Original subtitles

Narrator: A blip on the screen,

A faulty frequency,

A relentless hum.

Everyday operations that can go unnoticed

Until a major glitch occurs.

"okay, something weird is going on."

Narrator: But what does the error really mean?

It's a whole bunch of different signals and frequencies.

Something is trying to manifest.

If it's not explainable, I guess you could call it a ufo.

Narrator: And what is the fallout?

There's reports of private security with machine guns.

They're in a world of trouble

Because they literally don't know what side's up.

Narrator: In some instances, it can end in tragedy.

And in others, it can lead to madness.

This is driving me nuts.

Mckinnon: We are a long way from being able to say

It's unexplainable.

We just don't know the answer yet.

Narrator: We are surrounded by endless streams of data,

Information bombarding us

From all corners of our known universe,

Sometimes a blip, an inexplicable signal,

Mysterious interference.

-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com

Captions paid for by discovery communications

1953.

On a cold night in late November,

An unidentified blip

Is picked up by a u.S. Air force radar station.

It appears out of nowhere,

Flying over lake superior near the canadian border.

Smerdon: The ground controller couldn't raise it by radio,

Which is unusual because they weren't out of radio range.

They scrambled f-89c interceptor called a scorpion,

Which is a fairly advanced tracking airplane.

Narrator: Pilot felix moncla and radar operator robert wilson

Take off from kinross air force base.

They go off on a routine intercept mission.

Smerdon: Our mandate is to be airborne within five minutes

And to go and climb up

And find that airplane, intercept it, close on it

And identify it positively.

After we do that, we go home...

Or we shoot it down.

Narrator: As they approach the location

Of the mysterious blip,

Moncla's jet has trouble locking in on the bogie.

He must rely entirely on ground control

To guide him into the small target in the vast sky.

At 8,000 feet in altitude, he starts to close in.

As this object and the aircraft moved closer together,

It appeared that the two things just formed one blip or blob.

Kislenko: One of the guys manning the radar station

Says one blip swallowed the other blip.

And then moncla's blip disappeared.

[ beeps ]

Narrator: Radio communication from moncla stops.

The radar people were expecting the aircraft

To come out the other side or move around it

Or do something.

Narrator: But as ground control waits,

The scorpion never reappears.

That must be horrifying because your first reaction

Is that the people on board that plane are dead.

Narrator: The air force knows it has a problem.

It's been 20 minutes since the last contact with moncla

And his jet is reaching the limit of its range.

Search and rescue are launched.

40 minutes after moncla's plane went silent,

Search and rescue pilot lieutenant william mingenbach

Picks up what sounds like

The missing pilot's voice on his radio.

[ radio chatter ]

And they recognize him apparently

Because they can recognize his accent,

And so it seems to be moncla.

Narrator: After the transmission heard by lieutenant mingenbach,

There is total silence.

Moncla and wilson are never heard from again.

Everything just disappeared without a trace.

You would expect that if the plane went down

As a result of a crash, there would be wreckage.

They find nothing.

Narrator: According to the official reports,

The unusual target moncla and wilson were pursuing

Is alleged to be a royal canadian air force c-47

That drifted 30 miles off course.

Here you have two bases in 1953 --

Canadian and american --

That are governing the same airspace

And the shared border across the lakes.

We're allies, but, of course, you know,

That is sovereign airspace and you want to make sure

Nobody's violating it and nothing goes wrong.

What makes a bogey a bogey is there's no identification

That goes along with that blip.

Identification friend or foe, iff,

The transponder has been around

Since the end of the second world war.

If the radar operator can positively identify

That aircraft, either by iff or by voice,

Then the fighters are scrambled.

Narrator: As the investigation into moncla and wilson's

Disappearance continues, canadian pilot gerald fosberg,

Who is believed to be the unexplained second blip,

Is brought in for interrogation.

He said, "listen, I was, first of all, not off course.

And second of all, there was no intercept aircraft."

If the c-47 was the bogey and it was flying along,

As we say in the business, fat, dumb, and happy,

According to his navigation aids, he's on course.

Something tragic happens

Before the scorpion gets up beside the c-47.

They have a malfunction.

They have to break off the intercept,

Whatever happened.

The c-47 could have kept going,

Not knowing that there was even an intercept in progress.

Kislenko: So if you take fosberg at his word,

There is something seriously wrong with this situation.

Narrator: The canadian report doesn't corroborate

The u.S. Conclusion that fosberg was the bogey.

If it's as straightforward as the american air force

Says it was, then the canadians

Should have very obviously had the exact same answers.

Narrator: In fact, there is no report of an incident

Involving any canadian aircraft

In the lake superior area on that date.

And that's where the trail of questions begins.

The first thing I would ask is why there was

Only one aircraft scrambled to do the identification

Because we normally flew in pairs.

If there had been a second aircraft,

It would have seen what happened.

The u.S. Military would have had a certain stake

In keeping aspects of the secrets.

There was probably a lot of, shall we say, butt covering.

Hayes: You don't want it getting out

That one of your craft crashed,

And you don't know what made it crash.

Kislenko: The fact that you don't talk about it

And don't do more exhaustive research,

Of course, people are gonna start to think

That you're covering stuff up.

Even if that part about the canadian pilot is true,

It still doesn't really go any ways to explaining

Why this jet disappeared.

If you've got a solid airplane being merged together

With a ball of light,

That's not something that happens every day.

So radar people are saying, "how can we explain this?"

Adve: Radar works by sending out a radio signal.

If there is a target, the radio signal hits the target

And comes back to the radar.

We can tell how far the target is by how long it took

For the signal to go, then come back.

Smerdon: When a fighter interceptor is scrambled,

They're just given an altitude and an intercept heading.

And when the radar operator

In the back of the aircraft locks on to the target,

Then he takes over the intercept,

Maneuvers his pilot to the position where he can look at it

And identify it with his eyeballs.

Adve: It's not even clear that we have evidence

That there was a target there.

The ground station could see this target very clearly,

Seemed to have a lock on it, did not ever lose it,

But the aircraft did not.

That's a very unusual thing.

If there's actually something up there,

Its radar should be able to see it.

Narrator: Ground control steers moncla towards the bogey.

He is seen intercepting the mysterious blip,

And then moncla's signal disappears without a trace.

Where did the aircraft go? Did it merge with it?

Was this a portal that this craft went into

And came out on the other side in another dimension?

We just don't know.

I think there is maybe some merit to the theory

That moncla and wilson

Did actually intercept some kind of object in the air

That may have been some sort of advanced technology.

Kislenko: This is the era of the u-2 spy plane,

And it does fly very high, very fast

And is specially designed to not be detected.

There are icbm tests that are going on.

There are high-elevation balloon tests

For both military and scientific purposes.

There are top-secret military programs

Designed to build better, faster, more important jets.

Narrator: Could an encounter

With a top-secret experimental craft

Be the cause of the plane's disappearance?

I don't think it was an experimental aircraft

He was chasing.

These experiments would have happened

In much more remote areas of the continent,

Especially if they wanted to keep it from the russians.

That was a significant political factor in the united states.

They have a burgeoning cold war, obviously,

With the soviet union.

And that means that americans are quite paranoid

About things like communist infiltration, communist plots.

A lot of fears around soviet invasion

Were about the soviets invading through northern canada.

Narrator: Moncla's plane disappearing

So close to the canadian border without an explanation

Fed into the overall concern of the times.

Soldiers are trained that the communist menace exists

And therefore are on guard.

When the kinross incident happens,

They took this very seriously

Because they didn't know what it was.

If it's not explainable

Or it's not positively identified in other ways,

I guess you could call it a ufo.

Narrator: Coming up...

The kinross incident fits quite squarely

Into the early days of the ufo craze.

Narrator: ...Is the official story of the disappearance

A smokescreen for a larger conspiracy?

The orchestration of secrecy and cover-up

Became a very, very well oiled machine.

Narrator: November 1953,

A u.S. Air force interceptor is sent on a mission

To identify an object in the sky,

Only to vanish moments later.

The american government's attempt to explain this

Just made it stranger.

Seemingly appropriate answers, people stop asking questions.

I think there were a lot of people who knew what happened,

Couldn't explain it,

But they knew that there was some anomalous object up there

That did something to our craft.

The kinross incident fits quite squarely

Into the early days of the ufo craze.

Kislenko: There are already unprecedented events,

Very secretive in nature bases which are popping up,

All sorts of strange stuff.

There are lots of films coming out

That featured extraterrestrial invasions.

So, of course, everybody was on high alert at all times,

Especially when we're talking about things in the air.

Project blue book was the u.S. Military's investigation

Into ufos to figure out what they were,

If they posed a threat, where they might be coming from.

There are supposed to be authorities that go out

And check and recheck all of the facts and figures

To map out the possibilities of alien life coming to earth,

But also to, of course,

Understand what the public is seeing

And thinking at a particular point in time.

Narrator: One incident that helps intensify the ufo craze

Happens just over a year before moncla's plane disappears.

On July 19, 1952,

Seven objects are caught on radar

In the prohibited air space near the white house.

This is something that would really feed into these fears

Of soviet invasion or extraterrestrial invasion

If it looks like they're targeting the president

In the white house, the center of america's power.

Viggiani: The radar operator tracked this thing

At 130 miles an hour,

Then eventually at 7,200 miles an hour.

If you fly a normal aircraft at that kind of speed,

You get a sonic boom.

This does not happen with ufos.

Narrator: Unable to dodge the public's fascination with ufos,

A statement is made by the u.S. Air force.

Viggiani: They pulled in general john samford and he supplied

A whole lot of nonsense for everybody to chew on.

We've been able to explain them as hoaxes,

As erroneously identified friendly aircraft.

Hayes: The more the government attempted

To explain away ufos or debunk them,

People increasingly see more and more ufos.

However, there have been a certain percentage

Of this volume of reports

That have been made by credible observers

Of relatively incredible things.

Hayes: A military pilot in terms of seeing something in the sky

Is more credible than someone

Who has no training whatsoever in that.

Of course, there are theories that as part of cover-ups,

Certain people were ordered not to report certain things

Or certain things were stricken from the record,

And that the men in black showed up at their doors and subtly

Or otherwise told them to keep their mouths shut.

Narrator: Could a government cover-up of a ufo encounter

Explain why there were no reports of wreckage

From felix moncla's plane?

They had to present any kind of explanation

They could to make sure that it didn't become,

You know, "pilot gets eaten up by a ufo."

So what do you do? You create misinformation

And you create other things around it

That create confusion.

Narrator: Is the strange radio transmission

40 minutes after the plane vanished

A military attempt at misdirection?

If somebody is listening in on moncla's transmissions,

Recording that, resending that is trivial.

Fallah: The real question here is,

Did he hear a specific message?

If he hears specific words that make a sentence,

That's when you start considering,

Is it a real signal from moncla

Or is it some other type of hallucination?

If you're the pilot that's been sent up after moncla

To see what's going on,

You're obviously going to have a higher level of alertness.

When you become more alert. What you're really doing is

You're just ramping up the volume

On every sensory input that you're getting at the time.

Now you start trying to make sense of that noise.

And when you're listening to noise and you have an idea

For what you want to perceive,

You're more likely to hear it.

Kislenko: And so you're left

With a really unusual proposition.

Is that somehow a phantom signal?

Is the plane somewhere in limbo? It's weird.

Unless, of course, it was extraterrestrial crafts,

And there was some kind of weird encounter.

They actually did swallow the plane

And somehow some kind of transmission got out.

Narrator: Could a government cover-up

Be at the heart of moncla and wilson's disappearance?

The only reason I think that moncla's blip disappeared

Was because he hit the water.

He crashed.

Narrator: Contributing to the theory

That moncla's plane crashed are reports

That the pilot suffered from attacks of vertigo.

Smerdon: Vertigo is a hallucination.

It's usually accompanied by a sense of spinning.

The orientation of the inner ear helps you determine

Your orientation to the world --

Upright, laying down, whatever.

If you pull 1, 2, 3g in an aircraft,

The fluid in your inner ear reacts to these g forces,

And they can set up some very strange conflicts

Between what the ear is sensing and what the eye sees.

So when I experience vertigo, and I experience vertigo a lot

Because of the maneuvers we used to do,

We had to rely on our instruments.

We had to trust them implicitly because that's all we have.

If he loses control

And goes into maybe perhaps a spiral dive,

He's in the water in seconds.

I don't know if anyone's ever landed an aircraft

In lake superior and lived to talk about it.

It's freezing cold.

If you're in that water immersed,

You're going to last half an hour if you're lucky.

Narrator: If moncla and wilson did crash,

Why hasn't any trace of the plane been found?

Macdonald: Search and rescue in the '50s

Would have been really limited

To looking at the surface of the water.

If they found something that was on the surface of the water,

They could deploy divers.

But when an aircraft or some other object hits the water,

It doesn't generally do a straight path to the bottom.

It's taking an angle. It's changing.

It could be affected by waves and sometimes current.

Arama: Lake superior is probably

The most hostile inland lake in the world.

I've been out on a canoe where the waves could go

From completely docile to 30-foot waves.

The chances of finding the target under the water

Where you found that surface debris is very, very slim.

Lake superior is deep and dark, and a lot of things

Get lost, never get found because divers can't go down

And find them.

Most of the things that are being found

Are being found using sonar.

Sonar works by using sound beams that will strike an object,

Bounce back to the receiver

And really build, like, a 2-d image for you.

And when you're looking at sonar images,

You're looking for lights and shadows.

So objects show up as lights.

And then there's a bit of a shadow

That is behind the objects.

And you can tell approximate size of things

Or height off of the floor by how long that shadow is.

Narrator: 2006,

More than 50 years after the plane's disappearance,

Adam jimenez and jim bisset from the great lakes dive company

Announce their discovery of an f-89

On the bottom of lake superior.

They saw this object,

And the object kind of looked like an airplane.

And then nearby, the object was this big, round, disc thing

With something that looked like a trail off of the back.

And their theory was that the airplane had hit the object.

So what they're claiming is this is the wing of an aircraft

And the other one's buried in the sand.

You know, you're not really seeing any lighted-up areas

Here at all.

You're just seeing shadow.

I would be looking for an object here

That was casting that long shadow.

So I would really be questioning whether or not

That was an aircraft on a sonar.

So I'm going to flip to the the teardrop flying saucer here.

What they were claiming is that the depression in the middle

Was something like a flying saucer type of shape.

That's a big stretch.

This could be a coil of wire.

This could be, you know,

A gas bubbling coming out from underneath it.

Just really nothing definitive about that that says,

You know, flying saucer or saucer at all.

Narrator: On September 22, 2006, jimenez and bisset

Were interviewed on "coast to coast am."

And then almost as mysteriously as they originated

And provided alleged evidence of the wreckage, they disappear.

The company that they claim to work for didn't really exist.

The website that they had up for a short amount of time

Just sort of went away.

Hayes: Of course, there are people claiming that this is

Just further evidence of a cover-up.

Macdonald: Dive teams do find things.

You know, if it's something that wasn't meant to be found,

Certainly the government can step in and say,

"hey, we don't want you messing around there."

I don't think they ever found it, to be honest.

Maybe they realized that they were going to get

Caught in this lie and just decided to take off.

Hayes: There are definitely documented cases of hoaxes

All the way through the history of the ufo phenomenon.

But in my research, they account for less

Than a percent of all sightings.

I think that most people reporting

Are actually sincere and authentic.

But in this particular case, they obviously were not.

So to the best of our knowledge, the craft and the pilots

And the radio operator just simply vanished.

Narrator: Coming up, for the past half century,

People around the world have been

Reporting a mysterious hum.

Like, the windows would vibrate.

You almost wonder if they're going to shatter.

This is driving me nuts, this noise.

Narrator: A strange sound agitates

And haunts across the globe

In places like auckland, new zealand,

Taos, new mexico,

Bristol, England, and windsor, canada.

The hum sounded like a very low-frequency rumble.

Mike: It resonates through the walls.

You think it's the fridge, and you turn the fridge off,

And it's still there.

Sonya: Almost like a car

That is playing really loud music.

And you hear that subwoofer noise.

Mike: It actually goes from a high-pitch volume to a whistle,

And then you get to "boom, boom, boom,"

The low frequency right after it.

Sonya: It's enough to shake your house at times.

The windows would vibrate.

You almost wonder if they're going to shatter.

This is driving me nuts, this noise.

Narrator: The hum is more than just an irritation.

It may actually be making some people ill.

Months ago, my wife was just fuming.

The whole house was vibrating. It was actually making her sick.

She wanted to get out of here.

Upset stomach, headache, sore neck, sore shoulders.

Narrator: How can a sound affect someone's health?

The typical frequency range of hearing for the human being

Is from 20 to 20,000 hertz.

Typically, the hums are in the low frequency

Or sub frequencies.

If it's below 20 hertz, those are the sounds

That people say they can feel it.

Mckinnon: If you've ever been to a concert,

And you've stood right up against the speakers

And you feel that thumping,

You're not just hearing it with your ears through the air.

You're feeling it through the vibration of your bones.

Narrator: The human body produces frequencies of its own,

Caused by a physiological process,

Like the beating of the heart and movement of blood.

When an external vibration

Matches the frequency of this process,

It's called a resident frequency.

A lot of the organs in our body

Have resonant frequencies below 20 hertz.

And if you're to excite these organs

Or these bones in your body and they start to move,

It'd be almost like the sensation of seasickness.

Narrator: The health consequences of the hum are varied.

But does it have a commonality in other aspects?

Mckinnon: The hum is renowned

For having some geographic hot spots,

Places where more people hear it than other places.

Novak: The question really is, though,

Are these hums the same or are they different?

So you could have the hum in one region

And there might be a local explanation.

And then somewhere halfway around the world,

It could be something else.

Some of the locations may be explained

By a very large and historical presence

Of a u.S. Military industrial complex.

Narrator: Taos, new mexico, is located 66 miles

From los alamos national laboratory,

Originally built for designing and testing nuclear weapons

During the manhattan project.

Mckinnon: One of the explanations for the hum

Is it could be nuclear testing.

In geophysical signals,

An explosion looks like a sharp jolt,

But then fades away.

And the bigger it is, the bigger explosion is.

In order to have enough nuclear explosions

To generate a consistent hum,

We would need to be constantly setting off nuclear weapons

All of the time.

Taos has been home also to some very top-secret air force

And cia-related projects from the 1950s onwards.

So it is quite possible that folks in taos

Are hearing distortions

Along the line of military technologies.

Narrator: The military uses low frequencies

For certain operations, such as signaling submarines

And sometimes for other, more harmful purposes.

We have lots of evidence that sound has been used as a weapon.

In world war ii, at the siege of stalingrad,

Russian soldiers played very loud music against germans

In the middle of the night to disorient and keep them up.

And then in 2017,

Canadian and american diplomats in havana

Were complaining about a frequency,

A sort of vibration sound.

Most of them likened it to the idea

Of a large diesel truck idling.

They were complaining about disorientation generally,

And some complained about being violently sick

And some actually were diagnosed with some brain damage.

So people immediately assumed

That this was some sort of intelligence operation

Being conducted by either the cuban government,

By potentially the russian government.

These are countries which, of course,

Are generally adversarial to western interests.

Narrator: Complicating attempts

To discover the source of the hum

Is the fact that not everyone can hear it.

And the people that don't hear it do think we're crazy.

Sonya: We definitely heard it.

Two doors down, they heard it,

And the woman across the street heard it.

But the person who lived right beside us

Didn't experience it at all.

Mike: Right now, I'm sitting in the house.

The fridge isn't running.

Furnace isn't running, and I can hear the hmmmmmmm.

Procter: It's hard to determine whether or not this is real.

Is this something that is really a natural phenomenon

Outside of them, or is it something

That's happening with our brain and interior?

We think of the ear as picking up sounds

And being a passive receiver that hears it.

But in fact, the ear itself produces sounds

That go back to the ear

Called spontaneous otoacoustic emissions.

If frequencies are coming in

And you're producing your own otoacoustic emission

Coming out there, you're going to have a cycle

Where you're hearing the sound that you're producing.

So a normal individual should just filter out the frequency

Of whatever their own internal emissions are producing.

But maybe that fails.

Maybe that could be part of the hum.

Narrator: Only 2% of people worldwide can hear the hum.

Is it possible these people have some sort of altered perception?

It's possible that the hum is a sensory transformation,

Which is where you get a sense in from one sense,

But you misattribute it or process it as another sense.

You get into this idea of synesthesia,

Where people can start tasting colors or seeing sounds.

6% or 7% of the population

Have some minor level of synesthesia somewhere.

Narrator: In windsor, canada, a facebook group has started

For those who can hear the sound.

The group was able to help investigators pinpoint

A possible source of the hum.

We had a monitor that we programmed

To send us alerts any time of the day

When a certain frequency level was detected.

We were able to coincide what we measured

To what people throughout the city were also reporting

At the same time.

All of the evidence pointed to zug island.

Zug island is a highly industrialized

Part of the detroit river on the detroit side.

It's got a long history of several industries,

With the most predominant and oldest one being u.S. Steel.

The canadian government did reach out,

And while there seemed to be a lot of goodwill

At the bureaucratic level over in the u.S.,

They just couldn't get private industry to cooperate.

It was dead silence.

We could not get to the island.

We're not permitted to do measurements right on the island

Mike: Because we wanted access,

They had to put up different security.

They had to keep us off.

We had both homeland security and the detroit police

Approach us, and there's reports

Of private security with machine guns.

Narrator: Coming up,

What is it they're doing that is so secret?

Kislenko: The refusal of anybody associated with zug to talk

Feeds the conspiracy theory.

Narrator: For the past half century,

People around the world have been reporting

A mysterious auditory phenomenon called the hum.

It feels like it's coming from the ground.

It's enough to shake your house at times.

Leading experts to speculate on its cause.

They may assume that it's something to do

With secret weapons or malintent by foreign governments.

Narrator: Some residents of windsor, canada,

Believe their hum is coming from a steel plant

On nearby zug island.

Looking at all the potential sources of energy

That could produce something like the hum,

The most obvious was the blast furnaces.

They could be the result of a process that they were running

Or they're just simply having issues

With their blast furnaces.

We weren't permitted to do measurements.

So while all the evidence points to this,

It's still somewhat circumstantial.

Narrator: A veil of secrecy is preventing further exploration.

Novak: Perhaps they're doing something that's classified.

You think that they could say that -- "it's classified.

We can't talk about it."

Sonya: From all over the world,

People have come specifically to research this hum.

And then they arrive in windsor, and it's --

It ceases. It stops.

And that's frustrating because then it makes it look

Like we're out of our minds and it doesn't exist.

Kislenko: Zug island is one of those things

That always kind of makes me go, "hmm,"

When it comes to any kind of conspiracy theories.

There's a sort of understandable curiosity behind zug,

But I don't necessarily leap right towards the idea

Of there's something secretive going on.

No major steel manufacturer

Is willing to disclose all of its processes.

However, the sort of mysterious comings and goings of the hum

And the refusal of anybody associated with zug

To talk to people obviously feeds the conspiracy theory.

In order to provide some sort of misdirection or disinformation,

The more conspiratorial things you let loose

About whatever the issue is,

The better the level of confusion.

It's sort of part of human curiosity.

Even a little bit of information

About something that's interesting

Or that could have a little bit of a kick to it,

People are all over it.

Narrator: But the hum isn't only happening in windsor.

There are hum hot spots all over the world,

Thousands of miles from zug island.

I think we know what's causing the windsor hum,

Even though we don't have that smoking gun in front of us.

But then you go to taos, new mexico,

And they don't have that same factory.

So what's going on there?

Narrator: Some theories suggest that perhaps the hum

Is not a man-made phenomenon.

Mckinnon: The earth is always moving.

It isn't a static thing.

We have hundreds of earthquakes every day,

Most of them too small to feel.

We have waves crashing into the beach.

We have wind blowing the trees. Their roots move in the ground.

All of these things can create a pressure wave in the air

That is too low frequency for humans to pick up,

But we monitor it in the infrasound network.

Infrasound is defined

As that limit of human hearing and below.

Technically, you shouldn't be able to hear the sound.

But technically, earthquake acoustic noises

Are also too low to hear.

But we've managed to pick them up on tape recorders before.

So every now and then, they go right up above

That 20-hertz limit into the audible range.

Narrator: Could this theory

Apply to some of the hums around the world?

Auckland, new zealand, is on a tectonic triple junction.

It's got one plate on top,

And it has other plates going underneath it.

This means it gets a lot of very, very large earthquakes,

And it also gets volcanoes.

So it could very well be a sound

That could be the source that's going on.

Narrator: The area around taos, new mexico,

Has had six low-magnitude earthquakes

In the past year alone.

But there are other ideas.

Taos is on a layline.

Narrator: Laylines are based on the much disputed theory

That ancient builders located their structures

Based on patterns of invisible lines of energy

Running through the planet.

And we know that ufos tend to congregate

Along those laylines.

Ufos have been reported to have a sense of vibration

Or hum to it.

Narrator: Still, another theory suggests

That the vibrations are coming

From massive waves crashing on the ocean floor.

Think about on the bottom of the ocean,

Just eddies and waves hitting the bottom

In a rhythmic kind of way.

And it's just enough

To be able to cause a little hmmmm

That people who have the sensitivity are picking up.

Narrator: Some of these waves

Can be picked up by seismometers thousands of miles away.

Mckinnon: The insight lander on mars

Has the world's most sensitive portable seismometer.

When they were testing it in central colorado,

They were actually picking up the sound of the waves

In the atlantic and the pacific at the same time.

Novak: It's something that could be viable

Because it's great amounts of energy.

And low-frequency sound at a high-enough energy

Can travel extremely long distances

Because of the long wavelengths.

Narrator: Whether the hums are all the same or different,

A man-made menace or natural phenomena,

The biggest mystery remains why so few people can detect it.

For all we know, there's a small, little gene

That in these people causes their --

Their basilar membrane in their ear

To be able to pick up a sound at one very low frequency.

Mike: I'm keeping track of all this on a regular basis, 24/7.

So when somebody finally says, "well, what proof do you have?"

I've got 17 terabytes of sound files, handwritten notes.

What do you want to hear?

Narrator: Coming up...

Frustrations were reaching their peak.

Narrator: ...In a quiet canadian town,

Citizens are being plagued by a strange phenomenon.

This frequency was off the charts.

Now people are starting to get super nervous because of that.

Narrator: Something mysterious and alarming

Is happening in the parking lot

Of a small-town grocery store in alberta, canada.

We would have people who come in and be like,

"I can't unlock my car. I don't know what's happening."

To vehicles running and not turning off.

They couldn't start their vehicle

If it was the type of vehicle

That had a push-button start in it.

There was also car alarms that were going off.

They were like, "oh, I just --I hit the unlock button

And opened up my door and the alarm went off

And it won't stop."

The first couple of times, I didn't think anything of it.

It was about the third time that I was like,

"okay, something weird is going on."

Carstairs is a small town of about 4,400 people.

Very tight community. We're the main grocery store in town.

So it's a center of the community.

Nothing ever really happens in carstairs.

So as soon as this happened,

It blew up social media everywhere.

We couldn't believe the amount of people

That were commenting on it.

Narrator: The strange reports alert

The attention of paranormal investigator melissa wilton.

I have been following

The carstairs key fob situation from the beginning.

Narrator: Melissa begins an investigation in carstairs

To find out what could be causing the abnormal situation.

I am a paranormal investigator

That takes a scientific approach.

We rely on data and evidence

That we collect rather than psychics

And things like that that you can't verify through science.

And so we use emf detectors

Which measure electromagnetic fields.

Any electricity or energy that's put out

By basically everything in your house.

So your refrigerator, microwave, tv.

So we'll go around and take base readings.

If they spike, it might mean

That something is trying to manifest.

Narrator: While melissa conducts her investigation

Into the paranormal possibilities,

Finding a solution is becoming even more urgent

For store staff.

Kennedy: We paid for people to get their vehicles towed

To a service center and try to get it resolved.

And once they were off the lot, it seemed to function fine.

Brown: Stephen and I decided to test it out.

So in the parking lot,

I would attempt to lock it and it wouldn't lock.

And then we drive a quarter mile down the street,

And it would work fine.

We drove the truck all around the town

And tried it in a variety of different areas

And it all led back to right around our store.

Definitely there was something happening in the parking lot.

Narrator: With no explanation for the crisis,

Speculation increases.

What force is causing key fobs

To fail in the parking lot?

The fob transmits a very, very weak signal.

It's designed to be very close to the car,

And it's designed to be weak

So that your battery would last a long time.

A malfunctioning piece of electronics can interfere

With the fob transmission.

It could be any piece of electronics

Within a 200-meter, 300-meter radius.

Melanson: I thought that it was our automatic door

That had, like, a haywire sensor

That was, like, sending off signals

That was messing with everybody else in the area.

We also have a security system within the store.

So people were speculating that it was that.

So we called in an electrician.

We shut down all of the power to the store

And that didn't have any effect.

It's got to be something, right?

So it's like if you can't immediately

Find a solution to something,

Then your brain starts to wander.

Brown: Some of the theories that started to come out

Was the american military might be involved.

And then that led to, of course, aliens.

90% was aliens, that they were hovering over this area.

I got a phone call where somebody who very much sounded

Like a radio-show host said,

"hey, is it true

That you guys have aliens in your parking lot?"

Kappeller: They assumed that there was a paranormal activity.

There was all kinds of weird talk.

Paranormal activity can suck energy from electronics

Or batteries in order to try and manifest.

If you're using a video camera,

Something paranormal might drain the battery

And then you can catch it on film

Because it killed your battery.

Something doesn't want you filming there.

Narrator: With the mystery still unsolved,

The store widens their investigation.

Kennedy: One of our guests was a shortwave radio operator.

So we had a directional antenna and a laptop

With a piece of software on it that read frequencies.

So he came in and he set that up for us and it showed

That this particular frequency was off the charts.

Kappeller: As soon as they saw high frequency

That they never heard of before,

That got people going on about conspiracies.

It's from aliens to somebody made a homemade device

And is messing with people.

People were worried about it affecting them.

You know, like microwaves can cause cancer type thing.

There was actually people that claimed

They won't even drive down main street anymore.

They actually take the long route around

To go to the post office.

Narrator: Coming up, with no answers

And a town paralyzed, events take an even stranger turn.

These two black vehicles pull up,

And gentlemen that are in suits come out,

Carrying weird machines.

I'm like, "alright, something's up. Something's going on."

Narrator: A mysterious force

Is plaguing the town of carstairs, canada.

Key fobs failing, vehicles refusing to start

And car alarms wailing for no reason.

Frustrations were, I would say, reaching their peak.

Narrator: Probes into the puzzle are launched,

But no answers are found.

Kappeller: Any type of corridor

That they try going down was a dead end.

Now people are starting to get super nervous because of that.

Narrator: Paranormal investigator melissa wilton

Is looking into possible causes for the phenomenon.

So far, I've taken some readings

Of the electromagnetic field levels.

When you have, like, really high emf levels,

It can cause all sorts of problems.

You never really know for sure

If it's paranormal or not until we investigate.

Narrator: While melissa

Looks into the potential paranormal causes,

The co-op staff continues to examine other leads.

Kennedy: We have a rail line that runs adjacent to our store.

They had placards out saying

That there have been changes to their radio equipment

That might cause interference.

They had validated for themselves

That their equipment was not causing the signal.

We looked at the car dealership to see

If there was anything going on there.

Kappeller: I work at two guys auto parts.

It's directly across the street from co-op.

Kennedy: They disconnected all their batteries

And the problem persisted.

And so they were eliminated as a possible source.

Narrator: Every local lead is followed

With no answers forthcoming from anyone.

It actually got to the point where the entire main street

Would all shut down at the exact same time,

Shut everything down, all power,

To see if it was still going on.

Narrator: The co-op staff are baffled

And desperate for answers.

Perhaps a clue can be found in another incident.

That year at a north carolina restaurant,

Customers were upset that their car key fobs

Had stopped working in the parking lot.

It was discovered that a nearby gaming house

Had used a jammer device

To interfere with radio signals clients were using to cheat.

A jammer is usually a high-powered transmission

That contains no information.

It's usually just noise.

And as long as the jammer is stronger

Than the desired signal, your fob isn't going to work.

Narrator: But there are no gaming houses near carstairs.

So what's causing the fobs to fail there?

Can the unusual frequency of the parking lot

Be part of a bigger criminal plan?

There was one theory that came up that potentially

There was thieves out there

That were duplicating the signal on the fob.

Adve: So you would unlock your car.

That's a transmission the thief records.

And the thief retransmits that same fob signal.

Your car thinks that it's you, unlocks itself,

And the thief steals your car.

Narrator: But is it really that easy to steal a modern car?

Now fobs don't transmit the same thing every time,

So every time they transmit something slightly different.

Narrator: Melissa wilton is concluding her investigation

Into the electromagnetic fields around the co-op.

While high levels can indicate paranormal activity,

It could also be the cause of a different problem.

There's something called the fear cage.

When you have a lot of electronics around you

All the time that are putting off

These really high emf levels,

They cause people to be paranoid or to feel afraid.

They're more prone to think like there's ghosts, demons,

Something like that.

So we have to take that into consideration

When we're investigating.

Narrator: This doesn't appear to be what's happening in carstairs.

The emf readings were exactly where I would expect them to be,

Mostly baseline across the board.

They would spike around the door,

Where I would expect them to, around the open sign,

Which puts off pretty high emf levels.

Some vehicles put a higher emf levels from alarm systems,

But there wasn't any really crazy spikes

That I couldn't explain.

I covered all my bases, and I don't think that

I'm going to catch any ghosts

Or anything like that, unfortunately.

Narrator: With paranormal activity ruled out,

The store staff takes the inquiry up another level

And calls in the canadian government.

I contacted the ministry of innovation,

Science and technology.

They have some testing equipment

To try to locate the source of the phenomenon.

Narrator: After combing the neighborhood,

The government agents

Track the signal's origin to a specific zone,

One that had previously been eliminated.

And all of a sudden,

You see these two black vehicles pull up,

And gentlemen that are in suits come out,

Carrying weird machines.

You know, they're very vague about what they were doing

Because, of course, you want to ask.

They walked around our entire lot.

And once they zoned in on it, it was a vehicle.

It was sitting on a trailer because it needed work done

And the battery was dead.

It was like, "that's impossible.

There's no way."

Narrator: The mechanics take the vehicle apart,

Searching for the source of the signal.

Kappeller: It took about a day and a half.

And then we finally found something that we're like,

"hey, this doesn't belong to the vehicle."

The owner of the store, he looked at it,

He said, "that's a jammer."

The police are trying to find out how fast you're going.

So the jammer is just sending out

This extremely strong signal.

It's like somebody shouting.

So it just overwhelms the radar.

It actually had its own battery backup.

So it was able to continue running even though the vehicle

Was not able to run.

After it was resolved,

It was just a sigh of relief throughout the whole store.

Kennedy: We put it out on our social media.

There was still sort of a little bit of trolling.

"of course, it wasn't you guys.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge." right?

There's always going to be the conspiracy theorists out there

That's not going to believe a logical explanation.

You don't realize how many signals

Are going at any one given time.

When you see what just one signal can do to an entire town,

You realize how powerful that is.