Original subtitles

[narrator] They are watching you.

More than 5,000 satellites circle the Earth.

Every day, they uncover new mysterious phenomena

that defy explanation.

The Mojave's 18,000 square mile cypher.

Whoa.

This must be it.

It's just one of the weirdest things

I've ever seen.

[narrator] Gateway to the Viking underworld.

Legends have it that this is where the devil

had an earthly court.

[narrator] And the 200,000 ton ghost ship.

We don't know what secrets it might have taken

with it to the bottom of the ocean.

[narrator] Baffling phenomena, mystery from space,

what on Earth are they?

[rock music playing]

[narrator] The Mojave Desert, South Eastern, California,

25,000 square miles of pretty much nothing.

And a mystery revealed from the skies.

Given just how remote this place is,

it's just one of the weirdest things

I've ever seen.

[narrator] Don Vaughn is investigating

this code etched into the featureless landscape.

Captured on April 22nd, 2020.

[Vaughn] This isn't really like anything

I've ever seen before.

It has that massive circle in the middle

and then it's radiating out rectangles.

[Klint] We got a very unconventional looking grid.

Closest thing that I can think of is pulling apart

a computer and looking at the circuit board.

It makes no sense to have it out

in the middle of the California desert.

[narrator] The Mojave has long been a place

for clandestine activities.

A historical haven for military experiments.

But these weird lines appear to be something different.

And they're over three miles wide.

They look like the kind of remnants

or the outline of a town.

And all is lacking are, well, frankly buildings and people.

Could this be the remains of an abandoned

real estate project?

We do know that in the Mojave desert,

there was one of these,

and it was called California City.

[narrator] These lines in the desert to the west

of the site in the image are all that remains

of California City.

One of the biggest real estate nightmares

in history.

Its story begins in 1958, when a property developer

launches an audacious plan to exploit housing shortages

in LA by constructing a new metropolis

in the Mojave.

The intention of California City

was to create a second Los Angeles

out in the middle of the desert.

An enormous city, more than 200 square miles

in scale.

[narrator] The developer buys up over

80,000 acres of scrub,

carves out hundreds of miles of road,

and start selling plots at under $1,000 apiece.

But the desert mega city dream soon becomes

a cash guzzling catastrophe.

[tense music playing]

[Trevor] Unfortunately, nobody wanted to live there.

It became infamous for being the largest city

that never went anywhere.

[Samantha] As real estate venture, California City was,

an enormous failure.

It really wasn't a very inviting place to live,

and so the developers cut their losses, and walked away,

leaving a ghost town in the sand.

[narrator] Yet a wider scan of the region reveals

this can't be the remains of another desert ghost town.

[Guy] Now, if you think this place is weird enough,

there are at least two more like it.

Not just in California, but also in Nevada

and Arizona.

So something seriously strange is going on

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] All in, the pattern stretched

across some 18,000 square miles of desert.

A swath of land almost 60 times bigger

than New York City.

Whoa.

This must be it.

These are the lines I saw in the satellite image.

[narrator] The lines in the image

are flattened tracks of dirt.

And there are hundreds of miles of them.

Oh.

I wasn't expecting this.

There's actually rocks lining the road.

[exhales] That is weird.

[narrator] Ancient people across the Americas

used rocks to create giant symbols

in the desert, perhaps says ritualistic

offerings or messages to their gods in the skies.

But never on this scale and in this regimented pattern.

[Vaughn] If that wasn't weird enough, got the same thing

going on in three states.

The only things with enough resources

to make something like this happen

are governments and big corporations.

It still doesn't tell me why it's here.

[narrator] The satellite image guides Vaughn

to an unusual shape to the north.

What is that?

Looks like a giant, empty swimming pool.

[tense music playing]

[narrator] The colossal concrete basin measures

around 12 and a half thousand square feet,

enough to hold 50,000 gallons of water.

And I can see that the concrete

has plants popping out of it all over.

Must not have been used in the couple decades.

But the weird thing is, it probably has enough

water in it to support thousands of people.

[narrator] 600 yards away, Vaughn finds the first clue

as to what drew so many people

to this desolate corner of California.

[Vaughn] Whoa! Look, it's a star.

I think it's been made out of the same rocks

as the edges of the road.

[tense music playing]

[narrator] The shape at the center of the patterns

was once one of the most wildly recognized, admired,

and sometimes feared symbols in the world.

I know that in World War II, all of the US

military vehicles had a five-pointed star

just like this, painted on them.

So maybe this site really is military.

Maybe it's from World War II.

[narrator] Declassified records confirm

that the massive patters in the image

are an extraordinary, yet forgotten relic

of military history.

The troops going through this called it hell.

These troops were facing threats

that they had never seen before.

And fairly a large number died.

But when you're talking half a million soldiers,

you're gonna expect that.

[canon firing]

[narrator] Coming up, mayhem in the Mojave.

Nonstop organized chaos to prepare our troops

for the largest campaign in history.

[narrator] And code of the Viking witch.

Labyrinths are seen as a gateway

to the underworld.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] Strange patterns stretching

over 18,000 square miles.

Something weird is going on out here.

[narrator] Have drawn Don Vaughn

to the Mojave Desert.

I've counted around 10 of them

between California, Nevada, and Arizona.

And they all look really similar.

[narrator] Clues on the ground reveal

that this seemingly, endless expanse of dirt roads

is all that remains of a gargantuan temporary city.

A brutal boot camp designed to ready

American troops for the horrors

of World War II.

What we're seeing in this image

is the largest army training post

in the United States.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense,

because the first area of conflict that the US Army

fought in World War II was actually in North Africa.

So this would be the perfect place

to train green troops for desert warfare.

[narrator] The massive training camp

has its origins in the late 1930s.

At this time, the US Army has just 180,000 soldiers.

Nazi Germany has over three and a half million.

As conflict looms, there is a growing horror

in Washington that the country is terrifyingly

ill-prepared to wage a global war.

When America entered into the war,

you got to remember that her military in many ways

are kind of light years behind what's going on in Europe.

And so there is a need to ramp up military strength

very, very quickly, and to take troops,

and to get them ready for a combat situation.

[narrator] To prepare hundreds and thousands of rookies

to take on the crack Nazi troops,

the US Government turns to its most battle hardened

and feared general, George S. Patton.

[Klint] Patton was a career soldier.

He first saw a combat in 1916, fighting Pancho Villa.

And then he commanded the Tank Corps in World War I.

We needed someone to command a fighting army

on the field of battle.

We didn't have many people that can fit that build,

but George Patton was one of them.

[narrator] Many in the US military believe

the key to defeating Hitler is a direct assault

on Nazi-held France.

But British Prime Minister Winston Churchill persuades

President Roosevelt to use North Africa as a launch pad

for an invasion of Southern Europe.

And that is why Patton alights on the Mojave Desert

and goes, "Yup, I'm gonna requisition

18,000 square miles of that and I'm gonna

use that to train my men."

[mortar firing]

[narrator] To mimic the rigors and dangers awaiting them

in the Nazi-held deserts of North Africa,

Patton orders the construction

of the largest military training ground in history.

Thirteen tent mega cities,

three miles long and one mile wide, each housing

fifteen thousand rookie soldiers.

They had to train over half a million troops.

To do that, they set up a logistical network

that would rival major cities today.

[narrator] At any given time, 180,000 troops

camp out in the desert.

During their 14-week training,

30,000 at a time

are put through a series of punishing mock battles

and exercises under the merciless Mojave sun.

There were hundreds of casualties,

people that suffered from heat stroke,

snake bites, scorpion stings,

even getting struck by tanks.

[Samantha] This was a grueling training program

for the men who were there.

It was war theater on a grand scale.

And it was designed to prepare these men

for something absolutely ferocious.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] The desert training center

is part of an astonishing nationwide recruitment drive

during the early years of World War II.

Between 1941 and 1943,

the unlisted strength

of the US Army increases by five million.

Yet Patton knows he needs more than

just trained soldiers to take on Hitler's

feared Africa Corps.

In order to defeat the Germans

in the expanses of the African desert,

the Americans needed armored divisions.

Patton needed his commanders to know the tactics

of fighting in a big,

open terrain area, vastly different

than the hedgerows and hills of Western Europe.

And Mojave was a perfect place to do that.

[narrator] As it prepares for war,

total US tank production stands at just 365 machines a year.

By 1942, this has increased to over 26,000.

And Patton uses the Mojave to choreograph

massive maneuvers of his new war machines.

Keeping everything flowing is absolutely critical

to large-scale warfare.

To do that, he needed to know if their equipment

was going to be able to handle extreme conditions.

Eighty odd years ago, this place would have been

a buzzing hive of activity, with planes flying

through the sky, tank battalions driving

across the landscape.

Essentially, a nonstop organized chaos to prepare

our troops for the largest campaign in history.

[narrator] In November 1942, just seven months

after setting up camp in the Mojave,

Patton leads the 33,000 strong

Western Tank Forces Assault

on North Africa.

His victorious campaign paved the way

for the Allied Invasion of Sicily and the conquest

of Italy, which sounds the death knell

for Hitler's control of Southern Europe.

[crowd cheering]

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] The site that gave rise to this pivotal moment

in history remains a monument to those that died

in the pursuit of freedom all those years ago.

Without the training undertaken here,

it's unlikely that the US campaign

in North Africa would have ended quite so quickly.

Who knows how much longer the war could have gone on,

and how many more would have died.

[narrator] Coming up, Sorceress Island.

This island had a fearsome reputation

as a center of evil.

[narrator] And Russia's mystery invincible weapon.

What you have is a single missile capable

of taking out 10 different cities.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] April 14th, 2021,

a satellite passing over the Swedish coastline...

scans Bla Jungfrun,

a bleak, isolated island steeped in myth

and folklore.

Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond,

this island had a fearsome reputation

as a center of evil.

Legends have it that this is where the devil

had an earthly court where he would have satanic feasts

and terrifying rituals.

[narrator] As the orbiting camera scans

the southern tip of the cursed island,

it captures a weird symbol on the rocks below.

It really looks like a giant just came by

and pressed its finger into the island.

But if you look closely, these are channels

that you can walk through, which means, essentially,

that what we're looking at is a labyrinth.

[narrator] Examples of labyrinths

are found throughout antiquity.

Mysterious codes etched into stone

whose precise meaning remains a mystery.

One interpretation of this ancient symbol

may explain this island's dark reputation.

Labyrinths are associated with mysticism

and seen as a gateway to the underworld.

Labyrinths are often part of the symbology

used by witches.

There's, uh, one possible explanation is...

This labyrinth that we're looking at

is a performance space for rituals.

It could have been left alone for centuries

because people were afraid to touch it.

[narrator] Around 12 centuries ago,

the Vikings ruled the waters around the island.

Their belief system could explain evidence

of witchcraft there.

The Vikings were famous for their sorcerers,

witches, and their understanding

of the combination between medicine and magic.

It's thought that each tribe actually

has their own labyrinth, dedicated to one

of the Norse gods, so Odin or Thor.

[narrator] Male Norse gods

dominate much of Norse mythology.

Yet in times of battle and bloodshed,

they turned to the goddess Freya,

and witchcraft.

The Vikings took magic very seriously.

And so witches played a very important role

in Viking society.

Witches were so important that you'd never start

a battle without being blessed by a witch.

[narrator] Viking witches were called staff carriers.

They travel from tribe to tribe,

delivering prophecies and communing with spirits.

The image we have today of witches with potions really

got its origins in Scandinavia and Viking culture.

It's very likely they practiced sorcery

by pharmaceuticals, that they gave you a plant

that would make you hallucinate.

[eerie music playing]

[narrator] Norse witches create potions

which transform warriors into berserkers.

[metal clanking]

[narrator] Fighters who waged battle

in a trance-like fury.

The term berserker is a fearless warrior

who basically is, like, a shape changer.

A berserker is one who assumes the guise

of a bear or a wolf, uh, a wild creature.

[narrator] By the 12th century,

much of Scandinavia

has converted to Christianity.

But belief in witchcraft remains strong in many

of the region's remote isolated populations.

These Pre-Christian Pagan beliefs carried on

like a substratum in society.

Scandinavia is a very rural landscape,

and so these activities could carry on

undetected literally for hundreds of years.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] In the 15th century,

the Catholic Church launches a violent campaign

to rid Sweden and the rest of Europe of witchcraft.

Over the following 150 years, witch finders prosecute

over 80,000 people suspected of practicing

black magic, executing half of them.

The authorities stopped at nothing in order

to seek out and condemn these perceived witches.

[Kevin] There was no real evidence.

It was just merely the suspicion

or the accusation of somebody close to you

that could result in your violent death.

[narrator] In Sweden, this bloody purge

is called The Great Noise.

A driving force behind it is a man known

as "the evil chaplain" who slays 71

suspected witches in a single day.

Confessions were exhorted

by torture.

And once that had been obtained,

the poor victim would be summarily executed.

In a lot of cases, they were beheaded

and their bodies burned.

It was a horrible purge of innocent people.

[narrator] It is believed that medieval witches

may have chosen the island in the image as refuge

from the horrors being carried out

on the Swedish mainland.

In the 16th century, scholars called this place

a sanctuary for witches.

Some traditions suggested that the witches

would come to this island often just before Easter

to celebrate these diabolical rituals.

[narrator] Who created the bizarre labyrinth

and when remains unclear.

Yet recent excavations on the island

suggests its connections to the dark arts

may stretch back for millennia.

Archeologists have identified at least two caves

that have been occupied during the Stone Age.

This is before the arrival of agriculture.

Among the discoveries was an altar,

and they did some carbon testing and found

that it was 9,000 years old.

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] The origins of the Vikings belief

in witches and the power they wielded

has long been shrouded in mystery.

The discovery could suggest that it was

from this island that it rose up

and helped guide the destiny of the greatest warrior race

the world has ever seen.

This really sets the imagination on fire

to think about what rituals took place,

and the gods that were celebrated

right here.

[narrator] Coming up, the mystery

of the disappearing mega tanker.

[man] This is so bizarre.

It seems as if this is a ghost ship.

[narrator] And the terrifying toxic time bomb.

It was an absolute environmental disaster.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] August 15th, 2020,

a spy bird scans

the tropical island of Mauritius,

1,000 miles off Africa's east coast.

[man] This looks like a real piece of paradise.

You can see the white lines of waves breaking

across the reef, but there's this rectangle here

that looks like a ship.

On these photos, it looks like it's stranded,

abandoned, might even be leaking.

[man] This looks like a pretty big container ship.

So if it is leaking, something toxic and horrible,

there's gonna be a lot of it.

[narrator] Maritime records revealed

that this is a 980-foot long tanker carrying around

one million gallons of heavy engine oil.

This boat is called...

Or rather was called, uh, the Wakashio.

Now, this is an enormous bulk carrier.

It's in the top one percent for size

of all the vessels ever built.

It's a seagoing giant.

[narrator] Over the following days,

images taken by Maxar revealed the monster

vessel is beginning to break up.

[Ken] This is where things really start to go wrong.

What we can see now is oil pouring out

of the side of the vessel into this area

between the coral reef and the island.

This is a disaster of epic proportions.

[narrator] Over 1,000 tons of oil decimate

the Mauritius coastline.

One of the worst spills in the Indian Ocean

in history.

Yet what baffles experts is how the 200,000 ton ship

crashed in the first place.

The Wakashio is a modern boat.

It's got all the latest tech on board.

So, uh, this is really perplexing.

[Mike] It should not be there.

What are the events that led to its grounding

on this reef?

[narrator] Analysts turn to satellite tracking data for clues.

They revealed that four days prior to the incident,

the Wakashio suddenly changes direction

as it crosses the Indian Ocean.

It then charts a relentless course

for the reefs at a steady speed of 11 knots.

[Adam] This is not a normal accident.

There should have been warnings that this shipwreck

was going to take place.

It didn't even attempt to slow down.

It seems as if this is a ghost ship.

It should have moved or changed direction

at some point.

This is so bizarre.

[narrator] There are over 300 ghost ships

and phantom vessels drifting the world's oceans,

their crews missing, their fate a mystery.

But this doesn't explain the Wakashio.

Some locals reported that there were lifeboats

from the ship, suggesting that sailors left

the stricken ship to get to shore.

[narrator] Allegations soon emerged

as to why the crew decided to flee the ship following

their four-day long collision course with the island.

Rumors very quickly started swirling around.

There was a party onboard and they didn't notice

that it was heading straight towards this reef, bang.

[Mike] But most people don't have

a four-day birthday party.

This is not a full explanation for why the ship

is on a crash course for four days

without altering speed or direction.

[narrator] As news of the incident spreads,

authorities suggest that bad weather could be to blame.

Yet satellite data reveals this can't be the case.

[Adam] The shipwreck can't be blamed on a storm.

The nearest storm is literally

a thousand miles away,

so something else went wrong on the Wakashio.

[narrator] Within hours of the ship hitting

the reefs, the Mauritian government

deploys teams to contain the disaster.

Every hour that goes by means more oil in the water

and more damage to the vessel itself.

[narrator] Despite their efforts,

currents drag the ship across

the sharp reefs, releasing yet more oil

into the ocean and onto nearby beaches.

Local people did anything they could to protect

their island.

They ran out with plastic bottles

and straw that they fashioned

into homemade booms for containing the oil.

[narrator] When the rupturing tanker breaks in half,

the government takes drastic

and controversial action.

Two weeks after it runs aground on the reef,

the Mauritian authorities decide to have the boat

towed out and then simply scuttled.

The scuttling is a controversial move,

because the pressure at the bottom of the ocean

will squeeze whatever is left in the Wakashio

out like toothpaste from a tube.

[narrator] What's more, the government

doesn't disclose the location of the wreck.

The cause of the giant ship's bizarre change

of course and its catastrophic collision

remain a mystery.

Something is really strange here.

There's just more questions than answers about this ship.

We just don't know what secrets

it might've taken with it to the bottom of the ocean.

[narrator] Coming up, the monster graveyard.

It was really like a scene out of hell.

[narrator] And the country-killing

mega weapon.

It's very possible that it's gonna change

the global dynamic.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] January 2021...

a satellite passing 20 miles southwest

of Kuwait City captures this image.

[Devin] This is interesting.

This looks like a black and tan stained glass window

has been built in this giant desert.

This is clearly manmade, but I have no idea

what this black stuff is.

It looks like a supersized mosaic.

[narrator] The mystery black blobs

cover around 10 million square feet of the desert.

Just a few days after the image

was taken, something weird happens.

This is shocking, this fire is so big,

you could see it from space.

[man] A cloud of smoke drifted hundreds of miles.

So this is a real danger.

When you see pools of black stuff in the desert

in Kuwait, you think it must be oil.

[narrator] For some analysts, the inferno

is a haunting reminder of a catastrophic sequence

of events in these deserts three decades ago.

[dramatic music playing]

Back in 1991, the Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait.

On their retreat, they had a scorched earth policy

and would literally destroy

wellheads and set them on fire.

[narrator] Some six months earlier, Saddam Hussein

had ordered the invasion of the gulf state

to try to gain more control over the region's oil riches.

Kuwait is a small country by size,

but in terms of how much oil they have, they're immense.

[man] It sits on top of the second largest oil field

in the world, the Great Burgan Field.

And that field has literally billions

and billions of barrels of oil in it.

[narrator] Hussein's invasion prompts

a massive counterassault by almost a million US

and allied forces

who capture or kill over 100,000 Iraqi soldiers.

As the survivors flee, the dictator orders them

to torch around 700 oil wells,

partly concealing

their retreat from orbiting spy satellites.

These fires took only a few moments to start,

but they took months to put out.

It was really like a scene out of hell.

[narrator] The oil fires also contaminate

over nine billion square feet of desert with a thick,

tarry sludge.

The mixture of oil and the sand made

something called tarcrete, which literally

is like a concrete.

It's a slurry, that when it hardens

is very difficult to clean up.

It was an absolute environmental disaster.

Given the history of this place,

you have to wonder if these pools

couldn't be some of the leftover oil

from that disaster.

[narrator] But when experts dial up the magnification,

the mystery deepens.

I can see tiny, little bits and pieces

within this black material.

It looks like some sort of physical substance,

almost grain-like.

We also see these rectangular shapes

that look like trucks, bringing something over

to this site, and dumping it in these cavities.

Is this a landfill?

[tense music playing]

[narrator] Mankind dumps two billion tons of trash

into landfill sites every year.

The US alone generates enough

to fill almost 100,000 Olympic

swimming pools.

What we're looking at here is a tire landfill.

A graveyard with all of these ponds

filled with tire waste.

[narrator] Each day, over four million tires

are discarded across the globe,

thousands of tons of which end up right here.

Many businesses throughout the United States

and the world pay for their trash to just

basically disappear, for someone else to handle it.

It's cheap to dispose of things like this

and countries like Kuwait have a ton of desert,

so people bring in tires from all over

to be deposited in landfills like this.

[narrator] Our obsession with horsepower

means that 14 million tires cover the desert here.

A sea of rubber rings which outnumbers

the local population, three to one.

This is in fact the largest tire dump

in the world.

Tires don't decompose, so they're being buried

in the desert to get them out of sight

and out of mind,

but they're not going anywhere.

[narrator] The average tire here

has completed at least 20,000 miles on the road.

This means they begin decimating the environment

long before they're dumped in Kuwait.

Every time you drive on the road,

little bits of your tire wear away,

and then they wash into the water system,

and eventually down to the ocean.

In fact 25% of the microplastics

in the ocean are from tire parts.

[narrator] The problem posed by particles

of killer rubber is only going to get worse.

With the increased popularity of electric vehicles,

experts estimate tire consumption

could double over the next decade.

Electric vehicles with that huge battery pack

are much heavier than gas vehicles,

and so they chew through tires much faster.

In some way, is our transition

to electric vehicles actually harming

the environment more

because we're putting more plastics into the ocean?

It's one giant feedback loop.

[narrator] Yet perhaps the greatest threat posed

by this vast tire dump

comes from Kuwait's 130-degree Fahrenheit

summer temperatures.

You have a flammable pile of tires

sitting in a very hot desert.

[narrator] Black objects absorb wavelengths

of light, converting it to heat.

Once temperatures approach 750 degrees Fahrenheit,

rubber starts to self-combust,

and the toxic tire dump turns into a ticking time bomb.

When you have giant pits of tires in a dry heat

for a long time,

it becomes a real fire hazard.

Once a tire fire starts, you really just have

to let it burn out because it burns extremely hot

and it's very difficult to put out.

[narrator] One such fire at this site consumed

five million tires, releasing ten million gallons

of oil into the ground, and a vast cloud

of noxious fumes into the skies.

And as yet more tires join this desert graveyard,

the next catastrophe edges ever closer.

If you think about where we're headed,

that pile is only gonna get bigger.

A bigger pile of tires means a bigger fire.

[narrator] Coming up, Russian's mystery dead zone.

There's clearly something very wrong here.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] September 2020,

an eye in the sky captures this image of the remote

Russian Kamchatka Peninsula.

What is really odd here

is this plume of lime green

spilling into the darker body of water.

It looks like it's infecting the area.

There's clearly something very wrong here.

This looks like an environmental catastrophe.

[narrator] Footage taken at ground level confirms

that something in the water here has turned

a 25-mile long stretch

of coastline into a dead zone.

Locals are reporting all kinds

of dead marine animals,

you got sea urchins, starfish, giant octopi

are washing up, and no one knows why.

[narrator] Historical records reveal

this isn't the first time mass death

has hit this region.

In the 1970s, there was an event

wherein a nearby valley,

we were seeing die-offs of all different animals

including bears, small rodents, and birds.

[narrator] Ground zero for the event

was an area known as the Valley of Death.

[Roland] Scientists actually figured out

that this die-off was caused by a volcano.

It was outgassing carbon dioxide

that had settled into the valley,

and any wildlife, big or small,

basically suffocated.

Volcanoes emit gasses that can be toxic to life.

They can emit them into the air,

they can emit them into the water.

So it wouldn't be unheard of that a submarine

volcanic event could taint the ocean.

[tense music playing]

[woman] When scientists did eventually test the waters,

they did find chemicals,

but not the ones that they were expecting.

What scientists find are traces of phenol.

Now, phenol is a chemical that comes from heavy industry

like the making of weapons.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] The toxic waters sit six miles

from the Radygino Military Base.

What concerns defense experts is that it's rumored

to be instrumental in developing

a new generation of super weapons.

Right now, the Russian Government

is investing in the development

of so-called invincible weapons,

and a lot of that goes

into the research and development,

and production of missile testing systems.

[tense music playing]

[narrator] President Vladimir Putin has recently announced

the development of six so-called invincible weapons.

He hopes they will revolutionize

Russia's ability to wage war and redress the balance

of power with Washington.

Even though these missile tests

were supposed to be secret, they're doing it out

in the open because Putin wants people to see

it's another opportunity for him to point

the spotlight on this greater, stronger

Russia that's rising out of the former Soviet Union.

[narrator] The biggest of Putin's invincible weapons

is the RS-28 Sarmat

also known as the Satan 2.

A 200-ton liquid fueled, intercontinental missile

with a range of over 11,000 miles.

Studies suggest it is capable of wiping out

an area of around 250,000 square miles.

It's a really terrifying prospect,

because what you have is a single missile

that then splits into 10 different warheads

that ostensibly could be capable

of taking out 10 different cities.

What makes it unique is its detection

and evasion capabilities.

One of the best ways to track a missile taking off

is from the boost of heat that can be tracked

by a satellite, but this system

has a very short boost, providing just a small window

to detect it.

[narrator] Even more troubling for the US

is Putin's development of a nuclear powered cruise missile.

It's radical propulsion system

will provide a warhead

with almost unlimited range, cruising at low altitude

to evade surface and space-based early

warning systems.

These missiles really kind of changed the game.

It's like coming in through the back door.

Russia's pursuit of more deadly,

and faster, and more efficient,

and more devastating missiles is beyond just a concern.

This is really a grave threat.

[narrator] Russian officials have since claimed

that algae, not missile fuels are the cause

of the toxins in the image.

Yet some fear it is evidence

that the country is dramatically ramping up

its invincible weapons program.

It's almost as if this spill is pointing

the finger directly at the missile testing site.

It's very possible with this creation

of a weapon system in Russia that it's gonna change

the global dynamic,

the idea that this missile

has taken such a leap in technology.

It's very worrisome.