Original subtitles

♪♪

Narrator: It began as a routine flight.

Chris Rutkowski: There had been a thunderstorm.

Suddenly, the copilot sees something.

Eric Delgado [on video]: It')s like an orb, man.

Look at that.

It')s pulsating.

Narrator: Not lightning, not weather, something else.

They were gonna have an imminent collision.

Eric Delgado: It was like floating,

but the maneuverability was incredible.

Ashley Kircher: I honestly don')t know what it was.

Narrator: Whatever it was, it moved like it had intent.

It was effectively something that was just following them

as they were travelling along.

Narrator: An ordinary light becomes something extraordinary.

I')ve never doubted there was something out there,

and once I had that encounter,

all they did was just kinda reaffirm it.

And it for me, it was like,

".Yeah, we')re not alone.

- We')re not alone."/ - ♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Chris: In March 2020,

a FedEx pilot was flying on a fairly routine mission

between Monterrey and Memphis.

And it was just him and his copilot,

and they were flying through the night sky.

They, you know, had been doing all the usual checks.

Cockpit was generally quiet.

Narrator: The pilot is former United States Air Force.

Super intelligent guys with lots of experience,

and I believe they were about an hour into their flight

heading towards the States.

Chris: In fact, they were talking a little bit,

with other aircraft and towers about having to

go around the thunderstorm, whether they had to climb,

whether they had to deviate from their path a little bit.

Narrator: On the flight deck,

Captain Eric Delgado is navigating his way around

the storm when his first officer

and copilot notices something unusual.

Eric: I go, ".We')re gonna miss him by 40 miles.

You guys have nothing to worry about."/

I go, it')s--I mean,

we')re not even really hitting any turbulence.

It')s, like, occasional light if that.

I go, ".Ah, don')t sweat it,"/

and we talked for a few more minutes,

he was like, ".I')ll see you back when we land."/

I go, ".All right, take care."/

We')re done with that, I take the airplane back.

We')re eating and just discussing those things,

and all of a sudden,

as I')m looking at my first officer,

his eyes get real big, and I')m looking at him,

and then he')s telegraphing over my left shoulder

where his eyes are.

So he')s kinda looking out my left forward window and he goes,

".Look at the shooting star,"/

and--but he stops, like,

and he never really gets the word ".star"/ out,

and his mouth falls.

And so I')m sitting here with my sandwich going,

".What the hell is he looking at?"/

And I turn around, and right there, man.

I mean, it')s like right there, probably a thousand feet or so,

there')s this white light.

John [on video]: I was gonna tell you, shooting star.

Eric [on video]: Shooting star, but then it stopped,

Eric: If you can imagine a lighthouse in some thin fog

as the light swings around, it kind of hits us,

the nose of the airplane,

and runs down the tail end of the aircraft.

And I')m like, ".Oh my God, this guy--it')s another airplane,

and he')s got a vector toward us."/

My heart')s racing.

I dropped the sandwich.

I grabbed my yoke, I grabbed my throttles,

and I')m thinking, ".He')s got a descending turn into us."/

That')s what I thought.

I')m just really scared.

I adjust the range so that it opens up,

and now I')m looking, like, 2.5, five miles

in front of the airplane as opposed to, you know, 80,

and there')s nothing there.

And I')m like, you know, ".Something')s wrong.

It')s okay, just go back to your training."/

So there I am, focused on my world,

focused on my instruments,

and you')re gonna get multiple warnings,

visual, oral, even in my HUD of traffic

and that you need to avoid it, so I was expecting the TCAS,

the Traffic Collision and Avoidance System to go off,

and nothing.

There was no indicator on the NAV display

of a hollow diamond, a solid diamond,

a yellow circle,

or a red square--well, a red square is bad.

By that time this thing')s screaming at you,

it')s telling you to do evasive maneuvers.

There')s nothing, and there')s no oral,

because you')ll get the oral warnings with it.

And so there')s nothing happening.

So I didn')t disconnect.

So we')re kind of just in level flight,

and this thing is bright, dim, bright, dim.

♪♪

Eric: And that')s all, and it was very cyclic,

it didn')t waver,

and then it kind of starts slowly moving back.

And, you know, my heart starts slowing down.

I')m like, "/Okay, what')s going on?"/

I go, ".John, turn off the lights.

Turn turn off the lights,"/

because I didn')t want to take my hands off anything.

So he turns the lights off to make sure I wasn')t seeing

like a reflection of something in the cockpit,

you know, back at us.

And then I started getting excited,

because I realized, ".Oh my God,

am I looking at what I think I')m looking at?"/

I grabbed my camera,

and back then I had a Samsung 9s.

I whipped this thing out and I roll a video.

Eric [on video]: Yeah, man,

this guy is not reporting TCAS.

That is an unidentified flying object, bro.

I can finally say I saw one now.

That is cool.

Eric: And we')re doing, like I said, you know,

eight miles a minute over the ground.

And then this thing was steady.

It was flying perfect formation with us.

And the only thing he did was probably slide out what we call

line of rest.

So he got as far out as maybe half-a-mile.

Eric [on video]: Looks like he')s going further away, man.

Yeah, I')m zooming in and he')s pulling away, dude.

And then he probably--or maybe a little more,

maybe a little more, and then came back in

as close as, like, say a thousand feet.

Eric [on video]: And it')s pulsating too, man.

That is nuts.

I wish we could get closer.

I can')t believe you saw it.

Eric: A little bit smaller than F-16,

and that')s when in my mind I thought, ".Okay, F-16,

wings, nozzle, exhaust, lights,

and then I')m really looking at this object now.

Again, bright, dim, bright, dim,

with my eyeballs.

There were no navigation lights, strobe lights, beacon lights.

There were no wings.

There was not an empennage, a fuselage.

There was nothing, man.

It was just a ball.

Neil Lavoie: There')s nothing that I')m aware of

that would be in a soccer ball shape

travelling at that speed that would actually

change its shape, et cetera.

Eric: Except when it dimmed,

you could see some surface features

that looked like either plasma,

but where')s the front?

There')s no windows, there')s nothing, you know?

It')s not a conventional aircraft airplane as we know it.

♪♪

Eric: All of a sudden we start to--it starts to fade.

I')m like, ".Oh, what')s going on?

What')s going on?"/

And we')re hitting those outer bands of that weather.

Again, it wasn')t the thunderstorm,

but it was the bleed off from it.

And I')m like, ".Oh, we')re gonna lose him.

We')re gonna lose them to the weather,"/

and it looked like he was wanting to go to the lightning.

It was really weird.

And then that')s it.

Ashley: It stayed on his wing,

but then he said it also went back a bit at one point

where they thought it had disappeared.

But about a minute or two later, it came back.

And so two minutes prior to airspace penetration

in US airspace,

this thing started changing colours.

Eric [on video]: It')s turning colours now.

Eric: It started peeling away slowly at first

started changing colours and then it just, bam.

I mean, was gone. Boom.

And I')m just getting goosebumps just thinking about it.

I was like, ".Holy moly, that thing just moved."/

And next thing you know,

they gave us the frequency change.

We talked to Houston and I')m like,

".That thing knew exactly where we were,

where it was, where it didn')t want to go,"/

and it took off, and it was gone and it was over.

And the whole encounter was probably just over 25 minutes.

♪♪

Chris: It')s actually relatively common

for pilots to report seeing UAP or UFOs.

In fact, there are something like

500 cases since the year 2015 on record in Canada alone,

and at least ten times that amount for The United States

from pilots reporting UFOs or UAP.

Now a lot of the time these things turn out to be

unexpected observations of satellite reentries,

some large balloons,

but in the case of what was seen over Monterey,

this was something else entirely.

Narrator: In order to get a closer look

at what was seen over Monterey in March 2020,

we used AI to enhance the footage.

What was a grainy image comes into focus,

and a distinct circular feature takes shape on the inside

of the anomaly.

By inverting the RGB and HLS channels of the video,

that shape becomes even more apparent

as a halo or glow seems to surround the object.

Because the UAP is constantly changing shape,

we analyzed another still from the footage.

This alternate view shows the same halo,

and makes the circular object on it even more apparent,

leaving experts to wonder what exactly

they could be looking at.

But the skies here have a reputation.

Long before Captain Delgado')s flight,

pilots and locals told of lights that tracked their planes,

technology that shouldn')t exist, moving where no radar could see.

And Captain Delgado, he')d already heard the stories.

The Zone Of Silence is a treasure chest of eerie legends.

Travellers claim hours vanish between checkpoints.

They arrive long after they should

with no memory of delay.

Ranchers tell stories of polite, tall, blonde strangers

who speak perfect Spanish, ask for water,

then disappear without footprints.

Others report communications go silent,

not in a burst, but in a slow fade.

Voices stretch and distort before dropping out completely

as if the signal is being absorbed.

Animals are said to avoid crossing the central zone

and will only skirt the periphery.

But this is legend.

There are so many stories about this place,

it')s hard to tell where observation ends

and imagination begins.

Eric: In that northern area of Mexico,

it')s actually quite large from states of Sonora

to, like, states of Chihuahua.

There')s some zones in there.

Like I think Chihuahua has this Zona de Silencio,

".The Silent Zone,"/ you know,

where magnetic anomalies and radios freak out

and all this weird stuff happens.

This region is geologically very complex.

♪♪

Narrator: And so are the skies.

For decades, lights like this have appeared,

then vanished, leaving no trace.

Some call it magnetism.

Others think it')s a signal.

But to the pilots who')ve seen them,

the object')s movement suggests more than simple propulsion.

♪♪

Narator: The zone of silence has been called many things,

magnetic anomaly, tourist legend,

forbidden airspace.

But for those who')ve flown above it,

the silence feels alive, and sometimes flies with you.

While no evidence confirms what is here

and only speculation fills the gap,

the zone of silence is believed by many to hide something

that')s been watching our skies far longer

than we')ve been flying through them.

For this investigation,

our producer team has speculated a point of origin for the craft

witnessed by Eric Delgado.

GJ 486 B, a rocky exoplanet

26 light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo,

scorched by its star where heat and magnetism

shape every motion.

Life here would be improbable, yet not impossible.

♪♪

GJ 486 B is an interesting case,

because it certainly wouldn')t have life as we know it

here on Earth.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: For centuries, lights have risen

and vanished over the Chihuahuan Desert,

but on this night, one of them followed a plane.

To understand what Captain Eric Delgado saw,

investigators turned their focus to the ground below.

This region, the Northern Deserts of Mexico,

is alive with magnetic distortion

and ancient geology.

Here compasses wander, storms form without warning,

and meteorite fragments lie scattered

like breadcrumbs from the sky.

Christian Bohm: In that part,

we have close to the surface

mainly Jurassic and Cretaceous sedimentary rocks.

But these sedimentary rocks aren')t just like

flat-lying limestones or so.

There are limestones and shales and so on,

you know, interbedded.

A lot of limestone actually.

But they')re like in, locally,

very crazily folded and thrusted.

In fact, regionally, from a geological point of view,

we call it the ".Fold and Thrust Belt."/

And so we have this Fold and Thrust Belt

of like various stratigraphic packages

of various compositions.

And this complex geology

makes for very interesting mineralization as well.

Oftentimes, we have various amounts of feldspars

and amphiboles and other silicate minerals

in there.

We can have oxide minerals that are also deposited,

shed off the continent.

For example,

magnetite can have magnetic little bands in sandstones.

So we have to think of these as geologically dynamic processes,

but most of them take a long time to form.

It')s just the whole framework.

It is very complex,

like what we find in terms of how the rocks

have been deformed and heated up together,

like in that part of Mexico.

♪♪

Narrator: Beneath the desert')s still surface

lies a battlefield of ancient forces,

layers of rock twisted and crushed

over millions of years.

Magnetite and quartz still hum with traces of that pressure.

If electromagnetic energy lingers anywhere on Earth,

it would be here,

in a place where magnetism bends and signals vanish.

The simplest truth may be that we')re not seeing

everything that')s there,

and that may give us a crucial clue

as to what Captain Eric Delgado saw that night in March 2020.

Murray Toews: So at first he thought maybe

that')s what was going on,

that there was another aircraft that he was aware of

that was in the space.

In fact, there was, but very quickly,

after his copilot had seen this object

drift towards their wing,

he saw it on his wing, he took his phone,

presence of mind,

and he started to shoot some video of it.

While they')re doing all this stuff too,

they also tried to do something else.

They tried to get a radar image of it.

It')s called ".painting,"/

painting a radar image of something.

It wasn')t a military aircraft,

so it was very limited in what it could do,

so it could never get a very good lock of it.

Narrator: While the pilot')s radar won')t register

the sighting, his cell phone will,

to a certain degree.

Cell phone cameras can')t capture what we see.

If you try to get a beautiful sunset or any object,

you')re never really seeing it as well as you can with your eyes.

But he was able to correlate what he saw,

which is effectively like an upside down tear-shaped object

that was glowing.

It had a bit of a glow around it.

Narrator: Cameras, like our eyes,

flatten the unknown into what we expect to see.

But when the atmosphere bends light

and magnetism warps signals, reality itself can distort.

I feel like there was a certain amount of distortion,

the kind of light that was coming off of it.

When you look at the footage,

it kind of looks like a drop of water on a window,

and then light passes through it and it')s out of focus.

But it actually does have a shape.

Narrator: Perhaps the UAP appeared

where the atmosphere was charged,

as if drawn to energy itself.

Murray: There was a thunderstorm that they were encroaching too.

In fact, they were just on the edge

of a thunderstorm that was happening.

So likely there was a buildup of charge of electrons

and things like that in the area.

There')s a perfect opportunity if you')re a curious species,

to see, well, what is the interaction

between this aircraft, if you')re a scientist,

and say the surrounding swell of electromagnetic activity

as a storm starts charge up like a gigantic battery.

And actually planes are designed so they can even take

direct lightning strikes, right?

So that could be a plausible reason why,

and they may want to see how does this gigantic

bird-like thing that these humans are in,

how does it interact with storms?

And in fact, there')s lots of cases

where UFOs were reported hovering

very close to aircraft,

either during storms or other kinds of activity,

seemingly inexplicably there,

but maybe because there is something going on

in the environment and you have this object

like an aircraft

or something that can observe the interactions.

Narrator: The mysterious orb also seems to react

to the plane')s electromagnetic signature.

When we enhance the image with artificial intelligence,

our focus is again drawn to this circular anomaly

on the surface of the UAP.

Is it some kind of sensor array that is registering

the radar signals from the human aircraft?

We can only speculate on its exact purpose.

But what is plain to see is that it')s there,

and reacting to something.

Ashley: And he also mentioned that it didn')t fly

in front of the plane,

that it only stayed off to the side,

which he thought might be because it might be aware

of whatever the plane gives off, electronic waves

and, I don')t know, other kinds of things.

So it stayed off to the side, he thought, for that purpose.

Narrator: For all our analysis, one truth remains:

We only perceive what our senses allow.

If the desert hides electromagnetic forces

we can')t record,

what else might be hidden in plain sight?

Some researchers believe the answer lies not in the sky

or the soil,

but in the way we see reality itself.

Murray: Our reality that we see is like an operating system

on a computer.

And the icons on that operating system

are the elements of our reality.

Our senses are built only for those things.

We need to be able to eat, to survive, escape predators,

and just navigate our world.

So you only see the world as if it were an operating system,

and the icons in it are all you need.

You don')t need anything past that operating system,

and you can')t see underneath that operating system.

So imagine you see something that was built

with a completely different mind,

completely different way of looking at the universe,

not evolved on this earth, and you see this object,

it would appear like a glitch to us.

It would be, in fact, evolution has created,

or rather we have evolved to see the world

only as we need to.

When you see something you don')t need,

you go, ".What is that?"/

And you will share that experience with others,

and you')ll all glitch.

You')ll go, ".Oh, it')s a--it')s a sphere.

It')s a saucer. It')s a blah.

It')s a it')s an elf. It')s a--it')s a ghost.

It')s Sasquatch,"/ because we')re glitching.

We can')t actually see it.

We')ll never be able to see it.

Neil: Because it travelled with the aircraft

for such a long period of time

and with the descriptions that the pilots gave

and the fact that these pilots are very experienced

and they both saw the same thing,

it')s a bit of a mystery to me.

The other piece that I')m curious about is the fact

that it disappeared when they reached the US border.

That')s a bit of a conundrum for me,

is why it suddenly would have disappeared,

or why it went away.

This one, I do not have an answer.

Narrator: If our senses can')t show us everything that')s here,

maybe they can')t show us

everything that')s possible either.

In the search for other worlds,

scientists have found planets that defy our expectations,

places where the rules of life and physics bend together.

Our production team')s speculative point of origin,

GJ 486 B, is a rocky exoplanet

orbiting so close to its star

that one hemisphere remains locked in perpetual heat,

exceeding 400 degrees Celsius.

Observations suggest traces of water vapour may exist

in its atmosphere,

though the data remain uncertain.

But if such an environment can sustain complex chemistry,

then the definition of ".habitable"/ may be far broader

than we assume.

So potentially we could imagine life to evolve

in really high temperatures.

We have life on Earth called extremophiles

that thrive in extreme temperatures,

extreme acidity levels, all kinds of different things.

Tardigrades is usually the classic example

that we give.

The issue is that life, as we know,

the only kinds of life that we')ve seen,

do require some amount of liquid water at some point

as a solvent for the chemical reactions to occur.

And at 430 degrees Celsius,

we can')t imagine how that would be.

Potentially on the night side, something could happen,

but at this point we')re really thinking of life

not as we know it on Earth.

We')d have to, like, think outside the box.

Dr. Michael P. Masters: It')s also very possible

that we could have organisms develop subsurface.

There could be cavernous places or water underground

that shielded from that heat,

and in fact, you could have a situation

where the outer crust is heated up

that heats pools of water underneath,

like aquifers, for instance, or underground lakes.

And in that situation,

it could be maybe somewhat conducive to life.

♪♪

Now investigators have pointed out that

in the exact direction that this thing was seen

was the planet Venus

and it wasn')t a perfect sphere at the time it was

a little bit gibbous which might account

for the egg-shaped appearance and while it seems

absurd to think that experienced pilots

would mistake a planet for something else,

it')s actually relatively common for people to mistake this.

Narrator: Maybe it was Venus, maybe not.

But when we explain away the impossible too quickly,

we risk closing the door on discovery.

Sometimes skepticism blinds more than belief.

So people have been trained over the years

to dismiss these things,

to not talk about them, and to feel like you')re crazy

if you did see something that doesn')t fit with the norm,

and we need to get past that as a society.

We need to get to the point where we can start

having these conversations,

and really discuss these odd aspects of our reality,

because they might be some of the biggest questions

of our time.

So I think the testimony of pilots are important,

because they have good eyesight,

they get tested for drugs and alcohol constantly,

they know what')s in the sky,

because they live most of their lives

working in this job occupationally.

They see what')s in the sky,

and they')re trained to recognize threats

and trained to recognize things that are anomalous.

So we shouldn')t necessarily place their testimony

above all others,

but it is important to recognize that these people

are reporting things all the time.

And in the case of Monterey,

you have two highly-trained individuals who have seen

a lot of things, 30-plus years in the sky.

When these people say they saw something strange,

we really need to take that seriously.

Narrator: Maybe what we')re chasing

isn')t out there in the dark sky,

but waiting to be seen in a new light.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Before we look to other worlds for the source

of these visitations,

we start with the tools we trust most:

radar, sensors, instruments built to see

what our eyes can')t,

because if something is truly there,

it should leave a trace,

and yet not every encounter does.

Neil: Radar is typically looking for larger objects

or large, storm formations and things like that.

And again, it also depends on which type of radar

you')re talking about.

Weather radar is designed to look for weather.

Military radar, when it')s used for actually identifying

there')s aircraft around them,

and then ground based radar can be looking for aircraft,

it could be looking for weather,

depends all depends on the type of radar,

how it')s used.

Eric: The radar on this airplane is by far,

of all the airplanes I')ve flown,

the best radar I')ve ever used for,

whether painting or, you know, painting anomalies,

stuff like that.

Ashley: I')m not a pilot,

but I know that they they live and die by their radar readings

and their instruments on their panel.

And he kept checking,

and in fact, he asked his copilot to put up some sort

of--he called it ".an antenna,"/ which is not really an antenna,

but it gives more view, like,

instead of just a couple thousand feet over the plane,

it goes up higher and lower.

It gives him a bigger view of what')s going on

around the plane.

And he said nothing showed up.

Where this thing was, should have been seen,

nothing showed up, and nothing on his radar.

Narrator: If radar couldn')t see it,

maybe it wasn')t built to be seen by human-made instruments.

Chrisian: And I')m not an extraterrestrial geologist,

but I have read

that in the universe,

plasma is actually the most abundant matter.

It')s very different from Earth.

So if something is coming from the universe,

from elsewhere, I just find it very intriguing

that we')re describing it as plasma,

probably having limited understanding

of what plasma means or looks like or could be

or what it could be used for.

We don')t understand how propulsion may work

for objects to come all the way to us,

likely from these enormously great distances.

I know the observations how these objects move.

They may hover,

they may spin with minor or no sounds related to it,

and then blink of an eye, they disappear.

♪♪

I')ve also read that plasma,

depending on the charge,

the level of ionization,

the charge of electrons in the plasma,

it has certain frequencies.

And these frequencies,

they, depending on the frequency, can interact

in different ways with radar frequencies.

So when a radar frequency, as we may emit it,

interferes with a plasma of a certain frequency,

it can be deflected, it can be absorbed,

and so this could possibly be an explanation

why some of these objects,

they don')t seem to appear on our radar screens.

♪♪

Narrator: So the question shifts;

if something in our own sky can hide from detection,

perhaps their place of origin is also hidden from our telescopes.

Our experts let imagination take the lead,

turning their gaze outwards to worlds that mirror our own,

just enough to make us wonder,

what if life out there rewrote the rules we take for granted--

♪♪

Narrator:--like on GJ 486 B?

Nathalie Ouellette: You would expect the star

to just blast away any atmosphere.

So an interesting result, the issue with that

is that potentially the water vapour signal

could be coming from the star

and not the planet.

So stars, even our sun,

can have water vapour inside of its sunspots.

The sunspots are colder regions on the surface of a star

or our sun, and water vapour

can be locked in there.

So when you')re looking at the signal,

you have the signal of the star and the exoplanet

all tangled together,

and you have to sort of disentangle them.

So that')s why we need to study the star in greater detail,

because we')re not actually sure if the water vapour

is coming from the star or the exoplanets.

And at 430 degrees Celsius, we can')t imagine

how that would be.

Potentially on the night side, something could happen.

♪♪

Nathalie: At this point,

we')re really thinking of life not as we know it on Earth.

We')d have to, like, think outside the box here.

♪♪

It')s rocky.

It has the potential for life in a similar way

as what we')ve experienced here on Earth,

but just being so hot,

it')s difficult to imagine what type of life might arise there.

Certainly not something we can say didn')t happen

or wouldn')t happen,

but it')s harder to imagine what that could look like.

Some possibilities, of course,

are that we have these thermophiles or extremophiles.

Narrator: Maybe life elsewhere isn')t fragile like ours.

Maybe it')s built for the furnace.

♪♪

Dr. Masters: It')s also very possible

that we could have organisms develop subsurface,

that there could be cavernous places or water underground

that shielded from that heat, and in fact,

you could have a situation where the outer crust is heated up

that heats pools of water underneath,

like aquifers for instance, or underground lakes.

And in that situation,

it could be maybe somewhat conducive to life,

that you could have an environment

where it')s protected, it')s warm,

it')s like a little soup bubbling under the surface

that might be a good place for life to arise.

Narrator: Even here on Earth, life finds a way,

thriving in boiling vents, drinking poison,

wearing armour made of metal.

If it can happen here,

maybe it can happen anywhere.

Dr. Masters: In many of these cases

with these sort of extreme environments,

it')s easy to just write them off

and say, ".Well, there')s no way life could be there."/

But considering what we see on this planet

and how life always finds a way

from the beginning stages of prokaryotic life

3.8 billion years ago and looking at the extreme forms

of life that we find around volcanic vents

and deep sea creatures

that exist in very different environments

from what we')re used to up on the surface as land mammals,

there')s certainly the possibility

that they could evolve in those places,

and I would even argue that there')s a good chance

that some of the benefits might outweigh the cost,

that there might be areas in something like

a subsurface warm aquifer where there could be benefits

that are inferred from that unique environment.

And based on what we see here on Earth,

it')s important to keep in mind that even if things

seem different from Earth,

it doesn')t necessarily mean that there can')t be life there,

or the potential for even intelligent complex life.

Narrator: With any of these exoplanets

that seemingly are so extreme

and so hot or arid

or just boiling oceans of ice worlds,

there')s always the question of what would make them

want to come to Earth and examine our planet?

Murray: I believe it')s a feature of intelligent life

to be curious,

and that')s how we learn,

that')s how we understand our environments,

That')s how we interact with each other.

We could also speculate that a ship had a reason,

and I think it was even speculated

that it was a FedEx plane.

Maybe there was something on the plane

that was of interest to extraterrestrials,

and they just wanna check up on the goods

and make sure it')s getting to its location.

It')s hard to know.

But I feel that curiosity

still is one of the major components to it.

Thunderstorms wouldn')t be unique to extraterrestrials

if they there are lots of, for example, gas giants

all over our galaxy.

In the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, for example,

it')s very active with thunderstorms and activity,

but at much different pressures

and much higher greater magnitude.

So, yeah, who knows?

They could just be measuring and comparing--comparing notes.

I am an advocate of the idea that if you are--if you have

the privilege of being a space-faring biological entity

or an intelligence or whatever,

you start to get a good sample and see your neighbourhood,

like, within 50, 100, 200, or, like, dozens of parsecs

all around you, different worlds

of different types and different kinds.

♪♪

Murray: You might wanna learn about life,

how it evolves.

You might want to know what worlds are habitable,

what habit worlds are not habitable.

They may have even originated from someplace

entirely distant and different.

And this is just along the way,

they')re just checking out the different worlds

as they move through the galaxy.

You don')t even know where they')re from.

Perspectivism, a sort of branch of epistemology,

which is test the limits of our knowledge.

What are the limits of our knowledge?

What can we actually learn from our world with our basic senses?

♪♪

Dr. Masters: It')s logical to assume that.

Once you reach a certain point of complexity

and intelligence and technological advancement,

it makes sense that you would start looking elsewhere

for other things that are doing similar things.

So in a way, we have to think about

all of these unique characteristics of Earth,

and all of the beautiful things that confer benefits

to life prospering and existing and flourishing

on this planet,

how that might look to organisms on other planets.

Narrator: If they thrive in heat,

maybe that glow we see isn')t life,

maybe it')s life itself.

On GJ 486 B, daylight is fire and night never comes.

If they came from there,

what would they see when they look at us?

Narrator: To us, heat means danger.

To these travellers,

it might be the only place life begins.

On a world like GJ 486 B,

the atmosphere glows with heat,

metallic vapours condense into rain,

and molten rivers trace the planet')s locked horizon.

Now we know if you were to land there,

it would be very uncomfortable,

because the temperature is about 430 degrees Celsius.

Narrator: And we may think that for a life form

forged in that heat, the appeal

of Earth')s relatively clement

and balanced environment would be obvious.

♪♪

Dr. Masters: Would they be like, ".Oh well, that looks beautiful,

with their oceans and their beaches

and their land?"/

At the same time, maybe that')s not the case,

because they evolved to

the parameters of that planet.

They evolved to what is ideal for them there.

So even though it')s beautiful to us,

it might seem like a horrible harsh environment

to intelligent life that developed in association with

those harsh conditions as we consider them,

but who are perfectly adapted to those conditions

because that')s where they evolved.

Narrator: If life ever emerged there,

it would have adapted to survive within extremes

of temperature and radiation,

thriving not in spite of the heat,

but because of it.

Perhaps what we')re seeing in our skies

are not visitors from cold space,

but beings drawn to the warmth that sustains them.

So on the other side, from the alien perspective,

they have the same problem as we do.

They realize that there')s different ways

of seeing the universe

depending on your evolutionary starting point.

Their operating system will see us a certain ways,

but they')re a little further along possibly,

and so they')re figuring out ways to understand us,

which would explain their curiosity.

Narrator: On a world like GJ 486 B,

life forms might not have bodies,

they may be more like currents,

creatures of plasma and magnetism,

reading the world through heat and charge.

If they look at us at all,

it')s through the shimmer of our energy,

not our eyes,

and this may be the key to the glowing orb

Eric Delgado saw in the skies above Monterey.

Ashley: And you can actually see it on the video.

You can see the halo around it.

It does look like plasma inside.

It looks like something that')s moving around inside.

But I')ve had reports

right from Canada, different parts of Canada,

where people have observed objects that they said

looked like plasma moving around.

So it wasn')t solid,

and it didn')t have any particular shape.

♪♪

Narrator: If we take this idea further,

they')re not inside the craft at all.

The craft is the phenomenon,

a self-organizing field of plasma that holds its shape

for only a moment before it dissolves.

You know, a soccer ball has those hexagons on it,

and it kind of looked like hexagonal type,

I don')t know if you want to call it a door.

I')m like, ".If that thing had a door

or something where somebody could get in out, that')s it.

That')s got to be it."/

Narrator: A body like that wouldn')t bounce radar.

It would swallow it.

The pilots saw a light that changed.

The radar saw nothing.

But if this light was intelligent,

it might have seen both, our energy, our signals,

our confusion, and deliberately stayed

just outside the range of our understanding.

Murray: Change of light and those kinds of things

could be indicative of a technology

that stabilizes the craft somehow,

or keeps it in place

or locked into the side of the aircraft, for example.

Whatever that is, we don')t know.

But it was truly interesting because it had a behaviour.

It didn')t have landing lights or directional lights,

didn')t have any strobes or any of that kind of stuff.

It was just a uniform glow that changed and alternated

as it hung out beside the wing.

Narrator: But imagine for a moment,

maybe what we call ".glow"/ isn')t light at all,

but breath.

Each movement through the electromagnetic field,

a pulse, a living exchange,

the shimmer of something simply existing.

When they try to describe what they saw,

it')s intriguing to me that

probably always they point out

that it')s very bright, glaringly bright in some cases.

They almost always describe something

that they have a difficulty

seeing what')s in this bright object.

They can determine an object,

but it')s like there is a glow around the object.

Narrator: Instead of sound or language,

the light might pulse frequencies that echo

through charged air.

To us, it')s a strange light show.

To them, it')s an attempted dialogue.

Christian: So on Earth,

we commonly think of three matters that material can exist:

solid, liquid, gas.

Those are the three.

Plasma is the fourth, in a sense

that it')s ionized gas.

Ionized gas means that in the plasma

ions and electrons are freely moving around.

Narrator: If they')re plasma based,

they might shift between visibility and invisibility,

condensing when observed, dispersing when not.

They don')t hide.

They just naturally are changing state.

Storms, lightning, ionized air, all energy sources;

maybe they follow the planet')s electromagnetic weather

just like whales follow ocean currents.

If their energy interacts with living tissue,

it could stir sensations, deja vu, awe, fear,

all through electromagnetic resonance.

Maybe the encounter isn')t just seen,

it')s felt deep inside the nervous system.

From that perspective,

if they')re bound to energy rather than space,

they might not fly at all,

just appear and reappear whenever the conditions match.

Not travelers in space, but in frequency.

On GJ 486 B, life wouldn')t begin in oceans.

It would rise from the atmosphere itself,

plasma holding shape through magnetic charge energy,

learning how to stay alive.

These aren')t bodies in the way we know them.

They')re patterns, self-stabilizing forms

fed by heat, bound by electromagnetism.

To survive means to draw strength from lightning,

solar wind, the living hum of radiation.

When the pattern breaks, it doesn')t die,

it divides.

A fragment shifts, finds charge,

and becomes whole again.

Their world may be chaos to us, but to them, it')s harmony.

An environment alive with currents to ride

and frequencies to follow.

And maybe that')s what brings them here to our radar,

our cities, our storms.

Every encounter might just be physics,

an involuntary impulse, a reaching out to understand.

These are obviously intelligent creatures,

but we can')t relate to them.

So how can we relate to them?

How can we connect to them,

or how do we understand them?

So they')ll do whatever means it takes to do it.

And from their perspective, we must look bizarre, right?

We just hug the ground, fly in the air, you know,

we watch reality television.

Like, we sit in in front of these boxes.

We')re bizarre.

But they may not see us that way.

They may see us for what we really are.

We don')t know what that is.

So it')s incredibly--it')s fascinating that something

as simple as seeing or thinking about UFOs isn')t that simple.

It could be very, very complex

and very, very depth-filled.

Dr. Masters: You don')t necessarily need to have

mass sightings.

You don')t need hundreds of witnesses.

We can learn a lot just from trusting reliable sources.

And a lot of times, unfortunately,

we discount individuals') accounts,

because we')ve been forced to think that people

who see UFOs are drunk, non sensical,

mentally ill people stumbling through the woods,

making things up, or seeing hallucinations.

That')s not the case.

And a lot of where that came from was an intentional effort

to stigmatize this conversation based on efforts

by the United States government with Project Sign,

Project Grudge, Project Blue Book,

especially Project Grudge.

The stated mission of Project Grudge

was to quell interest in, and conversations about,

these types of questions, the UFO phenomenon in general.

And this isn')t conspiracy theory.

This is well known.

This is the actual stated mission of this institution.

So people have been trained over the years

to dismiss these things, to not talk about them,

and to feel like you')re crazy if you did see something

that doesn')t fit with the norm,

and we need to get past that as a society.

We need to get to the point where we can start

having these conversations,

and really discuss these odd aspects of our reality,

because they might be some of the biggest questions

of our time.

Chris: Why would an alien craft pace

a commercial terrestrial airliner?

That')s a really good question.

I don')t know.

Could be that there is this crossing of paths,

two ships passing in the night, one alien and one not-so-alien.

There')s no official report on this particular case,

but most investigators do think it was probably

a prosaic explanation like Venus.

And yet, this nagging feeling,

why would such a reliable and experienced observer

make such a mistake?

Eric [on video]: That is an unidentified flying object, bro.

I can finally say I saw one.

Now that is cool.

♪♪

Eric [on video]: And it')s pulsating too, man.

That is nuts.

I wish we would get closer.

I can')t believe you saw it.

I')ve never doubted there was something out there,

and once I had that encounter,

all they did was just kinda reaffirm it.

And for me, it was like, ".Yeah, we')re not alone.

We')re not alone."/

I mean, we')re, you know, small in comparison

to their technology and whatever they can do,

but we')re not alone.

♪♪

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♪♪

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