You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained, season seven, episode ten, Into the bad Lands. After the discovery of the strangely mutilated calf, doctor Colum Kellerher and the rest of the team from Robert Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science are a little rattled. The next few days are spent analyzing all the data they pulled from the area, but nothing unusual is found. A few days later,
a light snow has fallen over the land. In the evening, doctor Kellerher and a colleague are in the team's trailer in the paddock at the front of the ranch house when they hear the Sherman's dogs barking manically outside. The men dash out of the trailer to find Terry Sherman, tending to the nervous looking dogs as he stares off into the distance. There's something out there, he says, nodding
towards the horizon. Moments later, keller Her and his colleague are holding onto the back of Terry's pickup as it tears off toward a herd of cattle nervously huddle together at the foot of Skinwalker Ridge. The high powered beams of the truck flash across the pasture as they roll and bump over the rugged terrain. Having drawn close enough, Terry picks out a silhouetted shape standing just off from
the hurt, sheltering by the trees. Believing it to be just another one of the cows, Terry drives around in an attempt to corral it back into the pack, but when they look again, the shape has gone. Scanning the darkness beyond, they see it again, only now it's sitting high up in a tree. When they draw closer again, they can see clearly that it is no cow. Terry slams on the brakes and grabs his rifle from the back. In seconds, he's leaning against the bonnet with his eye
peering down the gun sight. The others train torches on the animal and its eyes light up. It's staring right at them. Terry, convinced this is the creature that killed his calf, lines up the shot and squeezes the trigger. The gun kicks back and the thing falls to the ground. Terry scrambles forward, scanning desperately for any sign of the creature,
but it's gone. Just then, he sends his movement to the left and turns to see something huge crouching like a dog, its thick trute muscles clearly visible under the moonlight. It stares at Terry for a second before springing high and away into the air. Terry fires two more shots into the dark, then gives chase after it. Kelleher and his colleagues find him a short time later, crouched over a small patch of snow. He directs their torches to the ground there, as they described it, later, they find
an enormous single footprint pressed into the snow. It's round at the base and roughly six inches wide, with what seems like two elongated claws coming off it. It looks a little like the print of an eagle or a hawk, but at this size, what it most resembles is a
large dinosaur. It's now June nineteen ninety seven, and doctor Kelleher, along with three colleagues and two healer dogs, is setting out to capture a mysterious light that was spotted a week earlier by another of the Big Low Team's investigators near the old ranch house. After setting up camp a few hundred yards south of the old cabin, it isn't long before the dogs begin to bristle seemingly alerted to something invisible in the space between them and the house.
Kelliher switches on his night vision goggles and gives a stifled cry. Barely a hundred yards in front of him, invisible to the naked eye, but clearly visible through the goggles is what he describes later as a bright ball of light, offering four meters off the ground. Almost as soon as he sees it, however, it disappears. Keller Her flicks a switch and bathes the pasture in the bright beams of industrial floodlights, something they'd set up specifically for
moments like these. There, shouts his colleague M, now also looking through night vision binoculars. There's something in the trees moving north. Kella Her fumbles with its camera and points it toward the tree line. He hurriedly takes a snap, holding the camera in place while he counts to twenty under his breath to give the infrared film time to
pick up the image. The dogs, barking louder out turn all their attention to whatever it is that's lurking beyond the tree line, while M scans left to right with the binoculars, tracking the shape through the trees. It's still moving, he says. Keller Heer clicks and counts to twenty again. We are watching you. Kellaher turns to his colleague and astonishment. The words had come from M's mouth, but the voice was not his. Jesus Christ, it took control of my mind,
says M, recoiling in horror. Then silence. The dogs cease their barking, and all about is still Kellerher looks on, incredulous as M struggles to come to terms with what just occurred. The pair stay there for another hour in the hope of recording any more activity, but they find nothing. Bigelow's team will return to this location numerous times over the next few weeks, only to be continually disappointed. That
is until one evening in August. It is while packing up after yet another fruitless six hour shift under the stars, that one of Bigelow's team notices something reflective on the dirt track below. It wasn't uncommon for a well polished surface or even a scrap of foil to pick up moonlight, especially under the vast desert sky with a bright full moon above. Only the moon was last full over a week ago. What's more, whatever this is appears to be
getting bigger. Before long, they realize it isn't a reflective substance at all, but some kind of light in and of itself. One of the team grabs a camera and hurriedly stuffs it with the role of infrared film, while another colleague pulls out the night vision goggles and raises them to his eyes. The pair struggle to focus on the orb of light as it continues to grow steadily in size, distorting and shifting as it expands, until it suddenly becomes clear that it isn't an orb but all.
It's a tunnel to what appears to be some other place where it is still daytime. All of a sudden, as they later reported, one of the men catches sight of something inside it, something moving. They watch in horror as a faceless creature with seemingly distended limbs and dark fur crawls forth from out of an unknown place. Small at first, it appears to grow in size as it pulls itself forward, inching closer and closer to the edge of the tunnel, before finally slipping out of the light
and dropping onto the prairie. The men continue watching, utterly, mesmerized as the creature stands up on two legs and speeds off into the fields. A moment later, the light is gone. The men, feeling suddenly exposed, pause for a brief second before hurtling down to the bottom of the ridge and back to the safety of the observation trailer. The following day, when the whole role of infrared film is developed, it reveals nothing as it happens. Despite a
number of supposedly startling observations. After almost a year of investigating, Robert Bigelow's team have failed to capture anything on film. All that time, they'd tried to be subtle due to an earlier suggestion of Terry's, who felt that every time he tried obviously to observe the anomalous activity, it would stop, as if there was some kind of awareness that he
was trying to observe it. By the end of that summer of nineteen ninety seven, however, the team decided to change tact and promptly erect six twenty four hour surveillance cameras around the property. All they had to do then was wait a full year passes without incident. Then, finally, in late July nineteen ninety eight, something peculiar happens. One morning. Terry, in his continuing capacity as ranch manager, is making his
routine check of the cameras. When he approaches the primary unit, a telegraph pole in the middle of the pasture with three cameras attached to the top. A wry smile breaks out across his face as he gazes up at the equipment. The cables that had previously been threaded so carefully through meters of PVC tubing and held in place with the duct tape were now dangling freely in the breeze. The tubing wrenched apart and discarded at the bottom of the pole.
As for the duct tape, it had completely vanished later that afternoon, having flown straight in from Las Vegas as soon as he heard the news. Doctor Colum Kellerher sits in the team trailer working through the footage from the damaged cameras. On the monitor, images of the pastures play out, the cattle ambling back and forth, flicking their tails as they chew on the grass. The images speed forward, flickering
and stretching, as Kelleher skips the tape onwards. Then releasing the dial, he lets the last few minutes play out When the timecode reaches eight thirty, the tape completely cuts out, and all the other tapes are the same, each going dark at precisely eight thirty. Doctor Kellerher realizes with some excitement that whatever happened must have occurred at that precise time. Some time later, one of the team returns to the trailer holding another tape, this time taken from a camera
that had been pointed directly at the vandalized post. If this tape works, they will see exactly what destroyed those cables. Kellerher slips the tape in to the deck and runs it back to shortly before eight thirty. Then hits play. A scene flashes up on the screen, an image of pastures and milling cattle, like before, only this time. Standing right in the middle of the image is the telegraph
pole with the three cameras attached to the top. The team watches, transfixed as the time edges ever closer to the eight to thirty mark, until finally the moment arrives eight twenty nine and fifty seven seconds, eight twenty nine and fifty eight seconds, fifty nine seconds, and then finally eight thirty, But there is nothing. The image remains just as before, with no sign of anybody tampering with anything,
not even approaching the post. The team skips the footage backwards and forwards, watching as daylight fades tonight, but still there is nothing. The following morning, the footage is taken to the investigation team's HQ in Las Vegas, where it has cleaned up and sharpened, so much so that they can even see the tiny red LEDs lit up on
the front of each camera as they record. As they play the footage back again, they watch stunned as each led light is inexplicably snuffed out at precisely eight point thirty, while all around the pastures remain empty and still. For the next two years, Terry continues to assist Robert Bigelow's team, hoping desperately for any kind of explanation as to what had terrorized his family and all the animals at the ranch, but the answers don't come. By nineteen ninety nine, the phenomena,
whatever it was, had gradually abated to almost nonexistent. There were still, apparently the occasional orb or light in places it shouldn't be, but Terry and Gwen Sherman felt that something fundamental had changed. Eventually, the Shermans make the decision to leave Bigelow Ranch behind for good, and new caretakers were installed with instructions to report on any strange activity that might occur, though to date it is not known
if any such activity has taken place. Looking at the various instants one at a time, the phenomena might have been explained away as unusual but not necessarily paranormal. When taken together, however, it was hard for Terry and Gwen not to suspect that something extraordinary UKNN and organized had either been observing them, examining them like zoologists to see how they ticked, or had simply been using their cattle
as cannon fodder with devices beyond their knowledge. They could only be thankful that whatever it was, or whoever they were, the family had not been harmed. By the end of the twentieth century, with the dissipation of activity on Bigelow Ranch, Robert Bigelow turned his focus to a new company he
founded in nineteen ninety eight called Bigelow Aerospace. The company was established to develop space destinations using the latest inexpandable technology, with plans to launch the first hotel in space by the year twenty twenty two, that idea has not yet come to pass. With interest in Bigelow Ranch beginning to wane, doctor Colin Kelleher and the rest of the investigative team were forced to call it a day, and in two thousand and four, the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS,
was eventually wound down and disbanded. The NIDS team and the Sherman family maintained to this day that they witnessed a variety of extraordinary and anomalous events, but also concede that they have no firm evidence to substantiate or back up any of their claims. In twenty sixteen, the Adamantium Real estate company, whose owners and provenance remained a mystery
to this day, took ownership of Bigelow Ranch. Mighte no official operations thought to be taking place on the site, it is believed to still be watched over by a number of cameras and motion detectors, as well as a twenty four hour surveillance team of armed ex military personnel. As our understanding of the world and the space around us continues to grow ever more sophisticated, so too do
our tools of exploration. Where once our intrepid endeavors were marked by an almost two dimensional terrestrial curiosity to look only beyond the distant mountain peaks, or across the seemingly endless bodies of water that lapped invitingly at our feet. More recently, it is to below those oceans and above
those mountain peaks that we have turned our imaginations. It is interesting, then, as our comprehension of spaces and dimensions evolve, to wonder where our descendants might find themselves venturing to one day. Equally fascinating is how easily our prevailing notions about the space around us can restrict our understanding of
what its true properties might actually be. On May twenty ninth, on the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa, a team of British scientists led by Secretary of the British Astronomical Society Arthur Eddington, are transfixed by something extraordinary occurring in the sky above them. It's shortly after thirteen hundred hours local time when a black disk begins to creep across the face of the Sun, drawing a vast
blanket of shadow over the land. Further and further it creeps until the light is all but extinguished, save for a few bright yellow beads peeking through the vast outer ridges of the jet black disc. All around the scientists, strange bands of undulating shadows ripple over surfaces as a moment of eerie silence gives way to a crescendo of
untimely cricket song. When the last of the solar crest is finally extinguished, a blinding flash of white flares out from behind, before receding to reveal the iris hue of the Sun's majestic corona, and all around, a distant hazy red glows ominously at the horizon of the Earth. It would be impossible for Eddington's team to ignore one of the most spectacular solar eclipses of the last five hundred years, But remarkably, it is not the Sun that they've come
to observe. Instead, it is to the giant orange eye of a bull that their attentions are turned, along with the other four brighter stars of the Hyades cluster that make up part of the constellation of Taurus. It is via the light omitted from these gigantic celestial bodies reaching out to us from one hundred and fifty three years in the past that Eddington and his team will record the gravitational warping of space predicted by Albert Einstein's general
theory of relativity. Within six months, when the results of the experiment are finally revealed to the world in a flurry of giddy newspaper headlines, our fundamental understanding of the universe will be changed forever. In nineteen oh five, Einstein's special theory of relativity had revolutionized the way we think
of space and time. No longer would they be considered fixed and immutable, but flexible, malleable terms dependent on the relative difference between the motion of the observed and the observer. With his General theory of relativity, Einstein had uncovered something perhaps even more profound. Where Isaac Newton before him had envisaged gravity as an attractive force operating within a three dimensional concept of space, Einstein had uncovered a fourth dimension
of space time. He theorized that gravity wasn't a force bringing objects together as such, but rather it was the bending of space itself. Although the prevailing laws of Newtonian physics had also predicted the gravitational warping of light as recorded by Eddington's team, they were wrong by roughly a half compared to Einstein's predictions. Prior to Einstein's calculations, Newton's law of universal gravitation had remained unchallenged for over two
hundred years, primarily because for all intents and purposes it worked. Indeed, Newton's laws do a great job predicting the motions of planets, or rocket shooting for the moon, or the trajectory of a ski jumper, even but when applied to the universe that Einstein had uncovered, they fundamentally break down. Einstein's conviction that the speed of light as a constant had lifted a veil to reveal a new universe that had been there all along. We'd just been too blinded by prevailing
ideas to see it. In nineteen twenty three, George Lemet, a young priest from Belgium studying at Cambridge University under Arthur Eddington's tutelage, found something unexpected in Einstein's calculations. At the time, it was generally held that the universe was infinitely old, that it had always existed, and the various bodies within it were completely static. Yet when Lemet examined Einstein's calculations, he discovered something quite different. The universe wasn't
static at all, It was expanding. Russian cosmologist and mathematician Alexander Friedman had also hit upon this idea as early as nineteen twenty two, when he provided calculations for both an expansion and steady state model of the universe. Friedman would never live to see the proof of his theory, however, as he died tragically of typhoid in nineteen twenty five at the age of just thirty seven. In any case, in nineteen twenty seven, la Mate published his findings with
great excitement. Unfortunately for him, however, nobody paid any attention to it, except for Einstein, who reportedly met him later that year and told him, your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable. What was most troubling about the implications of Lemetra's idea, and what had so upset Einstein, was that if everything was moving further away, it must have at one point been a lot closer together. Lemetre called his discovery his hypothesis of the primeval atom.
We might know this better to day as the Big Bang theory. This theory was given greater credence when astronomer Edwin Hubble announced in nineteen twenty nine that distant galaxies were moving further away from us and faster than those closest to us. Then, in nineteen sixty four, Arno Penzius and Robert Wilson, with the guidance of Robert Dickie, uncovered the existence of the cosmic microwave background residual radiation pervading all of the known universe that many consider to be
the best evidence to date for the Big Bang. Realizing his mistake in the end, Einstein proclaimed Lemetra's theory the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened, demonstrating that what counts ultimately is the data, not the ideology. What can't be overlooked is the reason that Einstein had missed what was already apparent in his calculations. It wasn't because he didn't understand it, but rather because
he was effectively blind to it. Einstein was so convinced that such a universe wasn't possible, even creating an additional component to account for it that he called the cosmological constant and that he later said was its greatest mistake, that he missed the proof of expansion already inherent in
his own calculations. Just as Einstein had been prepared to look beyond conventional wisdom to reassess the work of Isaac Newton, so too had Lamet disregarded pervading convictions of the day in order to see the universe anew Though it must be added that with eye Einstein being the genius that he was, it turns out his derided cosmological constant might have a function after all, with some linking it to
the unknown quantity often referred to as dark energy. Although it is of course one thing to reinterpret calculations that have already been demonstrated to work, it is quite another to speculate on something with no hard evidence whatsoever. Lest we forget, it is less than one hundred years ago since we thought the universe had no beginning, was static in composition, composed of only three dimensions, and consisted entirely
of the Milky Way. Today, many leading scientists are beginning to consider the possibility that our universe is only one of many universes existing within a much broader region of space time than we had previously imagined. With our ever advancing understanding of the quantum realm, we find ourselves taking seriously notions such as the many world's interpretation, first proposed by physicist Hugh Everett i ID In the nineteen fifties,
for which he was widely ridiculed at the time. Everett's idea poses the possibility of an infinite number of universes branching out from ours, providing an alternative universe at every conceivable moment. The idea has some startling implications, not least the possibility that everything that could ever happen already has, having barely had a moment to wrap our heads around
Einstein's four dimensional universe. Advocates of the branch of physics known as string theory proposed that space might actually consist of eleven or even twenty six dimensions. There are some, however, who would discourage our intrepid ventures, who aren't so keen on the prospect of uncovering new worlds and whatever else
we might find along the way. As Stephen Hawking pointed out, the history of humankind is littered with the debris of civilizations destroyed at the hands of those who considered themselves superior. If we struggle to see the world in the same way within our own species, let alone, how irrelevant we consider the lives of the millions of other species with whom we share the planet. What complications might arise should
we be confronted by a species more advanced than ours. If, in our search for hidden worlds, we find a gateway to access one, what price might we pay for opening it? Perhaps sticking to our own patches best lest we suffer the fate of Frank Cotton, for example, from Clive Barker's darkly erotic pain to Human Flesh, The hell Bound Heart. In Barker's novella The hedonistically Curious, Frank, in his quest for ever more sensual pleasure, is introduced to a mystical
puzzle box known as the La Martian Configuration. It is said that the box opens a portal to an extra dimensional realm of unfathomable pleasure, administered by a race of powerful entities known as Cenobytes. It is only when Frank successfully unlocks the portal that he realizes, to his horror, that the zadomasochistic cenobites demons to some angels to others have an understanding of pleasure that is somewhat different to ours.
Frank's reward for accessing their world is to have his skin ripped from his body before spending an eternity in torture. From most human perspectives, the cenobites are monstrous. From theirs, they are simply cenobites. For now, at least, we need not worry about such horrors. But it's worth bearing in mind just how often and significantly extraordinary theories drawn from
maths can predate our ability to physically prove them. Although those multiverse and many world's interpretation theories are only presently speculation, they might one day prove to be places we will
not only communicate with, but visit too. As unfathomable as some ideas may at first appear, sometimes it isn't until our perceptions of what is possible have shifted that previously unseen layers of the universe or indeed universes, can be peeled back to reveal their true nature underneath, even if the evidence was in front of us all along. To paraphrase philosopher Roger Scrutton, the consolation of the imagination often
turns out not to be imaginary consolation. Ultimately, no matter how much further or deeper we look, perhaps there will always be something that we don't know, hidden away from the beaming light of human endeavor. But one thing seems certain. As long as we are around to do so, we will never stop searching for whatever that is. This episode was written by Richard McLain Smith Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now
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