Phantom Signals (2020–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Curse of the Lost Cosmonaut - full transcript
A haunting voice suggests the Soviets have lost a cosmonaut in space.
Narrator: A distress signal is
overheard from deep in space.
Podlaskaya: Sounded like
she was talking to somebody.
Narrator: Authorities deny
it ever happened.
The soviets were anxious to
cover up some of their mistakes.
Narrator: Voices of the dead
torment soldiers in vietnam.
Very much like somebody
coming from the beyond.
Narrator: Do these spirits
have a message for the living?
Dr. Kislenko: He tells them,
"it's time to leave
before you die."
Narrator: Massive thunderclaps
come out of nowhere,
But there is no storm in sight.
I mean, you got to run
for the hills
When you hear
something like that.
Narrator:
Endless streams of data,
Information bombarding
the planet from within
And from the furthest
stretches of the universe...
What messages do these
phantom signals hold?
♪♪
1960 Italy.
Battista brothers achille,
a cardiologist,
And giovanni,
a forensic scientist,
Build their own
radio listening station
In an abandoned
world war ii bunker
Using scavenged
and borrowed equipment.
They claim to have
intercepted communications
Of russian and u.S. Astronauts
to their ground controls.
Though intriguing, most of
the broadcasts are routine.
But then something else,
something chilling.
The battista brothers had
multiple claims
That they had a tracking station
Which gave them the ability
to track
Low earth orbiting satellites
or manned space travel.
Among some of
their larger claims,
They had a recording
of what seemed to be
The last words
of a soviet cosmonaut.
[ woman speaking indistinctly ]
According to their claim,
The spaceship was flying away
from earth in a trajectory
That didn't take them across
the horizon,
Just pointing away so the signal
kind of just slowly died out.
Among other things, they had
what sounded like a heartbeat,
Sounded like someone
breathing, potentially,
And there was also, I believe,
a transmitting s.O.S. Signal
That didn't have
the doppler effect.
So it means it was traveling
away from earth
Because it kept getting quieter
and quieter and quieter.
Narrator: The brothers claim
this secret communication
Is the last transmission
of a cosmonaut
Trapped in a doomed spacecraft
floating helplessly in space.
The soviet government denies the
existence of any manned missions
Prior to the flight
of yuri gagarin in 1961.
But rumors of
early space flights
Ending in disaster
haunt the soviets.
Nass: Right, so I guess
the concerning thing
For a lot of people at the time
Is that we're in a situation
where the soviets
Are potentially
putting people into space
In a kind of
undocumented fashion.
If that were the case,
then it would be a cover-up.
Dr. Kislenko: The idea that the
russians would lose cosmonauts
As part of their
training program in general
And then specifically in space
is plausible.
It's not out of the realm
in part because
We don't know everything
from soviet archives.
The space race was one of
the most competitive times
In u.S. History
and russian history.
And what drove that in many ways
was the competition
Between
the russian space program
And the american space program
To demonstrate
the technological capacity
To be able to send humans
to space.
Again, the russians
beat the americans
By literally probably
a month or so.
Dr. Kislenko: If you could be
the first to conquer space,
It reinforces the idea that your
state has a tremendous amount
Of potential capacity
and integrity to it.
It was a tough time because you
were looking for those firsts,
You know, the first spacewalk,
Dr. Kislenko:
The soviet union was always
an enormously secretive society
Of keeping all information
to a very bare minimum
In closely guarded hands
to preserve this idea
That the ideological experiment
that was the soviet union
Was undefeatable,
that it was perfect.
But we have no real
corresponding evidence
In terms of documents,
even defectors that came out.
We lack that sort of
smoking gun, as it were,
To say definitively
these guys were in space.
Narrator:
But if the recordings are real,
The brothers have evidence
that russia launched
Two or more manned space flights
prior to gagarin.
If they're not, where do
these transmissions come from?
Is this a distress call
from somewhere else?
Whether or not people were
eavesdropping and able
To hear something different,
I don't know.
Narrator: Between 1960 and 1964,
The brothers supposedly record
thousands of hours
Of both telemetry
and communications
From missions
including sputnik, vostok,
And even the u.S. Mission
explorer.
The soviets dismiss the battista
brothers' claim as a hoax.
But still, the haunting russian
voice of the distress call
Was not so easily forgotten.
The distinct things
that I was able to catch
On the first try...
She was counting down.
She was saying, "three, four,
five, three, four, five."
She also said, "okay, okay,"
The word that you use
When you respond
to somebody talking to you,
And you acknowledge
that you understand
What they're saying.
Based on the tone of her voice,
It sounds like she was listening
and responding.
So it wasn't just her speaking
independently of anybody else.
It sounded like it was within
the context of a dialogue.
In the middle of the clip,
That's when she was
most agitated.
In her tone, it didn't come out
That the distress was due
to any kind of emergency
Or unsafe situation.
I think it sounded more like
She was trying to reiterate
something louder
Because she wants to be heard.
Narrator: A few years later,
on July 20th, 1969,
America would be the first
and only nation
To land a man on the moon.
This incredible achievement
inspired an event
That would suddenly
call into question
The soviet dismissal of
the battista brothers' claims.
A pair of amateur
radio enthusiasts in kentucky
Are directly listening in on
the highly anticipated mission.
Larry baysinger, former military
radio technician,
And journalist glenn rutherford
Tapped the frequency of
12-watt radios using vhf radio.
They bury 6,000 square feet of
copper plating in the backyard
To ground the equipment.
The antenna is made
from chicken wire and aluminum,
The radio receiver
from a korean war tank
Found at an army surplus store.
Baysinger makes
some adjustments.
Aiming the antenna at the moon
made more difficult
Because it's a cloudy night,
They manage to record
35 minutes of the moon landing.
By and large,
we're just throwing signals
Out into the air all the time.
If you had the right equipment
and set it up,
You could intercept
those signals
And hear what was being said,
at least by the astronauts
When they're talking
back to earth.
Nass:
He built his antenna basically
with scratch-built material.
He's using wood for some of
the stabilizing arms.
And from all of his effort,
He was able to build a beam
antenna for receiving signals
That were coming from the moon.
Back then, most of these
transmissions were unencrypted.
They were just basically able
to receive them
Using army surplus equipment.
Assuming that there was
something in low earth orbit
Or in a launch trajectory
away from earth,
And they had
an appropriate transmitter
Capable of reaching earth,
I don't see any reason why
that there couldn't be someone
On the ground
picking up those signals.
Narrator: The two listen in,
amazed by their success
As astronauts speak
to president richard nixon
And remark on the play
of shadows on the lunar surface.
So larry's listening
to the vhs signal
Directly from the moon,
so he heard it first.
He heard it seconds ahead
of when it got turned around
By the news stations
and sent out.
Narrator: Is it conceivable
that in the 1960s,
Amateur equipment
Assembled and monitored
by casual civilians
Could pick up russian
space program transmissions?
Nass: Radio, in a simplified
description,
Would be imparting information
onto a radio signal
That you're using some kind of
antenna to push out.
Receiving would be the antenna
is picking up the signal,
And that is then getting
pushed out into the speaker
That you're listening to,
or the headphones.
Narrator:
In the early space race years,
The communication systems
from the vostok mission
Are based on vhf communications,
143.625 megahertz,
But also on
shortwave communications
Using strong transmitters
Belonging to the ussr
ministry of communications.
Even today, 45 years after
the end of the space race,
Radio frequencies are easily
captured from space.
Nass: Just as a demonstration,
We can set up a simple antenna
that doesn't even move,
And it will just pick up
the signals
That are being downlinked
by the satellite.
So right now, we're trying
to catch the downlink
Of the upcoming noaa
weather satellite path,
Which goes from south to north.
It's downlinking a rf stream
that we're gonna pick up
And convert
back into an image file
Which we can see on the screen
for weather patterns.
As the satellite's
passing overhead,
It's basically going to be
downlinking different images
That it's captured
as it's gone over the world,
Basically, to show
interesting weather patterns
For
the national weather service.
This is 137 megahertz,
Which is the same space
of frequencies
That is used today
by low earth orbiting satellites
And manned international
space station-type satellites.
Larry has a recording
of an apollo mission.
It is likely that the battistas
could have recorded
Something else
which happened later
When technology
improved a little bit
During the cold war.
Narrator: So if it is possible
to intercept such a signal,
Why are the soviets
denying the entire existence
Of the transmission
and the event?
If you fail, it obviously casts
a pall of doubt
Over whether or not
You have the technological
acumen that you claim to do.
Nass:
At the same time, the soviets
Could just easily say,
"eh, never happened."
And that's exactly
what they did, right?
They said, "nope, we don't know
anybody like that.
We've never had anybody
on the books like that.
Narrator: Were the phantom
transmissions picked up
By the battista brothers
Really the dying words
of a soviet cosmonaut?
In this cloak-and-dagger era,
how far will the russians go
To make sure no one posed a risk
to their plans?
Narrator: 1960.
Two italian brothers
build a radio-listening station
In an abandoned
world war ii bunker,
Claiming they've picked up
russian space mission
Radio signals.
But things take
a much darker turn
When they intercept
what they describe
As the dying words
of a cosmonaut
Trapped in a failing spacecraft.
[ woman speaking indistinctly ]
Dr. Proctor:
I think the last thing that
they ever would have imagined
Is that they would pick up
a transmission
Of the last moments
of someone's life in space.
Many people thought that
there would be tragedies
Exploring space.
Dr. Kislenko: People died
on a fairly routine basis
Because of technological
and scientific error,
Programing problems,
pilot error,
Whatever you want to call it.
I'm absolutely convinced
soviet leaders at the time
Were saying, "we cannot afford
the public to understand
That we make mistakes
Or that we're gonna own up
to our mistakes,
Because then
anything's fair game."
Narrator: Recently declassified
documents reveal the soviets
Are potentially covering up
multiple cosmonaut injuries
And deaths...
More than previously thought.
When we talk about the
space race for either country,
You're in a whole world
of conspiracies.
The so-called sochi six is
rather notorious photograph
Taken of the elite graduating
class of soviet cosmonauts,
And it has been doctored
over time to remove some people
From what I think originally
was 11 astronauts down to 6.
Narrator: Why are only some of
the cosmonauts' faces
Physically removed
from these photos?
At the core of it is this notion
that there were cosmonauts
Who died
in orbital flight missions
Before yuri gagarin in 1961.
This was not the first time
the soviet union
Had doctored photographs.
It's not just that they died.
Some of them never existed.
They're erased from history.
And they do that
to make it very clear
That there's one narrative
in soviet history.
Any failings along the line
of that official narrative
Were seen to be
either counter-revolutionary
Or to challenge this notion
of soviet supremacy.
Narrator: With these
and even more rumors
Haunting
the soviet space program,
What would be the repercussions
of the cold war?
You can imagine the impact
in a place like the soviet union
Where the same revelations
aren't just gonna be sad
Or bring up questions about cost
or, you know,
That it's gonna speak
fundamentally to the regime.
If the russians had a mistake
or something went wrong,
They were not gonna let that out
Because it was
all about success.
Doesn't take much
to logic through that and say,
"well, if you've made a mistake
And I can question
your validity,
Then I'm gonna do it
in a lot of other ways,
Like whether or not
you should be the only party
And whether or not
you should be the government."
Narrator: Out of fear
of appearing vulnerable,
Could soviet government
officials actually keep
The deaths of cosmonauts
completely covered up?
There were a lot of things
that the soviets did
That we still
don't fully understand,
Even with the release
of documents and archives
And discussions
with people in the period.
Nass: What bothers me the most
about it is if it was a hoax,
Tracking that stuff,
I find interesting enough.
It didn't have
to be sensationalized
Into possibly a cover-up.
Either it's bad because
the soviets actually did
Cover something up,
Or you had these brothers
that were possibly doing this
For fame
or some kind of attention.
Dr. Kislenko:
We need more evidence.
We lack documentary evidence
to suggest
That any of the cosmonauts died
in secret missions
That were never announced
to the public.
We have a couple of documents
that say,
"let's keep soviet failures
down to a minimum,"
But that doesn't
necessarily confirm
That the soviets were in space
Before they say
they were in space.
Narrator: Though
the iron curtain fell in 1991,
Many of the records remain
classified or missing.
I think any time you're engaged
in this kind of,
You know, tremendous exploration
of the unknown,
There's going to be
this kind of doubt.
Narrator: We may never learn
the full details
Of the russian space program
Or how many cosmonauts
were lost,
But they will
never be forgotten,
Due in large part
to the early radio experiments
Of the battista brothers.
On the evening
of February 10th, 1970,
In the jungles of vietnam,
A horrible wailing torments
the people of hau niga province.
[ howling and thumping ]
♪♪
The sounds of people screaming,
Crying, gongs banging,
And a child
calling for her father
Are followed by a clear message
That came from the voice
of a dead vietcong soldier.
"my friends, I am dead."
Then a warning
to his former brothers in arms
To turn back
and give up the fight.
Dr. Kislenko: Pretty scary.
Very much like somebody
coming from the beyond,
In this particular case
coming from hell.
He's wondering.
He's basically,
at least initially, unclear
Whether he's alive or dead
And making
a very emotional appeal
To fellow soldiers in the field
To stop fighting
before it's too late.
Narrator:
If the spirits of the dead
can reach out to the living,
Could the jungles of vietnam
really be haunted
By the ghosts
of their dead comrades?
Dr. Kislenko:
It's very powerful.
It is scary.
This is like the twilight zone.
Narrator: Or could
the horrible wailing sound
That threatened
to drive these men to madness
Have another meaning?
Narrator: By the late 1960s,
The u.S. Is embroiled
in a terrible war in vietnam.
Thousands of casualties
are inflicted on both sides
As the conflict spirals
out of control.
The conditions
for this particular war
For both sides were horrific.
If the jungle doesn't get you
With disease and rain
and leeches and insects,
Obviously the enemy will.
And this was not easy warfare,
Just sending in 3,000 tanks
in a field.
This was getting down and dirty
in a very inhospitable jungle.
So the vietcong soldier who was
used to all the jungle sounds
And can sleep through it
Is now hearing something
they have no experience with.
Dr. Kislenko:
These things happened
in the middle of the night.
You know, you can imagine
it's absolute silence,
It's pitch dark, and then
pretty much out of nowhere,
You hear this dreadful sound
echoing.
[ howling ]
Dr. Fallah: You hear a sound.
You look.
You start saying,
"is it there, is it there?"
And then when
there's nothing to see,
Your mind starts trying
to make sense of the world.
So what could it be
That you can hear
but is invisible around you?
Narrator:
It is the vietnamese belief
that the dead must be buried
In their homeland,
Or their soul will wander
aimlessly in pain and suffering.
So when you die, your soul goes,
And that's why it has to be
properly accounted for.
You need that burial
to take place.
It needs to be commemorated.
It needs to be in your homeland.
And if it's not,
your soul wanders.
And that is the worst
hell on earth for vietnamese.
Somewhat, I guess, to christians
Worrying about
being in limbo forever.
Your cultural background
goes a long way
Into your normal
everyday experience growing up,
Which also goes a long way into
How you make sense
of the world around you.
Scorpio:
It's a buddhist belief that
you're bound to your homeland
And your family.
You might have lived
in the same village
For five or six generations,
So you have a very, very strong
connection to that land.
Dr. Kislenko:
And what they come to do is to,
In effect,
worship dead ancestors.
They offer food
as well as sometimes money
And other goods to the dead
as a means of appeasing them
And honoring them.
In the mind
of a vietcong soldier,
If you're hearing these voices,
There's already
a cultural aspect
Where you expect to be
More connected with the spirits
in the world around you,
That there's this idea
there are spirits.
These are profound beliefs
in vietnamese religion
And vietnamese culture.
And that's a big part
of what these boys
Fighting in the jungle
believed in.
And then that might lead
to this idea,
If you've grown up in a culture
where there are more spirits,
There are things you can't see
in the world around you,
That you might start attributing
it to other things like that.
Narrator: If these are
the voices of departed soldiers,
What message are they trying
to get across to the living?
Dr. Fallah: These sounds
that we're talking about
Weren't terribly clear
to begin with.
They were a little hard
to hear and understand
So that you've got this kind of
series of possibilities
For what that sound can be.
And then within a few seconds,
They're talking to you
as a person,
As a fellow soldier, asking you,
"why are you fighting?
Why are you still here?
Why don't you go back home?"
Dr. Fallah:
A rational person who's rested
Easily comes into,
"well, these aren't real,"
But they're in
a stressful situation
That causes that noise
to increase
And opens up
the number of possibilities
From their own memory
and experience to draw upon.
Scorpio: If you combine
their spiritualism
And their belief system,
I can easily understand
That they would be
in a state of confusion
And totally believing
that that's real.
Narrator: The mysterious voice
heard in the jungle appeals
To his vietcong brothers.
It tells them to go home.
"this is your chance to leave
before you die
And wander the earth
Because there is no one
to bury you."
Moaning, the groaning,
the dialogue from a dead soldier
Who you can identify with,
And in the middle
of the darkness,
In the middle of a war
which you know
You have a pretty good
likelihood of getting shot at
Or getting killed,
that must have been terrifying.
Arama: I don't know how I would
have reacted myself
If I was one of
those vietcong troops
With their belief system.
I think I might have run as fast
as possible in a state of panic.
Narrator: But even if
just one soldier experienced
Hearing a ghostly message,
How could the same event
be reported by an entire group?
So the idea of mass hysteria,
when somebody is stressed out
Or under some physiological
change that they can't explain,
Other people sometimes end up
feeling the same way themselves.
When you're sitting
in a group of people,
You end up getting to
an average emotional state
Based on everybody involved.
So if everybody's anxiety
raises a little,
The average raises a little.
You get this kind of
infectiousness.
When you have a lot of people
starting to make that report,
Then you got to think that
it's not about an individual.
It's not a single type
of stressed person going crazy.
It's more that
there's got to be something else
That everybody's experiencing
such that a number of them
Experience it so strongly
that they're willing to speak up
About it
to everybody else around them.
So even the most educated and
trained and scientific of us all
Are suspect
to that kind of fear factor.
Dr. Fallah: I do think
that there's a lot
We don't understand
in the world,
And we don't entirely know
what is going on.
When we don't
understand something,
We have generally put it in
the realm of the supernatural.
Narrator: Could these be
the voices of the dead pleading
For their comrades
to save themselves,
Or is there a darker origin
to these recordings?
Narrator: In the jungles
of the vietnam war,
A horrible wailing torments
the people of hau niga,
The sounds of people screaming,
Crying, gongs banging,
And a child
calling for her father
Are followed by a clear message
From the voice
of a dead vietcong soldier.
"my friends, I am dead."
Dr. Kislenko: If you're in
the jungle at night,
You hear horrifically
ghostly sounds,
You hear moans, you hear groans,
and then you hear somebody
Talking to you
as if they're dead,
Which makes you think,
as a vietcong soldier
That it's one of your comrades
and, of course,
Could be you
at any particular moment.
Narrator: Are the jungles
of vietnam haunted,
Or are there
other forces at work?
Perhaps we can find a clue
in the fact that the sounds
Seem to start appearing
at a specific time in the war.
I think the invading force
obviously would have
Had more technology
and maybe bigger numbers.
So that's probably helping
their adrenaline a bit.
But it might have been a false
adrenaline in a sense, too,
Because the vietcong troops...
They would have been
totally accustomized
And acclimatized
to the surroundings,
Easily 1,000% better
than the americans.
So you hear the sound
in the woods,
And you're in a ditch
with your comrade,
And you're gonna
look around first
To see where it's coming from,
because if you can see
What it is,
you can make sense of it.
Then you start getting into
increasing your stress levels
And your concern about it.
Dr. Kislenko:
So you are constantly afraid,
And that's where the conditions
are really ripe
For messing with your mind.
And that's precisely where
the americans come up
With psychological operation.
Narrator: Ghost tape number 10
Is part of a recently
declassified
U.S. Psychological warfare
campaign
Known as
"operation wandering soul."
Nass: So then we find out about
ghost tape number 10,
Which was basically a collection
of voices in vietnamese
Saying things like,
"this is your ancestor.
Stop doing what you're doing
'cause you're going to die."
Dr. Kislenko:
There's a variety of messages.
This is not just one.
There are messages of
pretty simple ones, right?
"run away. Come to us.
We're gonna win this war.
You're fighting the americans
Who, you know,
have superior technology
And training,
and they'll kill you."
The one that's sort of
most famous and most haunting
Is this idea of,
you know, the displaced soul.
Various sources will tell you
that it started in 1970,
But there are historical records
about using similar tapes
Much earlier than that
in the 1960s.
Some will tell you it was
only used in south vietnam,
But we know for sure
that they were used
In places like laos
and cambodia, too.
Nass: Later, we find out
that they, of course,
Were using them
with p.A. Speakers.
They were connecting them
onto helicopters
And flying around areas
That they thought there might
have been the north vietnamese
And using that in possibly
an effective way,
Although it's never been claimed
by the north vietnamese
At all at that time
or later historically
From people who were fighting
at the time
That it had an effect
of actually scaring them away
From their course of action.
Arama: If you combine
their spiritualism
And their belief system,
You'd be shocked at
how people start to think
And start to hallucinate.
Narrator: U.S. Engineers spend
weeks recording eerie sounds
And altered voices
which pretend to be
Vietcong killed in action
For use in the operation
with the intended purpose
Of instilling a sense of turmoil
in the enemy.
The resulting tape,
dubbed "ghost tape number 10,"
Is played on loudspeakers
outside u.S. Bases
And sometimes
from patrolling helicopters.
The voices call on their
descendants in the vietcong
To defect and cease fighting.
Who would want to hear
a ghost story
When you're in the middle
of those conditions, right?
It's like, you know,
when you're a kid at a campfire
And you get spooked
by a ghost story.
You know,
this is ten times worse, right,
Because there's actually people
out there trying to kill you.
It's this super-sensory overload
Because you're not able
to control it.
When your body and your mind
Has gone through
that level of stress,
You can't push things aside
as easily
As you could otherwise,
and it's those type
Of environments
that lead people to snap.
Arama: A big debate among
survival experts
Is what's more important,
The psychological
or the physiological?
I think most research
points at the will to live
In the psychological as the key,
'cause the minute you panic,
you're dead.
Narrator:
The stress of jungle combat
conditions for the vietcong,
Primarily sleep deprivation,
May have also worn down
their psychological defenses.
When you have sleep deprivation,
starvation, severe dehydration,
Those all play
into your psychology.
When you're deprived
of all the basic essentials
For physiological survival,
Your brain does go...
It goes wacky.
But hardly any of the experts
talk about sleep deprivation
Because it's so abstract.
Sleep deprivation changes
our control
Or the steadiness in our brain.
Normally, we kind of have
a signal
Where we vary in a small range
when we're rested
And have right nutrition.
But when we're sleep-deprived,
We get these high variabilities
to everything going on.
And that means things that
so far out of range
From our normal experience,
You might think
are really happening.
Arama: And all of a sudden
even the so-called expert
Is hearing things
and have no idea what it is,
'cause they're hallucinating,
they're delusional.
Their mind's not gonna operate
The way a normal person's mind
will.
They're gonna be
susceptible to suggestions.
They could have
psychotic breaks.
They could
exhibit hallucinations
Like schizophrenia.
Arama: Your body has to rest
to replenish everything
And make good decisions.
So if you're seriously
sleep-deprived,
You're gonna make
the worst choices.
And that's what we call
the domino effect,
And it leads to
worse choices and death.
The stress means
every little thing
Is going to have
a major impact on you.
And how do I trust the men
next to me in the war
If they're starting to go crazy?
Narrator: "wandering soul" is
part of the official effort
To convince the vietcong
to surrender.
Unofficially,
the american troops
Tried many different
psyops tactics
In their attempt
to accomplish this task.
Dr. Kislenko:
The american playing-card thing,
Which is featured in many
vietnam war-style movies,
Is the calling card for death.
Dr. Fallah: If you can win
the battle of the mind
Before you get
into the physical battle,
You're going to have
an advantage.
It's like, you know,
the maori when they famously
Go into battle
doing their tribal dances,
Making faces, right, at death.
Dr. Fallah:
The maori use the haka
To try to intimidate
their opponents
Before engaging in battle.
That sends
a psychological signal
About the kind of enemy
you're fighting.
Narrator:
This isn't the only attempt
By the american psyops division
to terrify the north vietnamese
Into surrendering.
Dr. Kislenko:
Very, very famously,
One of the ghost tapes involves
tiger sounds.
[ growls ]
There are rumors that
americans took a tiger scream
And then put it on tape
And then went out
into the jungle,
Having already circulated
among soldiers
The notion that they were tigers
And then later that night
Broadcast this manufactured
tiger sound.
[ tiger growls ]
Narrator: So what is the impact
of this psyops tactic?
Arama: It was guaranteed
there was an effect.
I would say that the americans
were very smart
To do what they did because
there's a good possibility
That it would have
reduced the morale,
At the very least.
Dr. Kislenko:
According to american documents,
There were several thousand
defectors
Over the course
of the late 1960s and early '70s
Under investigation revealed
that they were at least in part
Motivated by these ghost tapes.
Narrator:
While it's hard to measure
The success
of operation wandering soul,
The tapes undoubtably put fear
in the hearts
Of whoever heard them.
Every night they played,
the jungles of vietnam
Came alive
with the voices of the dead,
Convincing some soldiers
to put down their weapons
And return home
to their families.
November 14th, 2017.
911 emergency lines
are inundated with calls
From 15 counties in alabama.
Residents reported
hearing a loud boom...
[ boom ]
...Like an earthquake
or a cannon...
[ boom ]
...Coming from the sky.
I can't imagine how terrifying
it would be to be standing here
And suddenly hear a huge
explosion or booming sound...
[ boom ]
...And as I look around,
Not being able to see
the source of it.
There's just this loud
cracking boom.
[ boom ]
Witnesses describe
what essentially
Sounds like a large cannon boom.
[ boom ]
Almost like an earthquake,
but it's above.
Narrator: The national
weather service announced
That they couldn't explain it,
As did the national
geological survey and nasa.
The massive boom didn't appear
to have a natural source.
[ boom ]
What was it?
The answer, it seemed, lay in
a centuries-old phenomenon
Known as skyquakes.
Skyquakes are a phenomena
where there's a very loud noise,
But when you look around,
There's nothing obvious
that's causing that noise.
The booms are extremely loud,
so loud, in fact,
That they often
set off car alarms.
[ car alarms blaring ]
And you can imagine that people
were like, "what was that?"
What happens when
there's thunder
But no clouds in the sky?
Where is that coming from?
Narrator: What is behind
these baffling sounds?
Pre-science, people would
have been terrified.
They would have thought
that it was a voice from god
Or some kind of bad omen.
A loud crack,
a boom, a growl, a rumble,
Some sudden, abrupt noise.
It's just coming
from somewhere out there.
You can hear it distinctly,
but you don't know why.
Narrator:
Skyquakes appear to have
no connection to the weather,
But could these behemoth sounds
be coming from the earth?
Or are they the product of some
unknown presence in the skies?
Narrator: Residents in
15 counties in alabama
Flooded the 911 emergency system
in November 2017,
Reporting mysterious thundering
sounds coming from the sky.
[ boom ]
The best explanation that can be
found for the terrifying boom
Was that they were a mysterious
phenomenon known as skyquakes.
[ boom ]
They are heard in every part
of the planet.
They strike out of nowhere.
[ boom ]
There is no apparent link
to the source.
What theories could possibly
explain their origin?
One of the more compelling
explanations I have heard
Is that these skyquakes
are caused by earthquakes.
Mckinnon: The earth is moving
all of the time.
Tectonic plates on the surface
of the earth
Are moving about the same rate
your fingernails grow,
So they're creeping along.
They get stuck, and they break.
It's kind of like
when you snap your fingers,
You're building up
the stress tension
Until it overcomes the friction
And you hear it
in the form of a snap.
So you can imagine taking
something like rock
That is fused together
That's under
a tremendous amount of strain
And then slipping and breaking.
A majority of the energy
released by earthquakes
Are actually released
by shallow earthquakes,
Which are earthquakes
that are happening
Closer to the earth's surface
Than ones
that we typically think of.
It can be possible
that an earthquake will occur,
And we won't feel it,
but it can produce a sound.
An earthquake generates a couple
of different types of waves.
One of them is a "p" wave,
a pressure wave,
Which is like
if you're splashing water
And it moves and pushes,
The next one that follows
is the "s" wave,
The shear wave,
that's moving back and forth.
So if you take a shoelace
and wiggle it,
That would be
the shape of a shear wave.
When pressure waves
are moving the earth,
That earth is then vibrating
almost like the skin of a drum
Or the membrane
of a loud speaker
And causing the air
to also vibrate.
It transmits that wave
from earth to air,
Which then people can hear.
That means that the bigger
the earthquake is,
The bigger the amplitude
of that "p" wave,
The louder it's going to be.
Things like how cold or how warm
Or how much moisture in the air
can affect
How sound propagates
through the air.
Mckinnon: Sound propagates
in all sorts of different ways,
And it can travel through rock.
Rock doesn't block sound.
In some ways,
it can even amplify sound
Depending what the frequencies
are and what your geology is.
The cool thing is that
because sound is an energy
And it's propagating out,
It can be subject to
the dynamics of the atmosphere.
It can bounce those vibrations
around and transmit them
Into places you wouldn't expect.
If we use krakatoa as an example
Of how you can have
a distant phenomena
And that sound under
just the right conditions
Travel what seems absurdly far,
Then suddenly it starts getting
a lot more plausible to look at
Maybe it's some earthquake
or landslide
Or eruption or meteor
or explosion somewhere else
That's under just
the right conditions
So that sound is traveling
very, very, very far.
Dr. Hayes: This is one
possibility that has some merit,
Although my understanding is
that it's harder
To track these ones
and that they don't seem
To follow typical patterns
of earthquakes.
Narrator:
While this explanation
would seem like an easy one,
It fails to explain
how some skyquakes
Don't have seismic readings
to accompany them.
Breaking the sound barrier
could definitely create a boom
Where you can't immediately
tell what the source is.
A sonic boom is when something
is traveling faster
Than the speed of sound,
so instead of sound waves
Just propagating out
sort of in all directions,
All the sound waves build up and
it arrives at you at one time,
So you get a very loud noise
all at once.
And it can be enough
to rattle windows
And can travel over
quite large distances,
Narrator: Is human technology
behind this bizarre phenomenon?
People have heard skyquakes
around the world for centuries.
Sonic booms are
an interesting theory,
But they don't really hold water
Because there's been testimonies
about skyquakes
Going way back before
jets were even invented.
Narrator: But again,
this theory has holes in it.
What could cause sonic booms
in the centuries before jets?
There must be something
in the atmosphere
Creating this percussion.
Sparling:
The vast majority of objects
That do enter the atmosphere
explode in the atmosphere.
Often large meteors,
if they do enter the atmosphere,
They're entering
at supersonic speeds.
They produce sonic booms
If they're large enough
of immense proportions.
Especially during the daytime
when meteors enter
The earth's atmosphere,
it's not always visible
Because of the the sunlight
in the bright sky.
We don't see the the streak
of light associated with it.
There is a potential for space
objects to enter the atmosphere
And cause a loud bang.
Nothing makes it to the ground,
But you would have...
If you were standing near it,
You would have the perception
of something exploding
Or a huge bang above you,
But no resulting cause
would be visible.
Dr. Hayes: That might be
an explanation for some,
But it just doesn't seem
to account for all of them
And for the diversity of them
around the world.
The world is full
of infinite possibilities,
And all of science
is trying to narrow down
To the most likely.
There may be an angle
in skyquakes
That we can relate to ufos
or extraterrestrial visitation.
There is a long history
of people seeing ufos
That vanish
in the blink of an eye.
Viggiani:
And some ufos have been tracked
At speeds
of over 7,000 miles an hour.
Dr. Hayes: I assume that
if they are visiting earth,
They've learned to exceed
the sound of speed long ago,
And this is not
a problem for them.
Maybe they're playing around
with the atmosphere.
Maybe they're playing around
with the physical reality
Of what we see,
And they're just creating
weird effects.
There's all kinds of things that
might be accounting for that
If you consider
extraterrestrials
As responsible for that.
Narrator: When we hear
something strange from above,
We look to the sky for answers.
But is it possible the answers
are right beneath our feet?
Narrator: Theories abound as to
the origins
Of earth-shaking booms
erupting from the sky.
Some believe these sounds
come from ufos.
But is the real origin
more earthly?
Very few, if any,
reports that I've ever read
Describe any loud sound
as a result of a ufo.
Dr. Hayes: At first it seems
plausible maybe,
Or it seems exciting
or enticing.
But when you really start to get
into the mechanics of this
And you get into the history
of ufo sightings
And what those usually
actually comprise,
They're quite different
phenomena.
And under those circumstances,
you would think
That there would be
some displacement of air
Or some sort of shockwave.
But very few of the incidents
that have reported to me
Have reported any kind of
percussive sound at all.
Narrator:
If the source of this phenomena
Does not originate in the skies,
Is the answer lying in wait for
us at the bottom of the ocean?
Most, or all, skyquake reports
Happen near
a large body of water,
Possibly because this helps
the sound to travel.
You might think that
there's nothing happening
Below the surface of the ocean,
But there's a tremendous amount
of things happening.
Mckinnon: All sorts of things
are happening underneath
The ocean surface at any time.
We're only seeing the waves
up at the top,
But underneath is an entire
rich geologic world.
There are volcanic eruptions
that happen underwater.
There are earthquakes.
There are landslides.
There are pieces of volcanoes
that break off,
And you have a flank collapse.
All of these things
are happening underwater,
And sound travels
really well underwater.
There's some layers of the ocean
That conduct sound
incredibly well.
They act almost as a wave guide,
bouncing the signal along.
But the thing about that is
It would also register
as an earthquake.
Mckinnon:
It looks like a sharp jolt
And then chaos as the smaller
pieces crumble out,
And it fades off fairly quickly,
Just like if you had a stack
of books and you drop them.
It's loud boom
And then the pieces kind of
tumbling off to the sides.
And you get the quieter pieces
falling down,
You see the same thing
in the seismic signal.
Dr. Proctor: Seismometers are
extremely sensitive,
So even though it might happen
in a remote part of the ocean,
Most likely we're gonna
pick that up.
We've got a lot
of seismic sensors,
But we don't have a whole lot
of the hydrophones,
Which you can think of as being
A really highly sensitive
3d microphone underwater
That can pick up vibrations
in any direction
And tell you what direction
it's coming from,
How big it is, what frequency
it is, what does it sound like.
And if you've got your three
points, you can back trace
And triangulate back
to where its source was.
But the oceans are really,
really, really big.
So even though we have
a global network,
It's still possible to have
places that we're missing.
Narrator: Could there be
any easy answer to skyquakes,
Or is the truth murky?
I think it's comforting
to people
To have one solid explanation
for something.
Something happens,
and there's one single cause.
It's just easier
to wrap your head around.
Kosiba:
Science is always growing,
Otherwise it would be
a really boring field
If we just figured
everything out
And we could explain everything.
Just because there's not
an easy explanation right away,
That doesn't mean that
you're not working towards it.
Sometimes we can take folklore
and story as hints
That we should investigate more.
There's a story of the day
the mountain moved
In the rocky mountains
of canada,
And it turns out
it was a loud cracking noise
That when investigated later,
There was a landslide
where there hadn't been one
The last time
people went through.
And then one day
there was a giant landslide,
The frank landslide, one of
the most deadly landslides
In canadian history,
and the mountain moved again
As it cracked and rumbled
and buried the town.
We could have used those stories
as a warning,
As a precursor,
as a way of exploring more.
Dr. Proctor: There's most likely
not one explanation
For all of the different types
of skyquakes we hear about
From around the world.
Mckinnon:
We definitely know landslides
create large, rumbling booms.
We definitely know
earthquakes can be acoustic.
We definitely know that meteors,
when they explode in the air,
Can create a sonic boom.
All of these are things
we've seen, we know,
We have observed repeatedly,
we understand.
If we actually
do solve this mystery,
It's probably going to be
the result
Of several different things
happening.
Mckinnon: Although we're
recording data all of the time,
We don't always know
what to look for.
There's so much happening that
we're trying to find a signal
In all of the noise.
Narrator: The next time you hear
a boom coming from the sky,
You might want to duck for cover
or brace yourself,
Because despite all
our understanding of science,
The world around us
continues to be
Both awe-inspiring, terrifying,
And beyond our control.
overheard from deep in space.
Podlaskaya: Sounded like
she was talking to somebody.
Narrator: Authorities deny
it ever happened.
The soviets were anxious to
cover up some of their mistakes.
Narrator: Voices of the dead
torment soldiers in vietnam.
Very much like somebody
coming from the beyond.
Narrator: Do these spirits
have a message for the living?
Dr. Kislenko: He tells them,
"it's time to leave
before you die."
Narrator: Massive thunderclaps
come out of nowhere,
But there is no storm in sight.
I mean, you got to run
for the hills
When you hear
something like that.
Narrator:
Endless streams of data,
Information bombarding
the planet from within
And from the furthest
stretches of the universe...
What messages do these
phantom signals hold?
♪♪
1960 Italy.
Battista brothers achille,
a cardiologist,
And giovanni,
a forensic scientist,
Build their own
radio listening station
In an abandoned
world war ii bunker
Using scavenged
and borrowed equipment.
They claim to have
intercepted communications
Of russian and u.S. Astronauts
to their ground controls.
Though intriguing, most of
the broadcasts are routine.
But then something else,
something chilling.
The battista brothers had
multiple claims
That they had a tracking station
Which gave them the ability
to track
Low earth orbiting satellites
or manned space travel.
Among some of
their larger claims,
They had a recording
of what seemed to be
The last words
of a soviet cosmonaut.
[ woman speaking indistinctly ]
According to their claim,
The spaceship was flying away
from earth in a trajectory
That didn't take them across
the horizon,
Just pointing away so the signal
kind of just slowly died out.
Among other things, they had
what sounded like a heartbeat,
Sounded like someone
breathing, potentially,
And there was also, I believe,
a transmitting s.O.S. Signal
That didn't have
the doppler effect.
So it means it was traveling
away from earth
Because it kept getting quieter
and quieter and quieter.
Narrator: The brothers claim
this secret communication
Is the last transmission
of a cosmonaut
Trapped in a doomed spacecraft
floating helplessly in space.
The soviet government denies the
existence of any manned missions
Prior to the flight
of yuri gagarin in 1961.
But rumors of
early space flights
Ending in disaster
haunt the soviets.
Nass: Right, so I guess
the concerning thing
For a lot of people at the time
Is that we're in a situation
where the soviets
Are potentially
putting people into space
In a kind of
undocumented fashion.
If that were the case,
then it would be a cover-up.
Dr. Kislenko: The idea that the
russians would lose cosmonauts
As part of their
training program in general
And then specifically in space
is plausible.
It's not out of the realm
in part because
We don't know everything
from soviet archives.
The space race was one of
the most competitive times
In u.S. History
and russian history.
And what drove that in many ways
was the competition
Between
the russian space program
And the american space program
To demonstrate
the technological capacity
To be able to send humans
to space.
Again, the russians
beat the americans
By literally probably
a month or so.
Dr. Kislenko: If you could be
the first to conquer space,
It reinforces the idea that your
state has a tremendous amount
Of potential capacity
and integrity to it.
It was a tough time because you
were looking for those firsts,
You know, the first spacewalk,
Dr. Kislenko:
The soviet union was always
an enormously secretive society
Of keeping all information
to a very bare minimum
In closely guarded hands
to preserve this idea
That the ideological experiment
that was the soviet union
Was undefeatable,
that it was perfect.
But we have no real
corresponding evidence
In terms of documents,
even defectors that came out.
We lack that sort of
smoking gun, as it were,
To say definitively
these guys were in space.
Narrator:
But if the recordings are real,
The brothers have evidence
that russia launched
Two or more manned space flights
prior to gagarin.
If they're not, where do
these transmissions come from?
Is this a distress call
from somewhere else?
Whether or not people were
eavesdropping and able
To hear something different,
I don't know.
Narrator: Between 1960 and 1964,
The brothers supposedly record
thousands of hours
Of both telemetry
and communications
From missions
including sputnik, vostok,
And even the u.S. Mission
explorer.
The soviets dismiss the battista
brothers' claim as a hoax.
But still, the haunting russian
voice of the distress call
Was not so easily forgotten.
The distinct things
that I was able to catch
On the first try...
She was counting down.
She was saying, "three, four,
five, three, four, five."
She also said, "okay, okay,"
The word that you use
When you respond
to somebody talking to you,
And you acknowledge
that you understand
What they're saying.
Based on the tone of her voice,
It sounds like she was listening
and responding.
So it wasn't just her speaking
independently of anybody else.
It sounded like it was within
the context of a dialogue.
In the middle of the clip,
That's when she was
most agitated.
In her tone, it didn't come out
That the distress was due
to any kind of emergency
Or unsafe situation.
I think it sounded more like
She was trying to reiterate
something louder
Because she wants to be heard.
Narrator: A few years later,
on July 20th, 1969,
America would be the first
and only nation
To land a man on the moon.
This incredible achievement
inspired an event
That would suddenly
call into question
The soviet dismissal of
the battista brothers' claims.
A pair of amateur
radio enthusiasts in kentucky
Are directly listening in on
the highly anticipated mission.
Larry baysinger, former military
radio technician,
And journalist glenn rutherford
Tapped the frequency of
12-watt radios using vhf radio.
They bury 6,000 square feet of
copper plating in the backyard
To ground the equipment.
The antenna is made
from chicken wire and aluminum,
The radio receiver
from a korean war tank
Found at an army surplus store.
Baysinger makes
some adjustments.
Aiming the antenna at the moon
made more difficult
Because it's a cloudy night,
They manage to record
35 minutes of the moon landing.
By and large,
we're just throwing signals
Out into the air all the time.
If you had the right equipment
and set it up,
You could intercept
those signals
And hear what was being said,
at least by the astronauts
When they're talking
back to earth.
Nass:
He built his antenna basically
with scratch-built material.
He's using wood for some of
the stabilizing arms.
And from all of his effort,
He was able to build a beam
antenna for receiving signals
That were coming from the moon.
Back then, most of these
transmissions were unencrypted.
They were just basically able
to receive them
Using army surplus equipment.
Assuming that there was
something in low earth orbit
Or in a launch trajectory
away from earth,
And they had
an appropriate transmitter
Capable of reaching earth,
I don't see any reason why
that there couldn't be someone
On the ground
picking up those signals.
Narrator: The two listen in,
amazed by their success
As astronauts speak
to president richard nixon
And remark on the play
of shadows on the lunar surface.
So larry's listening
to the vhs signal
Directly from the moon,
so he heard it first.
He heard it seconds ahead
of when it got turned around
By the news stations
and sent out.
Narrator: Is it conceivable
that in the 1960s,
Amateur equipment
Assembled and monitored
by casual civilians
Could pick up russian
space program transmissions?
Nass: Radio, in a simplified
description,
Would be imparting information
onto a radio signal
That you're using some kind of
antenna to push out.
Receiving would be the antenna
is picking up the signal,
And that is then getting
pushed out into the speaker
That you're listening to,
or the headphones.
Narrator:
In the early space race years,
The communication systems
from the vostok mission
Are based on vhf communications,
143.625 megahertz,
But also on
shortwave communications
Using strong transmitters
Belonging to the ussr
ministry of communications.
Even today, 45 years after
the end of the space race,
Radio frequencies are easily
captured from space.
Nass: Just as a demonstration,
We can set up a simple antenna
that doesn't even move,
And it will just pick up
the signals
That are being downlinked
by the satellite.
So right now, we're trying
to catch the downlink
Of the upcoming noaa
weather satellite path,
Which goes from south to north.
It's downlinking a rf stream
that we're gonna pick up
And convert
back into an image file
Which we can see on the screen
for weather patterns.
As the satellite's
passing overhead,
It's basically going to be
downlinking different images
That it's captured
as it's gone over the world,
Basically, to show
interesting weather patterns
For
the national weather service.
This is 137 megahertz,
Which is the same space
of frequencies
That is used today
by low earth orbiting satellites
And manned international
space station-type satellites.
Larry has a recording
of an apollo mission.
It is likely that the battistas
could have recorded
Something else
which happened later
When technology
improved a little bit
During the cold war.
Narrator: So if it is possible
to intercept such a signal,
Why are the soviets
denying the entire existence
Of the transmission
and the event?
If you fail, it obviously casts
a pall of doubt
Over whether or not
You have the technological
acumen that you claim to do.
Nass:
At the same time, the soviets
Could just easily say,
"eh, never happened."
And that's exactly
what they did, right?
They said, "nope, we don't know
anybody like that.
We've never had anybody
on the books like that.
Narrator: Were the phantom
transmissions picked up
By the battista brothers
Really the dying words
of a soviet cosmonaut?
In this cloak-and-dagger era,
how far will the russians go
To make sure no one posed a risk
to their plans?
Narrator: 1960.
Two italian brothers
build a radio-listening station
In an abandoned
world war ii bunker,
Claiming they've picked up
russian space mission
Radio signals.
But things take
a much darker turn
When they intercept
what they describe
As the dying words
of a cosmonaut
Trapped in a failing spacecraft.
[ woman speaking indistinctly ]
Dr. Proctor:
I think the last thing that
they ever would have imagined
Is that they would pick up
a transmission
Of the last moments
of someone's life in space.
Many people thought that
there would be tragedies
Exploring space.
Dr. Kislenko: People died
on a fairly routine basis
Because of technological
and scientific error,
Programing problems,
pilot error,
Whatever you want to call it.
I'm absolutely convinced
soviet leaders at the time
Were saying, "we cannot afford
the public to understand
That we make mistakes
Or that we're gonna own up
to our mistakes,
Because then
anything's fair game."
Narrator: Recently declassified
documents reveal the soviets
Are potentially covering up
multiple cosmonaut injuries
And deaths...
More than previously thought.
When we talk about the
space race for either country,
You're in a whole world
of conspiracies.
The so-called sochi six is
rather notorious photograph
Taken of the elite graduating
class of soviet cosmonauts,
And it has been doctored
over time to remove some people
From what I think originally
was 11 astronauts down to 6.
Narrator: Why are only some of
the cosmonauts' faces
Physically removed
from these photos?
At the core of it is this notion
that there were cosmonauts
Who died
in orbital flight missions
Before yuri gagarin in 1961.
This was not the first time
the soviet union
Had doctored photographs.
It's not just that they died.
Some of them never existed.
They're erased from history.
And they do that
to make it very clear
That there's one narrative
in soviet history.
Any failings along the line
of that official narrative
Were seen to be
either counter-revolutionary
Or to challenge this notion
of soviet supremacy.
Narrator: With these
and even more rumors
Haunting
the soviet space program,
What would be the repercussions
of the cold war?
You can imagine the impact
in a place like the soviet union
Where the same revelations
aren't just gonna be sad
Or bring up questions about cost
or, you know,
That it's gonna speak
fundamentally to the regime.
If the russians had a mistake
or something went wrong,
They were not gonna let that out
Because it was
all about success.
Doesn't take much
to logic through that and say,
"well, if you've made a mistake
And I can question
your validity,
Then I'm gonna do it
in a lot of other ways,
Like whether or not
you should be the only party
And whether or not
you should be the government."
Narrator: Out of fear
of appearing vulnerable,
Could soviet government
officials actually keep
The deaths of cosmonauts
completely covered up?
There were a lot of things
that the soviets did
That we still
don't fully understand,
Even with the release
of documents and archives
And discussions
with people in the period.
Nass: What bothers me the most
about it is if it was a hoax,
Tracking that stuff,
I find interesting enough.
It didn't have
to be sensationalized
Into possibly a cover-up.
Either it's bad because
the soviets actually did
Cover something up,
Or you had these brothers
that were possibly doing this
For fame
or some kind of attention.
Dr. Kislenko:
We need more evidence.
We lack documentary evidence
to suggest
That any of the cosmonauts died
in secret missions
That were never announced
to the public.
We have a couple of documents
that say,
"let's keep soviet failures
down to a minimum,"
But that doesn't
necessarily confirm
That the soviets were in space
Before they say
they were in space.
Narrator: Though
the iron curtain fell in 1991,
Many of the records remain
classified or missing.
I think any time you're engaged
in this kind of,
You know, tremendous exploration
of the unknown,
There's going to be
this kind of doubt.
Narrator: We may never learn
the full details
Of the russian space program
Or how many cosmonauts
were lost,
But they will
never be forgotten,
Due in large part
to the early radio experiments
Of the battista brothers.
On the evening
of February 10th, 1970,
In the jungles of vietnam,
A horrible wailing torments
the people of hau niga province.
[ howling and thumping ]
♪♪
The sounds of people screaming,
Crying, gongs banging,
And a child
calling for her father
Are followed by a clear message
That came from the voice
of a dead vietcong soldier.
"my friends, I am dead."
Then a warning
to his former brothers in arms
To turn back
and give up the fight.
Dr. Kislenko: Pretty scary.
Very much like somebody
coming from the beyond,
In this particular case
coming from hell.
He's wondering.
He's basically,
at least initially, unclear
Whether he's alive or dead
And making
a very emotional appeal
To fellow soldiers in the field
To stop fighting
before it's too late.
Narrator:
If the spirits of the dead
can reach out to the living,
Could the jungles of vietnam
really be haunted
By the ghosts
of their dead comrades?
Dr. Kislenko:
It's very powerful.
It is scary.
This is like the twilight zone.
Narrator: Or could
the horrible wailing sound
That threatened
to drive these men to madness
Have another meaning?
Narrator: By the late 1960s,
The u.S. Is embroiled
in a terrible war in vietnam.
Thousands of casualties
are inflicted on both sides
As the conflict spirals
out of control.
The conditions
for this particular war
For both sides were horrific.
If the jungle doesn't get you
With disease and rain
and leeches and insects,
Obviously the enemy will.
And this was not easy warfare,
Just sending in 3,000 tanks
in a field.
This was getting down and dirty
in a very inhospitable jungle.
So the vietcong soldier who was
used to all the jungle sounds
And can sleep through it
Is now hearing something
they have no experience with.
Dr. Kislenko:
These things happened
in the middle of the night.
You know, you can imagine
it's absolute silence,
It's pitch dark, and then
pretty much out of nowhere,
You hear this dreadful sound
echoing.
[ howling ]
Dr. Fallah: You hear a sound.
You look.
You start saying,
"is it there, is it there?"
And then when
there's nothing to see,
Your mind starts trying
to make sense of the world.
So what could it be
That you can hear
but is invisible around you?
Narrator:
It is the vietnamese belief
that the dead must be buried
In their homeland,
Or their soul will wander
aimlessly in pain and suffering.
So when you die, your soul goes,
And that's why it has to be
properly accounted for.
You need that burial
to take place.
It needs to be commemorated.
It needs to be in your homeland.
And if it's not,
your soul wanders.
And that is the worst
hell on earth for vietnamese.
Somewhat, I guess, to christians
Worrying about
being in limbo forever.
Your cultural background
goes a long way
Into your normal
everyday experience growing up,
Which also goes a long way into
How you make sense
of the world around you.
Scorpio:
It's a buddhist belief that
you're bound to your homeland
And your family.
You might have lived
in the same village
For five or six generations,
So you have a very, very strong
connection to that land.
Dr. Kislenko:
And what they come to do is to,
In effect,
worship dead ancestors.
They offer food
as well as sometimes money
And other goods to the dead
as a means of appeasing them
And honoring them.
In the mind
of a vietcong soldier,
If you're hearing these voices,
There's already
a cultural aspect
Where you expect to be
More connected with the spirits
in the world around you,
That there's this idea
there are spirits.
These are profound beliefs
in vietnamese religion
And vietnamese culture.
And that's a big part
of what these boys
Fighting in the jungle
believed in.
And then that might lead
to this idea,
If you've grown up in a culture
where there are more spirits,
There are things you can't see
in the world around you,
That you might start attributing
it to other things like that.
Narrator: If these are
the voices of departed soldiers,
What message are they trying
to get across to the living?
Dr. Fallah: These sounds
that we're talking about
Weren't terribly clear
to begin with.
They were a little hard
to hear and understand
So that you've got this kind of
series of possibilities
For what that sound can be.
And then within a few seconds,
They're talking to you
as a person,
As a fellow soldier, asking you,
"why are you fighting?
Why are you still here?
Why don't you go back home?"
Dr. Fallah:
A rational person who's rested
Easily comes into,
"well, these aren't real,"
But they're in
a stressful situation
That causes that noise
to increase
And opens up
the number of possibilities
From their own memory
and experience to draw upon.
Scorpio: If you combine
their spiritualism
And their belief system,
I can easily understand
That they would be
in a state of confusion
And totally believing
that that's real.
Narrator: The mysterious voice
heard in the jungle appeals
To his vietcong brothers.
It tells them to go home.
"this is your chance to leave
before you die
And wander the earth
Because there is no one
to bury you."
Moaning, the groaning,
the dialogue from a dead soldier
Who you can identify with,
And in the middle
of the darkness,
In the middle of a war
which you know
You have a pretty good
likelihood of getting shot at
Or getting killed,
that must have been terrifying.
Arama: I don't know how I would
have reacted myself
If I was one of
those vietcong troops
With their belief system.
I think I might have run as fast
as possible in a state of panic.
Narrator: But even if
just one soldier experienced
Hearing a ghostly message,
How could the same event
be reported by an entire group?
So the idea of mass hysteria,
when somebody is stressed out
Or under some physiological
change that they can't explain,
Other people sometimes end up
feeling the same way themselves.
When you're sitting
in a group of people,
You end up getting to
an average emotional state
Based on everybody involved.
So if everybody's anxiety
raises a little,
The average raises a little.
You get this kind of
infectiousness.
When you have a lot of people
starting to make that report,
Then you got to think that
it's not about an individual.
It's not a single type
of stressed person going crazy.
It's more that
there's got to be something else
That everybody's experiencing
such that a number of them
Experience it so strongly
that they're willing to speak up
About it
to everybody else around them.
So even the most educated and
trained and scientific of us all
Are suspect
to that kind of fear factor.
Dr. Fallah: I do think
that there's a lot
We don't understand
in the world,
And we don't entirely know
what is going on.
When we don't
understand something,
We have generally put it in
the realm of the supernatural.
Narrator: Could these be
the voices of the dead pleading
For their comrades
to save themselves,
Or is there a darker origin
to these recordings?
Narrator: In the jungles
of the vietnam war,
A horrible wailing torments
the people of hau niga,
The sounds of people screaming,
Crying, gongs banging,
And a child
calling for her father
Are followed by a clear message
From the voice
of a dead vietcong soldier.
"my friends, I am dead."
Dr. Kislenko: If you're in
the jungle at night,
You hear horrifically
ghostly sounds,
You hear moans, you hear groans,
and then you hear somebody
Talking to you
as if they're dead,
Which makes you think,
as a vietcong soldier
That it's one of your comrades
and, of course,
Could be you
at any particular moment.
Narrator: Are the jungles
of vietnam haunted,
Or are there
other forces at work?
Perhaps we can find a clue
in the fact that the sounds
Seem to start appearing
at a specific time in the war.
I think the invading force
obviously would have
Had more technology
and maybe bigger numbers.
So that's probably helping
their adrenaline a bit.
But it might have been a false
adrenaline in a sense, too,
Because the vietcong troops...
They would have been
totally accustomized
And acclimatized
to the surroundings,
Easily 1,000% better
than the americans.
So you hear the sound
in the woods,
And you're in a ditch
with your comrade,
And you're gonna
look around first
To see where it's coming from,
because if you can see
What it is,
you can make sense of it.
Then you start getting into
increasing your stress levels
And your concern about it.
Dr. Kislenko:
So you are constantly afraid,
And that's where the conditions
are really ripe
For messing with your mind.
And that's precisely where
the americans come up
With psychological operation.
Narrator: Ghost tape number 10
Is part of a recently
declassified
U.S. Psychological warfare
campaign
Known as
"operation wandering soul."
Nass: So then we find out about
ghost tape number 10,
Which was basically a collection
of voices in vietnamese
Saying things like,
"this is your ancestor.
Stop doing what you're doing
'cause you're going to die."
Dr. Kislenko:
There's a variety of messages.
This is not just one.
There are messages of
pretty simple ones, right?
"run away. Come to us.
We're gonna win this war.
You're fighting the americans
Who, you know,
have superior technology
And training,
and they'll kill you."
The one that's sort of
most famous and most haunting
Is this idea of,
you know, the displaced soul.
Various sources will tell you
that it started in 1970,
But there are historical records
about using similar tapes
Much earlier than that
in the 1960s.
Some will tell you it was
only used in south vietnam,
But we know for sure
that they were used
In places like laos
and cambodia, too.
Nass: Later, we find out
that they, of course,
Were using them
with p.A. Speakers.
They were connecting them
onto helicopters
And flying around areas
That they thought there might
have been the north vietnamese
And using that in possibly
an effective way,
Although it's never been claimed
by the north vietnamese
At all at that time
or later historically
From people who were fighting
at the time
That it had an effect
of actually scaring them away
From their course of action.
Arama: If you combine
their spiritualism
And their belief system,
You'd be shocked at
how people start to think
And start to hallucinate.
Narrator: U.S. Engineers spend
weeks recording eerie sounds
And altered voices
which pretend to be
Vietcong killed in action
For use in the operation
with the intended purpose
Of instilling a sense of turmoil
in the enemy.
The resulting tape,
dubbed "ghost tape number 10,"
Is played on loudspeakers
outside u.S. Bases
And sometimes
from patrolling helicopters.
The voices call on their
descendants in the vietcong
To defect and cease fighting.
Who would want to hear
a ghost story
When you're in the middle
of those conditions, right?
It's like, you know,
when you're a kid at a campfire
And you get spooked
by a ghost story.
You know,
this is ten times worse, right,
Because there's actually people
out there trying to kill you.
It's this super-sensory overload
Because you're not able
to control it.
When your body and your mind
Has gone through
that level of stress,
You can't push things aside
as easily
As you could otherwise,
and it's those type
Of environments
that lead people to snap.
Arama: A big debate among
survival experts
Is what's more important,
The psychological
or the physiological?
I think most research
points at the will to live
In the psychological as the key,
'cause the minute you panic,
you're dead.
Narrator:
The stress of jungle combat
conditions for the vietcong,
Primarily sleep deprivation,
May have also worn down
their psychological defenses.
When you have sleep deprivation,
starvation, severe dehydration,
Those all play
into your psychology.
When you're deprived
of all the basic essentials
For physiological survival,
Your brain does go...
It goes wacky.
But hardly any of the experts
talk about sleep deprivation
Because it's so abstract.
Sleep deprivation changes
our control
Or the steadiness in our brain.
Normally, we kind of have
a signal
Where we vary in a small range
when we're rested
And have right nutrition.
But when we're sleep-deprived,
We get these high variabilities
to everything going on.
And that means things that
so far out of range
From our normal experience,
You might think
are really happening.
Arama: And all of a sudden
even the so-called expert
Is hearing things
and have no idea what it is,
'cause they're hallucinating,
they're delusional.
Their mind's not gonna operate
The way a normal person's mind
will.
They're gonna be
susceptible to suggestions.
They could have
psychotic breaks.
They could
exhibit hallucinations
Like schizophrenia.
Arama: Your body has to rest
to replenish everything
And make good decisions.
So if you're seriously
sleep-deprived,
You're gonna make
the worst choices.
And that's what we call
the domino effect,
And it leads to
worse choices and death.
The stress means
every little thing
Is going to have
a major impact on you.
And how do I trust the men
next to me in the war
If they're starting to go crazy?
Narrator: "wandering soul" is
part of the official effort
To convince the vietcong
to surrender.
Unofficially,
the american troops
Tried many different
psyops tactics
In their attempt
to accomplish this task.
Dr. Kislenko:
The american playing-card thing,
Which is featured in many
vietnam war-style movies,
Is the calling card for death.
Dr. Fallah: If you can win
the battle of the mind
Before you get
into the physical battle,
You're going to have
an advantage.
It's like, you know,
the maori when they famously
Go into battle
doing their tribal dances,
Making faces, right, at death.
Dr. Fallah:
The maori use the haka
To try to intimidate
their opponents
Before engaging in battle.
That sends
a psychological signal
About the kind of enemy
you're fighting.
Narrator:
This isn't the only attempt
By the american psyops division
to terrify the north vietnamese
Into surrendering.
Dr. Kislenko:
Very, very famously,
One of the ghost tapes involves
tiger sounds.
[ growls ]
There are rumors that
americans took a tiger scream
And then put it on tape
And then went out
into the jungle,
Having already circulated
among soldiers
The notion that they were tigers
And then later that night
Broadcast this manufactured
tiger sound.
[ tiger growls ]
Narrator: So what is the impact
of this psyops tactic?
Arama: It was guaranteed
there was an effect.
I would say that the americans
were very smart
To do what they did because
there's a good possibility
That it would have
reduced the morale,
At the very least.
Dr. Kislenko:
According to american documents,
There were several thousand
defectors
Over the course
of the late 1960s and early '70s
Under investigation revealed
that they were at least in part
Motivated by these ghost tapes.
Narrator:
While it's hard to measure
The success
of operation wandering soul,
The tapes undoubtably put fear
in the hearts
Of whoever heard them.
Every night they played,
the jungles of vietnam
Came alive
with the voices of the dead,
Convincing some soldiers
to put down their weapons
And return home
to their families.
November 14th, 2017.
911 emergency lines
are inundated with calls
From 15 counties in alabama.
Residents reported
hearing a loud boom...
[ boom ]
...Like an earthquake
or a cannon...
[ boom ]
...Coming from the sky.
I can't imagine how terrifying
it would be to be standing here
And suddenly hear a huge
explosion or booming sound...
[ boom ]
...And as I look around,
Not being able to see
the source of it.
There's just this loud
cracking boom.
[ boom ]
Witnesses describe
what essentially
Sounds like a large cannon boom.
[ boom ]
Almost like an earthquake,
but it's above.
Narrator: The national
weather service announced
That they couldn't explain it,
As did the national
geological survey and nasa.
The massive boom didn't appear
to have a natural source.
[ boom ]
What was it?
The answer, it seemed, lay in
a centuries-old phenomenon
Known as skyquakes.
Skyquakes are a phenomena
where there's a very loud noise,
But when you look around,
There's nothing obvious
that's causing that noise.
The booms are extremely loud,
so loud, in fact,
That they often
set off car alarms.
[ car alarms blaring ]
And you can imagine that people
were like, "what was that?"
What happens when
there's thunder
But no clouds in the sky?
Where is that coming from?
Narrator: What is behind
these baffling sounds?
Pre-science, people would
have been terrified.
They would have thought
that it was a voice from god
Or some kind of bad omen.
A loud crack,
a boom, a growl, a rumble,
Some sudden, abrupt noise.
It's just coming
from somewhere out there.
You can hear it distinctly,
but you don't know why.
Narrator:
Skyquakes appear to have
no connection to the weather,
But could these behemoth sounds
be coming from the earth?
Or are they the product of some
unknown presence in the skies?
Narrator: Residents in
15 counties in alabama
Flooded the 911 emergency system
in November 2017,
Reporting mysterious thundering
sounds coming from the sky.
[ boom ]
The best explanation that can be
found for the terrifying boom
Was that they were a mysterious
phenomenon known as skyquakes.
[ boom ]
They are heard in every part
of the planet.
They strike out of nowhere.
[ boom ]
There is no apparent link
to the source.
What theories could possibly
explain their origin?
One of the more compelling
explanations I have heard
Is that these skyquakes
are caused by earthquakes.
Mckinnon: The earth is moving
all of the time.
Tectonic plates on the surface
of the earth
Are moving about the same rate
your fingernails grow,
So they're creeping along.
They get stuck, and they break.
It's kind of like
when you snap your fingers,
You're building up
the stress tension
Until it overcomes the friction
And you hear it
in the form of a snap.
So you can imagine taking
something like rock
That is fused together
That's under
a tremendous amount of strain
And then slipping and breaking.
A majority of the energy
released by earthquakes
Are actually released
by shallow earthquakes,
Which are earthquakes
that are happening
Closer to the earth's surface
Than ones
that we typically think of.
It can be possible
that an earthquake will occur,
And we won't feel it,
but it can produce a sound.
An earthquake generates a couple
of different types of waves.
One of them is a "p" wave,
a pressure wave,
Which is like
if you're splashing water
And it moves and pushes,
The next one that follows
is the "s" wave,
The shear wave,
that's moving back and forth.
So if you take a shoelace
and wiggle it,
That would be
the shape of a shear wave.
When pressure waves
are moving the earth,
That earth is then vibrating
almost like the skin of a drum
Or the membrane
of a loud speaker
And causing the air
to also vibrate.
It transmits that wave
from earth to air,
Which then people can hear.
That means that the bigger
the earthquake is,
The bigger the amplitude
of that "p" wave,
The louder it's going to be.
Things like how cold or how warm
Or how much moisture in the air
can affect
How sound propagates
through the air.
Mckinnon: Sound propagates
in all sorts of different ways,
And it can travel through rock.
Rock doesn't block sound.
In some ways,
it can even amplify sound
Depending what the frequencies
are and what your geology is.
The cool thing is that
because sound is an energy
And it's propagating out,
It can be subject to
the dynamics of the atmosphere.
It can bounce those vibrations
around and transmit them
Into places you wouldn't expect.
If we use krakatoa as an example
Of how you can have
a distant phenomena
And that sound under
just the right conditions
Travel what seems absurdly far,
Then suddenly it starts getting
a lot more plausible to look at
Maybe it's some earthquake
or landslide
Or eruption or meteor
or explosion somewhere else
That's under just
the right conditions
So that sound is traveling
very, very, very far.
Dr. Hayes: This is one
possibility that has some merit,
Although my understanding is
that it's harder
To track these ones
and that they don't seem
To follow typical patterns
of earthquakes.
Narrator:
While this explanation
would seem like an easy one,
It fails to explain
how some skyquakes
Don't have seismic readings
to accompany them.
Breaking the sound barrier
could definitely create a boom
Where you can't immediately
tell what the source is.
A sonic boom is when something
is traveling faster
Than the speed of sound,
so instead of sound waves
Just propagating out
sort of in all directions,
All the sound waves build up and
it arrives at you at one time,
So you get a very loud noise
all at once.
And it can be enough
to rattle windows
And can travel over
quite large distances,
Narrator: Is human technology
behind this bizarre phenomenon?
People have heard skyquakes
around the world for centuries.
Sonic booms are
an interesting theory,
But they don't really hold water
Because there's been testimonies
about skyquakes
Going way back before
jets were even invented.
Narrator: But again,
this theory has holes in it.
What could cause sonic booms
in the centuries before jets?
There must be something
in the atmosphere
Creating this percussion.
Sparling:
The vast majority of objects
That do enter the atmosphere
explode in the atmosphere.
Often large meteors,
if they do enter the atmosphere,
They're entering
at supersonic speeds.
They produce sonic booms
If they're large enough
of immense proportions.
Especially during the daytime
when meteors enter
The earth's atmosphere,
it's not always visible
Because of the the sunlight
in the bright sky.
We don't see the the streak
of light associated with it.
There is a potential for space
objects to enter the atmosphere
And cause a loud bang.
Nothing makes it to the ground,
But you would have...
If you were standing near it,
You would have the perception
of something exploding
Or a huge bang above you,
But no resulting cause
would be visible.
Dr. Hayes: That might be
an explanation for some,
But it just doesn't seem
to account for all of them
And for the diversity of them
around the world.
The world is full
of infinite possibilities,
And all of science
is trying to narrow down
To the most likely.
There may be an angle
in skyquakes
That we can relate to ufos
or extraterrestrial visitation.
There is a long history
of people seeing ufos
That vanish
in the blink of an eye.
Viggiani:
And some ufos have been tracked
At speeds
of over 7,000 miles an hour.
Dr. Hayes: I assume that
if they are visiting earth,
They've learned to exceed
the sound of speed long ago,
And this is not
a problem for them.
Maybe they're playing around
with the atmosphere.
Maybe they're playing around
with the physical reality
Of what we see,
And they're just creating
weird effects.
There's all kinds of things that
might be accounting for that
If you consider
extraterrestrials
As responsible for that.
Narrator: When we hear
something strange from above,
We look to the sky for answers.
But is it possible the answers
are right beneath our feet?
Narrator: Theories abound as to
the origins
Of earth-shaking booms
erupting from the sky.
Some believe these sounds
come from ufos.
But is the real origin
more earthly?
Very few, if any,
reports that I've ever read
Describe any loud sound
as a result of a ufo.
Dr. Hayes: At first it seems
plausible maybe,
Or it seems exciting
or enticing.
But when you really start to get
into the mechanics of this
And you get into the history
of ufo sightings
And what those usually
actually comprise,
They're quite different
phenomena.
And under those circumstances,
you would think
That there would be
some displacement of air
Or some sort of shockwave.
But very few of the incidents
that have reported to me
Have reported any kind of
percussive sound at all.
Narrator:
If the source of this phenomena
Does not originate in the skies,
Is the answer lying in wait for
us at the bottom of the ocean?
Most, or all, skyquake reports
Happen near
a large body of water,
Possibly because this helps
the sound to travel.
You might think that
there's nothing happening
Below the surface of the ocean,
But there's a tremendous amount
of things happening.
Mckinnon: All sorts of things
are happening underneath
The ocean surface at any time.
We're only seeing the waves
up at the top,
But underneath is an entire
rich geologic world.
There are volcanic eruptions
that happen underwater.
There are earthquakes.
There are landslides.
There are pieces of volcanoes
that break off,
And you have a flank collapse.
All of these things
are happening underwater,
And sound travels
really well underwater.
There's some layers of the ocean
That conduct sound
incredibly well.
They act almost as a wave guide,
bouncing the signal along.
But the thing about that is
It would also register
as an earthquake.
Mckinnon:
It looks like a sharp jolt
And then chaos as the smaller
pieces crumble out,
And it fades off fairly quickly,
Just like if you had a stack
of books and you drop them.
It's loud boom
And then the pieces kind of
tumbling off to the sides.
And you get the quieter pieces
falling down,
You see the same thing
in the seismic signal.
Dr. Proctor: Seismometers are
extremely sensitive,
So even though it might happen
in a remote part of the ocean,
Most likely we're gonna
pick that up.
We've got a lot
of seismic sensors,
But we don't have a whole lot
of the hydrophones,
Which you can think of as being
A really highly sensitive
3d microphone underwater
That can pick up vibrations
in any direction
And tell you what direction
it's coming from,
How big it is, what frequency
it is, what does it sound like.
And if you've got your three
points, you can back trace
And triangulate back
to where its source was.
But the oceans are really,
really, really big.
So even though we have
a global network,
It's still possible to have
places that we're missing.
Narrator: Could there be
any easy answer to skyquakes,
Or is the truth murky?
I think it's comforting
to people
To have one solid explanation
for something.
Something happens,
and there's one single cause.
It's just easier
to wrap your head around.
Kosiba:
Science is always growing,
Otherwise it would be
a really boring field
If we just figured
everything out
And we could explain everything.
Just because there's not
an easy explanation right away,
That doesn't mean that
you're not working towards it.
Sometimes we can take folklore
and story as hints
That we should investigate more.
There's a story of the day
the mountain moved
In the rocky mountains
of canada,
And it turns out
it was a loud cracking noise
That when investigated later,
There was a landslide
where there hadn't been one
The last time
people went through.
And then one day
there was a giant landslide,
The frank landslide, one of
the most deadly landslides
In canadian history,
and the mountain moved again
As it cracked and rumbled
and buried the town.
We could have used those stories
as a warning,
As a precursor,
as a way of exploring more.
Dr. Proctor: There's most likely
not one explanation
For all of the different types
of skyquakes we hear about
From around the world.
Mckinnon:
We definitely know landslides
create large, rumbling booms.
We definitely know
earthquakes can be acoustic.
We definitely know that meteors,
when they explode in the air,
Can create a sonic boom.
All of these are things
we've seen, we know,
We have observed repeatedly,
we understand.
If we actually
do solve this mystery,
It's probably going to be
the result
Of several different things
happening.
Mckinnon: Although we're
recording data all of the time,
We don't always know
what to look for.
There's so much happening that
we're trying to find a signal
In all of the noise.
Narrator: The next time you hear
a boom coming from the sky,
You might want to duck for cover
or brace yourself,
Because despite all
our understanding of science,
The world around us
continues to be
Both awe-inspiring, terrifying,
And beyond our control.