Original subtitles

♪♪

Reporter: An unexplainable series of strange bright lights

seen over the skies of Arizona gets a lot of people wondering

what the heck they saw.

Dr. Lynn Kitei: No one has taken that information,

and I have the picture.

Reporter: Did Arizona have visitors from another galaxy?

Ashley Kircher: They could be coming huge distances.

It's just that we don't know how they do it

because we haven't discovered it ourselves.

Chris Rutkowski: The lights were on a very large,

dark object that blocked out the stars.

It is very rare for thousands of people to call and report

seeing the same lights in the same spot at the same time.

David Parker: And it was glowing.

It put out its own light.

Narrator: Thousands of people all seeing something

they can't explain.

Ashley: But with a mass sighting,

of course, you can't interview everybody,

but still, it makes it very, very credible

to me anyway.

Narrator: But while many question,

.What is it? /

we can't help but wonder: Amongst billions of planets,

why here and why now?

What are they looking for, and where have they come from?

These are the questions that can only be answered

from the UFO itself.

The UFO's POV.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: March 13, 1997.

As comet Hale Bopp blazed overhead,

thousands of witnesses across Arizona reported something

far more extraordinary moving through their skies.

Amongst them was a nurse finishing his shift.

David: I lived in Phoenix.

I was working in East Mesa,

so it was about 25 miles away from work.

And I was heading down Route 60 between Mesa and Phoenix,

and the freeway was under construction.

You had to exit and get on top of the overpass,

and then go back down onto the freeway.

So I was probably around Tempe and I had exited

and went up over the overpass,

and there was a hill of construction dirt.

Narrator: At the same time, Dr. Lynn Ketai,

a respected physician, home from the night,

is having an experience all of her own.

My husband was on the phone with my mother-in-law

from back east calling to wish me a happy birthday.

And suddenly he says, .Lynn, get over here quick.

What the hell is that? /

Never sounds like that.

Sounded alarmed.

So I grabbed a towel, wringing wet,

run to the window,

and a little below us--and we're pretty high on a mountain

in Paradise Valley,

but a little below us were three amber orbs

in a pyramid formation about 50, 75 feet off the desert floor.

And I looked to see, it was very dark,

and nobody was there.

And I thought, .I've gotta get my video camera, /

but it was downstairs

and I didn't wanna miss anything.

You don't know how long it's gonna last.

Chris: The Phoenix Lights, as they become to be called,

they are some of the most interesting aspects of ufology

all rolled into one.

They're kind of a Rorschach test for anyone who's interested

in UFOs.

Because on March 13, 1997,

UFOs were seen in great numbers by a lot of people

throughout Central Arizona.

Dr. Ketai: So we're talking multiple events

happening at the same time in different areas

over at least four states, and over at least a dozen hours,

so it's much more information than the general public

is aware.

Also, the Phoenix Lights have become the most witnessed,

most documented,

most important mass anomalous aerial sighting

in modern history, if not all of history.

Chris: And these are the objects that were lights in the sky

that some people believed were two or three in numbers.

Some people saw five to seven to 10.

And some people said that the lights were on a very large,

dark object that blocked out the stars.

Narrator: But where might something of such

advancedtechnology have come from?

There's currently no way to know for sure,

but logic would suggest that it could only come from a planet

outside our solar system, a so-called .exoplanet. /

Of the thousands of exoplanets so far discovered,

the producers of this series decided to use K2-18b

as a case study to theorize on this episode.

K2-18b is a 124 light years away from Earth.

Nathalie Ouellette: So K2-18b was the first exoplanet

in the habitable zone of its system

to ever have a detection of water vapour.

And it was a huge discovery,

the first time we find water vapour essentially

in the habitable zone.

Now I say .water vapour, / not .liquid water, /

so it might not have liquid water.

So K2-18b is, we think, a mini Neptune.

So in our solar system,

there are what we call the ice giants,

Uranus and Neptune.

It doesn't necessarily mean .ice water / or .water ice. /

It means other things that aren't just hydrogen or helium,

like methane, for example.

Michael P. Master: So it's obviously interesting

that we find carbon, that we find water vapour.

With K2-18b, it indicates that

there is something important going on here

and we should certainly pay attention to that.

There's so many other ways life could evolve on other planets

and still reach a state of high intellect and a state

where they modify their environment

for their own needs.

Narrator: In terms of their own needs,

what might they be lacking that would draw them across galaxies

to Phoenix, Arizona?

Christian Bohm: Arizona is known,

and New Mexico for that matter,

are known for their big clear skies,

like, numberofdays -of-sunshine-type of thing.

Also known for, like, quite extreme environments,

like desert.

You know, the North Pole is a desert in a sense.

When people talk about, like, Mars or moon or other planets,

when we try to figure out what the conditions are there,

you know, like we tend to compare them

with like extreme environments on our planet,

and those can be, like, environments like in arid

deserts that are extreme from a temperature point of view,

humidity or water point of view.

Narrator: Is it possible that what people observed that night

in March, 1997, were visitors interested in surveying

a very specific local environment

to compare it to their own?

Chris: Because there were so many witnesses

and a number of videos,

you can't deny that something really occurred that night.

Now what that was needs a little more explanation.

Christian: When somebody says something

that we can't readily explain,

I think rather than just dismiss it,

we need to just search a little bit harder,

and to be more creative, and more open minded.

Reporter: An unexplainable series of strange bright lights

seen over the skies of Arizona gets a lot of people wondering

what the heck they saw.

Narrator: The fact is, people saw something,

something big.

Dr. Kitei: The first experience for me with the Phoenix Lights

without any knowledge or interest in the topic at all,

and as a healthy skeptic I have to see it to believe it.

♪♪

Ashley (: So it's it's just a bit harder to pin down facts

and details,

and how credible the witness is,

but with a mass sighting, of course,

you can't interview everybody,

but still it makes it very, very credible, to me anyway.

Chris: Some people said that this thing passed

directly over them.

There's stories that this was a mile

to as large as eight miles wide at one point,

which is a little hard to imagine,

and yet we have those reports from witnesses.

Some people said it took a couple of minutes

to drive under it.

Ashley: I know there was a a pilot,

or a couple of pilots,

that said it absolutely blocked out the whole runway.

But, again, depends on

how are you--what are you comparing this to?

Like, what's your perspective

when you see something in the dark sky?

How can you tell?

And, you know, I've had this before with other witnesses,

even local witnesses who have had sightings.

This is years back,

but they said it was the size of a football field.

Narrator: Typically, one would picture the crew

of such an enormous ship as being very numerous,

all scurrying about the ship and its various technologies.

But does the environment of K2-18b offer a clue

as to the likely physiology of its inhabitants?

Michael: In the context of what sort of life we would expect

on a massive planet like K2-18b,

it would have to be able to withstand not just the gravity

of the planet itself,

but also the weight of the atmosphere.

Nathalie: Quite a bit bigger than the Earth,

on the order of three times the size of the Earth,

nine times the mass of the Earth.

So again, the gravity would be quite a bit bigger.

Michael: We certainly wouldn't expect anything like humans,

especially with our fragile skeletal system,

and our air-breathing lungs.

So if I had to speculate,

I would think maybe some sort of large,

semi-gelatinous blob-type thing,

but not necessarily breathe in the same way that we do

just because of the problems and with the density of the air,

and the thickness of the atmosphere

and the gravity of the planet itself.

If there was going to be life that evolved,

an intelligent life,

it's hard to say exactly what it would look like,

but if you ask a lot of the most creative people,

they'll often tell you that their ideas

don't come from themselves.

There's this expression that, people don't have ideas,

ideas have people.

And in many cases,

that might be the situation throughout the cosmos too.

There's sort of this universal consciousness

that individual entities tap into,

the hive mind of bees, ants,

where they sort of act as one entity,

they all could just be one intelligence working together

even throughout the entire planetary system.

Narrator: We may be seeing multi-organic beings

from a large planet,

potentially with a shared intelligence network,

capable of creating spaceships a mile wide?

That's huge.

But how would these ships compare to modern aircraft?

♪♪

Neil Lavoie: For an airplane to fly at a very,

very low speed,

something that big is difficult.

I don't really think a large aircraft

would have necessarily been able to fly at a very low,

low speed.

Not for very long.

Small aircraft can do it,

but the bigger ones,

they'd have a hard time staying in the air.

You've got weight, lift, drag, right,

also playing in there.

Murray Toews: Commonly, people don't look up.

People just go about their lives.

They might look up and look at the pretty stars,

or they look at a plane.

But if they really look,

then they start to wonder if it's a little off,

and that's what happened.

[camera shutter clicking]

Dr. Kitei: So I viewed these orbs that seemed to be

attached to something,

and some people saw that it blocked out the stars.

Others saw it looked like water.

Other people saw actual craft.

Murray: There were a lot of reportings of this sighting

of these lights,

but there were also a lot of interpretations of that too,

which I'm not surprised,

because my experience so far has been that virtually everyone's

got some kind of different experience.

However, there were some commonalities

in that the common conception was that it was a massive,

boomerang-shaped object hovering over the city of Phoenix.

And in fact,

there is video that kind of shows that.

Narrator: What's interesting is to think about what makes

a specific place unique on planet Earth

from an alien perspective, and to decipher this,

we need to know about its geology.

Christian: Talking more specifically about the geology,

Phoenix is nestled in an alluvial basin

between mountain ridges.

Up to three kilometre thick of alluvial sediments

shed off the mountains, fill the basin.

So those are basement rocks.

They got metamorphosed, heated up, deformed.

You would see, like, folding.

They're all, like, at a steep angle, inclined,

and they're mineralized.

They actually have significant mineral resources.

Narrator: So we have thousands of people seeing something

in the sky way bigger than anything we've ever seen

over an area with significant mineral resources.

Obviously, there are many piecs to this puzzle,

but before jumping to conclusions,

a closer look at exactly what was seen that night

in March, 1997, is in order.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: March 13, 1997, 8:45 pm.

David Parker, a nurse finishing his shift,

finally leaves work after working late.

He encounters a road construction zone

with a huge mound of dirt.

What happens next has him questioning everything.

David: It was glowing.

It put out its own light.

And so it wasn't like there was light shining on it.

It was glowing itself.

And how people could miss that, I don't know.

And I'm seeing it mostly horizontally.

I mean, didn't have to lift my head.

To see the tip, I had to look directly up,

but to see the rest of the craft,

I only had to raise my eyes like 20 degrees,

and I could see the whole thing horizontally.

If I had gotten out of work on time,

would have missed it completely.

I just happened to be at the best place I could possibly be,

to be elevated,

to be able to see it from the vantage point that I saw.

There was no wind,

and I didn't feel any tingling on my face.

It just coasted.

It was just taking its time.

There was a silver ring coating the inside of the opening,

and out of that it looked like liquid fire,

and it was a thick viscous substance,

like a lava lamp, orange,

and it would drip down and form a big drip and then stop

and go back up.

And I was bathed in orange light.

I was completely orange and the ground was orange,

because I was so close to this stuff,

this stuff that was dripping down,

but there was no odour.

Narrator: Perhaps this .lava-like substance /

was actually a methane- or hydrogen-based

propulsion system,

an element that exoplanet K2-18b is thought to be made o.

Ashley: A lot of people that I've talked to,

they don't get that descriptive.

But a lot of times when your mind is seeing something

that you can't wrap it around,

then you kind of maybe lose perspective

or you might overstate it or understate it.

But he was so to the point and so detailed

that--and it stayed with him.

I mean, it's been almost 30 years.

I think it also depends on your personality.

He was a hospice worker.

He's obviously very compassionate,

but also I think a good observer.

When you're working in healthcare,

you're always observing people and things and situations,

so I think in some ways it was classic,

but in some ways he was unique.

Again, I think it's a very individual thing.

David: It was like a little feeling in my head,

and there was just overwhelming love and acceptance

and .We're here for you and, you know, we love you,

we're here checking on you. /

And it wasn't words,

was just this incredible emotion.

There was no seams in the bottom of the craft.

It was one solid piece of material.

It looked like metal.

It reflected just a little bit of light.

And the oval indentations that were on the bottom,

they cast shadow from the streetlight

right by my right shoulder,

and my bright headlights on the indentations in the bottom,

and then the orange glow from this lava stuff dripping down,

the light sources were changing, my viewpoint was changing.

Because I've had people say that maybe it was a hologram,

but it cast shadows, and the shadows changed.

So it was absolutely a massive, solid, piece of material.

I don't know what the sides looked like.

There was no seams.

There was no nuts.

There was no bolts.

There was no rivets.

It was just one solid piece of some sort of material

with thousands of indentations.

Thousands and thousands.

Easily a mile wide.

♪♪

David: I had thought about hitting it with a rock.

I truly felt confident I could hit it with a rock.

And I really thought, .Ooh,

I wonder what it would sound like. /

It didn't blow any dust in my eye.

There was no odour.

There was no wind.

There was no sound.

There was nothing.

Ashley: He described that there was no wind,

there was no contrails of any sort,

No noise.

It was silent and slowly moving.

But the lava things are--I've never heard of

anything like that,

and I like the way he described it

where it looked like it was dripping lava,

but then it went and got, you know,

pulled back up into the craft.

Michael: In the context of what we see reported

with the Phoenix Lights and especially this description

of sort of a glistening fluid lava lamp plasma almost

seen dripping down from this craft,

it is interesting to speculate that maybe if you did have life

evolve on a planet like K2-18b,

that it could be something like that.

And not even completely formed holistic entity unto itself,

but something that sort of is more fluid and moves

and can rejoin and bring itself back together.

Again, it's sort of getting out there

in the realms of what we would expect to see

with regard to intelligent life forms,

what they might make,

how they might interact with their environment,

how they might construct something capable of travelling

such vast distances.

Narrator: But what sort of crat could move

without any sound at all?

How would that even work?

In the case of stealth technology with aircraft,

what a lot of the technology revolves around is burying

the engines inside the nacelles,

and burying those nacelles inside the fuselage.

So that way,

that a lot of the NORSE transmission

doesn't get transmitted from the fuselage.

♪♪

David: You know, people are calling in

and people saw this, that and the other.

So then, you know, there was talk.

I just, you know, talked to my friends,

and I would run into some other people that saw it.

One of my coworkers who was in North Phoenix,

he was stopped at a red light,

and the craft came from behind him,

so he didn't see it till after it was completely over his head.

But he was in his car with the windows rolled down,

and he was listening to the radio,

and the car stopped next to him,

and all at once everything went silent.

And he couldn't hear the radio,

couldn't hear the crickets, couldn't hear his motor,

and then he looked up

and the craft went right over his head.

So that brought up, you know, we've all been wondering,

is it truly silent or was it able to mute sound

all the way around?

Now he didn't see the lava dripping down.

It was incredibly low to him.

He said he could have hit it with a rock.

Chris: He says that he thought his DNA had been altered

by his observation,

that he himself has been changed.

As a matter of fact, he went through a form of rapture

when he had seen the Phoenix object,

which changed his life completely.

And this is something that we get quite frequently

actually from UFO witnesses who are very passionate

and very hardcore believers,

that the reinforcement of your passionate belief in aliens

is strengthened immensely by a close encounter of some sort.

And it suggests that the UFO phenomenon,

while it has a physical component that perhaps

there's a physical craft there,

there's also a psychological and a paranormal component,

a mental component, that affects you personally,

or your belief system has changed completely.

And that can radically change your life,

and it has been life changing for so many people,

not just Parker but also Kitei.

Narrator: Seven miles away from David Parker,

Dr. Lynn Kitei, a respected physician,

was photographing the same phenomena from her balcony.

- [camera shutting clicking] - ♪♪

♪♪

Dr. Kitei: From our vantage point,

South Mountain and the Estrellas intersect.

On March 13,

when thousands of people were outside purposely looking up

at the sky for a glimpse of the Hale Bopp comet,

they also caught a glimpse

of these one to eight mile-wide objects.

These orbs that seemed it would attach to something

in rock solid formation or actual craft.

I actually did it another night every 15 minutes

to see when these groups of lights go out.

Well, I usually take a bath between 7 pm and 8 pm,

and my husband had called me out of the bath originally.

So let's be conservative and say 8:00 starting point.

The first lights start going out at 9:00.

♪♪

Dr. Kitei: And consistently, from my vantage point,

they were appearing there, which was interesting,

because it was so unnerving, because it was so massive.

Two months before the mass sighting,

I caught the same exact phenomena in the same exact

location as I would during the mass sighting,

turn into a .V / and called around,

found air traffic controllers the next morning.

We saw the same thing at the same time,

and they were very forthcoming originally,

and shared that not only was it

over Class B restricted airspace,

there's a 30 mile radius around the centre of the airport.

I still can't wrap my head around it,

because what I told you is what I remember.

I don't remember going inside,

I don't remember looking at a clock.

What I told you is what I remember from that night.

Narrator: If Dr. Kitei saw the same phenomena as before,

the lights in the distance would have to be connected

to a larger craft.

Using AI video enhancement,

we can make out the shape of a single-bodied UFO.

Murray: In particular,

David Parker's personal sighting is interesting.

He describes a lot of things

that you could start to talk about potential physics of that

and then work backwards to the origins

of those kinds of things that you see.

And if nothing else,

it's a great exercise to understand how something works,

starting from something you see and working backwards.

You know, verified or not verified,

it doesn't matter.

Narrator: But what makes all this even more interesting

is that David's, Dr. Kitei's,

and the rest of Phoenix's experience on March 13, 1997

aren't even the first time people have spoken about there

being UAPs in this area.

Dr. Kitei: And there's an interesting story

because in between South Mountain and the Estrellas

is a basin, the Gila River Indian Reservation,

which is very sacred ground.

So I called him up, and I said,

.Did anybody happen to see strange lights on March 13? /

And he started to giggle.

And I said, .Is that funny? /

And he said, .Are you kidding?

We've been looking up at them for centuries.

We call them &sky people,' &light beings.' /

I had no idea.

That was the first I heard of it.

Christian: So we're talking about the ancient civilizations

that were definitely present in that region over a long time

and there were several civilizations.

These people were called, like, .sky watchers / too.

So they obviously had a very deep and close connection

to the sky.

Narrator: The interesting thing is how this place

seems to always have been of interest

to extraterrestrial life.

Could this be some kind of natural portal

that has been attracting visitors for millennia?

This is reminiscent of the concept of the Axis Mundi

in Indigenous cosmology,

a kind of nexus point between worlds.

We've always thought of it as a spiritual portal,

but maybe it is a portal to another part of the universe.

And perhaps this close connection is similar to one

that David and Dr. Kitei felt as well.

But more than this,

it tells us that something abot this place in North America

is special,

not just to those who live there and call it home,

but possibly to visitors from another world.

Knowing this will only help us try to determine

what those visitors were really here for.

♪♪

♪♪

[camera shutter clicking]

Narrator: By understanding what these visitors

might be looking for and how they operate,

it's possible that we can trace back to where

they may have come from.

Chris: I have studied the possibilities

and done research on the number of stars in the galaxy,

and the possibility that there are planets

around some of those stars.

And one would think that

with the billions and billions of stars,

as Carl Sagan used to say, that exist in our universe,

that somewhere there might be a star very much like our sun

with a planet very much like Earth.

Nathalie: So our sun is a star, sort of like any other star.

It's what we call a G-dwarf,

and it's pretty average sized,

but the great majority of stars are actually smaller.

Probably 95% of stars are smaller than our sun.

You have a lot of K-dwarfs,

a lot of red dwarfs that are a lot redder,

a lot cooler, a lot smaller,

and what's really good about these stars is,

because they're smaller,

the exoplanets that are orbiting around them are relatively

larger in comparison if you compare our planets to the sun.

And so they will have a larger impact or effect on their star,

making them easier to observe.

So that's why we have the huge majority of exoplanets that have

been discovered are orbiting around red dwarfs.

There is a connection though to finding habitable exoplanets,

however, because these smaller stars,

K-dwarfs and red dwarfs, they live for a lot longer.

That means that that gives that exoplanetary system more time

for life to potentially develop over time.

Life isn't going to appear from one day to the next.

You need time for that to happen.

Narrator: For some, the probability of life

seems assured.

But how would they get here from light years away?

What energy sources would they harness

and what technologies would they use?

Neil: You got four forces on an airplane.

You got thrust, weight, lift, drag.

And it's a balance of forces in order to stay in the air.

You also have to have the thing in balance.

No aircraft can fly unless its weight and balance

characteristics are correct.

Narrator: But that's exactly what thousands of people,

including David Parker and Dr. Lynn Kitei saw.

A massive aircraft able to propel itself at varying speed,

to maneuver and defy gravity without making a sound.

It all depends on the design of the aircraft.

What it's designed for is really what it comes down to.

Helicopters don't fly fast.

Why?

Because they were designed to not fly fast.

They were there to actually be able to hover

and land in small locations, right?

Narrator: However, we know from David's account

that there was no wind and no sound,

so there must be another kind of explanation.

♪♪

Murray: Now let's imagine a helicopter taking off

in real time,

taking off and hovering and then moving

and gently moving like this.

The occupants of that helicopter experience

very mild effects, right?

And taking off, landing, moving, stopping in the air,

going backwards or whatever;

a very calm, relaxing experience,

I suppose, if you're in a helicopter.

Now imagine you're in a ship that generates

its own gravitational field.

So time for you inside the ship will be different

than the time that's experienced outside.

Okay, so what would that be like?

Well, if you're inside the ship,

there's a form of time dilation that happens.

It's all relative frames of reference

to your surrounding area.

Your time frame reference is different than it is outside.

In fact, from your perspective,

inside the ship would seem like being inside a helicopter.

It would seem very easy.

But you start to notice that around you everything

is moving at a different speed than the rest of you.

Things are moving a little different.

You're able to manipulate space and time adequately

to have this time dilation experience that happens.

It also happens if you travel towards the speed of light.

Time dilation happens.

You actually age slower relative to everything else.

Everything around you moves faster.

♪♪

Murray: So take that same image of a helicopter taking off

in real time, but now speed it up.

What do you get?

You get this effect.

But the occupants don't experience that.

They experience a nice comfortable helicopter effect.

They're just gently gliding along

while everything around them

is in a different reference frame.

So that could be an explanation

for that maneuvering and behaviour.

Dr. Kitei: Our concept of time is primitive.

Linear time, past, present and future

may be primitive.

It may not be what time really is at all.

And quantum physics and quantum mechanics now talking

about 10 or 11 different dimensions out there.

So if there are other times and spaces along with ours,

why is it such a leap to think

that there may be other intelligences,

even sentient intelligences in those other times and spaces

that we get glimpses of if we're open to them or invited?

Narrator: While this explanatin doesn't explain how the UAPs

in Phoenix were doing what they were doing,

it does give us a window into another way of thinking,

a way that we can't even comprehend, yet.

♪♪

Ashley: They could be coming huge distances.

It's just that we don't know how they do it

because we haven't discovered it ourselves.

And there are stories about recovered craft

and reverse engineered,

and now they're able to replicate some of these things

and do some of these maneuvers that before we said weren't able

by our own aircraft to be done.

So I honestly think they are from other planets,

other galaxies.

They have a different way of travelling than what we know.

Neil: Depending on how you can actually support your nacelle

and your intake,

you can actually keep that thing quite quiet externally.

It might be noisy in the airplane,

but not so much noisy on the outside of the airplane.

And again, by mixing your exhaust gases,

keeping it laminar, mixing it with colder air,

you can actually reduce the sound signature,

because less turbulence, less noise.

Narrator: So we've imagined ho, but why?

What kind of world would produe visitors interested

in Arizona's unique geology?

Our experts are building a profile.

The ranges and the basins with a huge, like,

over 1 billion year time gap in between.

There's a lot of things that happened, like, at the tail end

of the geologic history within the last 20 million years.

There's mineralization there too.

There's younger veins that are mineralized.

There are some interesting patterns there

that could reflect potentially an alien mind,

or a sense of organization that makes sense to them,

and maybe less sense to us as to why.

Although there are animals that do that too, right?

Canadian geese, for example.

Perfect example of that, you have, you know,

.V / patterns.

♪♪

Narrator: Phoenix sits atop a geological gold mine,

copper that conducts, mercury that mystifies,

uranium that radiates.

Are these the resources drawing visitors from dying worlds?

Christian: Phoenix mineral deposits,

they are, like, rare metals, rare Earth minerals,

you know, Cesium is a rare earth element.

They find all kinds of applications

in, like, high-tech industries.

You know, there's a lot of these rare metals

that go into various parts of computers, chips

and all kinds of things, including batteries.

Each one has slightly different properties that makes it useful

for slightly different applications.

But they're all sought after.

Narrator: The profile emerges: A civilization from a world

of scarce resources; clear skies for astronomy;

technologically advanced enough to bend physics itself,

and they found Earth.

Could K2-18b be the source of these extraterrestrial visitor?

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Narrator: We can only imagine how beings from another planet

would see our Earth,

but why would we think it would be from somewhere like K2-18b?

Nathalie: And so there's a team in England

who have been studying it very extensively,

and in 2023, and also recently in 2025,

they put out a result where they say they detected

a certain molecule called dimethyl sulfide or DMS.

And the interesting thing with DMS is on Earth,

the only thing that can create DMS is biological life,

typically phytoplankton or other marine simple life.

So potentially it's a biosignature,

and so anything that has sort of carbon inside of its elements

is really interesting in the search for life.

It's not a place where humans could go definitely,

but we could imagine potentially life evolving,

because it could be an ocean world

under that really thick atmosphere.

Yeah, so these planets are sort of built like onions

with layers, even our own planet, the Earth,

except that it's more like an apple.

You have the really thin atmosphere.

You have our crust, you have our mantle, our core.

So even these gas giants,

they would have potentially an atmosphere.

For K2-18b there might be an ocean,

a liquid ocean, under that atmosphere

and then a rocky core at the centre.

So potentially it would be in that liquid ocean,

where you would find life developing.

Michael: Dimethyl sulfide is an important biosignature,

and one that is found

in association with K2-18b.

If we are talking about an organism that evolved

in a very high gravity, dense atmospheric environment,

it's pure speculation,

but just based on what we see in the oceans,

the deep oceans,

which is one of our better indications

of what that might be like,

because we have a lot of pressure in the deep oceans,

and you tend to have a lack of sunlight,

so they tend to be darker.

There's a lot of bioluminescence.

It's possible that this thing could also produce

its own light.

We see that with a lot of deep sea creatures.

But it's really fluid.

They're likely to just really be spread out to help accommodate

their physical form in the context

of this really strong gravity and thick atmosphere.

Narrator: One can imagine that life like this would have

to evolve over a huge amount of time,

and it's reasonable to assume that durtheg in the course

of this evolutionary process,

they might too have come into contact with other life forms

that might have introduced them to new technologies

that their planet doesn't have.

If so, is it not also possible

that to sustain their new technologies,

these beings would then need the kind of minerals

and elements found in and around Phoenix?

Christian: The magnetic properties

of some of the concentrations of minerals,

they could potentially interfere with some signals

that may be used in aviation.

Mineral exploration,

it can emit pulses, it can emit signals

to induce those fields, and to get that response back.

That mercury definitely is an odd one in the area.

Also, is a pegmatite field.

Pegmatites are like very fractionated,

kind of like the last bit of the melts that come from intrusions

that can be enriched in rare metals such as lithium.

We tend to call them in the industry LCT pegmatites:

lithium, cesium, tantalum pegmatites.

Very sought after these days for known reasons,

with all the battery technologies and so on.

Narrator: Is it possible that through their sensors,

this advanced species might penetrate beneath the surface

of the barren desert and detect the treasure trove

of rare elements embedded below,

the very materials their world may desperately need.

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Christian: And a big part of it is, like,

the plate tectonic processes,

the geological processes that are ongoing,

that keep diverse life going and evolving.

So those plate tectonic processes,

they're a mechanism to recycle, to reproduce nutrients.

You know, this is an ongoing machine,

interaction from, like, heat produced internally

from the Earth, the sun, the rotation around the sun.

You know, everything is in interplay to keep it going.

And that's unique.

That's unique to Earth.

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Narrator: In a theoretical scenario,

assigning K2-18b as a homeworl,

it's important to remember that other possibilities

are truly endless.

Nathalie: We're scientists.

We have to be sort of skeptical.

The results are very strong from the team,

but other people studying that same data,

when they model it,

they can explain that signal away with other things.

There's also the issue that just because DMS is only produced

by life on the Earth,

doesn't mean that there couldn't be a weird

non-biological process on an alien world

that can produce DMS.

Volcanoes or some kind of geological activity

or a chemical process.

And so not only do we need to study this exoplanet,

but we need to be doing tests in labs to try to figure out

if DMS can be produced by non-life activity.

Narrator: So it's possible that alien life could come from

somewhere like K2-18b.

But perhaps what they are detecting in hopes to possibly

help sustain their civilization goes beyond minerals

and resources.

The profound emotional responss of witnesses suggest

a deeper interaction,

one that may transcend mere observation.

Ashley: I think in some way that might play a part

in why they happened to be there at that time.

Because I have had witnesses where one witness

has seen one thing,

and one witness has seen something completely different,

or one witness has seen nothing,

and this other person is all excited

because they've had some kind of experience.

It's got to do something with their perception

which boils down to their brain.

That's just my personal opinion.

David: It was huge.

Or did the craft do something to me?

I would think that if I did something to myself

to psych myself out

and to have this incredible feeling of gratitude,

that it would diminish.

It's been almost a third of a century.

So I really think it was something from it.

I think something--whoever was inside,

whoever had their hand on the steering wheel,

I really think that there was a connection between them,

at least with me, if not everybody else.

Dr. Kitei: You couldn't hear a sound,

and as intently as I was watching these two lower orbs,

it felt like something was watching me.

It just did.

And going through my mind,

I was thinking, .Who are you? What are you?

Do you know that I'm here? I'd love to meet you. /

That's exactly what I thought.

Murray: Illumination that you see,

maybe there's some significance to that.

That could just be an organizational feature

of that entity or alien species to go into those

kinds of configurations.

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Narrator: Among thousands of exoplanets discovered so far,

a select few match our profile; desolate worlds

orbiting older stars where civilizations

have had eons to evolve beyond our comprehension.

But is it really feasible

that in an entirely separate solar system

fuelled by the light and heat from a star older

and more powerful than ours,

an advanced species of life form could flourish?

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Chris: Well, there probably is a star

not far away that's a hundred years older

than our sun, but stars live a very long time.

Just imagine a star that's a thousand years older

than our sun,

10,000 years older,

a 100,000 years older than our sun,

and that star has planets around it,

and on one of those planets that just happens to be life like us,

maybe intelligent life, maybe more intelligent than us,

and they would have been in existence

for a hundred thousand more years than ours.

What would their technology be capable of?

Would they have the capability of travelling between the stars?

Nothing in physics says that this is possible.

So who's ever living on that distant planet may not be able

to break the laws of physics,

but maybe they can bend them in ways

that we haven't even conceived of yet,

but they can travel between the stars.

I think that's one possibility

that cannot be completely dismissed.

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Narrator: If, in March 1997,

the Phoenix Lights were evidene of an alien incursion

of some kind, their survey complete,

is it likely that this would be an isolated event

or their final visitation?

Or was it merely the latest in an ongoing series of visits

to source the materials they need

to sustain their existence?

Michael: What's the likelihood that we would get

such similar life forms

this close together and this close together in time?

So yeah, that celestial and planetary time component

is huge.

Our earth and our sun are old enough that we've had

that necessary time for all of these things to unfold.

Christian: You know, from a creative point of view,

to talk about these things,

to try to apply a science mind in some ways,

but without it getting in the way.

The key is just, like, for both sides to be open-minded.

Narrator: The pattern emerges:

Locations rich in rare materials;

sites of geological significance;

places where Earth's ancient processes

have concentrated elements scarce elsewhere in the cosmos.

From the UFO point of view, Earth isn't randomly visited.

It's precisely targeted.

Dr. Kitei: Whoever is behind this,

I have no idea who's driving these things.

I wish I did know.

But whoever is,

is trying to wake us up in a very gentle,

non-threatening way that they're here.

And also waking us up to the positive potential

we have as human beings,

because the aftereffect, that's what's so profound,

is life changing, is so positive,

a positive transformation,

an awakening to have a connection suddenly.

Be aware that not only are we not alone in the universe,

but a connection to the universe,

and to the Earth,

and to each other that they may never have felt before

in their entire life.

Narrator: The Phoenix lights my have been more than a sighting,

perhaps a survey, a greeting, or even a test.

As we look to the stars, wondering who's out there,

we might ask instead: What is it about here,

about Earth, about us, that draws them back?

The answer may not lie in those stars,

but in the very ground beneath our feet.

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