Weird or What - Season 01, Episode 06 (Full Episode)

you know what I've been around I've traveled the world met some interesting people done some crazy things so you might just think there's not much that could take me by surprise you'd be wrong the world is full of stories and science and things that amaze and confound me every single day incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night some I can answer others justify logic can people move from the present into the past or future eyewitnesses report a woman materializing from thin air could she be a time traveler an ancient stone structure suggests the incredible did ancient pagan worshipers practice human sacrifice in New Hampshire plants seem to possess strange powers allowing them to detect human thought are they sentient beings with dark intent yeah it's a weird world and I love it one minute I'm sorry I just I couldn't put this book down the time machine written in 1895 by HG Wells with this one book a hot new science fiction genre was born the time-travel story now of course there are endless books films and TV shows on the subject of the mind-boggling paradoxes of journeying across time great stuff shame the concept of time travel is just fiction in it isn't it on July 15th 2006 famed science fiction author Whitley Strieber best known for his books the hunger and communion was out at the theater with his wife Ann and her friend Starfire tor little did they know what would happen that night would rival anything found in witless books nothing seems impossible to me anymore I haven't talked about it very much after dinner and and her friend went into what they thought was an empty lady's room well it's a very small room about 10 by 12 there was nobody in that room except for an stripper and myself so I was standing on these steps no one went in it after the two of them went in it and I was watching the entire time Anne was a little bit before me and she left and said she would wait for me outside so I went outside stood in front of the door waiting for starfighter as I slightly rounded the corner coming out of the stall a woman just materialized whoa she didn't seem to understand where she was she seemed confused and then she just left the room while I was standing there a woman came out I go out the door to the ladies room and an streamer rushes up to me very very excited she says a lady came out but she didn't go in a lady came out but she didn't go in this was pretty amazing because we knew no one was in there when we went in so how could someone have come out who was never in there in the first place no one absolutely no one went in that bathroom who was this mysterious woman and how could she have appeared from nowhere for the eyewitnesses this is no ghost story for them the answer is much weirder something altered the timelines we were brought together like a bad edit of a film and that's how we almost collided right two women go into an empty bathroom and three women come out it really possible this mystery woman slipped through from another time that weirder what I say that's the weirdest weirder what yet yeah it's pretty far out but remarkably time travel may indeed be possible and proof could soon be found in a 17 mile tunnel deep underground at the border of France and Switzerland this is the Large Hadron Collider a 17 mile long tunnel designed to smash atoms together in an attempt to recreate conditions that last existed just before the Big Bang when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old scientists at the LHC are trying to understand what happened in that critical moment to make our universe what it is by solving this they hope to shed light on some of the most fundamental unanswered questions in physics with the Large Hadron Collider perhaps one day we'll be able to answer these cosmic questions what happened before the Big Bang it's impossible to go through a black hole can you bend time into a pretzel we're now entering the cusps the cusp of human progress a hundred years ago think how primitive we are a hundred years from now think about advanced computers artificial intelligence will be right now we're at the most interesting point in human history the cusp when we're going to walk it through the universe a complete understanding of how the entire universe is really constructed might enable future physicists to find a way to manipulate the fabric of space-time itself and travel into the past or future but can we really manipulate time to find out we first need to investigate the time itself Isaac Newton imagined time as an arrow always travelling straight forward in one direction but then Albert Einstein came along and said that time is more like a river that can meander flow at different speeds and even Eddy back upon itself now we look at a river and we think of the the spot on the river where we are is something like the present moment and then upstream from us is the future this is coming towards us it's relentless it's sort of inevitable in a moment what was up there is going to be here at downstream from us we can think of as the past so these are events that have already happened so there you have it you've got the future you've got the present moment you've got the past is it possible to go against the flow of time into the future or move even further downstream into the past going back in time is simple theoretically all we need to do is beat light to its destination travel faster than light speed how fast is that well as Albert Einstein figured out light travels at a fixed and constant speed throughout the universe of 186,000 miles per second and the space shuttle can travel around five miles per second so we have a bit of a problem but our hopes of meeting our ancestors aren't over yet modern physicists have built on Einstein's theories and discovered that although we may not be able to beat light in a head-to-head race we might be able to cheat and take a shortcut going back in time is simple theoretically to do this a time traveller would need to bend the fabric of space connecting two distant points to create a theoretical tunnel through space and time known as a wormhole there are two parallel universes perhaps it might be possible to build a gateway between these universes a wormhole a shortcut like the looking-glass of alice think of Alice in Wonderland she had a looking-glass and she put her hand through it and her hand went to the other side of forever that is a wormhole but could we manipulate the very fabric of time and space if we have something called negative matter or negative energy it might be possible to build a gateway to another universe a gateway to another point in space or time now of course in science fiction we have the dilithium crystals of Star Trek people talk about spice people talk about other exotic chemicals that will open these gateways well I'm a physicist to us it's negative matter or negative energy negative energy we can actually create in the laboratory that's already been done but only in microscopic quantities negative matter we've never seen before if we can find a negative matter meteorite in outer space just perhaps maybe we can harness it to open a gateway to another universe the only problem is the amount of energy required to punch a hole to the other side of the universe is impossible for us to achieve with our current technology the trick is to assemble enough positive and negative energy in order to rip open the fabric of space and time that's really hard we're talking about the energy of a black hole the energy of a star in order to bend time into a pretzel what do you mean it's impractical to go back in time can't make a wormhole what's wrong with these eggheads ok so traveling into the past might be a tad beyond our reach but here's something surprising most physicists believe it's possible relatively easy in fact to travel into the future how do you exploit iron Stein's theory of relativity to travel into the future well it turns out it's not that hard to do now it's hard from an engineering point of view you just need a really fast spaceship which we don't have but if you had one here's what you do you just go on a long journey and come back home remarkably this is possible because time behaves differently when an object or person travels at high velocity it's called time dilation if you move fast enough your clock will disagree from a clock that's been left at home the similar thing can happen if you spend a lot of time in a strong gravitational field like near a black hole for example this amazing feat has actually already been accomplished Russian cosmonaut Sonny a curriculum has spent more time in space than any other human being from 1988 to 2005 Kanekalon spent 803 days orbiting the Earth at high speed at times curriculum was traveling at 17,000 miles per hour nowhere near the speed of light but fast enough to travel forward in time it's only about one fiftieth of a second so it's almost too small to even notice but he has aged just a little bit less than let's say if he had to had a twin brother who had stayed on the ground he's just a little bit younger than his brother would have been using this theory it may be possible to travel thousands of years into the future imagine traveling all the way around the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy our galaxy now it's very big it's about 150 thousand light-years around so it's going to take a long time you start accelerating at a rate of one g which is the normal force of gravity that you feel just sitting here so you have this very mild acceleration but you keep it up long enough you're eventually going very fast when you get halfway around you start decelerating and after many many more years you end up back on earth where you started from here's the thing to someone who has stayed at home and just watched you go and is waiting for your return and they have a long wait because it's going to take 150 thousand years before you come back but for you from your point of view onboard this spaceship only 23 years will have passed so although it seems impossible time-travel is theoretically at least real and the Large Hadron Collider could yet witness science fiction become functioning science fact and some theories where there's extra dimensions of space in addition to the three that we see little compact tiny dimensions extra dimensions of space there's a speculative idea that they may be able to make a mini black hole in the Large Hadron Collider so he's it possible the mystery figure that appeared that night in Los Angeles was really a time traveler perhaps even from a future where science had finally answered the secrets of the universe and we're now able to manipulate time could be we physicists believe that a time travel is possible all the paradoxes can be resolved if a parallel reality opens up and there are no contradictions you simply change the past of another universe this also means that perhaps in the future our descendants may have the energy and the ability to create a time machine so one day if somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great-great-great-great great-great-great granddaughter don't slam the door is that weird or what a mysterious set of stone structures in rural New Hampshire could this be a place of pagan worship and human sacrifice thousands of years old the astronomical alignments are one of the key pieces of evidence to cite is ancient does this mean ancient Europeans crossed the Atlantic thousands of years before Columbus so really does open up a whole different way to look at North American history what is this place who built it and what could its existence mean for America truth in history it would seem is a sliding scale the facts that we know today may all crumble away with discoveries of tomorrow and those discoveries are often to be uncovered the most unlikely of places for example could an innocent-looking pile of rocks tucked away in the corner of the farmers field in the northeastern United States challenged everything we think we know about American history what if the first European to arrive in North America wasn't Christopher Columbus or even a Viking what if instead of coming to New England in search of religious freedom the first European settlers came to practice human sacrifice in Salem New Hampshire mysterious grouping of megalithic stones standing 14 feet high surround a compound that houses a maze of eight foot long chambers and crypts set into the ground the centerpiece a huge stone slab that looks like a sacrificial table this is Dennis stone his family has owned the site for three generations and he has an amazing theory Stone believes that this is the oldest man-made structure in the entire United States American Stonehenge may be one of the more important archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere there are different theories of who built the site if it is in fact ancient and was built by old world people this would demonstrate the people cross the Atlantic Ocean a few thousand years before Christopher Columbus or even the Vikings came to America sounds crazy doesn't have the very idea that explorers predating Columbus by millennia but across the Atlantic and made America their home well before you dismiss the idea consider this it was only in 1960 that the Norwegian archaeologist and inch dad was ridiculed when she proposed her idea that Vikings had settled North America in the 12th century but it turned out to be true in stats discovery change history and the Viking settlement she found in Newfoundland Canada is now an official world heritage site could this structure have been built by mysterious ancient travelers Stone believes similarities between his site and archaeological sites in Europe hold the key to uncovering the truth we have a couple of chambers here that are very reminiscent of chambers found in France Ireland Spain and Netherlands one of the purposes we know of is that they were used for astronomical alignments with the Sun Moon and stars and there are just own macas the Sun would rise or set over these stones so the moon would do the same thing and this may have been tied into the religious ceremonies along a stadia the shortest day of the year or the equinoxes and it's also stones that align with cross-quarter days days in between the seasons the ancient Celts and other cultures actually set up stones which were mockney's times the Celts a diverse group of tribes that dominated much of Central Europe until around 1600 years ago stone remnants of Celtic structures including elaborate burial chambers can be found all over Europe it has also been suggested that the Celts were involved in the construction of England's most famous ancient megalith Stonehenge a site some believe was created as a giant astronomical tool it stones aligned to the Solstice positions of the Sun and Moon did Celts come and settle America a thousand years before Columbus in the 1970s berry fell again a professor at Harvard stumbled upon a stone carved here on site and the kind of writing that was on the stone something called Iberian Punic the Iberian Peninsula area at that time housed the Celts David Brody is an amateur archaeological researcher he supports the idea that the celts not columbus were the first europeans to reach the new world we think of the Kelsie's being from ireland but actually originated in central europe and then went down to the Iberian Peninsula but is the celts leaving the iberian peninsula regional that i think came over here and established the cited america Stonehenge this place is becoming weirder and weirder by the minute so the heck wasn't hanging around these woods all that time ago and what were they doing could this site in New England share the same purpose as the original Stonehenge in Old England a prehistoric monument of huge carefully aligned stones assembled by ancient Britons for some mysterious pagan purpose if the Celts did build this American Stonehenge as a religious site then dentists stone has some striking ideas as to what ceremonies would have been performed here I'm standing next to the sacrificial table it's one of the main features at America Stonehenge this table measures about nine feet in length six feet in width and it sits on 4 stone legs on the surface of the stone is a rectangular cutout or groove that's been made on the surface and it has a little runoff so if a ceremony of some type was taking place a fluid could run through the channel and then run off the stone into a base perhaps although little is directly known of the Celts religious practices the Romans who fought them and even Julius Caesar himself often described how Celtic druids or priests carried out human sacrifice to honor their many pagan gods the discovery of various ancient sites of ritualized murder in Europe may support this the stone table in Salem also has another even more bizarre feature Dennis stone calls an Oracle tube this tube goes through about eight feet comes out underneath the sacrificial table the voice would project out under the table during a ceremony perhaps and people would hear the voice you think it was a God or spirit talking to them I am the god of you in the world I accept your sacrifice remember always obey the priest when we find these large elaborate stone structures historically they were done to honor gods for religious purposes whether it's the pyramids or Stonehenge in England or Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris the when ancient man went to the effort to build something this elaborate it was done for religious purposes and again that takes me back to the Celts perhaps 500 BC that's a type of thing that they did all over Europe at that time and would have done here if they came to America America settled by Iron Age Europeans it's an explosive theory but not one exactly shared by many experts research since 1940 says showing there's a great deal of differences between what we find in Ireland and what is found at this site there are major differences in the architectural styles there are differences in the engineering of how the buildings put together an expert in prehistoric stone structures James gage also believes that an ancient civilization built this place but based on carvings in the stone themselves his theory is that the structure was created by a more local people Native Americans first and foremost is the large number of Native American artifacts ivenna found at the site these artifacts range from scrapers and projectile points up we normally expect to paint cups in rubbing stones this evidence also includes clay pottery that they were actually manufacturing on site it was a small wetlands area where they were able to actually mine the clay in adjacent to it they had a small area where they were making the pots and firing them one of the more interesting features about this site is it has a number of Peck grooves shift out stone basins and they're all been created by pecking out the stone using a hammer stone and this pecking technique is very distinctive to the Native Americans the Celtic culture was a fairly advanced civilization had metal tools and they were making gold artifacts we would expect him to use you know more advanced technology than just simple era stones the Native American theory makes obvious sense but not according to David Brody it is possible that the Native Americans did build the america's stonehenge site it would have been out of the ordinary for them to have done so so I'm not inclined to think they did they didn't if eclis Native Americans in this area of the country did not typically build with stone they had stone tools and they used stone to build their hearts but they didn't build these elaborate structures typically out of stone once in a while it was his sweat lodge but there's too many of these chambers here in addition the Native American tribes although a lot of their history hasn't wiped out in the New England region they don't take ownership of this site like they take ownership of other sites that they believe they did build so I'm not gonna tell you that they didn't do it but I think the weight of the evidence is more in favor of some kind of ancient seafaring European civilization so while these experts can't agree which ancient civilization built the American Stonehenge another archaeologist Kenny Feder believes whoever is responsible was an ancient at all counts in New England three thousand years ago I don't think so but ok archaeological sites where people were so neat that they picked every stinking artifact up and left no physical evidence behind not bloody likely okay it looks like we're back to square one so who could it have been that built those incredibly weird structures was it the Celts none likely the Native Americans maybe not well how about another slightly less romantic theory one of it was assembled by a couple of drunken eighteenth-century farmers if America Stonehenge is what I think it is which is 19th century idiosyncratic structures that doesn't make it any less important than if it's a three thousand-year-old site with Celts traipsing around in southern New England makes it of different significance but I don't think it makes it less significant it just makes it different fetish theory is the structures were constructed by the descendants of the Celts the better known European settlers that came in the centuries after Christopher Columbus bringing with them traditional ways of building stone structures yeah damn right they were Celts but they were Celts from the 1800s and 1700s because those are the people who roamed here good point but can't the more recent Celtic immigration theory explained the existence of the site's most McCobb and enigmatic looking object why does American Stonehenge appear to have a sacrificial table look at the names of the towns for example in New Hampshire around where America Stonehenge is looking the towns in the counties places like Londonderry but why is it called Londonderry because of people who lived here were from Great Britain they were Celts these stones are found actually throughout New England so you sort of left with a choice either there was a there's this like widespread practice of human sacrifice throughout New England or we got something else going on I think it's something else that's going on your google lie stone or sight or press stone you'll actually come up with some antique sites will sell you stones like that the deal is if you know something about historical technology that historical process we do know that the stones like that are found throughout me they were used for a number of kind of mundane purposes not sacrificing people but in fact make you maybe making apple cider who are producing lye soap the deal is that an artifact like that an object like that is something that we in the modern world is suffering from kind of cultural amnesia we don't press our own cider we don't make lies soap anymore and so the objects the artifacts from that period that any little kid would be able to tell you oh yeah we use that for making soap today it's mysterious so are the drainage grooves on the four-ton stone table actually for apple juice not human blood it may be the most plausible theory but the mystery of the American Stonehenge cannot be cleared up quite so neatly charcoal pits at the site have been carbon-dated and believed to be more than 2,000 years old and Dennis stove still believes his site is proof that an ancient people commemorated the coming of the solstices here exactly as they may have done at the real Stonehenge the astronomical alignments are one of the key pieces of evidence the site is ancient the alignments do not work today they're off a certain amount due to the earth's tilt changing 1977 we took four years worth of survey data we sent it to the harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Cambridge Mass they ran it through the computer and they said that if these were used for astronomical purposes they would work about 1800 BC plus or minus about 200 years we have taken carbon dating zone the hilltop about 16 of them in the main site which was where we're standing right now the oldest carbon dating was four thousand years old this agrees pretty closely to the astronomical data and results American Stonehenge could be proof that ancient Europeans traveled to North America thousands of years before Columbus or it could be a rare example of Native American stone building or it's just a really weird apple cider factory built by colonial farmers only one thing is for certain the origins and purpose of American Stonehenge remains a mystery is that weird or what most people don't believe this but I have a real green thumb a secret to my success I talked to my plants I stroked them and I give them a little tender loving care why because I believe plants like humans are emotional beings they have feelings just like you and I do they love they fear they can be affectionate and they can communicate you don't believe green matter has gray matter No well watch this of all the many different organisms that are on the planet Earth common sense dictates that manage are the most advanced capable of fought reasoning and emotions a shocking new evidence suggests that plants may possess these abilities as well and even more mysterious they may have the power of ESP is this science fiction or science fact researchers attempt to establish interspecies communication is it weird or what our story begins in Italy where Carlos Ignasi runs a 24-acre vineyard in the Tuscan hills a music lover Carlo was well known to serenade his grape pickers with an accordion but in 2002 Carlo would stumble upon the true amazing power music could have when as an ecologically friendly way of controlling pests from ruining his crop shag nause placed loudspeakers all around us vineyard to play twenty four-hour-a-day classical music the pests were frightened away but that's not all something else happened something bizarre the grapevines nearest the speakers grew 50% larger than the rest of the crop matured more quickly and even grew towards the source of the music it's fantastic to see us impossible to - to believe the batches are four times more for example deliver two times more so the sound is like a like light so why is this happening is there a logical explanation or is the reason for stranger could the soaring sounds of baths and Mozart's delicate ditties revolutionized the way we treat our greenery researchers discovered that popular tracks such as Simon & Garfunkel's Ridge of troubled waters and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony improved milk yield in dairy cows by as much as one liter per day why because calming music was found to reduce stress in the animals happy moves equals more milk could something similar be happening with plants could relaxed grapes with impeccable musical tastes ripen quicker good plants have an intelligence science has yet to fathom botanist dr. Jay DeMuth or says that the grapevines response to music can be simply explained basically we are talking about vibrations plants are able to exhibit primary perception where they can pick up happenings from their surroundings and that can be read out as electrical impulses as far as classical music is concerned perhaps there are certain tones certain timbre certain levels of vibration that plants are more responsive to in that particular musical soundwaves our vibrations in the air made up of different frequencies the vibrations caused by the sound of music can be felt by the plants in their leaves or in the soil research suggests that plants may respond to music by increasing the expression of the genes stimulating growth so the plants just feel music rather than hearing it is the perceived wroth of grapes or joy just a boring biological response based on sound vibrations may be but Susan dudley a plant evolutionary ecologist has another theory for why Carlos grape vines grow so dramatically and it may have something to do with how the plants and the vineyards are related to each other every plant has mother and a father at the vineyard in Tuscany could be doing better because they're planted next to their siblings for some plants we know the plants do do better when they're planted next to their siblings and what my research does is show a possible mechanism for that that they're not producing these competitive behaviors when they're with their siblings so that's a plausible theory to create a consistent grape most vineyards use cuttings from healthy plants then grab them onto root stock this means that often most of the vines in a given field are genetically related clones I went looking to see whether plants could recognize who their relatives were and behave differently with those relatives what we found is that plants respond differently to liquid in which other seedlings had been it so you put a seedling in the liquid you take it out you put your test seedling in and you measure it and it will grow more roots if that first seedling was a stranger but it won't grow more roots that that first seedling was a sibling and we had a control where we just lifted them out put them back in again we definitely see that there's something something soluble some kind of chemical maybe that the roots probably put into the liquid that they're responding to but we don't know what it is plants compete for limited resources like sunlight nutrients and water meaning there are winners and losers in this equation Dudley's research has shown that when certain plants grow beside the kin they work together for mutual survival and are more likely to all do well with a winery usually vintners are planting all the same kind they're not planting very different kinds together so rather than better sharing because they're different they might be sharing better because they're less competitive with each other okay okay and maybe I am barking up the wrong tree sorry seriously what if the grapes of Tuscany and plants in general don't ripened or respond or grow tall and healthy because they love music what if it's because they love each other but can this sibling explanations officially solve a mystery in the Italian Vineyard family ties may make the vines grow better but why would only some vines grow toward the speaker could the answer be far stranger than anything even science fiction writers might imagine could as many researchers believe vines and other plants be sentient beings capable of displaying conscious choice I believe plants can sense now whether they can sense precisely our thoughts or the thoughts of other animals around them really remains to be proven so I wouldn't go so far as saying that here they have the ESB and everything however what I definitely can say is they would be influenced very easily by the changes in their environment and that maybe reflects to a certain extent the thought process we do not know JD pin is assistant Zak are going to put the sentient being theory to the test they're going to hook up this plant to a state-of-the-art polygraph sensors will read the subtle changes in the plant's electrical activity to see how it responds to various stimuli if there's a noticeable spike in the plans electrical activity then that would suggest that the plant can read human thoughts an absolutely curious about what is the outcome from this particular experiment because it might actually be an opening for the way my own research direction that will move into because if there is a positive positive response I would really love to follow that up in a more scientific manner for their first experiment they're going to test what many gardeners believe to be a fact that plants respond well to human touch lightly brushing the leaves and the stems of the plant no sorry Zach but there's no response now they're going to attempt what few scientists have ever tried before threatening thoughts they're gonna see if plants have ESP no response so far that's all I got yeah we haven't gotten any responses yet since there's no response Jacob and Zach are going to raise the intensity of the next experiment they're going to threaten the plant with violence cut clot olá so as soon as you were on the way to cut it there's a huge spike that's really interesting because it was at a lower level spiked up came down went up again and then has now started resting at another level so the spike actually comes prior to your action amazingly before he could cut the plant there's a noticeable spike on the line detector indicating a physiological response by the plant that would suggest that the plant could read Zach's mind this was almost the perfect moment for a plant to have become anxious when you reached it with the scissors with a very clear intention at least in your mind unspoken so again maybe maybe we are looking at something real scientifically speaking this hardly would count as a result unless we could repeat at multiple times but the fact is and it's a way it comes as a major surprise to me because I was not expecting this at all and we had already gone through one plant and looked at the other one and gone through different situations where we realize this is not happening and then suddenly when Zach moves in with the scissor and I guess with a very clear intention of carrying the threat out there there is a very very clear spike so if human beings are ever going to prove plants are sentient or have ESP more research needs to be done if it's ever proven true the implications would be enormous it would shake the very foundations of our human existence and necessitate a dramatic change in the way we relate with this mysterious specie is that we're what so three weird mysteries the multitude of even weirder possible explanation a woman materializes from nowhere into an LA bathroom did she use a wormhole to travel through time did she travel faster than light speed is any of this possible a mysterious stone structure in New England proof that the ancient Celts settled the United States was this built by Native Americans or was it created in more recent times as a booze making factory lines in Italy seemingly respond to the sounds of Mozart our plants sentient beings with human feelings and desires you decide join me next time for more stories that will undoubtedly be weird what you

Channel: Brittany Meads

Views: 228,770

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Keywords: weird, or, what, season 01, episode 06, season, episode, full episode, william hatner, william, shatner, disocvery, history, channel, Weird Or What? (TV Program)

Id: VzoCu3aYk9A

Length: 45min 3sec (2703 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2013