Original subtitles

♪♪

♪♪

Nick [on video]: Whoa! What the [bleep]?

Tessa [on video]: What's going on?

Nick [on video]: I don't know, honey, what is this?

Tessa Nick [on video]: Whoa!

It was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

It was crazy.

Like, there was stuff that was flying around us right then.

Tessa [on video]: Wow.

[Tessa gasps]

I had, like, my camera up here,

and it was bringing the lens of my camera down to the ground.

It was more like, .Okay, that's pretty weird. /

Murray Toews: It's really difficult to speculate

if we are being visited,

why they cluster in certain areas.

Dr. Michael P. Masters: The Alaskan Triangle,

it's a really fascinating place

where a lot of very strange things happen.

Ashley Kircher: I think they're making themselves known,

because they want to prepare us.

That's just my opinion.

Chris Rutkowski: Dogs were barking

and there was this sense that something was wrong.

Tessa [on video]: Whoa!

Nick: And we noticed that there was one right above

the bay over here, just moving around,

blinking in all sorts of colours.

Yeah. It moved so fast.

You can see it almost like a tracer behind it, you know?

[barking]

Nick: I grabbed my.44 Magnum

and brought it inside the RV after with me.

Narrator: When the sky itself seems to send a warning,

what kind of danger is waiting in the dark?

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Dr. Masters: The Alaskan Triangle is named such

partly because of the Bermuda Triangle,

which most people are familiar with.

And it's a really fascinating place where a lot

of very strange things happen.

Small town at the very tip, as far north as you can go,

runs all the way down into Anchorage

and then over to Juneau, Alaska.

And within this triangle,

it's very well known for a lot of UFO sightings,

disappearances of planes,

entire planes with pilots and crew,

and all of the passengers that disappear,

and are never seen again.

Narrator: Since the 1970s, over 16,000 people

have gone missing in this triangle.

Within it lies the town of Yakutat.

This is where Nick Pavlik lives.

Nick: Just a beautiful place in Alaska, you know?

Surrounded by natural beauty everywhere,

and it's a very small community

of really tight knit families, you know?

Christian Bohm: The most wild and remote place in Alaska

where a lot of unusual things can happen.

Nick: Six hours daylight, and then it's pitch black.

But in the wintertime,

it's like nothing you've ever seen.

It was December 14 of 2019.

I was on a medical trip

with my girlfriend Tessa from Anchorage.

Chris: This is getting close to the time of 24 hour darkness,

so you're not that far north yet,

but you're far enough north

that it's pretty cold and it's dark.

And the sky is beautiful.

Nick: We were out of firewood in the main house

and I had recently purchased a motorhome,

and had propane for the propane furnace.

We stayed in there just for the night for heat.

And about like five in the morning,

I started getting raindrops on my forehead and above my bed,

you know, dripping on me.

So I got up.

Chris: So we took his camera out and tried to get a video

of whatever was causing this leak on the van.

Well, he was surprised to see off in the distance

above the trees, a light,

and it was shimmering.

It was changing, dancing colours.

Nick [on video]: Keep recording no matter what, okay?

Tessa [on video]: I am not stopping.

Chris: And he didn't know what this was.

And his girlfriend as well took a look,

and she didn't know what this thing was either.

Tessa [on video]: Wow.

This is blowing my mind.

Nick [on video]: I knew these [bleep] were out here.

Tessa [on video]: Everybody better be watching this.

Nick [on video]: Nobody is.

We are the only ones watching this, Tessa.

- Tessa [on video]: Bull. - Nick [on video]: I guarantee.

Tessa [on video]: There has to be so many people in the world

that can see this right now.

Narrator: Nick called his friend, Crainston Nigus,

eager to share what their cameras caught.

Together, they poured over the strange footage,

trying to make sense of it.

Was it a trick of the light, or something else entirely?

Strangely, the very next night, the phenomena appeared again.

Crainston: It was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

It was crazy, though.

Like, there was stuff that was flying around us right then,

7AM.

And later,

when we looked at the security camera footage

that was infrared light,

that's when we saw the other stuff happening on the ground.

Narrator: They weren't the only witnesses.

On the other side of town,

Quinn Newland also saw the lights.

Quinn: This had been going on all winter.

But, yeah, I think he was the first

one that said something,

because we had all kinda gotten footage

and then he had said something.

- Woman [on video]: It's moving. - Quinn [on video]: Oh my god.

Woman [on video]: I'm not kidding.

Quinn [on video]: This is like exactly what they seen

on [bleep] Nick's video.

I don't know. I'm keeping my hands still.

Woman [on video]: Okay, because it's moving.

Quinn [on video]: Mom, come look at this.

Quinn: It's the same thing everyone goes through.

You go, .Oh, is that--it might be a shooting star.

Oh, it's a satellite going by, / you know?

.It's this. It's that. /

I don't know. It was definitely just different,

because we've seen satellites before.

We've seen stars, you know?

Tessa [on video]: Wow.

Chris: And when you have multiple witnesses see

the same or similar object--

Tessa [on video]: This is blowing my mind.

--it suggests that there is a real phenomenon

that whether it be a natural phenomenon

or something that's flying up there caused by humans,

we know that multiple witnesses suggest that this is a case

that should be taken a little more seriously

than just a single witness case.

♪♪

The fact that you have this light just above the treeline,

just above the mountains, changing colours,

brings up a very interesting question in ufology.

Narrator: From a scientific standpoint,

what can be drawn from witness accounts like these?

Do they point to natural explanations

or hint at something less understood?

Neil Lavoie: So satellite would have been way up in the air,

and that's not really what they described.

Satellites follow a pattern movement.

These things moved in figure eights, et cetera.

So very doubtful it was a satellite.

As far as an aircraft goes like a helicopter

and a fixed wing,

they made note that they knew what a helicopter

and fixed-wing looked like.

- Woman [on video]: Look at it. - Quinn [on video]: Look at it.

Woman [on video]: It's moving. You can see it.

Quinn [on video]: Can you see it?

Look at it.

Woman [on video]: It's going like this.

Neil: Well, based on my understanding

of what they saw,

it sounds a lot to me like drone technology.

- ♪♪ - [drones buzz]

Narrator: For argument's sake,

what is the plausibility that the phenomena might be drones?

Neil: At the period of time,

there were several drone models that could have actually been

used to do that.

You can actually get lightning kits for these things,

so you can actually see them at night.

And there's also the ability to do swarms of drones.

So you can actually program drones to actually do

different patterns, right, together.

Ashley: So how the witnesses described this

was, it was a ball of light zipping around

and blinking very quickly,

but then sometimes it would explode into many colours,

and then go back down to a white ball of light,

which I've actually never heard before.

♪♪

Nick: We're at the house that I was living in at the time.

We had my RV right about right here,

where this puddle runs right here.

And then my security camera was right there.

♪♪

Nick: I had woken up.

I hopped out of my RV,

and then above the tree line over here,

I saw a weird light,

made my neck hair stand up out of nowhere.

I went in and got Tessa,

and we noticed that there was one

right above the bay over here, just moving around,

blinking in all sorts of colours,

figure eighting and stuff right here.

You can see like the curvature of its turns and stuff,

you know?

Yeah, it moved so fast you can see it almost had, like,

a tracer behind it, you know?

Tessa [on video]: Wow [gasps].

Nick: Yeah, we were kind of shocked.

Nick [on video]: Keep recording, no matter what.

Tessa [on video]: I am not stopping.

And kind of in awe, and then kind of the shock

and awe became a little bit scared towards the end of it,

I'd say.

You know, enough to where I grabbed my.44 Magnum

and brought it inside the RV after with me,

you know, just for my own comfort,

even though I know it probably wouldn't help nothing [laughs].

♪♪

Murray: So three gentlemen witnessed light formations,

points in the sky.

One of them, I believed,

had an effect where their dogs started barking,

uncontrollably prior to seeing an event.

It speaks to the weirdness that was going on at that time.

Tessa [on video]: Wow [gasps].

Murray: It's really difficult to speculate

if we are being visited,

why they cluster in certain areas.

Quinn [on video]: I don't know. I'm keeping my hands still.

Woman [on video]: Because it's moving.

Quinn [on video]: Mom, come look at this.

Woman [on video]: There it goes. Right there. Right there.

You see it?

When Cranston also came out

and started videoing and looking at the sky,

he was seeing basically the same things

that Nick and Tessa were seeing.

- [dogs barking] - ♪♪

Crainston: There's all kinds of activity going on.

When we were in town, we saw, like,

three different places in the sky

where there was something moving all over the place.

And so when we got back out here,

we spotted a few more things.

And I parked down here,

and I was filming that direction,

and it was crazy.

Narrator: Could all this activity be coming

from somewhere in our own solar system?

Nathalie Ouellette: So that's a really interesting question too

because the habitable zone,

is a lot wider than just where the Earth is located.

Venus and Mars are sort of the limits

of the habitable zone.

So when you're placing that Goldilocks zone

in exoplanetary systems beyond the solar system,

you have to think that if aliens were looking in,

might consider Venus and Mars as potentially habitable,

and we know they're not very hospitable in the solar system.

Earth is right in the middle though,

so we're in a really comfortable place.

So I actually think if there was alien life in the solar system,

it would be on one of these water worlds

or ice moons rather than Mars.

That's where I would place my bet.

Nick: Quinn, he happened to see something shortly after,

he's like, .Yeah, look at this. /

And a few--like, the elders,

they've been seeing it for years, they said,

you know, throughout time, way back when.

Quinn: There's definitely been other encounters

that I've heard from the elders and stuff, but...

Nick: For me, you know, they're in their 70s and stuff,

they're talking about, you know, 40,

50 years ago.

They've been seeing it, you know,

since they're my age or younger.

And I didn't really get time to ask them in-depth,

like, you know, .Have your people, you know,

your grandparents or elders seen this too, /

you know?

[frenetic scratching sounds]

Narrator: Most UFO encounters come without a sound,

but not this one.

Why did these witnesses hear something when so many others

report silence?

Nick Pavlik called it .electronic crickets. /

Nick: Yeah.

It was making, like--I guess I can call it,

like, electronic crickets would kinda sound like,

you know?

Nothing like I ever heard, you know,

and it'd come in and out of, like, hearing range,

but you can hear it on some of the audio.

[frenetic scratching sounds]

Nick: I've never heard that sound before or since.

[frenetic scratching sounds]

Narrator: What kind of presence makes a noise like that?

And then there's the camera footage.

Beneath the strange churring, a steady thumping can be heard.

Is it mechanical, natural, or something else entirely?

Chris: We talk about visual cues,

feelings of anxiety,

but sounds are another kind of phenomena

that are sometimes associated with UFOs.

And in the case of Yakutat,

we had a number of witnesses say that they had heard things

like electronic chirps or crickets of some sort.

Certainly, sounds are part of the UFO phenomenon.

In the case of Yakutat,

I think that the fact that sounds were heard in addition to

the visual cues suggests that there was more to the phenomenon

than just an object that was dancing around in the sky.

Tessa [on video]: Oh, there's more.

♪♪

♪♪

Quinn: I was sitting there recording it,

and I had my camera up here,

and it was bringing the lens of my camera down to the ground.

So I was, like--so I was aiming it up in the sky,

and it'd go and it'd bring my lens,

like, down to the tree line.

Quinn [on video]: It just keeps on, like,

flicking my camera down.

And I go and I reset it, and just go like that.

But it's just the lens.

And then I'd be sitting there and,

like, have it up here.

And it, like, it happened multiple times,

because it's like, okay, maybe I just, you know,

accidentally brought it down,

but it go [affects dip], and I bring the lens.

That's what freaked me out.

And after that, it seemed like it started, like,

kind of coming closer towards our neighbourhood.

So we sat there--I mean,

this was probably about like 30 minutes we were sitting there.

And it started getting a little closer

and it was like, .Yeah, okay, that's a little weird. /

Tessa [on video]: What are you?

Nick [on video]: This is weird.

Tessa [on video]: Come on, show yourself.

You know I'm watching you, huh?

There's many of these things.

There's not just one.

So in Tessa's video, she's she's talking to them,

and she's saying, .Oh, I see you.

Come out and show yourselves, /

and all of a sudden,

that one of the lights becomes a big blue orb.

Nick [on video]: The circle cracked.

The lights go in circles. You see that?

Tessa [on video]: [gasps] Nick!

It's very fast.

You really have to watch for it.

Tessa [on video]: I wonder how big it is.

As far as what I mean with, like, the colour,

especially when there was, like,

that high activity period of time when we'd be hearing

that cricket noise or whatever,

it'd be whipping around,

and then it looked like it would just explode into colour.

It'd be, like, the white light would go "poof"

in like a round blast of, like, blue or red or green,

and then just it come right back to a light flying around still

like the little white, you know?

Narrator: What were the lights and what does that tell us

of the visitors?

Are they trying to communicate with us?

Dr. Masters: Anything conscious is intelligent in some form.

It's interacting with its environments in ways

we don't maybe understand

or maybe don't bother to focus on

because we're somewhat anthropocentric

in our perspective of other conscious life.

But there's study after study that shows that even plants

react to their environments and have communication pathways

that allow them to know of threats that exist.

- ♪♪ - [water babbles]

So it's benign, to a degree,

observational communication that they want with us.

Tessa [on video]: It's something intelligent.

Nick [on video]: Something big.

Tessa [on video]: I know.

Murray: It's a good perspective

because, again, that's another way of flipping it,

flipping your point of view, right?

We fail miserably at talking to our cat,

but we know what our cat wants.

We know what our dog wants.

But past that,

we don't really know a lot about them as entities.

Tessa [on video]: What is it, Nick?

Narrator: Could the lights be some unknown mode of propulsion

or communication?

Or could they be an advanced sensor system?

Nick [on video]: Big craft,

and we're seeing only just little lights around the craft

here and there.

Tessa [on video]: Whoa!

Narrator: Science has shown us that light

can be used as sensors.

In the security field,

light is used in motion detection.

Other applications include UV radiation monitoring,

heat detection,

RFID scanning for inventory,

even to track vital signs in medical fields.

[frenetic scratching noises]

Narrator: But what about the sounds our witnesses heard?

I heard it both audibly and digitally.

Tessa [on video]: What the [bleep] are they, Nick?

Nothing like I ever heard.

It comes in and out of, like, hearing range,

but you can hear it on some of the audio.

[frenetic scratching noises]

Yeah. I've never heard that sound before or since.

Tessa [on video]: What's going on?

Nick [on video]: I don't know, honey.

Nick: It was .imminent danger approaches. /

.Imminent danger, / and just constantly that thought

kept running through my head on repeat.

Quinn: I'm sitting here recording it,

at the same time, which was freaky,

all the dogs in the neighborhood

were just making horrendous noises.

They were just kind of screeching

and barking, hardcore.

I mean, the way up until the next neighbourhood over.

[dogs barking incessantly]

Chris: Dogs were marking,

and there was this sense that something was wrong.

Quinn [on video]: Something's going on here.

We can surmise a couple of things.

One is that you're in fact hearing the mechanical workings

of whatever that craft or crafts might be.

Or two, it could be a form of communication.

For example,

there's an effect known as the Doppler effect.

If you were sitting in your car and someone were to yell at you,

speeding past you in a car,

the sound waves become more compressed

as you get closer to you,

and then they stretch as they go farther away.

The typical .siren you hear in the night / sound.

[siren blares]

Murray: So there's a theory out there

that what you're witnessing

is whatever the sound of that craft is.

Let's imagine that it is powered by a gravic field.

And a gravic field is like a gravity well.

Like the Earth pulls in a gravity well.

Time for us is actually a little different down here.

It's a little slower than it is for us just ten, 15,

20 kilometres going up.

But if you have a powerful gravic field,

and you had a ship that was powered like that

and it made a sound,

then the sound that would come out would be distorted,

and you'd have these weird sped-up sounds.

They'd be warped or distorted.

Neil: So if you have multiple drones,

generally drones have little rotors on them,

and they're spinning and they're buzzing away.

But they're not all spinning at the same speed.

As you're moving the drone,

what happens is they change the speeds of each rotor

to actually control the flight.

And what'll happen is if you have multiples,

they start to resonate with each other a little bit,

and you can actually hear a modulation to it

depending at times.

So you might even hear it in the form of a clicking noise,

especially if it's cool outside.

The other piece is with known drone technology at the time,

they're using transmitters in the gigahertz range,

and your phone works in the gigahertz range,

and if you record the noise,

might hear clicking in the microphone,

or the signal can even interfere with the phone,

maybe even making it make noise.

Nick [on video]: What the [bleep]?

Narrator: The craft's impossible movements

ignite the imagination.

What if the lights weren't flying freely at all,

but moving across a grid on the craft itself?

That could explain their strange motion.

Perhaps it was searching for something,

or someone.

Nick: I mean, must have been covering miles,

probably at least three, possibly five miles in a single,

you know, blink flash, you know?

Just super fast.

To do a full figure eight, no more than a second,

maybe half-a-second, just really fast.

Crazy fast, you know?

The blinking lights looked like maybe lights going off

in like a sequence around something.

Nick [on video]: It's a circle craft.

The lights go in circles. You see that?

Tessa [on video]: Yeah.

Nick [on video]: It's spinning a circle around a craft.

Do you see that [bleep]?

Narrator: If one were to try to discount this

as a UAP experience, how might it be rationalized?

Neil: If you were operating your drones,

you'd wanna be able to see them.

And if you had multiple drones, if you had one here, one here,

and one here, and you've shone a light,

or you had this one's light turn on here,

and then this one's turned its light on here,

and this one turned its light on here,

that makes it look like that drone just moved really fast.

It just sort of teleported itself almost over into there,

and then teleported itself there.

Narrator: However, rather than a sudden jump,

the eyewitness footage shows a continuous path of light.

So while there may have been multiple vehicles,

they weren't flashing in sequence as one might expect

from man-made remote, or automated machinery.

Chris: Whatever this light was,

it was moving around in a way

that didn't seem to be an airplane,

didn't seem to be a star or a planet.

In fact,

there were no planets easily visible that night at all.

So they had no idea what this light was,

and it seemed to be approaching, getting further away,

and they also had this feeling of dread.

They were in some sort of danger or shouldn't be there.

Our atmosphere does play interesting tricks,

on distant lights, especially low to the horizon.

Is this what was seen?

Well, we simply don't know.

But the fact that so many people were seeing it

and insisting that these were not aircraft,

drones, stars, planets, satellites,

it suggests that there is a real phenomenon

that was being observed.

Narrator: Could it be that these visitors never crossed

interstellar space at all?

What if their origin lies here

in our own celestial neighbourhood?

If so, what else might be stirring

in the shadows of our solar system,

waiting for us to notice,

attracted potentially by those icy moons

around Jupiter and Saturn.

And the reason why they're interesting for life

is even though they're very far from the sun,

they are covered in ice,

and they hide underneath their surface a liquid water ocean.

So they do have lots of liquid water,

and it could be that that ice is actually really useful

to protect any potential life inside from harmful radiation

in space.

Narrator: As compelling as the idea of sentient neighbours

within our solar system may be, the truth seems far stranger.

These visitors move with a mystery of space and time

that no nearby world could conceal.

If they are not from here,

then they must be from far beyond,

crossing unimaginable distances.

And if they've come so far,

what might they be searching for?

Dr. Masters: Maybe they're looking for

a pristine environment to make their own home

or to extract all of the resources

that we have that maybe are lacking on their planet.

One thing that characterizes this planet

ever since the Neolithic Revolution,

the Industrial Revolution,

is we overuse and over-extract resources throughout the process

of entropy causes problems.

We're facing a climate catastrophe.

We're a resource-needy planet.

You know, that's not going to change.

And because of the unusually diverse geology,

and the geological history of Alaska,

the climate, the weather, the seasons,

then the unusual differences in elevations,

in the glaciers, and how the glaciers change,

it's just so dynamic.

Being close to the plate margin, you know,

it's a very active area for seismicity,

earthquake activity, so there's a lot going on.

And when there is a lot going on,

that can lead to unusual accumulations of minerals

like gold, gold deposits that are being mined.

But there's a lot of other mines too, base metals.

So, Yakutat, I would focus on titanium

in addition to gold.

The interesting thing compared to elsewhere in North America

or in Alaska is that I would be looking for the titanium

actually in, like, sand deposits that are the product

of erosion and recycling and so on.

The titanium is concentrated in a mineral

that's called ilmenite.

And the ilmenite originally, it comes out of weathered,

eroded, broken-down rock that's iron-magnesium-rich,

like volcanic rocks, ultramafic rocks,

magnesium-iron-rich.

Narrator: Could it be these mineral-rich deposits

that are attracting visitors?

If they didn't come from within our system,

where might they have come from?

So you can't see these exoplanets themselves.

They're too small,

especially next to a really bright star.

So what you do instead,

you have specialized telescopes like Kepler,

who's now retired, and the TESS mission.

They stare at hundreds of thousands of stars

for longer periods of time, and they see if these stars dim,

get less bright periodically.

And if there is a dimming sort of like on a regular basis,

that's a good clue that something is orbiting around it.

Narrator: Among the many new worlds revealed by the searchers

at NASA and the European Southern Observatory,

one stands out to the producers of our series,

LHS-1140b.

Could this distant planet hold the answers?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: To even imagine where they might have come from,

we first have to understand how life might evolve

on another world,

and why they might travel to ours.

We're not saying this is the place,

we're only assigning a world to look at as a possibility.

A planet like LHS-1140b, similar to ours in some ways,

gives us a starting point.

Nathalie: So LHS-1140b

is a super interesting exoplanet 48 light years away,

and what is really interesting it's a super Earth.

So it's larger than Earth, more massive than Earth,

but when we look at its density it could potentially be

an ocean world.

So it would have a rocky core,

but it would have potentially a liquid ocean

covered with a crust of ice.

Dr. Masters: LHS-1140b is another one

of these exoplanets that for some reason

I feel a connection to.

First and foremost,

the James Webb Space Telescope has indicated it's probably not

one of these thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres

but we've found CO2,

we've found water vapuor, nitrogen;

there's a number of things that indicate

that the atmosphere might be conducive to

the formation and sustenance of life.

Like some other exoplanets, it is tidally locked,

which because Earth isn't,

we could see as being somewhat of a negative characteristic.

However, because with this tidal locking,

you have two different environments on either side.

Narrator: On a tidally locked planet,

there is no day or night,

only freezing darkness on one side,

and burning constant sunlight on the other.

Nathalie: So what could be happening here actually

is that the starlight always hitting the same spot

could be melting the ice in that region,

causing the ice to melt and creating a liquid ocean

right there.

So we call it .an eyeball planet. /

It looks like an eyeball essentially.

And you could have life develop within that liquid ocean.

It is thought to be an ice world,

which again, our brains instantly go to, .Well,

can't be life on an ice world.

We look at Antarctica, we looked at the Arctic,

and there's not a lot of life. /

Nathalie: So with the data that we have,

we know that it doesn't have

a really thick hydrogen-based atmosphere,

which we don't want.

That would be too much pressure on life.

So what we have is data right now is telling us there could be

a very Earth-like atmosphere that is heavy in things

like nitrogen, for example,

and potentially water vapour or CO2.

Carbon dioxide, we tend to think is bad,

because it's sort of poison,

but it's actually quite nice if you wanna heat up a planet

and have the greenhouse effect.

So we still need more data for LHS-1140b.

It's a prime target for the James Webb Space Telescope

to get more data,

but this eyeball planet potentially is one of

the most promising candidate for alien life.

Narrator: What might life look like on a world forever locked

to its star,

with one side in perpetual daylight

and the other in endless night?

Dr. Masters: Because of this tidal locking,

it's considered an eyeball planet,

and that opens up all kinds of possibilities,

because now we're talking about life that might thrive

in a hot environment right at the cornea,

if you will, of the eyeball,

and then you have a potentially cooler area around the iris,

and then you get into the sclera of the eyeball,

and there could be all kinds of things going on

right at that point between the ice and the water.

Narrator: This point between ice and water is called

.a terminator zone, /

which is bathed in constant twilight,

and would likely be the only place on the planet

to be potentially hospitable.

Dr. Masters: Being tightly locked

and the different temperatures of the water

going from very hot to very cold on the opposite side,

you might have the opportunity for life to arise

with characteristics of an atmosphere

that we would expect to protect it from solar flares

and to sort of keep the temperature stable

throughout that environment,

even if it is fundamentally different

than what we see here on Earth,

because our planet does spin every 24 hours.

Narrator: A tidally locked world with extremes of heat and cold,

and perhaps a fragile balance in between.

If an atmosphere exists,

it could shield life from deadly solar flares,

and create a stable zone where something might endure.

And if such conditions are possible,

then LHS-1140b becomes more than just a distant rock

orbiting its star.

It becomes a true candidate for life in some form to adapt

to an environment unlike anything on Earth.

Dr. Masters: LHS-1140b,

I think it's really interesting and a prime candidate for a life

in some form to adapt to that unique type of environment.

It's really interesting to think about what life might look like.

We know it's not one of these

dense hydrogen-rich types of atmospheres,

like what you see on Jupiter and Neptune.

However, it's considered to be an ocean world/ice world

considering it is tidally locked.

So if life was to evolve,

we would expect something that evolved to an ocean environment.

So instantly you think of octopi,

you think of fish.

At the heart of it, because it is a big,

heavy ocean world,

we would expect big, thick organisms

that are able to withstand that gravity,

move through this soupy, thick, watery world.

Nathalie: If you look at, for example,

the deep sea creatures that we have on Earth,

it's not gravity that they're feeling,

but they're feeling an intense pressure from all of the water

over top of them,

and they've adapted to live in those conditions.

So we have every reason to believe that if life

were to evolve in these high gravity situations,

they would adapt as well.

Dr. Masters: On the flip side,

you could potentially have the opposite configuration

where instead of being big, heavy, thick,

you might have something that's smaller and more spread out,

more molecular, microscopic, that's joined together,

that exists as an organism that's more movable,

sort of free-floating,

or not really bound by the mass and the gravity,

because they've taken an opposite configuration.

The question then becomes: Could something like that go on

to form the complexity necessary to really develop intelligence

and the manipulation of its environment

to send signals into space, or to travel through space,

to really occupy its planet to the extent

that we would see biosignatures even?

If we would even be able to recognize it,

so it would be so different from life on this planet,

would it have the same biosignatures?

Narrator: On LHS-1140b,

intelligent life may have evolved entirely

beneath the water's surface.

And if life can thrive in such hidden places,

it raises an even greater question:

If worlds like this exist,

then why don't we see signs of them?

Nathalie: So the Fermi Paradox is essentially looking

at how abundant exoplanets are in our galaxy,

and how likely it would seem that life would somehow

at some point evolve, and just looking at the history,

the length of time that has passed in the history

of the universe,

there must have been at least a few forms of life at this point

that would have developed the technology to explore

some amount of our galaxy, and leave traces here and there.

Narrator: Since fire is likely something

they could never have used,

it may be possible that they developed

a biochemistry solution to work with materials,

such as metal, to craft items for daily life

and components for their vessels.

All this would mean their ships would be filled with water

from their own planet for life support,

much like our own space vessels are pressurized

and filled with oxygen.

With water and ice abundant,

they might master pressure-based structures,

carving habitats,

or even using controlled melting/refreezing

as construction processes.

♪♪

Nick [on video]: It's huge.

- Tessa [on video]: Nick. - Nick [on video]: Shh.

Quiet now.

Tessa [on video]: It's filled our sky.

Crainston: We didn't even realize

what was going on exactly

till after we were looking at the footage,

and it's the last second of the footage,

this thing flies down.

And if you adjust the colour,

you can see the outline very clearly,

you know, of a saucer shape.

Narrator: Using AI video enhancement,

we can make out the shape of a blue-lit saucer-like UFO.

If what Crainston and Nick saw was from a planet

like LHS-1140b, what might they have looked like?

There's a window on the dome,

and there's a figure standing in it.

And, yeah, it's nuts.

I pointed the silhouette of a figure out to Nick,

and then he was looking at the footage,

and he goes, .Is that an eye that you can see one of? /

And then so I adjusted the colour on it,

and then you see both eyes,

and on the head of this figure standing there.

It's mind blowing.

I don't know what to say.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: The remote landscape of the Alaska Triangle

may be drawing visitors from another world.

Could there be other reasons they would come?

Might they be responding to signals we have emitted?

Murray: Anything's possible.

I mean, that's how absurd it is.

We're talking about being visited by aliens.

That's our starting point.

[laughs]

Keep going.

So it's possible.

But science will cut those things down.

What we understand will cut those things down.

Then we look at the tool of science and go,

the tool of science might not be perfect either.

So we're lonely.

So we send out probes,

and perhaps exactly that's what's going

on the other way too.

Because it's true across the board,

the ocean of space and time is vast.

All the stars you see in our sky

are almost entirely our galaxy alone

among billions of other galaxies,

each with billions of stars each,

all types of stars that could harbour life.

Narrator: But beyond the wild beauty of Alaska,

what lies beneath the surface may be just as extraordinary.

For centuries,

people have ventured into this rugged land in search

of what it hides.

Christian: Yakutat, like much of Alaska,

is just so rich in mineral resources.

And it's so rich in potential too.

Even though there has been mineral exploration

for centuries,

including the Alaska and Yukon Gold Rush

that everybody's familiar with.

And it's a hotspot for mineral exploration today.

Titanium, it's light, and very robust,

and it's being added to steel commonly.

It enhances the properties of steel greatly.

So it's not like it's unusual that we have magnetic properties

in rocks.

Magnetite, it's probably the best-known magnetic rock.

♪♪

♪♪

Nick [on video]: Whoa!

- You see that? - Tessa [on video]: Yeah.

Nick [on video]: What's it doing?

That's not natural.

It moves so fast. Whoa!

A little teeny speck.

Narrator: If lights in the sky truly belong

to beings from elsewhere,

then what do they see when they look down at us?

A fragile world glowing in the dark,

alive with countless voices,

and a species still learning what it means to survive,

to build, to wonder.

To them, are we a curiosity or a warning?

♪♪

Narrator: A mirror of what they once were,

or something entirely new?

Murray: So you may go, .Okay. I'm gonna go out of our way.

There's all these boxes.

There's these upright creatures.

We've dealt with them before.

Let's try that one with four legs over there.

Let's see if we can get something out of that dog. /

So they may generate sounds or whatever they need to do

to provoke a reaction,

and they might measure that reaction,

and that's just all they're doing, right?

And it wouldn't be funny if we weren't the primary focus.

It's healthy to speculate. It's healthy to have ideas,

have conversation, and to be knocked down and say,

.No, that's a ridiculous idea. /

But it gets you thinking, right?

That's what we wanna do.

We wanna think about it.

We wanna look from a UFO POV, from their point of view,

you have to flip.

Flip everything around,

and you'll discover very quickly things look remarkably alien.

We look remarkably alien probably to extraterrestrials.

Nick [on video]: What the [bleep] are you?

Tessa [on video]: It's all over the sky.

Nick [on video]: I knew something was [bleep] going on.

I felt it in the back of my neck, Tessa.

Tessa [on video]: Whoa!

Narrator: Why do so many UFO reports include strange lights?

And could those lights be nothing more

than stars and aircraft?

Or might they reveal something deeper

about how these objects move?

Chris: The fact that there are lights associated

with some of these UFO reports and UAP reports,

gives more weight

to the idea that these were in fact

either planes or stars or planets or something,

because an alien craft might not necessarily

have these kind of lights.

Although there has been a number of ideas thrown around

and speculating that perhaps the lights themselves

are a clue to UFO or UEP propulsion.

Perhaps there's some light given off

when an electromagnetic field is turned on,

or varied in some way,

that allows the craft to rise or fall or travel,

and go in and out of dimensions,

or whatever the UFOs are supposed to be doing.

But it does raise some very interesting questions:

Are we seeing natural human phenomena

as opposed to alien phenomena?

Tessa [on video]: Wow.

This is blowing my mind.

I think they're making themselves known,

because they wanna prepare us.

That's just my opinion.

Tessa [on video]: Everybody better be watching this.

There has to be so many people in the world

that could see this right now.

Ashley: And the more sightings there are,

now it's almost becoming like an everyday thing.

Like, you go on anywhere online or on YouTube,

and even very credible people seem to have more experiences.

And even like, you know, farmers and regular people

driving down the road, I believe they're coming more,

and showing themselves more for a reason.

♪♪

Narrator: Further speculating,

if they were flying a search pattern,

and if it wasn't minerals or resources they were looking for

over Yakutat, what were they looking for?

Could they have been combing the area for one of their own?

That could explain the ground activity

Nick and Crainston reported.

Such erratic movement, to some of us at least,

appears stressed.

That could explain why they risk detection so close

toa populated area,

the search pattern of their movements,

the ground activity, and possibly the sounds heard,

which could be thought of as communications.

Ashley: I guess it was Cranston's video,

a lick a nighttime video.

I froze the video and I enlarged it,

but it doesn't do a good job of shapes,

but just the way they were moving,

they were coming from every direction.

It just looked like bats.

But I did see the white moving things on the ground,

and I have no explanation for that

except that they were maybe insects.

♪♪

Narrator: We captured a moment from this video

from their security camera and enhanced it using AI.

Our AI enhancement shows something that is definitely not

a bat or an insect.

The edges are fairly straight,

giving it a boxlight or blocky appearance

rather than anything organic.

They appear more like drones straight out of science fiction.

The mystery may never be answered,

but the truth of what Nick and his friends witnessed

may not be far in the future.

The questions linger.

Has any of this brought us closer to understanding who

or what these visitors might be?

Ashley: And the government certainly has

sat on this information for many years.

But now with so many people pushing for disclosure

and having videos and all kinds of

more evidence--and I think there is evidence,

they're saying there's no evidence,

but there is.

Tessa [on video]: What is it, Nick?

Narrator: Do they even understand .encounter /

the way we do?

Maybe we're just noise in the background of a larger mission.

Maybe they're looking for a beautiful planet

with all of these resources and freshwater and saltwater

and land and life.

The Earth is heating up, anthropocentric warming.

So if another intelligent civilization

also went through that period

and maybe are looking to escape their planet

in the same way that we're looking at Mars

as a potential jumping off point if Earth becomes uninhabitable,

if another society is doing that on a different planet,

should we be worried?

Should we be worried about them coming here as they're Zion,

as their place to escape the difficulties

that they've created for themselves,

and getting to that point in complexity.

Narrator: The remoteness of the Alaskan wilderness

may be an enticing location to conduct their missions.

Vast stretches of mountain and tundra remain unexplored,

concealed beneath endless snow and silence.

Could this isolation provide the perfect cover for alien missions

linked to the strange lights

and unexplained encounters reported in the skies above?

Dr. Masters: There's a lot of theories

about what could be happening.

There's even theories about underground UFO bases.

A lot of these things are seen coming in and out of the sides

of mountains.

And obviously, it gets a little more

into conspiracy theory here,

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.

Narrator: What is it about the night sky that draws us in,

making us pause and wonder at the beauty above?

Nick: You know, I used to love to stargaze

and like, you know, look at the moon into the stars

and the watch for shooting stars on a clear night,

you know, or the Aurora Borealis,

the Northern Lights are really cool to watch.

But yeah, not anymore. Not after that.

I kind of took a long break.

It took me a while to, like,

wanna look up there in the dark, you know?

Nick [on video]: Whoa!

Nick: I think I was more startled,

because I just didn't know what it was,

and not knowing something could be kind of scary,

you know?

Quinn: I definitely believe there's other life out there.

I feel like it's too big to not.

You know, if it was something that came,

it was more just--yeah, it's kinda like I was saying,

was just--it was more I felt like I was in such awe

where I didn't even care.

- Nick [on video]: What is this? - Tessa [on video]: Whoa!

Narrator: Nick and his friends spoke of lights that darted

and twisted across the sky,

unlike anything they had ever seen,

and of strange activity on the ground that left them both

intrigued and deeply unsettled.

Nick [on video]: Please keep recording no matter what, okay?

Tessa [on video]: I am not stopping.

Wow [gasps]. Oh!

Nick [on video]: See what I'm saying?

Narrator: Were they simply witnessing something earthly,

misinterpreted in the dark of night,

or were they standing at the edge of a mystery far greater,

an encounter with extrasolar visitors?

For now, the questions remain, but each story,

each unexplained light,

keeps the possibility alive that we are not alone.

It seems kind of weird after an encounter like that,

but after that, I kind of quit looking.

Which--I don't know.

Some people would go the other way,

and really try to deep dive into it.

I was just kind of like, .Okay, that was pretty weird, /

and kind of left it at that.

Nick: Just keep an open mind.

I'm not aware of what its intentions are

or what it was exactly.

I know it's unknown to me

and the people I talked to about it,

it was like--yeah, still kind of an unknown thing.

Just always keep an open mind

and never, you know, pass judgment on someone

that's just trying to share a story, you know,

type of thing.

♪♪

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