theory.

- A hijacker would have a purpose.

We have seen the 9/11 hijackers.

They would hijack an aircraft full of fuel

in order to crash into a target to make a statement.

So it didn't make sense that a hijacker would storm

the cockpit of a 747 full of cargo

only to crash it into an empty field.

- [Rudy] And the tight security within the perimeter

is also key.

- There's a lot of layers of security to get through

for somebody to sneak onto the airfield in some way,

shape, or form, forcibly take over the aircraft.

Never say never, but I'm not aware of that happening

any time in the 20 years the U.S. was in Afghanistan.

- [Rudy] The plane's cockpit voice recorder

was recovered after the disaster,

and it showed no evidence of a cockpit struggle

or of any kind of pilot error.

But the wreckage did reveal

that a key part of the plane's controls had been damaged.

- So what happened was the hydraulic system

that controls the horizontal stabilizer was destroyed,

which then resulted in

the complete failure of the aircraft.

- [Rudy] The horizontal stabilizer

is part of the plane's back wing that helps produce lift

in order to balance the plane's gravity

and center of pressure, keeping the whole aircraft stable.

But what took out the horizontal stabilizer?

The mystery leads us back to the fact

that the plane was carrying cargo, not people.

In this case, a very special kind of cargo.

- The 747 was loaded with five MRAPs.

These are mine-resistant, ambush protected vehicles.

- [Rudy] MRAPs are the transport vehicle of choice

where RPGs and IEDs are a common threat.

(explosion booming)

"Popular Mechanics" writer Joe Pappalardo knows them well.

- An MRAP is an up-armored Humvee.

If you stack two of 'em on top of each other,

it kind of looks like what an MRAP is.

- So imagine five of these in a 747, which is prone

to being sensitive to the weight distribution.

- [Rudy] And it turns out a fatal error was made,

not during takeoff,

but while that heavy cargo was being loaded.

- So here you have an aircraft taking off with five MRAPs

and one of them comes loose.

- That enabled that vehicle to smash into the hydraulics,

destroying the airplane's ability to control itself.

- [Rudy] The sliding MRAP not only

damaged the plane's mechanics,

it doomed the flight's physics.

- [Joe] That would throw the center of gravity off,

that would ruin the weight and balance.

- So the aircraft was not able to get enough wind

over the wings in order to maintain the lift,

causing the engines to stall.

And once the engines are stalled, you're done.

- [Rudy] This avoidable tragedy underscores the importance

of an an overlooked aspect of our military: logistics.

- Armchair generals think of battles won and lost

because of the weapons and the warriors, but the logistics

is what really supports a military campaign.

(tense music)

- Brother, that's a disturbing story.

- I'll say.

And check it out.

An NTSB investigation found that the carrier

omitted critical information in their manual

about how to properly secure the freaking cargo.

- Well, fortunately since then,

there's been a whole slew of new regulations and rules

related to cargo planes like this one.

Hopefully it never happens again.

- War can mess with your head space.

Now most of us in the military are familiar

with post-traumatic stress

and the terrible mental and emotional burdens

borne by veterans around the world.

- Ronnie, I still have bad dreams about my fallen brothers,

but in this next incident, some Vietnamese soldiers

were hearing the cries of their dead comrades

while they were awake.

- It was all part of an ingenious mind game

devised by the Americans.

And the question was, what was behind the ghost sounds

of the Vietnam War?

February 10th, 1970, units of the North Vietnamese Army

are deep in the jungles of Hau Nghia Province

at the height of the Vietnam War.

It's just after dusk when the NVA

hear a series of spine-chilling sounds.

(ghostly moaning)

Let's hear that again.

These are the actual recordings, by the way.

(ghostly moaning)

And it's not just moans, but words in Vietnamese.

(ghostly voice speaking Vietnamese)

- [Ronnie] The voices sound like the wandering souls

of dead NVA comrades killed on the battlefield.

(ghostly voice speaking Vietnamese)

- If I was a 19-year-old

communist soldier from the north,

you've already got a lot of things to be scared as hell of,

and then what do you hear?

The jungle is full of those sounds and voices

that are speaking to you in your own language.

(ghostly moaning)

- [Ronnie] As the troops listen more intently,

more sounds follow, banging gongs, sobbing women.

(ghostly moaning)

And then a clue, an oddly specific suggestion.

(ghostly voice speaking Vietnamese)

- [Ronnie] What was behind these ghostly sounds?

Now, a lot of people believe

that the jungles of Vietnam are haunted,

especially considering that over 300,000 people

are still unaccounted for

just from the period of the Vietnam War.

Rudy, you've spent time training people in Vietnam.

What do you think about this?

- I hate to say it, Ronnie,

but there are aspects of these sounds

that remind me of my experiences both in and out of combat.

This right here, that's straight out of the PSYOPs playbook.

- You're right, it is.

Our experts are gonna tell you how it worked.

(tense music)

(ghostly voice echoing)

Superstition was a powerful weapon in the Vietnam War.

In fact, both sides had their share of ghost stories.

- There's a story involving American soldiers

crawling down a tunnel to find the Viet Cong,

but instead they heard a female voice

calling for them as they left.

(ghostly cries)

And there were also reports from soldiers of ghostly figures

moving through trees, and fanged creatures

who would try to kidnap and eat troops

while they were in the jungle.

- [Ronnie] But the true story of these voices

was a closely guarded secret for years.

It wasn't until 1969 when the first reports revealed

to the public that the voices were actually

part of a manipulative mixtape

that was blasted across the countryside by American GIs.

It was part of a PSYOPs mission,

codenamed Operation Wandering Soul.

- There was a recognition that people in Vietnam

had religious beliefs and superstitions

whereby the souls of dead people

were wandering in the forests and in the jungles.

The American military understood

that that was a superstition that the enemy had,

and that maybe it would provide an upper hand

in the battle space.

(ghostly voice speaking Vietnamese)

- [Ronnie] Former Green Beret and PSYOP specialist Mark Sauter

says one ominous recording, which featured actors

playing a deceased Viet Cong soldier and his grieving family,

was a big hit.

- Ghost Tape Number 10 was the most frightening

and diabolical mixtape ever created.

(ghostly voice echoing)

And it was created by the U.S. Army Sixth PSYOPs Battalion.

- [Ronnie] When first deployed, Operation Wandering Soul

exhibited its powers of persuasion.

The audio actually caused enemy combatants to surrender.

It even terrorized South Vietnamese troops

and civilians alike.

- In one case, a offshoot of Wandering Soul

was playing the sounds of a tiger roaring

near a Vietnamese position

where a tiger had attacked a soldier.

And according to veterans,

this resulted in more than a hundred of the enemy

abandoning that position.

- [Ronnie] However, the psyop could only fool

the enemy's ears for so long

before they eventually tuned it out.

By the early 1970s, Ghost Tape 10 and many of the recordings

from the operation were put out of rotation.

And as we know, whatever impact Operation Wandering Soul had

on the North Vietnamese, it didn't scare them off

from their goal of taking South Vietnam.

(tense music)

So Rudy, what do you think about all this?

It's a pretty original tactic, right?

- Ah, it's clever, but in no way original.

Back in the Philippine communist insurgency in the '50s,

one U.S. advisor helped the Filipino military

leverage the legend of a local vampire

to instill sheer terror in the enemy.

So making use of folklore for PSYOPs

is an established tactic.

- Yeah, sometimes when war isn't scary enough,

it helps to enlist the supernatural.

- Now, if you're American, you know this picture

of U.S. Marines raising the Stars and Stripes

during the battle of Iwo Jima.

Rudy, as a Marine, what goes through your head

when you see that picture?

- Honor, courage, commitment,

the values of the Marine Corps.

But Admiral Chester Nimitz said it best,

"On this day on Iwo Jima,

uncommon valor was a common virtue."

- Well, for Russians and their cool hats,

this picture from World War II is just as sacred.

But the question is,

was this iconic World War II photo faked?

May 2nd, 1945, Berlin, Germany.

In the morning, a group of Russian soldiers

burst through the front doors of the Reichstag.

This is the main government building in Nazi Germany.

It's iconic, and it's a smoking wreck.

When they get to the roof,

three soldiers unfurl the flag of the USSR.

As the Hammer and Sickle flap in the breeze,

a news photographer snaps that incredible photo.

- It comes on the heels of the iconic Iwo Jima image,

And so the Soviets recognize how important that was

symbolically, and they're trying to kind of replicate that.

- [Ronnie] Why is this single photo so important?

Well, remember, this is a country

that lost an estimated 27 million people in World War II.

That's almost four times more than Germany,

and nine times that of Japan.

- The Soviet government was able to show this photo

to its people and say, "It's over."

We didn't survive, we emerged victorious.

- There's a lot of real pride and emotion

that goes into this image.

They're putting the Soviet flag on the Reichstag.

That's the the heart of Germany.

It's the heart of Nazi power.

- [Ronnie] The picture is worth more than a thousand words,

so what's the problem?

Well, today there's people who feel the photo

at the Reichstag was staged, and that aspects of it

were faked with a kind of 1940s Photoshopping

to cover up some ugly aspects of the story.

Could it be true?

- Okay, okay, first things first.

There's a difference between fake and staged.

The Iwo Jima photo was staged.

The real first flag raising, this is what it looked like.

It happened an hour and a half earlier,

but they wanted a better shot for this iconic moment.

So they got a bigger flag and they did it again.

- Now, this Russian photo,

there might have been more going on here,

and our analysts dug into it.

(tense music)

First question about this picture.

Did it really capture the moment

the Reichstag was first taken?

Historian Martin K.A. Morgan says, "Nyet."

- The Soviets moved into and occupied the Reichstag,

and even raised a flag, the day before this.

That was taken down overnight by the Germans

when they briefly reoccupied it.

Then the Reichstag building itself was reoccupied

by Soviet forces once and for all

on May 2nd, at which point it was decided

to re-stage a flag-raising event.

- [Ronnie] What about the flag itself?

Political scientist and U.S. Air Force veteran,

Dr. Sarah Kreps says it was made for the occasion,

a premeditated photo op.

- This is really jerry-rigged.

It's tablecloths that are sewn together

and you can even see the seam here.

They are sewn together to make a flag

for precisely this purpose.

The reason why that's so important

is because this is all symbolism.

This is propaganda.

(shutter clicking)

- [Ronnie] Okay, but it goes further than that.

Remember, the Soviets pioneered the art

of photo manipulation.

They removed party members from photos with Stalin

and Lenin if they fell out of favor or were executed.

So was that kind of trickery at work here?

Well, here's what we know.

When the photographer, Evgenii Khaldei, return to Moscow

immediately after snapping the shot,

Soviet officials suggested he tweak it a bit.

Look closer, and compare the before and after.

- In the revised photo, they pulled it in;

it focuses more on the destruction.

It's a lot darker.

There is no horizon, there is no light.

It is more of a celebration of tragedy

and of the pain that the Soviets had to go through.

- [Ronnie] All right, the Soviets doctored it a little

to make a point.

A lot of people would say, "Big deal."

But look closer.

In the original, the soldier holding the flag waver's feet

seems to have two wristwatches.

But in the doctored final version, he only has one.

Why change it?

- A man with one watch, that's understandable.

A man with two watches is a man

who has been corrupted by Western influences.

- [Ronnie] That's the communist spin.

But there may have been a darker explanation:

in a word, looting.

- Once a city was captured,

the Russian soldiers would be allowed loose in the city

to take whatever they want.

And for every Soviet soldier with a watch on his left wrist,

there were probably nine more watches on his right.

- [Ronnie] Tragically, this goes way past

stealing watches and jewelry.

- The Soviet military goes wild with looting,

and raping, and murdering in this city.

There's an estimate that as many as 120,000 German women

and girls were raped

in the immediate aftermath of the battle.

- [Ronnie] The Soviet's fear news of atrocities

will tarnish their status as victors.

- When you're looting on a widespread basis,

you look a little bit more like a conqueror

than a liberator.

- [Ronnie] So the doctoring of this now-famous photo

wasn't merely cosmetic.

It was in fact a coverup.

- So instead of a looting thief,

you've got a responsible soldier.

And it's a very small difference.

It's almost inconsequential,

but it's extremely consequential because the Russians

were gonna base their entire post-world order

on the worthiness of their troops,

on the right to a seat at the table

'cause they earned it from bloodshed.

(tense music)

- So, staged? - Affirm.

- Altered? - Check.

- Deceptive?

- Well, there's no doubt the Russians earned their victory

the hard way, but this photo seems designed

to cover up some of the terrible things

they did to achieve it.

- There may be no more intriguing mystery around here

than the secret Nazi projects

whose true purpose remains unknown.

- Bro, this next one is the granddaddy of 'em all.

It's a mystery literally the size of a mountain.

What were the Nazis hiding in Project Giant?

August 2016.

A media frenzy has erupted in Lower Silesia, Poland

after word spreads that two explorers

may have made a stunning find in a series of tunnels.

- These seven tunnels are square miles in area.

They have rooms that are hundreds of feet long,

ceilings that are 50, 60, 70 feet tall.

They're basically subterranean neighborhoods.

But what makes them truly enigmatic and very, very bizarre

is that there's virtually no primary documentation

as to what these tunnels were going to be used for.

- [Ronnie] There is documentation

on when these tunnels were built: 1943.

At that time, the Nazis occupied Poland

and over 13,000 prisoners were used as slave labor

to build a base known as Project Giant.

One of the workers' stories was documented

by Menachem Kaiser.

His grandfather's first cousin spent time at the facility.

- Abraham Kaiser was one of the prisoners

who worked on the project.

He was one of the slave laborers,

and he had managed to keep a diary.

- [Ronnie] Unfortunately, Abraham's diary only detailed

where he worked and what his day-to-day was like.

And he never learned the base's true purpose,

which takes us back to the question,

what were the tunnels for and what were they hiding?

- All right, Ronnie, we've got the map here.

My first question is, if Project Giant is such a big deal,

why is it in Poland as opposed to Germany

where all the Nazis are?

- 'Cause the Nazis were arrogant, man.

- Mm.

- See, the Nazis didn't expect to lose Poland.

It was supposed to be a bastion for them.

What they did is they slapped Project Giant right here

into Lower Silesia.

You're so far away from U.S., from British,

and all the other Western Allies.

- Maybe its location is actually a clue for its purpose.

tense music)

- [Ronnie] People have theorized that Project Giant

was everything from a massive occult temple

to a place where Hitler kept his own fleet of UFOs.

That's right.

As crazy as it sounds, there are some who believe

the Third Reich had its own flying saucer project where,

using alien technology, they created Reichsflugscheiben,

a.k.a., Reich flying discs, large, pilot-controlled discs

that could reach speeds of up to 5,000 kilometers an hour.

Many UFOlogists believe these saucers were built

in the coastal city of Peenemunde,

where the Nazis developed the first rockets,

and that the saucers themselves were stored

in the Project Giant tunnels.

- The absence of documentation,

and the absence of explanation has created a vacuum.

That vacuum has been filled by speculation.

There are some people that believe there are Nazi UFOs

in those tunnels, and I'm not making that up.

In other words, in the absence of a plausible explanation,

what do we get?

We get these outrageous, that make no sense.

- [Ronnie] But there's no more alluring explanation

than that Project Giant was meant

as a secret storage facility

for the infamous Nazi gold train,

one of the biggest and most enduring legends

of World War II.

- The Golden Train is an ostensibly legendary train

full of looted Nazi gold.

According to legend,

the Germans had loaded up 44 crates of gold,

put it on this train, and for whatever reason,

the train was diverted and hidden inside of the mountain.

- It was hidden in these tunnels,

again, to avoid detection,

and that somewhere within these tunnels,

this gold was hidden,

and it is there waiting to be discovered to this very day.

- [Ronnie] Has a lost treasure been discovered?

When ground-penetrating radar used by Polish explorers

Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper

discovered what look like a train,

that question captivated the public.

But hold on a minute.

- I just don't see that Hitler would just leave this gold

somewhere that Germany no longer controlled

under the theory of, I'll come back for it later.

That just doesn't make much sense.

- [Ronnie] Those radar scans that look like train cars,

they turned out to be nothing but rock formations.

- And the reality is, it's a myth.

We are clinging to these myths about World War II

that we want to be true that unfortunately they're not.

- [Ronnie] So if there's no UFOs, and no Nazi gold,

could Project Giant have been a place to develop

or store secret weapons?

- There's some wild theories about weapons that

the Germans were developing, creating sonic weapons

that can bring down formations of bombers,

or anti-gravity weapons that will give them

the perfect aircraft.

- [Ronnie] Nazi anti-gravity tech may seem like

stories ripped from a comic book,

but the secret weapons theory isn't such a fantasy.

- The only reason why you would build facilities,

as far as we can tell, with electrical wiring, with sewage,

which are sort of linked to one another by rail,

is if you're intending for large amounts of people

and materiel to be within those facilities,

and you want to be able to sort of, you know,

move them from one end to another, which suggests to me

that this would probably be a place where you would

sort of assemble necessary German war production.

- The theory kind of makes sense because if he can

relocate some of this industry

into these underground facilities in Poland,

would help him prolong the war longer

by keeping the German factories running.

- [Ronnie] The real purpose of Project Giant

may only have been revealed if the Nazis had won the war.

Fortunately, that didn't happen.

All Project Giant does today is remind us

of the scale of Hitler's evil dreams.

- You get like a small taste of the ambition of the Nazis,

and in that sense it's demonic,

and it really does have a grip on the imagination,

and it's frightening and awe-inspiring.

(tense music)

- Okay, I get it.

No gold train.

The structures of Project Giant remain a mystery

and a breeding ground for all kinds of conspiracy theories.

- But with accounts suggesting more tunnels yet to be explored,

this is one mystery that might someday be solved.

- Being away from home, sometimes for a long time,

can take its toll on service members.

- That's right.

Hundreds of servicemen leave their post every year.

Now some of those desertions are easy to explain,

and others are bonafide head-scratchers.

- Like this story of an intoxicated mechanic

who seemingly pulls off an impossible heist.

The question: what happened to the homesick mechanic?

1969, the English Channel.

You're looking at footage from a rescue mission.

A search team is hoping to find a missing mechanic.

Instead, all they find is this big oil slick,

and right here, an empty life raft.

What really happened here is a mystery,

and the woman in this photo is at the heart of it.

It all went down the night of May 23rd.

While most people are asleep,

a 60-ton C-130 Hercules cargo plane

roars down the runway of the RAF Mildenhall airbase

in Suffolk, England.

This is a flight unlike any other.

Not only is the pilot drunk, he's not even a pilot.

The man in the cockpit is 23-year-old

U.S. Air Force mechanic Sergeant Paul Meyer.

- The very idea of an untrained mechanic

thinking he could take a C-130 is unthinkable to me.

- [Rudy] Earlier that night,

Meyer had been boozing at a house party,

becoming erratic and combative.

Plastered and lovelorn,

Meyer decides he wants to see his wife.

Except there's a hitch: she's in Virginia.

- He's feeling rather homesick, has a lot to drink,

and comes up with a brilliant idea, and that is to fly home.

- [Rudy] So Meyer goes rogue.

He impersonates a high-ranking officer and calls the base,

asking for a C-130 Hercules to be fueled up and made ready,

and wait for it, the dispatcher complies.

- Maybe when you get a call from a commanding officer

in the middle of the night, you just follow orders.

- [Rudy] With plenty of cojones,

but absolutely no flight training, Meyer takes off.

Retired naval aviator Ward Carroll

shows us why that was no easy feat.

- So in this government training film,

you can see a nice view of the C-130 cockpit.

What jumps out at you right away

is just the number of gauges.

To get the airplane airborne,

you have to know which one of those dials is the altimeter,

which one's the airspeed indicator,

then the attitude indicator.

It's a daunting amount of information

that's in front of you.

- [Rudy] Nevertheless, Meyer begins flying west

towards the United States.

As soon as the Air Force realizes something is wrong,

they scramble a fighter jet and another C-130

to intercept him.

According to the official record,

they never established contact.

Meanwhile, Meyer's contacted someone else.

Mid-flight, the fleeing sergeant places a strange call

to Jane Meyer, his spouse.

As their conversation drags on for 45 minutes,

Meyer's mood suddenly shifts.

He tells Jane he's run into trouble.

Seconds later, the line goes dead.

What happens next is the subject of intense controversy.

But everyone agrees an hour and 45 minutes after takeoff,

the C-130 crashes into the English Channel.

The military says the plane disintegrated on impact,

but plenty of questions are still hanging in the air.

- Rudy, how do you think Sergeant Meyer

acquired the technical know-how to take off

and fly this plane for more than 90 minutes?

- Well, think about it this way.

A pilot could know how to fix the aircraft,

at least the basics.

Conversely, a mechanic might know the basics of flying

and be able to taxi and take off.

All those cockpit dials, they look pretty intimidating,

but Sergeant Meyer could have picked up just enough

to pull this thing off.

- All this makes you really wonder what happened to him.

- Well, let's check with our experts

and see what they think.

(tense music)

Retired officer Preston Stewart has studied the case.

He says many believe the Air Force sent up that fighter jet

not to assist Meyer, but to shoot him down.

That's because Meyer didn't boost just any plane.

He may have taken one with sensitive documents

or technology that posed a national security risk.

- One of the theories put forward is that the plane,

the C-130 that he did take control of,

was operated by or used for the CIA,

suggesting that either some documents on the plane

might be of a classified nature that the United States,

British, NATO, anybody didn't want

falling into the wrong hands.

- Meyer's family has supported that theory for years.

- I will believe to the day I take my last breath

that they took him down.

They felt like they had a right to.

We just wanna know

why the government didn't tell us the truth.

- [Rudy] Journalist MJ Banias has a different theory.

- Sergeant Meyer was most likely not shot down.

The intention would be to try and communicate with him

to give him instructions to land the plane

or ditch the plane in a safe location

so that no one would get hurt.

- [Rudy] The strange call Meyer made from the cockpit

to his new bride back home is also a key clue.

- There's this added mystery where all of a sudden,

he's successfully able to place a call to his wife

while on board this aircraft.

Telecommunications were pretty old school.

You know, you needed to patch the call through radio

in order to make that call.

- [Rudy] In other words, Meyer couldn't have done this

without Air Force assistance.

The contents of his call are also interesting.

Meyer tells his wife he's coming home

and flying low to avoid radar detection.

She was trying to convince him to go back,

but after several more minutes on the call,

the United States Air Force interjects.

- Somebody chimed in trying to get her to keep him talking

'cause they were using that to track where he was.

- [Rudy] Whether the Air Force wanted to talk him down

or shoot him down, Meyer never makes it home.

According to this radar watch log,

the southern radar station loses contact

at 05:48 that morning,

and the plane disappears right about here.

- It's very possible that Meyer knew that his aircraft

was gonna go down.

So instead of attempting to ditch it into the water,

he simply opened one of the doors and leapt out.

And when he did jump out, you know,

he lands in ice-cold ocean water, hypothermia sets in,

it doesn't take long, and all of a sudden, he perishes.

- [Rudy] The United States Air Force

treats this incident as an accident and closes the case.

But 50 years later, there may be answers still to come.

In 2018, an exciting discovery:

the wreckage of the C-130 is discovered by a dive team

at the bottom of the English Channel.

Meyer's family, having relentlessly pursued answers

for all these years, hopes that a planned salvage operation

will finally solve this mystery.

- The plane was, for the most part, pretty much intact.

But why would they tell us the plan disintegrated on impact

when some divers start out within a year, two years, maybe,

or so, and found the plane?

(tense music)

- They never find Meyer's body.

Rudy, that part reminds me of the famous hijacker,

D.B. Cooper.

They never found him either.

- They find parts of the plane and a life raft.

That tells me he might even have survived.

- It's not impossible, but Rudy, you and I both know

that booze, love, and home sickness,

they can make you do some crazy things, man.

- You know that's right.

- Now it's time for this week's secret weapon.

In this case, we're talking about something dangerous

and rare that lurks beneath the waves,

and I'm not talking about a megalodon.

- We're talking about submarines.

But in this case,

what happens when a sub is owned by a secretive,

violent organization that threatens the United States

even as we speak?

The question: how do the secret narco subs work?

(Guardsmen shouting in foreign language)

June 18th, 2019, the Pacific Ocean,

just 200 miles off the coast of Colombia,

a high-speed cat and mouse chase is underway

as the U.S. Coast Guard is in hot pursuit.

As we can see in this intense footage,

a strange submersible vessel is doing its best to escape

while Guardsmen are screaming at it to stop.

Let's give it up for that Coastie getting it done.

The hatch finally opens,

and the captain of this unidentified floating object

throws up his hands to surrender.

But what exactly is the ship?

Former submarine commander, David Marquet.

- Ah, well this is a homemade miniature submarine.

I do know I would not wanna be on that thing.

- [Rudy] This video quickly goes viral,

not only because of the vessel's strange design,

but because of its cargo.

More than 17,000 pounds of cocaine worth over $232 million.

- The cartels are constantly looking for other means to

transport drugs from South America

to the continental United States.

The technology employed is pretty high tech.

- It's estimated that over 70 of these narco subs

will be made this year alone.

- These things are also believed to be moving

about 30% of Colombia's total cocaine.

Now fortunately, the Coast Guard's had the opportunity

to seize and study some of them.

- But what are we really looking at?

(tense music)

How do narco subs work?

Well, former submarine engineer Ken Sewell

says they're not full-service submarines

as we normally understand them.

- Technically speaking, we're looking at what's called

a semi-submersible.

They are, just a little bit of it comes up above the water.

It's just a small amount of positive buoyancy.

They suck air in,

run a combustion engine, exhaust it out,

not unlike a speedboat.

- [Rudy] But as Captain Marquet examines the video,

he sees this design has a remarkable ability

to elude detection.

And that's why it's such an important tool

for the clandestine drug trade.

- It's so low, so it's hard to show up on radar.

I'm guessing it has a diesel engine

because these are probably the intakes.

It seems to be moving pretty well.

- [Rudy] Where did it come from?

We know there's a sprawling international black market

in illegal weapons, but Sewell says,

with these submersibles,

it's much easier to make one from scratch.

- To build one of these, you really just kinda need

a metal shop and a welder.

To bend the metal and weld it together,

it's not really that complicated.

- [Rudy] Still, in order to even operate a plant,

there must be some fundamental knowledge

of how this technology works.

- This is technology from folks who know what they're doing.

You can imagine a former nuclear sailor in a major navy,

Russian, British, French, or American,

suddenly being approached with huge sums of money,

seven digits plus, to assist in this effort.

The cartels certainly have it within their means

to woo that kind of talent.

- There are a lot of personnel from the former Soviet Union,

and I know some of 'em ended up down there

building these things.

I wouldn't be surprised if the North Koreans

even got into this.

- [Rudy] And perhaps the scariest thought

about seeing these types of innovations

is what other nefarious purposes could they be used for?

Why stop at drug smuggling?

- I look at something like that,

and I'm thinking something more of a,

if you can transport narcotics or illegal contraband,

you can transport a dirty bomb, a nuclear who-knows-what.

Something that could cause way more damage than cocaine.

(tense music)

- Recently, President Joe Biden told Congress

these semi-submersibles pose, quote,

"A significant danger to the United States."

- And not just the United States.

Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka

have become the first terrorist organization

to develop these kinds of underwater weapons.

- That's scary stuff, brother.

That's our show for tonight, people.

Until next time, keep your powder dry.

- And your head on a swivel.

Good night.

(tense music)