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You know what? I've been around for a while.

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I've traveled the world, met some interesting people, done some crazy things.

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So you might just think there's not much that could take me by surprise.

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You'd be wrong.

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The world is full of stories and science and things that amaze and confound me every single day.

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Incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

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Some I can answer. Others justify logic.

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A man beats incredible odds and cheats death.

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He's struck by lightning six times, yet lives.

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Is he a human lightning rod?

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A small child freezes solid in sub-zero temperatures, clinically dead for two hours.

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She amazingly survives. How is this possible?

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Beneath the Pacific Ocean, mysterious discovery threatens everything we believe about our nation's history.

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Did Chinese explorers reach American shores years before Columbus?

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Yep. It's a weird world. And I love it.

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The World

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The World

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For this next weird tale, I've been compelled to write a little poem.

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Here goes. Lightning strikes fear in the heart.

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With its silver forked skies all peeling with thunder.

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Well, actually lightning doesn't strike fear into my heart.

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Given the fact that I live here in the United States,

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that my odds of being hit by lightning are about one in 750,000.

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So I'd have to be really unlucky to get beat by those odds, right?

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The World

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46-year-old Carl Meis may be the unluckiest person on earth.

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The Oklahoma resident has been struck by lightning more than once.

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The first time in 1978.

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A storm came up and it was lightning and thunder and I'd run to the truck.

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And about the time that I grabbed the door handle, lightning struck.

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Just a flash of lightning knocked me back four or five feet on the backside.

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It just made me sore.

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Then a few years later, lightning struck again.

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Lightning struck hit the transformer on the pole above us.

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When it just knocked the way out of me, it felt like somebody had hit me with a club or a baseball bat.

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And I was laying on the ground and whenever I got up, this plumber came up and said,

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Are you all right? And I said, Man, somebody hit me.

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He said, No, you got struck by lightning.

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In 1996, Carl is watching a tornado from what he thinks is a safe distance.

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And so I'm standing under a tree and about that time lightning strikes a tree.

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It comes down that and knocks me over against the house.

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And I'm thinking, you know, this surely couldn't be happening again, you know, but it did.

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Carl was hit for a fourth time in 1999, again in 2005.

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A year later, Carl entered the record books as the only living person struck by lightning six times.

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A little storm popped up and I was sitting in the house and I went out and put a tarp over the hay.

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And then about the time you put tires on top of the tarps to keep them down on something like that.

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And about the time I went to throw the tire up, all I remember is a bright light and noise.

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And I woke up on the ground and so they took me over to a building, you know, and they called the ambulance.

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And all the people came and went on and they put me in the hospital for three days.

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That time I was laying on my stomach on the ground working on this wire and it burnt my chest, you know, on the other side of my chest, on the left side of my chest.

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A man struck by lightning six times in 30 years, a series of events so bizarre and so improbable, it defies logic.

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But what are the chances?

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Mathematician Jeffrey Rosenthal has calculated the extraordinary odds of Carl Meis' run of doomed luck.

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If we just kind of pretended that lightning was equal around the United States and everyone just had the same chance of being struck all the time,

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then the chance that somebody would be struck six different times over the course of 30 years is extremely unlikely.

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It's like one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, if you just consider everyone to be equal,

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then someone would be struck six times in a 30 year period.

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I have more of a sense of feeling if it happens again, you know, it could kill me, you know, and I don't know why I feel that way.

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So that way I'm pretty careful but going outside.

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So why does this keep happening to Carl?

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Rosenthal suspects the answer has something to do with where in America Carl lives.

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Well, there's actually more lightning strikes in Oklahoma than on average, so your chance of being struck or killed or injured by lightning

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are higher if you live in Oklahoma than they are just for an average person over the course of the whole United States.

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Oklahoma, the heart of America's tornado alley, and a state that gets hit with the third highest numbers of lightning strikes in the U.S. every year.

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Around one million.

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Oh my God!

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If we compare that, for example, to California, then California, the same rate, is about 0.02.

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So you're about 34 times more likely to be killed by lightning if you live in Oklahoma compared to if you live in California.

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Rosenthal theorizes that Carl's increased probability of being struck is due to another important factor.

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He lives on a farm and his job as a maintenance worker at the University of Oklahoma keeps him frequently outdoors.

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So for an average person in Oklahoma, there's about one chance in 147,000 that they'd be struck by lightning in a given year.

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But Mr. Meiss, well, he apparently worked outside a lot and maybe spent about 80 times as much outside in his work life as the average person.

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So if we think about it that way, then we could say that this works out to his chance of being struck by lightning in a given year.

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There's about one chance in 1,800.

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So what are the chances Carl will be struck again? Let's do the math.

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The probability of an Oklahoma being hit by lightning is, let's see, the population divided by average number of strikes giving the U.S. a one in 470,000 chance.

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And then we divide this again by the fact that Carl Meiss is approximately 49 years old and the average U.S. male lives to 76,000.

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Carl, 27 years left and we factor in his job and lifestyle and we discover the chances of Carl being hit is one in 5,480,000 or pretty low.

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So I think Carl can relax.

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But then again, the dude was hit by lightning six times, so maybe Carl from now on.

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Please stay indoors.

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Combining factors, including lifestyle and location reveal, Carl is many times more likely to be struck by lightning than your average person.

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But can probability alone really explain why Carl has been struck six times?

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Or could there be something special about Carl that makes him attract this deadly natural force?

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A huge electrical discharge between a thundercloud and the ground.

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Lightning is a massive version of the electrostatic spark given off when you touch a door handle.

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Each lightning bolt has as much energy as a ton of TNT.

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Even if you could avoid being struck directly by a bolt, lightning can radiate across the ground and anyone like Carl can be affected indirectly through physical contact with a struck object.

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Suffering third degree burns, ruptured eardrums and even death caused by a disruption of the nervous system and stopping the heart.

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Now, let's have ourselves a little Ben Franklin moment.

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When a lightning bolt bursts out of a thundercloud, it releases a massive amount of electrical energy into the air.

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Metal objects act like an antenna for this electricity, basically pulling in the excess energy that's in the air.

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That's why if you're holding metal or just near metal, you're directing the charge of the lightning bolt straight to you, causing you to be electrocuted, even if you're never directly struck by lightning.

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Lightning researcher Don McGormann thinks the indirect nature of the majority of Carl's lightning hits can explain his misfortune.

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Every time he was struck, Carl was touching something that conducts electricity.

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A lot of his injuries were caused by touching metal. He probably wasn't struck directly in the good many of those cases, but the fact that he was touching metal caused him to be injured in those situations.

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He was touching long pieces of metal, which is even worse, or large pieces of metal.

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So he was touching a wire, the lightning struck a nearby pole, the current surge came through the wire and hit him.

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He was touching a crowbar, and so even if the crowbar wasn't hit directly, it would still pick up the electrical energy from a lightning flash and really seriously injuring.

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Even exposing yourself to the hazard is by staying outside, lots of people are outside, and it's just a statistical fluke, I think, in one way.

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Like I said before, though, being outside and touching metal are things that greatly increase your chances of being injured.

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And so if there's one thing I would urge Carl to do, it would be if he's got to stay outside, go ahead and stay outside, but get away from metal.

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Don't be touching metal or standing in pools of water.

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Carl Meis puts himself in harm's way far more often than most people.

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But that alone cannot explain his 30 years of living in fear.

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Electrical expert David Stetzer wants to test a more bizarre theory.

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Is there something about Carl himself that makes him more susceptible to lightning strikes?

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Current will take the path of least resistance. Now that's Olin's law.

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Electrical resistance is measured in ohms.

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If you knew where lightning was going to strike, and we went out on a golf course and somebody was 200 ohms of resistance and somebody was 500 ohms of resistance, and lightning hits,

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more current would flow through the person that has 200 ohms of resistance than the person that had 500 ohms of resistance.

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If the person has less resistance, they're a better conductor.

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Again, going back to what you want to conduct electricity.

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You want to use a ceramic rod or you want to use a copper wire, for example.

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So copper wire has one valence electron or it's more conductive.

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People's resistance to electrical currents vary. Some scientists believe levels of body fat and sweat can be a factor.

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Stetzer's experiment will determine if Carl has less resistance that could explain why lightning is striking him more than other people.

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And so we're going to connect that to you and we're going to measure the voltage drop between here and here.

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The more voltage that it drops, the more conductive you are.

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First, Stetzer is going to test Carl's friends, Joe and Steve.

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He's reading 2.3 volts, 2.4.

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Almost 4 volts.

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But what about Carl's friends?

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Here we go.

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And you can see the number drops down to 1.9 volts.

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Amazingly, Dave's test has revealed that Carl does indeed have greater conductivity than normal.

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But Don McGormand, one of the world's leading experts on lightning, is skeptical about the findings.

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There's very little about a person that could make them more likely to be struck.

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Even if they're a little more conducting, that's a really, really small influence on where lightning flash hits.

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Because a lightning flash is coming down from miles up in the atmosphere and it's finding its way down to the ground.

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And why it hits a particular patch of ground is really a statistical process.

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It's the chance of any one piece of ground being hit, if you look at that probability ahead of time, is really, really small.

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It seems the reason Carl's been repeatedly struck by lightning can be traced to several factors.

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Where in America he lives?

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His outdoor lifestyle?

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His proximity to conductive materials?

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And sheer bad luck.

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But one question remains shrouded in mystery.

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How has Carl survived almost completely unscathed?

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Mathematician Jeffrey Rosenthal continues to grasp at a simple logical answer in a story that seemingly defies reason.

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So you actually have even a little better than a 50-50 chance of surviving, even if you did get struck six times.

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So by comparison, if you flip a coin you have a 50% chance of heads, so the chance of getting heads six times in a row would then be a half multiplied by itself six times,

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which is one chance in 64 or just about one and a half percent.

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So it's much less likely that you'll get six heads in a row than that you'll survive six major lightning strikes in a row.

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According to Rosenthal, the odds of Carl's survival are around one in five thousand.

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But the fact remains, this is a man struck by lightning a world beating six times.

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Is that weird or what?

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What's the difference between a man and a woman?

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In the dead of night, a toddler wanders lost and alone in the eye of a winter storm.

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She quickly succumbs to the cold and is frozen almost solid like a block of ice.

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Within minutes, she is clinically dead.

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Until something happens that can only be described as weird or what.

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Edmonton, Alberta, Layla Nordby and her two daughters, Erica and Elise, were having a sleepover at a friend's house.

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But when the kids went to sleep, the fun night turned into a waking nightmare.

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Erica was next to the wall and sometime through the night she shimmy down the wall and basically got out of bed and went exploring.

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Layla woke at 2am when she saw her little girl had vanished. She panicked.

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I went all around the room, I went downstairs, I went into the playroom, I went everywhere and Erica was gone.

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Then I saw the back door flapping and that's when I realized something was wrong and that's when I started panicking.

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Erica had managed to get into the backyard wearing only a t-shirt and a diaper.

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The temperature was a minus 11 degrees Fahrenheit with a vicious wind chill.

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When I went outside and I looked over to the left you could see these little footprints and you could see the trail.

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So I followed that little trail and it was only about 12, 13 feet but it felt like it was longer.

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And at the end there I found Erica.

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So coming to hypothermia, Erica's heart had stopped beating.

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She had been clinically dead for over two hours with no visible signs of breathing or blood circulation.

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In this state, permanent brain damage can occur within a matter of minutes.

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So I had no idea what I was in for.

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I didn't even know that there was a way to help her.

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I didn't know that there was nothing.

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When paramedics arrived, they found a distraught mother with her child almost frozen solid.

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When the paramedics took her from my arms and then they made a big clunking sound when they put her on the table.

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I really thought my daughter was not going to make it.

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But remarkably, they detected faint signs of life.

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All I can remember is one paramedic saying, we got a pulse, let's move her.

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And they moved her quick.

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Arriving at the hospital, Erica's internal body temperature was 60 degrees Fahrenheit,

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nearly 40 degrees lower than normal and far colder than any previous patient had survived.

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We're talking about at least an hour and a half.

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So by that point in time, I think we still knew that there was a chance,

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but our fear was that the chance of either her pulling through alive

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or the chance of pulling through without significant brain injury was getting smaller and smaller.

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So not so small that it wasn't worth trying, but clearly by the time we were hitting the intensive care unit,

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we're getting very worried as to if we got her back, how badly injured she was going to be.

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Dr. Alan DeCand, battle to get Erica's core temperature back to 98.6 Fahrenheit.

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The problem always ends up being up front trying to be able to predict whether or not

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this is going to be the one kid that ends up getting through.

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And I think what we end up doing is throw everything at that job,

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use all of your expertise, all the equipment, all the personnel that you have.

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It's long odds, but you do what you can to hopefully get that one in a thousand through.

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Incredibly, the team was able to get the toddler's heart beating and her lungs working again.

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Despite suffering severe frostbite on her fingers and toes, requiring skin grafts,

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Erica was saved, brought back from the dead.

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But this is not the first time a human is recovered from extreme cold core temperatures.

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In October 2006, a Japanese rock climber got lost for 23 days on Mount Rako, Japan.

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When found by rescuers, his organs had failed, his core temperature was 71 degrees Fahrenheit.

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But he made a full recovery. How could this be possible?

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The doctors tell me that it was like an animal going into hibernation,

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and basically going unconscious. It kind of helped me to deal with it.

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That subconscious, they were all like some kind of animal.

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Did Erica's body somehow do the impossible and go into some form of life-saving hibernation?

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Dr. Giesbrecht has spent over 20 years studying the effect of cold on the human body.

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Hibernation is an intentional decreasing of temperature and metabolic rate and oxygen consumption.

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Everything still works just at a slower rate at a lower temperature.

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Humans are not designed to do that. We're designed throughout our entire life.

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All year round, we operate at a normal core temperature.

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The only reason that we ever get low temperature is not because we allow it, which is what hibernation is.

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We get to a low temperature only because we are accidentally cold stressed to the point that we can't defend against it,

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and we are in a clinically bad situation.

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Animals hibernate to survive the long cold winter months when food is scarce.

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Can humans pull the same biological trick in extreme circumstances?

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Bears, for instance, are made to, in the winter, go to sleep, slow down their metabolism,

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and lower their core temperature to a very, very low degree.

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But their heart is still working and they're still breathing throughout the whole winter period.

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But unlike a hibernating bear, Erica was found in a state of near cardiac arrest.

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We are made to live our whole lives at a core temperature around 98.6 or 37 degrees Celsius.

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When a human becomes severely hypothermic and they become clinically dead, their heart's not working, they're not breathing,

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that is not hibernation. That's clinical death.

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So was Erica's hypothermic state mistaken for hibernation?

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Hypothermia occurs when the body's core temperature drops below normal.

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A drop of a mere three degrees causes shivering and lethargy.

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Blood flow becomes restricted to the hands and feet.

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A drop of five degrees can lead to a loss of coordination, slurred speech, and violent shivering.

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At this point, people become irrational and their pulse rate decreases.

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By the time the body drops to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, severe hypothermia has set in.

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A person looks dead and cellular processes cease.

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Before long, major organs begin to fail, causing clinical death.

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But how did Erica survive with a core temperature of just 60 degrees?

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Ironically, doctors believe the fact that Erica was so young, tiny, and fragile might have been what saved her.

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If your heart's gonna stop, you want your heart to be stopping when the organs are still full of enough oxygen and energy

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so that they're gonna be able to work for a long time at a low metabolic rate while you're trying to restart the heart.

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Because all tissue requires less oxygen when it's cold, when you become clinically dead because of severe hypothermia,

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your tissue is actually preserved for a while.

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So you can go a longer period of clinical death than you could if you died when you were warm.

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Small children and babies, because of their body surface area,

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because of how large their skin is relative to their overall weight and overall size,

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they are exquisitely sensitive to losing heat and developing a very low body temperature very quickly.

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Did Erica's tiny size help save her life?

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If you cool down fast enough, what happens is that your organs, the function of them, it slows down.

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The metabolic activity, how much oxygen, how much energy they end up needing to survive,

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goes down to just a trickle of what the normal amount of energy and oxygen would be usually necessary to keep you alive.

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So what happened with is that because she rapidly cooled down, it allowed her,

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even though her heart had stopped contracting and her heart wasn't pushing blood around her body,

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she had a much, much longer period of time where her organs were going to be able to survive without the heart pumping oxygen and nutrients.

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In normal conditions, the brain can be deprived of oxygenated blood for around five minutes before suffering irreversible damage.

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After around ten minutes without oxygen, death is almost certain.

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Because extreme cold reduces the body's metabolic activity, the brain can survive unharmed for hours or even days

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on the reserves of oxygen and energy present when the body is rapidly cooled.

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This condition is called metabolic icebox and occurs when the core temperature drops below 86 degrees.

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We often have the question, how cold is too cold?

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And it's people like Erica who make the answer to that question very difficult.

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Twenty years ago we would have said that Erica could not survive, but then somebody treated her and she lived,

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so it's very, very difficult to say. We don't know the lowest limit.

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Erica's core temperature was 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius.

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There used to be limits of temperature, it's 20 degrees, body temperatures of 19 degrees, body temperatures of 18 degrees.

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It does keep on getting lower.

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18 degrees Celsius is 64 degrees Fahrenheit. Until recently doctors didn't attempt to resuscitate people with core temperatures below 68 Fahrenheit.

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Luckily for Erica, today doctors work on a different principle.

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We basically tell physicians and anyone else who finds someone cold, you must try to revive a person almost no matter what.

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That's why we say you're never cold and dead until you're warm and dead.

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We end up trying to rewarm people. If we think by the circumstances of where they had their cardiac arrest,

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we think that there is a significant chance that we're going to be able to resuscitate them.

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Basically if someone is found cold and clinically dead, unless they have an obvious fatal injury,

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or they're literally like a block of ice and cannot be moved at all,

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we say because of people like Erica, try to revive them because you never know.

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Usually doctors have to warm up hypothermia victims by filling their lungs with warmed air,

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injecting warm fluids, or by warming the blood through an external heater.

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Her temperature when she arrived was about 16 degrees, her heart started working again at about 17 degrees.

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But Erica had one last surprise in store, a mysterious biological response the medical team simply cannot explain.

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The wonderful thing about what happened with Erica is once her heart rhythm fixed itself and her heart started pumping,

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basically she regulated her rewarming by herself.

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Her heart pushing blood around her body and us just providing warm air blowing over her skin,

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she was able to regulate how quickly her body temperature needed to rise.

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For some reason, Erica, with that body temperature, gods were on her side.

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Erica survived her ordeal without suffering any form of brain damage.

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She spent six weeks in hospital but made a full recovery.

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My health is pretty good. When I grow up at night I'm going to be a wrestler and during the day I'm going to be a teacher

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because sometimes teachers can be actually good role models.

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I think I'm a lucky kid.

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For Erica's family and the doctors who brought her back to life, Erica's survival isn't just lucky, it's miraculous.

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This remarkable story raises as many questions as it answers, but whatever the truth,

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Erica now has a second chance to enjoy a long life.

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Weird or what?

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Who were the first foreigners to lay claim to what is now the USA?

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Well, most people would answer.

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Thanks to Christopher Columbus it was these guys, the Spanish.

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There's some evidence to suggest it was even these guys, the Vikings.

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But what if intrepid explorers from somewhere completely unexpected had really discovered America a hundred years earlier than anyone else?

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Mysterious carved stones found off the coast of California threatened to turn history on its head.

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I've never seen anything like this.

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These stones could be proof that the Chinese beat Columbus to the New World.

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Bob Muster was scuba diving off Palos Verdes in Southern California when he made a strange discovery.

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I love to dive, it's a lot of intrigue.

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Every time you go you don't know what you're going to see.

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You may see a turtle every once in a while, you do see him.

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You might see a shark out here who'll be cruising along on scooters and this seven-gill shark comes right up and swims alongside of you.

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You think that's my buddy? No, that isn't my buddy. And it's just a lot of fun.

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I used to collect seashells for an old man that I knew.

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And as I did it, I found two round balls down there with a hole in them.

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Now how did that hole get there?

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I've never seen anything like this.

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I had no idea what this thing is. I had no idea. Nobody else did.

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The stone is unlike any natural object Bob has ever seen.

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Suspecting it must be man-made, Bob took a picture of a stone and sent it to experts in underwater archeology.

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They suggested it might be a boat anchor.

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Stone was used as boat anchors for over 3,000 years.

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The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all used stones with grooves or holes cut into them to secure the ships.

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Stone anchors were only replaced when iron and steel became widely available.

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And Europeans who reached the coast of California in 1542 would have used metal.

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So where could stone anchors have come from?

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Well, let's see. I've been studying those Palace Forty stones off and on for, gosh, 35, 40 years.

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Larry J. Pearson is an expert in nautical archeology.

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The stone anchor style represented by the collection from Palace Forties is a traditional anchor shape or group of anchor shapes

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that have been used continuously since very early times in China.

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The Chinese began switching from stone to metal anchors around 600 years ago.

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If Bob's anchors are at least that old, it could change everything we know about American history.

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It could mean the Chinese beat Columbus by over 100 years. It's a controversial theory.

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There's a huge fringe element out there that we'd like to believe in the Tooth Fairy and everything, you know.

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Larry Pearson has another less sensational theory. He thinks the rocks are from modern times.

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The most logical explanation for the presence of that assemblage at that location has to be 19th century Chinese fishing.

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Larry's argument is that modern fishermen use an old technology because stone is cheap and readily available.

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Chinese fishermen in the 19th century California were using stone anchors of a style that had been used for thousands of years in China.

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Bob isn't convinced that his stone anchors belong to 19th century immigrant fishermen.

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He claims that some as yet unrecovered anchors weigh thousands of pounds, way too big, for the immigrant fishing boats to even carry.

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I think there's a couple out there that are 3,000 or 4,000 pounds and I think the real big ones out in 60 feet of water, they've got to be at 4,000 or 5,000 pounds.

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He assembles a team to recover a giant anchor to prove his point.

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Bob and his team pull up a huge stone anchor.

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The original one weighs 280 pounds. The biggest one we brought out of the water weighed 1,031 pounds.

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Could a small 19th century fishing boat have really used an anchor weighing around 1,000 pounds?

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Amateur historian Dr. Shirlangli has spent years studying the stones and he believes a far more incredible theory.

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That the anchors are from a massive fleet of ocean going ships under the command of 15th century Chinese admiral and explorer, Zhang He.

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I can tell you this much. Chinese knew more about the world in Zhang He's time than all the European cartographers did.

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In fact, the European world maps drawn 100 years later probably were all based on some of the fragmented information collected by Zhang He during his trips.

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Zhang He's fleet is known to have reached India, the Middle East and East Africa.

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Some scholars believe he rounded the bottom of Africa and made it to the Atlantic.

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But Dr. Li believes Zhang He got even further than that.

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What Zhang He did was actually going west from China through the Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Pacific and then head home.

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That's the route he picked.

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Li believes the Chinese landed in the Carolinas, making contact with local Native American tribes.

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It's controversial, but if it's true, Li's theory would mean the Chinese circumnavigated the globe before the Spanish and beat Christopher Columbus to America.

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Can such an incredible idea be real?

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One piece of evidence supports the so-called Zhang He map.

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It is said to be a copy of a 15th century Chinese sailing map which contains detailed descriptions of Native Americans.

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Does the history of America need to be rewritten?

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Historian Professor Jennifer Perthel doesn't believe it.

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Chinese sailors had almost no experience in open water.

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We know, of course, that they have the astrolabe. They get this from the Persians during the time of Mongol rule.

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We know that they know about latitude and longitude because under Mongol rule there's a globe that's made by a Persian astronomer in 1267, which is gridded with latitude and longitude.

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So they know the world is round.

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But what they don't really know how to do is sail across empty blue water.

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Dr. Perthel doesn't think the Chinese were capable of crossing oceans in the 15th century.

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They're used to sailing from one coastal landmark to the next one.

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And they also don't really know how to ride currents and wind patterns.

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And I would say it's significant that the first crossing of the Pacific from Asia to California or New Spain to Mexico actually starts in Cebu City in the Philippines and ends up in Acapulco in 1565.

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And it's navigated by Spanish sailors who have experience sailing in open water in the Atlantic.

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And they in fact apply their experience in the Atlantic to riding curved current and wind patterns to the Pacific.

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They guess, literally, that the conditions might be like those in the Atlantic.

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And they apply that to sailing across the Pacific.

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And that's what enables the voyage to be successful.

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It's hard to imagine that the Chinese, without that experience of open water sailing, would actually be able to make that crossing easily.

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But Dr. Lee claims he has more evidence that Zheng He managed to cross the Atlantic.

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A mysterious brass medallion found buried in North Carolina.

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Along the route Lee believes the Chinese would have taken.

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I think one of the major pieces of evidence is my brass medallion.

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The main thing that caught my eye was the inscription.

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It says, great Ming, Xuan De.

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Xuan De is the emperor who sent out Zheng He, the Ming Admiral, for the last time of his seventh trip,

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to visit other foreign countries.

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And then the last two words mean delegated to gift.

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The word delegated is the key, because the emperor could not present a gift to the head of state.

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So he delegated an important person to present this gift.

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And this one must be a representative of the emperor, and he must be a very significant person.

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And this is only an ambassador.

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At that time, Zheng He is not only an admiral, but he also acts as the ambassador to visit the foreign countries.

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No one knows for sure how old the medallion is or where it came from.

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But to Dr. Lee, the exposure to Chinese culture and technology left other indelible echoes on the Native American's way of life, language, and even the way they wore their hair.

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It is interesting, but Dr. Lee's theory is not supported by most experts in the field.

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Dr. Pertle thinks it's strange that there are no Chinese records of Xuan He's alleged discovery.

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In a culture that was so good at documenting, recording not only text but pictures.

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So one would think that if the Ming had managed to reach North America, we would have some kind of textual record, and that that record would have been transmitted either in manuscript copies or in print.

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One also might think we have an extraordinarily strong tradition in China also of printing not only text but images, so one would expect to find perhaps printed maps.

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So perhaps it wasn't the medieval Chinese who came to our shores and left these great stone anchors.

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But new evidence from scientific dating done on a stone similar to that found by Bob Musterl suggests the answer to this mystery may be even more incredible than anyone could ever have imagined.

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Down in San Diego, they brought a stone anchor, a round stone with a hole in it, up from very deep depth.

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It had magnesium nodules growing on it, so they dated those magnesium nodules and it was 4,000 years ago.

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Now the Chinese had huge boats in those days. The boats were so large they had 1,000 crew members, and they had sail and paddle wheel and oars.

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The implications are enormous. An ancient civilization reaching America's west coast 4 millennia ago.

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People in Europe didn't even know the existence of Pacific Ocean, so this has to come from Asia and most likely from China. That's my conclusion.

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And that's amazing. I think it's really, really fantastic.

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We discovered these stones. We're inquisitive about it. I've always been that way in my life and I want to find out what they are before I pass on.

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And we got a hurry.

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The origins of the huge sunken stones remain a mystery. Are they discarded anchors? Did they belong to 19th century fishermen?

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Or did a medieval Chinese admiral set foot on American soil generations before the Europeans? Weird or what?

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The World of the Dead

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So three bizarre mysteries, each with several possible explanations.

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A man is struck by lightning a world record six times. Is he just the world's unluckiest man?

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Can mathematics explain his run of doomed luck? Or is there something special about his body that might actually attract lightning?

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A child freezes almost solid on a harsh Canadian winter night. She is clinically dead for hours, yet survives.

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Did her body go into some form of human hibernation? Did the fact she was just a tiny toddler actually help save her?

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And in America's coastal waters, huge sunken stone objects suggest the extraordinary.

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Are they anchors left by a fleet of medieval Chinese ships?

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Is this proof another civilization reached California before the Spanish? You decide.

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Join me next time for more stories that will undoubtedly be weird or what.

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The World of the Dead