Original subtitles

♪♪

Narrator: In remote places,

strange things can go unnoticed for a long time.

Chris Rutkowski: To some people, it's not a question.

It's already known that they are here.

She feels like she's being communicated with,

probably awestruck by her experience.

They all look at us like we're crazy.

[laughs]

Narrator: A rare natural phenomenon

or a precursor to alien contact?

Neil Lavoie: There are certain parts of Alaska

that are included within something that's called

the Alaskan Triangle.

Susan Reft: My one daughter,

she never wanted to come to Alaska--

♪♪

--because the UFO sightings up here.

Narrator: Seeing is believing,

but it is not just the sight of the object,

but how Susan feels that is disconcerting.

Ashley Kircher: She thought they could see her inside her window

and that they were observing her.

And she became very fearful.

Narrator: What should we feel when alien beings watch us

from the skies above our homes?

Perhaps we should be afraid.

Susan: I was very fearful because I didn't want it

to come and get me.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Anchorage, Alaska, is a far cry

from the bustle of city life.

Alaska is a place of big wilderness and big sky.

♪♪

Christian Bohm: It's a wild place,

and it's a wild place

because of where it's located on this planet.

And it's a wild place with high mountains

and deep valleys and ocean and lake and wild climate.

♪♪

Ashley: There's so much wide open space in Alaska.

It's not contaminated by so many lights and huge cities

and even maybe air traffic and that kind of thing.

- [plane cuts air] - ♪♪

So things are more noticeable just like they are in

the rural areas.

People see things that you're never going to see in the city.

♪♪

Chris: Because it's so isolated,

something that you see in the sky might stick out in your mind

and be a little more obvious.

And such was the case of August 7, 2018,

where Susan Reft and her husband were watching the sky one day.

Neil: She was looking at an iridescent cloud

which has a bit of a rainbow effect

because it contains ice crystals within it.

Susan: We lived in Anchorage about seven, eight years,

and then we moved to Wasilla, bought a house out there.

Well, I love photography,

so I was taking pictures with my camera and I noticed these,

like, different colours in the clouds and rainbows.

It's kind of like oil paints you would see from a car puddle.

So I zoomed in on it and I was like,

.Wow, there is stuff up there. /

♪♪

Chris: There is a scientific explanation,

as one might expect.

This is cloud iridescence.

And this cloud iridescence does occur fairly regularly,

I've seen it many times.

What happens is that very,

very small particles are reflecting the sun,

tiny water droplets high in the atmosphere,

and very similar to rainbows and sundogs

that if they're seen at the right angle,

they will reflect a variety of colours in different directions

and can appear very colourful.

She had been taking photographs of rainbow-like effect

in the sky, likely caused by ice clouds.

And then suddenly, virtually out of nowhere,

a very large, dark object appeared,

approximately two football fields in length.

Susan: So I was taking pictures of those and sat down

and zoomed in on them

and was seeing some aircraft or something up there,

real tiny.

♪♪

Susan: As soon as I was saying that,

my husband's like, .Come over here,

you gotta see this, get this picture. /

Grabbed the camera

and there's this huge aircraft right there.

[camera shutter clicks]

She did start taking pictures,

and the first ones didn't work at all,

but the last two worked.

So she got two photos.

Susan: I had my smallest lens on

and I didn't have time to zoom it,

so that's not zoomed in at all.

So to the eye it looks further away,

but to us it was really close.

♪♪

Murray Toews: And it just sat there--

♪♪

Murray:--and she had the camera on hand, thought she'd try

and take a picture of that object,

but it did not work.

She had a sense that there was an intelligent presence to it,

to the point of even maybe frightening her a little bit.

♪♪

Chris: Sometimes you hear about cars stopping,

their motors shutting down, their lights going out,

that seems to be something that's common in UFO literature.

And it seems that according to the witness,

that's what occurred this time,

that the camera refused to function,

even though it worked perfectly fine in all other instances,

but just somehow couldn't capture a clear image

of the objects that were seen in Anchorage.

♪♪

Susan: Finally, I took two pictures

and then it vanished.

It was just gone that quick.

This didn't have any wings.

It was just hovering in the sky.

It was huge.

It was massive.

Right after I seen it, I locked all of our windows.

♪♪

Ashley: But then at the same time,

her husband, who was also there, said,

"Look out the window."

And she says there was this huge craft outside her window.

Murray: And then it started to move rapidly out of the way

as a plane approached.

And as it went away, her camera appeared to work

and she was able to take a couple

of very quick photographs of that object.

That kind of thing happens a lot for the record,

and everyone knows this, UFOs are very, very difficult

to take photos of because they move so quickly.

♪♪

Narrator: On that day in August 2018,

Susan had experienced something profound.

Could our perceptions we relied upon so fully

at times like this?

I often talk with people about

how big an object was, and very often somebody

will say something along the lines of,

"Well, it was as big as the moon.

Well, we often see the moon at night,"

and it turns out that the moon itself,

at full moon, if you stretch out your arm

with an aspirin or Tylenol tablet,

it actually covers the full moon.

♪♪

Chris: Perceptive ability and descriptive ability

are two different things,

and they aren't always mutually exclusive.

What you think may not be exactly what you see.

Our mind can have tricks played on it as well as our eyes.

Neil: When you're making an estimate,

if you see an airplane that's a low-flying airplane,

and you see it, and you go, .Okay,

well, that's a certain size, /

but you look at an airliner,

it's smaller than a small bush plane,

but it's a much bigger airplane, right?

The size distortion when something's at a distance

from you is very hard to judge.

Narrator: How does one gauge an accurate size of something

in the air?

Using an airplane as a reference point,

they fly at approximately 30,000 feet

and are 231 feet long.

Given their relative size versus the objects

that Susan photographed,

one can see how they came up with being the size

of two football fields.

♪♪

Narrator: Could there be more to it?

♪♪

There are certain parts of Alaska that are included

within something that's called the Alaskan Triangle.

♪♪

Narrator: Alaska is the place of 20,000 disappearances

since as early as 1972.

While not all of these are attributed to extraterrestrials,

the number is simply staggering.

♪♪

Chris: There have been a lot of cases from the eastern

and southern part of Alaska around Juneau.

There have been a number of cases

a little bit north of there,

Anchorage and in the interior on the Alaska highway,

for example.

♪♪

There's a lot of things that play into this.

There are UFOs seen constantly.

Could that be related to the disappearances?

Could that be related to the paranormal activity?

But people are starting to recognize that there

is maybe more of a correlation than we previously thought.

♪♪

Narrator: Despite the obvious natural dangers inherent

in Alaska's remote, untouched nature,

many believe that there is some kind of distortion

that disrupts navigation.

Christian: Under Anchorage, Alaska,

that has been and continues to cause

tectonic activities with, like, earthquakes

that goes all the way along

the suture between the two plates,

down through British Columbia down to California.

That's one of the most active zones tectonically.

So we have ongoing seismic activities,

and it's a tectonically ongoing active area.

There's old rocks there.

We have thinning of crust in places.

We have thickening of crust,

which typically refer to mountain building.

When you bulge up crust, you form mountains,

but at the same time, you compensate elsewhere,

and you extend crust, and you thin the crust.

And that means that the heat from the Earth's interior

comes closer to the surface,

and there's energy to be accessed

and released there as well.

♪♪

Narrator: The latent energy of this area

has been around for millennia.

Even some of its oldest inhabitants,

the Indigenous Tlingit people,

have long told stories of the spiritual gateways

and an ancient spirit that lures

the unsuspecting traveller to their death.

♪♪

♪♪

Susan: It was, kind of, you know--it was a little bit,

and then it moved, and then it was just gone.

There was no sound.

It was like a hovering.

That's how I would describe it.

But just vanished.

It was just gone.

I don't know if it went through some type of black hole

or if it just made itself invisible.

One of the most common things we get as UFO investigators

and researchers is when somebody presents us with a photo

and says, /Tell me what this is. /

♪♪

And it's our job to try and figure out what it was.

But very often,

we don't have details on where this was taken,

what time, what date, what direction you were looking,

how high up in the sky, were you using your eyes,

binoculars, cameras, and so forth.

And it's impossible from a simple photograph

to determine what things are most cases.

Narrator: And that's exactly what an unidentified

aerial phenomenon is.

Something that is not able to be explained away

by natural or human causes.

♪♪

Narrator: Perhaps what we expect to see

is only based on the limits of what we believe

about the possibilities of life.

♪♪

Narrator: The galaxy may have things in store

that defies our very comprehension.

♪♪

Michael: Obviously, if you see a light in the sky,

it could be a lot of things.

It could be a star, it could be an airplane.

But when they're moving erratically,

moving in and out of brightness, darkness, pulsating,

changing colour,

it really makes you sit up and pay attention

and recognize that you're looking at something

that's not normal.

♪♪

Narrator: Maybe the reason Susan Reft saw something

in August 2018 that didn't seem to behave like a craft

was that it wasn't one.

♪♪

I can feel the fear that I felt that day,

and the excitement.

I can just picture it right there.

Right there.

It was kind of like right where that cloud was,

but up a little bit,

and the rainbow cloud was right over here,

and it was just, boom, right there.

I was shocked, I was scared, because I'm like, you know,

.How in the heck can it see me

all the way in this apartment, you know? /

♪♪

Narrator: Using AI to enhance Susan's photographs helps us

see what may not already be evident.

♪♪

All the stories usually point to more personal experiences,

which makes it suspect

because people think, "Well, you're just delusional.

Why would it talk to you?

Why are you important?

You're not an alien. /

Maybe they're not interested in social structures.

And here's the other thing,

.How come it's not take me to my leader?"

Why are they not doing that?

That might be another clue as to what's going on.

Of course, a world leader would think,

.Well, y'all come to me.

I'm important, / right?

♪♪

Narrator: Could this be a different sort of contact?

Not one world to another, but one being to another?

They were selected somehow for some information.

Now, sometimes this is simply

an imagination that one desires to be contacted so much

that they believe that they are, in fact, contacted.

In other cases,

perhaps they're pulling the investigator's leg.

In this case,

I believe that the witnesses were quite sincere,

that they felt that there was some sort of communication

between the objects and themselves.

♪♪

Narrator: So could this encounter in fact

be no more than an interstellar traveller

stopping to look at wildlife it is curious about

rather than some major incursion or visitation?

♪♪

Murray: How do we communicate with something

that has likely evolved so vastly different?

Chris: So we do have a desire for some sort of communication.

Now, is it possible that aliens

not only are technologically advanced,

but also spiritually and metaphysically advanced?

And perhaps they come from somewhere

where there is a telepathic communication,

even though we don't know how telepathy could possibly exist.

But perhaps there's some mental aberration

that could be affected of your surroundings.

And perhaps a connection could be built between a witness

and an alien.

It could be that we're ants in an ant farm,

that we're being observed and experimented on.

♪♪

You don't need a surface or even a planet for life to develop,

you could just live in the clouds.

♪♪

Narrator: Perhaps life on another planet

just evolves differently--

♪♪

Narrator:--and the technology that is developed

is unique to that place.

♪♪

Nathalie Ouellette: And so there is this theory in astrobiology

where life could develop in the cloud deck.

We're lucky here on this planet that we can mine

all of these resources that help us construct

all of these things that allow us to interact

with the cosmos in a way that potentially other planets

might not be able to if they didn't have

those same resources,

because they might not have those same materials available

if it's just largely hydrogen, helium.

Narrator: Producers have asked our experts to speculate

about what life might look like if these visitors

came from planet WISE 0855,

7.4 light-years from the sun in the constellation Hydra.

♪♪

Nathalie: WISE 0855 is a very interesting case

because it is not an exoplanet.

It is actually what we call a brown dwarf.

So a brown dwarf is a class of celestial object

that is in between a planet and a star.

So what characterizes a star is that it's massive enough

for nuclear fusion to happen in its heart.

But nuclear fusion of hydrogen specifically,

takes a lot of mass and energy to fuse together hydrogen atoms.

♪♪

Nathalie: What's interesting with WISE 0855

is that it's quite cold.

So brown dwarfs are sort of these failed stars.

They're bigger than the largest gas giant planets,

but they're not massive enough in order for hydrogen fusion

to occur in their core.

Heavy hydrogen or deuterium can fuse.

♪♪

Nathalie: That is what is the furnace,

the engine of the star.

A planet doesn't have enough mass for that to happen.

A brown dwarf is sort of like this in-between object

where there's enough mass for nuclear fusion

of heavy hydrogen or deuterium to happen.

That takes less energy than hydrogen fusion.

So it's typically between 13

and 80 times the mass of Jupiter.

♪♪

Nathalie: The people who study brown dwarfs

prefer to call it a super planet.

♪♪

Nathalie: So WISE 0855 is not a planet orbiting a star.

It's its own object, free-floating around.

And it is the coldest brown dwarf we've ever discovered.

It's about 10 times the radius of Earth

and something like three to eight Jupiter masses.

Not even Earth masses,

but Jupiter masses.

It's huge.

It is room temperature.

You can think about putting out a piece of cheese on a plate

and life starts growing on it.

We see moulds and bacteria

and all of these different organisms.

The thing is, though, that those already existed.

We just don't see them because they're too small

until they grow into these colonies.

For a long time,

there is this idea of spontaneous generation,

that they would take a small piece of fruit

and put it in a jar, and suddenly there's Drosophila,

there's fruit flies on it.

Where did those come from?

But it's just the limitation of us not being able to see

the things that are very small made us think

that life grew out of nowhere,

whereas those things already existed.

They were floating around it and they just started to grow

in this isolated environment.

So I think it would be a little bit different,

but potentially there's some overlap there where we could

have things in that sort of nice,

warm, cozy environment start to develop.

♪♪

Narrator: But how can life just suddenly exist

in a complex form?

Michael P. Masters: Again, this would be an abiogenesis itself

at some point now or in the past or in the future,

who knows when.

But life started here in a very harsh environment.

♪♪

We have to recognize that we might be anthropocentric

in saying, just because we like this temperature,

everything does.

You go outside,

if it's negative 40, you're very uncomfortable.

If it's plus 40 Celsius, you're very uncomfortable.

♪♪

Michael: The fact that life started here on this planet

3.8 billion years ago in a very harsh, hot, putrid,

as far as the way we would consider environment,

but it thrived.

So it's important to recognize our potential anthropocentrism

and saying, just because this planet is nice

and comfortable for us,

it still might not be conducive to abiogenesis,

the beginning of life unto itself.

♪♪

Nathalie: This brown dwarf, we think,

is actually between minus 20, minus 30 degrees Celsius.

That sounds really, really surprising.

And so it doesn't have a surface for life to potentially live on.

But because it's so cold,

we think in the other upper layers of its atmosphere,

it could have clouds,

water vapour clouds, potentially.

♪♪

Narrator: And this water vapour could be the wellspring of life.

Over millions of years,

this life may have evolved into beings that look more like

they are swimming in the planet's atmosphere

than a terrestrial organism,

perhaps like a whale or a jellyfish of the sky.

♪♪

Neil: The hydrodynamics between

something like a jellyfish and a whale

is a whale actually swims through the water, right?

And it's actually propelling itself through the water

through movement of its body

and the fins are basically stabilization--

♪♪

Neil:--whereas the jellyfish is usually in a dome shape,

and it uses its movement of the dome.

It distorts the dome,

and it actually causes itself to propel that way.

And it's got a trailer on it that acts as a tail,

that actually adds stability there,

because that will drag behind.

It's almost a bit like the concept of a kite.

Narrator: Is this what Susan Reft saw

in the skies above Wasilla, Alaska, in 2018?

♪♪

Narrator: Some kind of interplanetary being swimming

in the atmosphere?

It was up there hovering like this.

♪♪

Susan: Just doing a little movement like that.

It wasn't totally still.

It was like crafting up there, hovering.

Solid black on the bottom, like a big shadow,

like a cloud.

But then the top was all, like, reflecting that sun,

the light.

It was really shiny.

♪♪

Narrator: It's possible that the visitors took an interest

in a being that was giving them some attention.

♪♪

Narrator: And this energy exchange

between observer and observed

was a catalyst for the entire experience.

♪♪

Maybe that's what it's trying to do,

is looking at you.

You're a lobster.

You know, it's like, .Oh, look. Look at that.

Isn't that interesting? Well, I'm off. See ya."

You know?

But this woman took that experience very seriously.

I don't feel like she had that sense.

I feel like from her experience, she took it to heart.

And that to me is intriguing.

Her response to her sighting, right?

It wasn't just a metal object in the sky.

It was big.

It was there.

It was trying to say hello.

And maybe it wanted an intimate relationship

because it jammed her camera.

But as it was left and seemed to unjam her camera.

Maybe they're not interested in social structures

or maybe they're not interested in civilization.

Maybe that's not important to them.

And that's a really good, interesting argument.

In fact, a number of physicists and astronomers

have warned that aliens visiting Earth

might be so sophisticated,

might be so technologically advanced,

that they would view us as ants in comparison to intelligence

and ability and would have no trouble in dominating us.

♪♪

Narrator: And more importantly, how would it be

from as far away from us as a planet

like WISE 0855 communicate with us.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: While we speculate on visitors from a star

that may only be able to create life in its atmosphere,

WISE 0855, we can only imagine how life

might have developed there--

♪♪

Narrator:--let alone been able to travel all the way here

from around 44 trillion miles away from Earth.

♪♪

Which brings us to the idea of communication.

"I want to learn about this organism.

Oh, it communicates, it's intelligent.

Oops, I evolved in a world without eyes.

I know you're there, but I sense you in another way.

But I can see a glimmer.

I can maybe connect with you in this other way."

And that's the experience that Susan Reft

might have experienced.

This is truly alien attempt and want to communicate.

Susan: You've heard all the stories.

So I went through the house and I locked all the windows.

I wanted that proof right there.

Now if I could get it, you know,

I wasn't backing it down from that minute.

But then afterwards it was just like, .Wow,

what just happened?

Did this just happen? /

Murray: Just like you might want to see a small animal

of interest on the ground,

you go to take a picture and it's gone.

So an interesting point,

there's a lot of interesting aspects to that sighting.

What struck me is this feeling of intelligent presence,

because we can certainly talk about the physics of

why the ship moved quickly or speculate

onto the UFO's behaviour that she had witnessed.

But what strikes me as interesting is the idea

that there may have been an attempt of communication.

And so here she is, and nonverbally,

there is no lights like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

There wasn't that sort of charming,

beeping or chirping or sounds or music effect or anything,

disco lights.

♪♪

Murray: You had just a dark presence

of an object that was sitting there

ominously floating in front of you,

that you were staring at it and it was staring back at you.

It didn't have eyes, so there was no eyes to lock.

So it makes me speculate that maybe it was in fact

trying to communicate with her.

♪♪

I'm not gonna step on their toes trying to get their picture,

to publicize it in any way that I possibly could.

To try to, you know, prove more that they're real.

Because I believe in them and I know they're real.

But that scared me and put a whole halt on it.

And I haven't taken any more pictures since.

Narrator: But how does a being from another

world communicate with us?

Imagine a being,

perhaps that evolved from a world without sensory perception

that we're used to.

Maybe they're sensitive to magnetic fields,

quantum fluctuations on a lower subatomic level.

Maybe they're communicating that way.

Telepathy, psionics, those kinds of things

are in the mainstream and they talk about that

quite a lot.

If we were to look at it at face value as we're looking

at a technological entity and/or ship,

then it could be either the ship itself has generated that field

to create that sense that she experienced,

or it in fact was trying to communicate.

♪♪

Narrator: What was it that drew the craft or creature to Alaska

that put Susan in its path?

Why was it there in the first place?

There is not only precious metals,

there is base metals.

Copper being very important still as an example

for a base metal.

But I think what's maybe of even more interest are minerals,

like rare earth elements.

Rare metals, we all have heard of them

more and more recently.

We continue to be increasingly interested in these elements

and minerals ourselves because they play a major role

in supporting advanced technologies.

They're being utilized for special type of magnets.

We use them in all kinds of electronics.

♪♪

I felt that when I was watching it,

there's another level of communication, a subtext,

if you will.

So say you're out on a date or something,

you might be saying something here,

but you're thinking something else.

Or if someone you know really, really well

for a great number of years says something,

you know, they're really saying this thing,

there's a subtext to it.

Chris: To some people, it's not a question.

It's already known that they are here,

and there's a lot of people in society who believe that.

And seeing objects that by themselves seem pretty innocuous

to some of us might be very profound,

might have deep meaning to a lot of individuals

who firmly believe

that the aliens are here for either nefarious purposes,

or because they are so obviously intelligent and powerful

and we don't know what they're capable of doing.

♪♪

Narrator: What is enough to make something take notice?

Do the curious themselves appear different to those

who have senses beyond our own?

♪♪

Murray: That was a passionate attempt

for an extraterrestrial race to talk to her

by any means possible.

Because their intent is to know us,

just to know us, that maybe they're alone too.

Maybe they want a friend.

They don't seem to want to destroy us.

They would have done it a long time ago.

They would have blown us up a long time ago.

So that right there tells me there's some communication,

like a physical interaction and an awareness

on the part of that ship or being

that this device in your hand somehow captures me

and I don't want you to do that.

So that speaks to a higher intelligence right there.

One other thing I wanted to say, too,

is that if this is what's going on,

they're making an effort to talk to us.

♪♪

Narrator: If visitors from another world

were trying to communicate,

one can't help but wonder why they consistently

choose to do so with those who already have

an inclination or belief in the existence to begin with.

Perhaps it is their curiosity that draws this contact.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: In the vast reaches of space and the entire cosmos

of possibilities unfolds.

♪♪

Narrator: It is sometimes hard to imagine things beyond life

as we know it.

Its shapes and sizes,

its technologies, and its motivations

may be beyond our perceptions.

Murray: From there, if they communicate,

how do they communicate?

So in other attempts that we've made,

apart from listening,

from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,

you have the messaging, extraterrestrial intelligence.

They are also working to develop language models

and ways to anticipate how to communicate

with hypothetical life forms outside.

So there are lots of attempts.

We're all attempting to do it.

In the old days,

and the people are still doing it,

they will go out and they will psionically communicate,

send out a mental collective signal through their minds

to draw UFOs to them.

And there have been claims that that's actually what happens,

and they visit them on a regular basis.

♪♪

Ashley: I do have one case that feels that he can summon them.

This is a current case,

and he feels that he does have a connection to them

and they will come when he summons them.

He feels very peaceful and feels that they are

benevolent and loving.

♪♪

Most of the other cases I have, they just do the observation,

they get either really scared and take off,

or they're totally blown away and want more.

But I can't say I've had any cases

where they feel like there's any sort

of communication or connection between them.

Not in my experience,

although I have read a lot about,

especially nowadays, where these military guys

are doing the summoning called psionics.

They feel like they have a connection with these things

and they're able to bring them in.

And who knows how long they've been doing it?

I mean, it's only come out now

because there's these whistleblowers

that are saying that this is happening.

It could have been happening years ago.

♪♪

Ashley: CIA did the whole remote viewing thing

that was all covered up

until finally someone leaked it or they had to admit it.

And then they said, .Oh, that program's been shut down. /

But then what I've heard is that that program is still running.

These things could all have been going on for many years.

♪♪

Ashley: Well, in Susan's case, she was very emotional

and already was very programmed by things

that she had watched and heard.

There's a lot of stuff there about abductions

and medical experiments, all that kind of thing.

I think she was more fearful about that.

♪♪

Ashley: It doesn't seem like she wanted to go outside

and try to get more pictures or go out another night

or talk to her neighbours or anything like that.

She kind of just shut down.

So she saw something and so did her husband,

and it freaked her out.

♪♪

♪♪

From the pictures that she has,

there's this large, dark thing,

and it was reflective.

It was reflecting the sun.

It was shiny.

So I think it would be hard to miss.

Most people would have seen that.

I mean, all you have to do

is tilt your head up a little bit.

And then they made the comment

that there was an airplane coming in,

they thought, from Kodiak Island,

that her husband said scared it, and that's when it disappeared.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: If we look at this image again with AI enhancement,

but this time with inputting the data about WISE 0855

and in minerals that are the region,

we get a different view of what may have been hidden

from our particular field of view.

Murray: It was just sending

a very basic sense of ominousness.

♪♪

That could happen any number of ways.

It could perhaps be inducing a field that it generates,

maybe by virtue of the field that gravic

or electromagnetic field,

or perhaps even a quantum-based field that affected

your thinking to feel like you were are comfortable

with this thing in front of you.

In fact, you can induce, it's called The God Effect.

You can induce feelings of elation and connection

with something just by inducing powerful magnetic fields

introducing it to your brain,

because your brain does not have shielding.

Narrator: Many believe that the UAPs or UFOs that appear

in the skies are beings trying to contact us.

While we speculate their origin on WISE 0855,

understanding more about this astral body

could perhaps give us insight into what beings

from a place like this may see when they look at us.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Maybe in August 2018,

Susan Reft and her husband had just been in

the right place at the right time

for a different sort of rare encounter.

♪♪

Narrator: One that wasn't human, but was indeed of this Earth.

Susan: It was super, super shiny on top.

It just was sucking up the sun's energy or to blend in

even with the sun.

It was just super shiny and just solid black on the top.

It was crazy.

Never seen anything like it.

It was just standing there.

It was like hovering.

Narrator: Maybe it's something looking for people

who can see it,

trying to make contact with us despite our differences.

Maybe that's not important to them.

Maybe they have a completely different way.

If this is alleged to be true,

how would you organize a civilization

over vast distances, over huge spans of time?

Christian: We tend to think along the lines

of things we know.

And so if I think of an exoplanet

that has a water vapour atmosphere,

so that's obviously something that can be

somewhat similar to the Earth's atmosphere.

♪♪

Christian: Its presence,

accumulation or possible escape on an exoplanet

in its atmosphere

and how it may impact life forms there.

I can only imagine that an environment like an exoplanet,

it's somewhat dynamic as well and it's changing.

So there may be a need to adapt,

to figure things out, to go elsewhere and check.

Narrator: Maybe they are creatures

of extreme environments,

which is why they appear in the Alaska Triangle.

Or maybe they, like us, must rely on elements of life

that are difficult to find in the great desert of

space between stars and planets.

The whole climate cycle as we know it on Earth,

it's very intense in an area like Anchorage,

with the control from the ocean currents

how a mountain range controls climates,

what it means locally, regionally,

water in its various forms, ice, liquid

and also vapour clouds.

Clouds are vapour.

♪♪

Nathalie: Potentially, clouds of even maybe water vapour

could condense in the upper layers

of its atmosphere.

And so we could potentially theorize that life

that doesn't require a surface could survive

in that cloud deck in terms of being on that planet.

♪♪

Narrator: Could it be that visitors are drawn

to the simple building blocks of life,

like water wherever they exist in abundance in the universe?

♪♪

Christian: Anchorage, Alaska, is a very attractive place

to access many of those elements.

But for a life form of intelligence

coming from elsewhere,

they may be interested in other things

that we're not considering presently.

I remember even 10, 15 years ago, as a geologist,

we didn't talk much or think much about certain type

of elements like cobalt or gadolinium,

or even like neodymium or some rare metals,

rare earth elements.

And now a lot of funding, a lot of activities,

a lot of exploration.

And Anchorage is a bit of an extreme place,

at least if it comes to humans and other forms of life,

we need to consider other type of life forms,

like organisms that exist in, let's say, a glacial lake,

or within the ice of a glacier.

Murray: So imagine what it would be like.

You have a species or a life form,

whatever form that may take a biological,

biomechanical, silicon-based.

It could be amorphous energy or whatever,

how they make sense of their environment

based on their evolution

and their ability to sense their environment,

to communicate with others,

to organize themselves into a society or a structure,

to traverse the universe,

to even visit us in the first place.

Susan Reft is standing there and she feels like

she's being communicated with.

Probably awestruck by her experience,

but she did have a sense that she was being communicated with.

♪♪

And then right before it vanished,

I got two pictures.

And my husband thinks it was because a plane

was coming in from Kodiak.

There was aircraft coming in,

and they didn't want to be seen by the aircraft.

So it either made itself vanish or it took off.

I didn't see the aircraft.

My husband saw that, my eyes were just on the UFO.

It's obviously showing itself to me

because I was taking pictures of them in the sky.

I believe in them.

So I've gotten other pictures and I had my smallest lens on,

and I didn't have time to zoom it.

So that's not zoomed in at all.

So to the eye it looks further away,

but to us it was really close.

What's happening there?

What's going on?

There's a lot of mystery associated with it,

a lot of theories about what could be happening.

But if enough people see these things,

we eventually have to pay attention to them

and take them seriously,

because there could be something more going on.

And the other one picked up.

It was like it was moving,

spinning a certain way,

so it didn't come out as vibrant.

But there was something up there doing that for sure.

Whether it was our own people or something else,

there was something up there making those colours.

Murray: There's different scales of technological milestones

that civilizations could take.

The Kardashev scale is one of them.

It's commonly talked about,

there's different types of civilizations

that using human advancements in technology,

they're able to actually scale it up.

And you could say it was a type 2,

type 3 civilization that's able to harness

massive amounts of energy,

like of a planet and then their own sun.

But behind all that is a technology

and a way of looking at the world

that requires a complex modality

of communication styles.

♪♪

Murray: So they've quite potentially have discovered

a more eloquent way to communicate

based on their evolution.

So the other scale is called a Barrow Scale

and it isn't civilization-based technologically.

Imagine a species that's gone the other direction

and they're just learning how to manipulate things lower down,

even down to the subatomic level,

even to the quantum level.

And there is some evidence to suggest that our brains

have a link to some quantum effects.

We weren't there standing next to Susan and her husband,

so we can't say for sure

that's what these were.

♪♪

Narrator: But what would a UFO POV be?

♪♪

Narrator: Perhaps they see a part of us

that is like them and can see in us themselves.

♪♪

Narrator: Only visible would be the part of us

that can communicate,

♪♪

Narrator: Our brains and our nervous systems

all connected by the electromagnetic fields

around us.

♪♪

Murray: Maybe upon reflection,

she could maybe think about it more,

maybe there's something there.

♪♪

Emerge in her dreams or her thoughts afterwards

that can piece together the puzzle that was sent to her.

That's just wild speculation.

It's fun to think like that.

Again, it does speak to the difficulty of communication

even with species on Earth.

One other more down-to-earth story that simultaneously

is that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

sends out signals into space trying to communicate

with other life forms.

And it makes a lot of sense.

♪♪

Seemed to me there was a subtext

and the physical presence of it too

was relating a communication style to her

that I'm not sure she's completely deciphered

in her own mind.

Maybe she's still working through it.

Susan: I haven't gone looking for them.

Kind of just, I know they're there

and I don't want them to bother me,

so I don't bother them.

♪♪

Chris: It seems reasonable that if aliens really do exist,

that they would communicate in ways

that we don't understand.

That's the definition of .alien. /

We don't have the ability right now to do any of this.

It's all in the realm of science fiction.

But of course, a lot of science fiction concepts

are becoming true every day.

And, you know, we're probably only 10 or 15 years away

from actual contact or actual identification

of life around some distant star.

Narrator: We don't see the world as it is,

we see it as we are.

An alien species would have a very different criteria

to explore Earth than we do.

Different needs and different curiosities.

Maybe we need to not ask what is unique about the Earth,

but what is unique about ourselves.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪