Original subtitles

♪♪

Narrator: May 1967.

A prospector is confronted by a massive flying saucer.

Stan Michalak: And they're descending,

and they're glowing very bright.

Dr. Michael P. Masters: A lot of people might turn and run away,

but Stefan was interested in what this is

and what's happen.

So he started to move toward this thing.

Stan: And a door opens.

And I went, .Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? /

All of a sudden, the world starts to spin.

He's on his hands and knees, and all he thinks about

when he looks around is, .If I don't get out of here,

I'm gonna die out here. /

♪♪

Stan: I'm horrified and super excited

all at the same time.

.Oh, my God. Space people. /

He never did find, you know, the mother lode,

but found something worse.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Chris Rutkowski: Almost 60 years ago,

May 20, 1967, near Falcon Lake, Manitoba,

which is near the Ontario border,

something really strange happened

that eventually became the most well-documented

UFO case in all of Canadian history,

and possibly one of the best in the world.

♪♪

Chris: On this particular morning,

a fellow by the name of Stefan Michalak

was doing some amateur prospecting,

just looking for interesting rocks.

Well, he had spent the morning tromping around the bush

some distance away from the town of Falcon Lake.

And then around lunchtime, he paused

and sat down near a large rock to have lunch.

Stan: My dad did World War II.

He saw things that would make your hair curl.

But he wasn't a fearful man.

He was a curious guy.

He was always curious, always looking, you know,

poking where he shouldn't be poking.

But this was the first time that he was truly afraid.

♪♪

Chris: Within a year of the event,

some civilian investigators thought

that perhaps more detail might be revealed

through Michalak's memory regained through hypnosis.

There had been some interest, even at this time in the 60s,

that hypnosis is some way to unlock repressed

or hidden memories.

Murray Toews: So a couple of sessions were scheduled.

Christian Bohm: Balkan Lake is part of

the Precambrian Shield terrain

close to the Ontario border in Manitoba.

Chris: The landscape is rocky and there's ridges

and quartz veins

and the possibility of some valuable minerals,

like copper and silver and perhaps even gold.

In fact, there is a gold mine that had been operating

a number of kilometres north of there.

Stan: He was looking for rock.

He didn't care about trees and lakes.

What he's looking for Is he's looking for this kind of stuff.

This is what he wants,

because it carries precious metals.

So he's following his nose as he comes up this ridge

and up the rise,

and he's basically poking around.

I mean, he has no agenda, he has no route.

He has a compass, but he doesn't know

where he's going.

He hears geese

and they're making a hell of a racket.

So he thinks, .Well, something scared 'em.

Fox, wolf, coyote, something."

So he gets up and he walks over to the edge

and he takes a look,

and they go skittering across the lake that way.

And off they go.

Chris: Did not know why the geese had suddenly

taken off from the beaver pond.

And then his attention was drawn up.

Stan: So there's two of them and they're descending.

And he sees them as cigar shapes,

because of course he's looking at them on end, right?

And they're glowing, they're very bright,

sunlight bright, coming down.

Now this is a perfectly blue sky,

and to attract attention on a nice sunny day

with a blue sky, they'd have to be

very bright indeed.

Stan: And no sound, no discernible jet engine noise.

♪♪

Stan: I have stood on a ramp 20, 30 yards

from a Harrier jump-jet when it took off.

Oh my God, that thing is loud,

like bone-crushing loud.

So if Dad is saying this 40-foot disc landed

with not a lot of noise at all,

then my mind immediately goes, .Oh my God, how? /

♪♪

Stan: They get lower and lower and lower

and they start to separate until one of them,

the back one, stops, and the first one continues

until it sets down right here, right where we're standing.

Chris: Having been in the military service,

he was familiar with what helicopters

and what aircraft looked like, and this was not that.

♪♪

Ashley Kircher: He definitely thought it was some sort

of experimental craft.

He sort of went through all the different things.

.Could it be Russian, could it be this,

could it be that? .

And he kind of thought it was an American experimental craft.

Chris: This was more a standard Hollywood-style flying saucer,

about 30, 35 feet in diametre, about 12 or 15 feet high,

with a dome that lights were coming out

of a--some slits in the top.

And he had no idea what this thing was.

Stan: He's a painter, he's a military veteran,

and he determines, .Oh, yeah, military craft of some kind.

Obviously experimental,

because I've never seen anything like it.

Okay. Ours? No. /

Chris: Maybe this was a test vehicle

of the American space program

that's supposed to be going to the moon,

and they had to stop for repairs

or maybe for testing of something else,

and they just happened to be over a part of Canada.

In fact, Falcon Lake is only a matter of 75 miles north

of the American border.

So maybe it went off course.

Stan: It doesn't look like anything he's ever seen.

But without a camera, how does he record this?

Pulls out his sketch pad, pulls out a pencil,

and he draws a sketch of it.

♪♪

Neil Lavoie: Back in the 60s,

there was experimentation with vertical takeoff

and landing aircraft beyond helicopters.

Helicopters themselves have rotor systems

that must counteract

and you must have an anti-torque device.

But to build an aircraft that actually is in a disc shape

that has full maneuverability back in the 60s,

very difficult, if not impossible

to achieve at the time.

Chris: He was trying to figure out while he's watching it,

what this could be.

Now he realized it was perhaps metal,

but he couldn't see any rivets or seams or anything.

It seemed to be one piece of metal itself.

Stan: So he finally decides he's going to walk

a little closer.

And as he gets closer, he realizes that,

yep, it's definitely metal.

So he goes back to the sketch

and he puts in notes.

It's still glowing, but the colour is changing.

It's not as bright as it was.

Now it's kind of getting duller.

And it's sitting here.

He can hear--even from there, he can hear hissing, fizzing.

You put something hot on here, right?

It's gonna burn all the crap underneath, right?

Dr. Masters: Obviously, when you're presented

with something that doesn't fit with your notions of reality

and technology that you're accustomed to,

seen especially in the mid 20th century,

you have questions.

A lot of people might turn and run away,

but Stefan was interested in what this is

and what's happening, so he started to move

toward this thing.

Ashley: He observed this thing.

He was looking at it from all angles.

Stan: And a door opens.

So now the door opens like an iris.

And he immediately realizes, .Okay, it's about 2 x 3 feet,"

but because the craft is shaped like this,

he's got to actually get on his hands and knees

to look in the door.

And through this, you could see

more lights pouring out from this particular object

from the inside.

Stan: Hundreds of thousands of lights.

Just lights.

Just lights constantly flashing.

Constantly flashing.

It's like looking at the sun.

You can't do it for long.

But smart guy, he's got goggles to protect him

from the chipping.

So he flips it down.

Now he looks, he notices the walls

are about 18 inch thick.

There's a honeycomb pattern in the walls of the craft.

.Okay, that's pretty cool. /

And then he hears voices.

Stan: Voices?

What does that mean?

When he tried to describe it, he said,

.You know, like children in the schoolyard. /

And I went, .Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? /

♪♪

Narrator: Stefan Michalak approaches the flying saucer

that's landed in front of him

and claims he heard voices coming from inside the craft.

Stan: And he hears the sound that he thinks are voices.

So he says, .Ah, people on board.

Definitely military craft, definitely in trouble,

probably American. /

.Hey, boys, come on out.

You're in the middle of nowhere.

Let me help you, I'll help you get out of here.

And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. /

No answer.

So then he thinks, .Ah, definitely Russian. /

So he has Russian.

So he calls out in Russian.

Then he has Polish, which is his native tongue.

Then he throws in a little Italian,

which he knows.

No answer.

So now he's a little ticked off.

Dr. Masters: He can't see who's talking.

And that's an important caveat of this story.

Unfortunately, he didn't get a visual of what the beams were,

but he could hear auditory dialogue taking place

in a language he didn't recognize.

Narrator: Stefan Michalak continued observing the craft,

noting an overwhelming, unpleasant odour surrounding it.

Stan: There is a stench emanating from this craft,

and it is the smell of rotten eggs, sulfur gas.

And that stink is present, and he can smell it

from 50 feet away.

Neil: Airplanes have a smell.

Go to any airport, go inside the hangar,

smell of fuels and oils are there.

They all have a unique aroma to them.

Stan: He also noticed on sort of the left side of the craft

from where he was standing, that there's what looks to be

a series of holes.

He counted them, but we don't know whether his count is right,

because we were never able to determine whether it's 5 x 8,

4 X 9, whatever it was,

but it's a grid pattern of holes,

and they're on this side and the door is on this side.

Chris: But by this time, since he was walking towards it,

he was right in front of this object.

Stan: So now he's literally within touching distance.

And keep in mind that all along

the horrible stink is in the air.

He's breathing it.

It's still hot.

He can feel the heat coming off the craft.

It's not making any noise that he can tell.

And he reaches out.

He's got a rubberized glove that has a rubber coating.

And he touches the edge of the craft,

and immediately pulls his hand back,

because it goes [affects sizzling noise].

And he burns the tips of the fingers

and melts the rubber off the gloves.

So it's still hot.

Stan: The door closes,

and the craft begins to rotate counterclockwise.

So it begins to move.

Again, no sound, no change, no engine noise.

And then it--because it's sitting at an angle,

he said what he remembered,

because you're looking at the edge,

he remembers seeing the edge level out.

Murray: This isn't something that is powered

by some magical force.

It looks like it's something we can understand.

Some kind of an energy source,

gives off radiation.

Narrator: Could this be human technology kept secret

from the world in 1967?

♪♪

Chris: As he's standing there and taking his glove off,

the entire object starts to move.

Stan: That area with those dots is now coming around.

And as it comes around him,

he gets hit in the chest with gas, steam.

It was enough to blow him back.

And he stumbles, he falls, and his shirt's on fire.

Stan: So he's ripping his shirt off

and throwing it to the ground.

His undershirt is burnt.

He's tearing that thing off

and he's throwing it to the ground.

Neil: If a person got exposed to the exhaust path

of a turbine engine,

they would definitely get burned.

Their clothes would actually be singed in not too long

of a time.

Dr. Masters: His hat burned,

his undershirt even caught on fire.

So he's stripping off his clothes

and he's trying to put the fire out

as this machine starts to levitate upwards.

Obviously not something that any sort of aircraft

could do in 1967.

So there's a lot of things that are just happening

all at once and really confusing.

And there's just this intense feeling of ontological shock

about what's going on at the same time,

this man's catching on fire.

♪♪

Stan: And as he's doing that, the craft has already risen

and is already moving in the same direction

it came from.

All of a sudden, the world starts to spin.

He's on his hands and knees, and up comes his lunch,

up comes his coffee.

Whatever he had when he was stripping the rock,

up it comes.

And he looks up and this craft is now

over the trees.

Stan: And then gone.

Murray: When he got up, he watched it take off

and then zip off into the sky.

Ashley: And that's when he started

walking around in circles

and trying to figure out how he was going to get help.

Stan: Whatever came out of that craft that hit him in the chest,

if you can imagine boiling water,

the steam from the water is boiled water.

But what if you have a mix of chemicals in there

and you're making steam?

Well, now that steam is filled with that stuff.

So whatever it was that hit him set his shirt on fire

and left the pattern of dots on his chest

and burn marks he would have absorbed.

So he's standing here, he's got no shirt on.

He's burned all the way up to here.

His cap, which he had on backwards,

is singed all the way across.

The burn stops at his belt line.

And the smell is still there.

This horrible stench is still here.

And he looks around and he realizes

that there is this 15-foot circle

where everything's been scrubbed clean

and burnt away.

And now he realizes his head is pounding.

The smell is in his nose.

He can't get rid of the smell.

He's just barfed up his lunch.

Stan: And all he thinks about when he looks around is,

.If I don't get out of here, I'm gonna die out here. /

Chris: He's woozy.

He has a compass.

He checks the compass,

and the compass needle is spinning.

Chris: He had no idea why the compass was spinning.

Perhaps it was due to some magnetic interference.

Stan: He sits down.

He's trying to get his head to stop spinning.

He finally finds an area where there's a bit of water.

So he washes his face.

He tries to get some water on him.

He drinks some water, which he immediately barfs up.

But he's still trying to get to the highway,

because he knows, .If I can get to the highway, I'm good. /

He does, unfortunately about a mile too far west.

So he's got a hike down the highway back to the motel

that he was staying at.

He's walking back to Falcon Lake

and an RCMP car pulls up.

You would think this would be the happy ending, right?

Wrong.

The guy in the RCMP car who gets out thinks,

.Okay, you're a weirdo. /

He's covered in crud, he's bedraggled, right?

He's not steady.

And he doesn't want the RCMP constable

to get too close to him.

Cause he doesn't know--because he still has that stench.

He doesn't know what has happened to him.

He doesn't know if he's radioactive

or you know--which is far-fetched,

but still he doesn't have a clue,

and he doesn't want to give whatever he's got to this guy.

So he says, .Look, I'll tell you what happened to me,

but you gotta keep your distance. /

.All right? /

So he tells him, what do you think?

The RCMP guy thought?

.Wow, whack job. /

And Dad had asked, .Is there a hospital nearby? /

.Kenora? /

.Is there a nurse anywhere here? /

.There's a nursing station.

I don't know if there's anybody there today.

It's a weekend. /

So he leaves him there.

So he's on the highway, walking back, hurt, sick.

He gets to the motel.

Now he's got to wonder what he's going to do.

Well, there's a bus, but it's going to come

at, like, 4:30 or 5:00.

Narrator: Stefan manages to make his way onto a Greyhound bus

for the two-hour ride back to Winnipeg.

When he arrives,

he's taken straight to the nearest medical facility.

Chris: He was taken to the Misericordia Hospital

in downtown Winnipeg where he was checked.

It was found that he had first and second degree burns

on his chest,

and something on his lower abdomen.

Stan: I knew something was wrong

when I got moved to the basement,

because now my parents' bedroom was a sick room,

and Dad was in it.

So I come upstairs for breakfast and mom says,

.You can go see your dad. /

So I open the door.

First thing, that stink, that wave of smell.

He took a bath on Saturday night,

when they came home.

He couldn't get rid of that smell.

That smell was basically coming out of him.

He was horribly sick looking, he was pale, he was in bed.

He didn't look good at all.

And I'm a 9 year old for whom my father was always my hero.

And now he's sick, he's hurt, and I'm standing there going,

.Oh, my God, now what? /

So he patted the bed.

I went and sat down.

He told me very briefly an outline

of what had happened.

I'm horrified, scared, and super excited

all at the same time.

.Oh, my God. Space people. /

Chris: Over the next several days,

recuperating at home, he was very, very ill.

He laid in bed and couldn't hold food down.

His burns slowly started fading, but never really went away.

But word got out that something had happened to Stefan Michalak,

and within a matter of a day or so,

Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the military,

the Royal Canadian Air Force, showed up on the doorstep

of the family home, wanting to talk to him,

wanting to understand what had happened,

and was there something related to security

that they needed to address.

Remember, this is '67.

No one has a playbook on this,

so no one is really up to snuff on protocols.

So they're making this stuff up as they go.

.Well, we should go out there.

You should take us. /

His doctor says, .Oh, no, no, no,

he's not going anywhere.

He's already lost 20 pounds in, you know, three or four days.

He's not eating.

He can't hold down any solid food.

He's blacking out.

You're not taking him anywhere /"

So he drew them this patrol map to show them

where the place was,

and they came out here and they couldn't find it.

So this goes on and on and on and on,

and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

Narrator: At the same time.

Stefan Michalak's flying saucer sighting

makes international headlines.

Speculation that is a real encounter

with alien life captures the public imagination.

Chris: Reporters camped out on the doorstep.

The intense interest in this particular case

that a flying saucer had landed in Canada

was very, very remarkable.

Stan: Over the years, the discussion of this incident

has failed to take into account the character of my father.

You got to know him and who he was to understand

how he did all the things he did,

from the walking out, to the coming back,

to the aftermath, to all of that.

You know, the fact that, .Well, I don't believe you. /

My dad would say, .I don't care.

You don't have to believe me, but I'm physical evidence

of something that went down. /

Narrator: Everyone wants to know what Stefan saw,

who was in there, and where did it come from.

Stefan refuses to say that this could be aliens

from another planet,

but let's speculate and see if we can find

plausible explanations for the unexplainable.

We once believed the Moon

might be home to our closest living neighbours,

but our knowledge has expanded.

Producers have asked experts to speculate

that our closest neighbours

could live on Proxima Centauri B,

around 4.24 light years from Earth.

Proxima Centauri B is kind of amazing

because it is in

the next exoplanet system over.

Dr. Masters: So they're our neighbours.

It's like looking out your window

and spying on your neighbour doing whatever,

we can spy on these planets,

because they're so close to us.

This one's also important

because it's almost the exact same size as Earth.

Narrator: Following the producer's lead and saying,

this craft is from Proxima Centauri B.

what information can we attach to this visitation?

The who, what, and most importantly,

why of all of this?

♪♪

Nathalie: The closest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri,

about four light-years away, and it just so happens that

that star not only has exoplanets,

potentially up to three exoplanets,

but one of them, Proxima Centauri B,

is in the Goldilocks zone of that system.

Dr. Masters: The mass is about 0.9 to 1.4 times

the mass of Earth.

The radius is similar to Earth.

The temperature, importantly, is about the same,

-8 degrees centre Celsius on average.

So it really has all of these characteristics,

in addition to being so close to us,

to being our closest neighbour,

that indicate that it might be a prime candidate

for life as well.

Nathalie: But one key thing that's going on

with Proxima Centauri B is the nature of its star.

Narrator: Proxima Centauri, the next star over from our sun,

is classified as an M star,

a smaller star with a lower mass,

which can enable a larger habitable zone on planets

that orbit closer to that star.

Dr. Masters: Proxima Centauri B is really, really close

to its sun.

And because of that, it sort of skews the data a little bit.

We don't know as much about it as we potentially could,

because of the interference that that star has

in association with us trying to collect data

from this planet.

So even though it's so close,

we have sort of a skewed perception

of what exactly is going on there.

It's like you look out and try to see

what your neighbour is doing, but all their blinds are closed.

Nathalie: And one issue is that its star,

a red dwarf, is very active.

It has lots of flares.

So potentially, if Proxima Centauri B

did have an atmosphere, it could be eroded away.

Narrator: Frequent solar flares can really mess with the way

a planet maintains its ecosystems,

and the evolution of possible life forms.

Nathalie: Some of these active flare stars,

their brightness can vary by factors of 100 or 1,000.

So imagine if all of a sudden the sun became

100 or 1,000 times brighter for a moment,

and then dimmed down again.

That's a really big change in your environment.

And it's not only the brightness.

You can also have very intense radiation.

So the star would look quite different in the sky

on Proxima Centauri B, even if the environment

would seem quite similar.

Dr. Masters: We don't really have a solid understanding

of the atmosphere, if it even has an atmosphere,

and we know how important that is to life here

on this planet.

So until we can really pinpoint some of those specific details,

it's certainly one to keep an eye on,

especially because of how close it is to Earth.

But there are still a lot of question marks

regarding the possibility of life arising

and persisting on this planet.

Nathalie: There's a lot of mystery surrounding it.

Even though it's very close to us,

we don't know if it has an atmosphere.

We do know it's in the habitable zone,

so it could sustain liquid water,

but the real issue is that it might not be able

to retain an atmosphere

because of all of that stellar activity.

Narrator: Another mystery that remains unsolved is,

could metals from another planet

be locked in the quartz of the Canadian Shield?

Could these metals be radioactive alloys

that affected Stefan Michalak?

Stan: So Marty MacGregor was a great family friend,

and he was an engineer, a civil engineer,

and he was also a surveyor.

So he said to Dad, .Look, why don't we go out there

on the anniversary, and we'll survey the site,

and I'll do up a complete plan of the site. /

And Dad said, .Well, that's a great idea.

Let's do that. /

So off they went.

So they get there, and Dad showed them, you know,

where the circle was,

because it was still quite obvious.

Stan: And he said, .You know,

when the government guys were here,

there's a spot in the middle where the radiation

is super high. /

Christian: You would actually be surprised

how high levels of natural radioactivity

we can find in a rock like a quartz monzonite

in this type of area.

Definitely enough to make the Geiger counter go end-pass.

Stan: And they had a Geiger counter.

They brought a kit of stuff.

And Marty says, .Show me. /

So you go over the site.

And he says, .See? Nothing, nothing.

All of a sudden [affects crackling sound],

and then nothing, nothing, nothing.

And Marty said, .Wow, that's really neat. /

And Dad said, .Well yeah, but doesn't mean anything. /

And Marty says, .Well, what if the radiation

is not coming from what's on top,

but from what's underneath? /

Christian: All of these rocks have quartz veining.

All of these rocks can be important for prospecting.

And all of these rocks include shears and fractures and faults.

The intrusive rocks,

particularly the most differentiated, fractionated

intrusive rocks of the complex, those have likely

a high level radioactive minerals incorporated.

Stan: So they grab a screwdriver and a knife and a hammer

and a few other tools they had with them,

and they find a crack right in the middle

and they start pulling apart the crack,

and of course there's nothing there.

Well, they keep pounding with this hammer and this screwdriver

and they're bringing up chips of rock,

and they're going down and they're going down,

and they get down maybe, you know, nine inches, a foot,

and Marty goes, .Hang on, hang on, /

and he's poking, he's poking and he's pulling,

and he pulls up a piece of molten metal.

Chris: They found a multitude of spherules

and blobs of molten metal,

and not just small pieces

that actually found larger pieces

4 or 5 inches in length of metal

that appeared to have been exposed to intense heat

and had partially melted.

Perhaps this object had dropped them,

had melted something that was already on the rock.

Difficult to say.

Marty says, .Well, there's more in here. /

And they start digging more, and they keep digging

and it's right at the spot.

And every piece of metal they pull up is hot.

So they gather it all up, they put it in a jar,

and they bring it home.

.What is this? /

Turned out to be high grade silver,

not found naturally, covered in pitchblende,

which is a uranium ore, which is highly radioactive,

which does not occur naturally in this part of Canada.

What is it doing in a crack in a rock?

Chris: You can see that it's got a .W / or .M / shape.

There's a flatter portion here as opposed to this end.

You can see that there's a hole through it.

There's also one that's partially covered up here.

But the question is, why would something

made out of silver be found in a crack in a rock

kilometres away from civilization

and have uranium ore stuck to it?

Murray: Whether it was aware of the prospect

or not might not be.

This may be another universal level

of chance, right?

Just two completely different life forms

just bump into each other.

But the area has a lot of biodiversity.

If you're an alien, you're looking for life,

there's lots of biodiversity there.

Narrator: Let's try to understand the encounter

from the POV of interplanetary prospectors.

Could these two aircrafts be prospectors from a planet

such as Proxima Centauri B?

And are they after the same mineral as Stefan Michalak?

Murray: I mean, you have a prospector

who's looking at minerals and rocks,

and the geology of the place is quite rich.

Then you have something that lands there,

and later on you have two curious beings

converging on a common area of mineral interest

or geologic significance.

We could speculate that a ship like that takes raw materials

and extracts what it needs and leaves a waste product

of silver, or perhaps it was you refining silver

for its components.

Whether it was aware of the prospector or not,

it might not be.

This may be another universal level of chance.

Just two completely different life forms

just bump into each other in a forest,

you know, randomly.

But the area has a lot of biodiversity.

If you're an alien, you're looking for life,

there's lots of biodiversity there.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Imagine that mineral prospectors

from our planetary next-door neighbours,

Proxima Centauri B,

land in rural Manitoba in 1967,

that they settle on this location

not only because of its rich biodiversity

and mineral composition, but because they detect

the activity of local prospector

Stefan Michalak.

♪♪

Chris: Were they checking up on us?

Were aliens wanting to perhaps take a sample?

Narrator: For visitors from a place like Proxima Centauri B,

there's a reason why this location makes sense.

Stan: This stuff is a carrier for the sorts of things

he was looking for.

And what he was looking for was quartz,

and quartz veins that might have signs

of precious metal.

This rock, which exists all over the Canadian Shield,

this is what he's looking for.

He's looking for this kind of stuff.

And more importantly, he's looking for quartz veins.

And there's a big one that no matter where I go

on this piece of rock, I can find a line of quartz.

So here's quartz.

This is what it looks like in its natural environment,

in and amongst this rock.

But that's tiny.

I want bigger, I want more.

I want giant patches of quartz.

So when he found that chipping rock over there,

he found a much larger piece.

And when you take away all this lichen

and all this moss, look what you find.

Look at that.

Look at that piece of quartz right there.

And as you find these rocks,

they start getting bigger and bigger and bigger

until you have entire quartz deposits.

When you have that?

Jackpot.

And because there are gold mines

not too far east and north of here,

they all knew that there was gold in them there hills,

and all they had to do was find it.

So Dad, you know, being a nature lover and a geology buff,

he said, .Hey, I want a piece of that. /

♪♪

Narrator: Speculation expands our imagination,

pushing us to understand alien perspectives

and outlandish possibilities that are nonetheless possible.

For example, the flying saucer could be inhabited

by a life form that lives in quartz itself.

Nathalie: Subterranean life could also

potentially be interesting

in these really extreme environments

where you have a lot of radiation,

so the Earth or ground can give you some coverage.

You would just need to have all of the other essentials

for life going on there.

But we know that there is subterranean life on Earth.

That's the thing with these alien worlds.

Some of them are Earth-like,

but they all have these peculiarities,

and so life would have to evolve

to adapt to those environmental conditions.

Dr. Masters: Life started here at a time

when this planet was hot.

Barely had an atmosphere, but there's liquid water,

there's dry land, there's a crust.

There were a lot of things that seemingly made it

very inhospitable.

But life arose, life thrived, we're here because of that.

Narrator: Could the ship's iris-shaped doors

observed by Stefan Michalak, offer clues as to who is inside?

If there's a door,

somebody's got to go in and out of the door.

There wouldn't be a door there for no reason.

Doors are very symbolic, but they're ultimately just ways

to keep things in and out.

So the functionality of that kind of a door

tells me that it is designed to not be a weak point

in a structural machine that traverses space, right,

at high speeds?

You need something that's as solid

as the structure around you.

So whatever technology that was there,

and I'll speculate, because of the way it closed,

that the metal that Stefan witnessed was not regular metal.

Perhaps I'll jump and say it was maybe more

of an intelligent metal,

or maybe on a more molecular level,

can sort of solder itself into a perfect seal,

because you would need it to be a perfect seal

to protect all the internal components.

♪♪

Narrator: And what about the voices Stefan Michalak hears?

Were they trying to speak to him?

Even for a multilinguist like Stefan,

how would he be able to understand

the communication of beings who evolved on

a completely different world?

Dr. Masters: When we look at the question of

life on other planets and life evolving

completely separate from ourselves on other planets,

we have to ask what their communication system

would be like?

Would we be able to communicate with them?

Would we hear anything like Stefan Michalak heard

inside this ship if they even evolve to buzz like bees,

or use infrasound like an elephant,

or ultrasound like a tarsier?

There's all kinds of different ways that we communicate here

on this planet.

Even though it's all vibrational sensitivity

and vibrational vocalizations in various forms,

there's a lot of different ways to communicate.

So we have to think, then,

with these organisms evolved on another planet,

and we're sending out radio frequencies,

but they buzz and dance like bees,

are they going to receive that?

Would we expect to understand what they say if they came here

and tried to communicate with us?

So I find it really interesting that what Stefan reports hearing

is actual vocalized communication,

similar to what we have,

in the sense that he could recognize it as talking.

Stan: And I said, .Dad, voices?

Like I'm talking to you now? /

Stan: So I said, .Dad, what was the noise you heard? /

And when he tried to describe it, he said,

.You know, [gibberish],

high, low, high, low, high, low, high, low. /

And I went, .Oh, my God.

Okay, I get it. /

If you've ever been on a playground

and close your eyes, that's exactly what you hear.

You don't hear conversation.

You hear high, low, [gibberish], jumble of sound.

Murray: The sound inside the ship might be my voice,

but as it passes through gravitational field

that's distorted in time, it may speed up or slow down.

Gravity is the force that causes it to speed up or slow down.

So if I said something towards an open door of an alien vessel,

and my sound waves went in,

they would be regular speed to us.

But they might slow down when they get inside there,

and it'll sound distorted.

And likewise, anything in here might sound normal.

When it comes out, it might speed up,

because time is different between the two points.

Narrator: We can also use human behaviour to speculate

the reasons for what an alien visitor would do

or what they might be looking for.

Is it possible the POV of the Falcon Lake aliens

is tailored to find mineral deposits?

They're instruments designed to pinpoint

specific geological formations like quartz or gold,

based on density, radiation,

or perhaps some other anomaly we have yet to discover.

Chris: A lot of psychologists and anthropologists will

land in an area by aircraft, take samples,

and leave again.

Was that the purpose of the aliens?

We simply don't know.

We don't have enough information,

and yet this case would seem to be

completely indicative of an alien spacecraft

coming down and taking a sample and wanting to be on Earth

without being observed.

Narrator: We have James Webb, SETI, and our best scientists

trying to reach out to our neighbours.

It's possible our neighbours are doing the same to find us.

From our experts' perspective, the Falcon Lake UFO case

offers unique ways to extrapolate

into the possibilities of who, where, and why.

Our experts posit that beings from Proxima Centauri B

could be prospecting for minerals of value to them,

leaving things like radioactive silver alloys

behind as a byproduct of their interstellar travel.

The alien prospectors could be searching

for the very same materials Stefan Michalak

was searching for in 1967.

♪♪

Ashley: This is a definite close encounter

of--I would say of the fourth kind,

because there was voices, a door opened up,

and there was clearly something inside the craft.

Now, I didn't come out and engage with him,

but he had audio.

He heard voices.

I've never heard of any instances

where they've heard voices.

This is a first.

Stan: I run into people who are 25, 35 years old,

and they have no knowledge of this.

So if I have a mission at all, it's simply to say,

.Look, a whole new generation can learn about this story. /

My job is to make sure that Dad's story continues,

or at least is remembered,

because I don't know how much time I got.

Who's going to tell the story when I'm gone?

So I think it's important.

Another generation needs to know this.

And with new technology we have now,

maybe even come up with answers, who knows?

♪♪

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