Original subtitles

♪♪

Bobby Vanderhoorn [on video]: Oh wow.

Narrator: Kelowna, British Columbia.

During a display of Northern Lights,

video evidence of illuminated shapes flying in patterns.

♪♪

Bobby [on video]: Holy, there's so many,

and they're low.

Bobby: My best guess is that it is something

not from Earth.

Bobby [on video]: What is that?

Murray Toews: Something more complex

and, from our perspective, weirdly religious.

♪♪

Is there some sort of coordination

among those intelligent beings?

♪♪

We don't know.

Narrator: Lights in the sky that demand us

to push our imagination to the furthest most limits.

Questions that connect us

to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.

Why did they come to Kelowna, British Columbia?

A question that can only be answered from the UFO POV.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: While there are many things that appear in the sky

that may defy our senses,

oftentimes these have either natural

or human-made explanations.

I'm typically quite skeptical and critical.

So when I see something, I try and just make sense of it,

and rule out all of the more common explanations.

Chris Rutkowski: May 10, 2024,

Bob Vanderhoorn and his parents and his son

were out trying to get a glimpse of the Northern Lights.

♪♪

I was on my rooftop patio,

and it was one of those, like, nice warm spring nights,

you know, like, those nights where it just doesn't cool off.

So we're up on the deck just enjoying a fire,

and my son Finley was there as well.

♪♪

Bobby: That night there was supposed to be

a really good show of the Aurora Borealis,

or Northern Lights.

And so we were waiting for that to happen, right,

because my son Finley,

he had never seen anything like that before.

It was probably around 9:30ish, right as it's getting dark.

♪♪

Chris: Perfect night for it, quite clear.

They were living at the time in a nice suburb of Kelowna,

and 10:00 at night, you know,

it's getting pretty dark at that time,

so they thought they would have a perfect night for looking for

some beautiful Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights.

Bobby [on video]: Dude, that looks insane.

Narrator: The family turned their gazes skyward,

along with their phones.

Bobby [on video]: Oh, wow.

Look at that big streak of pink, Riley.

Riley [on video]: Yeah.

Chris: And while they were doing that,

they saw something that was not the Northern Lights.

Bobby: I'm like, .I need to get a video of this /"

So I started taking some videos of it,

and my son was trying to--I do have a couple videos

my from my son, Finley, capturing a couple videos.

He actually got one that I couldn't pull up the video

on my phone quick enough to get it.

These These things go fast, but he managed to catch it,

and it's a really good one

in the sense that you can see the skyline,

although he's not holding his phone as steady.

That night, I think I ended up with, like,

five or six videos of these things.

My son got a couple as well,

and my parents still can't make sense of it.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: That is so weird.

Bobby [on video]: Yeah. What are those?

Bobby's Mother [on video]: Unreal.

Bobby: I started to notice these groups of these glowing orbs.

That's probably the best way I can describe it.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: Holy, look at that.

Bobby [on video]: What is that?

♪♪

Bobby's Mother [on video]: Oh my goodness.

See that?

Oh, and now they're bunching all together.

They were in a line.

Sometimes there would be groups of like three or four of them.

Sometimes there's groups of, like, 15 or 20.

It was really unusual.

And they don't fly in any sort of set formation.

You can kind of see them move around.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: See how they all go together?

Bobby: Wow.

Narrator: As Bobby and his family ponder

the origins of what they are witnessing,

they realize the lights are moving in a uniform direction.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: Look at that.

Bobby: There are these glowing orbs that are streaking

right across the sky from,

like, one horizon to the next until they just disappear.

Yeah, most of them are heading north.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: Oh, there's another bunch up there.

Narrator: More and more lights appear,

prompting the witnesses to wonder what they are.

Bobby's Father [on video]: It's fireworks.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: No.

Bobby's Father [on video]: Those four, yeah,

there are separating.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: Those are not birds.

At the end of the night, they had counted,

which is quite amazing, they had counted 150 orbs

in different groups.

Now he said they were in formation,

but the odd one would sort of fly out and out of formation

and then come back.

♪♪

Bobby: So now we're just looking for these things instead

and trying to figure out what we're looking at, right?

Because we've never seen anything like this before.

Narrator: What are they looking at,

and why are they here?

Are we missing something that perhaps video enhancements

from AI may reveal?

The objects become clear and distinct,

but that still doesn't tell us what

makes Kelowna, British Columbia a candidate for visitation.

Bobby: I felt perhaps whatever energy the Aurora Borealis

brings into Earth's atmosphere,

perhaps they utilize that or they're enjoying it.

I don't know.

It helps them fly, travel.

It's fun.

I'm not sure.

But that was my theory at that time.

I felt like it was linked.

♪♪

Could there be a connection between the orbs

and the Borealis?

♪♪

There's an interaction between our magnetic field,

and thank God

for the magnetic field,

because it screens out a lot of terrible things.

One of them is in fact the charged particles

from the sun.

♪♪

Chris: Magnetic field protects us from harmful radiation

and particles that are spewed out by our sun

from time to time.

The prominences that are sometimes seen on photographs

and movies of the sun that extend many,

many thousands of kilometres away from the surface,

they actually spew particles that are very deadly

to life towards the Earth.

And the magnetic field that protects us

takes these particles and directs them

towards the North and South Pole away from us.

Murray: What's happening is that the sun is sorting off

charged particles that are being pulled in

by the magnetic field of the Earth.

And so you can learn a lot about the relationship

between the Earth, how the Earth works,

its magnetic fields, and how it interacts with the sun.

♪♪

Ashley Kircher: Maybe they were getting some energy

from the electricity of the Aurora Borealis,

which is quite a big jump to make.

♪♪

And all of this combines to a very remarkable,

very interesting case for analysis.

These groups of objects did seem to form a V shape occasionally,

but most of the time they were clusters that had extended arms

and also the clusters shifted position.

So it wasn't as if these things were on a solid object.

These various lights or orbs were groups of lights in the sky

themselves moving together.

And this suggested that they were not a solid object,

but were themselves very discrete objects

moving together.

Bobby [on video]: Weird.

Chris: Usually when we hear of groups of lights

moving in the sky,

we immediately think of Starlink satellites.

They are very, very noticeable.

We get them reported as UFO flotillas or whatever.

They seem to be long lines of orbs or lights in the sky

that are following one another like strings of pearls.

That's not what these were seen at Kelowna in 2024.

There was something else.

We extrapolate all these other ideas.

Often, they're conspiratorial or they're imaginary,

but if you look at it from another perspective,

it's actually a clue as to their behaviour.

You can work backwards from those behaviours

and extrapolate what they could be doing logically

or what hypothetically an alien species might want

to learn from us if they were to come here

a great distance for whatever reason

to fly in our atmosphere,

and to play around with the Aurora Borealis

that interacts with our magnasphere.

I mean, it's bizarre.

But it's interesting.

A curious, intelligent species would do that.

They would go out of their way to do something

that would appear to be absolutely bizarre

from our perspective.

♪♪

♪♪

Using our principles of deduction

and trying to be as Sherlock Holmes-y as possible,

we can eliminate a number of possibilities.

- [drone buzzes] - ♪♪

Bobby: I think my parents at one time

suggested maybe groups of drones,

but we couldn't really make sense of that either,

just because drones usually fly in a formation

if they're in a group, and they were silent as well,

and typically you can hear drones.

And where we were seeing these in the sky is,

some of them were below cloud level,

some of them are higher up in the atmosphere.

Neil Lavoie: My understanding what Bobby saw was orbs

that were going from horizon to horizon,

and they would travel very silently,

and they would have a fixed pattern.

Sometimes they were in clusters,

sometimes they were in a bit of a line,

sometimes they were in a V formation,

sometimes they were individual.

Something that's highly plausible

is they might have been just satellites.

♪♪

Michael P. Master: There are these fast-moving objects

that move from one side of the sky to the other,

seemingly in groups.

And that's really interesting because a)

they're moving in a way that conventional aircraft can't,

and b) they're clustered together.

Neil: Satellites can actually follow

different orbital patterns.

They can go polar,

so they can go from north to south,

they can go south to north, they can go across the Equator,

and they can go east to west, west to east.

So there's lots of options there,

and it kind of aligns with some of what he was describing

with the way that some of these patterns would be.

Murray: They're steadily just moving across the sky,

not entirely uniformly, sometimes in a V pattern,

and sometimes they will sort of intertwine with each other

as they move across the sky.

And I believe it's from south to north.

♪♪

Chris: The other thing about moving south to north

are ordinary satellites, usually one by one,

but there are groups of satellites,

military satellites,

reconnaissance satellites that move in twos and threes,

and those are well known, but they can be very striking,

especially the ones that are moving three-by-three

can give the appearance of triangular craft.

♪♪

Ashley: Satellites don't streak.

They move at a very uniform pace.

♪♪

Chris: That night, there was broken

but generally good cloud cover,

so these lights appeared to be underneath the clouds,

and when you hear that, you think, .Well,

that can't be a satellite, because the satellites are much,

much farther in the sky, 75 kilometres or so,

and that would not be visible if there was any kind

of cloud cover. /

Narrator: Since conventional aircraft or satellites

don't fit the description of what the Vanderhoorns see,

skeptics consider the possibility

of bird migration to explain the configuration

of the phenomena.

- [geese honk] - ♪♪

You can think of pelicans, seagulls,

a number of other birds.

If they're flying over some very bright light sources,

their undersides will reflect the light.

And if they're moving over these cities that have

very bright light sources,

you can actually see the individual bellies.

Birds glow at night.

They migrate at night.

They go in formation,

but they also fly out of formation sometimes

and then come back in.

They don't necessarily make any noise.

I mean, geese honk,

but there's lots of other birds that are just silent.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: I know they're separated.

- Those are not birds. - ♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Bobby Vanderhoon and his family spot

moving lights in the Kelowna sky,

lights that defy their comprehension.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: Those are not birds.

I thought about, yeah,

perhaps it is drones, birds,

some sort of planes, something else.

However, none of those make sense.

And so it does make me lean more towards something either

not from this world or something that is man-made,

but, you know, the general public

is just not made aware of it.

Murray: It's actually a very practical configuration.

So to say that they're just birds

just based on their configuration

would be wildly incorrect, because we don't know.

They could have adopted easy formations.

Fighter aircraft will do that V formation.

It's a fairly common formation of things.

So that may stem to a universal logic in intelligent beings.

Say they were grouped in alien craft or aircraft or birds,

maybe they adopt similar kinds of behaviours.

Bobby [on video]: What is that?

Michael: When we have multiple of these individual

flying objects together, it begs the question,

is there some sort of coordination

among those intelligent beings that may be piloting them?

Narrator: An alien intelligence with the ability to coordinate

flying objects that travel through, above,

and below the clouds.

The producers have challenged our experts to hypothesize

on a given planet,

and what life form could actually evolve there.

Some scientists theorize that newly discovered exoplanets

possess the ingredients for life.

Christian Bohm: What we do know about some special exoplanets

that are in the habitable zone,

so that might allow for life to exist,

that there is essential building blocks like water,

most likely in vapour form, and gases like methane.

Imagine being in an area

where you're surrounded by steam at all times.

GJ 9827 d, it's larger than the Earth,

about two times the radius, three times the mass.

So gravity would be stronger there.

You'd have the pressure of all the atmosphere.

So a little bit of a hellish sauna kind of world.

The attraction for life forms or forms of intelligence

coming from such an environment

could be simply trying to study or understand

how life is thriving on Earth,

where water and methane is present in vast amounts,

and in various forms.

So water in all its three forms present on Earth

plays a significant role for life.

Bobby [on video]: I know.

I got this one, though.

Narrator: Our AI enhancement of the Vanderhoorn video

is inconclusive, but what becomes clear

is these are indeed individual light sources.

They are not connected by any solid structure we can see.

Bobby: Yeah, we just couldn't make sense of it.

And here in Kelowna too,

there's an international airport,

and we remember watching a couple of these groups

fly right by an airplane that's taking off,

and it just, like, begs the question,

like, pilots must be seeing these,

because they're so close in proximity to one another.

Like, we're literally seeing a group of these things

go flying by as there's a plane taking off.

Neil: When you're dealing with airplanes and helicopters,

you never really see them go horizon to horizon.

It's more of a straight line

because you're much lower level.

But when you're going across from one point of the horizon

to the other point of the horizon,

it's a little higher up.

So--or a lot higher up.

Bobby [on video]: These ones are not flying in unison.

Ashley: He's almost like the perfect witness in some ways,

because he was very detailed, he followed up.

Bobby's Mother [on video]: And now they're bunching

all together.

He also eventually showed his videos to friends,

and even sent them to a local news station.

Narrator: Soon, the Vanderhoorns realized

they weren't the only ones to see this anomaly

over the Kelowna skies.

A few years earlier, on February 6, 2017,

another sighting occurred.

♪♪

Woman [on video]: And that's the last one right there.

Bobby: We have video footage of these.

There's a website that has a video from 2017

where it's still daylight,

and you can see these flying under the clouds.

Well, it certainly matches what my videos look like,

although it just looks like round,

bright orbs in the sky traveling as groups.

In that person's video, there's two small groups,

and they're travelling underneath the clouds,

and my understanding is it was a father and daughter,

and the daughter noticed those in the sky.

They pulled over.

This is in West Kelowna,

and they captured those on video.

And that was back in 2017.

So there has been people seeing these

over the course of the last few years.

♪♪

Narrator: Bobby's video goes viral.

Others come forward with similar videos in different places,

from as far away as a man in Mexico.

Bobby: He reached out to me after my videos surfaced

and he's seen the same thing.

He managed to capture a video probably a couple months

after I did,

and I've heard of a couple of other people

that have seen them as well.

♪♪

Narrator: And then a year later, in April 2025,

Bobby Vanderhoorn sees the lights again.

He was out with his girlfriend on the patio--

♪♪

Ashley:--just relaxing.

She jokingly said,

.Wouldn't it be great if we saw those orbs again? /

Bobby: I was just spending a nice Friday night

with my girlfriend, Lindsay,

and we were just enjoying the fire on the patio,

and we just looked in the sky,

and she happened to spot a couple groups

of these flying overhead within, you know, two minutes

of her making that statement.

Bobby [on video]: Are you getting that on video too?

Holy.

There's so many, and they're low.

Bobby: As soon as we started seeing these, though,

we turned the lights off, turned the fire off,

and that's when we started catching video of it.

♪♪

Lindsay [on video]: There's a big group.

Bobby [on video]: Where?

Bobby: If I was to best describe them,

I would say they're roughly the size of a very small car.

Like, although they're not in that shape necessarily.

I think they're kinda like a boomerang shape,

and they fly forward silently and fast.

Bobby [on video]: Yeah, makes you feel just like...

Narrator: To this day,

the witnesses are unsure just what it is they have seen.

♪♪

Ashley: So again, in groups of ten, 15.

Amazingly, they ended up counting them all.

He said about 250 that night.

Bobby [on video]: That's insane.

Those ones are so low.

This is the best one.

Bobby: We saw substantially more than the first time.

♪♪

Narrator: Faced with yet another incident,

scientists wonder, why Kelowna?

So to my right would kind of be East Kelowna.

To my left there is Dilworth Mountain.

Then behind me,

you would have Okanagan Lake in Downtown Kelowna.

Christian: That lake is just unimaginably deep.

I believe it's something like more than 600 meters

below sea level.

It's just incredible.

♪♪

Christian: So this presents potentially an environment

that hosts very unusual forms of organisms that adapted

to great depths in this freshwater body near Kelowna,

which could be of interest just as a place to study,

to understand how organisms thrive,

what type of organisms there may be at--just at the lake bottom,

for example.

It's a very interesting experimental ground to study

adaptation of all kinds of organisms in this area.

Narrator: From the point of view of the visitors,

Earth and its liquid water would seem like an exotic place

with bizarre processes, energies,

and organisms to study.

A place that is completely unlike GJ 9827 d.

Nathalie Ouellette: GJ 9827 d is the smallest planet

we've ever detected an atmosphere on.

So again, very hot,

which is why the water would be in steam form,

making its atmosphere.

Potentially, in the ocean underneath,

there might be something interesting,

especially on the night side where it would be cooler,

you could have some of that water vapour condensing

into clouds.

It would be a very different experience

living in that environment.

Christian: An exoplanet may experience changes as well.

They may have escape or accumulations of gases,

escape of accumulation of water vapour,

and so on.

So it's very interesting from a point of view to study

the Earth environment,

its changes that could provide a teaching ground.

So when things get really, really hot with a high pressure,

the phase of water can sort of get a little bit tricky

to determine.

It could be that thick steam atmosphere sort of transitions

into a liquid ocean at deeper depths in a sort of odd way,

just because the pressure is very, very high.

You sort of have the same issue with our gas giants,

Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus.

As you're going deeper into their atmosphere,

the phase of the gas that's there starts

to be a little bit odd where it's not quite a gas,

not quite a liquid.

Things can get odd on these planets

when the pressure's really high.

♪♪

Narrator: But with so little known about these locations,

light years from Earth,

is it really possible that they might have advanced technology

to surveil locations in distant solar systems?

Bobby [on video]: This is insane.

- Lindsay: [inaudible] - Bobby: I don't know.

Lindsay [on video]: It's so weird.

♪♪

Chris: It's possible that a civilization

around a star that's very advanced

in terms of years and technologically

might have figured a way to not break the laws of physics,

but to bend them in ways that we simply can't even comprehend.

And if they can bend the laws of physics,

they might be able to travel between the stars,

and decide to come here and visit us.

♪♪

♪♪

Michael: What's inside?

Who's controlling them?

What's controlling them?

Especially when we see them working together.

If it's just one object flying through the sky,

it could be a shooting star, obviously.

We know how airplanes and helicopters move.

Lindsay [on video]: Oh, there's a big group.

Bobby [on video]: Where?

- Lindsay: Right there. - Bobby: Oh, yeah.

Michael: So these groups of UFOs then beg the question,

are there multiple individuals inside these craft

working together, flying in formation?

So it certainly indicates that there is

an intelligent life form piloting these,

and that they may be somewhat social,

cohesive in some ways,

whether they're working together through technology to maintain

their position and trajectory,

or they're consciously controlled

and there's some sort of overarching force,

a mind control thing.

Bobby [on video]: Like, we're just not the most

intelligent species.

Bobby: I get the impression that they are definitely travelling

in a direction with some sort of destination.

Chris: They're moving very, very quickly

through the sky in the general direction

of north and northwest.

Bobby: You can watch the horizon in the south,

wait for them to arrive,

and then you wait for them to fly right over,

and they just fly all the way to the mountain range to the north.

For an airplane to go across the skyline takes a long time

compared to a satellite.

A satellite will do a lot of movement.

Some of the satellites are travelling

7 kilometres per second.

An airplane doesn't move that fast,

so it takes it a while.

And a helicopter?

Helicopters are usually around 120 miles an hour or so.

They don't move very fast,

and they're usually closer to the ground.

So they would stand out quite significantly.

And drones, again, even small drones are noisy,

but they're only doing 30 to 40 miles an hour top end.

♪♪

The flow of the magnetic field of the Earth

goes from south to north.

Narrator: Earth's core is filled with hot liquid iron

that's constantly moving and spinning.

When this liquid metal moves around,

it acts like a giant electromagnet,

similar to how electricity flowing through a wire

can create magnetism.

This creates Earth's magnetic field,

which works like an invisible shield protecting us

from harmful radiation from the sun.

Chris: If there were no magnetic field,

they would impact the surface of the earth and cause mutations

and all sorts of nasty things to occur.

In doing so, when they impact these particles,

the magnetic fields create beautiful,

wondrous light displays.

Beautiful greens most commonly,

but very often reds and other colours depending on the nature

of the particles themselves.

Michael: The earth really is perfect.

It's ideal.

It's not tightly locked.

It rotates.

We have a great atmosphere.

We have a molten iron core that gives us

electromagnetic shielding against solar flares.

So we wouldn't necessarily expect all of those things,

and we don't see those things very often on other exoplanets.

Narrator: The experts theorize that Earth's magnetic field

could be a signal to alien scientists,

a beacon that can be sensed from light years away.

Maybe that's an indication that there is life here

and aliens would pay attention to that possibility

that this is a prime candidate for life in the universe.

Maybe those are indications that we would be a candidate

for visitation by our cousins.

Bobby: All I can say is what I saw,

and I can describe it, and I can let you know,

like, what my best guess is.

My best guess is that it is something not from Earth.

♪

Murray: Imagine you have crafts that have alien

and exotic technology.

So if it was, say, generating a field,

which is often talked about, effectively a warped field

or a gravitational field around it,

which is taking the gravity that you're familiar with

and just manipulating it in such a way

that it will fold into a shape, or flow over top of an object.

You can think of gravity as wind or a field that acts like wind,

or can be made to behave like something

it doesn't naturally do to an end.

And that end is to manoeuver, to be stealthy,

and to do all kinds of interesting things.

Narrator: For Bobby Vandehoorn,

the technology used by the operators

of the lights seen over Kelowna

reminds him of surfers attracted to high tides.

Bobby: I grew up on Vancouver Island,

and when there's a big storm,

you just see all of these surfers that are just all

heading out towards the West Coast.

That's where they're headed because of this big storm,

and that's just what came to mind

when I saw all of these things flying through the sky,

is we have this big, for lack of a better term,

a storm with the Aurora Borealis,

the exact same night I'm seeing all of these orbs.

Narrator: Is there a way we can explain what is going on

in Kelowna, Canada?

♪♪

♪♪

Nathalie: So the Fermi Paradox was an idea

offhandedly said by physicist Enrico Fermi

in the 1950s.

He was at a conference and they were discussing

the potential for alien life.

Keep in mind, exoplanets weren't discovered back then.

And he basically just blurted out,

.If there's aliens, where--where is everyone? /

♪♪

Ashley: Nobody--I don't care who it is right now anywhere,

nobody really has an explanation.

They just have theories,

conspiracy theories or scientific theories.

But so far, they're all just theories.

Chris: We do know that one thing that Earth

has that most other planets don't

is water.

♪♪

Narrator: Could visitors from distant exoplanets be interested

in the ingredients of life, such as water?

♪♪

Chris: Water is relatively rare in liquid form,

probably without exception around the galaxy.

And if that's true,

water was an essential building block,

it's how we evolved,

we believe we came from small creatures

that were in the ocean.

If water's that rare,

perhaps an indication of life elsewhere in the universe

would be the presence of water vapour.

♪♪

Nathalie: Indeed, on Earth,

we know that liquid water is a really important solvent.

So it's the medium in which lots of chemical reactions can happen

for life to exist on Earth.

♪♪

Christian: Earth most likely provides

a very unique environment in terms of

elemental building blocks such as water and vapour.

♪♪

Murray: We know that there are exoplanets that exist outside

of our solar system.

We know that they exist.

We're very early on in our exploration.

We're able to look through the atmospheres of alien worlds

from their suns, and through spectroscopy,

we are able to figure out

what their atmosphere compositions are.

Chris: And we have detected water vapour on distant planets

through spectroscopy and a number of instruments.

So it's possible that if aliens are travelling

throughout the galaxy looking for life.

♪♪

Chris: They may have found water vapour in our atmosphere

and think that there is life here,

so we would be a very good candidate for visiting.

In other words, we would be visited by our cousins.

♪♪

Nathalie: GJ 9827 d is the smallest exoplanet

for which we have detected with confidence an atmosphere.

So this is either a super Earth or a mini Neptune,

sort of on that cusp, but that makes a big difference.

A super Earth would mean that it had a rocky core

with potentially a thick atmosphere or an ocean.

♪♪

Nathalie: A mini Neptune would be

that it's mostly a gas-type planet,

like Neptune.

So it's very hard to determine sometimes on which side

of the fence a planet lies on.

♪♪

Chris: Astronomers have identified a number

of nearby planets,

and actually have imaged some nearby planets

around distant stars not that far away,

within 20 or 30 light years,

which is still an enormous distance.

♪♪

Chris: But conceivable if there's a way

of travelling between the stars.

And these planets,

they're much larger than our Earth.

They may be closer to their star,

which means they would be hotter.

Narrator: For all our speculation,

NASA qualifies GJ 9827 d as a Neptune-like planet.

However, we think it's probably more of a mini Neptune,

so it has a thicker atmosphere, potentially an ocean underneath.

But what's really exciting is that we have detected

water vapour in it,

So that's why we call it a steam world.

♪♪

When we quote the temperature of an exoplanet,

we'll talk about its equilibrium temperature.

So that's the surface temperature of the planet,

based on how much starlight it's getting from its star,

how much energy and heat.

♪♪

And so that's assuming that there's no atmosphere

that's retaining some of that heat.

♪♪

So what we think it is,

it's a rocky core covered by a thick atmosphere

of steam water vapour.

Michael: So when we're looking at this question

of whether life could evolve

in a really thick water vapour-type

of environment, absolutely.

If there's any indication whatsoever based on what

happened here on Earth that life can arise and persist anywhere,

this is a great case study.

This is the petri dish of Earth that indicates that,

because the atmosphere was toxic.

The environment was hot.

The water was really just starting to move and form.

♪♪

Michael: So yeah, I would argue that life

doesn't just need liquid water,

but it could also arise and persist

in more of a free-floating state,

in a water vapour state, and clouds,

in thick gaseous hot environments.

So these exoplanets can be very Earth-like

in terms of their size, their mass, their composition,

but they're gonna tend to be very close in

with very short years, short orbital periods.

And because they're so close,

a lot of them are going to be tidally locked essentially.

So that ends up being a little bit different from what we have

here on Earth.

They won't have the same day-night cycle

that we have here.

They'll have a day side and a night side.

♪♪

Narrator: But if there are life forms on GJ 9827 d,

what might they look like?

And is there any possibility that they might be sentient

and sufficiently advanced to cross galaxies?

Nathalie: GJ 9827 d not only has an exoplanet atmosphere,

but it is the first confirmed steam world.

So it is very hot, very close to its star.

♪♪

Nathalie: Hotter than 400 degrees Celsius.

So if there is water there,

it might not be able to live in a liquid form.

GJ 9827 d is not a place where we would expect to see

anything resembling humans.

And in fact, for life to evolve there at all,

it would be something completely different

than what we are used to considering

in the context of intelligent life,

or any life for that matter.

Who's to say that there aren't other opportunities

that we haven't explored that could maybe foster

other forms of life?

♪♪

Murray: Maybe their sole purpose is,

one, to measure our magnetic field of the Earth,

how that interacts with the sun--

♪♪

Murray:--because right now the sun is very active,

so it's creating an Aurora Borealis effect.

So they're able to measure, they're able to test,

and to effectively map out how that works.

Because they're travelling from a south to north direction,

which, by the way, is the direction of the flow.

♪♪

Narrator: The conditions for life present in GJ 9827 d

stretch the limits of human imagination.

What does it mean for the technology available

to its inhabitants?

Michael: In a lot of UFO cases,

descriptions have been given where it's not simply

joysticks and buttons,

but in some cases there's handprints

where their energy is almost in control,

and there's other aspects of their sort of telepathic

kinesthetic psychokinesis sort of activities happening.

Murray: Sometimes our idea that there are going to be

other humanoids on ships may be incorrect.

And instead,

what we are in fact looking at are beings that have adapted

to an environment over a great period of time to space itself.

And what we are actually witnessing

are living extensions of life, or biological machines.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Working within our process,

we have pushed the boundaries of our theory to now suggest

it is possible for the craft seen in the skies above Kelowna

to actually be a life form itself.

♪♪

Chris: We have cell phones and watches

and things like that

a hundred years ago wouldn't have even been thought of.

Imagine if that planet around that star had

a hundred years ahead of us in terms of a boost.

What would their technology be like?

Not just a hundred, but imagine a thousand,

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years

in advance of us technologically.

♪♪

Murray: So for us to say, .Oh no, that's it,

well there can't be anything more than a microbe, / is,

I understand the odds

of complex life are very, very difficult.

There's a lot of hurdles to get through

to get to where we got to, but we got there.

♪♪

Murray: We put probes on the moon.

We are going that direction now.

AI intelligence is an extension,

is a biological extension of our thinking process.

We're making synthetic intelligence.

We already have machines.

We've sent probes into space.

We have probes on Mars that are intelligent.

They need to be intelligent.

It seems to me that over a given time,

a biological starting point, which is us,

over a great span of time may generate

or create something that is biological.

Often we divide ourselves from that transition,

but it's possible that over time we become those machines.

♪♪

If you were a species that evolved where longevity

was entirely different,

and you were able to go into space and you were,

say, radiation resistant,

you already have two things working for you right there.

Maybe gravity isn't a factor.

Three!

You don't have to rely on gravity to keep your bones

dense enough to hold you up against gravity.

Or if you're smart enough,

can modify yourself to adapt to those kinds of things.

So the distance that you would travel is not a problem.

You don't even have to travel at the speed of light to get here.

You could take your time.

And along the way,

you could marvel at all the magnetic fields,

and soak it all in en route to this weird little binary system

called Earth and the Moon.

And on it are teeming with life surrounded

by the magnetic field, protecting life on that planet.

They would be very inclined to see how the magnetosphere works

on our planet.

Usually with an electric field,

you can learn a lot about the object that's generating

the electric field.

And so let's imagine that these are--these individual orbs

and they're triangular formation or perhaps even

their guiding lights to a hidden obfuscated triangular ship,

they may be looking for an opportunity

to learn about the Earth through the magnetic field

and its interaction with the sun.

Narrator: These extreme conditions,

where matter behaves in ways we don't typically experience,

reminds us how much about planets remains mysterious,

even in our own solar system.

But physical attributes, like pressure and temperature,

are just one piece of the puzzle.

To truly understand a planet's ability to harbour

or sustain life,

we may need to consider forces that are even less understood,

forces that may shape and protect planetary environments

in ways that we're only beginning to grasp.

♪♪

Murray: We don't know.

We don't really understand enough about

how magnetic fields work.

It's bizarre.

From almost a spiritual, scientific, magneto perspective,

let's imagine that really from their perspective,

they see magnetic fields as a signature,

as a form of communication with an entity.

They regard the Earth's magnetic field as an entity.

It's a living thing.

It changes, it moves, it grows, it's volcanism.

♪♪

Christian: No, we actually don't know

how vast the cosmos is

and what else is out there, and we obviously keep exploring.

♪♪

Christian: Planet Earth is unique in so many ways.

♪♪

Christian: There is nothing like this in our solar system.

There is no other planet that I'm aware of that presently

has water in its frozen, liquid and gas forms.

♪♪

We know that life started on this planet

pretty soon after it could.

The Earth's about 4.5 billion years old.

We have life at 3.7 billion, 3.8 billion years.

The time in between,

it's basically just a massive pile of magma.

Like, there's nothing that could probably live on that.

Once it started cooling down enough that life could arise,

it did.

♪♪

Michael: So that indicates that abiogenesis

might be pretty common,

that there could be a lot of life out there

all throughout the cosmos, and that it's pretty hearty.

It tends towards self-replication.

So that would have been a very extreme environment.

These were the first extremophiles,

and in a sense,

everything on Earth is descended from that,

so we're all extremophiles in a way.

Narrator: Regardless of the reason,

Bobby Vanderhoorn continues to watch

the night skies of Kelowna, hoping for another visitation,

connecting it to the visitations of others.

Bobby [on video]: Have you ever seen so many?

Lindsay [on video]: No!

♪♪

Bobby: There is a few people that have been seeing these

in the area.

It's not just me.

However, getting connected with these people is tough.

That's actually part of my only motivation actually

for getting together and speaking about this.

However, there is a few people around that have seen these,

and it is neat to get to know them,

find out what their experience is,

if they noticed anything different,

any patterns that we're recognizing.

Bobby [on video]: That's insane.

♪♪

And once you see something,

whether it's one little thing in the sky,

or even the Aurora Borealis,

you suddenly get pulled into this mystery.

And, you know, could there be a connection between the orbs

and the Borealis?

And just in the fact that he was watching that was wonderful.

But I think he got pulled into it,

he was in awe, and I think that's great.

Bobby [on video]: This is the best one.

I am curious.

I want to know if someone else has the answer,

or if someone else has experienced this,

and they do know what it is.

♪♪

Narrator: Is Earth so special that beings

from 100 light years away would visit us?

♪♪

Narrator: Do we possess something unique in the cosmos?

♪♪

Narrator: Until we understand their point of view,

we'll never truly know.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪