Original subtitles

♪♪

She says she saw this craft just come up

and hover over the mountain.

It seemed to be different.

It didn't seem to be a plane or a star

or anything that she was familiar with.

Murray Toews: It was multicoloured,

and it had almost like a shifting quality to it.

Tamara Roberts: It was pretty intense.

It scared me.

And you know, to be honest with you,

when I was driving down that dark road with no headlights,

I felt like it was following me.

I'm sure it wasn't, but it felt that way.

Ashley Kircher: So she drove the rest of the journey

to her place on a dark road.

She looks out the window and there's the light,

you know, some distance away over the mountain,

but it seemed to be brighter and definitely there

as if it had somehow followed her.

Tamara: That's not an airplane.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: In October 2024,

Alaskan wildlife photographer Tamara Roberts

drives to Juneau's Mendenhall Glacier

to shoot the Aurora Borealis.

Mendenhall is a spectacular, easily accessible glacier

just 13 miles from Alaska's state capital.

It's a major tourist attraction,

but it's also a rapidly retreating glacier,

a visible symbol of climate change,

with its terminus recently pulling completely away

from Mendenhall Lake.

Tamara never gets to see the Northern Lights.

Instead, what she captures that day

sends her racing home in the dark,

and searching the sky in terror from her kitchen window.

What an aurora basically is,

it's a result from a solar storm.

So the sun actually produces solar flares.

And when it produces solar flares,

it ejects charged particles.

I think nitrogen produces a blue or a purple.

So you'll get these waves of light that go along with it.

The KP Index is a measure of how much of that

is actually going to occur.

So it's a scale from 0 to 9.

So at 0, you're not really gonna have much of an aurora.

At 9, it's going to be high intensity.

Narrator: On this particular night,

the KP index is at a 7 or 8,

a great night to photograph Northern Lights

if you can find a clear place to view them.

Alaska is near a plate margin

where, you know, the Pacific Plate

dives under the North American Plate,

and through this collisional zone,

that's where you build like the Alaskan Range,

you know, the mountains as we have them in the Juneau region.

Narrator: And what better place to view the spectacular

natural light display than on top of a glacier?

This is the beautiful Mendenhall Glacier,

and I spend a lot of time here photographing the animals

in the glacier,

but I liked shooting the Northern Lights.

And this particular night, the KP Index was really high,

so I came up about 2 am, and most of the time,

there's always people up here when the Northern Lights are out

because there's lots of photographers here.

You can always count on there being other people up here.

Narrator: But this particular night

that Tamara drives up the mountain,

she notices something strange.

When I pulled into the parking lot,

there was nobody else here.

So I backed up underneath this light pole right here,

cracked my window a little bit,

looked around for the Northern Lights

and I didn't see any.

Was sitting there for 10, 15 minutes, nobody else came.

And that really unnerved me quite a bit.

Well, you ever wondered if we're all alone

in the universe?

One Juneau resident believes she not only has the answer

that we're not, she also has the proof.

Juneau resident Tamara Roberts says she's been taking photos

and videos of strange lights near Thunder Mountain

and Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau.

♪♪

Narrator: Sitting alone on top of Mendenhall Glacier,

waiting to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights,

Tamara sees a different kind of light altogether,

one she can't explain.

Tamara: It was the brightest thing I've ever seen in my life.

And to watch the colours bounce off the snow

and, like, refract from the snow,

it was 10 times brighter than like a stadium football field.

♪♪

It seemed to be different.

It didn't seem to be a plane or a star,

anything that she was familiar with,

because she had been looking to the sky

for quite a long time before that.

But this particular night,

this light seemed to be so bright it was actually

reflecting off the glacier, dancing different colours,

just a little bit above the mountain.

♪♪

Ashley: Usually when people observe these things,

they're way up high.

They might see the odd light, you know, flashing.

But to her, she said it had

every colour of the rainbow in it,

which was very interesting,

because that's--people don't usually get

that kind of description.

Tamara: To watch the colours bounce off the snow

and, like, refract from the snow,

it just solidified for me that it wasn't an airplane.

It wasn't a drone.

It was not a helicopter.

It was something that I can't explain.

♪♪

Ashley: I still heard stories of anomalous lights,

and people had sworn that they've seen UFOs,

and even Sasquatch.

I didn't have any kind of evidence for that,

but just being a tourist and talking to people,

I did get a sense that that was a hotspot.

In fact, the Alaska Triangle.

Narrator: The Alaska Triangle is a mysterious area

located around Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiavik,

which has been the site of an estimated

20,000 disappearances since the 1970s,

including several aircraft disappearances.

For many, it's become the landlocked equivalent

of the Bermuda Triangle.

Chris Rutkowski: There's been some discussion

of an Alaska Triangle

that ranges from Juneau up to Anchorage

and up the Northern Ocean.

You know, whether that physical description

of what's going on or not,

there have been cases throughout that particular area.

Narrator: As Tamara looks on at the object in the sky,

she's suddenly struck by how eerily quiet the night is.

Tamara: Silent. Not a sound to it.

Not a sound to it. Kind of wish it had.

You know, that's another way, you know,

I could tell the people that don't believe it wasn't any

of the things that you might think it could be,

like the airplane or whatnot, because there was no sound.

♪♪

And it hovered, it stayed in the same place for so long

that there's nothing that I know of

that we have that can do that.

Murray: It's actually very common.

And what's eerie about it is that there often isn't any.

Even with sometimes mass sightings,

there's usually something, like, virtually nothing,

which runs contrary to what you're seeing

because sometimes you get UFO sightings

where objects are large and massive,

and they're completely silent, completely stealth.

Neil Lavoie: As far as helicopters go,

it probably wasn't a helicopter for the simple fact

that helicopters make a lot of noise.

And the way she described it, it was fairly silent.

So it's very unlikely it was a helicopter,

very unlikely it was a fixed wing aircraft,

very unlikely it was a drone.

Because again, drones actually make a fair bit

of noise as well.

And they can hover,

but they generally don't produce that much light.

The amount of light she described was substantial,

because it lit up quite a bit of the glacier.

This overwhelming feeling just came over me

and said, .You need to go, / and I mean,

got really scared just out of nowhere.

And so I put my car in drive.

My car's not old.

And I started to pull out of the parking spot.

And my car sputtered.

And so I slammed on the gas, you know,

like to make sure it didn't die.

And as I slammed on the gas, the car got going a little bit.

And as I was leaving the parking lot,

my headlights go out, both of them go out.

Chris: She couldn't get them started again.

There was some sort of electrical interference

with her car's headlights,

but because she wanted to get away

even though she had no headlights,

she was in such a panic, she drove anyway.

Tamara: The shapeshifting was surreal.

It made every different shape you can think of,

from like a donut with a hole in the middle of it,

to long squiggly worm-like, to triangles, you name it,

it changed shapes instantly.

Like every two seconds,

it would be something completely different.

Narrator: Tamara races down the mountain road in the darkness,

hopeful that a trooper will pull her over

so she can at least corroborate what she's seen.

The original photos are blurry and hard to make out,

just distant shapes in a hazy sky.

Using artificial intelligence to enhance the image,

we hope to sharpen them and bring out hidden detail.

It's the same technology used by police departments

and forensic investigations

as scientists studying deep space.

Strikingly, with the visitor shape shifting,

it doesn't appear that the images she shot

are of the same anomaly at all,

as though there are multiple ships that are appearing

in the skies over Juneau, Alaska,

even though it's just one.

What we find was surprising.

In the enhanced images,

an oftentimes purple glow appears around the object.

Other times, the multicoloured luminance is accentuated,

reminding us of plasma,

the same glowing energy you see in lightning

or certain electrical effects.

More curious is how the plasma changes colour.

It's not one consistent glow like some king

or propulsion drive.

Its hue and colours augment just as fast as its shape,

defying our expectations around the craft.

Next, we inverted the colours,

basically flipping the image like a photographic negative.

Sometimes this technique reveals things

the eye can't normally catch, but in this case,

the inverted images didn't show us anything new.

There is only one thing for sure:

the experience was unsettling.

Tamara: It was pretty intense.

It scared me because I wondered, did it follow me home?

I mean, I'm sure it didn't,

but it kind of felt like it did, you know?

Narrator: Finally home, Tamara thinks she's outrun

the unexplained object in the sky,

but she isn't out of the woods just yet.

When she saw it out her window,

it was actually closer to her than when she was seeing it

from the parking lot to the mountain.

And then she just set up her camera

and, again, started filming,

and saw this object

that actually was--it did have multicoloured lights,

and it was morphing into different shapes.

A tube, a sphere, triangles, she said even squiggly lines,

and she had her camera going for about, I think,

another 20 minutes.

Narrator: The second batch of images captured by Tamara

is even more intense.

The colours are brighter, more vibrant,

and the AI enhancement reveals something startling.

For brief moments,

the object takes on shapes we recognize from decades

of UFO reports.

The classic disk, the triangle.

But just as quickly,

it morphs again into something else entirely.

That familiar multicoloured glow is still there,

pulsing and shifting.

We run the colour inversion again,

hoping this closer, more detailed set of images

might reveal something the first batch couldn't.

But once more,

the inverted images give us nothing conclusive.

What we're left with is deeply unsettling.

This wasn't a distant sighting.

She couldn't drive away from whatever this was.

It followed her home.

A silent, shapeshifting light over a glacier,

a car's headlights dying in an instant.

And from Tamara's kitchen window,

the same object, now closer.

If this isn't an aircraft or the aurora,

what is it, and why is it here?

♪♪

Narrator: In October 2024,

atop the famous Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska,

wildlife photographer Tamara Roberts is confronted

by a shape-shifting luminescence whose origin

and purpose is unclear.

♪♪

Narrator: As Tamara's account raises

more questions than answers, experts turn to the land itself.

Why Juneau?

What is it about this stretch of Alaska

that seems to attract attention from miners,

explorers, and perhaps even from beyond.

Juneau, Alaska,

there is actually such a thing as the Juneau Gold Belt.

Juneau, Alaska is like one of these

important historical places.

You know, we've heard about the Yukon Gold Rush,

but it's all equally important in Alaska,

and Juneau is one of these places

where there definitely was an historic gold boom.

Narrator: When we think of the Yukon gold rush,

we imagine it as something out of the past,

specifically the 1890s, when 100,000 prospectors

flocked to the region.

But despite their best efforts,

there's still plenty of gold in those hills.

♪♪

Christian Bohm: That's ongoing, today.

There's gold mining in the area.

You know, you're talking about Juneau, Alaska

from a geological or from a minerals point of view,

gold comes to mind first.

But in addition to the gold,

like, there's so much else going on in Alaska,

and specifically in Juneau region.

And we not only have, like,

enrichments of precious metals like gold, silver,

we also have, like, base metals, copper, zinc, lead.

Like, all of these are just enriched because Juneau,

Alaska is such a geodynamic place.

♪♪

Narrator: Gold has long defined the region,

a resource hidden in the very bones of the mountains.

But it isn't just the promise of wealth that makes Juneau unique.

The ground here is alive,

shaped by forces few places on Earth can match.

That's where, like, the Pacific plate

is subducted under North America,

heated up due to its partial melts

that intrude the continent under Alaska.

There is intrusions like we've heard all of,

granites, batholith.

These intrusions are generally enriched in fluids,

in metals.

You know, I call them partial melts.

They're enriched in silica, and silica in its simplest form,

forms quartz.

And interestingly, like,

the gold actually is mostly enriched in quartz veins,

and it's structurally controlled.

[drill whirs]

Narrator: From shifting tectonic plates to veins

of quartz and gold,

the geology of Juneau is anything but ordinary.

Yet the mysteries of this land aren't just below ground.

They reach into the skies.

There was a plane in 1950 that was carrying,

I think, 44 people,

and it just went right off the chart.

There was no mayday.

There was no any kind of wreckage found.

It just kind of disappeared.

Narrator: Objects disappearing out of the Alaskan skies

are not uncommon.

The mountain ranges, likewise, are not without incident.

Ashley: Alaska's huge people go out in small planes

and fly into mountains and that kind of thing.

But there are some cases where--especially this one case,

where a fellow was in a marathon,

he started at the base of a mountain

with many, many people, and ran up to the mountain.

There was only one way up, one way down.

He never came off the mountain.

He never came down.

They have actually videos of him running.

And then everybody else had come down

and people along the route

were saying this person hadn't come off the mountain.

They did a huge search for him.

His family came out.

He never appeared.

No remains.

No--no nothing.

So that was really kind of mind-blowing.

Narrator: The runner's name was Michael LeMaitre,

who on July 4, 2012,

disappeared without a trace during the notorious

Mount Marathon race in Seward, Alaska.

Disappearances, vanishing planes,

strange lights in the mountains.

Given its peculiar similarities to the Bermuda Triangle,

locals call the region the Alaska Triangle,

a place where Tamara Roberts experiences firsthand

an event that defies explanation.

When the headlights zapped out--and they didn't just go,

choop, like this.

They flickered a couple times and then they were just gone.

And I'm thinking, .Okay, they're going to come back on. /

I turned my headlights back on and off, on and off,

on and off, didn't do a darn bit of good.

It's a newer car

and there's just zero explanation

for why the headlights were going to do that.

And to pick that time to do it, that's not a coincidence.

Not at all.

No, whatever that was,

it disabled my headlights without a doubt.

Fried them, essentially.

Ashley: So she said it was a, you know,

a fairly new vehicle.

She couldn't figure out why that happened.

It seemed like they sputtered a few times,

and sort of tried to come on, but then went out.

So she drove the rest of the journey to her place

on a dark road.

And she even said she was hoping for police

or somebody to stop her and pull her over,

because she was so scared.

One can only wonder what had caused

this electrical interference to cause the lights to go out.

Was it a fault?

Was it something from the outside affecting?

Narrator: Could there be an otherworldly explanation

for Tamara's experience?

♪♪

The Fermi Paradox highlights the contradiction

between the high probability

of extraterrestrial life existing,

given the universe's vastness and age,

and the complete lack of evidence for it,

famously summarized by physicist Enrico Fermi's question,

.Where is everybody? /

Nathalie Ouellette: The Fermi Paradox is essentially looking

at the statistics

and 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 and 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,

and we haven't found any concrete evidence of that yet.

Chris: There have been cases throughout that particular area.

One can remember that in January and February of 2023,

objects were shot down in the north,

particularly just off the ocean in Northern Alaska.

This hour, dramatic new details

about the unidentified object shot down by fighter jets

just miles off the coast of Alaska yesterday.

Unlike the Chinese spy balloon shot down last Saturday,

this object demanded more immediate action yesterday.

Officials say it was flying much lower

at 40,000 feet,

making it a dangerous potential threat to civilian aircraft.

But now we are learning that US military pilots who approach

the craft have given conflicting accounts of what they saw.

Chris: It was supposedly some sort of balloon or incursion.

It was actually called a UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,

by NORAD.

And NORAD took the extraordinary action of authorizing

the shooting down of an object over North America

for the first time in NORAD's existence.

And that was very substantial.

And just a year later or so,

Tamara Roberts had her experience.

It shows that Alaska has had a number of cases

of odd objects and lights in the sky

that have puzzled people for centuries.

Tamara: The activity is heavy and it has been

since the 50s, 60s.

Planes disappearing, never being found.

The airline pilots having their instruments malfunction

while they're flying over, you know--through the triangle.

I've seen many UFOs from the plane,

like, in the plane, between here and Anchorage.

I've got some really great footage of things

between here and there that just make you go, .Wow. /

Narrator: From lost runners to missing aircraft;

from legendary gold to modern day

unidentified aerial phenomena.

Juneau sits at the intersection of Earth's restless geology

and unexplained aerial mysteries.

Are these connections coincidence,

or a clue?

Is there something significant about Juneau

that would draw the attention of visitors

beyond our solar system?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: The so-called Alaska Triangle

has earned its name

not only from the number of mysterious disappearances

and sightings on its famous tundra,

but also for its unique geological properties.

It's a bit of a hotspot for mineral exploration.

It's close to Yukon and northern BC.

It's part of a bit of a geological triangle,

where there are many gold mines, gold operations.

Until today, this is one of the hotspots,

certainly in North America, for exploration.

That includes gold, it includes silver,

it includes rare and strategic minerals.

There's a lot going on there.

That's just looking at older rocks,

at the complex rocks.

As I said,

the geology continues to be very dynamic.

So quartz is abundant in the Earth's crust

and in the Earth's surface,

because the crust is fractionated.

The crust evolved over geologic time,

and separated into a fractionated crust,

and a more depleted mantle.

Quartz veins are quite unique.

And so if you think in terms of, like, an intrusion

that contain quartz in its magma and cooled down,

and has, like, quartz as crystals within the rock,

like a granite, a quartz vein is,

you know--it can be like 95% quartz.

Importantly for Juneau, Alaska,

it's the gold that finds itself concentrated in quartz veins.

♪♪

Narrator: Juneau is not just a historic gold town.

It's a geological hotspot,

rich with a cocktail of rare and strategic minerals,

a landscape that might draw not just prospectors,

but perhaps visitors from elsewhere.

Chris: So this is something that's throughout

UFO literature.

The idea is that these UFOs or UAP are somehow powered

by electromagnetism or magnetic fields,

and that in turn, if you get too close,

causes interference with the running of a motor,

running of an engine,

electrical interference with headlights, with radios.

If you recall in the movie

Close Encounters of the Third Kind,

that's also a very, very common meme

where the radio starts going haywire

as soon as a UFO or UAP appears.

It came from nowhere.

I just said, .Leave; leave now, /

and that's when I put my car in driving.

I was, like, .I'm out of here. /

And yeah, it was just--it was quick.

It came on out of nowhere.

I wasn't fearful like that, except for that moment,

and then all the way home, of course.

I think what scared me the most

was that when the car started to malfunction,

I'm thinking, .Wow,

if it's gonna do that, what next? /

Who are they? Where are they coming from?

Extraterrestrials from another planet would have no reason

not come here and take our resources,

and enslave us, or feed off of us.

Tamara: My adrenaline was going really fast.

Yeah.

I have not been back up here at night by myself.

I'll bring somebody with me,

but not come back by myself at night.

Daytime, I have no qualms,

but I won't come back at night alone again.

You know, if my car hadn't malfunctioned,

it might not have frightened me as much as it did,

but that whole thing was just too much,

because it was so real.

Narrator: Disappearances, electrical anomalies,

unexplainable lights.

Together they paint a portrait of a region that sits

at the crossroads of science, myth, and mystery.

But could there be an explanation

for what Tamara sees?

Perhaps visitors from a different planet.

If so, from where?

Experts take a look at exoplanet LP791-18D as an example

of a planet that may have produced intelligent life.

♪♪

LP791-18D is a really interesting system

about 27 light years away,

just on the outskirts of the habitable zone of its star.

Narrator: If intelligent life from another planet

has visited us, what are they after?

And what can the makeup of their planet tell us about them?

What if the lights Tamara witnessed

on the Mendenhall Glacier in October 2024

weren't just passing by,

but were drawn here for a reason?

♪♪

Narrator: Juneau's geology is anything but ordinary

and has attracted the attention of prospectors,

scientists, and mythologists for centuries.

Is it enough to draw visitors

from the distant exoplanet LP791-18D?

Because of a tidal interaction,

a gravitational interaction with one of its nearby planets,

one of its siblings,

we actually think there's a bunch of tidal heating

going on in that planet,

sort of like the moon Io with Jupiter.

We think that the temperature is between 30

and 130 degrees Celsius,

quite a range depending on what's being outgassed,

but it is sort of, like, in the habitable zone,

and very close into its star.

So the year is very short as it's moving around.

So if you landed on it,

it would be sort of similar in size to the Earth,

a little bit stronger gravity.

♪♪

Narrator: Tidal heating,

gravitational forces from a nearby celestial body

repeatedly deforming the planet, causing it to stretch and flex.

Although it might be habitable, it sounds extremely hostile,

and capable of accommodating only the most robust of species.

So Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system.

It's just covered in volcanoes all around.

Because it's so close to Jupiter,

as it's orbiting Jupiter, it's being deformed,

and that deformation is heating its core,

making it geologically active.

So we think the same thing might be happening with LP791-18D.

We think it's being deformed, causing this internal heating,

and creating the surface covered in volcanoes.

Narrator: If the surface of the planet is itself like a furnace,

what kind of life could such an environment sustain?

So LP791-18D has about the same mass as Earth.

So you might look at that and think, .Well,

it could possibly have life similar

to that which evolved here,

maybe even something resembling a bipedal organism,

an upright walking hominin type of form, /

for instance.

But it does suffer from one major caveat,

and that is tidal heating.

Narrator: Tidal heating can be a critical factor

for planetary habitability,

as it can provide the necessary internal heat source

for liquid water and geological activity on exoplanets--

♪♪

Narrator:--even those far from their host stars.

But there are drawbacks to it as well.

What happens is that because of another sister planet

in orbit around the star,

it creates this expansion and contraction of the planet,

which creates a lot of heat.

Good example, sometimes when I'm out working on a fence

and I don't have wire cutters,

I'll just bend the wire back and forth,

back and forth.

It gets really, really hot and then just breaks apart.

Narrator: In a world of constant flux,

it's hard to imagine how life once began.

How might it be sustained?

And how it might have the opportunity

to evolve into higher life forms.

It's hard to imagine how life would necessarily survive

in that type of environment,

except we do have cases where life exists around volcanoes.

So that heat that's generated--seemingly life

likes heat, especially in a very simple unicellular form,

similar to what we see 3.8 billion years ago

with the first prokaryotes here on Earth,

they developed in a very hot, extreme environment.

Narrator: Another thing to consider about LP791-18D

is that it orbits the M-type dwarf star,

much smaller and less bright than our own sun.

Michael P. Masters: And one thing that's also important

to point out is that we oftentimes think of life

needing a sun, life needing a star

to generate that heat and that energy

that it draws off of for its own subsistence.

But there could be situations where we have planets

because of this tidal heating

where it's not even a matter of what kind of energy

it gets from its sun,

but the energy generated from those tidal forces,

and the heat that comes from them

could be an internal life giving mechanism.

Nathalie: We're really interested, obviously,

in all the exoplanets, but in terms of habitability,

LP791-18D is interesting not only because of its location

in the system,

but it's sort of an idea of maybe you don't just need heat

from the star to drive the development of life.

There could be an internal source of heating as well

that can help.

♪♪

Narrator: Another factor to consider

is the volcanic activity on exoplanet LP791-18D.

The gravitational interaction caused by tidal heating

occurs along its elliptical orbit,

causing internal friction and heat,

forcing intense volcanic activity to the surface.

Nathalie: Volcanoes here on Earth expel a lot of CO,

which is a greenhouse gas,

which is not a great thing here on Earth

because humans are putting in so much extra greenhouse gases.

But in a lot of these worlds, if the temperature is too low,

you want that CO2.

You want those greenhouse gases to increase the temperature.

♪♪

Nathalie: Things like volcanoes might actually be

very, very essential in the formation of life.

If you're thinking more broadly about volcanism,

we think that hydrothermal vents at the bottom of oceans

might have been a key in the first kinds of life

on Earth here.

So volcanism is actually something super interesting

when we're searching for alien life.

♪♪

Narrator: Given the resilience and abundance of life on Earth

under the most extraordinary of circumstances,

is it so hard to imagine that a planet such as LP791-18D

might have produced life?

♪♪

Narrator: And if so,

what would life forms from such a place think of us?

Maybe their idea of civilization is completely alien to us.

They see us from an entirely different perspective.

They may not even make connections of what we're doing.

They might not be able to connect the fact

that you go into a car and you drive somewhere,

and then you go pick up a hamburger,

and you go back and you get out of your car;

they might not know what that means

because of the sheer differences of our species,

evolutionarily speaking, entirely different.

They would have to spend a lot of time trying to figure us out.

So I'm not surprised that if they attempted to communicate

via lights or some form of induction

through electromagnetic fields to influence us

that they might not get it right.

♪♪

Narrator: It's fascinating to think that an alien species

might want to travel light years to our planet

and attempt communication with us.

But for some,

the probability of such a sophisticated species

emerging from a planet as tumultuous as LP791-18D

is still in question.

Are we talking about sort of intelligent life

that can build spaceships and travel across the cosmos?

Maybe, but it's doubtful.

What we're most likely going to find in this situation

are similar to what the extremophiles,

the life that exists in hot volcanic environments

here on Earth.

It's difficult to think how you could have complex

intelligent life forms develop in that environment,

but again, life finds a way.

♪♪

Narrator: Earth itself has experienced several

catastrophic events,

notably the five major mass extinctions

caused by factors like asteroid impacts

65 million years ago, which killed off the dinosaurs,

massive volcanic activity, and climate change.

♪♪

Michael: If it was able to get to the point that it started

to sort of have this self-sustaining

technological adaptation feedback loop, who knows?

It's possible that you could get things developed

that we just can't conceptualize

given our cushy environment here on Earth.

Speculation over whether or not LP791-18D

has produced intelligent life aside,

it is possible that there's another explanation

for what Tamara sees on October 20, 2024.

Perhaps the mysterious colours and shapes are the effects

of solar flares.

It's going to be high intensity.

When there's high intensity like that,

the amount of charged particles coming in

can actually affect satellites,

it can actually affect all sorts of things.

Again, it will actually contribute

to electromagnetic interference.

It can actually affect power lines.

You don't necessarily even have to see it,

but all of the energy that's in the air

can actually be substantial.

On that particular night, based on what I've read,

the KP Index should have been about a 7 or an 8.

So that's fairly high intensity,

which really leads me towards the weather phenomenon.

Narrator: But could a solar storm account

for the fear Tamara experiences

while watching the object in the sky?

Tamara: Just looking up after 20, 25 minutes or so,

I just got this feeling of dread.

It came from nowhere.

It just said, .Leave; leave now, /

and that's when I put my car in drive,

and I was like, .I'm out of here. /

♪♪

Narrator: Whatever it is that Tamara sees,

she's certain that it's not of this world.

♪♪

Narrator: It's possible that even under

the extreme conditions

found on our hypothetical source planet, LP791-18D,

life might still have found a way to subsist and evolve,

possibly even intelligent life.

But would life from a planet nearly 90 light years

from Earth travel all this way simply for our minerals?

Is the abundance of gold on Earth really worth the journey?

Chris: Tamara, because she had read so widely,

she interpreted what she was seeing

based on what she had read.

And she had read the tales of the Anunnaki,

which were a mythical race that lived

many, many years ago,

but they were interested in producing gold ornaments

and gold idols and figures like that,

and she figured because that area of Alaska

does have gold mines and, you know,

mining of other precious metals perhaps that this was a craft

that was piloted by new versions of the Anunnaki coming to earth

looking for more precious metals that they could use

in their various devices,

either that are powering their spacecraft

or for their own personal use.

Theory was one of these ancient races

that apparently--like Atlantis, you know?

They were there and then they had some catastrophe,

but they were a very advanced civilization.

The Atlanteans, but also the Anunnaki

according to what I've read,

and her explanation was that the Anunnaki came thousands

and thousands of years ago because they needed gold

for their planet.

Tamara: They're an alien race,

and they're believed to be like the ones that created us,

and their planet needs gold to survive,

and that's why they come for our gold,

but they--apparently they manipulated genetics

and made us to be their gold workers.

A lot of the stories between the Anunnaki and the Bible

are so similar.

Narrator: An alien race fixated on gold,

and an abundance of it in Juneau.

Could this explain the presence of this mystifying light

over the glacier?

And if it's gold

these extraterrestrial visitors are after,

what could they be using it for?

I'm not necessarily a gold expert,

but we know it's rare,

and that's part of the attraction for gold

besides some of its unique properties.

But its rarity makes it desirable,

And it's just a visual of gold.

As I said, like nothing looks like gold.

It has just this special, yellow brightness

that's unique to gold.

It's also an extremely good conductor.

So there's gold in your phone.

You know, there's gold in computer.

It's still a very important component.

It is gold,

but at the same time there is significant mineralization

of other precious and base metals

throughout Alaska and in the Juneau area.

Narrator: Though highly sought after,

gold isn't essential to our survival.

But its rarity and value make it unlike any other resource.

If an intelligent species that relies on gold

to power its technology exists,

it would make Juneau a logical target.

♪♪

We can't really conclude exactly what it was that Tamara saw.

It could have been an aircraft going on some search and rescue

or reconnaissance mission.

There certainly would be a lot of activity,

especially following the shooting down of the UAP

in Alaska the year before.

There's some concerns about Canadian sovereignty

versus American sovereignty in the North,

and this certainly was within a matter of 10 or 20 miles

of the border between Canada and The United States.

So, you know, there would be some reasonable expectation

that this could have been an aircraft.

It could have been a drone.

The changing of the colours that Tamara describes

could be related to a drone of some kind,

but we don't have any verification.

Narrator: For the witness, the mystery wasn't theoretical.

It was visceral.

It was bouncing off the snow.

Like, you could see the lights on the snow,

and I was like, .Wow. /

So I sat there for a few minutes and I started recording it

with my phone, and I used my camera,

I took still photos,

and I just sat there just in awe.

I knew what I was looking at.

I was in total awe.

And I had the creeps really bad.

Fear and fascination,

two currents pulling at the same moment.

But if you're not speaking with sound,

how do you signal across the dark?

So the tried, tested, and true example

of alien life on Earth is the octopus,

which uses chromatophores or pigmentation to communicate

to predators, .Stay away, /

or shield itself in its environment,

and to some degree communicate.

Now there's an excellent example of an adaptive quality

that is of an intelligent creature,

which octopuses are very, very intelligent.

And we often go, .Well,

not as intelligent as me or you, /

but that's a scale that we have to sort out for ourselves,

because of the universal scale intelligence may be fine tuned

to your level of adaption to that environment.

And so that becomes their primary way of communicating.

Narrator: So if these lights are a form of communication,

there's no sound involved, no language as we understand it.

Instead, it's visual, like flashing a signal.

The colours and patterns might be trying to convey

something simple, .Look at me, /

or .Come closer. /

But here's the problem.

We're not wired to understand it.

We may be watching a message we can't read,

seeing a language that was never meant for humanity.

So if I were to follow this line of thought,

I would say it was an attempt that didn't work very well

on the aliens' part,

and it just left Tamara kind of like scared,

because she felt like it was following her,

and she had this sense of dread.

An interesting experience, and not an uncommon one too.

♪♪

Narrator: But not everyone is convinced

that intelligent beings from a distant galaxy

would travel light years just to communicate with us.

I feel that that's extremely important in getting

at the question of extraterrestrials

or maybe some other theory.

How would they find us in the vastness of the universe,

even within our own galaxy,

with hundreds of billions of stars separated

by 100,000 light years from one end to the other?

And why would they care?

Why would they care to come here to this planet?

If they were us from the future,

it sort of provides a better explanation

of both of those questions.

They would know we're here, because we're their ancestors.

They would also care, in the same way that I care,

about my ancestors.

As a biological anthropologist,

I spend a lot of time digging up fossils,

and studying fossils and teeth.

The only thing that remains of our distant ancestors,

because that's all we have.

Narrator: Imagine Juneau, not through human eyes,

but through the perception of a visitor

shaped by another world.

From orbit, the glacier's ice isn't just white,

it glows like a living circuit.

Streaked with quartz veins

and threaded with magnetic anomalies,

what we see as frozen silence,

to them appears as pulses of energy,

signals carried along gold and mineral seams in the rock.

♪♪

Narrator: If these beings evolved on a volcanic world

like LP791-18D,

their senses might be tuned to heat,

to chemical outgassing, to electromagnetic resonance.

Where we see only mountains,

they might perceive streams of invisible force,

gradients of radiation,

or volcanic echoes hidden beneath the crust.

The aurora, so beautiful to us,

could blaze to them as more than light,

as raw electrical information pouring from Earth's

magnetic field.

The sky itself becomes a map,

a beacon drawing them toward this valley.

Perhaps to their senses, Juneau is not remote wilderness,

but a flashing signal,

a convergence of geology, magnetism, and atmosphere

that marks this place as rare, even precious,

across the cosmos.

♪♪

Narrator: Fermi's Paradox may not be a paradox at all,

but a misunderstanding shaped by human expectations.

The problem may not be the absence

of extraterrestrial life,

but our failure to recognize it when it appears.

We search for familiar signals, technology, communication,

patterns that resemble ourselves,

while ignoring the possibility that alien intelligence

operates in ways we don't yet understand.

Life elsewhere may exist on timescales far beyond

a human lifetime,

or communicate through phenomena we dismiss as natural.

In that sense, the universe may not be silent.

We may simply lack the tools and perspective to hear it.

♪♪

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