The Proof Is Out There: Top 7 TERRIFYING Unexplained Phenomena | History

We now head to the great state of Texas for the story of an unexplained phenomenon which occurred in, of all places, a suburban kitchen. March 2017. Erica Garner is home alone in her house just outside Houston. Her husband has left for a business trip. I was outside, I was playing with my two dogs and I noticed something very strange on my rooftop. There was black birds going in a circle. I had never seen that before. This feels like some sort of omen as Erica goes back inside. She's giving water to her dogs when suddenly. What was that? Let's freeze on that because if you blink you'll miss it. A strange blue light streaking through the room leaving Erica stunned and momentarily at a loss for words. That's weird. It was almost like plasma. Everything in the room turned completely white almost like an explosion and my eyes started burning. It's really weird. Even stranger, the flash only lasts a second though Erica says it felt much longer. What was that? It traveled almost like it was a train coming across the room slowly coming in for a stop and this happened for all about seven seconds. And that night things get downright funky. I'd had trouble sleeping, I was having some strange dreams and it definitely impacted me. Erica's dreams of pink and purple galaxies make her feel like she's been transported through time and she wonders if the blue flash could have been an extraterrestrial force. Into my research trying to figure out what possibly a blue beam of light could come from people have said they've experienced alien abductions and they might see a blue beam of light. One similar case happened in 1975. An Arizona logger named Travis Walton disappeared after walking toward an unidentified beam of light in the forest. He recalled being transported to a strange place surrounded by alien beings and when he made it home he was shocked to learn he'd been gone for five days. There are definitely things in this world that we do not understand. So what is Erica's blue flash? Well we know it's not her security camera malfunctioning because we can hear her reacting in real time. So the first thing we did was a proper analysis of the footage. Photography expert Andrew McCarthy starts by examining the footage frame by frame. So right after this the camera lost several frames. You see a distinct jump. Her hair moves, the dogs move, it's just a significant jump. She said it was seven seconds. I'm not sure if it was seven seconds but it was a long time, long enough that they significantly shifted positions. But McCarthy says there's something else that's even stranger. What didn't make sense to me is nothing here is casting a shadow. It seems like the lights were supposed to be coming behind the camera to cause this but you would see some kind of shadow cast on the legs of these chairs, you know on the dogs. You don't see any of that. It's just bright and it's uniformly bright. Forensic investigator Chase Klotzke is curious if the flash could be something as simple as a so she asks the Garners to run a test. Erica and her husband put this light bulb in and they tapped it and if you tap it long enough it burned out. Once you compare when the light bulb blows out and that reaction and you put it next to the blue flash they're not even close. Okay so if it wasn't a blown bulb was it possibly a strike of lightning from outside? Atmospheric scientist Deanna Hentz reviews the local weather radar from that day. What you're seeing is that a round of fairly intense thunderstorms went through the Houston area but it was about one o'clock in the morning whereas this video was taken at 11 30 in the morning. That really leaves me to think that lightning is not responsible for that flash. Some experts believe wormholes in the universe create paths to move backwards in time and through parallel universes. Perhaps the blue flash was one such path. I stand more on the side of this being a time glitch. It's an error in our time-space fabric. So what is it? The strange jump in the footage does point to some kind of time glitch but whether it's caused by an alien force a wormhole or something else is unclear. So for now I'm prepared to call this a genuine unexplained phenomenon. We take you back to 1971 the village of Belmez in Andalusia, Spain. Local resident Maria Gomez Camara discovers a strange discoloration on her concrete kitchen floor. Oddly after a few days it changes and forms what appears to be a face. She tries to scrub it away to no avail so her husband then tears up the floor and re-cements it but a week later the face reappears in the floor followed by several more. A number of times they've taken up the floor they've tried to get rid of them but the faces just keep coming back. Word quickly spreads about the phenomenon in Belmez. There's been a number of investigations and attempts at analysis of the site and none of them have come up with any evidence of paint or tampering that would lead to a concrete explanation for the existence of the faces. Even stranger while researchers were examining the site a number of long expired human remains were found buried underneath the house unbeknownst to the family. I was able to verify that there was a late 1800 cemetery in that location. It likely was a catholic cemetery that was long forgotten and when they needed room to build homes they just went ahead and built a home over it without realizing that the headstones had been removed. A lot of the people that visited the Belmez faces thought that the bodies or the spirits or the souls beneath the home were showing themselves through these faces on the floor. The family has always insisted this was not a hoax. They weren't hand drawing the faces on their own floor and though the mother Maria died in 2004 the image continues to draw visitors to the house to this day. But what are they really looking at? Our experts face off. First perhaps this could all have been another example of pareidolia. The tendency of humans to see familiar shapes within randomly occurring patterns but Andrew McCarthy isn't so sure. Some say that these images could be an accident. Maybe they simply spilled something on the floor which stained it and it resembled a face. Then why does the face keep reappearing time and time again? That seems to rule out a coincidence. Catholic miracle researcher Michael O'Neill says that while this resembles some confirmed miracles it can't be classified as such. There's a case in the 1700s in Austria called Our Lady of Absinthe began to manifest the face of the Virgin Mary. The glass was wiped clean with acid and the image came back according to the investigator and as a result they declared it to be miraculous. We don't have the same situation now. We don't see in real time the image returning so it cannot be established as miraculous. A chemical engineering firm in Spain that analyzed the Belmez faces in 2014 told us their tests using infrared scanning and electron microscopes did not find any traces of inorganic materials like paint where the images appeared. But Mick West thinks it's very possible the faces weren't painted on but instead created with another technique. It seems almost like very dark around the outside of the face and then it's white in the middle so it could just simply be that they added something like bleach but then would eventually evaporate and you wouldn't really see any residue of that. Mick makes an interesting case for bleach but the most recent testing did not detect bleach or paint so our verdict these strange faces remain an unexplained phenomenon until we get more concrete proof. In November 2017 just as people are clamoring to get their hands on the latest iPhone the internet is sent into a frenzy not by some viral dance craze but by a 19th century Austrian painting. A photo of the expected one by artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller starts getting a lot of attention on Twitter. A lot of people online point out that in her hands there is something very strange and definitely out of place. It looks to be like she's checking her Instagram or TikTok on a smartphone. Keep in mind this picture was painted in 1860. The girl's pose is unmistakably that of a distracted pedestrian from today staring at a handheld device. People online immediately speculated this could be evidence someone in the future invented the ability to travel back centuries and brought back a sample of advanced technology. This is also not the first historic painting where 21st century technology was spotted. This 1937 mural by Umberto Romano seems to show a Native American staring into his own smartphone and this depiction of God and Jesus in an Italian church fresco from the 1600s had people seeing something else from the heavens. A lot of people online claim that this image of the earth with these antennae strongly resembles the Sputnik satellite launched by the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. But how would late renaissance painter Ventura Salambeni know what our early satellite technology looked like? Could he have been a visionary genius like Leonardo da Vinci who prefigured the airplane with this device called the ornithopter? Or did someone from the future really go back in time? We now know Michelangelo secretly painted anatomically accurate images of the human brain on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So painters can sneak secret images into their work. But an artist hiding evidence of future time travelers would be even more mind-blowing. So is that what we're seeing here? Our experts enlighten us. First, we asked physicist Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi if time travel is even theoretically possible. The laws of physics do allow for time travel under certain situations. One of them is when you have a wormhole. If you move around one end of the wormhole at near the speed of light, someone could actually exit the wormhole before they entered it, meaning they went backwards in time. So it's theoretically possible, but is it probable? We showed the paintings to Mick West. He says these modern looking objects don't quite add up to clear proof some later generations solved the time travel equation. If time travelers were coming from a thousand years in the future, they would bring things from their time. I don't think they would stop off in the early 21st century and pick something up and then go back to the 18th century. So it seems likely the smartphones are being mistaken for something else, but what? For the lady that's walking in the meadow, it was very common to have these little books that were devotions or just little religious scriptures. We have those little hymnals in museums that are about roughly the same size as the date from that same period. And as for the Sputnik satellite. Between the Christ figure and God is this huge sphere which is called a creation globe. The antennae are actually scepters that God and Christ were holding. The Renaissance artist was trying to envision this whole idea of creation with his artistic license. Clearly a lot of internet users jump to the same wrong conclusion, and there's a good reason for that. When our children and grandchildren look back on the artwork that we've done, they may be scratching their heads and wondering what is that object he's holding in his hand. So by the time our descendants look at artwork from today, technology will have moved on, and they may similarly confuse certain objects for newer technology that has since emerged. Our verdict? A collective case of misidentification. We can't rule out that somebody in the future has unlocked the secret of traveling to the past, since even scientists of today say space and time are not absolutes. But these paintings are not proof of that being the case. It's 2010 near Lake Natron in northern Tanzania. A British photographer travels to the lake with camera in hand and is instantly taken aback by what he encounters. From his photos you might think that these are pieces of artwork, maybe even wicker creations. But these are real animals seemingly petrified in place. A frozen flamingo floats on the water while a stock still songbird perches on a branch. Author Heidi Hollis says these photos are so chilling that they became an internet sensation. It seemed like they were frozen in mid-motion of living their lives, so it was really just disturbing and really heartbreaking to see. The animals in these photographs definitely look like they could have encountered the ancient Greek monster Medusa, who turned all who gazed upon her to stone. But there's another theory that hits a bit closer to home. In that area there is the legend of Papaboa, which is a bat-like demonic creature that would come and paralyze people in their sleep. And there are many who are suspicious that Papaboa is responsible for killing the animals here at Lake Natron. There's also a more natural theory about what brought these animals down. Some say the red color of the lake seen in some footage is evidence of toxic algae that is killing the creatures. What's most curious about Lake Natron is that it doesn't appear to be deadly to all animals. In fact, 75% of the world's population of lesser flamingos live in its lagoon. So who or what happened to these unlucky animals that seemingly froze them in place? Could it be the legendary Papaboa after all? We turn to our experts to investigate. Science writer Amy Teitel considers the famous legend of Papaboa. According to legend, Papaboa only attack humans with the goal of inspiring fear spreading throughout humanity. So for this demon to hypothetically attack an animal is not how this myth goes. So let's rule out these mythological beings. Could there be a real-life predator that's causing these animals to freeze at the moment of death? Wildlife biologist Dr. Stephanie Shuttler looks into this theory. There are animals that can essentially freeze their prey by paralyzing them. Snakes do this with venom. It breaks down different parts of the prey's body and they can't move. And there's the brown recluse spider. When it bites you, it breaks down a tissue. But spiders and snakes, they consume the prey that they kill. So it's really strange that we see the bodies of these animals largely intact. So if it's not a predator, could toxic red algae have killed these creatures? Biologist Dr. Floyd Hayes investigates. Red tides occur in areas that are rich in nutrients. They're caused by dinoflagellate algae, which produce toxins and can kill organisms. But organisms killed during red tides are not preserved like this. In fact, they quickly disintegrate. Yet NASA geologist Dr. Bob Anderson thinks the algal blooms may provide a clue. This is a lake that's associated with volcanism. When you have these nearby volcanoes, a lot of times they have these toxic type of gases in there. These algaes are feeding off of the nutrients that are coming from the volcano. So toxins from volcanic gases or algal blooms may be what's causing these deaths. But then why aren't the animal remains decomposing? There are a number of lakes that have high concentrations of natron in them that have formed when large amounts of volcanic ash cover the lake. And as the water evaporates, the sodium bicarbonate become concentrated. The lake is extremely alkaline. It has a pH of about 9 to 10.5. And Anderson says it's this high alkalinity that solves the mystery. This animal looks like he's been exposed to this alkaline type of area. Somehow they get covered up quickly from the water. They're in the muds, and these muds are also very alkaline. And so they actually act as a coating, and they mummify the thing. Anderson says what the animal's body goes through is also similar to petrification, which turns organic material into fossils. What happens in this process is that water goes through, and this water's carrying minerals. They take out an organic mineral and replace it with a mineral like quartz or something that's very hard. Our verdict? So this is really pretty cool. It turns out these animals are not actually petrified. They're mummified. The high alkalinity in the lake from sodium bicarbonate is what causes this process. But that still doesn't explain why the creatures are perfectly frozen in place. Well, we caught up with a photographer, and he admits he found them on shore and then posed them like this to achieve that haunting look in his photos. It's late September 2019 in the coastal town of Weston-Super-Mar in England. One morning, a local woman wakes up bewildered at what's taking place in her bedroom. She grabs her phone and starts recording. I'm in my bedroom. And I'm looking at the wall. What is this sorcery that is happening? The woman holds up her hand in front of the wall in a state of utter shock. The image is blurry, but you can clearly see her pan the camera as a red car drives past a block of buildings. I am confused at how this is happening. It appears a row of white houses is being projected onto her bedroom wall. They look like perfectly normal residential buildings, except for one thing. They are all upside down. Journalist Amy Title wonders if it's all an illusion. What's really interesting is her curtains are pretty much completely closed, so it could just be a trick of the light. When the video gets posted and goes viral, some suggest the buildings are not of our world, but a nearly identical one, a glimpse into another dimension. Is such a portal even possible? Consider that other dimensions might exist according to something called string theory. String theory is a theory where instead of having atoms as kind of the base layer that creates everything, that everything in the universe is created by one dimensional strings. These one dimensional strings or filaments of energy are the smallest objects in the universe, and they're said to vibrate in different patterns. And these strings can vibrate against each other and create multiple dimensions. Now, string theory tells us there could be up to 10 or 11 dimensions. So has this woman discovered something big or is it just another example of other freaky physics? Our experts untangle what's going on. We have a scene from another universe right in someone's bedroom. How is that possible? Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says something kind of like this is possible theoretically with a wormhole, where two black holes in different universes connect, establishing a doorway between them. But the proof wouldn't look like this. Now, of course, if a black hole or wormhole were to open up in somebody's bedroom, the energy is so great that anyone's bedroom would be sucked inside, never to be seen again. If it's not a bedroom black hole, maybe there's a projector hidden in the room. Video analyst Mick West takes a look. These images are a bit blurry. I think if someone was trying to fake some kind of alternate reality, they would have used a clearer image. We can see that it is actually a projection because she waves her hand and leaves a shadow. So it's not actually something that's added to the video afterwards. So it's not CGI, but could it be a bit of movie magic coming from an electronic projector? That doesn't explain why the image appears upside down. And West says it doesn't match what he sees from the woman's shadow. The projector would have to be behind her for her to cast a shadow on the wall. And what's behind it from that perspective is the window. So the projector would have to be basically where the window is. In the clip, we don't see a projector, but we do see tiny gaps in the curtain. There's just this one small, thin rectangle, a hole, an aperture. And because this is the only way that light can get in, it's acting as what's called a pinhole camera. The term we use for that is camera obscura. As light rays hit an object and then travel through the aperture of a pinhole camera, they project the image of an object upside down. This creates the camera obscura effect. And just to prove it conclusively, West has been able to recreate it. I took this plastic sheet here, and I put it over the window, and it has this little hole in here. And then when I turn the camera around, I can see that there was a projection of my backyard onto the back wall of my garage. And like in the video we saw, I can cast a shadow on it. And here's an image of me walking around, waving this umbrella around, projected onto the back wall of my garage. Our verdict? This is an example of camera obscura from a pinhole camera accidentally made by the window shade. The buildings we see in the image are actually the neighbors' houses from right across the street. We might not have traveled to a new universe, but we got a good lesson in the optics. You passed. Class dismissed. December 2019. It's just after Christmas in the small community of Porter, north of Houston, Texas. A man is heading out alone on what seems like a normal Lone Star evening, but his doorbell is about to catch something extraordinary. The motion sensor records the man as he exits the front door and strolls casually down the walkway. But as he turns towards the driveway, he freezes momentarily and suddenly vanishes. Watch that again and pay close attention to the ball of light that shoots up to the sky as he disappears. Did we just see an act of teleportation? Journalist M.J. Benias, who reports on the unexplained, says it wouldn't be the first reported case. Cultures and religions have been talking about the ability to travel great distances in a short period of time for generations. In Jewish Kabbalah, rabbis and ascetics could pray and meditate and enter a holy state where they would be able to perform a sort of teleportation act. Let's teleport back from ancient Israel to modern Georgia. And this internet classic, a high-speed pursuit shot from a police dash cam in 1997. Police officer is hot on the tail of someone who stole a car and is trying to chase him down. After a bunch of maneuvers on the road, in some bizarre twist, the car thief takes a left turn and disappears through a fence. Lieutenant Wayne Daniels was at the wheel during this perplexing event. When it all occurred, it happened so fast. I figured the fence would wrap him up, he'd be in a big old cocoon. But yet the fence was still standing in front of me, keeping me closed off from getting inside the yard. I had no idea to begin with how a car could get through a 10-foot chain-link fence. And just recently, we've seen headlines reporting that teleportation is now a matter of science, at least on the subatomic level. So the idea has been around since Einstein. We've known that it's possible to teleport at least photons. And even more recently, scientists have been able to use quantum entanglement to teleport larger structures. Now, based on some physics calculations, it's thought it would require the energy an entire city uses for a year to teleport a human being. But that hasn't stopped people from believing that advanced teleportation tech exists in secret. So do these videos prove it? Let's turn to our experts. First, Michael Primo examines the doorbell video. So I've analyzed many ring camera video recordings, but one thing that they all have in common is that they use a high level of what's called visual compression. So I employed what's called macro block analysis, as well as motion vector analysis. These tests reveal that the encoder was not documenting new pixel information for 30 frames. It is entirely possible that this is encoder error. So there's several different reasons as to why this occurred at this specific point in time. The first is there was a drop in the internet connection to which the camera was not transmitting information to the cloud to actually document its frames. The second is simply camera malfunction. So the glitching doorbell didn't capture teleportation in the act. But how did that car in the police video seemingly teleport to the other side of the fence? After some investigation, Lieutenant Daniels believes he solved the puzzle. On most fence, when you set the poles, you put the fence on the outside of the poles so that it protects anyone from going through the fence into a yard. This particular fence was set on the backside of the pole so that when the car hit the fence, the aluminum ties that hold the fence to the poles pop loose. The fence swung open like a garage door, and before the dust could settle, the fence had done come straight back down in front of me. So our verdict on both of these videos, the anomaly of the teleporting Texan can be explained by a faulty camera, and the mystery of the vanishing Georgia bandit can be explained by a faulty fence. However, a recent experiment in 2017 by Chinese researchers did manage to teleport the quantum state of a photon to a satellite 870 miles in orbit. Perhaps the days of Be Me Up Scotty could be on the horizon. It's May 2017, and we're in the lush forest outside Portland, Oregon, where a hiker records a most unusual walk in the woods. Watch that again. The hiker walks through the mirror as though it's an open door, then turns back to see where he came from, and eventually returns back through the mirror. I get it, pretty out there, but if it's an illusion, it's an impressive one, and that's not all. As he goes through the mirror, you can see that the ivy is on the right side of the tree, but then when he goes back through and he turns around, the ivy is on the left. So it seems like everything has flipped. It's really disorienting. Now work with us here a minute, because McCarthy points out that modern science is open to the notion of mirror worlds. There are actually scientists out there who are studying the idea that a mirror universe might actually exist, and they're running experiments using subatomic particles to see if those particles will turn into mirror versions of themselves. The idea of mirror universes comes from a measurement of neutrons that makes no sense. Neutrons, when taken out of the nucleus of an atom, will decay away. According to the law of conservation of mass, that can't just happen. If neutrons are, say, disappearing, then maybe they're disappearing into an alternate parallel universe. Sounds crazy, but this is actual physics that people are testing. If a parallel universe does exist, has this individual found a portal to it? Before you go running headfirst into your reflection, let's ask our experts to explain. Our astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi says the existence of a mirror universe is theoretically possible, but points out we wouldn't be able to just step into it. When physicists speak about a mirror parallel universe, they're talking about something similar to what we have, but we don't feel it or interact with it. In this case, the person is still in our universe. So we need a more prosaic explanation of this footage, and forensic video analyst Mick West thinks he's got one. So I think what happens here, you can kind of get a clue as he gets towards the mirror here, he approaches the mirror at a 45 degree angle, so you can't see his reflection. So I think what happens, and if this was the mirror, you'd come up to the mirror, 45 degrees, you rotate it, come back out again, then turn around, then you can come back in, do the same thing, come out this way. All you have to do is then cut that video and remove the bits where you turn the camera. It's very, very well done. It's a camera trickery, but it's nicely done camera trickery. Okay, our verdict. This video was an impressively made hoax. While a mirror universe may still exist, we don't yet have an easy way to visit it. Not through a mirror, and sadly, not through a TV screen either.