WILLIAM SHATNER: Northern Mexico, April, 2000.
In the mineral-rich town of Naica,
more than 1,000 feet below the surface of the Earth,
a group of miners drilling through a cave wall make
a remarkable discovery, not of precious metals,
but something far more wondrous and mysterious--
a glittering cavern, untouched for half a million years,
filled with the largest crystals ever found.
It's amazing.
There are crystals that are huge, so big you
can actually walk across them.
And for these crystals to have gotten as big as they are,
they had to have been growing for hundreds of thousands
of years.
It's a fascinating location.
This is something you would think
would only exist in the world of science fiction and fantasy.
But the fact is, it's all too real.
WILLIAM SHATNER: Measuring up to an astonishing 40 feet
in length and weighing as much as 55 tons,
the giant beams are the purest form of selenite crystal
in the world.
Crystals are the most orderly structure in nature.
And they have the ability to absorb frequency and energy
from objects around them.
Now it is my theory that these giant pylons
have the ability to transmit and receive information and light.
WILLIAM SHATNER: Only a few months
after its discovery, a team of scientists
was sent in to study this geological anomaly.
They soon learned that Naica's crystal cave may be,
not only beautiful, but deadly.
TRAVIS TAYLOR: It's 90% to 100% relative humidity
inside this cave, and it's always
over 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
You might think, well, 113 degrees isn't that bad.
It gets to 140 degrees in the deserts in Iraq all the time,
and people live there.
But the relative humidity in those deserts is 10%.
In this cave, there's so much humidity you can't
sweat and cool your body off.
LEELA HUTCHISON: I received an invitation
to go on an expedition, an exploration
of these giant crystals.
I was aware of the heat and humidity,
but nothing prepared me for what hit
me when I entered those caves.
I felt like I was hit by a tsunami of tremendous heat
and humidity.
I started shaking.
I was scared.
These are near fatal conditions.
WILLIAM SHATNER: Due to the crystal cave's
lethal atmosphere, the research team
was restricted to 10-minute exposures
to avoid being cooked alive.
For gemologist Leela Hutchinson, the most
unexpected discovery wasn't something she saw,
but something she heard.
One of the things that I realized,
as I had to focus so intensely to keep my wits about me,
was this ability to hear a low hum.
[humming]
And I thought that was very strange.
Nikola Tesla was quoted as once saying that we may not
understand the growth of a crystal,
but nonetheless it is "a living being."
WILLIAM SHATNER: Energy from living giant crystals.
In an attempt to navigate the unusual properties
of the crystals within the Naica cave,
NASA developed special cooling equipment, allowing scientists
to withstand the cave's lethal conditions for as
much as 30 minutes at a time.
And according to their research, the hum
emanating from the crystal cave may not
be because its crystals are storing energy,
but because they're harboring something
even more unexpected--
life.
LEELA HUTCHISON: In the 2008 expedition,
the NASA scientists went into caves
and drew out fluid inclusions in the largest crystals
and found microbes that are considered
to be extremophiles--
microbes that are living organisms,
they're single-celled, and they have
the ability to survive and thrive in extreme environments.
One of the interesting things about the extremophiles
was there is nothing in our genetic database
that comes close to what these extremophiles are.