1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,000 ivity. 2 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:31,920 Why do stones move all by themselves, 3 00:00:31,920 --> 00:00:39,360 in California's Death Valley? Can frogs and toads really live for centuries 4 00:00:39,360 --> 00:00:48,880 entombed in solid rock? Do the mountains of Mongolia still harbor neanderthal man? 5 00:00:48,880 --> 00:00:54,080 Did he die out 40,000 years ago, or does this ice block contain a survivor? 6 00:00:54,080 --> 00:01:01,440 This man helped build the world's first atom bomb. Has he also found the key to the age-old 7 00:01:01,600 --> 00:01:12,080 puzzle of ball lightning? The journey from the great rock of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka has taken us 8 00:01:12,080 --> 00:01:19,440 all around our earth and beyond. To Stonehenge in England and the Midsummer Sunrise. 9 00:01:21,520 --> 00:01:24,560 To Atacama in Chile and its unknown giant. 10 00:01:25,520 --> 00:01:31,840 To Ireland and Midwinter's Dawn at the oldest building on earth. 11 00:01:36,800 --> 00:01:39,760 These have been the wonders of the mysterious world. 12 00:01:43,520 --> 00:01:47,760 In the snows of the Himalayas we have followed the tracks of its elusive inhabitants. 13 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:59,200 And deep in the forests of North America caught glimpses of shadowy creatures. 14 00:02:05,920 --> 00:02:09,280 In Costa Rica the giant stone balls remain a mystery. 15 00:02:09,520 --> 00:02:18,480 In Munich the Baghdad battery is still a powerful enigma. 16 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:25,840 These have been the mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, 17 00:02:25,840 --> 00:02:31,680 author of 2001 and inventor of the communication satellite. From his home in Sri Lanka after 18 00:02:31,680 --> 00:02:36,960 a lifetime of science, space and writing he has pondered the riddles of this and other worlds. 19 00:02:37,120 --> 00:02:42,720 In this series we've scanned an entire spectrum of mysteries. Some are amusing, 20 00:02:43,600 --> 00:02:48,720 some are trivial, some are complete enigmas, some we may even have solved. 21 00:02:50,080 --> 00:02:56,800 But they vary wildly in significance. Some though fascinating are probably quite unimportant. 22 00:02:57,680 --> 00:03:03,360 Others, if we could fathom them, might change our entire understanding of the universe. 23 00:03:06,960 --> 00:03:22,880 They may. 24 00:03:22,880 --> 00:03:38,720 Dawn over Death Valley reveals an earthbound moonscape amongst the most hostile territory 25 00:03:38,720 --> 00:03:40,520 in all America. 26 00:03:40,520 --> 00:03:44,880 Bitterly cold by night, blistering desert by day. 27 00:03:44,880 --> 00:03:49,120 Its only inhabitants are herds of wild donkeys. 28 00:03:49,120 --> 00:03:54,960 But here, strange tracks keep appearing on the baked surface, left by huge boulders. 29 00:03:54,960 --> 00:03:59,440 Stones would seem to move under their own power, curving and looping for hundreds of 30 00:03:59,440 --> 00:04:03,440 yards and even for miles. 31 00:04:03,440 --> 00:04:08,880 The scene of this weird phenomenon is racetrack plier, a dried up lake on the edge of Death 32 00:04:08,880 --> 00:04:13,040 Valley. 33 00:04:13,040 --> 00:04:17,240 Geologist Dwight Carey with his new bride has made the seven hour journey here from 34 00:04:17,240 --> 00:04:18,240 Los Angeles. 35 00:04:18,880 --> 00:04:23,240 For more than a decade he has been trying to find the key to the strange forces which 36 00:04:23,240 --> 00:04:33,400 cause the stones to move. 37 00:04:33,400 --> 00:04:38,840 I think we can conclusively say that there is no doubt that the stones do move, that 38 00:04:38,840 --> 00:04:43,440 the stones move distances in one movement apparently upwards of two and three hundred 39 00:04:43,440 --> 00:04:44,520 feet. 40 00:04:44,520 --> 00:04:49,480 We're talking about stones from the size maybe of your little finger on up to large 41 00:04:49,480 --> 00:04:54,880 stones of six or seven hundred pounds. 42 00:04:54,880 --> 00:04:59,840 No one has ever seen a stone move, but Carey quickly ruled out hoaxes. 43 00:04:59,840 --> 00:05:04,240 They couldn't have moved quarter ton rocks for hundreds of yards without leaving tell-tale 44 00:05:04,240 --> 00:05:05,240 traces. 45 00:05:05,240 --> 00:05:10,400 He also discounted theories that racetrack plier was affected by mysterious vibrations 46 00:05:10,400 --> 00:05:13,320 or magnetic effects. 47 00:05:13,320 --> 00:05:20,320 As each new and serpentine track appeared it was painstakingly plotted. 48 00:05:20,320 --> 00:05:27,240 Now we'll stretch it tight. 49 00:05:27,240 --> 00:05:31,080 That's seventy four feet four inches. 50 00:05:31,080 --> 00:05:35,160 Carey marked each stone with a stake to measure how far it moved. 51 00:05:35,160 --> 00:05:38,840 He painted the corners to show which way each faced. 52 00:05:38,840 --> 00:05:43,720 He even built corrals around groups of them to see if they all moved at once. 53 00:05:43,720 --> 00:05:51,320 It took him seven years to formulate a theory. 54 00:05:51,320 --> 00:05:56,760 He thought that perhaps once every two or three years rain and wind joined forces to 55 00:05:56,760 --> 00:06:01,600 produce precisely the right conditions. 56 00:06:01,600 --> 00:06:07,840 The plier surface is probably rather firm but contains a thin layer of very slippery 57 00:06:07,840 --> 00:06:11,560 mud possibly with some water standing on top of it. 58 00:06:11,560 --> 00:06:16,360 And the wind is able to pick the rock, start the rock to move and slide it across on the 59 00:06:16,360 --> 00:06:20,760 firm base but pushing aside the very slippery mud and sliding right on top of that as it 60 00:06:20,760 --> 00:06:21,760 moves. 61 00:06:21,760 --> 00:06:28,440 He's probably moving a couple of feet per second as it rides off across the plier and 62 00:06:28,440 --> 00:06:32,640 after a hundred, two hundred feet of movement or sometimes just a very little movement the 63 00:06:32,640 --> 00:06:36,120 stone will eventually come to rest as the wind dies down. 64 00:06:36,120 --> 00:06:41,000 I believe it's basically changes in the wind during the time when the rock is moving that 65 00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:45,120 cause the stone trails to be so variable. 66 00:06:45,120 --> 00:06:51,840 The wind not only being funneled through this area but the cliffs that protrude out sometimes 67 00:06:51,840 --> 00:06:58,280 give a whirlwind type effect so that the wind is actually whipping around in different directions. 68 00:06:58,280 --> 00:07:04,400 Basically what we've done is developed circumstantial evidence that builds to the point of saying 69 00:07:04,400 --> 00:07:10,680 wind on a sloppy plier surface is the only explanation we can come up that's legitimate. 70 00:07:10,680 --> 00:07:15,720 No one has ever been out here and actually seen a stone move. 71 00:07:15,720 --> 00:07:21,200 Probably it's a fact of nature that it only happens on dark and stormy nights when no 72 00:07:21,200 --> 00:07:24,880 one in their right mind would be out here in the first place. 73 00:07:24,880 --> 00:07:29,760 The moving stones of Death Valley are quite surprising but I'm sure that Dr. Carey has 74 00:07:29,760 --> 00:07:33,000 solved this minor mystery. 75 00:07:33,000 --> 00:07:36,080 Are there other mysteries to which we'd like answers? 76 00:07:36,080 --> 00:07:49,480 I have a hunch that one of the most important of all mysteries may be ball lightning. 77 00:07:49,480 --> 00:07:55,560 The definitive sighting of ball lightning was the one at Creil in Scotland in 1966. 78 00:07:55,560 --> 00:08:00,200 Mrs. Jean Meldrum and her mother were at the Beach Cafe one August afternoon. 79 00:08:01,200 --> 00:08:06,440 I looked up because I heard this noise getting louder and louder and it was like a just like 80 00:08:06,440 --> 00:08:10,480 a ball of fire it was like orange in the middle and it was luminous white round and it rolled 81 00:08:10,480 --> 00:08:15,000 right along the side of the cafe when the wall in the cafe and it came to the window 82 00:08:15,000 --> 00:08:19,680 and it came out the window and I came up lifted up the way to have a look to see what this 83 00:08:19,680 --> 00:08:23,560 was and the thing came out the window and battered across the front of my chest and 84 00:08:23,560 --> 00:08:27,320 then it just well it vanished because I picked the kid up and I went inside because I was 85 00:08:27,440 --> 00:08:31,880 panicking by this time but I was sore for days after it and just there was nothing else to 86 00:08:31,880 --> 00:08:35,640 see after it had gone but it was just like a big ball of fire. 87 00:08:35,640 --> 00:08:41,000 All of a sudden the whole kitchen were standing and just were lit up luminous white. 88 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:47,120 I couldn't understand it was very frightening and then the people the screaming went on 89 00:08:47,120 --> 00:08:53,040 till the beach was empty the cafe people had all run out the cafe they ran out like lightning 90 00:08:53,040 --> 00:08:57,800 and the beach attendant who had a wooden leg he usually sat on the table just next to the 91 00:08:57,800 --> 00:09:03,960 counter and you never send him moves so quick in all your life he was gone with the rest 92 00:09:03,960 --> 00:09:08,600 and the following day I discovered the two gas jets in the top of the cooker were cut 93 00:09:08,600 --> 00:09:12,840 right through and we had to send it to the blacksmith and create all the local blacksmith 94 00:09:12,840 --> 00:09:14,160 to be repaired. 95 00:09:15,160 --> 00:09:21,160 A year before across the Atlantic Clara Greenley was having an irritating afternoon. 96 00:09:21,160 --> 00:09:27,160 I was trying to fly that had been around I had to wait and this is where I don't know 97 00:09:27,160 --> 00:09:35,160 why all I turned to look at my neighbor and when I did why I seen right outside the screen 98 00:09:35,160 --> 00:09:42,160 in that direction this little this ball of lightning I didn't know what it was why it 99 00:09:42,160 --> 00:09:50,160 appeared oh the size of a probably a basketball or maybe a little larger and it started well 100 00:09:50,160 --> 00:09:58,160 the color of it was like orange more or less and it had like a halo around the edges of 101 00:09:58,160 --> 00:10:03,160 it so just about the time that I was talking to my neighbor about this fly it came in and 102 00:10:03,160 --> 00:10:11,160 I hit down and when I did this ball of lightning it fell to the floor rolled around a little 103 00:10:11,160 --> 00:10:18,160 and exploded and made a terrible sound I guess about like a shotgun and my neighbor looked 104 00:10:18,160 --> 00:10:21,160 at me and said that oughta got him. 105 00:10:22,160 --> 00:10:28,160 Ball lightning terrified peasants and killed a pig in Salignac France in 1845. 106 00:10:28,160 --> 00:10:33,160 Deanne de Quartier was chased by it on her wedding night in 1557. 107 00:10:33,160 --> 00:10:40,160 In St. Petersburg Professor Richmond was killed by it and at Gorge de Loup in France in 1901 108 00:10:40,160 --> 00:10:43,160 the ball lightning disrupted dinner. 109 00:10:43,160 --> 00:10:48,160 In 1868 a Viennese eyewitness painted what he saw. 110 00:10:48,160 --> 00:10:54,160 At Edinburgh University ball lightning apparently penetrated a window of the meteorology department 111 00:10:54,160 --> 00:11:00,160 and at Castleford in Yorkshire it was photographed during a storm at two o'clock in the morning. 112 00:11:00,160 --> 00:11:05,160 At Los Alamos birthplace of the atomic bomb traumatic clues to the mystery of ball lightning 113 00:11:05,160 --> 00:11:07,160 have been found by James Tuck. 114 00:11:07,160 --> 00:11:14,160 Professor Tuck has distilled its characteristics from eyewitness reports. 115 00:11:14,160 --> 00:11:19,160 This ball very characteristically floats through the air like this. 116 00:11:19,160 --> 00:11:24,160 The ball on the average is about a foot in diameter. 117 00:11:24,160 --> 00:11:33,160 Sometimes the people who say they've seen it a meter a yard in diameter and there are some people who claim they've seen it about the size of a walnut. 118 00:11:33,160 --> 00:11:39,160 It's not very bright about the brightness of a hundred watt lamp. 119 00:11:39,160 --> 00:11:43,160 Now that's pretty bright at night remember but in the daytime it's nothing special. 120 00:11:43,160 --> 00:11:46,160 It's said to make a fizzing buzzing noise. 121 00:11:46,160 --> 00:11:53,160 It lasts on the whole on the average about five seconds. 122 00:11:53,160 --> 00:11:59,160 Stories from the US Navy submarine service put Tuck on to an experiment. 123 00:11:59,160 --> 00:12:09,160 Submariners told him how clumsy switching of the batteries could produce fireballs which often burnt their legs. 124 00:12:09,160 --> 00:12:20,160 At Los Alamos Tuck persuaded some colleagues to help him in the lunch hour to try to manufacture ball lightning. 125 00:12:20,160 --> 00:12:27,160 For on the very premises where he had helped build the atomic bomb Tuck had discovered they had a gigantic submarine battery 126 00:12:27,160 --> 00:12:31,160 as big as a power station but now redundant. 127 00:12:31,160 --> 00:12:41,160 One day the last before the battery was due to be dismantled they decided to surround the switchgear with a small concentration of methane gas. 128 00:12:41,160 --> 00:12:52,160 Well we set out to experiment with a cellophane box around the switchgear and we were all behind the sandbags about a hundred or fifty feet away from the switchgear. 129 00:12:52,160 --> 00:13:01,160 We had the cameras rolling we took the picture and I made a bit of a blunder of small mistake about the right gas concentration in this box 130 00:13:01,160 --> 00:13:10,160 with the result that instead of the gas merely serving as some kind of component in any future ball lightning that we hope to make 131 00:13:10,160 --> 00:13:16,160 the warming by the arc caused it to explode in a mild way. 132 00:13:16,160 --> 00:13:23,160 Now the arc itself makes a big noise but what happened was the whole thing went like this. 133 00:13:23,160 --> 00:13:30,160 Mark lifted the roof a little and we were all staring at this with our jaws dropped round our ankles in horror. 134 00:13:30,160 --> 00:13:38,160 Well then that was the experiment and that was over and we did a little illegal champagne drinking and said well it was a good try. 135 00:13:38,160 --> 00:13:40,160 We didn't succeed folks. 136 00:13:40,160 --> 00:13:49,160 That was there. The colour film of this kind has to be processed elsewhere and when it came back from the lab and we examined the last film 137 00:13:49,160 --> 00:13:55,160 to our profound astonishment there was an object on it. 138 00:13:55,160 --> 00:14:06,160 We could see the explosion and so on but there was an object which came along towards us bounced on the floor went off the frame. 139 00:14:06,160 --> 00:14:14,160 It had a diameter of about ten say three inches in diameter. It was on 150 frames of the film. 140 00:14:14,160 --> 00:14:19,160 Both cameras showed it went behind something and came out again on the other side. 141 00:14:19,160 --> 00:14:24,160 It floated. It didn't fade. It kept the same brightness. 142 00:14:24,160 --> 00:14:31,160 I must say that it had a lot of characteristics of ball lightning. 143 00:14:31,160 --> 00:14:41,160 Can I say as a scientist that we have made ball lightning I'm afraid not because an honest scientist must repeat it over and over 144 00:14:41,160 --> 00:14:49,160 and find the conditions for when it does it and when it doesn't but this was an exposed fact to affair we couldn't repeat it. 145 00:14:49,160 --> 00:14:58,160 So all I can say is I think if I were asked honestly had we made ball lightning I would say I'd got 50-50 chance we had. 146 00:14:58,160 --> 00:15:07,160 Ball lightning involves matter at very high temperatures the so-called plasma state found in the cosmic furnaces of the stars. 147 00:15:07,160 --> 00:15:17,160 Through its study we may be able to create here on earth sources of infinite power and then our energy problems will be over forever. 148 00:15:17,160 --> 00:15:22,160 But its mankind's past to which this grisly cadaver offers a clue. 149 00:15:22,160 --> 00:15:34,160 Known as the Minnesota Iceman, entombed in a glass-topped coffin, he was the star exhibit in a travelling show which drew astonished crowds in the late 1960s. 150 00:15:34,160 --> 00:15:42,160 The keeper of the corpse Frank Hansen claimed it had been found locked in an ice flow off Siberia in the Sea of Ocosk. 151 00:15:42,160 --> 00:15:49,160 For the show the ice was painstakingly pared down over the body. 152 00:15:49,160 --> 00:15:54,160 The zoologist Bernard Hervelemans has spent a lifetime on the track of unknown animals. 153 00:15:54,160 --> 00:16:03,160 By chance he was staying with a colleague in America when the Minnesota Iceman was revealed. They hastened to examine it. 154 00:16:03,160 --> 00:16:09,160 There was no doubt that we were looking at some sort of man. 155 00:16:09,160 --> 00:16:16,160 Not homo sapiens but some sort of strangely hairy man. 156 00:16:16,160 --> 00:16:26,160 We were struck by many things, the enormous hands and the enormous feet and also, more especially the features of the face. 157 00:16:26,160 --> 00:16:33,160 Because it was absolutely unlike any man on earth. 158 00:16:33,160 --> 00:16:43,160 It was obvious that this creature had been killed because the one eye was completely missing 159 00:16:43,160 --> 00:16:50,160 and the other was hanging out of the socket and it had blurt all around. 160 00:16:50,160 --> 00:16:57,160 So we thought it was probably shot in one eye and the bullet made the other eye pop out. 161 00:16:57,160 --> 00:17:04,160 At first Hervelemans had expected a fake but now he believes the Iceman was genuine. 162 00:17:04,160 --> 00:17:14,160 From seeing it there is no question that the Iceman could be a hoax, a fake dummy rubber dummy or what have you. 163 00:17:14,160 --> 00:17:23,160 As they told in the press when you have seen something, we examined this creature for three days very carefully. 164 00:17:23,160 --> 00:17:31,160 And we were very suspicious I can tell you at the start. But after a while that was quite ruled out. 165 00:17:31,160 --> 00:17:40,160 No there is absolutely no doubt for me that I have been examining a Neanderthal man, the surviving Neanderthal man. 166 00:17:40,160 --> 00:17:47,160 Hervelemans' account made world headlines with his proposition that the fresh frozen corpse was a Neanderthal, 167 00:17:47,160 --> 00:17:54,160 man's closest evolutionary relative previously presumed extinct for 40,000 years. 168 00:17:54,160 --> 00:18:04,160 In the furor that followed the Iceman was spirited away and many other scientists claimed that Hervelemans had been duped. 169 00:18:09,160 --> 00:18:17,160 Yet perhaps his idea that Neanderthal man may still be living is not utterly outrageous. 170 00:18:17,160 --> 00:18:27,160 In 1941 this man, Viktor Juszczyk, a Polish exile who now lives in Blackpool, was on the run from a Russian prison camp. 171 00:18:27,160 --> 00:18:33,160 As he wandered across Mongolia he came face to face with a wild man. 172 00:18:33,160 --> 00:18:37,160 For a moment I was terrified and at the same time excited. 173 00:18:37,160 --> 00:18:53,160 He was very broad, he's got no hair on his face, he's got a wide mouth, he's a Mongolian and a schemotype, very broad, white teeth. 174 00:18:53,160 --> 00:19:00,160 His look is, you never see anything look like that. This is a stone age man. 175 00:19:01,160 --> 00:19:06,160 This wild man was reportedly shot by Russian soldiers that same year. 176 00:19:06,160 --> 00:19:13,160 A Red Army Colonel, V.S. Kanapetian, said its shape was human but its eyes were dull like an animal's. 177 00:19:13,160 --> 00:19:21,160 One of the foremost authorities on Neanderthal man is Dr. Myra Shackley, the University of Leicester in England. 178 00:19:21,160 --> 00:19:30,160 In 1979 she went on an expedition to the go-by desert where she thinks that Neanderthal men may still be found. 179 00:19:30,160 --> 00:19:37,160 If so, this would be a stunning discovery and would open a whole new chapter on human evolution. 180 00:19:37,160 --> 00:19:43,160 Dr. Shackley gathered her evidence in Mongolia's Altai mountains where the creatures are known as Almas. 181 00:19:43,160 --> 00:19:52,160 I got a picture of almost unanimous agreement that strange, wild people were living in the high mountain areas. 182 00:19:52,160 --> 00:20:02,160 The Mongols say that they're human in appearance but that their speech isn't the same as the Mongol speech. 183 00:20:02,160 --> 00:20:10,160 There's been no attempt direct communication, although they trade by putting a parcel of skins on the ground, 184 00:20:10,160 --> 00:20:16,160 then retreating and then coming back later to collect what's been left in exchange. 185 00:20:16,160 --> 00:20:24,160 There's a recent report of a Russian doctor who in treating some of the Mongols in a very remote area met an Alma family. 186 00:20:24,160 --> 00:20:27,160 So there seems to be no doubt that the creatures are there. 187 00:20:27,160 --> 00:20:34,160 They seem to be rather short, stocky and to be very shy. 188 00:20:34,160 --> 00:20:41,160 It's also mentioned in many stories that they are rather hairy and have very primitive clothes. 189 00:20:41,160 --> 00:20:47,160 In this respect, the description of Neanderthal man fits the Almas really quite well. 190 00:20:47,160 --> 00:20:57,160 If he managed to get into the high mountain areas, then there's no reason why there shouldn't be adequate breeding populations of Neanderthal men still surviving. 191 00:20:57,160 --> 00:21:08,160 And indeed this seems more likely than the alternative which is that a very successful species of man should suddenly become extinct for no apparent reason. 192 00:21:15,160 --> 00:21:26,160 Persistent reports of the survival abilities of another type of creature have brought Dr. Mike Tyler from Adelaide University, Australia to Brighton Museum and its Cabinet of Curiosities. 193 00:21:28,160 --> 00:21:39,160 Here lies a mermaid marooned among the grotesque relics of the air and sea. 194 00:21:43,160 --> 00:21:53,160 And strangest of all this rock which was found in 1883 inside in a secret cavity, a fully grown mummified toad. 195 00:21:54,160 --> 00:22:00,160 The specimen was discovered by a man working on the roads by the name of Mr. Nye. 196 00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:09,160 And he picked up this particular stone and although it seems rather heavy to me, apparently he noticed that it was a good deal lighter than usual. 197 00:22:09,160 --> 00:22:16,160 And as a result he split the stone open and inside for the first time discovered this strange dead toad. 198 00:22:17,160 --> 00:22:25,160 This toad emerged alive from a solid block of coal which had been burning in the half of a Mr. W.J. Clarke at his home in Bath Street, Rugby. 199 00:22:25,160 --> 00:22:30,160 Although it had no mouth and no rectum it lived on for five weeks. 200 00:22:30,160 --> 00:22:36,160 Old books like White Watson's Strata of Derbyshire of 1811 contain further reports. 201 00:22:36,160 --> 00:22:44,160 At Eastwood Colliery a toad was taken alive from a coal seam in the fire engine pit but died immediately on exposure to the air. 202 00:22:45,160 --> 00:22:50,160 And at Cowden near Ashford two toads were found alive in a block of marble. 203 00:22:52,160 --> 00:22:58,160 In a letter to the Times in 1862 a Mr. Scott reported two cases of toad in the hole. 204 00:22:58,160 --> 00:23:04,160 One was found in the middle of a four foot stone which later formed part of a plinth in Birmingham Town Hall. 205 00:23:04,160 --> 00:23:11,160 Scientific American as recently as 1933 carried the story of a frog nicknamed Old Rip after Rip Van Winkle. 206 00:23:11,160 --> 00:23:17,160 He seemingly survived for 34 years beneath a concrete roadway at Shenectady in New York. 207 00:23:19,160 --> 00:23:25,160 The specimen in my hand is quite an intriguing one and it's indeed an oddity. 208 00:23:25,160 --> 00:23:33,160 However this particular nodule, this particular stone in fact contains an aperture at one end. 209 00:23:33,160 --> 00:23:40,160 The aperture is about half an inch in diameter. It's a little smaller than the diameter of my small finger. 210 00:23:40,160 --> 00:23:48,160 And it is conceivable that the toad crawled in through that hole at a stage when it was quite young. 211 00:23:48,160 --> 00:23:59,160 It perhaps found insects inside there and there's certainly some evidence that some insects are attracted to toads perhaps by the peculiarities of their smell. 212 00:23:59,160 --> 00:24:02,160 Smells that we can detect too. 213 00:24:02,160 --> 00:24:11,160 And so we can envisage a situation in which we have the toad here inside a cavity, inside the rock, eating and eating and eating 214 00:24:11,160 --> 00:24:20,160 until he reaches the point when it's quite impossible for him to leave. He in fact is larger than the aperture through which he crawled. 215 00:24:20,160 --> 00:24:27,160 In 1825 the naturalist Dr. William Buckland buried some toads in sealed stone cells for a year. 216 00:24:27,160 --> 00:24:32,160 Some survived the first 12 months but not a second gruesome interment. 217 00:24:32,160 --> 00:24:42,160 As we refer to Buckland's experiments to animals which can live for short periods of time and perhaps live without food for a year or more. 218 00:24:42,160 --> 00:24:51,160 But in rocks we're talking of millions of years and there's no way in the world in which an animal can survive without food and water 219 00:24:51,160 --> 00:24:56,160 or survive at all for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. It's just impossible. 220 00:24:56,160 --> 00:25:05,160 And so when we have these stories of pieces of rock being split open with smooth surfaces, cavities in the middle and frogs walking out 221 00:25:05,160 --> 00:25:09,160 well that just remains an absolute mystery. 222 00:25:09,160 --> 00:25:20,160 Well, one day we may know the answer. But even if you solve all the mysteries we've discussed in this series there are plenty more where they came from. 223 00:25:20,160 --> 00:25:29,160 For our universe is not only more mysterious than we imagine, it is more mysterious than we can imagine.