You've heard of the Incredible Hulk,
but tonight, we're going to introduce
you to the Incredible Tulk.
He appears to be capable of superhuman feats of strength.
How does he do it?
Just watch.
October 2017, it's a seemingly typical day in Luton, England.
A nearby security camera is recording
as a determined man approaches a small, blue car
parked on the street.
He reaches under the front bumper,
and after a few seconds, proceeds
to not only lift the vehicle up, but actually push it backwards.
Look again.
The car is parked, but he's able to push it out
of the way in his bare feet.
The man performing this incredible feat of strength
is Hakan Acar, a.k.a.
the Incredible Tulk.
HAKAN ACAR: I couldn't go anywhere because someone
blocked my driveway.
So my thought process was I'm going to go to the car.
I'm going to see how heavy it is, decided to lift there.
I started just pushing and pushing
and pushing until the car was actually
veering off into the road.
NARRATOR: Hakan isn't the only modern-day Hercules
caught on camera treating a car like a children's toy.
This video from Russia in 2016 shows a man overpowering
this vehicle's acceleration.
So how are these guys doing this?
Some have speculated that there
might be a genetic mutation behind super strength.
There's a protein called myostatin, which typically
inhibits the growth of muscles.
But if you have this condition that limits myostatin,
your muscles will actually grow bigger.
NARRATOR: Artificial substances can also be involved, pushing
the limits of human strength.
Steroids are the modern method, of course,
but the practice goes back ages.
We know that warriors in South America from Aztec and Mayan
cultures would often ingest plants that contained what we
would call narcotics today for the purpose
of getting ready for combat.
NARRATOR: Mescaline, which naturally occurs in cacti,
such as peyote, were common sources of such drugs.
MJ BANIAS: It reduces fear, but it also opens up blood vessels.
It opens up how much oxygen the body can take in.
NARRATOR: Hakan assures us that's not
what's giving him his strength.
HAKAN ACAR: I've never took anything in my life.
I've always been naturally quite strong.
And then, once I started actually going to the gym
and training, I realized that my strength
levels were quite high.
So Hakan's superior strength really is the result of nature
and regular trips to the gym.
But is his ability to move an entire car as impressive
as it looks to the rest of us?
Or is there something else at work here?
Let's have our experts do the heavy lifting.
[music playing]
Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi says Hakan's physical strength is part
of the equation, but he is also getting
a big assist from an age-old scientific principle.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: We know cars are heavy,
on average around 3,000 pounds.
But he's using one of the six simple machines,
and that is the lever.
The front tires are where the fulcrum is located.
And he's basically just lifting it off the ground a little bit,
one end of it, and that's very different than just
picking up a car and lifting it above your head.
NARRATOR: Hakan has essentially turned the car
into one big resistance arm that redistributes its own weight
toward the back wheels, similar to how
you can move a bunch of heavy rocks in a wheelbarrow.
Professor Michio Kaku also says it's not the muscles you may
think that are at work here.
We're not talking about upper body muscular strength.
We're talking about his feet helping to push the car,
and the car in turn is designed to minimize friction
in the horizontal direction.
NARRATOR: That explains why those bare feet
seem to help as well.
HAKAN ACAR: My crocs ended up getting
flung off at the same time.
I thought I'd get a bit more traction with my feet.
NARRATOR: Hakan built up a greater coefficient of friction
with the road allowing for even more horizontal force.
And as for the guy in Russia battling the accelerating car--
MICHIO KAKU: Look at the wheels.
He's lifted the car off the ground,
so most of the energy of the gasoline
is being used to simply spin wheels.
NARRATOR: Because this is a front-wheel drive vehicle,
the back tires on the ground aren't
powered by the accelerator.
He appears to be able to take a car's forward motion
and stop it when actually that energy is being wasted.
Our verdict, a blend of strength and proportional mass.
There's no doubt that Hakan has above-average strength,
but a variety of outside conditions
are making the Incredible Tulk's astounding feat slightly easier
than it looks.
May 2021, Canadian resident Rob connects with Chris
from Utah on a video chat.
The two met on a Facebook group that
explores the idea of possible extrasensory powers.
Chris claims to have one particularly shocking ability.
There you go.
NARRATOR: With a piece of foil on one finger,
Chris holds up a light bulb and presses the end,
and suddenly, he's able to make it light up without any wires.
Turn it all around everywhere, so people can
see there's nothing anywhere.
Perfect.
NARRATOR: The two got together to talk to us.
ROB: I was skeptical.
I got him to take his camera and show it all around because I
was wondering if there was some kind
of a static generator or a Tesla coil, but there wasn't.
NARRATOR: Chris says this extraordinary ability was
taught to him by a man in South America who honed this power
through years of meditation.
CHRIS: We're like a capacitor or a battery.
That's what my teacher taught me.
All I'm doing is I'm gathering an abundance of negative ions
from the atmosphere and charging my body with it,
so I create a voltage differential.
And so what you're seeing most of it is static discharge.
Now, does that hurt, Chris?
Oh, it-- it drains.
It's physical exercises like moving his muscles
in a certain way, breathing a certain way,
and it creates the charge.
It pulls negative ions out of the air.
So the negative ions in his body are going through the bulb,
lighting it up, and then they pass on their way to ground
and discharge to the ground.
It's really just about physics.
Now, the average human produces about 100 watts
of electricity at rest, but we generally
lack the ability to focus that energy
into a consistent current.
So how is Chris able to do this?
Let's ask the experts.
[music playing]
So of course, our first question,
is this just a clever trick?
Mick West thinks the answer is yes.
He's actually got a little bit of foil
on the end of one finger.
If you look at a regular light bulb,
you see it's got one contact in the middle and then the other
contact where the screws are.
And electricity normally flows across those.
But if you stick a battery and a small bulb
inside the light bulb, you can actually create a trick light
bulb that will light up when touching a bit of aluminum foil
to the two contacts, and I think that's all
that's going on here.
NARRATOR: But maybe that's not how the trick is done.
Wow.
NARRATOR: Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi says it may be possible
he's not collecting ions from the air,
but that he's conducting the electricity
coming from somewhere else.
Our bodies are 50% water.
And the water in our bodies is a pretty
good conductor of electricity.
The body can hold a voltage if he's directly connected
to a source of power, and he can transfer
that voltage to the bulb, causing it to illuminate.
NARRATOR: It's not out of the question
then that Chris is hoaxing us by hooking himself
up to a low-voltage current.
Contact? Yup.
NARRATOR: But even a small sustained amount
could have damaging effects.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: A current going through your body,
particularly if it goes through the heart,
it'll upset the heart's rhythms.
So the first question may be, how are they surviving this?
Ow.
NARRATOR: When we talked to Chris and Rob,
they insisted no wires or trick bulbs were involved
and even demonstrated this power in a new way.
Let me hold your hand, OK, and I'm going to take the ball.
And I'm going to touch to the ground and the table.
There it is.
There we go.
If you look around the table, there's
nothing attached to the table.
There's nothing attached to Chris.
It's not a trick light bulb.
I can't make it go on by touching it.
No way, no how.
But if I grab his hand, then I can do it.
Ow.
[laughs]
Our experts were pretty convinced this was a hoax,
but even though we weren't with Chris and Rob in person,
their demonstration was pretty convincing.
Since we can't explain how he's doing it,
we're going to call this an unexplained trick.
In July of 2017 in Zhuhai, China,
it's a typical day as a motorist drives
through a quiet parking lot.
There's nothing to indicate that a potentially
deadly tragedy is seconds away.
Watch closely on the right of a security footage as the car
seems to hit a bump.
And suddenly, we see a child emerge from under its wheel.
The car stops, but incredibly, the child
seems to walk away unharmed.
A similar miraculous video emerged from Nanjing, China
in 2016.
[music playing]
And yet another in Mumbai, India in 2018.
[music playing]
Author Alexis Brooks says there have been actual documented
cases of humans born with nearly indestructible bones,
including a man in 1994 who walked
away from a near-fatal car crash virtually unharmed.
The X-ray showed that he had negligible injuries,
and the doctors, of course, scratched their head.
They discovered that he had a very rare bone mutation.
His bone density was actually eight times more dense
than the average human being's.
When the doctors told the man of what they found,
he said that doesn't surprise me at all.
It's no wonder I've never been able to stay afloat
when I try to swim.
NARRATOR: Researchers at the Yale Bone Center later
discovered the man wasn't the only one
with these near-indestructible bones.
Do these kids have the same condition?
There are a few open questions here.
First, are these videos real or hoaxes?
And if they are real, how did these kids survive?
Let's turn to our experts.
[music playing]
Video forensic expert Michael Primeau
runs tests on the video from Zhuhai,
comparing it to what another camera recorded
from an overhead angle.
From these two different perspectives,
there is a consistency between how the vehicle travels
from its passenger frontside tire
and its passenger rearside tire as it travels over the subject.
Would that be difficult to manufacture, the vehicle's
movements over the subject?
Yes.
NARRATOR: So we're going to say this video is real,
but physics professor Michio Kaku
says in a small, almost miraculous number of cases,
it may not require superhuman bones for children
to walk away.
MICHIO KAKU: We think of the kid as like a small adult.
You realize that the laws of physics
apply differently to the child.
The child has a much smaller height off the ground.
This car goes over the child very quickly,
minimizing the energy transfer to the child,
while an adult would have sustained maximum damage.
NARRATOR: Dr. Kaku explains this in terms
most drivers can understand.
When a car goes over a twig, the twig hardly notices at all.
It doesn't necessarily brake because the time of impact
is so tiny, and the energy transfer to the twig
is almost minimal.
But think of a car going over a log.
NARRATOR: The log is much taller than the twig
and thus creates much more sudden vertical force
between the car and the log.
The energy transfer is much greater.
There's much more damage.
So our verdict--
the videos are real, and these children
were likely spared by physics and tremendous good fortune.
However, the vast majority of children in this situation
would not survive.
So always, always drive carefully and keep
your kids out of traffic.
It's August 2011 in West Allis, Wisconsin.
Dozens of people are watching a seemingly unassuming acrobat
flip over some of those gathered to watch,
and his grand finale is eye popping.
Watch that again in slow motion.
The stuntman runs full speed towards
an oncoming black sports car.
Just as it seems he will be hit, he takes a flying leap
and flips right over it cleanly.
And he's not the only one who appears to be pulling off such
a potentially deadly stunt.
In November 2020, a Michigan man was
filmed flipping over a red sports
car accelerating towards him.
MAN: Oh, my god.
NARRATOR: In another viral video,
a British gymnast backflips over a speeding Formula
One race car like it's nothing.
These situations would end in disaster for most humans.
Here's a memorable fail, makes you
wonder if this isn't another CGI prank like we've seen before.
You may remember the guy dodging traffic in Colombia.
And if it's not a hoax, exactly how
are these men pulling this off?
[music playing]
There is this ability in some individuals
to shift the rules of reality or the physics of oneself.
There have been yogis who, while in the process of deep prayer,
were seen floating, literally levitating above the ground.
NARRATOR: However, some of those claims of levitation,
like that of Yogi Subbayah Pullavar,
supposedly observed by 150 people in 1936,
turned out to be a clever hoax involving a concealed pole.
So are these modern displays of gravity defiance also
fakes or the real deal?
The current Guinness World Record
for a standing vertical leap is 67 inches,
and that's without a flip and a car careening towards someone.
So is this really possible?
And what to make of those failed attempts?
Whoa!
We asked the experts.
[music playing]
First, Mick West looks for signs any of these videos were faked.
Check out this example.
Here, the effect was achieved by combining
a shot of the flip and one of a driving car taken later.
But the Wisconsin flipper is different.
There's nothing that leaps out to me as being
a particularly fake video.
We see his reflection in the windscreen
when he jumps over it, here.
We see the reaction of the crowd.
The shadows also line up in this video from the parking lot,
but the video on the racetrack raises a flag.
You'll see right here there's a large chunk
of the rear spoiler missing--
and not only just in that frame, but in other frames as well.
There's a chunk missing right here.
He's obviously very capable of doing backflips.
I think they've taken two shots identically,
with the camera perhaps synchronized,
and composited them together.
And they've unfortunately not done a perfect job of it.
NARRATOR: As for the other two videos,
professor Michio Kaku says these stunts are
certainly possible for certain humans
with the right physical traits.
The key physical characteristics
that these people have to have is coordination
of their lower body weight.
You want to be able to have strong leg muscles.
It's the vertical lift from a dead stop
that allows you to perform these gyrations in the air.
AMY ESKRIDGE: You can think of it like a spring.
The amount of force that a spring exerts
is directly correlated to how far you push
the spring down and then how far the spring then
expands back up.
It's the same with muscles.
NARRATOR: It also requires a certain mental acuity.
You have to overcome the tendency to tense
up as the car is coming at you.
You want to approach it in a loosened and relaxed state.
You want your muscles to start out maximally lengthened so
that you get the most force that you possibly
can out of that contraction.
The single most important characteristic that you
have to master is timing.
If you take off too late, the car hits you.
You take off too early, you land on top of the car.
So our verdict, these stunts can
be faked, as in the case of the racetrack video,
but there are certainly people out there capable
of leaping over a moving car.
In the authentic videos, the talented stuntmen
got lucky with the timing, but it
could have still ended badly.
So don't go trying this at home.