The US and Russia have often found themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum. But the two countries share at least one thing-- frequently reported alien encounters. It was your average December day in Siberia's Amur region-- temps below zero, 2 feet of snow, and many more trees than people. According to local reports, a man was out just walking his dog. And ultimately, they stumble across this strange 3-foot creature lying in the snow. It was missing a limb.
It had sort of a dark grayish skin color, no hair or sort of noticeable facial features to recognize. TONY HARRIS: Let's freeze on that. Notice how the thing's head is tilted in an odd way, as if it was speaking or screaming before it died? TONY HARRIS: The people filming are convinced it's an alien. And here's the really wild thing. This might not even be the first likeness to appear in Russia.
In 1996, a local woman discovered a strange creature in the wilderness. It was nicknamed Alyoshenka by the media. But according to the woman, the creature was still alive when she discovered it. Siberia is also the site of the famous 1908 Tunguska meteor strike. It leveled 80 million trees over 830 square miles.
Though some believe it wasn't a meteor at all, but a crashed alien spaceship. So is this latest video proof of alien life? Let's check with our experts. We first speak to field biologist Lucy Eckersley. The first question, could this creature be some kind of tragically malformed person? I immediately can tell this isn't human because it's very small. And it also doesn't have the formed chin and cranium of a human.
Its head is a very different shape. TONY HARRIS: OK, we're not looking at a human. But Eckersley finds a clue to suggest it may be one of our cousins. Look closely at those arms. LUCY ECKERSLEY: My first thought is, maybe this is a primate, something that has really long arms for reaching through and swinging from trees. Something like a squirrel monkey.
TONY HARRIS: Of course, squirrel monkeys are native to the tropics of South America. So how could it be in Siberia? Could it have escaped from a zoo? That's a mystery, but one that forensic investigator Chase Kloetzke thinks she can solve quickly. There's no gore. There's no liquid. TONY HARRIS: For Kloetzke, that's a red flag. The scene is missing important details of a recently deceased flesh and blood creature.
You would expect to see something, whether it's alien blood or fluids or even some sort of pus. TONY HARRIS: And if this alien just survived a crash, you'd never know it from the video. There was no debris, there were no scorch marks, there were-- there was nothing. The snow was pristine. After studying the video, there was just so many things wrong with it. I don't like it, I'll be honest with you.
So what is it? Not only does a squirrel monkey in the middle of Siberia not make sense, but it's really the lack of any gory details that just doesn't feel right. So we're going with Chase on this one. The Russian alien corpse is a hoax. Clearly, some people can't get enough alien corpse footage, even though it drives the serious UFO researchers nuts. We just call them as we see them.
An enigmatic radio broadcast that no one claims to run has been transmitting a monotonous droning sound, like this one, virtually nonstop for over five decades. [buzzing tone] The buzzing is occasionally interrupted by a voice speaking Russian. MAN (ON RADIO): [speaking russian] TONY HARRIS: Ryan Schaum, an amateur radio enthusiast, runs one of many websites devoted to the phenomenon. What originally got me into The Buzzer was the mystery of it, like who's broadcasting this, why they are, and what possible purpose could it have. I did kind of get hooked to it, so I just keep on searching for more information about it, hoping to find some sort of rational explanation.
TONY HARRIS: Investigator Chase Kloetzke says thousands of dedicated enthusiasts like Ryan are heating up the internet with talk that The Buzzer's origin is the former Soviet Union. We trace it back, basically, to Russia. It could be anything from a communication device to speak to submarines or a coded way to speak to spies, the military. TONY HARRIS: There is another theory that the buzzer is part of a nuclear deterrent system, a so-called Dead Hand station. CHASE KLOETZKE: The theory behind the dead man's switch is that if Russia is attacked and decimated, The Buzzer stops. And then nuclear weapons are automatically deployed in retaliation to the West.
[booming] The nuclear Dead Hand system is part of a long-standing policy called mutual assured destruction, or MAD. If all sides know nuclear war is unwinnable, no one will start one. But is the buzzer really a part of that, or does it have another disturbing purpose? Let's ask the experts. We turn to our military expert, Tim McMillan. He studied the history of The Buzzer, and he's skeptical it has anything to do with nukes. In 2010, the signal ceased.
Very fortunately, we didn't see the launch of any missiles. We didn't see apocalypse. And so that would suggest that it's probably not linked to some type of nuclear detonation device. TONY HARRIS: So what about the submarine signaling theory? When I first heard about this buzzer, I thought it must be a way to communicate with submarines deep in the oceans. But that requires very low frequency transmission. TONY HARRIS: ELF, or Extremely Low Frequency, waves can penetrate seawater hundreds of meters deep.
At these frequencies, the signal doesn't degrade much due to atmospheric conditions or the depth of the ocean. But Kaku says The Buzzer works at a much higher frequency. So he thinks it's being used to communicate with people on land, but at a great distance. You might say to yourself, well, why don't the Russians simply use the internet? Well, the problem with that is security. And so you want to use over-the-horizon radio for a certain kinds of sensitive communication.
Shortwave radio is phenomenally good at sending messages past the line of sight because these messages actually bounce off the ionosphere and then come back down to Earth. So you could shoot messages across entire continents. These regular intervals of noise, they're basically saturating this shortwave radio channel so other people can't hop on the station and compete with you.
TONY HARRIS: But why do that? Dr. Gottesman says that by claiming the frequency, Russia can use it at any time as a so-called numbers station, to send secret messages often hidden in a group of numbers as they are read out loud. TONY HARRIS: And McMillan agrees. TIM MCMILLAN: It's fairly unsophisticated but a brilliant way to communicate with your deep-cover spies who may be all the way across the world. TONY HARRIS: Other countries, including the US, have allegedly used so-called numbers stations for espionage.
And if it's an old-school form of spycraft, McMillan says it's still useful. The idea of continuing to use it today-- why not? It makes your adversaries have to listen in. It makes them try to crack a code that maybe you're not even using anymore.
But it could be something else that we haven't even considered. It's an unknown. Who knows? If nothing else, it's a mystery. So our verdict is mixed. We're pretty sure it's a Russian numbers station, but we don't know exactly what sort of messages it's sending, if it's currently in use, or if it's a ruse, or if it's just a placeholder for the frequency.
So for now, we're just going to have to keep listening with anticipation for the next big clue. It's 2011 in a small village in Russia. A local farmer reports that his home is shaken by a large explosion nearby.
While looking for the source, the farmer stumbles upon this-- some remains that look nothing like the usual local wildlife. Take a good look. The creature has a strange head and an even stranger torso and limbs.
And the state its in is even more puzzling. It appears petrified. The way this finding is displayed in the video is also quite intriguing.
What's very interesting to me is that they're drying some corn at the same time. And I wouldn't think you'd want to put something alien next to a food resource. TONY HARRIS: According to the source who gave us this video, the cause of the explosion was never found. But residents of the town were more frightened by what this creature could portend for their village. Journalist Erin McCarthy says local legends could explain why. In Slavic folklore, there's Baba Yaga, a witch who lives in the woods, in a shack that has chicken legs and chicken feet.
She also steals and eats children. TONY HARRIS: Baba Yaga has become the equivalent to the boogeyman for kids in this region. Some locals may have believed, this creature was her handiwork, but McCarthy says there could be another slightly less creepy explanation. Permafrost is melting in Russia.
And with that melting, all kinds of extinct creatures are popping up like mammoths and rhinos. So potentially, this creature is something that's extinct that we just don't know about yet. Now, there are some conditions on Earth that could instantly mummify a living creature, like the super alkaline waters of Lake Natron in Tanzania. But there's no evidence something like that currently exists in Russia. So before we determine if this video shows an undiscovered dinosaur or even a child-eating witch, our experts will dig deeper. First, video forensic analyst Mick West examines whether the specimen could be some kind of hoax.
I think the only way you could have done that is to have modeled it from life. And that means that you actually had the real thing to start off with. So I think the simplest explanation here is that what we're seeing is what we're getting. This is, in fact, a dead animal that has been partially or fully mummified. TONY HARRIS: If this is indeed some kind of animal, what kind of animal? Just in terms of the morphology, something about its face looks quite birdlike to me. It looks like it could have part of the beak that had formed off or not been preserved in this mummification process.
But it's got a really big eye socket. Birds tend to have quite small eyes. So for me, that would kind of rule out a bird. TONY HARRIS: That Xes out it being one of Baba Yaga's chickens.
Biologist Floyd Hayes is thinking mammal. FLOYD HAYES: OK, right here, it looks like there may be some teeth in the jaws. To me, the skull looks much more like a mammal. It does look like there may be a wing.
It could potentially be a fruit bat. There are some large species of fruit bats called flying foxes. TONY HARRIS: Furman sees some merit in the bat theory.
They also do have that similar large nose that we can see in this fossil. In terms of their skeleton, they do have a long neck as well. And going right to the end of what looks like it could have been wings, they have what looks like it was a claw or a hand of some sort.
TONY HARRIS: So it kind of looks like a large fruit bat. But here's the problem. They don't live up in Russia though.
They're more characteristic of the tropical islands in the Western Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean and in Southeastern Asia. TONY HARRIS: Floyd says, until this family comes forward with the specimen, we can't be certain what it is. The process of mummification could take a long period of time. It's possible that this is an extinct species of animal that formerly lived in Russia, that is no longer there today.
So I know we're going out on a limb here. But for now, we're going to say this is an unidentified extinct animal. Of course, it would take proper scientific examination to know for sure.
But with the Arctic warming two times faster than the global average, we may see more strange creatures thawing out from the permafrost soon. And we'll do our best to identify them. One night in 2015, a group of veteran fishermen is out on a routine trip when they come across something they cannot explain. A camera on board captures a strange, bright blue-green light glowing just below the surface of the lake.
As you can see, when the camera zooms out, the light stays put in the choppy waters as the ship heads back to shore. Locals have long believed strange things are happening below the surface here. Lake Baikal's a hotbed of UFO activity. So if there's beings coming from a different planet, we would expect that they might want to set up a base here on Earth.
So a place like Lake Baikal could be a very good location. TONY HARRIS: Journalist MJ Banias recalls one reported encounter in the lake that lends credence to this theory. There's a strange story that comes out of Lake Baikal in 1982. Russian divers were operating under the water when, all of a sudden, they bumped into these strange creatures.
According to the story, these creatures were wearing silvery suits. They were humanoid in appearance. The divers were so shocked by what they saw that they tried to quickly leave the area, and three died due to coming up too quickly from the depths of Lake Baikal. TONY HARRIS: This blue light has never been seen again.
So who or what created it? There is undoubtedly animal life down there that has yet to be found. Whether that animal life is alien in nature, that is still in the realm of speculation. Two thirds of the 2,000 plant and animal species living around Lake Baikal can't be found anywhere else in the world, so it's already a unique place. But does this video indicate there are extraterrestrial beings camping out there too? Let's let our experts have their say.
First, we have video forensic analyst Michael Primeau check whether the light could have been digitally inserted in the footage. It doesn't appear to be CGI. It doesn't look like something that was added after the fact. TONY HARRIS: It's possible then that we're just looking at a search light from another unseen boat or an aircraft, based on how light should act on a lake such as this. But physics professor Michio Kaku throws cold water on that idea.
The surface ripples in all directions. Some of the light would have been reflected in different angles, but we see no evidence of an external light source. TONY HARRIS: An external light source would fan across the water like this, but we see nothing like that here.
That also rules out the reflection of the moon. So if it's something under the lake, marine biologist Shea Conger examines if it could be coming from a man-made underwater vessel. SHEA CONGER: You wouldn't have an artificial light on during the night if you wanted to study animals in their natural environment, so it seems pretty unlikely that this is some sort of a research vehicle. TONY HARRIS: It's well known that bioluminescent marine life glows at night, but Conger doubts that's what is happening here either. SHEA CONGER: We don't actually have any bioluminescent animals in Lake Baikal. It's a freshwater body of water.
In addition, bioluminescent animals tend to act in kind of a flashy manner. We would see a flash of light, and then it would dissipate. This is a solid light source, so I can actually rule out the fact that it might be some type of animal. I conclude that this is some sort of underwater technology that's really difficult to understand or make sense of.
Our verdict? This is still an unexplained phenomenon. We can't say for sure whether or not it's from something extraterrestrial. But two years after this incident, a mysterious mass death of seals in the lake also baffled researchers. So something fishy is definitely happening. Moscow, Russia, May 2019. A photographer sets up to shoot a full moon over the city.
He's struggling to get focus when this leaves him more than a little moonstruck. TONY HARRIS: First, three black circles cross in front of the Moon. And almost as soon as they pass, even more come in to frame. TONY HARRIS: We stabilize the frame and zoom in. There's no question, a cluster of objects is flying in a loose formation. Could these circular objects be asteroids or a fleet of alien craft? If they are, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy calculates their size based on the Moon's diameter at an estimated orbit 60 miles above the surface.
If these objects were orbiting the Moon, they would have to be 2 to 3 miles wide. TONY HARRIS: If they are UFOs, they would be almost 40 times the size of the largest craft in Earth's orbit, the International Space Station. So who, or what, is capable of building so many super structures and putting them into lunar orbit? So are we looking at something huge orbiting the Moon like a fleet of UFOs or a cluster of asteroids, or are we taking the wrong perspective? Is it something smaller and closer to Earth? We ask our experts to shed light on the mystery. First, astronomer and video effects designer Marc D'Antonio analyzes the video and confirms it's real, not photographic trickery.
MARC D'ANTONIO (VOICEOVER): I know this camera very well. You can zoom in very close to the Moon, as you can see. This is an actual image from his camera. TONY HARRIS: So could they be oversized satellites we Earthlings put into lunar orbit? There are a lot of spacecrafts orbiting the Moon. But they're not in the same orbit, so they're not in the same areas. TONY HARRIS: Another important fact-- hundreds of astronomers observe the Moon every night.
So you'd think anything odd popping up in its orbit would have set off alarms around the world, right? Still, NASA's Bob Anderson thinks they might be satellites, just not in the Moon's orbit, but in ours. BOB ANDERSON: At first, I thought it might be satellites circling the Earth or a group of satellites that are orbiting the Earth. TONY HARRIS: That would make sense because it's getting crowded up there with actual clusters of satellites, like SpaceX's Starlink network. The company has launched over 1,700 so far, with the option to add another 10,000. This seems to be case closed, except in studying that video more closely, Anderson and D'Antonio both see something that doesn't match up with satellites.
MARC D'ANTONIO: Right here. These objects are coming close to each other and then getting far away. So that negates the possibility that these are satellites. Maybe we're actually looking at birds. They fly around willy nilly, OK, haphazardly through the sky. TONY HARRIS: The birds and their flapping wings form silhouettes that appear on the camera's sensor as round objects.
MARC D'ANTONIO: It's very likely that we're looking at migratory birds of some kind. Satellites don't speed up and slow down, and the video was shot in May during migration, so we're going to call this one migrating birds. Still, the space around the Moon could be getting crowded soon. NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans there by 2024, and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk plan to build lunar bases. It is early August, 1996, in the industrial town of Kyshtym in the Russian Ural Mountains.
While investigating a robbery, police detective Vladimir Bendlin stumbles upon a shocking discovery. A local woman shows him a grotesque creature that makes his stomach turn. TONY HARRIS: It was around 10 inches long and hairless. It had brownish, grayish skin, a really strange skull with ridges and protruding eyes. The woman said she'd found the creature weeks earlier near a cemetery, still alive.
She lovingly dubbed it Alyoshenka and said her family cared for it for a few weeks until it finally died. Bendlin says the woman's mental state was questionable and the details of her story inconsistent, but he still needed to identify this body. TONY HARRIS: A first examination of the specimen determined it was likely a human fetus, but Detective Bendlin took it to a pathologist for a second opinion.
And according to forensic investigator Chase Kloetzke, the evidence was anything but clear. CHASE KLOETZKE (VOICEOVER): There are several things missing-- ears, nose, genitals. Probably the most striking piece that we found that really puzzles everybody is it's absolutely absent of a navel. TONY HARRIS: No belly button? That's odd.
But perhaps there's an equally unusual explanation. In 1957, there was a disaster at a military facility near Kyshtym. There was an explosion in a tank where nuclear waste was stored, and it sent a radioactive plume over many nearby villages. Some have speculated that Alyoshenka might be a deformed fetus caused by the fallout from that disaster. TONY HARRIS: Detective Bendlin also brought the body to someone he hoped could determine if perhaps Alyoshenka was not of this Earth at all.
He did eventually give the mummified corpse to some UFO investigators. TONY HARRIS: But the case then took another strange turn. After which, it vanished without a trace. So now, only videos and photos of Alyoshenka survive. The Kyshtym explosion was actually the worst nuclear disaster until Chernobyl, but the Soviet government didn't come clean about it until 1989. So is Alyoshenka linked to the fallout? Was it a visitor from somewhere even further away? Our experts are on the case.
Science writer Mick West weighs the theory that this is some kind of extraterrestrial specimen. It looks a bit alien like. But the thing about aliens in popular culture is they often look like babies. They have big bulbous heads, and they have small bodies, and they have skinny limbs. TONY HARRIS: West thinks, the creature's inhuman eyes and head are most likely explained by the Kyshtym disaster.
I think what we have is a badly deformed child because of a mix up in the genetic code. It could be something that came from radiation in that area. TONY HARRIS: But anthropologist Kathy Strain thinks the creature predates the 1957 explosion by millennia.
It looks like it's a human infant that died in childbirth. Its head is cone-shaped like that due to the birthing process. And eventually they became mummified. I do not believe that this woman had this alive for three weeks. It is clearly very old, maybe even a thousand years old. TONY HARRIS: Interestingly, the woman who claims to have found this specimen alive was eventually taken to a psychiatric facility.
But Detective Bendlin says family members who backed up her story seemed entirely trustworthy All right. This one continues to be confounding. Based solely on the video evidence, our verdict is that Alyoshenka is a mummified infant. However, until the body is recovered and a DNA test is performed, we can't say for sure.
2023-01-24