Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A cosmic wreck in america

that almost made an earth shattering discovery.

It really looked like the signal was coming from a faraway planet.

Secret ruins that decided britain's fate.

A lot of what went on here was top secret for good reason.

In rajasthan, India, a fort of colossal proportions.

It's really just staggering the scale of this place,

you know we're talking walls 22 miles in circumference.

Seven massive gates, seven massive bastions.

And an extraordinary French castle

hiding a great deception.

I see a lot of story book,

but there's a lot more to this place than meets the eye.

Decaying relics.

Shadows of lost worlds.

Ruins haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting...

To be revealed.

In the piedmont region of the American state of Georgia,

two lonely structures gaze at the heavens.

You've got all these trees and then all of a sudden,

it breaks through...

And you see something that you completely

don't expect to see here.

There's no mystery as to what these are,

they're two great, big satellite dishes.

They have clearly been sitting there

in the weather and not being used for some time.

They were built at great expense, but what exactly were they for?

Cold white walls, no windows, air vents,

these two great big dishes on top surrounded by fencing,

it's like some sort of villain's lair.

When you get inside you can see they've been stripped pretty bare,

any valuable equipment was taken away long ago.

Now it's just kind of a hodgepodge of junk.

There's stacks of wooden chairs,

there's even an old refrigerator.

This was a place for brilliant scientists

who were searching for life beyond planet earth.

There was a moment when we thought

we had proof that something was out there

and this complex was at the centre of this story.

When these structures were built in 1976

it was called the woodbury earth station.

It was built by at&t the giant telecoms company.

In the 1970s,

the telephone industry was going through a revolution.

It was becoming feasible to send all kinds of data

including telephone calls up to satellites in orbit,

so, at&t built these two dishes to serve as an uplink and downlink

for this satellite phone transmission system.

The unique landscape here made it a perfect place

for an earth station.

Scott Harris is a planetary geologist

who has investigated the area's ancient beginnings.

Well, we're in this unique depression

called the cove,

my colleagues and I have been researching the site

for about 20 years,

looking at the possibility that these radio telescopes

actually sit in the middle of an ancient impact structure.

This cove dome crater appears to be the remnants

of a large meteor strike,

whatever hit this hit it hard enough to pulverise rock,

even melt the rock and then leave that crater ring around the side.

There's no coincidence that these dishes

are in the middle of that crater

because the deep depression about 300ft deep provides

a radio and microwave-free zone.

You can build your big dishes here

and they'd have very little interference

from surrounding electromagnetic sources.

But woodbury earth station's time in service was short.

The thing about satellite technology

is it changes so rapidly.

Paul steffes is a professor

at the school of electrical and computer engineering

at Georgia tech

and still recognises old machinery here

from the at&t days.

All of these pieces

are from the original southern antenna installation,

there are motors, there are wave guide components

that were used in the microwave communications

with the satellites.

There are power supplies and regulators that control

the very special amplifiers

that were used in the original facility.

This tank of helium actually represents a coolant

when the at&t facility was built

in order to keep the satellite signal strong,

the amplifiers had to be cooled with liquid helium.

By the late 1970s,

it was possible to provide the same level of service

with a dish that was only 15ft wide rather than 100.

So, by 1980, just a few years after they'd built it,

at&t retired this facility and abandoned it.

But that was not the end of the story here,

far from it.

Soon these giant dishes would be involved in a close call

with something truly out of this world.

Paul was on the ground when the woodbury site

was at the centre of this close call.

Our team leader, Jill tarter,

was one of the earliest folks involved with the searches.

And because she and her husband Jack,

who was also a radio astronomer,

always felt that they should be ready in case good news comes.

They kept a bottle of champagne

in their fridge and Jill mentioned to me

that after this detection was made,

they made sure the bottle was still there and full.

In 1996, Paul wasn't working for NASA,

but an independent organisation known as SETI,

which stands for search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

This was an organisation that originally had been funded

by the American federal government, their funding gets cut

and they become a non-profit.

Their mission is to find evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence

by searching space for signs that something is out there.

And woodbury played a key role in this hunt.

We operated as part of the project Phoenix

at the SETI institute

from 1996 all the way through to the year 2000.

Project Phoenix was a successor to a NASA programme

of searching the skies for artificial signals emanated

by foreign or rather distant civilisations.

The theory is that if some intelligent civilisation

developed anything like humans did, at some stage,

they might invent something like radio.

A signal from a radio station

whether it be music or talking

would not look anything like a signal from a star,

you know, you might see the beat of the music

or other very particular patterns that had to be made

by something intelligent,

so, that's what they started looking for.

But when SETI took charge of the woodbury earth station,

it wasn't fit for the task.

The requirement for the SETI programme

to be able to point precisely at given targets

was far in excess of the previous pointing capability

of this facility.

In 1996 SETI, provided a million dollars

to upgrade one of the dishes

so, it could become part of project Phoenix.

They put in a new motor, they took out an old stairway,

and they put in a new flexible cable carrier

called the twister.

The one that we installed on the centre of the southern dish

on this facility was built so that

we could monitor signals over a wide range of frequencies.

When at&t used the facility for microwave communication,

there were very specific narrow bands

that they used.

We need to be able to receive over a wide range of frequencies

since we have no knowledge of what frequency

an external civilisation might use.

When the upgrades were complete,

it was renamed the woodbury research facility.

It would provide follow-up detection

for another SETI station in greenbank, West Virginia.

So, having this device, which we called a fudd,

follow up detection device,

was the key for being able to quickly scan the skies

and excise any radio frequency and interference.

If you watch the movie 'contact', after their detection of a signal,

Jodie foster kisses the screen and says, "thank you, elma"

and of course the software that ran the fudd was named elma.

Woodbury was essential to making sure

that any signals from one facility

could be immediately verified by the other.

They were there to double check.

To confirm signals identified as alien.

Less than a year later, at 6am on 23 June, 1997,

SETI made contact.

Woodbury's sister facility got a signal

that looked really distinct.

This might be the greatest scientific breakthrough

in human history.

They were scanning a star named yz SETI

about 12 light years away from our sun

when they started to hear something

that they thought might be promising.

So, this really looked like it might be the big one.

Being in that room, in that moment,

you'd go crazy with excitement.

They needed to use woodbury

to check that the signal was genuine.

But disaster had struck, it was off-line.

About 1.5 weeks

before the close call a lightning storm struck the dish

and caused damage to one of the receivers

that was used to monitor for project Phoenix,

so as a result, we were unable to run

the follow up detection device those days.

So, the dish was down, it wasn't available

to confirm this possible sighting of an alien intelligence.

The researchers were biting their nails.

They were trying to figure out how they could confirm it.

While Paul's colleagues were putting the champagne on ice,

he had to catch a flight to SETI headquarters in California.

But this gave him some time to think.

As I was flying on the plane,

I had with me a paper copy of all of the spacecraft

that we had in our database.

And the more I looked,

the more I realised that this specific frequency corresponded

to one that had been assigned to a satellite called soho.

Soho was a deep space explorer designed to monitor the sun.

And that's when I realised as I was flying west

that this was likely a signal from the soho space craft.

The SETI telescopes were pointed into deep space,

and on its orbit around the sun,

the soho satellite had crossed their path.

The signal was being made by intelligent life.

Unfortunately, it was us.

Of course if woodbury had been online

at that moment in time,

this would all very quickly have been squashed,

but they weren't there at the moment that they were needed.

SETI continued to operate the woodbury research facility

until the year 2000

when technological innovations made it redundant once more.

It has remained dormant ever since, silently watching the skies.

Although SETI has now left woodbury behind,

it remains committed to the search

for intelligent life in the universe.

After all these years, SETI is still at it,

they have a new project called breakthrough listen

where they are looking at a million nearby stars

and 100 different galaxies, continuing to search

for any kind of sign that we're not alone,

that there's someone else out there.

A legacy of woodbury is that it shows

if we don't look for this extra terrestrial intelligence,

we'll never find it.

I think we should cast our eyes to the heavens

and keep on searching.

You know what, I do think the truth is out there.

In the Indian state of rajasthan is an engineering marvel

that once protected an empire.

There are mountains all around and then dominating this landscape

is this huge majestic structure.

Looks almost like the great wall of China,

but we're definitely not looking at that

'cause we're not in China.

And as we get closer,

we get a feeling not only for how massive these walls are

but we get a feeling for what a huge amount

of ground they cover.

Commanding gates guard the treasures inside.

There are buildings full of beautifully carved statues

and tall pillars supporting vaulted roofs.

And there's really a distinctly religious feel

to the place

because many of these interior structures

look like temples.

All of this massive imposition

of human will on the wilderness is part of the vision of one man.

And its history tells a story of faith,

conquest, and betrayal.

Sandeep Sharma is a local historian

who is fascinated by this site's past.

Today there are no signs of life, but it was once a hive of activity.

500 years back, it would be as lively,

as crowded as it can get

because people would come here, gather around here,

to seek permissions from the king and from the security personnel.

This is the kumbhalgarh hill fort.

This place was built by rana kumbha,

who was the ruler of mewar

one of the great kingdoms in rajasthan, in India.

Mewar was part of a far more fragmented India

than we know today.

This was a time of conquest and conflict.

All of the ruling families were constantly fighting over land.

The threats of an invading army was very real.

With the kingdoms capital over 50 miles east in chittorgarh,

this fortress was a second line of defence.

If mewar is attacked,

rana kumbha wants to take the capital,

the administration, the civil service,

everything required to run his kingdom

and tuck it safely behind walls in the mountains.

Kumbhalgarh was the crown Jewel in the mewar kingdom's defences,

but blood spilled here was before construction even began.

Historically, this place was very important

because it is dedicated to the martyr meru,

because he sacrificed his own life as a volunteer

for the luck and the prosperity

of the people of the fort kumbhalgarh.

Locals still to this day say that when they started building it,

each time they placed a stone or built part of a wall

that evening the whole thing would crumble back down

to the ground again.

King consulted one of his spiritual advisors

who said that the fort couldn't be built

until somebody voluntarily gave their life as a sacrifice.

So, they say that a wandering pilgrim

or perhaps one of the king's troops came forward,

volunteered to be the sacrificial lamb, so to speak.

As the story goes, he began walking up a hill.

And as he climbed, he was beheaded.

His head struck off by a sword

rolled to a stop where one temple was built

in his memory.

With the so called curse lifted, in 1433, construction began.

It lasted 15 years.

After the great wall of China,

it is the longest wall in the entire world.

It is 15ft wide, it is having the interlocking engineering

which for that particular point of time

was an engineering marvel.

And it's really just staggering the scale of this place,

we're talking seven massive gates, seven massive bastions.

When finished, it proved to be

one of the most impenetrable fortresses

known to man.

The heavily fortified battlement stretched

for 22 miles completely surrounding the fort

and the settlement within.

But even this great bastion could not protect the king

from an enemy within.

This is the Shiva temple,

which is inside the kumbhalgarh complex

where kumbha used to pray.

And he was not armed at that point in time when he was praying

to lord Shiva,

so, his son murdered him in the same temple.

The murderous heir udai Singh was driven by ruthless ambition,

but he didn't get to rule for long.

Udai Singh wanted the power, wanted the prestige,

he then set out on the road and was struck by lightning.

Many believe that his untimely death

was a divine punishment for his betrayal.

After his father's murder and udai's dramatic end,

the fort lost its importance to the rulers of mewar.

Until in the 1500s,

a great new ruler decided to resurrect it.

Early in the days, maharana pratap was said

to be the best warrior in the whole warrior clan.

The new king's arch enemy was akbar the great,

the leader of the mogul empire.

Pratap spent his entire life fighting

the mogul empire

and it's armies tried on many occasions

to capture the fortress,

but every time they were unsuccessful.

Kumbhalgarh was still impregnable by direct assault.

It took yet another act of treachery to finally breach its walls.

Some say a traitor inside the fort poisoned the water supply.

And that meant that with the walls abandoned

and the gates abandoned,

akbar and his mogul army were able to come in

and take over the city.

According to legend, pratap eventually managed

to take back what was rightfully his.

But after his death in 1597,

kumbhalgarh went into a long decline.

Following India's independence from the British,

the fort stopped being used

as a residence by rulers in the region,

and it's been empty ever since.

In 1951, kumbhalgarh became a protected monument.

Today, its gates are open to all.

This is really one of the more spectacular sites

in the world and it gives us a really fascinating insight

into the glories of Indian civilisation

and into the ferocity of competition

between these warring Indian city states.

In the quiet countryside to the north of London lie remnants

of britain's incendiary past.

The urban sprawl ends and suddenly

there's this vast expanse of countryside.

It looks like most of this area is surrounded by fences

with barbed wire on the top.

It was patrolled 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

by armed security guards

because of the materials they were dealing with

and some of the secret work that went on to this site.

Scattered across a vast area are traces of an explosive industry.

Some look like they could be hundreds of years old.

Others look like they're from a more recent industrial era.

Smashed windows, peeling paint, cracked concrete,

birds nesting in the rafters,

it's quite an eerie place to be.

You can't help but be drawn by this unusual curved tunnel

which leads into a circular room inside the hill.

Born of incredible scientific advances,

this place played a key role in unleashing violence

on a scale never seen before

and it has been shrouded in secrecy to this day.

As you go past the no entry sign into this dark tunnel,

you find yourself in a concrete bunker

with a strange fortified room at its centre.

You can tell it's relatively modern,

but that really is all you can tell.

Very little is known, probably all still covered

by the official secrets act,

which may never be released

depending on what sort of work they was carrying out.

Laurence Burnett is a local expert

who has spent 20 years uncovering the history of this place.

They provide a very strong chamber

that can withstand enormous pressures,

enormous stresses and that's really the only evidence

we've got of what was going on in this part of the site.

It's possible we'll never know all the details,

a lot of what went on here was top secret for good reason.

But a ruined building nearby

suggests that it's all part of a much longer story.

This collection of buildings and structures

is known as press house number two.

On the left hand side, we've got the press metal structure,

directly behind me, you've got the big blast wall,

and on the right hand side, you've got the hydraulic house,

which generated hydraulic power

to actually work the base of the press.

This place was definitely producing something dangerous,

why else would they put a big thick wall

between the water wheel and the metal machine?

This whole thing was set up as a process,

one of 17 steps to make gunpowder.

Spread over an area of 170 acres,

this is the royal gunpowder mill's waltham Abbey.

Originally a private enterprise

it is rumoured to have supplied gunpowder

to some rather infamous clients.

It's even possible that the gunpowder

that guy Fawkes famously tried to use to blow up parliament

might have been manufactured here.

But its biggest client by far was the British government,

so much so that in 1787 they bought it.

They took it over and said this is too important

to be left to some private owner.

We need to run this as a national defence priority.

It developed over centuries

to become one of the most important centres

of gunpowder production in britain.

Trafalgar, Waterloo, the crimea, the burr war,

the American war of independence,

the first Indian war of independence,

and countless other battles,

the gunpowder made here helped fuel

the unstoppable British military machine.

But as scientists at sites like this

were making explosive new breakthroughs

in the mid 1800s,

Europe was teetering on the edge of armageddon.

The discovery of new chemical compounds

and new processes to manufacture them

resulted in an arms race that was to lead

to industrialised chemical warfare.

Dubbed the chemist's war, it saw the deployment of new

and ever more deadly weapons.

A ruin hidden in the undergrowth shows how hard britain was working

to stay ahead of the competition.

The material that was produced on this site was a liquid

and it was so sensitive,

so volatile that the only way you could produce it

was at the top of a man-made hill

and this is what this structure is here.

This was a new type of explosive that was far more powerful

and made a faster moving explosion than gunpowder.

This building is the nitrator

and this was solely built to produce nitro glycerine.

You can still see the marks in the walls where the top floor

was situated,

all the way round and the stairs coming down

'cause it would have been a wooden building

to reduce the risk of sparks,

you can still see the lead flashing,

there was an entrance way here, possibly stairs going up around

from that to the charge house at the very top.

The inner structure, which is rotted away,

was where the nitro glycerine was produced,

the remains today prove

just how volatile this new chemical was.

Nitro glycerine is made by the combining of two acids,

nitric acid and sulphuric acid with glycerine.

It's very dangerous work and is only stable

between 60 and 70 degrees fahrenheit.

It's actually a big blast wall,

so, if anything does go wrong,

the energy from the blast would go out

through the curved exit way

and straight up in the air and it wouldn't damage

any of the other production buildings

around this area.

Fortunately, it never happened here,

otherwise this building probably wouldn't still be here.

The highly explosive qualities of nitro glycerine

made it absolutely ideal for the purpose,

but the problem was its extreme volatility,

and it couldn't be transported in its pure form to the front-lines.

The raw nitro glycerine needed to be combined

with other compounds to stabilise it,

which in 1889 led to the development

of a revolutionary new product, cordite.

Cordite as a propellant was absolutely fantastic

compared with the previous propellants

that we used it's smokeless,

there was more energy per given mass,

and it was used from anything from pistols,

rifles, large cannons, naval guns,

it was just the propellant to use,

it was easy to use and it powered every gun available

to all the forces,

so, it was a revolutionary product really.

When the first world war broke out

in 1914 demand for cordite greatly increased.

But the royal gunpowder mills were equal to the task,

providing British troops with what they needed.

The British expeditionary force in 1914

was modern agile and mobile,

but when it arrived on the continent,

they were expecting one kind of warfare

and it soon turned in to something very different.

People can be Manning artillery guns miles from the front,

raining death down on an enemy they had never seen

out of the sky, both sides did this relentlessly,

month after month, year after year.

If waltham Abbey wasn't producing cordite,

then we would have been in serious trouble,

at the time there was no other factory

that could produce that amount of high quality propellant.

But as the scale of the war increased,

cordite production had to be ramped up

even further if britain was to stay in the fight.

You had belt-driven equipment,

belt-driven presses, which made a hell of a noise.

You had the clattering of the machinery, the pumps,

the belts slapping about,

and it would have been a, a very noisy

and quite an unpleasant place to work.

At the height of production,

the factory was producing

100 tonnes of liquid nitro glycerine a week

and the rest of the factory was producing

75 tonnes of cordite every week.

But it soon became clear that there was a problem.

They were chronically short of labour.

With all the men away fighting in the war

and the demand for cordite,

like never before, they hired over 3,000 new employees

to help produce it and most of them were women.

They kept the place going really,

bit of initial training and they got on with it,

it was maintenance, production, transport,

absolutely everything on site to keep the site going,

so, it was absolutely amazing really.

As the war progressed,

soon even the scaled up facilities here

couldn't keep up.

The government built new larger factories

around the country to meet demand,

but it was the royal gunpowder mills that pioneered

the production of cordite at a moment

when all might have been lost.

The legacy to the country is that it saved our bacon really.

It was vital, absolutely vital to the success of,

you know, our forces.

Incredible.

The royal gunpowder mills were eventually closed in 1945,

but as the mysterious bunker

at the heart of the complex suggests,

it still played a vital role in protecting britain

for years to come.

Just three days after the mills were shut down,

it was reopened again.

It was turned in to a place for weapons research

and for experimentation.

The facility was finally decommissioned in 1991

ending over 300 years of cutting-edge research

at waltham Abbey.

But lots of what went on here is still classified,

still to this day we don't really know

to the true extent what happened here.

I mean, maybe we'll never know.

In France's loir valley,

a fairy-tale castle dominates the landscape.

When I look at this place I see a lot of Disney.

It's sophisticated, symmetrical, just gorgeous.

You've got these beautiful porticos,

balustrades, terraces, all done in the renaissance style.

Surrounded by a deep moat,

this place clearly had strong defences

and some fascinating excavations have taken place here.

And if you move further in,

that's when it starts to get interesting.

There is an entrance down there

that shows that there

is a great deal going on beneath the surface.

(Speaks French)

It's cool, it's damp and it's dark.

There are places where as you walk,

you realise you're walking down a ramp

and that you are no longer walking on a corridor,

you're not walking on a steady floor,

the floor is dropping away beneath you.

We're talking hundreds and hundreds of metres of corridors

and little alleyways

and all sorts of different little tiny rooms

and caverns and spaces.

This is a place that was dug out with hand tools,

we can almost, when we look at these marks,

imagine the sweat of good French stone cutters

digging their way into this hilltop.

Herve chaudron has spent ten years

uncovering this hidden world below chateau de breze.

(Speaks French)

This was a place of last resort,

built out of the fear of a rampaging band of warriors

advancing up the nearby river loir.

This is a river that leads right into the Atlantic ocean.

It was a highway for peaceful trade and it was a highway

for moving goods to market and it was a highway

for the vikings.

In the 9th century, viking raids across France

grew in their frequency and ferocity.

But one event in 885 ad shocked the entire country.

The siege of Paris.

That siege went on for nearly a year,

it was absolutely brutal and vicious,

the vikings took no order, they slaughtered people,

they enslaved people,

they took whatever wasn't nailed down.

There was real danger that these cut throat warriors

might turn their attention to chateau de breze.

The lords here were acutely aware of the threat

and turned to the ground beneath their feet for protection.

If you were a big land owner in France at the time,

you had to take counter measures,

you had to prepare to defend yourself

against the vikings or hide from them.

Survival depended on a deception.

They had to convince the vikings

that there was not one castle but two.

So, secrecy was its first defence.

And the chateau de breze is unique in that they decided,

"ok, we're going to have a relatively modest palace

"above ground."

You would abandon the structure above.

You would let the vikings take it, loot it, have their way with it

and you would vanish

into this secret underground labyrinth.

It wasn't only people's lives that were at risk

but also their livelihoods,

this was an ancient survivalist bunker.

People didn't keep money in banks, wealth wasn't in something,

you know, that was hidden away, it was literally within the food

and the chattels that you had in your location,

that's all you had, that's all the wealth you had,

and that had to be protected at any cost.

(Speaks French)

With these extensive preparations,

inhabitants were able to survive down here

for a very long time.

(Speaks French)

If the raiders above somehow discovered

the hidden entrances,

there was still a very effective last line of defence.

The only access is through a narrow ramp or a narrow stairs

so, people could come down and at most two abreast,

so, troops at the bottom could hack them up

as they tried to come down a relatively small numbers.

(Speaks French)

A single Archer, a determined fighter

could defend the entire underground system.

It's not known whether these defences

were ever discovered or put to use,

and eventually the threat of viking raids passed.

But they were just the beginning of the story

for the fortifications here.

There was still the threat of civil war in France

between candidates for the French throne

in which this family might become involved,

it might need a defensive position, but also imagine

there were all sorts of pandemic diseases

circulating around France, Europe, and the world at the time.

Work began in the 15th century

and lasted for more than 200 years.

The deep moat was dug and the new owners used

the excavated stone to build a more imposing castle above.

They really fixed it up.

They expanded.

They build it out in classic renaissance style.

Faced with the prospect of deadly diseases

and the development of new more destructive weaponry,

the lords of breze once more turned to the subterranean defences.

The main threat to a castle is canon.

Great big gunpowder canon smashing the walls to pieces,

and if all of the working parts of your castle

are below ground level, where the canon can't get them,

then it doesn't matter what the enemy does

to the top half to the part above ground.

To match the opulence of the new castle,

the stronghold below was also overhauled.

You had a relatively crude refuge

created in the medieval period

against the vikings that was now expanded

in to a much more expansive tunnel network.

But these new tunnels came with

a few important upgrades to deal with the latest military technology.

(Speaks French)

Using the same principles as the earliest tunnels,

the new construction meant that defenders

were able to hold out

against even the most determined attackers.

People are going to be blazing away at you with muskets

and handguns and arrows and boiling oil,

and all of this place is going to be

a death trap for anybody who tries to get in.

You had sort of fake tunnels installed

to deceive invaders who would go down

the wrong tunnel and become trapped in a dead end

and be overwhelmed.

Despite its formidable defences,

chateau de breze was never put to the test.

If your fortress is good enough,

if everybody knows

that even if they destroy the towers,

the fortress will keep on fighting from below,

nobody's going to attack, and you know what?

It worked, this fortress was well enough built

that nobody ever even tried to get in.

But had anybody ever tested it,

they would have had a very bad bloody nose.

Kept as a close secret over the centuries,

the underground strong hold faded into obscurity.

(Speaks French)

Today chateau de breze's dank tunnels have found

a very fitting new purpose.

These cool, dark caverns are perfect for storing wine

that's still made here on the estate today.

(Dramatic music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV