They say dogs experience the world differently from humans.
Their senses of smell and hearing
are far better than ours.
But a recent video has people wondering
if these superpowers go far beyond their noses and ears.
On a sweltering July day in 2020,
UK residents Meg Oxtoby and Jeff Parlett are on a hike
with their trio of Hungarian Vizslas,
unaware of what they're about to witness.
We were walking along, just having a chat
like we normally do, and then we noticed
that the dogs were not moving.
At first, this looks like a photograph, but keep watching.
The camera starts moving, and yet the dogs all appear
to be frozen in their tracks.
We couldn't believe it.
You could see the leaves moving and all the bushes,
but the dogs were completely still.
I'm telling you, we are not freezing
or slowing down this video.
You can tell by the shrubbery right
here, that it's moving in the wind!
Now check out how this dog has his leg raised and tail curled.
And this other dog is frozen in mid-step.
Look, it seems impossible to maintain balance like that.
The three Vizslas stay in that position for four whole minutes
before resuming their normal dog activity.
We were completely gobsmacked.
HOST: Ancient cultures from the Greeks, to the Romans,
to Koreans all have myths about dogs
having supernatural ability.
The Mayans believe that dogs, known for being great swimmers,
swam the souls of the dead across a shadowy lake
to the afterlife.
Forensic investigator Chase Kloetzke wonders if something
like that is at work here.
Are there, like, forces somehow
making them stop like that?
It seems like a theory is that dogs
have a spiritual side almost.
They sense things like earthquakes,
illness, even death sometimes.
Recent studies have explored whether dogs
have some sort of sixth sense to communicate telepathically.
Meg and Jeff concur.
Their dogs seem to have some kind of canine ESP.
They knew what they were all doing,
and they knew how long to stay still for.
So it's just amazing how they can communicate
without actually speaking.
So that side of it is kind of magical, really.
Oh!
That was me trying to freeze for just five seconds.
It's impossible!
I'm too twitchy.
So forget about four whole minutes.
It's clear these dogs can do some amazing things, right,
but can they really freeze themselves in mid-step?
Let's take the video to our experts.
Zoologist Roxy Furman considers whether a supernatural force
may have terrified the dogs into a form of paralysis.
Dogs definitely do freeze when they're afraid,
so there could be something that's made them scared.
But there's nothing else in their body language
that indicates fear.
Their ears are up, their tails up.
Vizslas are hunting dogs, but I don't think that they can be
that still for the entire duration of a four-minute video
without kind of any movement.
It looks like it's been edited in some way, to me.
HOST: Compare this other video of hunting
Vizslas with Meg and Jeff's.
You can see these other dogs don't maintain their posture
as well or as long.
So maybe Roxy's right--
Meg and Jeff's dog video can't be real.
So there are apps that can be downloaded
on these mobile devices that can animate
certain areas of a picture while preserving
other areas frozen in time.
Although these apps can deceive a viewer,
we found no evidence to support that this file
was manipulated or slowed down or frozen in any way.
HOST: So this is, in fact, real.
Still, biology professor Floyd Hayes
believes this is just the product
of centuries of breeding.
This is a behavior that is selectively bred
for in several breeds of dogs, although it is
reinforced in dogs by training.
In fact, they actually can be trained
to lift the paw above the ground when they are pointing.
HOST: Hayes may be on to something here.
At the end of the video, we do see the dogs unfreeze
as soon as a bird flies away.
But here's the catch--
Meg and Jeff say they have never trained
their dogs to behave like this.
We teach them, you know, sit and stay.
But this-- this was coming on a completely different scale,
and something that I can't see being
taught to them whatsoever.
Our verdict?
This is still an animal anomaly.
These three Vizslas really did freeze
in place for four minutes.
And if Meg and Jeff truly didn't train
them to do this, how they stopped time
is still a doggone mystery.
October 2018-- Jason Asselin is giving friends
a tour along the shores of Lake Superior
near Marquette, Michigan.
As we're walking along the lake shore,
I heard somebody gasp.
And I looked over, and I saw them
pointing out into the water and said, "what is that out there?"
HOST: Jason pulls out his camera and starts recording.
There's what appears to be a tall and large
object on the horizon.
So let's take a closer look.
The object is gray in color, but the shape
appears pretty blurry.
Jason and his friends think it might be a ship.
JASON ASSELIN: This ship would have had to have been
hundreds of feet into the air.
We never thought that it was a "ghost ship" at the time.
But when I got home and watched the video,
that's all I could think of--
we just saw a ghost ship.
MJ BANIAS: Since the late 1800s, there
have been hundreds and hundreds of shipwrecks that
have occurred on Lake Superior.
It's definitely a dangerous patch
of water that is essential for trade, but very risky
to travel in.
HOST: From the SS Western Reserve
in 1892 to The Hudson in 1901, many large freighters
have sunk in bad weather only to be seen again,
allegedly plying the waters long after a tragic wreck.
According to local legend, one of the most famous ships
to have gone down is the SS Bannockburn.
Locals call it the Flying Dutchman of Lake Superior,
and people still claim to see it to this day.
HOST: That's a reference to the legendary Flying Dutchman,
the doomed 17th century ship that's been sighted
and spoken of for centuries.
Jason can't help but wonder if this
is the mysterious phenomenon he's captured on camera.
We just witnessed something out of this world.
There's a poem about the world's most famous
phantom ship with the line, "they
who see the Flying Dutchman never, never reach the shore."
But when it comes to getting answers, never say never.
Here's what we found.
First, science writer and forensic video analyst
Mick West focuses on the shape of the object in Jason's video.
He notes that most famous shipwrecks in Lake Superior
are freighters with steam engines.
This looks different.
It looks like a sail ship.
I don't know whether they have big sail ships
on the Great Lakes, but that's what it looks like.
And if that's unexpected, then that's a-- that's a clue
that it's not actually a ship.
HOST: Next, the team considers another possibility.
Physicist Dr. Michio Kaku says it might be a mirage.
A mirage is caused by temperature inversion,
and dense air bends light more than hot air.
HOST: A temperature inversion can
make images below the horizon visible, distorted
in the distance.
So could the weather be causing this effect?
Atmospheric scientist Dr. Deanna Hence
looked at the data the day the sighting happened, and sees
just such an inversion.
The temperature is decreasing, and it's actually
getting closer to zero.
So this is that temperature inversion
that can lead to that warm air sitting on top of cold air.
This can actually really change how light can propagate
through the atmosphere.
HOST: Then Mick West tries to put the pieces together.
Could a temperature inversion have distorted something
that is already there?
Turns out there's a small island 12 miles offshore in this area
that's normally hard to see.
MICK WEST: Up above, we have a view of the island.
So this is the direction we're looking from, so I just simply
lined up the lighthouse here in the top with the lighthouse
down here.
So that lines up perfectly.
So what is that thing?
The key for us was the temperature
data and that island.
Our verdict-- mirage.
A temperature inversion caused an island
that's usually a bump on the horizon
to look like a phantom ship.
It's January 17, 2020, in Fargo, North Dakota.
Winter has really set in with packed snow and ice
on the ground, and temperatures dipping to 1 degree overnight.
After looking at an office space to rent, accountant and mother
of six Nicole Heffner returns to her car and records
something very strange.
It was very icy.
And it was so windy that I could hardly even walk
on the sidewalk because it was almost blowing my feet out
from underneath of me.
And I noticed that there was a light pole in the parking lot
that was just wiggling, and it was rattling really loudly.
Everyone thought it was really unique and crazy and special.
It just made you think that we can all feel the cold.
It affects things that even aren't alive, like our cars
and the buildings.
HOST: And here's what makes this a mystery.
We can see that the wind was blowing--
look at that bush.
But strangely, there's an identical pole
in the background that doesn't seem to move at all.
Animism is a religious belief that objects
and plants have souls.
And while there is no way to test whether that's true
or not, we can try to see if there's
a scientific explanation for what we're seeing here--
no matter how uncanny it may be.
So let's have our experts weigh in.
Could the cold have caused this?
Atmospheric scientist Dr. Dianna Hence has pulled up the weather
data from that day when temperatures were
well below the freezing mark.
DIANNA HENCE: Typically speaking,
these kind of poles easily withstand cold temperatures.
We see these kind of light poles all over the country,
and they're built to withstand a wide range of conditions.
HOST: That takes us to the wind.
Could it be to blame?
Given that hint that the wind was affecting the bush
within the video screen, I just wanted to check
and see the wind speeds.
It turns out that they were going at a pretty healthy clip,
anywhere from roughly about 30 to closer to 40 miles per hour.
HOST: In fact, Hence says a blizzard was blowing
through the region that weekend, at times
causing whiteout conditions.
But physicist Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi says
it's not only the speed of the wind
that matters, but its direction and frequency.
HAKEEN OLUSEYI: Any gust of wind is not
going to cause a light pole to shake in this way.
What we're looking at, potentially,
is resonant phenomena-- and so what matters
is the frequency of the wind.
Everything solid has a natural frequency of vibration.
Well, you don't have to hit an object with a hammer,
you can hit it with the wind.
The wind makes vibrations in this lamppost,
and these vibrations are magnified
if they resonate with the length of the lamppost.
HOST: So when the vibration of the wind heading the light post
has the same frequency as the natural frequency of the post,
it amplifies the vibration, causing this resonance effect.
Physicist Dr. Michio Kaku says if the resonance
were to get strong enough, the light pole
might actually collapse.
That's what happened in 1940 in Washington.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed
as a consequence of wind.
Wind passing over the bridge causing the entire bridge
to oscillate like a snake.
HOST: This is a phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter, which
occurs when the energy from the wind
is rapidly absorbed by the structure
and converted into mechanical vibrations.
So our verdict-- it was certainly
cold enough in North Dakota to make people shiver,
but the light post is vibrating so violently because the wind
gusts are causing resonance.
And the adjacent light post isn't moving,
because the wind is hitting it at a different frequency--
perhaps because the vibrating post is in a tight wind tunnel.
It's May 2020, and when Alexa Walkovitz learned her mother's
dog Lala was lost, she and her friend Anna
did something you might find hard to believe.
We look in our [inaudible],, we picked the settings,
and we just think really, really long and hard about Lala.
Let's visualize in our mind us finding her.
HOST: What?
Well, believe it or not, it's all about an app
called Randonautica.
Alexa and her friend set an intention and thought
of her mother's dog.
The Randonautica app, which claims to direct people
to a real-world encounter with those intentions,
then displayed random GPS coordinates near her home
in the Mojave Desert.
We're walking forward, walking forward,
and Anna turns to me and kind of like says, what's that?
There was a little animal.
Where did you come from?
And I realized it was a dog.
I didn't even see it!
HOST: Take another look.
Out of nowhere, this dog appears in the desert.
Now, it turned out this dog wasn't her mother's.
It had escaped from a nearby property.
And although Alexa never found Lala,
she is convinced the app taps into the power of the mind.
It was kind of a healing adventure,
because maybe that was my dog speaking through that dog,
and was trying to say to you, like, listen, it's OK.
Here I am to comfort you for a moment.
HOST: Experiences like Alexa's made
Randonautica the craze of 2020.
In just three months, the app drew over 15 million downloads,
with thousands of posts on social media of people
declaring their intentions.
WOMAN: The intention for my Randonautica journey is purple.
HOST: Heading to random locations--
Is that a purple house?
HOST: --and finding their wishes at least partially fulfilled.
Like thinking of purple, and then having
the app lead to this backyard.
WOMAN: This is kind of blowing my mind right now.
So does the world of the mind connect
with the physical world?
Can Randonautica really manifest our intentions?
We asked our friendly physicist to come up
with an experiment to test it.
Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi and Dr. Michio Kaku
give us our guidelines.
In order to test this idea to see if it works,
you have to do a lot of tests to remove
the statistical uncertainties, and you
have to keep very careful records of when you're right
and when you're wrong.
WOMAN: There it is.
Second, when it comes to a goal,
make it specific and not metaphorical.
My intention was adventure and cool stuff,
and this is so cool.
Not something that looks pretty.
WOMAN: Wow!
No-- cash.
That, to me, would be a very convincing experiment.
HOST: So that's just what we did,
asking our test subject to declare cash as her intention.
$100.
HOST: The app generates random GPS coordinates.
Now let's see where we're going.
Part of a hairbrush?
HOST: So far, no cash.
All right, my intention, $100.
$100.
Found a weird buckle thing.
HOST: Our subject keeps repeating the experiment.
My intention, $100.
HOST: Then, at one location, no dollar bills, but--
Found some batteries.
So we didn't find any money at this location,
but there is a bank really close to here.
So you never know.
Maybe that's what drew me here.
HOST: Like many Randonautica stories,
the exact intention didn't manifest,
but something kind of related.
So what's happening here?
Kaku believes the explanation is something
called the synchronicity effect, a phenomenon
where people interpret two coincidental events
as intertwined.
WOMAN: Wow!
Synchronicity, for example, is you're thinking about Joe,
and Joe calls you on the telephone.
And you say to yourself, a-ha!
I knew it.
I'm psychic.
WOMAN: This is kind of blowing my mind right now.
HOST: But Kaku explains, while everyone
remembers the occasional hits--
Most of the time they're misses.
You forget about them.
But think of all the times when you
thought about Jane and Harry, and they didn't call you.
Our verdict-- most likely coincidence,
which comes from people making very
general wishes like something that will make me happy.
But there is a lot we still don't know about this universe.
But that's what we think.
What do you think?