Original subtitles

- Tonight, on "The Proof is Out There".

Fragments from a crash at Area 51

that the government doesn't want you to know about.

- I was met by armed security that prevented me

from getting anywhere close to the wreckage.

- [Tony] Could this 75-year-old photo

be evidence that the Yeti roams the Himalayas?

- He reported that there's actually two forms of Yeti,

one that steals and eats yaks,

and then the other one that actually eats human beings.

- [Tony] Is this mummy the remains

of an ancient alien species?

- We're seeing three fingers,

three toes, very odd shaped face.

- [Tony] The mystery behind a human pin cushion.

- The doctors and the scientists of the era

were just stunned that he could do this.

- [Tony] And is this enormous cigar-shaped object

some kind of interstellar command craft?

- The shape that we see in this video

is often referred to as a mothership.

- [Tony] Around the globe are videos.

- [Witness] Oh, there he goes.

- [Tony] Photos,

and sounds that defy explanation.

[electric whirring]

- [Expert] We don't know where they come from,

who made them, or how they operate.

- [Tony] What are they?

- [Expert] Some sort of bizarre mutation.

- [Expert] What's exciting is nobody really knows.

- Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.

- I'm Tony Harris,

and as a journalist for more than 30 years,

I've followed the facts where they take me.

Now I'm bringing that spirit of investigation

to the world's strangest sounds and images.

- [Witness] It's coming towards us.

- [Tony] We'll analyze each one with top experts.

- It's a credible case.

It's a credible video.

- [Tony] And pass a verdict on what it is.

- This video was clearly faked.

- The proof starts now.

[dramatic music]

Good evening, everyone,

and welcome to "The Proof Is Out There."

Strange things are stirring near Area 51.

For decades,

the highly classified Air Force facility

has captured the public imagination.

And now a local researcher claims

he has proof of what really goes on there.

Take a look at this.

It's the morning of September 23rd, 2025 in Rachel, Nevada,

about 30 miles north of Area 51 itself.

Joerg Arnu, an Area 51 watcher,

is reviewing his latest data.

- I usually record Area 51 security radio traffic at night,

and then in the morning I listen to what's been going on.

- [Tony] That's when he hears this intriguing transmission.

- Whoa, what is going on there?

So, of course, I had to know more.

I got in my truck and I drove out to the area,

and on my way out there,

I was met by armed security

that prevented me from getting anywhere

close to the wreckage.

- [Tony] A few days later,

officials clear out and Joerg swoops in,

capturing this video at what he believes

is the crash site outside the base.

- [Joerg] There was burnt areas, burnt Joshua trees.

It looked like they had covered up

the entire crash site with fresh dirt.

- [Tony] Joerg finds numerous pieces of debris

varied in material and size.

Joerg posts his findings online,

drawing national attention to the crash

and its alleged coverup.

- It is almost impossible to always completely

sterilize a location of all traces of a crash.

So then we resort to something else called seeding.

A team will go out,

try to recover what they can,

but then they'll start throwing parts of things

that have nothing to do with the crash.

- [Tony] So if these pieces of debris were seeded

as a decoy away from the real debris,

the question is, what actually crashed there?

- [Luis] Area 51 has been historically associated

with secret test flights of some of America's newest

and latest technologies,

going all the way back to the U2 spy plane.

- [Tony] So top secret tech is one possibility,

but we all know Area 51 is rumored to test something else.

Reverse engineered alien craft.

Check out this 2026 video of a mysterious flying triangle.

It's just one of many sightings around the base

that fueled the conspiracy theories.

- [Luis] A mystery is born

in the lack of available information

and what greater mystery do we have here

in the United States?

None other than Area 51.

- The Pentagon now claims that during the Cold War,

it spread rumors about alien craft at Area 51

to cover up for the real aircraft being tested there.

In other words,

let the locals think it's a flying saucer

so they don't realize it's a U2 spy plane.

Is that the truth or another cover story?

And what really crashed there recently?

[tense music]

First, was that mysterious triangle an alien spacecraft?

Maybe not.

- We have a pretty obvious contrail behind the object,

so that's telling us that is something

with a conventional propulsion system.

It could be a host of different aircraft,

prototypes, classified,

perhaps even some unmanned systems that we're unaware of.

- [Tony] How about that debris?

Even if we accept that the military seeds UFO crash sites

with earthly junk to throw people off,

we'd expect to find some trace of something otherworldly.

Was there?

- UFOs would probably use

metallurgically advanced concepts.

You can see in some of the video here,

this looks like something that,

you know, we might recognize

as perhaps a piece of fiberglass.

This little piece here,

based on this rectilinear shape,

it looks like a tiny piece of carbon fiber.

This is not metallurgically advanced.

- [Tony] So could this just be debris

from a secret experimental craft?

- [Tim] The Air Force has gone on record

and confirmed that a military aircraft did indeed crash.

What they haven't done is explained exactly

what it was that crashed.

It was later reported by the Air Force.

The FBI had become involved because there was evidence

that unknown individuals had entered the crash site

and had tampered with it

and in fact planted false debris inside the crash site.

- Saying that the site was tampered with

by somebody other than Air Force officials is weird,

because who else would tamper with it and for what reason?

- It could suggest that there is some type

of counterintelligence component to try to conceal

some types of classified program that crashed.

[tense music]

- Our verdict, an unidentified secret project.

We believe the Air Force

that it was one of their aircraft that crashed,

but we don't know what the aircraft was

or if we believe their claims about outside actors

planting the decoy debris.

We move now to the mountain ranges of Asia,

home to a legendary monster known as the Yeti.

You're about to see a photo possibly connected

to one of these creatures that was snapped

more than 70 years ago

and it still has people talking.

It's 1951, high in the Himalayas.

British mountaineers,

Eric Shipton and Dr. Michael Ward are trying to become

the first people to climb Mount Everest

and prove it, when they make an odd discovery.

- They were in a place called Menlung Basin

at about 16,000 feet above sea level

when they found strange footprints in the snow.

- [Tony] These are the photos they took.

They seem to show enormous human-like prints.

Using an ice ax and boot for scale,

they measure 12 to 13 inches long and six inches wide.

- Their Sherpa guide says,

"Oh, I know what those things are.

Those are Yeti prints."

This particular track had a very large,

unusual big toe.

The last three digits were grouped together,

and the second digit seemed to be

a bit larger than the last three.

The two men followed the trackway for almost a mile

before they lost it in rocky terrain.

- [Tony] A lot of people today have heard of the Yeti,

but that wasn't the case in 1951.

The mountaineers learn about Yetis from their guide,

Tenzing Norgay, who says the creatures

have long been known and feared by local people.

- Tenzing reports that these animals

are about five feet tall,

have a conical shaped head,

covered in a brownish red sort of fur,

and walk on two feet like a human being.

He reported that there's actually two forms of Yeti,

one that steals and eat yaks

and the other one that actually eats human beings.

[Yeti growls]

- [Tony] Shipton and Ward fail to reach Everest's summit,

but their photos turn the Yeti into a worldwide sensation.

Less than two years later,

Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary

become the first confirmed people to climb Everest,

and on their climbs,

they find further evidence of the Yeti.

The famous Hillary is hooked.

- [Cliff] In the area of Cho Oyu,

one of the mountains in the Himalaya range,

he ran across a strange scrap of fur.

Hillary conducted several more expeditions to the Himalayas

with two goals in mind, high altitude exploration,

but also looking for the Yeti.

- [Tony] All this prompted the Nepalese government

to issue Yeti hunting permits.

They're about a thousand American dollars each,

but what do our experts think about those photos?

[tense music]

Let's address some skeptical claims first.

Could these prints actually have been made

by local villagers with abnormally shaped feet?

- There are highlanders who are in very remote areas.

They can't get medical attention,

and so there are certain foot conditions that

could result in something like this.

But when they're walking around barefoot in these areas,

they're at lower altitudes.

Where these prints are found,

where it's so high and so cold

and the snow is so deep,

it's hard to believe that anyone

would actually survive those conditions barefoot.

- [Tony] If people didn't make them,

are they the tracks of a known animal?

- There are a lot of very large animals in this area

that could possibly make a footprint that large,

but a lot of those animals are actually quadrupedal

and not bipedal where this looks like something is actually

standing more upright, like in a human-like stance.

And just the shape of the foot

doesn't really match any known animal in the area.

- [Tony] So is this a hoax?

- There are some people that claim

that the entire Yeti is a hoax,

and even Sir Edmund Hillary walked back

on what he said about the possibility of a Yeti

and admitted that it was a great way to fundraise

for exploration and an expedition.

But if this is a hoax,

then it's an especially well thought out one

because it has spanned decades,

has been very much analyzed,

and we still don't have a scientific answer

to explain exactly what it is that we're looking at.

A footprint without a foot remains a mystery.

We don't know where that came from.

[tense music]

- Our verdict, this is a possible Yeti.

These prints resist easy explanation.

Though with today's high-tech cameras and drones,

you'd think by now, we would have solid proof

of the creature's existence.

- Peru's Nazca lines are intricate designs

that can only truly be seen from above.

For decades, some have speculated

they must be connected to extraterrestrials,

though they have been dismissed by skeptics.

Well, now a set of remains allegedly

from the same region is stirring up controversy.

We're in Cusco, Peru, where an NGO dedicated

to archeological research called the Inkarri Cusco Institute

has been studying a new specimen.

You're looking at video of one of the so-called

Nazca mummies,

a curled up figure referred to as Madrecita.

She has an elongated head, chalky skin,

and thin, bony limbs.

- There's actually pieces of metal embedded

into the body of whatever this is.

The head has some, for example,

and the hands have them as well.

But also the head's unusual in other ways.

The Inkarri Institute claims that the cranium

is twice as thick as a normal human being.

And it's tridactyl.

three fingers on each hand and three toes as well.

- [Tony] These three fingers and toes are a common trait

among the mummified remains supposedly recovered

from the Nazca region.

- [Cliff] In 2023, a Mexican UFO researcher

showed these alien mummies to the press.

If these are biological specimens,

then this is evidence of the existence

of a tridactyl species.

- [Tony] Another theory:

that it's a previously unknown ancient hominid.

If so, it wouldn't be the first discovery

like that in recent years.

- In 2003, paleoanthropologists made a surprising discovery

on the island of Flores in Indonesia.

These skeletons were a new species

later named Homo floresiensis.

This species is apparently quite small,

and there are reports of small, hairy hominoids

being sighted by the local people to this very day.

- Homo floresiensis, a.k.a. the Flores Man,

is also nicknamed the Hobbit since it is believed

these short individuals only stood around

two to three feet tall.

Could Madrecita similarly be

from a newly discovered species?

[tense music]

- Homo floresiensis evolved to be a little bit smaller

because of the environment he was living on on that island.

However, when we look at this mummy,

what we're seeing are things that are not within

that hominin range.

- [Tony] So is there another explanation

for the strange appearance of this specimen's head?

- [Kathy] They use these elongated skulls

to point to alien origin

because aliens have bigger brains,

so they need a bigger skull to contain all that knowledge.

But archeologically,

we know that they happen in certain cultures.

Using cradle boards,

they would basically mold that head

into the shape that you want,

and it's often a symbol of status,

and that's why they did it.

- [Tony] Yet, what about the pieces of metal

embedded in the mummy's body?

- [Kathy] In Peru in particular,

they practiced a medicine that if you were hit in the head

and you're missing bone,

they would use other things

such as metal or sometimes other parts of skulls

or animal bones to put it into the wound

and let a bone grow to it.

We find this often in Peruvian burials

where after the injury,

the individual lived for

a significant period of time afterwards.

- [Tony] But this mummy's skull was still much thicker

than what's normal for a human, right?

- You can see in the CT scans that they did of the cranium,

it's really two millimeters difference,

and that can be a normal variation in a human.

The skull is human, the eye sockets are human,

but the exterior are made to look like they're alien.

- [Tony] And would an alien

even have three fingers and toes?

- Many people believe that aliens are supposed to be

a superior version of humans,

and if that's the case, it would make no sense

that they would be missing a thumb, right?

Thumbs allow us to carry things

and use our hands as a functional tool,

and the tridactyl appendages look like fabrication.

They look like they were just added on

to what could be a real skeleton.

- [Tony] And that's exactly what could be happening here.

- [Lisa] This bone structure looks really off,

and I'm not really sure how this would function in life,

and it looks like it's covered in either clay

or almost maybe even a paper mache,

so it's harder to identify

where one bone ends and another begins.

For all of these reasons,

I think this skeleton is fabricated.

[tense music]

- Our verdict, hoax.

This is consistent with previously debunked

Nazca mummies, fabricated using elements

of genuine ancient human and animal bones.

Now to another controversial theory of the past.

We all know the rhyme.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

But what if another 15th century explorer

beat Christopher Columbus to the Americas?

It's 2001 in Shanghai.

Liu Gang, a lawyer and amateur map collector,

visits an antique store

where he finds this world map from the 18th century.

A closer look reveals a note that claims

the map is a copy of an original drawn in 1418.

So what?

Well, look, the map clearly shows

the continents of North and South America.

- [Tony] For Liu Gang, this map is proof

that the famous Chinese mariner, Zheng He,

beat European explorers to the Western Hemisphere.

- Zheng He is, according to Chinese history,

instrumental in the building of China's great navy

during the Ming Dynasty.

Using force when necessary, Zheng He

is able to establish some pretty impressive trade routes

that run from mainland China down into India,

to the Middle East, into Africa,

and all the way back.

- [Tony] But did his fleet make it to the Americas?

- [MJ] A scholar by the name of Gavin Menzies

believes that perhaps somewhere around 1421,

the Chinese Navy was actually able to go to the New World,

to North America and South America.

Menzies points to this long, winding wall

that exists between California's San Jose

and the Carquinez Strait,

known as the Berkeley Mystery Walls.

It's built similarly to the Great Wall of China,

and it resembles some aspects of other Chinese engineering.

- [Tony] The evidence doesn't end there.

Some have argued these donut-looking stones

are further proof of China's alleged

discovery of the Americas.

- In 1975, local divers were diving off

the Palos Verdes Peninsula

and found some rather unique, unusual stones.

These stones were rather notable

because they had holes in them.

They ended up finding about 36 of them, I believe.

- [Tony] The theory is that the stones

were anchors from ancient Chinese ships

that wrecked off the California coast.

- The experts who claim these stones

are actually 1,000-year-old ship anchors

base the theory on their donut-like shape.

But are they really ancient artifacts?

And what about our map?

Are these relics just trying to pass for the real thing?

[tense music]

We have a lot to explain here.

Let's start with the so-called anchor stones

found off the coast of Palos Verdes.

Turns out they're made from rocks found in California.

- They're local stones,

so they're just native to the area.

- [Tony] And it's likely they were used by visitors

from Europe as something called whale weights.

- [Kathy] So when the Portuguese were whaling

off the shore of California,

they would use these weights and nets

to hold a whale in place

until they processed it.

As far as the Berkeley Mystery Walls,

these are actually pretty widespread

all over the state of California.

What they are is actually fence lines for ranching.

I would say maybe 19th century,

and it could have been Spanish

or Mexican or early American.

We really don't know,

but all those cultures practiced cattle herding,

and it's not a mystery at all.

- [Tony] But what about Liu Gang's map itself?

- Standout weird thing

for this being a map made in China,

is why isn't China in the center of the map?

- [Tony] Compare Liu Gang's map

to another one from the same era.

This one places China smack dab in the middle,

reflecting what historians call sinocentrism,

the belief that the Middle Kingdom stood

at the center of the civilized world.

- If it had just shown China as the center of the world,

we would have known that it was Chinese in origin,

but it's a dual hemisphere map,

and at the time,

the only people doing stuff like this were the Europeans.

[keyboard typing]

- Our experts are calling this a hoax.

To be sure, Zheng He was an accomplished mariner

with a formidable fleet,

but there is no solid evidence that he discovered America.

- In an era of bright orbs and metallic spheres,

you may wonder what happened

to the classic UFOs of yesteryear.

The saucers, the cigars.

Are they still here?

It's June 2024 in Belgrade, Montana.

A lone sky watcher is using a SIONYX night vision scope

when they notice something peculiar over Big Sky country.

- In this video, we see a large, cigar-shaped object

that's quite bright in intensity

until it reaches a point

where it seems to go behind the cloud,

so this tells us it's very high up in the atmosphere

and would represent enormous size.

- First time I saw this,

I was very intrigued and very excited.

- [Tony] Alejandro Rojas is a consultant with Enigma Labs,

a crowdsourced log of UFO sightings

from all over the world.

- [Alejandro] The only thing that the eyewitness

had told us on this one

is that it looked like a blur with the naked eye.

- [Tony] The anonymous submission

takes on a life of its own,

making headlines for its distinct cylindrical

or cigar-like shape.

This was one of the most often reported

UFO shapes in years past.

Take this photo from 1950,

or this one from 1967, and Rojas says

UFOs shaped like this could be special.

- The shape that we see in this video

is often referred to as a mothership,

and there are some credible cases out there

with people reporting that sort of thing.

- [Mindy] In 1952, in Oloron, France,

there was a mass witness sighting across two towns

where dozens of witnesses reported seeing a silent,

floating, cigar-shaped object,

which was dropping small objects behind it.

- People who saw the cigar-shaped object in Oloron

said it was accompanied by 30 red spheres,

hence the idea of a mothership.

Now, the object in the Montana video

sure looks like a cigar,

but if cigar UFOs are supposed to be motherships,

then where are all the little probes?

I don't see them.

Hopefully our experts have more insight.

[tense music]

Going off that cylindrical shape,

we first consider if this could be a solar balloon,

which famously resembles cigars.

- Such a balloon rises just like a hot air balloon,

but in this case, the air inside the balloon

is heated by the sun.

Now, once the balloon cools in the night,

the air would, again, become more dense

and the balloon would lose its buoyancy.

Then it could be, for example, descending.

- Could it be a solar balloon?

I don't believe so.

A solar balloon is small,

and this solar balloon would have to be

just a few hundred feet away from you.

In this video, it's actually transiting

behind the clouds here, as you can see,

so it's fairly high.

- [Tony] That doesn't just rule out a solar balloon.

It tells us something important about the object.

- So it could be super far away

and very, very big, right?

The moon is one quarter the size of Earth,

which is really big,

but it's over 60 Earth radii away,

so it looks somewhat small.

So the farther away it is,

the bigger and the brighter it must be.

- [Tony] While that size may seem consistent

with a cigar-shaped mothership,

it's also inconsistent with reality.

- [Marc] And it means that

it wouldn't go unnoticed by everybody.

Every branch of the armed services

would know this thing is out there

if we had something that big in the sky.

- [Tony] But hold on.

There's still one more clue to consider.

Look closer.

- [Marc] As it's moving, you can see

that this is not just one singular object.

It looks like it's a string of beads.

- [Tony] That's a dead giveaway for Starlink satellites.

- And the Starlink trains,

when they're first released, look like this.

They're close together, tiny dots,

and it's moving, your eye sums it together,

summarizes it all.

And in this particular case,

the SIONYX camera would take the satellites

and probably bloat them into a single line,

and this is exactly what it looks like.

[tense music]

- Our verdict, Starlink satellites

in a tight-knit train formation

before they spread out into a wider array.

In 2024 alone,

there were a total of 89 Starlink launches.

I'd like to see an alien mothership

deploy numbers like that.

Then again, maybe I wouldn't.

- In a previous season,

we covered the shocking story of a man

who could press a blowtorch

to his tongue without burning it.

If you thought human endurance couldn't be more extreme,

you need to see this newsreel from the 1940s.

But first, a double warning.

This footage may be disturbing for some viewers,

and definitely do not try this at home.

Basel, Switzerland, 1947,

a Dutch performer named Arnold Gerrit Henskes,

better known as Mirin Dajo,

claims he is invulnerable to injury.

His performances are so unbelievable

that doctors suspect a hoax.

To prove it, they set up a camera

and have Dajo perform his act.

- [Host] You are going to see a man have a 28-inch sword

thrust through his body without hurting him.

[suspenseful music]

- [Tony] Look at that again.

The blade plunges into Dajo's body,

and instead of collapsing in pain,

he casually struts around the stage with his arms extended,

and no signs of bleeding.

- [Host] This is no fake, with a quick thrust,

the sword pushed through between the ribs of the other side.

- The doctors and the scientists of the era

were just stunned that he could do this.

At first, the suspicion was magic tricks

and stunts and illusions,

but once the X-rays were taken,

that was the big reveal.

Mirin Dajo was actually having these things done to him.

Of course, Dajo was not alone in doing some of these stunts.

Jack Schwarz, a Holocaust survivor,

professed that he had survived by training his mind

to tolerate just about anything

that was done to him physically.

- After his liberation, Schwarz demonstrated this control

by publicly inserting needles through his arms,

claiming his mental discipline allowed him

to overcome physical suffering.

- [Tony] In Dajo's case,

some believe he wasn't overcoming pain at all.

- Many claim that it might be pain insensitivity,

congenital analgesia.

Those with this congenital anomaly,

they're gonna have the injuries, of course,

they're just not gonna experience them as pain.

- There is evidence our bodies adjust

to compensate for pain.

Take the Yahgan people of Tierra Del Fuego,

who were known to swim and dive in freezing

sub-Antarctic waters, often while naked.

Could Dajo's body have adapted in a similar way,

or will our experts poke holes in that?

[tense music]

- [Mireya] What we're seeing here is not someone

who's not experiencing the pain,

but they're totally pushing through it

in really, a showman professional way.

- [Lisa] You can see on his face these beads

of sweat coming down his cheeks and below his eyes,

and that is a natural response to pain.

In the medical world, we call this diaphoresis.

You can have the best poker face in the world,

but sometimes your body just gives away what you're feeling.

- [Tony] But there should at least be some bleeding.

So what's going on here?

- [Lisa] If you look closely, they're actually

pinching and holding pressure on the skin

just as they're pulling out the sword.

And what that does,

that's how we control bleeding in the hospital, right?

When there's bleeding, you put pressure on the point

and that stops the bleeding and helps the body clot.

- [Tony] Even if they found a way to control the bleeding,

how does a sword go through a man

and not cause some serious internal damage?

- [Lisa] In this angle,

he is heading right under the shoulder blade

and looks like he's going in between the ribs

to the side of the lung through the thorax

and really is nowhere near the heart,

nowhere near the aorta,

which is the biggest blood vessel

going down the center of your body.

He's clearly to the side of that

where he's less likely to cause

any kind of devastating injury.

- [Mireya] Part of what helps explain this

is the blade that they use.

If they were using this very broad blade,

you know it's gonna tear up a bunch of organs,

but this is a very narrow blade which allows

for it to pass through in a very precise way.

[tense music]

- Our experts believe Mirin Dajo's feats were made possible

through a combination of developed scar tissue

and the use of thin blades guided with extreme precision.

But ultimately, he wasn't invincible.

Tragically, just a year after his performance

in Switzerland, Dajo swallowed a metal splinter

that caused fatal internal bleeding.

- Each day in this country,

26 million kids take the bus to and from school.

And you might think there's nothing special

about a school bus filled with unruly children,

but the spooky students seen in our next video

are in a class of their own.

It's May 31st, 2024, in Opelousas, Louisiana.

The birds are chirping, the air is warm,

when Dontae Sonnier spots a school bus

where children seem to be causing havoc.

Moments later, he notices that things

are not quite what they seem.

As I got close, it looked like the shadows

got to disappearing, like right before my eye.

And once I seen that there was actually like no shadows,

it just put a bad feeling in my stomach.

I ran. [chuckles]

I got out of there like as quick as I can.

- [Tony] Once he's home,

Dontae shares his video and it goes viral.

- [Dontae] I thought it was a me thing.

I thought I was just tripping about the whole situation,

but when I made the post,

millions of people seen the same thing that I seen.

Half believe it was ghosts and half believe,

nah, it was just something around.

- [Tony] He's not alone.

In a previous episode,

we featured this unexplained phenomenon from England

capturing a ghost-like shadow figure.

Plus, the school bus has its own creepy tradition.

- There are ghost stories about school buses

that pop up across the country.

Sometimes the same story of ghostly laughter

or figures of children playing

will be told in different towns.

It's part of our collective psyche.

The starting point of these school bus ghost stories

seems to be a horrific episode

from December 1st, 1938.

A packed school bus in Sandy, Utah

was on the road during a blinding blizzard

and the bus collided with a 50-car freight train.

[bus smashes]

The story was a tragedy known to the whole nation,

but it also engendered a lore

of ghostly school buses.

[tense music]

- [Tony] First question for our experts,

is the footage real or some kind of digital fakery?

- We were able to eliminate any concerns for AI generation,

computer generated images,

like staging within the scene so to speak,

to misrepresent or misguide the viewer.

And ultimately, the verdict on this

is that the video is real.

It is authentic.

- [Tony] So these are definitely shadows,

but shadows don't automatically mean ghosts.

- What is a shadow?

It is where light is being blocked.

So it could be the case

that there are children playing nearby, running around,

and when they pass in front of the pathway of the light

that's coming at this low angle,

they block some of that light

and cast shadows inside the bus.

- [Tony] It's logical, but is there proof?

- [Michael] I was curious as to

if anything could actually be gleaned

from the inside of the bus through image enhancement.

As the shadows appear,

you can see these pixels moving inside the interior

and it's consistent with the movement of the shadows

and then a second person comes in.

- [Tony] So it appears that this is simply two people moving

throughout the bus and being projected

across all these different rows.

- We can see that because people are moving,

their shadows fall onto those seats,

making it look like children are playing.

- [Hakeem] I can't blame Dontae.

It's natural for some people to jump to ghosts

because shadows have often been associated with ghosts.

I get that it looked creepy to him,

seeing this weird phenomenon.

[tense music]

- Our verdict, we're saying these were shadows

cast onto the seats from people inside the bus.

Dontae understandably freaked out,

simply backed away before he could spot these kids.

This might not be the last time we tell the story

of a spooky school bus,

but this one has hit a dead end.

- [Tony] We have new developments in a story

we first brought to you in a previous season.

[device groaning]

These strange sounds were captured

by several concerned citizens in Los Angeles

back in January 23rd, 2021.

[device groaning]

The sound was booming

and it reverberated through the whole community,

startling warehouse worker Erick Reyes,

who recorded the video.

- It kept on going, so I started like filming.

That really freaked me out.

- [Tony] One theory was that the sounds

came from a local Navy base and might even be connected

to an experimental program involving sonic weapons.

- Many have said that the Navy has acquired

armed merchant ships

and have outfitted them with modular weapon systems.

Is it possible that the sounds we're hearing

are coming from these new

naval capabilities off the coast of Los Angeles?

- [Tony] But according to our experts,

sonic weapons are usually focused

in one specific direction

and wouldn't bounce around or vary like this.

- So it did not seem like

that this sounds in this recording

would be attributable to military operations.

- [Tony] They thought the explanation

for the sound was less interesting.

- [Rob] The area in which the recording was made

does have some industrial operations,

so it is conceivable that the sound

that was heard in the recording

might be from some sort of industrial source.

- [Tony] Our original verdict

was unidentified industrial noise,

but recent headlines inspired us to take another look.

In January 2026, after President Trump revealed the use

of a mysterious secret weapon he called the Discombobulator,

rumors quickly spread that US troops had used

some kind of experimental device

to incapacitate Venezuelan soldiers.

- The reports from the individual on the scene

was that the soldiers who arrived had brought a device

that had created some sort of intense sound wave

that caused all kinds of physical symptoms, nose bleeds,

pain in their head, even vomiting blood.

- [Tony] These intense sound wave descriptions

appear very different from known sonic weapons

like LRAD, which produces sharp,

high-pitched, siren-like shrieks.

- General design and purpose of the LRAD types of devices

is to cause a sensation that's painful for an individual

so that they want to flee,

but the description in Venezuela seems to incapacitate them,

so you would expect that the sound waves emanating

might reflect off nearby objects and buildings and surfaces.

It is possible that the sounds

would reverberate around in the manner

that we observe in the California sounds.

[tense music]

- It's interesting,

but no one was knocked out by the LA sounds.

So for now, we're sticking with our original verdict.

By the way, did you know that when the volcano

Krakatoa erupted in 1883,

the explosion was so powerful

that it ruptured the eardrums of sailors

nearly 40 miles away?

And that's our show for tonight.

Thank you so much for watching,

and as always, keep those cameras rolling.

[dramatic music]