The Proof Is Out There 4 CHILLING MONSTERS Lurk in National Parks History

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Maybe not. But what about a hundred trees? And what if they could have been knocked down by a raging Bigfoot? It's January 27th, 2018 in Olympic National Park, Washington. During the middle of the night, seismic monitors pick up an event that registers as a small earthquake. In the morning, park rangers head out to the location where the readings took place near Lake Quinault. And that's where they find this. Toppled and snapped trees litter the landscape, blocking the road and damaging utility lines. Field researcher Cliff Barrichman says park rangers witnessed about 100 trees torn apart over an area that extends nearly half a mile long. This example of one of the snapped trees is staggering. It is a very large tree. This trunk is probably four or five feet in diameter or more. Many of these splinters are literally the size of two by fours. This tree fall quickly became a local mystery. What could have caused such awesome damage? Of course, weather is the most obvious explanation. Many believe that the circumstances here point to some sort of weather pattern. There are microcosms of unique weather patterns that are very highly destructive. Barrichman notes that after these pictures were released, speculation heated up on the internet that this destruction was the work of a creature believed to roam the area for centuries. The Sasquatch. Sasquatches, like all other apes, are known to break and twist trees. Why would a Sasquatch be breaking trees? Apes might break things to show how big and strong they are. And a Bigfoot might show how big and strong he is to protect his territory. At least that's how one story tells it. In 1924, gold prospectors on Mount St. Helens allegedly encountered a group of seven foot tall ape-like creatures. They say they shot at the creatures, injuring one. But that night, they say they paid for it. The ape men descended on the prospector's cabin, throwing boulders and ripping holes in the roof until daybreak. So perhaps these territorial Bigfoots are back in action. But by Barrichman's own admission, nobody has ever seen a Bigfoot this angry. Something like this would be unheard of. Now, Olympic National Park is well known for strange and paranormal occurrences. Some say the area is haunted by the Lady of the Lake, the spirit of a young woman whose oddly preserved body was found floating in the park's Lake Crescent three years after she disappeared. Is what we're seeing here something supernatural? Or is there a more earthly explanation? Let's see what our experts think. Could this damage be the work of one of America's most elusive creatures? People are often drawn to the Bigfoot theory. And even though anthropology and anatomy professor Jeff Meldrum is convinced Bigfoot exists, he's just as convinced these photos are not proof of the creature's handiwork. I do not think these trees were knocked down by Bigfoot. You look at behavior of animals, they're very goal oriented. They don't have a surplus of calories to expand on frivolous activities like pushing down trees, even if they were capable of doing that, unless there was some motivation or some return. I don't think attributing this to Bigfoot activity would be reasonable at all. Okay, so Dr. Meldrum says we can rule out a Sasquatch, but meteorologist Juan Hernandez says the weather theory has its own challenges. A microburst is typically accompanied by heavy thunderstorms, but radar from that day shows nothing of the kind. The storms were not there. We had what we call stratiform rain that was ongoing. Microbursts also scatter broken trees in every direction. These trees fell in one direction. That is one of the reasons that I believe this was not a microburst. Of course, strong winds can knock down trees even when there's no rain, but Hernandez notes that the winds were coming out of the south and the trees were knocked down in the opposite direction. So what gives? Now, when we compare wind damage, it could potentially be two different sources. It could be straight line winds or it can be tornadic winds. When we're looking for tornado damage, a lot of the trees oftentimes they fall in a crisscross pattern. Here, we don't have that. They're all laying down in one direction. The answer? One of those quirks of science we love so much on this show. There are specific weather patterns that oftentimes lead to something that is fairly common in mountainous terrain, and that is rotor circulations. A rotor circulation is a turbulent airflow pattern that occurs near mountains or large topographic features. As stable horizontal airflow encounters a mountain, it is forced to ascend on the windward side and descend on the leeward side. The interaction between the descending air and the updraft creates a turbulent region known as the rotor, characterized by rapidly changing winds and severe turbulence. Hernandez says that's what knocked the trees down, and the force of those falling trees was ultimately so powerful, that's what registered on the park's seismic monitors. The conditions were right for the occurrence of a rotor circulation. We had a stable layer around the peak, meaning the wind would come up the mountain and quickly descend because of that stable layer on top. That wind was allowed to rotate in a valley where the damage occurred. It does check all the boxes for conditions that would promote the development of a rotor circulation. Our verdict? Rotor circulation. Hernandez's analysis has us convinced that we are looking at a weather event, but we're still on the hunt for that definitive evidence of Bigfoot, so send us anything you have. It's July 2016 in the Pisgah National Forest in western North Carolina. Two astronomy-grade cameras have been installed by Appalachian State University astrophysicist Dr. Dan Caton to observe the Brown Mountain Ridge every night, and now they seem to have captured something inexplicable. Anomalous white lights blink on sporadically in the night sky high above the ridge and over the streetlights down in the town. In the span of about 20 minutes, they appear at least four times. Dan says when he played back this footage, he was amazed. This video stood out in that it had something that was obviously different, but we had a light here that persisted over 20 minutes, came and went, had no lateral motion, sideways, had no up-down motion. These claims are paranormal. They deserve investigation. Although accounts of the mysterious lights go back many years, the first published article about them only came out in 1912. Around this time, there were frequent reports of sightings from a spot near a local hotel in the mountains. Journalist M.J. Banai says the reports had reached such a fever pitch by 1922 that the U.S. Geological Survey decided to investigate. People claim that what we're seeing here is a phenomenon known as ball lightning. You have static electricity just like you do with a regular lightning strike, except instead of it arcing into a sort of line, it balls up and it sort of hovers temporarily. Others, though, believe the Brown Mountain Lights have a spookier source. There's a school of belief that the Brown Mountain Lights are actually some sort of manifestation of spirits or ghosts. There's claims that soldiers from the Civil War were killed during a battle near the mountains, and what we see are their ghosts carrying lanterns at night. Another theory that's been floated is train headlights. In 1913, a USGS investigator found that Southern Railway trains could be seen from Brown Mountain and that many reported sightings lined up with the train schedule. But this idea was flushed out after the tracks washed away in a 1916 flood, and the sightings continued. So will our experts finally be the ones to get to the bottom of this centuries-old mystery? Physicist Dr. Matthew Shadagas explores the ball lightning hypothesis. We don't understand from a scientific perspective how ball lightning could form. We have a series of equations in physics known as Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's equations tell us how to make predictions for how electrical phenomena behave. Unfortunately, Maxwell's equations don't give us something that looked like ball lightning. These four complex equations are named after Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who came up with an early version of them in the 1860s. Based on the equations, the size of ball lightning's electric charge would be too great for it to move as observed here. So could the lights just be coming from a plane? When the light shows up, it looks sort of like a floating, hovering ball. You know it's not a plane. A plane that has blinking lights is traveling through the frame is going to make a long, drawn-out line. But what if it could be a reflection of a light on the ground, as we discussed before in the case of the Turkish UFO? Since we keep mentioning the Fanta Morgana phenomenon, here's how it works. It occurs when the temperature of the air below the line of sight is colder than the air above. This causes light rays passing through to bend down, making the image of the object appear higher than the actual object. This is an illusion that occurs near the horizon, and we see lights that are significantly above the horizon. The high altitude of the lights doesn't seem to make much sense for the Fanta Morgana theory, and the conditions need to be just right to create such an illusion. This is seen with such frequency, we're going to rule that explanation out. Therefore, our verdict is that the brown mountain lights remain unexplained. Hopefully, with continuing research, we will someday crack the code. March 2021, Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Park rangers are hiking across the frozen tundra when they come across something they had never seen before. A strange group of footprints sits frozen on the Alaska ice. Adding to the mystery, the four-toed prints appear to be on top of the ice rather than in it. The scale of the large prints is evident in the compacted snow oddly left behind. Many online sleuths believe these prints could be between 16 and 18 inches long, with the spaces between each footprint appearing to average around three feet. Field researcher Cliff Barrickman, who runs the North American Bigfoot Center, knows a thing or two about mysterious footprints. When you look at the footprints in the photographs, they poke above the ground, that's unusual. And could they actually be in a bipedal fashion? And certainly the snow screams yeti. There are plenty of stories and evidence to suggest that a Sasquatch-like humanoid could thrive in the frozen tundras like that of Alaska. The indigenous people of the Himalayas coined the term yeti to describe an ape-like bipedal creature they believed to be stalking the icy cold mountaintops. And the Alaskan natives had their own name for a similar creature they called Nantinuk, which translates to half man, half beast. One particular story from Alaska, hunters shot a moose and tracked it, and when they got to the area, there was blood everywhere and 18-inch long footprints, but no sign of the moose whatsoever. Whatever left 18-inch footprints brought the moose with it. But according to Barrickman, there could be another explanation for these prints that many say are downright wolf-like, but huge. The dire wolves were the largest canids during the Pleistocene era, and although extinct, a Montana rancher recently reported encountering one. He was even successful in hunting it, although DNA evidence revealed it was, in fact, just a large gray wolf. Could it be that we have some sort of ice age remnant here leaving footprints through Denali National Park? The dire wolf could weigh up to 200 pounds and grow to up to six feet long, and while they are usually associated with a modern-day gray wolf, the dire wolf's DNA actually has more in common with today's African jackals. But is it a wolf or a bigfoot that left those prints in the snow? Our experts tell us what's afoot. We sat down with biologist Floyd Hayes to make sure that these prints were, in fact, not left behind by a known species, such as a bear. The problem with that is that this is in the month of March. These tracks have been there for a while, and at this time of the year, those bears would be asleep. They basically hibernate during the winter months. Hayes points out that the shape of the prints do not align with that of a typical grizzly. These footprints look more like a canid, which is a dog of the family Canidae. In bear tracks, you typically see five toes, whereas in dogs you normally see only four toes because the fifth toe doesn't quite reach the ground. If these tracks were made by a member of the Canidae family, how could they appear bipedal? Hayes explains. When a dog walks, it often places its hind foot in the same position as its front foot, and they often create a single line of tracks that are slightly offset from each other. So could these be the prints of a long-lost dire wolf? Hayes says that big bad wolf needed a massive, steady supply of fresh meat. The dire wolf formerly preyed on large species of grazing mammals, but after they became extinct, the dire wolf didn't really have much of a food supply left, and it too became extinct. But that still doesn't rule out the possibility that these prints could belong to some sasquatch-like beast, such as the yeti. Anthropology professor and Bigfoot expert Jeff Meldrum first breaks down how these strange prints could be perfectly preserved pedestaled atop a giant sheet of ice rather than sunk into it. When a footprint compresses that snow, it makes it much more resistant both to melting but also to wind erosion. The wind has just scoured away the loose snow, leaving behind the compacted snow beneath the footprint. This process could possibly make footprints appear like they were left behind by an animal much larger than the actual culprit, but they also preserve some key hidden details. Primates don't have individual digital pads. You can see the individual digital pads as well as the larger pad of the hind foot of this canid. The pattern is very recognizable, so this is absolutely a gray wolf and not a sasquatch. So, our verdict? These weren't made by a sasquatch or a giant dire wolf, just one of the 10,000 gray or black wolves living in Alaska, with some help from the snow drift to make its paw prints appear larger. In May 2021, Queensland-based Yowie researcher Dean Harrison and his team are testing out infrared cameras at Springbrook National Park. They picked this spot because they believe they've seen traces of Yowie activity among the brush, and that night they captured this mysterious footage. The thermal imagery seems to show a solitary figure hiding behind or even hugging a large tree trunk. Now, this is doing what Yowies do. They hug a tree, pretend they're a part of a tree, if there's a human in the area, and they just blend. So, you can see him just putting his head in. Minutes later, the image changes. Now it looks like there's a couple. Two giant creatures emerge from the foliage, and one is bending down to pick up something. As it bends over, you can also make out what looks like one of the creature's heads. It looks cone-shaped. The figures are large, with wide shoulders and ape-like proportions. Field researcher Cliff Barrickman, who has been to Australia to study the Yowie, says the footage aligns with descriptions from indigenous peoples going back centuries. All the aborigines down there have drawings on the walls of caves depicting these things. They're prevalent in their storytelling traditions as well, but then the settlers came in the late 1700s, and they too started running into Yowies, which is another very strong indicator that they're a real biological animal. Now, Bigfoot-like creatures are part of folklore the world over. Nepal has the Yeti. Mongolia has the Alma. And one theory is that they all descended from a single Asian ancestor, some of whom made it to Australia, while others crossed the Bering Land Bridge, came to North America, and evolved into Bigfoot. If this video is real, it could help prove that theory, but that's a big if. There's some sort of subject, creature, person, if you a heat signature. And as we go through different FLIR filter arrays, this object's movement is consistent. There is something happening in here that's moving around. Look at the footage with this filter. Now the head comes into better view. It appears to have a pronounced sagittal crest, a ridge of bone along the top of the cranium. It's similar to what's seen in the skulls of the early hominid Australopithecus, which some believe to be the common ancestor of Bigfoot, yaoi, and other similar creatures. But Primo is cautious. Although we have not found any evidence to support that the recording was fabricated, we have no idea what is being depicted here. Next, our zoologist Roxy Furman analyzes the anatomy of the figures. What we can see clearly at one point is that there are two animals pictured. It also looks like it's a bipedal animal, which means it walks on two legs. That might have you thinking primate, but here's a key fact. There are no known primates native to Australia. In fact, the only bipedal animals are the cassowary and the kangaroo, which look nothing like this. So how do we explain the heat signatures in those head shapes? Furman thinks she may have the answer. People wearing headlamps. That would explain why the head's a slightly strange shape. That would mean the people were either misidentified or their participants in an elaborate hoax. Maybe Australia's version of the Patterson-Gimlin film, if that was a hoax too. But anthropologist Kathy Strain says that in this case, size does matter. The research team went back to the spot in daylight and measured the tree, matching the thermal footage as best they could to get a sense of the size of the figures in the infrared video. Whatever it is, is more than eight feet tall. The possibility of them being human is highly unlikely. I came to the conclusion that what this video shows are two real yaoi. I think it is one of the most significant films taken in at least 50 years. So yes, there's a possibility that this is a hoax, but based on Professor Strain's estimate of the creature's height, we're going to say these are possible yaois.