Could a small piece of aircraft debris
found on a remote desert island
finally solve America's greatest aviation mystery?
Is this part of Amelia Earhart's airplane?
Why are space agencies like NASA
scouring the deepest parts of the ocean
for signs of extraterrestrial life?
We know more about the surface of Mars
than we know about our deep seas.
And what could explain
the hundreds of mysterious ghost ships
washing up on the shores of Japan?
Could the North Koreans be sending spies to Japan in these boats?
The underwater realm is another dimension.
It's a physically hostile place,
where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.
I'm Jeremy Wade,
and I'm searching the world
to bring you the most iconic and baffling underwater
mysteries known to science.
The vast majority of our ocean is unobserved,
unmapped and unexplored.
It's a dangerous frontier
that swallows evidence.
You have nowhere to run.
Where unknown is normal
and understanding is rare.
It's one of history's most perplexing disappearances.
In 1937, aviation pioneer,
Amelia Earhart, vanishes over the Pacific Ocean.
There are no traces of what happened to her
or her aircraft.
This lack of evidence has opened the door to nearly 100 years of rumor,
hearsay, and wild conspiracy theories.
But now, can a small piece of aircraft debris
found on the beach of a remote tropical island
finally help solve this mystery?
July 1937,
Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan,
are flying over the Pacific Ocean
in their twin engine, Lockheed Electra.
Amelia Earhart is this glamorous,
exciting aviatrix,
who's breaking glass ceilings
with her adventures and her flying.
She had already become the first woman
to do a transatlantic flight.
She was on her way to becoming the first woman
to circumnavigate the globe.
Earhart is 22,000 mile
into this record-breaking journey,
only one thing stands between her and glory...
The vast Pacific Ocean.
She was doing the hardest bit,
2,500 mile, over water flight
to a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific
called Howland Island.
It's a tiny target for them to reach,
but they're going to need to refuel there.
Luckily, Earhart and Noonan have a helping hand.
Anchored off the coast of the island is the Itasca,
a U.S. Coast Guard ship equipped with a radio transmitter
to help guide them in.
But as Earhart closes in,
things start to unravel.
We cannot reach you by radio, on the line 1-5...
She was unable to get a bearing
on the signals sent out by the Coast Guard.
There's a problem with their radio transmissions.
Howland Island wasn't there in front of them
when they expected it to be.
Earhart isn't receiving
or responding to the messages being sent out by the ship.
Earhart was calling in the Itasca.
Itasca was replying,
but Earhart was not hearing their replies.
The radio operators can only listen in horror,
as the drama unfolds,
until all contact
is lost.
Where did they go? What happened to them?
It's one of the greatest mysteries of our time.
When Amelia Earhart was reported as overdue,
missing,
it was huge news
all over the United States, all over the world.
A massive rescue effort is launched,
but after weeks of searching,
Amelia Earhart is officially declared lost at sea.
It's concluded she must have crashed into the water
somewhere close to Howland Island.
The hunt for her aircraft deep beneath the waves
continues to this day.
Many people believe this lost at sea theory,
but no trace has ever been found of a crash
around Howland Island.
What if Amelia Earhart and her navigator
didn't crash at sea at all?
In the days following her disappearance,
something happens that supports this possibility.
People were saying that they were receiving signals,
radio signals
even after the disappearance of the airplanes.
These calls go on night after night.
They're hearing Amelia Earhart very clearly saying,
uh, "SOS, SOS, this is Amelia Earhart."
But after finding no trace of Earhart or her plane,
the official search dismisses these radio messages
as false reports or hoaxes.
But what if they were real?
Did Amelia miraculously survive and make it to dry land?
If so, the question is where?
Our best piece of information
about what happened in the final moments,
hours of Earhart's flight,
are the radio logs.
This real-time record
was transcribed by the radio operators aboard
the U.S. Coast Guard vessel,
and it contains a tantalizing clue.
The last thing they heard her say
was, uh, "We are on the line
157337,
running on the line north and south."
These numbers refer to a fixed navigation line
that runs directly through Howland Island.
Amelia and Noonan were using it to try
and get a fix on their location.
So they're running on the line looking for Howland Island,
which is what they should have done.
Crucially, around 400 miles to the south
on the same line
lies another small piece of land,
Gardner Island.
Gardner Island is... Is a very small atoll.
It's got fringing reef and an internal lagoon.
It's like an elongated triangle.
This uninhabited island
was searched back in 1937,
but only from the air.
Is it possible the official search missed something.
For over 30 years, Ric Gillespie has been leading a team
of multi-disciplined researchers,
who think this might be the case.
In the 1990s,
they launched a series of ambitious expeditions.
We were the first people
to go to that island
and look for signs of Amelia Earhart.
They searched for clues above and below the water,
using everything from metal detectors
to state-of-the-art sonar technology.
And they uncover profound evidence,
including a 1930s pocket knife
and a glass bottle that used to contain
women's anti-freckle cream.
What's all this stuff doing there?
But it's not the decisive proof
Ric and his team have traveled all this way to find.
Are there any signs of Amelia's aircraft?
Everybody talks about a smoking gun in the Earhart mystery
has to be the plane.
Everybody wants the plane.
Initially, there were no signs of it on the island
or in the shallow reef that surrounds it.
Then finally,
a breakthrough.
And there's this piece of aluminum laying right there on the surface.
At that point, you don't know
whether it's something important or not.
The thin metal sheet, has lines of rivet holes,
an unmistakable indication
that it came from an aircraft.
How did it get all the way out here
to this uninhabited island?
Are these the remains of Amelia Earhart's airplane?
Is it the proof that she crashed somewhere near
or even on this island?
When a team of researchers scour a remote Pacific island
for signs of the long lost aviator, Amelia Earhart,
they find a vital clue.
A small piece of aluminum with telltale signs
that it came from an aircraft,
raising the possibility
that Earhart crash landed on the deserted island
and lived out her days as a castaway.
Could this possibly be part of Amelia Earhart's
Lockheed Electra?
Ric's team begin the laborious task
of comparing the rivet patterns on the aluminum
with aircraft from the same period.
We cannot forget that
World War II is virtually contemporary with Amelia Earhart.
Wreckage from World War II planes
litters the Pacific Ocean.
Does the aluminum sheet match with a Lockheed Electra?
The pattern doesn't quite fit.
It's like close but no cigar, and it's got to be perfect.
But it doesn't appear to match
with any other aircraft either.
We were stuck.
We said, we don't know where this thing came from.
It's a devastating blow.
What this piece of metal is
and where it came from remain unclear.
Could the answer be hiding in plain sight?
Footage from Amelia's record-breaking journey
shows one easily overlooked anomaly.
You can see that there was a repair done to the plane,
where there's a piece of sheet metal that was added
that you don't see in earlier legs of their trip.
Earhart's plane had a small navigation window
in the back right hand side of the fuselage.
But in later pictures,
it's not there.
They took that window out
and covered the hole with a plain aluminum patch.
This reignites interest
in the aluminum sheet found on Gardner Island.
A custom repair job
might explain why the rivet markings
don't match with a Lockheed Electra
or any other aircraft.
Ric and his team put this theory to the test
by checking the size and shape of the window patch.
It's almost like solving a puzzle
and trying to figure out where the puzzle pieces fit.
They find that the size of the patch
and that of a mystery piece of aluminum
are a perfect match.
It's the biggest breakthrough yet,
but not conclusive proof.
For that, direct evidence is needed
that ties this small piece of aluminum
to Amelia's aircraft.
Now we can use new technologies
to help us gather more evidence, and hopefully,
help us solve this mystery.
In 2021,
Penn State University
offered to analyze the piece of aluminum
using their own nuclear reactor.
The team are using,
uh, neutron activation analysis to understand
the construction of the metal.
By showering it with radioactive neutrons,
they may reveal subatomic clues
hidden on the surface of the aluminum.
Things like tiny traces of paint
or indentations, for example, from serial marks.
Things like that, which you just wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye.
We've gotten some preliminary reports from Penn State.
The researchers, Daniel Beck and Alison Portanova,
spot hidden inscriptions etched into the metal.
Their system showed, what appeared to be, three letters
on the surface of the sheet.
This new discovery could be a game changer.
If these are tool marks or even better yet, a serial number,
this could be a direct link to Earhart's aircraft.
For now, what the letters mean remains unknown,
but the scientists at Penn State have plans to apply new,
more refined filters to their neutron imaging equipment.
With better resolution and more analysis,
Ric and his team may be able to prove,
where this piece of aluminum came from,
and the answer could finally solve
one of the most puzzling aviation mysteries of all time.
Over the past decade,
hundreds of abandoned boats have washed up
on the shores of Japan,
from small wooden rowing boats
to larger steel vessels.
Where they come from and what happened to their crews
is the subject of global speculation.
But can breakthrough satellite technology
finally help solve the mystery
of Japan's ghost ships?
Since 2017,
the number of abandoned boats arriving on Japanese shores
has increased to unprecedented levels.
There are sometimes hundreds, every year, washing ashore.
Where are these boats coming from?
What has happened to their crew?
Tragically, they aren't always empty.
Some of these broken vessels contain the bodies
of those who were sailing them.
These corpses are occasionally found
in a strange condition.
Some are even missing their heads.
Heads missing?
Ooh!
Ships are turning up
on the western coast of Japan full of corpses.
What's going on here?
The first step in unraveling this mystery
is finding out where these boats are coming from.
The local police launch an investigation.
The results are perplexing.
The Japanese authorities have identified
that the vessels come from North Korea, because of the artifacts within them.
It's a breakthrough that only partially solves the puzzle.
North Korea lies over 600 miles away.
How are these boats ending up in Japanese waters?
For many Japanese citizens,
large numbers of mystery ships arriving from North Korea
causes fear and paranoia.
The context here is that relations between
Japan and North Korea are very strained
because of years and years
of North Korean ballistic missile tests.
In 2017,
these missile tests ceased.
Their end coincided with the dramatic increase
of abandoned boats finding their way to Japan.
But some people are convinced this is no coincidence
and that instead of sending rockets towards Japan,
the North Koreans are now sending ships full of spies.
As hundreds of abandoned boats
wash up along the western shores of Japan,
many local residents suspect foul play.
One new theory suggests these ghost ships
actually belong to an unlikely group of people,
North Korean spies.
It's a suspicion, born from years of distrust
between the two nations
and a long history of North Korean espionage on Japanese soil.
Over recent decades,
the North Korean state has abducted people from Japanese coastlines.
No one knows how many citizens have been taken,
but the authorities believe it could number in the hundreds.
Are these so-called
ghost ships simply a new tactic in this dirty war?
Could the North Koreans now be sending spies
to Japan in these boats?
To find out, I'm talking to Prof. Araki,
an expert in North Korean politics.
Have you investigated any of these ghost ships yourself?
Have you found anything to support the idea,
they are being used by spies?
Oh.
Do you think this hat belonged to a spy?
Prof. Araki's theory
is supported by the fishing equipment
often found on board these abandoned vessels.
It also partially solves another unexplained detail,
why some of these ghost ships
still contain the decomposing corpses of their crew.
So we know where these vessels are coming from
and who owned them,
but we still don't understand what's happening to them.
Accidents at sea kind of do happen,
but why so many North Korean fishermen have been lost at sea
defies explanation.
The Sea of Japan
is one of the most fiercely contested bodies
of water in the world.
The location of international boundaries is disputed.
And Japan, Russia, China and both South and North Korea
all compete for the same fish.
To get an edge in this highly competitive piece of water,
some of these countries have been accused
of deploying so-called dark fleets.
They are fishing vessels that are doing their best
to stay off the radar.
These flotillas can comprise hundreds of ships,
and they often fish illegally in other country's waters.
They don't want to be detected by authorities
or anybody that's monitoring them.
Now, state-of-the-art
satellite technology is helping researchers
find these clandestine fishing fleets.
So the fleets that were invisible
and very, very hard to track now become trackable.
Pictures beamed from space
reveal huge numbers of Chinese fishing vessels
operating in Korean waters.
These illegal fleets are capable of decimating fish stocks
and displacing North Korean fishermen.
What we think is happening are these North Korean vessels
are going further and further out into the sea
to try and make their quotas, to try and catch
the amount of fish they need.
Most of these fishing vessels are not properly equipped
for these sorts of long distance voyages.
They don't have anything to send out an SOS
if they get into trouble.
That crew, once they are beyond sight of land,
are completely on their own.
Equipment failure and dangerous seas
may go some way towards explaining
Japan's ghost ships.
But one strange question remains unanswered.
Why are some of the corpses found on board
missing their heads?
Around the world, fishing conflict
is increasingly common.
Have the international disputes on the Sea of Japan
turned violent?
Or is there a less sinister possibility?
Could there be a natural explanation for this phenomenon?
It's thought many of these ghost ships
spend months at sea before reaching the Japanese coast.
Some people have suggested that these heads were removed
through natural decomposition processes.
The tale of Japan's ghost ships
is something straight out of a horror movie.
But satellite technology has revealed that
this real life story may in fact be about
our overexploitation of the oceans,
and by exposing and clamping down on illegal fishing,
we may be in sight of bringing this gruesome phenomenon to an end.
In 2019, a swimmer off the coast of Israel
spots something unusual on the seabed.
Beneath him is a strange stone tablet
covered in what looked like ancient hieroglyphs
from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.
Can an ongoing investigation
help reveal what this bizarre artifact is?
Is it genuine? And if so, how did it find its way
to the bottom of the sea?
After his incredible underwater discovery,
Rafi Bahalul alerts Israel's antiquities authorities,
who dispatched a team to inspect and recover the artifact.
The preservation is amazing.
When you look at it, it almost looks as if it was made recently.
Like, perhaps it could be a fake,
but in fact, it's just very, very well-preserved.
If genuine, it's a wonder how this tablet has survived
in such good condition, but that's not the only mystery.
It is covered in, what is unmistakably,
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Deciphering these markings may help
reveal more about this strange stone
and perhaps even its age.
Only a handful of characters are carved into the rock,
giving Israel's leading scholars very little to go on
to decode this puzzle.
Amazingly, they are able to use
the style of the hieroglyphs
to date the tablet to a specific era.
The iconography and the inscription
that was made on that slab
was done over 3,000 years ago.
It dates from the New Kingdom,
a golden age of ancient Egypt,
when this once mighty empire was at its zenith.
The markings on this stone
refer to an ancient Egyptian goddess called Seshat.
Seshat is the goddess of wisdom and knowledge,
a lesser known deity seen less frequently
in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
She's usually only mentioned
in very important temples that were built by pharaohs,
so her appearance on a tablet
found underwater is very mysterious.
This vital clue suggests
that the stone tablet is a small piece
of an ancient Egyptian temple.
Could the rest of it still be here
in the same patch of seabed?
Is it a remnant of a lost city,
of a lost settlement?
Is it an Egyptian version of Atlantis?
A strange stone tablet is found on the sea floor,
close to the coast of Israel,
and some people think its discovery might point
to a lost settlement
hidden beneath the water.
Could it be that here we have a newly found
ancient Egyptian temple or even a city
on the seabed?
It's a tantalizing possibility,
but the hopes of finding an Egyptian Atlantis
are quickly dashed by one critical anomaly
located at the bottom of the stone tablet.
It has a hole cut or shaped into its side.
This circular feature is a giveaway sign
of the stone tablet's true purpose.
What we have is an almost square, rectangular stone
with a large hole cut through it.
In the Bronze Age, all anchors looked exactly like this.
It's a revelation that helps explain why this stone tablet
was found under water,
but something still doesn't make sense.
Most other ancient Egyptian anchors
are plain and simple in design.
The mystery here is actually the quality of the tablet itself.
The hieroglyphs are beautifully carved.
They're very, very detailed and very clear.
They must have been carved by a highly-skilled stonemason.
They say to us that this is something very special indeed.
You might want to ask the question, well,
if it's this beautiful inscription, why,
why do something so mundane with it?
Could the answer lie in ancient Egypt's reputation
as a seafaring powerhouse?
Ancient Egypt is one of the first maritime cultures in world history.
Then, as now, ships are great symbols of wealth and power,
so often Egyptian pharaohs like building really grandiose vessels
to display the monumentalism of their reign.
Is this stone anchor from a mega yacht
of the ancient world,
perhaps even one belonging to a mighty pharaoh?
It's an exciting theory,
but not one that everybody is ready to accept.
So if you look closely at this stone,
it's very clear that some of the words are cut off in half.
Israel's antiquities experts
also noticed this subtle detail
and more.
At the bottom of the stone,
the face of the goddess appears to have been purposely
chiseled away.
What could explain this unusual damage?
This is a common thing that we see,
where certain iconography that has meaning or has
some kind of religious or spiritual power
might be removed,
usually by people who don't believe in the same thing.
Unfortunately, this was all too common in ancient Egypt,
when one deity became less popular
or for political reasons,
people would go around defacing images of them.
If this stone tablet is originally from a temple,
how did it end up in the sea?
This was clearly an architectural element from a building
that was ripped off the building
and cut up to be reused as a stone anchor.
This appears to be some form of ancient recycling,
where a sailor needed an anchor
and found this abandoned stone
and then created an anchor out of it.
The story of this strange stone tablet
appears to be solved.
But one detail remains unanswered.
The one piece that's missing from this discussion is actually about the ship
that the anchor came from.
The identity of this vessel is unknown,
but archeologists suspect it may have sunk in a storm,
explaining how this anchor finally came to rest
on the seabed.
This stone tablet remains an unparalleled discovery,
one of the best preserved ancient Egyptian anchors ever found,
and researchers are planning to return to the site
where the anchor was found
hoping to unearth more treasures
from the same shipwreck.
New findings may finally reveal
where the anchor came from and who it belonged to,
thereby solving the last pieces of this puzzle.
Are we alone in the universe?
It's one of life's greatest mysteries.
With recent advancements in space exploration,
we've never been closer to knowing.
To find out where to look for extraterrestrial life
and what it might look like,
astronomers are now turning their telescopes around
and pointing them, not at the stars,
but down into the depths of the unexplored oceans.
2013,
an ROV operating in the Indian Ocean
near a drilling site records something strange.
What am I looking at here?
Is it an animal?
It morphs shape in front of their eyes...
before putting on a dazzling light display.
It's only once the footage gets back to the surface
that this creature is identified
as a potentially rare shape-shifting ctenophore.
This alien-looking life form is known to science,
but what other strange creatures
could remain undiscovered
in our vast underwater world?
Seventy percent of the surface of Earth
is covered in ocean,
yet 80% is unexplored,
unobserved and unmapped.
The underwater realm
includes some of the world's most extreme environments,
and it's filled with bizarre creatures.
If we can find life, even the smallest,
simplest examples of it
in unexpected places on our planet,
this does raise the notion that we could perhaps
find it in other places within our solar system.
2017,
a survey team drills holes to the seabed
through 3,000 feet of Antarctic ice sheet.
It's a very, very extreme situation,
both in terms of temperature and lack of light.
These pitch black subzero waters
are one of the most hostile environments imaginable
and an unlikely place to find signs of life.
The scientists are here to collect mud samples from the sea floor,
but they are stunned by what they find
hidden away beneath the ice.
They spot 22 unidentified organisms,
unknown to science, clinging to the side of a rock.
Somehow in the darkness,
organisms managed to survive.
How is this possible?
What are these unknown creatures?
When researchers drill holes
beneath the thick Antarctic ice,
they find something no one can explain.
What researchers see underneath the Antarctic ice sheet
are living creatures
that are kilometers inside the edge of the shelf.
These mysterious lifeforms
appear to be unidentified types of sea storks and sponges.
Scientists do not expect to see animals in this environment.
People are most familiar with photosynthesis,
where organisms on planet Earth
get their energy from the Sun,
that would be your plants, your algae, your phytoplankton.
Finding life here is so strange because
unlike most other food chains,
no light penetrates this far beneath the ice sheet.
Right now, scientists can only speculate
how these creatures survive,
but they think they might have evolved a unique way
of gathering energy.
We call it chemosynthesis,
the ability for organisms to get energy from chemicals
that they're surrounded with, as opposed to getting energy directly from the Sun.
If life can survive on Earth
in even the coldest and darkest environments,
could it also survive in places even more extreme?
The bottom of the ocean is a very mysterious place,
about which we know very little.
Its deepest parts are well over six miles beneath the surface.
In this hostile environment,
it's not just the lack of light
that makes it so hard for life forms to survive.
They have to be able to cope with the high pressure,
because of all of that water weight coming from above.
It's a place that even scientists struggle to reach.
At these depths, the pressure is the equivalent
of putting one ton of weight on the tip of your finger.
It takes specialized, reinforced submersibles to explore,
but the few people brave enough to venture this deep
have reported weird and wonderful encounters.
Life in the deep ocean
takes on forms that sometimes are even
beyond our imaginations.
And incredibly, it's not just in the water,
where we are making groundbreaking discoveries.
In 2020, scientists examine core samples
taken from hundreds of feet below the sea floor
in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean.
What emerges stuns them
and biologists around the world
and could reshape our understanding of life.
When a team of scientists drill down deep beneath
the floor of the Pacific Ocean,
they find something they never expected,
life.
The core samples that emerge contain colonies of bacteria,
somehow thriving in ancient volcanic rock
below the seabed.
We're talking about rock that could be anywhere from ten million
to 100 million years old.
Stranger yet, the bacteria were found
more than 400 feet beneath the sea floor...
Leaving the puzzle of how they got here
and how they survive.
When these rocks formed and then cooled on the seabed,
microcracks appeared, which were later infilled by clay minerals.
Trapped deep underground,
it's speculated that the bacteria extract energy
from chemicals in the surrounding clay.
Their discovery could have radical implications
for our search for extraterrestrial life.
The key thing here is that
conditions in the deep ocean beds
are quite similar to some of the conditions on Mars.
All evidence suggests
Mars was once a water world,
and though it lost its vast oceans billions of years ago,
it could still have similar types of rock below its surface.
If life can manage to survive within rocks
that are ten to 100 million years old
in the deepest parts of the ocean, then certainly
they should be able to handle the conditions that we see
on many other planets.
The discovery of these incredibly hardy bacteria
could also add weight to an even more radical theory.
Could life survive in the vacuum of outer space?
Some scientists speculate
that simple life could be incubated on asteroids
and other space debris
in a similar way to the bacteria found beneath
the Pacific Ocean.
We know that life first emerged on Earth
at least 3.5 billion years ago,
but the exact mechanisms
and nature behind the emergence
of the first Earth life forms remains mysterious.
The conventional theory is that life emerged
deep in our oceans,
around hydrothermal vents,
which spewed minerals and heat
into the surrounding water.
But there are alternative
and more controversial theories.
There's one theory called panspermia.
That's the idea that life could potentially
travel from one planetary body to the next.
The idea of panspermia doesn't have a lot of evidence right now.
However, some believe that this might actually be
a reasonable explanation on how life
began here on Earth.
Discoveries being made in the deep corners of our oceans
are radically changing our understanding
of where and how life can survive.
And these insights are helping scientists continue their search
for life elsewhere in the cosmos,
and may soon even lead us to the discovery of
alien life on other worlds.