The UnXplained: Mysteries of the Universe

Unidentified objects,

witnessed by military pilots.

Extraterrestrial probes,

flying through our solar system.

And a potential alien home world that may be hidden

in the darkness of space.

When we look up into the night sky, the pinpricks of light

we see are but a mere fraction of the billions

or even trillions of stars and planets in outer space.

The sheer vastness of the cosmos begs the question

are we alone in the universe?

Or is it possible that somewhere out there

there are intelligent beings, just like us?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

The New York Times publishes a bombshell report

which reveals the existence

of a top secret military initiative known as AATIP:

the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

The purpose of the project was to scientifically investigate

unidentified flying objects,

more commonly known as UFOs.

In the weeks that follow, a number of previously

classified military videos are leaked to the public.

One clip from 2004 shows an encounter between

U.S. fighter jets and a mysterious flying craft

that appears to be from another world.

This object that was videoed in 2004

was doing some really strange things.

I mean, just crazy things.

The fastest aircraft that we know how to build

can't go that fast.

It also appeared to have no actual source

of propulsion at all,

which is another big mystery

that can't be easily explained.

This video has become known as the Tic Tac video

because one of the pilots, Captain Underwood in this case,

nicknamed it that 'cause that's what he thought

it kind of looked like.

I remember it wasn't that long ago

when if you asked the U.S. government

for its official line on UFOs,

they would say, "No one's interested.

No one's studying this. We don't have any programs."

Some people now talk about this event

and say, "Well, maybe this was extraterrestrial."

This is a bombshell.

One can't avoid the conclusion

that we are not alone.

Are we on the verge of proving that there is

extraterrestrial life in the universe?

It may sound hard to believe, since this age-old mystery has

baffled us for centuries.

But many scientists are now quite confident

that there simply has to be

intelligent life on other planets.

The universe is huge,

gigantic beyond human imagination.

So, how many stars are there in the visible universe?

100 billion times 100 billion.

And to believe that we are the only game in town,

I think, is the height of arrogance.

So we have this fascination

with other intelligent creatures in the universe.

I think everybody looks at the stars at night--

on a, you know, on a deep, dark, starry night--

and all of those points of light,

and it's a reasonable question to ask

whether or not we're the only time life has happened.

Or are we just one page in a very, very long book?

For thousands of years,

looking up at the stars with our naked eyes

was the only way we could search for extraterrestrial life.

But then, in the 19th century,

telescopes gave us a close-up view of Mars

for the first time, which fueled intense speculation

that there may be life on the Red Planet.

There was a gentleman named Giovanni Schiaparelli in Italy,

who was making copious maps of the Martian surface.

Well, what do you see with an old telescope

when you look at the Martian surface?

He saw lines on Mars, and Schiaparelli termed these

as canale in Italian, which is the word for canals.

Schiaparelli speculates that this might be evidence

of a huge planet-wide network

of channels essentially designed

to carry water around.

And then, of course, fascination

with the possibility of life on Mars

just simply exploded.

Suddenly, all this buzz starts coming around about,

wait a minute, there's an entire

extraterrestrial civilization on Mars.

So, following in that line of inquiry,

a lot of people started writing these books

and popular articles where there are Martians

with vast communications networks.

They've got ships sailing Martian seas.

They've got vehicles.

It wasn't terribly scientific,

but it got a lot of people thinking about it.

While we now know Mars is a dusty, barren planet,

Schiaparelli's theory was just the beginning

of a growing scientific effort

to search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

NASA launches a Titan rocket

carrying the Voyager 1 probe into space.

Voyager's primary mission

is to journey to the edge of our solar system and beyond

and send back unprecedented data and images.

But the probe also serves another purpose,

which is rather unusual--

it carries a message that will hopefully be received

by an alien civilization.

Voyager 1 has a really interesting artifact

that's mounted to it.

And it's a golden record.

Think of a vinyl record that plays music.

And the idea being, if someday,

Voyager 1 travels far enough that it's recovered

by extraterrestrial intelligence,

they might be able to figure out

how to operate the record and learn about us.

Carl Sagan was one of the intellectual giants

of the 20th century, and he and a handful of others

put together this project to create the famous Golden Record.

So this golden disc was an old-style phonograph record

filled with both visual and audio messages.

So the audio messages include the sounds of animals,

sounds of nature, waterfalls, wind, rain,

dozens of people saying hello in different languages.

On the video side, we have images of Planet Earth,

there's an astronaut in space,

images of civilization,

and a lot of people, of course,

to show a representation of humanity.

And so, if some aliens happened to intercept this thing

they can hopefully retrieve these messages.

The question is, will they?

Will an alien civilization discover--

and decipher-- the Voyager Golden Record?

Perhaps.

But NASA recently invested billions of dollars

in a new telescope that may give us a glimpse

of alien home worlds.

Today is a historic day.

Six and a half months ago, a rocket launched from Earth

carrying the world's newest,

most powerful deep-space telescope.

Deploying a sunshield the size of a tennis court.

At an event in the White House,

President Joe Biden unveils the first image

taken by NASA's brand-new James Webb Space Telescope.

We can see light from the oldest galaxies.

The oldest documented light in the history of the universe.

From over 13 billion years ago.

The groundbreaking instrument is

the most powerful telescope ever built,

and it's specifically designed

to look for planets where aliens might live.

The James Webb telescope,

it's an infrared telescope,

so it's sensitive to heat.

But that's really not the big deal.

The big deal is that it can look,

for example, at a planet around another star

and actually see it.

It might only look like a dot on a photo,

but you take the light from that dot,

put it through a prism,

and you could tell what's in the atmosphere

of that planet.

The most exciting thing in the development

of the James Webb Space Telescope is

we can tell the chemicals

that are in an alien atmosphere.

We could look for industrial chemicals

which could only get there

if there is a technological civilization

on the planet.

This was not possible even ten years ago.

In 2023, NASA announced

that the James Webb Telescope had detected chemical evidence

that a planet named K2-18 b

may potentially have an ocean...

...which could also be home to a form of plankton.

This exciting discovery has led scientists to predict

that the telescope may one day

provide definitive proof of alien life.

But looking in outer space

is not the only way to find out

whether we're alone.

Some astronomers are listening

for radio messages that were sent

by extraterrestrials.

Across the United States, millions of household radios...

MAN (over radio): I'll take a look to see what I can find.

...playing the familiar hum of music and entertainment

suddenly go silent.

But this isn't some widespread technical failure