Original subtitles

♪♪

Narrator: A quiet prairie morning until a local farmer

sees something above his canola field

that isn't of this world.

Leo Fuhr: Because the thing is,

you hear a lot of these stories and you think,

.Well, they're just fictional. /

Neil Lavoie: I really don't think it was a hoax.

The family had nothing to gain by doing it.

Narrator: Impossibly smooth, impossibly fast,

and it leaves something behind.

They had hordes of people walking through their fields.

Narrator: Authorities step in.

Experts examine the evidence.

What they find only deepens the mystery.

And there were a bunch of them, physical evidence,

that something actually sat on the ground

or hovered above the ground.

Dr. Michael P. Master: You don't see that a lot

in the UFO lore, but clearly it happened here.

Narrator: Half a century later, this story doesn't get old,

and it all began with one simple farmer who saw something

that shouldn't exist.

Leo: Your memory sorta lapses and that.

But something like this, your memory doesn't lapse.

It stays in your mind.

And the thing is,

I recall it like it was yesterday.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Just after 10 AM, September 1, 1974,

a Saskatchewan farmer walks into his canola field and stops cold.

In a town of 800 people,

one single man sees something that doesn't fit the land,

the sky, or anything in between.

Leo: And my mom did say that night the dogs

were really raising Cain,

and they were barking and making a lot of noise.

Narrator: Langenburg sits in the heart of canola country.

Flat, golden, and wide open to the sky.

Out here, crops stretch farther than the eye can see.

The land doesn't hide things.

Chris Rutkowski: It was overcast,

maybe a little bit misty,

and he'd gone out to finish swathing

the canola crop that they had there.

As he's driving along,

he sees this metallic thing in the middle of the field

just off to the side of a slough.

And so he thought, .Well,

maybe somebody has put up this duck blind. /

But as he gets closer,

he gets as close as 15 feet away,

so pretty close,

and he realizes it's not a duck blind at all.

Ashley Kircher: I haven't personally heard of a lot

of Saskatchewan's incidences or sightings.

So to me, this was the first one.

Narrator: Canada had seen strange lights before,

rumours, sightings, isolated claims,

but nothing like this.

Chris: And he looks,

and there's this upside down bowl,

silver bowl thing down onto the ground,

almost to the ground, a foot off the ground or so.

And they were grey in colour

and they rose out of the field

and they were sort of spinning a little bit.

Spinning, spinning, spinning really, really quickly.

He had the impression that there might have been,

you know, rivets or something on it,

but it's spinning so quickly he couldn't tell.

And it actually had a little rim around the bottom,

as if it was a real cereal bowl of some sort.

The other objects were spinning around too,

just the same way.

And he was very puzzled as to what these things

could possibly be.

Murray Toews: He was rendered immobile,

whether it was because of his sheer fear

or because he was--

--he didn't want to be seen, it's hard to know.

Chris: He's familiar with helicopters and aircraft,

but these didn't seem to be anything like that.

Neil: The only thing that I can think of that would have

a spinning effect at a high rate

would be like the rotor system of a helicopter.

I don't know of any aircraft that actually spins

at a high rate of speed.

I don't believe that this was a rotorcraft for multiple reasons.

One is the noise,

because there was no description of loud noise

with this sighting.

And rotorcraft in 1974

would have been fairly loud, engine-wise and rotor-wise.

The other pieces is a rotorcraft or a vertical takeoff

and landing aircraft, which were very, very rare

at that period of time.

Ashley: And I think he observed them until they took off.

As they lifted off,

they apparently went right over his head,

and he said it was, like, what,

maybe 10 feet over his head, which is amazing.

And he did see these sort of pipes

coming out of the bottoms of the crafts.

The closeness of the craft was amazing.

Nobody has a craft fly 10 feet over their head.

And the fact that he got such a close look at these things,

it could have been a type of propulsion.

I mean, I just don't know.

And he was able to count four to five pipes

in each of the crafts.

Murray: There was a grey mist that was given off

as it ascended,

so there's another physical effect there,

but really a grey mist.

Like, why a grey mist?

You know, what happened?

You know, there wasn't a burning or anything.

It could have effectively been like steam

when you iron clothes.

Narrator: The discs disappear,

but there is silent proof that something unnatural was there.

And even today,

I'm really not sure of anything that I know of

that would actually produce a spiral formation

in a field of canola or anything like that.

I'm not aware of any craft that would do that.

Murray: There's a series of them

and they're about eight feet in diameter

and they have kind of a--they all have the same

kind of a swirl formation and flattened,

but the field was not burnt.

There wasn't any burning.

Some instances where things are just burnt,

there's just a burn mark.

There was some wind involved,

or something that flattened it out

and moved it all in one particular direction.

It's intriguing because there wasn't a lot

of wind sounds reported.

Not like they were giant fans attacking a field

and whipping it around.

It was more of a, you know,

pressing down on it a little bit,

and leaving and going away.

Leo: So he just felt that he needed to keep on swathing,

because that was his job that day,

to cut that canola down.

And so the thing is he just kept on till lunchtime.

So most people, I would say, especially nowadays,

they'd be running for their phones, they'd be,

you know, doing all kinds of things,

telling all their friends and everything,

and this man just went along and got his job done.

Dr. Masters: This is one of those cases

where it's not just somebody's word.

You don't have to just believe what they say.

The uniqueness and the novelty

and sort of the classic culture shock,

or ontological shock that comes with seeing something

that's not supposed to be there,

and that you can't even really make out

or understand what it is.

It's just too different.

Narrator: Edwin Fuhr's mother wasn't entirely surprised

by his story.

The night before,

she has a hint that something strange is nearby.

She says, .Now I know why the dogs

were making such a fuss. /

It was quite a thing.

Then we found out that same afternoon.

So we, right away, got into the car and drove over.

And I know my dad right away after they finished their meal,

they went out.

He went out there to see it.

And lo and behold, those rings--the rings were there,

and he couldn't believe it.

Narrator: Fuhr family inspects the crop circles,

but Edwin can't bring himself to approach them.

The minute he got closer, he said, .I feel it. /

Felt it in his body.

And as far as we were concerned ourselves,

it didn't matter much to us, you know,

like there was no sense of anything happening.

♪♪

So with many UFOs, they're rotating.

It's one of the most commonly described characteristics,

is that they're rotating counterclockwise or clockwise.

These set down and left a ring.

In a lot of cases,

what you'll have is a UFO comes down

and a tripod leg configuration comes out.

They sit down on those,

and you can see those three smaller rings.

These actually left very large concentric circles,

but with an area in the middle that wasn't as affected.

So they landed in tall grass,

and this area about 10 metres across was very much bent down,

pushed down, in association with rotation arguably,

one presumes rotation of these craft,

but there's an area in the centre that wasn't affected.

That's not super common.

Narrator: At first,

Edwin Fuhr said nothing to anyone but his family.

In a town like Langenburg,

you don't rush out and say you saw

five spinning discs in your field.

He wasn't looking for attention,

and he wasn't sure he'd be believed,

but those crop circles weren't going away.

Leo: The RCMP came out once they found out,

and then there was people that came out

from the national research.

And, yeah, there was a steady traffic of officials on that.

Narrator: They were aligned,

as if the craft above had mapped them,

measured their shape, and altered their chemistry,

with some reports showing that the area was radioactive.

Ashley: And I believe there was some radioactivity present,

or a higher level of radioactivity present

in the circles.

Narrator: Not only is the incident overwhelming

to Edwin Fuhr,

he is not used to talking to the police,

especially not about flying saucers in his canola field.

What I liked about this case was that the farmers

are so down to earth,

guys that just wanna get their job done,

they wanna get their fields plowed,

they don't run around making up stories,

especially in the 70s.

I mean, this was kind of unheard of,

and nobody about UFOs certainly at that time,

and certainly not these type of people.

So I was very--Leo, the brother that gave the report

was a good reporter,

but you could tell there was nothing

that he would have embellished.

Murray: Edwin wouldn't stand to win anything, actually.

If anything, it would completely ruin his life.

What does motivate people to talk about

these kinds of things?

And these days, more than anything,

it's YouTube, it's getting likes,

it's being watched.

It's money.

Or back in those days, 1974,

it would have been maybe being a TV personality

or something like that.

But those are the kinds of things that generally

a farmer doesn't want to do,

and I don't wanna speak for old farmers.

But my grandfather was a farmer,

and that's the last thing he would want.

And then all of a sudden the word spread.

From then on for the next about a week or so,

people kept coming and coming.

Like, small planes were landing on the road.

So it was amazing, because the thing is,

there was a trail through the swath in the field

where this all happened,

and they were through the canola field.

They were just like cattle were walking through.

Like it was--it was unbelievable

to see that whole situation there.

Narrator: Edwin's father began to supervise groups of visitors

to ensure the public's impact on the field was minimal.

Dad kept on taking these people out there

and meeting them out there

and telling them what all had happened

and everything else.

And then it was about--I'd say about a week or so,

his hand started swelling up.

Because he spent a lot of time out there,

and they were like cushions, and the thing is,

it was a few years later he ended up with cancer,

and whether that was the case or not,

I don't know.

But his hands were an indication of him going out there.

And my cousin, he spent a bit of time with Dad,

and they were crawling around in the grass looking to see

where these things were sort of sitting on the ground.

And he ended up having knee problems shortly after that.

And he was telling me that he went into the doctor and that,

and they tried different things,

and he couldn't figure out what the devil the problem was.

So he sort of links that to that.

♪♪

Narrator: Saskatchewan is called .the land of living skies, /

but that morning, in September, 1974,

the sky didn't just come alive.

It sent something down.

Five spinning objects hovered with purpose.

Were they watching, waiting,

or doing something we couldn't see?

♪♪

Narrator: The crop circles left behind

in Langenburg, Saskatchewan in September 1974

appeared aligned with precise, almost surgical spirals,

as if the UAPs above this field in the middle of nowhere

had a mission.

I was somewhat skeptical until I saw the rings.

It wasn't manmade or anything like that, you know.

And it was a donut shape,

and I'd say they were approximately eight feet

in diameter.

And it was like a donut;

grass that was upright in the middle.

And the grass was one way.

The way it was spinning, you know?

It wasn't roughed up or anything like that.

It was proof that there were definitely something there.

Everyone accepted the fact that Edwin

had actually seen something.

Word got around and pretty soon everybody wanted to see

the flying saucer landing spots.

And the media came out,

the local newspaper came to take photographs,

radio stations, TV stations.

It was really quite a media circus for some time.

Everybody wanted to get their own look at what had happened.

And media actually treated Edwin fairly well considering,

you know, apart from the flying saucer aspect,

and, you know, .Was this an alien landing spot?"

Because there was physical evidence,

the tendency was to take his word a little more seriously

than if he was just telling a story.

It's a great story,

but we do have this physical evidence that was left behind.

Narrator: Crop circles have always divided opinion.

Mystery to some, mischief to others.

And yes, some can be made

by people dragging boards around and that kind of thing.

Narrator: But at the time of Edwin Fuhr's sighting,

the crop circle phenomenon was only just beginning

to enter public consciousness.

Chris: At the time in 1974,

people had not heard of crop circles.

What had been talked about were called .saucer nests, /

and there had been some that had been found

a few years earlier in Australia, for example,

where swirl patches were found in some reeds.

And it would take a few more years before crop circles

really started appearing in any number.

Ashley: I think this was very unique.

I did hear in the UK,

they started seeing them probably in the late 70s

and then into the 80s, they became very prevalent.

But the problem then was they couldn't tell the ones

that were hoaxed from the ones that were

actually maybe made from something else.

Most crop circles had no UFOs associated with them.

So Langenburg was sort of a very,

very unique case.

Narrator: Crop circle cases are usually discovered

after the fact,

but Edwin Fuhr saw the five metallic discs hovering above

the crop while they were creating the impressions.

That puts Langenburg, Saskatchewan in rare territory,

a visual link between the phenomenon

and the physical trace.

Chris: We do have this physical evidence that was left behind.

Now, there didn't seem to be any reasonable explanation.

Somebody from the National Research Council of Canada

had pronounced this as being caused by fairy ring mushrooms.

And there's a type of mushroom,

and you may have seen them in meadows in large patches,

where one mushroom grows,

and then it sends its spores out into a wide circle,

and then mushrooms grow in a circle,

and then those grow further and further out.

But they take years to reach any kind of reasonable size,

even just two or three or four feet.

These things were impressed in canola,

which is not grass.

♪♪

Chris: There's no question that the weight of Edwin's story

plus the evidence on the ground suggested this was

a real physical event that needed some explanation.

♪♪

Chris: But following the discovery

of the Langenburg rings,

other people had found similar depressions and swirled green

on their own property.

There were probably about half-a-dozen to a dozen

that were found throughout Saskatchewan

in the coming weeks.

So whatever was occurring seemed to be recurring,

and that added to the mystery.

Ashley: I think this was almost like an experimental thing.

I don't understand why craft would come and lay down grass

for no reason in front of a witness.

And certainly nowadays, are saying,

and even scientists are saying,

there's like mathematical formulas to some of these.

Narrator: In some crop circles,

the technical accuracy of the lines

and shapes suggest tools

or methods beyond casual human ability,

possibly using geometry-based energy projection.

Chris: Some have described crop circles as a type of art,

and some of them are so magnificent and intricate

that one can only think of them as some kind of art.

But the art was simply not present.

They weren't really conceptual pieces at all.

If anything, they were something

a little more down to earth, on the Earth.

Ashley: And a lot of times the farmers especially say

there's nothing in the field night before.

In the morning they come

and there's this very complex pattern in there.

So I do feel it is some sort of a communication.

Chris: Why Langenburg?

There's not really any metal outcropping,

there's no nuclear sites,

there's nothing really to attract something.

In fact it's, you know,

off the beaten track for quite some distance,

but maybe that was the attraction,

the fact that there wasn't a lot of attention.

There were a number of farms, but few and far between.

Maybe the fact that there weren't that many people around

to witness this was the attraction for coming down

to Earth for whatever reason.

We don't really have an explanation as to why Langenburg

as opposed to anywhere else.

Narrator: But dismissing the complexity

of what could have fuelled the Langenburg UAPs

risks never understanding what drove them there.

Langenburg had no factories, no airports, no radiation zones,

just quiet fields,

and a population of only 800 people.

If you were sampling Earth's biology,

its air, soil, and life,

this is the place to extract a sample that is uncontaminated,

untouched, the opposite of a hotspot.

Langenburg could serve as a control group.

Murray: The large forests and stuff that we marvel

at pine trees and bears and foxes and wolves

and that kind of thing,

pretty much dominate that ecosystem.

And there are smaller subsets to that,

like other like ants or small fungi and that kind of thing.

But in the prairies, it's very, very, very, diverse,

and it's heavily nuanced.

So if I was an extraterrestrial,

I would want to look at the local fauna,

and just test it and see what's going on.

One way you can do that, actually,

in testing biological anything,

because we're comprised of proteins that assemble ourselves

into what we call life,

is either strong EMF, or electromagnetic frequencies,

and radiation, is one way to determine

and understand how biological processes work.

We use that all the time anyway.

We use it in biological sciences.

So when you think about it,

it kind of makes sense that if you're an extraterrestrial

and your interest is the Earth and you want to learn more of it

from a scientific perspective or an exoscientific perspective,

you may employ these remotely controlled ships to come down

and just take a little sampling.

♪♪

Narrator: The discs hovered in silence,

but their presence may have stirred something invisible.

♪♪

Narrator: The spirals left in the field

suggest a rotating electromagnetic field,

the kind known to affect the human nervous system.

Headaches, nausea, disorientation.

If people got sick,

it may not have been a coincidence.

It's possible the UAP wasn't here for what was above ground,

but for what lay below it:

The soil, the bedrock, the mineral code,

the radiation signature no one thought to measure.

♪♪

Christian Bohm: Well, Saskatchewan is

a mineral rich province, so I don't want to simplify it.

But I think Saskatchewan's economy has been benefiting

from its large world-class potash deposits.

So Saskatchewan equals potash.

Potash is almost like a salt, but it's very potassium-rich.

And it's the potassium that's being used as fertilizer,

for agriculture purposes predominantly.

Potassium is an essential nutrient

for many, many life forms,

so it goes far beyond just simple agriculture.

Narrator: When we look at extraterrestrial contact,

we tend to frame their visits by things that matter to us:

life, water, radiation, heat.

But what if their interests had nothing to do with

what we value?

Murray: So there was an experiment done in Alaska.

So the theory goes, they found something

the opposite of what they were expecting.

They were finding a particle,

like an anti-neutrino going the opposite direction.

But the idea is this: .We weren't looking for that,

and we inadvertently found something

we weren't looking for, / and that's the takeaway.

So in that thing we weren't looking for might be the thing

that how we frame this particular situation.

They're looking for something that we can't think of,

because we're not alien.

They may be looking for anti-neutrinos

from a parallel universe, which sounds bizarre,

but the idea that other universes alongside ours,

like gravity, could potentially be sensed

across dimensions.

So they could be sensing that kind of thing.

Like, it might have more to do with

some feature of our world that gives off a kind of radiation

that we don't care about, that's important to them

and not us.

Narrator: Whatever they were doing,

it's likely it had everything to do with who or what

was inside the craft.

It could be some sort of drone technology,

obviously, from a society

that's much more advanced than our own.

We're not talking about modern drones that were seen in 1974.

That technology didn't exist.

But it's very possible that these were unmanned as well,

and that's important to keep that in mind.

In a lot of these cases,

just because we see a machine being operated

by some intelligence,

it doesn't always mean that that intelligence

is inside the craft.

Especially once we start talking about these smaller,

metallic spheres,

it's not likely there's an alien inside of that.

It's likely that it is some sort of drone technology.

♪♪

Narrator: Following this theory,

producers have tasked our experts to explore Kepler-442 B

as the possible source of Langenburg's visitors.

♪♪

Nathalie Ouellette: So Kepler 442 B,

we think it's quite Earth-like,

a little bit bigger than the Earth,

about 1.4 times the size, 2.3 times the mass.

So the gravity would be a little bit stronger there.

It's in the habitable zone,

so the temperature would be correct for liquid water

to exist there.

Narrator: Kepler-442 B might be habitable,

peaceful, perfect.

But if they came here from there,

the question is why?

♪♪

Narrator: Whatever visited that field outside Langenburg

in rural Saskatchewan doesn't appear to be built for contact,

but may well have been constructed for distance

and precision.

How do you travel at a tremendous rate of speed

to get to some place to even study them,

and then why wouldn't you get out and say hi?

Why wouldn't you go talk to Edwin Fuhr,

who just got off his swather to come investigate

and introduce yourself?

Or at least,

if there's no one present to shoot out a little message

on a piece of paper that says who you are

and what you're from.

A lot of what we see with these encounters

is some sort of covert data collection

or observational mission,

and things like that might be better off

just using your technology

and not subjecting yourself to harm.

What if Edwin had a 12 gauge,

and you get out to introduce yourself

and he blows your head off?

Like, things are important to consider.

So even outside of the craft as the technology

and the data collector itself, maybe they're creating robots.

Maybe they're creating drones in the same way

that we're making robots that look like us.

In a lot of cases, you might have non-biological,

or maybe even biological drones, who go out

and do some of the dirty work for them,

who go out and abduct the person,

or go out and study the environment,

where they're a little more expendable

because they're not you,

they're not the society and the people

or the individuals that created them,

but rather something that's more expendable

and can be used for these purposes.

We could imagine an extraterrestrial species

sending out probes in the same way that we sent out

Voyager 1, Voyager 2,

sent out all of these rovers to Mars.

Even comets.

We send them out to comets to intercept those.

So maybe this is some sort of technology

that's almost even on autopilot

sent out to conduct these missions

and to collect this data,

and then just comes back with that data.

It returns in the same way

that your little robot vacuum cleaner does.

At the same time,

maybe they wouldn't necessarily make contact

because they're so far advanced,

and much more advanced than we are in our own technological

and cultural evolution, that it's not worth their time.

Chris: Previously, there had been some sightings of lights

in the sky.

Some turned out to be fireballs and meteors,

that type of thing.

But others were unusual lights that were seen

in the neighbouring area, some as far west as Saskatoon,

some a little bit to the east.

Narrator: Could these then have been drones?

Quiet, deliberate, already mapping the region

as an advance party for the visitation

witnessed by Edwin Fuhr?

Dr. Masters: There's a lot you can learn from using

your technology to go out and collect data for you.

Narrator: Or if you're designing a craft

for quiet planetary observation, you don't need a cockpit.

You need sensors, autonomy, a long-range purpose.

Dr. Masters: And we also have to look at what we have,

not just in the context of what might exist on other planets.

Narrator: If these five ships were drones,

what kind of world made them?

Maybe somewhere like Kepler 442 B, older,

steadier, more advanced.

To find answers, we have to look beyond our star,

and maybe beyond ourselves.

Kepler-442 B

is a very interesting exoplanet

because it is very, very Earth-like,

one of the most Earth-like that we know in terms of its size,

its mass.

Kepler-442 B is one of these planets that really

makes us think about the possibility of life,

and even complex intelligent life arising.

Narrator: The way the canola bent,

not broken or burned,

suggests this wasn't a mechanical impact,

but a biological or organic scan.

You would assume that to be high efficiency when you

witness all these weird little things floating silently.

What's powering them?

They were very purpose-built when you think about it.

They look like they were built specifically to whip up canola,

or field wheat into a pattern.

Not that much different than if my aunt was

what was known as a cytologist,

and her job was to whip up samples in a certain pattern.

There's certain test things you do that you put samples

in a tube,

and you put it into a centrifuge,

possibly get a similar activity.

Something that resembles a human version of a scientist

in outer space on steroids, basically.

♪♪

Narrator: The scan was gentle,

like it was initiated by someone that knows how to interact

with life, and Earth-like conditions

without appearing hostile.

Leo: And the grass was swept one way,

you know, like they were spinning one way,

and that's how the grass was folded down,

and in the centre part the grass was still upright.

Narrator: Kepler-44 is a real star system identified

by the Kepler Space Telescope.

It's home to at least one confirmed exoplanet,

Kepler-442 B,

a little over a thousand light years from Earth.

While there's no known connection,

it's a compelling candidate while imagining

where a craft like this might come from.

While this system is not in our immediate cosmic neighbourhood,

its sun-like star and planetary dynamics make it a candidate for

harbouring advanced civilizations.

Considering UAPs that exhibit advanced propulsion

or scanning behaviours,

their origin might be attributed to this distant,

potentially habitable system.

It's very interesting in terms of it being Earth-like,

but because it's so distant, even the strongest telescopes,

like the James Webb Space Telescope,

can't characterize it,

can't tell us if there's an atmosphere

or water on these planets.

We're sort of like at the outer limits of that bubble

that we're looking at.

But even there, we're finding these exoplanets

that are Earth-like.

So we need to sort of keep pushing that boundary.

A lot of the exoplanets that we have discovered

are very close into their star,

and so they're orbiting around their star in the matter

of a few days.

And because they're so close in,

they tend to be what we call .tidally locked, /

so you always have the same face that is facing the star.

Because this exoplanet, Kepler-442 B,

is farther away from its star,

it takes 112 days for it to orbit,

and it may not be tidally locked.

So it may be orbiting,

rotating around itself more normally sort of like the Earth.

So it may have a more normal night-day cycle,

which helps quite a bit in terms of, like, equalizing

the temperatures on its surface.

And its star is very quiet, so we know that.

We know that it wouldn't have the potential of eroding away

an atmosphere if there was one.

♪♪

Narrator: If the creators of the UAPs came from a planet

like Kepler-442 B, Earth-like, but denser and calmer,

then maybe these ships reflect the minds that made them.

Travelling at the speed of light,

it would take over a thousand years

to get from Kepler-442 B to Earth,

so it would need to be worth their while.

Dr. Masters: In many cases, we might expect non-contact

simply because of the vast difference

between their technology and our own,

which is an indication of their level of advancement

and our own.

The technology is sort of a metric

for how we might conceptualize that.

But to me, just in looking at the way this case unfolded

and the technology that was described,

this almost feels like a futuristic extraterrestrial

or extratempastrial,

maybe a future human technology that was on some sort

of scouting mission or data collection mission,

and wasn't necessarily piloted by individuals

inside that machine.

♪♪

Narrator: Silent and precise,

these machines might not carry passengers,

but their design suggests something familiar,

as if their creators remember us,

or are perhaps in some way connected to us.

It very well could be something like ourselves.

It has sort of these classic UFO-type characteristics,

where in many of these cases we do find upright walking humanoid

or human forms in association with them.

Narrator: If they share our shape and similar life

giving properties of our planet, do they share something deeper?

A common origin, a parallel evolution,

or a mirror held up across the stars?

I think human behaviour wants to feel

there is something bigger out there,

and this is mysterious,

and they wanna be connected with something,

whether it's a divine, unexplainable,

or alien from other planets.

People are always looking for some kind of connection

to the divine, I think.

And a lot of people believe that that's what this is.

Narrator: If these ships came from Kepler-442 B,

Earth-like but steadier and more defined,

then what we saw in Saskatchewan was just one note

in a much larger signal.

We watched them watching us,

but what might they see when they look at us?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Maybe they never meant to meet us,

or maybe they couldn't.

So instead, they sent drones to be their eyes,

observers designed to last longer than any life form

could survive the journey.

Not explorers, but data gatherers.

Dr. Masters: If we are talking about,

hypothetically, let's say, an extraterrestrial species

that evolved on a planet 12, 15 light-years away,

depending on their speed,

they could get here within a lifetime.

If we're talking about hundreds or thousands of light years,

obviously we get up against the limitations of a lifespan,

as we understand it here on Earth.

♪♪

Narrator: Kepler-442 B, for example,

orbits a main sequence star that is more stable

and longer lived than the sun.

That means fewer violent solar flares,

more consistent climate,

and a longer window for life to evolve without interruption.

Though technically younger than Earth,

this stability would allow for life to develop

far sooner than it could here, perhaps even millions of years.

And once a species masters its ecosystem,

they may begin to manipulate it.

They can genetically or technologically engineer food,

shelter, temperature regulation.

Physical toughness becomes unnecessary.

With an extended lifespan and a long lived planet,

they may have coevolved with their technology,

gradually offloading or delegating physical tasks

to artificial intelligence.

♪♪

We don't bend down and start having conversations

with termites in a termite mound.

We don't see any reason to do that,

because they wouldn't understand what we were saying.

So it could be when we're dealing with

these extraterrestrial species,

or whatever's making these technologies,

it could even be if its future humans

are so far from our future that it's like us trying

to have a conversation with a macaque.

We're just too separated in time in our level of understanding

and our consciousness.

They obviously could have a longer life history cycle

and live to be much longer

relative to how we perceive time on our planet

based on our celestial timekeeping mechanisms.

♪♪

Narrator: On a planet like Kepler-442 B,

where sunlight lingers and atmospheres change slowly,

vision might have evolved differently.

No eyes, no lenses, they wouldn't see the way we do.

Their skin sees, each cell tuned to light and pressure,

each ripple a signal.

Where a human face would hold emotion,

theirs hold silence.

In a world where danger fades

and artificially intelligent machines do heavy lifting,

biology adapts through time and evolution.

What begins as wearable tech like headsets or implants

could evolve into inborn organic transceivers,

bioelectric nodes that sync with machines as naturally as a limb.

Muscles' atrophy.

Speed and strength give way to longevity, precision,

and data retention.

It is no longer necessary to react via fight or flight.

Bodies need to interface to understand.

It's entirely possible that life in such an environment

bears no resemblance to the human form

or its evolutionary path.

Gravity seems to be one of the most important

variables here.

With that said, the distance from our sun

not being entirely locked, having an atmosphere,

having a liquid core that gives us electromagnetic field

that protects us from solar flares,

there are a lot of things.

But gravity seems to shape a lot of what happens on this planet

as a rocky planet for land animals.

Once you get into the water, once you get into the oceans,

because of buoyancy,

there's a lot more variation in organisms

that can exist in the higher oceans,

the lower--you even have great white sharks and certain whales

that'll go really deep relative to what we'd expect

these to be able to do.

But on land, gravity is really that key variable.

We might expect these larger, more sturdy,

multiple-legged organisms.

We might expect things like ants and other insects

that almost have a hydraulic exoskeleton system

where they're able to lift many times their body weight

because they don't have this internal skeletal structure

and these muscles that are moving them.

Rather, they're much more able to withstand gravity,

and lift heavier objects

because of this different musculoskeletal system.

Really, there's a lot of different forms

that could arise.

If I had to speculate,

I would think it would be some sort of large,

multi-legged, maybe octopedal type of animal,

a grazing animal based on past studies,

or something more similar to a lot of the insects

that we have on this planet

that aren't affected as much as mammals are,

because they have a different musculoskeletal system

that allows them to withstand higher gravities like that.

Narrator: What we see in the Langenberg drones,

they may be the fingertips of a species.

The craft didn't damage the crops or seek interaction.

The plants were precisely bent, not crushed, burned,

or broken.

The UAPs hovered low, made no attempt to communicate,

then vanished.

This suggests a non-invasive observational mission.

When they look at Earth,

they may not see cities or borders, only rhythms,

anomalies, and signals.

Perhaps they're detached,

more philosophical than territorial,

less concerned with outcomes and more with the patterns

we leave behind.

And with that imprint recorded, they vanish.

Murray: Sometimes when you go down a certain direction,

you discover lots of other things along the way

that you do expect, right?

Then if they're conducting science,

and they're, say, used to hopping from planet to planet,

they may be looking for something,

part of a larger puzzle,

a picture that they want to create for themselves

to make sense of their universe the way they see it.

Narrator: Perhaps this is just a dot

in a larger constellation.

A Saskatchewan canola field today,

another place tomorrow.

♪♪

Narrator: But how do they see it?

What is their POV?

Taking into consideration everything we have theorized,

we are left with a potential vision of just that.

These pseudobiological drones could be capturing data points

that read chemical signals as they explore the elements

that make up other planets, analyzing and storing that data

to be shared with their home planet.

The more we learn about space, the stars, the planets,

the signals, the clearer the picture becomes.

Every new piece of data sharpens our understanding

of what might be watching or waiting.

We can't really have, like, one correct answer

when we don't have enough data.

So there is a next generation of giant telescopes

that are currently being built on Earth,

and so they will have a great amount of sensitivity.

In terms of exoplanet studies, they would, for example,

potentially be able to take direct images of planets

that are the size of the Earth.

So that's like fantastic,

because right now we can only take pictures of things

like Saturn, maybe Uranus at the limit.

♪♪

Nathalie: And these telescopes,

they're going to go online in the next five, ten,

15 years.

So that's really exciting.

We also hopefully will have a successor

to the James Webb Space Telescope

called the Habitable Worlds Observatory,

and that would be set for launch in 2040 or so.

And that would be also very sensitive,

more sensitive in different kinds of light.

So we are pushing forward.

It's hard to say exactly what's needed until you actually

do the experiment,

but these are going to be huge steps forward.

And I believe now the RCMP,

there is some sort of--a bit of a task force being set up

to be more a little bit more investigative

and not so casual and just write things off.

We need real education.

So I think to have groups like MUFON,

the Canadian UFO survey that's been going for 40 years

has so much information in there.

And I think that's a real good science-based,

evidential type of reporting where people that,

even if they don't believe it,

they can see that there's been some serious work done here.

And there is, like, 5% of unexplainable.

Maybe it's 95% explainable, but 5%, there's no explanation,

and I think that is going up now,

because we were only looking at Canada in our reporting,

but now you look at worldwide,

that unexplainable number has gone way up.

Narrator: And that unexplainable quotient starts

with a lone farmer

looking out over his canola field in Saskatchewan

a half-century ago,

and witnessing something unexplainable

in the realms of human experience and technology.

Murray: He just happened to be there.

Edwin just happened to be right there.

Without a camera, right there.

But a reliable witness nonetheless,

because he had so much to lose.

Leo: So I believed it because the thing is, you know,

seeing it here was believing.

There was no two ways about it.

♪♪

Within the past five years or so,

the Royal Canadian Mint decided to feature a number of

objects that are related to Canadiana on coins

as official legal tender, and they put together

a series of coins depicting significant UFO cases

throughout Canada

as being culturally significant, part of our social fabric,

and certainly a UFO landing spot like Langenberg,

which attracted so much attention,

and is talked about to this day 50 years on,

shows that it was worthwhile depicting.

So we have this silver coin showing Edwin Fuhr

and the upside down bowl in the field

which actually glows as well on the coin under blacklight.

It's a culturally significant event for Canada,

and certainly in North America.

It also shows that the government of Canada

took this case seriously, which it certainly did,

not only the National Research Council of Canada,

the RCMP,

but also the Royal Canadian Mint itself,

thought Langenberg was something to be celebrated.

♪♪

Narrator: In 1974,

a farmer saw something he couldn't explain.

Decades later,

the Royal Canadian Mint memorialized it.

This moment, this mystery,

is forever part of Canada's cultural record,

a quiet reminder that we are not alone.

♪♪

♪♪

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