1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,000
You know what? I've been around for a while.

2
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:07,000
I've traveled the world, met some interesting people,

3
00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:10,000
done some crazy things.

4
00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:14,000
So you might just think there's not much that could take me by surprise.

5
00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:16,000
You'd be wrong.

6
00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:22,000
The world is full of stories and science and things that amaze

7
00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:24,000
and confound me every single day.

8
00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:27,000
Incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

9
00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:33,000
Some I can answer. Others justify logic.

10
00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:38,000
Like the heart transplant patient who undergoes an uncanny transformation,

11
00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:41,000
assuming the personality of his donor,

12
00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:47,000
scientists ask, could the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde be real?

13
00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:51,000
A weird phenomenon is appearing in lakes and rivers.

14
00:00:51,000 --> 00:00:54,000
Perfect circles of ice, some so big,

15
00:00:54,000 --> 00:00:58,000
they're visible from space. What are they?

16
00:00:58,000 --> 00:01:01,000
And a DNA test that suggests the impossible,

17
00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:05,000
a mother somehow genetically unrelated to her own children.

18
00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:09,000
Could the tests be wrong? Or is the truth beyond reason?

19
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:14,000
Could it be possible for a human being to have more than one set of DNA?

20
00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:18,000
Yep. It's a weird world.

21
00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:21,000
It's a weird world.

22
00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:24,000
And I love it.

23
00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:27,000
The World

24
00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:48,000
It only to me to tell you that modern medicine is utterly remarkable.

25
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:51,000
The kind of procedures that only exist in the room.

26
00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:54,000
Science fiction 50 years ago are now commonplace.

27
00:01:54,000 --> 00:01:57,000
Take heart failure. Still the world's biggest killer,

28
00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:03,000
but these days, if you're lucky, doctors can transplant a healthy heart

29
00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:09,000
into your chest within weeks you can be up and running with a whole new lease on life

30
00:02:09,000 --> 00:02:12,000
thanks to the kindness of some recently departed donor. Incredible.

31
00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:19,000
But as this next, weird tale will reveal transplant patients

32
00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:25,000
may be getting more than they bargained for, not simply someone else's heart.

33
00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:29,000
But their personality too.

34
00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:34,000
I had worked very hard and I had sold my soul for the greenback.

35
00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:40,000
I was a fat, out of shape businessman, not taking care of myself.

36
00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:45,000
My exercise regime was going to two banks each day to deposit

37
00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:51,000
and walking to my office, which was across the driveway from the home we had built.

38
00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:54,000
Bill Wall was obsessed with making money.

39
00:02:54,000 --> 00:03:00,000
But when he suffered a massive heart attack in 1999, his life changed forever.

40
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:06,000
They told me a number of times I was their worst cardiac case ever.

41
00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:14,000
Bill needed a new heart and on February 22, 2000, a suitable organ became available.

42
00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:19,000
The donor was a Hollywood stuntman named Brady Michaels,

43
00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:25,000
a fit, focused, passionate man who tragically died doing the job he loved.

44
00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:31,000
Brady's death would ultimately save Bill Wall's life.

45
00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:39,000
I remember waking up that afternoon very sore, but I had a new heart and I was smiling.

46
00:03:39,000 --> 00:03:44,000
I was grinning from ear to ear because I was so thankful because living in the hospital,

47
00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:53,000
you get to appreciate and if you're smart, you learn love, patience, tolerance and understanding

48
00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:56,000
because there's so many angry people in the world.

49
00:03:56,000 --> 00:04:01,000
But after his operation, Bill says he started acting in strange new ways.

50
00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:05,000
Well, the first thing that really shocked me was that day driving to work.

51
00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:10,000
I usually listen to classic hard rock, Led Zeppelin, things like that.

52
00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:15,000
Don't ask me why, but that morning I flipped it to like a jazz station.

53
00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:23,000
And I'm driving to work and I hear this song and it was Shadei the Kiss of Life.

54
00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:27,000
I started crying and it was like butter going through a knife.

55
00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:31,000
And I usually don't cry. It takes a lot to make me cry.

56
00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:36,000
And here I was like freaking out.

57
00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:42,000
Bill learned later that his heart's donor, Brady Michaels, was also a jazz aficionado.

58
00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:49,000
According to Bill, the transplant didn't just change his musical tastes, it also changed his vocabulary.

59
00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:58,000
And it's really funny. I can tell you as a cutthroat businessman, the surfalingo and dude did not fit into my character.

60
00:04:58,000 --> 00:05:06,000
It just, you know, big CEOs are working with people like Apollo Allen or Jerry Rheinstorf.

61
00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:09,000
They didn't know from dude. They didn't want to hear that.

62
00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:13,000
He also found he was copying Michael's taste for healthy food.

63
00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:19,000
He was a health nut. He was very big on salads.

64
00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:27,000
In the old days, if there weren't French fries, if there wasn't a steak or a lobster tail or something fried,

65
00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:31,000
it wasn't going to happen now. Once in a while as a treat, I'll have something like that.

66
00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:36,000
But I actually love salads and one other little thing.

67
00:05:36,000 --> 00:05:41,000
When I work out, I found and when I drive now I'm drumming and I'm beating.

68
00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:48,000
And I never had a beat before. And now I've gotten pretty good with it, especially when I'm in the gym working out.

69
00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:54,000
I play my music and I rock in the gym. I'm totally oblivious.

70
00:05:54,000 --> 00:06:05,000
Most astonishingly, Bill's new heart transformed him from an overweight couch potato into a physical fitness freak just like Brady Michael's.

71
00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:15,000
Bill believes that in taking Brady Michael's heart, he has taken some of Michael's personality.

72
00:06:15,000 --> 00:06:19,000
I'm living with a part of him that he's blessed me.

73
00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:31,000
And with that blessing has come some ideas and thoughts and characteristics that have kind of melded and become a part of my everyday life.

74
00:06:31,000 --> 00:06:35,000
Wow, this is all very weird. I told you it was weird.

75
00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:41,000
The guy gets a heart transplant and he believes he got a bonus. You got the donor's personality too.

76
00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:47,000
And it's more than the heart. Think about it, there are thousands of other transplants done each year. Lungs, kidneys, livers.

77
00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:56,000
If this guy's right, are those people getting their donor's personalities as well? Is this even possible?

78
00:06:56,000 --> 00:07:02,000
Bill Wall's remarkable story suggests something that common sense says cannot be.

79
00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:06,000
Could our organs really store the essence of our being?

80
00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:12,000
Can one person's body assimilate the personality of someone long since dead?

81
00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:15,000
Psychology professor Dr. Gary Schwartz thinks so.

82
00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:31,000
If all tissues could store information and energy, then if a tissue was removed from one person and was surgically placed in another, there would be a transplant not only of the matter, but of the memory as well.

83
00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:36,000
Bill's case is not all that unusual when compared to other extraordinary cases.

84
00:07:36,000 --> 00:07:45,000
Schwartz has researched the transfer of memory for 30 years and has tracked down some 70 cases of similar donor stories.

85
00:07:45,000 --> 00:07:56,000
I have seen too many cases of uncanny and accurate parallels for me to question whether there's a phenomenon here.

86
00:07:57,000 --> 00:08:04,000
In 1988, Claire Sylvia received the heart and lungs of a young man who died in a motorcycle accident.

87
00:08:04,000 --> 00:08:13,000
After the operation, she develops a new taste for beer, green peppers and chicken nuggets, things her former self would never have eaten.

88
00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:20,000
The donor's parents tell her that their son Tim loved nothing more than beer and green peppers and chillingly.

89
00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:27,000
On the night Tim died, he was riding his motorcycle with a box of chicken nuggets in his pocket.

90
00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:39,000
There are examples from Bill's case which indicate the specificity above and beyond simple changes in diet or exercise, which a lot of people might do because they had a heart transplant.

91
00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:50,000
Can't these personality changes be explained as a reaction to a brush with death or even as side effects of the powerful anti-rejection drugs used after transplant surgery?

92
00:08:50,000 --> 00:09:04,000
The first thing we want to entertain are conventional explanations like side effects of the drugs, stress of the surgery or just changes in philosophy of life.

93
00:09:05,000 --> 00:09:16,000
The side effects from major organ transplant are mostly related to the immunosuppression that's required because the recipient immune system wants to fight against the new organ.

94
00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:29,000
And so they're given drugs and medication to tame down their immune system and most of the side effects and toxicity come from these immunosuppressant drugs that reduce the response of the body to the new organ.

95
00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:42,000
A side effect of a steroid might change people's anxiety level or it might change maybe a certain food preference, but it's going to be random in relationship to the preferences and personality of the donor.

96
00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:49,000
In order for that change to match the donor, there has to be some coupling and that coupling is not going to come from the drug.

97
00:09:49,000 --> 00:10:02,000
Now the drugs may facilitate sometimes those connections, but they're not causing the match. The matches can only be explained by some sort of memory or informational connection.

98
00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:15,000
I don't think the anti-rejection drugs as toxic as they may be could explain the specific information that gets transferred. That would have to be pure luck or some actual mechanism of transference from the donor to the recipient.

99
00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:31,000
So it appears to be too much of a coincidence to be the drugs. Dr. Stuart Hamarov has a radical theory that suggests something almost beyond belief. Can the human heart actually store our memories?

100
00:10:31,000 --> 00:10:40,000
It's not only the brain that can store a memory. We have muscle memory. We learn to play tennis and there's information stored in the nerves that control the muscles.

101
00:10:40,000 --> 00:10:57,000
And the heart has a lot of neurons. Outside of the brain, that's one of the largest collections of neurons in the body. The nodes that control the beating of the heart and the conduction and the synchrony of the muscle so the heart beats together synchronously are fairly a substantial complex of neurons.

102
00:10:58,000 --> 00:11:03,000
In Danglia A.V. knows that we form a network of neurons inside the heart.

103
00:11:03,000 --> 00:11:13,000
Neurons are specialized cells that transmit information via electric impulses and chemical signals throughout the body's nervous system.

104
00:11:13,000 --> 00:11:23,000
The information they carry allows us to move, think, learn and feel. Most neuroscientists believe that long-term memories are stored exclusively by neurons in the brain.

105
00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:26,500
Dr. Hamarov has a more radical theory.

106
00:11:26,500 --> 00:11:30,500
He believes memories can also be stored by neurons in other parts of the body,

107
00:11:30,500 --> 00:11:34,800
within a cellular structure called a microtubule.

108
00:11:34,800 --> 00:11:38,600
Microtubules seem to be the most likely site

109
00:11:38,600 --> 00:11:42,960
for memory to be housed because we know that in Alzheimer's disease where you lose memory,

110
00:11:42,960 --> 00:11:46,000
it's the microtubules in the brain neurons that fall apart.

111
00:11:46,000 --> 00:11:49,960
So there's a number of avenues of evidence to lead to the fact that the

112
00:11:49,960 --> 00:11:54,720
microtubules are housing and storing memory, but it would be focused and more

113
00:11:54,720 --> 00:11:59,320
prevalent in parts of the body that have the most neurons, the most microtubules,

114
00:11:59,320 --> 00:12:02,960
namely the brain and the big nervous ganglia like the heart.

115
00:12:02,960 --> 00:12:07,520
If Dr. Hamarov is right, memories can be stored by microtubules in the brain,

116
00:12:07,520 --> 00:12:11,960
the heart, and the spinal cord, or anywhere else there are neurons.

117
00:12:11,960 --> 00:12:16,160
This could explain why when Bill Wall got a heart transplant,

118
00:12:16,160 --> 00:12:18,960
he got a memory transplant too.

119
00:12:19,960 --> 00:12:26,460
Dr. Hamarov came to his theory of memory initially by studying neurons and anesthesia

120
00:12:26,460 --> 00:12:30,460
and then extending that to other organs, particularly the heart.

121
00:12:30,460 --> 00:12:37,460
So he's looking at a very special case of how a particular component of a cell can have memory.

122
00:12:37,460 --> 00:12:39,460
And I wouldn't disagree with him.

123
00:12:39,460 --> 00:12:44,460
Throughout human history, poets and philosophers have invested the heart

124
00:12:44,460 --> 00:12:47,460
with powers and meaning beyond that of a simple organ.

125
00:12:47,460 --> 00:12:53,960
In Papua New Guinea, victorious warrior tribes would consume the hearts of the vanquished

126
00:12:53,960 --> 00:12:55,460
to absorb their qualities.

127
00:12:55,460 --> 00:13:01,960
In the arts, the heart has always been seen as the source of all love and passion.

128
00:13:01,960 --> 00:13:08,460
Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known

129
00:13:08,460 --> 00:13:09,960
that Shakespeare?

130
00:13:09,960 --> 00:13:15,460
The heart is central to our culture and it is our own center.

131
00:13:15,460 --> 00:13:17,960
From the heart, everything flows.

132
00:13:17,960 --> 00:13:23,460
Now, some scientists believe the heart literally has a mind of its own.

133
00:13:23,460 --> 00:13:30,460
But could memory and intelligence be found in more than our hearts and heads?

134
00:13:30,460 --> 00:13:36,460
Could it be coursing through our whole bodies?

135
00:13:36,460 --> 00:13:39,460
Dr. Schwartz's theory takes things a step further.

136
00:13:39,460 --> 00:13:44,960
He thinks memory can be stored in all cells throughout the body, not just the neurons.

137
00:13:44,960 --> 00:13:48,460
Thanks to something called feedback.

138
00:13:48,460 --> 00:13:52,460
Feedback is the essence of learning and memory.

139
00:13:52,460 --> 00:13:56,460
Now, that same feedback process operates at any level.

140
00:13:56,460 --> 00:14:01,460
It's what operates within the neurons that allow the neurons to learn between them.

141
00:14:01,460 --> 00:14:06,460
But that same feedback that allows the neuron cells to learn is feedback that can operate

142
00:14:06,460 --> 00:14:13,460
within the interconnected network of cells in the heart or the lungs or any other organ.

143
00:14:13,460 --> 00:14:20,960
That's why feedback memory is, if you would, a universal memory model which then can in

144
00:14:20,960 --> 00:14:24,960
unique ways be applied to any system at any level.

145
00:14:24,960 --> 00:14:29,960
Feedback occurs when a past event influences the response to the same event in the present

146
00:14:29,960 --> 00:14:30,960
or future.

147
00:14:30,960 --> 00:14:36,960
According to Schwartz, this loop allows individual cells to have a sort of memory.

148
00:14:36,960 --> 00:14:39,960
That's another thing about these feedback loops, the recurring process.

149
00:14:39,960 --> 00:14:44,460
Every time you repeat the process over and over again, it makes the memory stronger.

150
00:14:44,460 --> 00:14:49,460
Could our individual cells have a form of memory?

151
00:14:49,460 --> 00:14:51,460
Schwartz believes they do.

152
00:14:51,460 --> 00:14:55,460
And what's more, he thinks he can prove it.

153
00:14:55,460 --> 00:15:00,460
We typically think of muscle memory as being mostly the brain.

154
00:15:00,460 --> 00:15:05,460
But it turns out the muscles have the potential to learn as well because all muscles have

155
00:15:05,460 --> 00:15:06,460
feedback.

156
00:15:06,460 --> 00:15:11,460
There go feedback memory and muscle memory in the muscles themselves.

157
00:15:11,460 --> 00:15:13,960
Schwartz can show this principle in action.

158
00:15:13,960 --> 00:15:19,460
A person is able to train his muscles to shoot basketball hoops using feedback so that he

159
00:15:19,460 --> 00:15:23,960
continues to hit the basket even when blindfolded.

160
00:15:23,960 --> 00:15:27,960
According to Schwartz, it is not just groups of tissue that can have memories.

161
00:15:27,960 --> 00:15:35,460
He thinks it is possible that every single cell in the body can store information.

162
00:15:35,460 --> 00:15:39,460
Since feedback loops are operating at every level in the body at every level, there's

163
00:15:39,460 --> 00:15:45,460
going to be theoretically memory and to various degrees learning at every level in the body.

164
00:15:45,460 --> 00:15:50,460
And so this is not a theory about brain learning or heart learning.

165
00:15:50,460 --> 00:15:54,460
It's really even not a theory about cellular learning per se.

166
00:15:54,460 --> 00:16:00,960
It's a theory about feedback learning and to the extent that cells have feedback loops

167
00:16:00,960 --> 00:16:02,960
that they will learn as well.

168
00:16:02,960 --> 00:16:07,460
Although unproven, this theory could help explain the cases of transplant recipients

169
00:16:07,460 --> 00:16:13,960
who report receiving the donor's memories, tastes, and behavior along with their new organ.

170
00:16:14,960 --> 00:16:17,460
Interesting, but unfortunately all theoretical.

171
00:16:17,460 --> 00:16:21,960
Maybe to find the answer to this mystery we should take a look at a different organ,

172
00:16:21,960 --> 00:16:23,460
the human brain.

173
00:16:23,460 --> 00:16:25,960
Maybe, just maybe.

174
00:16:25,960 --> 00:16:30,960
Now that Bill has his new heart and his health, it's gone to his head.

175
00:16:31,960 --> 00:16:38,960
Could getting a new lease on life convince you that you are a whole new person?

176
00:16:38,960 --> 00:16:41,960
Bill doesn't think it's all that simple.

177
00:16:41,960 --> 00:16:47,960
Certainly just getting a transplant and a second chance at life changed me in a major way,

178
00:16:48,460 --> 00:16:55,460
but I also totally believe that certain characteristics of my donor have become a basic part of my life

179
00:16:55,460 --> 00:16:59,460
and I feel that this is the cellular memory that's changed my life.

180
00:16:59,460 --> 00:17:03,460
I honestly feel made me a better person, a happier person,

181
00:17:03,460 --> 00:17:09,460
and I actually love now caring and helping and wanting to make a difference.

182
00:17:09,460 --> 00:17:13,460
Most neuroscientists remain skeptical that cellular memory exists at all.

183
00:17:13,460 --> 00:17:19,960
Nevertheless, Bill all believes memories, just like organs, can be transplanted.

184
00:17:20,960 --> 00:17:27,960
One thing is true, Bill's experiences have definitely been weird or what.

185
00:17:43,960 --> 00:17:52,960
Pie, warm round, delicious, simply nothing weird at all here,

186
00:17:52,960 --> 00:17:54,960
but this got me thinking about pie.

187
00:17:54,960 --> 00:17:58,960
No, not this pie, the number pie.

188
00:17:58,960 --> 00:18:01,960
You need the number pie to explain the simple circle

189
00:18:01,960 --> 00:18:07,960
and just like the simple round delicious pie, when you dig deeper it gets more complicated.

190
00:18:07,960 --> 00:18:12,960
Pie is a constant, the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter,

191
00:18:12,960 --> 00:18:18,460
but that ratio can be calculated forever without coming to a final decimal.

192
00:18:18,460 --> 00:18:28,460
Circles, they start off looking so simple, but when you get down to it, they're really complicated.

193
00:18:29,460 --> 00:18:35,460
On December 13, 2007, amateur photographer Brooke Taylor was walking through

194
00:18:35,460 --> 00:18:38,460
Rat Ray Marsh Conservation Area, Southern Ontario.

195
00:18:38,960 --> 00:18:42,460
Well, I love to do nature photography landscapes primarily,

196
00:18:42,460 --> 00:18:47,960
creeks and waterfalls and anything that's sort of remote and off the beaten path.

197
00:18:47,960 --> 00:18:55,960
When he got to Sheridan Creek, Brooke saw something bizarre, majestic and totally unexplained.

198
00:18:55,960 --> 00:18:58,960
Well, I was coming down here to see what the creek looked like

199
00:18:58,960 --> 00:19:02,960
and as I was coming around to the boardwalk over there, I happened to see it.

200
00:19:02,960 --> 00:19:07,960
It was about six feet, maybe a little bit more in diameter and it was turning.

201
00:19:11,460 --> 00:19:16,460
Brooke had stumbled upon a strange, beautiful and mysterious phenomenon.

202
00:19:16,460 --> 00:19:21,460
I was really amazed, it was so cool, a perfectly round circle inscribed in the ice.

203
00:19:21,460 --> 00:19:25,460
And so I set up my camera and started shooting.

204
00:19:28,460 --> 00:19:31,460
Brooke posted the photo on the internet and after 150,000 hits,

205
00:19:31,460 --> 00:19:38,960
he quickly learned that ice circles were a global mystery found across the US, Canada, Europe, Russia.

206
00:19:39,960 --> 00:19:43,960
But what or who was creating them?

207
00:19:43,960 --> 00:19:48,960
To Taylor, this similarity to a famous English hoax seemed obvious.

208
00:19:49,960 --> 00:19:53,960
Well, I entitled my photograph, Creek Circle, take off on Crop Circle

209
00:19:53,960 --> 00:19:57,960
because the crop circles are obviously a little bit mysterious.

210
00:19:58,460 --> 00:20:01,460
Perfectly round circles forming naturally in the ice.

211
00:20:01,460 --> 00:20:04,460
Come on, it's too good to be true, right?

212
00:20:04,460 --> 00:20:06,460
Too perfect, too weird.

213
00:20:07,460 --> 00:20:14,460
Surely someone is messing with us, creating ice circles like they would create crop circles.

214
00:20:15,460 --> 00:20:21,460
For over two decades, strange geometrical designs known as crop circles appeared in British farmland.

215
00:20:21,960 --> 00:20:24,960
In 1991, two men admitted they were behind the hoax.

216
00:20:24,960 --> 00:20:29,960
They created these amazing patterns with little more than a length of rope and a plank of wood.

217
00:20:31,960 --> 00:20:38,960
So could the ice circles be the handiwork of human hoaxers, just like many crop circles turned out to be?

218
00:20:39,960 --> 00:20:43,960
It's impossible for somebody to generate these circles.

219
00:20:43,960 --> 00:20:47,960
The ice is very, very thin, very delicate, very fragile.

220
00:20:48,460 --> 00:20:53,460
And you try and put any sort of thing to cut the ice, you're going to leave evidence of it.

221
00:20:53,460 --> 00:21:00,460
Or you're going to have to somehow be standing in the ice or standing in the water to be able to hold whatever tool that you have to cut the circle.

222
00:21:00,460 --> 00:21:05,460
So I wouldn't, it's mother nature doing her finest.

223
00:21:06,460 --> 00:21:12,460
Len Zabelanski is an engineer at the Cold Region's Research and Engineering Laboratory in New Hampshire.

224
00:21:12,460 --> 00:21:16,460
Their research helps the U.S. military operate in cold climates.

225
00:21:16,960 --> 00:21:19,960
Ice is nice. This is what we do day in and day out.

226
00:21:19,960 --> 00:21:25,960
We have three facilities here that we replicate the different processes, the ice processes in different phases.

227
00:21:25,960 --> 00:21:28,960
We're in the test basin where we do flat ice, sheet ice.

228
00:21:28,960 --> 00:21:35,960
We have another facility where we bring a river system inside and then we have a large general research area.

229
00:21:36,960 --> 00:21:41,960
Len sees a fundamental problem facing people wanting to hoax an ice circle.

230
00:21:42,460 --> 00:21:47,460
Because ice floats on top of the flowing river, there's no support below.

231
00:21:48,460 --> 00:21:51,460
The ice doesn't have any strength whatsoever.

232
00:21:51,460 --> 00:21:56,460
It's a very delicate process and it's the water that's sort of holding it together.

233
00:21:56,460 --> 00:21:59,460
And there's basically no strength in this.

234
00:21:59,460 --> 00:22:03,460
For anybody trying to go out and do that, the ice has no strength.

235
00:22:03,460 --> 00:22:10,460
And so he has to basically stand in mid-air to be able to do this and that's physically impossible.

236
00:22:10,960 --> 00:22:17,960
Zablinsky believes these perfect ice circles are formed by a unique combination of natural processes.

237
00:22:17,960 --> 00:22:22,960
And for the first time, using a unique experiment, he intends to prove it.

238
00:22:22,960 --> 00:22:25,960
The way the ice circles form is basically in a back-eddy.

239
00:22:25,960 --> 00:22:28,960
The ice will follow the water.

240
00:22:28,960 --> 00:22:30,960
And if the water goes in a circle, so will the ice.

241
00:22:30,960 --> 00:22:34,960
Back-eddies can be found on bends and rivers where a constriction

242
00:22:35,460 --> 00:22:40,460
forces some of the water to flow back on itself, creating a rotating pool.

243
00:22:40,460 --> 00:22:44,460
So the theory goes that in the winter, when ice flows into an eddy,

244
00:22:44,460 --> 00:22:48,460
it too becomes part of the rotation and begins to grow and grow outward,

245
00:22:48,460 --> 00:22:53,460
until it grinds against the surrounding static ice like a gristmill,

246
00:22:53,460 --> 00:22:57,460
creating the perfect, beautiful ice circle.

247
00:22:57,460 --> 00:23:04,460
And what happens in the winter environment, ice that's coming down into this backwater area,

248
00:23:04,460 --> 00:23:06,460
actually goes around as well.

249
00:23:06,460 --> 00:23:11,460
And as the ice is contributing into this background, it continues to grow in a larger and larger circle.

250
00:23:11,460 --> 00:23:16,460
If you look at an ice circle that we've had pictures of, it looks like a vinyl record,

251
00:23:16,460 --> 00:23:20,460
because everything is all very circular with different little ridges around.

252
00:23:20,460 --> 00:23:23,460
So what's happening is the ice is coming down, bangs into the circle,

253
00:23:23,460 --> 00:23:26,460
and it just sort of squashes in and you get a little ridge.

254
00:23:26,460 --> 00:23:31,460
And that ridge just keeps building up in time and getting larger and larger and larger and larger in diameter.

255
00:23:32,460 --> 00:23:37,460
Like a gristmill, the rotating ice circles grind against the surrounding ice,

256
00:23:37,460 --> 00:23:42,460
creating a perfectly round circle and its mirror image.

257
00:23:42,460 --> 00:23:46,460
The two pieces will sort of nest together with a little bit of open water between them.

258
00:23:47,460 --> 00:23:52,460
And there's a very narrow gap, but you can actually see the milling process actually taking place.

259
00:23:52,460 --> 00:23:57,460
Len believes this is exactly what happened to create the ice circle in Brook Taylor's photo.

260
00:23:57,460 --> 00:24:03,460
You can actually still see rings. This is the kind of ice circle that we're going to duplicate today.

261
00:24:04,460 --> 00:24:08,460
What are these mysterious circles of ice? Are they a natural process of nature?

262
00:24:08,460 --> 00:24:15,460
Can they be recreated in a lab or does the answer to this bizarre mystery lie beyond our planet?

263
00:24:16,460 --> 00:24:19,460
At the Cole Region's Research and Engineering Laboratory in New Hampshire,

264
00:24:19,460 --> 00:24:25,460
engineer Len Zablanski intends to find out with an experiment that has never been attempted before.

265
00:24:25,460 --> 00:24:30,460
Recreating the conditions that he believes will lead to the creation of an ice circle.

266
00:24:32,460 --> 00:24:40,460
What we've created here is the river process that would contribute to the formation of an ice circle.

267
00:24:40,460 --> 00:24:46,460
In a temperature-controlled laboratory, Len has recreated the prevailing physical and environmental conditions

268
00:24:46,460 --> 00:24:49,460
that existed when Brook Tyler photographed the ice circle.

269
00:24:49,460 --> 00:24:54,460
The water is coming from our upstream reach of the river. It's coming down past,

270
00:24:54,460 --> 00:24:59,460
but we have more water coming into this section of the river that we can actually allow to leave

271
00:24:59,460 --> 00:25:04,460
to sort of create a backwater ready. What happens is the water coming into our ready reach,

272
00:25:04,460 --> 00:25:12,460
our hydraulic section, is less than the water that we're allowing to release from our control section.

273
00:25:12,460 --> 00:25:15,460
So we're continually recirculating. That's the recirculating section.

274
00:25:15,460 --> 00:25:20,460
And so a little bit of the water will come out, but the ice will actually stay in and continually circulate.

275
00:25:20,460 --> 00:25:27,460
The back-eddy is a rotating pool of water Len believes is needed to trap and grow ice into a circle.

276
00:25:27,460 --> 00:25:33,460
We're generating small snow crystals that are settling on the water surface,

277
00:25:33,460 --> 00:25:39,460
and that's what we're using to initiate ice. And as the ice forms and creates and circulates around,

278
00:25:39,460 --> 00:25:46,460
we're controlling the amount of ice that we're generating so we're not plugging up the system.

279
00:25:46,460 --> 00:25:52,460
The snow acts like a seed and helps ice crystals to form in the flowing water.

280
00:25:52,460 --> 00:25:59,460
And once the merci will pump, and as the water comes around, it just shoots it forward along with the ice

281
00:25:59,460 --> 00:26:02,460
down into our ready section.

282
00:26:03,460 --> 00:26:09,460
The experiment begins. Will Lens River form an elusive ice circle?

283
00:26:09,460 --> 00:26:13,460
You'll see there's a piece of ice that just started spinning around in our circle.

284
00:26:13,460 --> 00:26:21,460
It will continue to build. And as it continues to rotate, ice that's coming from upstream, we accumulate on the edge,

285
00:26:21,460 --> 00:26:25,460
and that's why you're going to start seeing these ridges.

286
00:26:25,460 --> 00:26:32,460
At first the ice in the back-eddy grows as predicted, but it isn't forming as a uniform disk.

287
00:26:32,460 --> 00:26:37,460
It's ice, but nowhere near the perfect ice circles he is trying to recreate.

288
00:26:37,460 --> 00:26:39,460
We just jammed it.

289
00:26:41,460 --> 00:26:46,460
Joe Dysloges is a fluvial geomorphologist or river expert.

290
00:26:46,460 --> 00:26:51,460
He believes he has a better theory to explain this weird quirk of nature.

291
00:26:51,460 --> 00:26:58,460
Let's not assume the most wild to start with and let's start thinking about the true explanations that really help

292
00:26:58,460 --> 00:27:01,460
understand these, and that is the science.

293
00:27:01,460 --> 00:27:07,460
But can science explain the three-mile-wide ice circle in Russia's Lake Baikal?

294
00:27:07,460 --> 00:27:15,460
Features from space look fantastic, but when you're actually on the ground, you get a better sense of what's likely to be controlling them

295
00:27:15,460 --> 00:27:20,460
and probably a different perception entirely about what the composition of them are and what they're made of.

296
00:27:20,460 --> 00:27:25,460
The best science relates to good field evidence, good field investigations,

297
00:27:25,460 --> 00:27:33,460
and a lot of the speculation, if you like, or the guesswork that comes from standing afar is a good first approximation,

298
00:27:33,460 --> 00:27:36,460
but good science really requires you to be out in the field.

299
00:27:36,460 --> 00:27:43,460
Joe has spent years studying how rivers behave in cold regions like Canada and Scandinavia.

300
00:27:43,460 --> 00:27:49,460
Well, cold climates are fantastic in terms of water and the way water freezes.

301
00:27:49,460 --> 00:27:54,460
You can see a whole range of shapes, but one of the most common one is circular,

302
00:27:54,460 --> 00:27:56,460
and they come in a whole variety of sizes.

303
00:27:56,460 --> 00:28:01,460
They form at different types in times of the year during the cold season,

304
00:28:01,460 --> 00:28:11,460
and it's just a tremendous way of understanding how rivers interact with freezing or cold environments.

305
00:28:11,460 --> 00:28:16,460
Joe believes there's another natural process that forms frozen circles on a river.

306
00:28:16,460 --> 00:28:18,460
It's called phrasal ice.

307
00:28:18,460 --> 00:28:25,460
Phrasal ice forms in rivers when the water cools to a point where you begin forming these ice crystals,

308
00:28:25,460 --> 00:28:27,460
or we call them ice nuclei.

309
00:28:27,460 --> 00:28:35,460
The process is called supercooling when water is just slightly below the freezing temperature and these nuclei begin to form.

310
00:28:35,460 --> 00:28:40,460
As the tiny ice crystals start to collide, they grow into larger clumps of phrasal ice.

311
00:28:41,460 --> 00:28:46,460
Ice is lighter than water, so as the clumps grow, the more buoyant they become.

312
00:28:46,460 --> 00:28:51,460
And as they float to the surface, they tend to form these nice circular ice pans,

313
00:28:51,460 --> 00:28:56,460
so they actually look like a rather weird phenomenon on the river surface.

314
00:28:56,460 --> 00:29:02,460
It's a promising theory, but Joe's ice pans don't look like the spinning perfect ice circles

315
00:29:02,460 --> 00:29:05,460
Brooke Taylor photographed in Ontario.

316
00:29:05,460 --> 00:29:09,460
Back at the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory,

317
00:29:09,460 --> 00:29:15,460
Len Zablansky is still having difficulty creating an ice circle in the lab.

318
00:29:15,460 --> 00:29:23,460
It's possible the rate of freezing is too slow, meaning new ice isn't filling in the gaps to make a circular shape.

319
00:29:23,460 --> 00:29:30,460
So that just shows you how delicate this process is when Mother Nature is generating these ice circles.

320
00:29:30,460 --> 00:29:33,460
Len decides to drop the ambient temperature.

321
00:29:33,460 --> 00:29:39,460
We've just dropped the temperature two degrees and we're generating more ice and it's freezing faster.

322
00:29:39,460 --> 00:29:42,460
The experiment begins again.

323
00:29:42,460 --> 00:29:49,460
This time the colder temperature is helping build the ice as quickly as it has melted or eroded away.

324
00:29:51,460 --> 00:29:55,460
You can see that some of the ice is starting to freeze into a circle.

325
00:29:55,460 --> 00:30:00,460
As Len predicted, the ice is growing thanks to new ice crystals joining from upstream

326
00:30:00,460 --> 00:30:04,460
and sheet ice growing out from the circle itself.

327
00:30:04,460 --> 00:30:09,460
If we let this run for another 6-12 hours, that ice will become very, very strong.

328
00:30:13,460 --> 00:30:19,460
Allowing his man-made river to flow for hours, Len hopes his experiment will produce a genuine ice circle.

329
00:30:19,460 --> 00:30:22,460
The results are remarkable.

330
00:30:22,460 --> 00:30:26,460
This is the first time we've created an ice circle of this quality in the lab.

331
00:30:26,460 --> 00:30:30,460
Sometimes we've been able to kick out, sometimes we've almost had it,

332
00:30:30,460 --> 00:30:33,460
but this is the first one that's actually starting to become circular.

333
00:30:33,460 --> 00:30:36,460
This is because it's starting to be mature.

334
00:30:37,460 --> 00:30:42,460
For the first time, Zablanski has shown one way ice circles can form.

335
00:30:45,460 --> 00:30:51,460
But many of these beautiful natural phenomena remain mysterious and not just on Earth.

336
00:30:51,460 --> 00:30:56,460
In 2010, NASA discovered circular grooves hundreds of miles wide

337
00:30:56,460 --> 00:31:00,460
etched into the surface of Europa, Jupiter's ice-bowl moon.

338
00:31:00,460 --> 00:31:05,460
And that, for now, will remain weird.

339
00:31:05,460 --> 00:31:07,460
What?

340
00:31:22,460 --> 00:31:27,460
Four unremarkable letters, A, T, G, and C.

341
00:31:27,460 --> 00:31:30,460
That's all there are in our DNA alphabet.

342
00:31:30,460 --> 00:31:34,460
Take those four letters, multiply them by billions, and arrange them in a unique sequence

343
00:31:34,460 --> 00:31:37,460
long enough to fill hundreds of telephone directories.

344
00:31:37,460 --> 00:31:45,460
And you have one strand of DNA, the source of the information that makes you, you, and me, me.

345
00:31:45,460 --> 00:31:53,460
But what if someone examined your DNA and revealed that you were not who you thought you were,

346
00:31:53,460 --> 00:31:57,460
and in fact you were sharing your body with someone else?

347
00:31:58,460 --> 00:32:04,460
In 2002, Lydia Fairchild, mother to four children fathered by her partner Jamie Townsend,

348
00:32:04,460 --> 00:32:08,460
applied for state benefits to help raise her young family.

349
00:32:08,460 --> 00:32:14,460
In accordance with state law, Lydia and her children had DNA tests to prove parentage

350
00:32:14,460 --> 00:32:20,460
at conception, we inherit half our DNA from our mother and half from our father.

351
00:32:20,460 --> 00:32:27,460
When all is normal, every child will have a genetic inheritance that can be easily traced to both parents.

352
00:32:27,460 --> 00:32:33,460
But Lydia's DNA results would prove to be far from normal.

353
00:32:33,460 --> 00:32:40,460
I got a call and the prosecutor had asked that I come up to the office.

354
00:32:41,460 --> 00:32:47,460
He started asking like, was I trying to do fraud by getting help from the state,

355
00:32:47,460 --> 00:32:51,460
because these kids aren't yours, and I was just, I stopped him from it, and I was like,

356
00:32:51,460 --> 00:32:53,460
what do you mean these kids aren't mine?

357
00:32:53,460 --> 00:33:00,460
And he says, well, the test came back, Jamie is the father of all the kids, but you are not the mother.

358
00:33:00,460 --> 00:33:06,460
The tests were repeated twice more, but both times the results were the same.

359
00:33:07,460 --> 00:33:12,460
Jamie was the father. None of the four children appeared to be related to Lydia.

360
00:33:12,460 --> 00:33:19,460
I was so scared. They said that they were going to take it to court, because they didn't find that I was telling the truth.

361
00:33:19,460 --> 00:33:21,460
They thought that I was lying.

362
00:33:21,460 --> 00:33:27,460
The state prosecutor started an investigation and Lydia found herself in front of a judge.

363
00:33:27,460 --> 00:33:31,460
The judge looked at me and he says, are these your children? I said, yes they are.

364
00:33:31,460 --> 00:33:37,460
You know, I got pregnant, I carried them, I delivered them. The doctor has ultrasounds of them being in my stomach.

365
00:33:37,460 --> 00:33:42,460
The judge said you opened a big kind of worms. He's like, we don't know what's going on here, but we're going to figure it out.

366
00:33:42,460 --> 00:33:49,460
He said he wants me to go down to a special lab and had DNA tested on me and my children again,

367
00:33:49,460 --> 00:33:54,460
but now not through the nurse, through the prosecutor's office, where she could possibly be making this mistake.

368
00:33:54,460 --> 00:34:04,460
Despite overwhelming evidence, supporting Lydia's claim, four DNA tests show that she is not the biological mother of the children she gave birth to.

369
00:34:04,460 --> 00:34:06,460
But why?

370
00:34:06,460 --> 00:34:14,460
First and most obvious reason to be explored, the possibility that the DNA tests could be wrong.

371
00:34:14,460 --> 00:34:19,460
To be told that DNA is essentially foolproof is very problematic.

372
00:34:19,460 --> 00:34:24,460
Dr. Kerry Bowman specializes in the ethics of medicine.

373
00:34:24,460 --> 00:34:31,460
Many people in medicine, and I'm one of them, would say nothing in medicine is 100%. It can get close to it, but it's not 100%.

374
00:34:31,460 --> 00:34:39,460
The talk, though, with DNA is that there's an exception and that DNA is virtually foolproof as a testing strategy.

375
00:34:39,460 --> 00:34:44,460
When in fact, they may be rare, but there are exceptions to that.

376
00:34:44,460 --> 00:34:50,460
So in fact, did Lydia really have a fair consent process? I would say not.

377
00:34:50,460 --> 00:34:57,460
Parental DNA tests themselves are more than 99% accurate, but humans can, and do, make mistakes.

378
00:34:57,460 --> 00:35:00,460
Had this happened to Lydia's tests?

379
00:35:00,460 --> 00:35:03,460
My first thought is perhaps somehow the samples got screwed up.

380
00:35:03,460 --> 00:35:11,460
Maybe they mixed up her DNA sample with some other women's and then when they tested it, of course it would show that it wasn't her kid.

381
00:35:11,460 --> 00:35:19,460
And my first goal was I was going to ask the court to order a whole new set of DNA tests done with a separate, a new laboratory to do it.

382
00:35:19,460 --> 00:35:23,460
See if the second laboratory came back with the same problem.

383
00:35:23,460 --> 00:35:33,460
Medical mix-ups do happen. In 2002, Linda McDougal from Woodville, Wisconsin, was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy.

384
00:35:33,460 --> 00:35:38,460
However, two days after the operation, doctors told Linda it had all been a mistake.

385
00:35:38,460 --> 00:35:42,460
Her biopsy results had been accidentally switched with another patient.

386
00:35:42,460 --> 00:35:47,460
Linda never had cancer and so the surgery had been completely unnecessary.

387
00:35:47,460 --> 00:35:52,460
Did a similar human error skew Lydia's DNA results?

388
00:35:52,460 --> 00:35:59,460
Or is the real answer to this mystery beyond anything medical science has ever imagined?

389
00:35:59,460 --> 00:36:01,460
So what is going on?

390
00:36:01,460 --> 00:36:07,460
Another theory suggests that Lydia could have given birth to her children and yet not have been their biological mother.

391
00:36:07,460 --> 00:36:13,460
It is speculated that Lydia was an IVF surrogate.

392
00:36:13,460 --> 00:36:18,460
So what a surrogate pregnancy is, is what used to be called test tube babies.

393
00:36:18,460 --> 00:36:31,460
When egg and sperm are introduced outside the womb in a lab condition, put together, they create an embryo and that embryo is then put into the uterus of a surrogate mother.

394
00:36:31,460 --> 00:36:37,460
So this woman has no biological relationship to the child that she is carrying and will eventually bear.

395
00:36:37,460 --> 00:36:43,460
But why would Lydia have carried the fertilized eggs of another woman four times over?

396
00:36:43,460 --> 00:36:45,460
It certainly wouldn't benefit fraud.

397
00:36:45,460 --> 00:36:53,460
IVF itself is extremely expensive and to speak in American dollars, you could easily be talking about 30 or 50 thousand dollars

398
00:36:53,460 --> 00:37:01,460
and how someone like Lydia Fairtale would want or could possibly do this to create some kind of welfare scam.

399
00:37:01,460 --> 00:37:03,460
I can't even imagine how that would work.

400
00:37:03,460 --> 00:37:11,460
The costs simply don't line up to whatever benefits someone could pull from this in terms of a welfare scam.

401
00:37:11,460 --> 00:37:13,460
It doesn't make any sense.

402
00:37:13,460 --> 00:37:17,460
And as Dr. Chitaid explains, IVF is not something that can be done at home.

403
00:37:17,460 --> 00:37:21,460
It's impossible to do in your kitchen in vitro fertilization.

404
00:37:21,460 --> 00:37:30,460
You have to stimulate the ovary of the mother and you have to make sure that you don't over-stimulate because then it will produce huge cysts in the ovary

405
00:37:30,460 --> 00:37:34,460
and can cause her to have dehydration and even death.

406
00:37:34,460 --> 00:37:39,460
So it has to be monitored very carefully by experts in this field.

407
00:37:39,460 --> 00:37:41,460
There's an even bigger problem with this theory.

408
00:37:41,460 --> 00:37:48,460
The father of all four of Lydia's children had been confirmed as her partner Jamie Townsend.

409
00:37:48,460 --> 00:37:54,460
It wasn't logical that somebody would hire Lydia to carry surrogacy and then have them all fathered by Jamie Townsend.

410
00:37:54,460 --> 00:37:56,460
Why would they pick him?

411
00:37:56,460 --> 00:38:02,460
And besides that, the children didn't go off to live with the contracting people who would hire Lydia to be a surrogate.

412
00:38:02,460 --> 00:38:03,460
It was just illogical.

413
00:38:03,460 --> 00:38:08,460
I mean, it had to be, it could have been an explanation that she was a surrogate parent,

414
00:38:08,460 --> 00:38:12,460
but I'd ask her, was there any surrogacy contract between you and anybody else?

415
00:38:12,460 --> 00:38:13,460
No.

416
00:38:13,460 --> 00:38:17,460
She was adamant she was not a surrogate parent for anybody.

417
00:38:17,460 --> 00:38:23,460
None of the theories seem plausible and case seemed destined to remain as mysterious as it was bizarre

418
00:38:23,460 --> 00:38:28,460
until Lydia's attorney discovered something almost too weird to be believed.

419
00:38:28,460 --> 00:38:33,460
A description in a medical journal of a rare and almost unheard of genetic condition

420
00:38:33,460 --> 00:38:38,460
only known to affect around 40 people in the whole world.

421
00:38:38,460 --> 00:38:43,460
Something called tetragametic chimerism.

422
00:38:43,460 --> 00:38:50,460
I was doing a little trolling on the internet and wondered if maybe it fit our scenario.

423
00:38:50,460 --> 00:38:56,460
And so I read it as much as I could understand, but it sounded very much like what we were dealing with.

424
00:38:56,460 --> 00:39:02,460
So I contacted Dr. Kruskal, who was one of the authors of the paper.

425
00:39:02,460 --> 00:39:07,460
She's now deceased and introduced myself in the phone and said,

426
00:39:07,460 --> 00:39:09,460
I think I've read your article.

427
00:39:09,460 --> 00:39:11,460
I think I have a case very much like it.

428
00:39:11,460 --> 00:39:14,460
Of course, they were intrigued about it.

429
00:39:14,460 --> 00:39:20,460
So could I send you the test results we have and maybe you can give us an insight of what's happening here.

430
00:39:20,460 --> 00:39:24,460
One way a chimeric can form is when two separate aches are fertilized by two sperm

431
00:39:24,460 --> 00:39:26,460
and then merged to form a single embryo.

432
00:39:26,460 --> 00:39:32,460
But simply, it's two non-identical twins merging very early on in pregnancy.

433
00:39:32,460 --> 00:39:38,460
Their two sets of DNA are then intermingled throughout the body.

434
00:39:38,460 --> 00:39:46,460
If Lydia Fairchild was a chimera, it could explain how her biological children have different DNA.

435
00:39:46,460 --> 00:39:50,460
They would have inherited one set of DNA from one area of her body,

436
00:39:50,460 --> 00:39:57,460
while the laboratory sampled other areas that contained a completely different set of DNA.

437
00:39:57,460 --> 00:40:00,460
Everybody then, I think, is when they kind of stepped back a little bit more.

438
00:40:00,460 --> 00:40:02,460
The prosecutors were confused now.

439
00:40:02,460 --> 00:40:06,460
All this time they've been trying to take them from me and I can just see on their faces like,

440
00:40:06,460 --> 00:40:09,460
whoa, you know what I mean, what did we almost just do?

441
00:40:09,460 --> 00:40:15,460
The problem with chimerism is that you have to actually do biopsies from different body organs,

442
00:40:15,460 --> 00:40:24,460
liver, kidney, intestine perhaps, and find out if all of them contain the same genetic material as we check in the blood.

443
00:40:24,460 --> 00:40:27,460
Lydia was sent back for more DNA tests.

444
00:40:27,460 --> 00:40:31,460
This time they took samples from all over her body.

445
00:40:32,460 --> 00:40:37,460
And my hair, blood, and swabs from my cheek came back as the same DNA,

446
00:40:37,460 --> 00:40:43,460
but my cervical smear came back as a different DNA, and it was actually the DNA that matched my children.

447
00:40:45,460 --> 00:40:48,460
The chimera theory was confirmed incredibly.

448
00:40:48,460 --> 00:40:51,460
Lydia Fairchild has two sets of DNA.

449
00:40:51,460 --> 00:40:58,460
The DNA in Lydia's ovaries being completely different from the DNA found in the rest of her body.

450
00:40:59,460 --> 00:41:06,460
Lydia Fairchild shows that DNA testing, fingerprinting, may not be perfect.

451
00:41:06,460 --> 00:41:12,460
So what happened in her was that the ovaries were produced by different cells

452
00:41:12,460 --> 00:41:18,460
than the cells that produced the white blood cells and the platelets in her blood.

453
00:41:18,460 --> 00:41:25,460
So those ovaries produced her children as if they are produced by her sister,

454
00:41:26,460 --> 00:41:29,460
but her blood contained completely different DNA.

455
00:41:29,460 --> 00:41:32,460
And your ovaries are what hold your eggs.

456
00:41:32,460 --> 00:41:38,460
So when your egg comes down and then you get pregnant, your child is going to carry the DNA that's in your ovaries.

457
00:41:38,460 --> 00:41:42,460
And my ovaries is actually my twin's DNA.

458
00:41:42,460 --> 00:41:45,460
And that's when she, I was like, my twin, what are you talking about?

459
00:41:45,460 --> 00:41:46,460
I don't have a twin.

460
00:41:46,460 --> 00:41:50,460
And that's when she, they kind of broke it down about what happened.

461
00:41:50,460 --> 00:41:56,460
Amazingly, Lydia's children had inherited their DNA from the non-identical twin

462
00:41:56,460 --> 00:42:01,460
that Lydia's embryo fused with just after Lydia was conceived.

463
00:42:01,460 --> 00:42:07,460
There was a final court hearing and the judge, he granted me my children

464
00:42:07,460 --> 00:42:12,460
that I am the biological mom of my kids and I remember crying so bad that I finally won.

465
00:42:12,460 --> 00:42:18,460
After all that fighting I did, I believe it was two and a half years I fought for my kids to keep them in my life.

466
00:42:19,460 --> 00:42:21,460
Lydia's world had been changed forever.

467
00:42:21,460 --> 00:42:26,460
She is one of only about 40 people on the planet known to be a chimera.

468
00:42:27,460 --> 00:42:32,460
If I never did that DNA to determine if he was the father or not, I would never know today that I was chimera.

469
00:42:32,460 --> 00:42:34,460
I mean, I would never know.

470
00:42:34,460 --> 00:42:38,460
I mean, I would still be living, not ever knowing that I had two DNAs.

471
00:42:39,460 --> 00:42:44,460
So it's very interesting how she broke it down for me about what had happened.

472
00:42:45,460 --> 00:42:50,460
Doctors believe there are many more as yet unidentified chimeras out there.

473
00:42:50,460 --> 00:42:58,460
Could someone you know have an extra set of DNA they got from their own embryonic twin without them even knowing it?

474
00:42:59,460 --> 00:43:01,460
Weird or what?

475
00:43:15,460 --> 00:43:21,460
So there we have it. Three weird stories, each with several competing theories.

476
00:43:21,460 --> 00:43:26,460
A man undergoes a life-saving heart transplant procedure but gets more than he bargained for.

477
00:43:26,460 --> 00:43:30,460
A new organ and a new personality.

478
00:43:30,460 --> 00:43:35,460
Is this simply psychological or the side effects of medicinal drugs?

479
00:43:35,460 --> 00:43:43,460
Or can the heart or even individual human cells store a person's memories and characteristics?

480
00:43:44,460 --> 00:43:50,460
Around the world, perfect, beautiful spinning circles of ice forming in lakes and rivers.

481
00:43:51,460 --> 00:43:55,460
Are they the winter cousins of the infamous crop circle?

482
00:43:55,460 --> 00:43:58,460
Or do science have the answers?

483
00:43:58,460 --> 00:44:02,460
A mother is revealed to be genetically unrelated to her own children.

484
00:44:02,460 --> 00:44:04,460
Is she trying to commit fraud?

485
00:44:04,460 --> 00:44:08,460
Or is she the victim of a series of DNA mix-ups?

486
00:44:08,460 --> 00:44:15,460
Or are we dealing with a rare and extraordinary genetic oddity?

487
00:44:16,460 --> 00:44:21,460
Join me next time for more stories that will undoubtedly be...

488
00:44:24,460 --> 00:44:26,460
Weird or what?

489
00:44:38,460 --> 00:44:40,460
Weird or what?

490
00:44:40,460 --> 00:44:42,460
Weird or what?

491
00:44:42,460 --> 00:44:44,460
Weird or what?

492
00:44:44,460 --> 00:44:46,460
Weird or what?

493
00:44:46,460 --> 00:44:48,460
Weird or what?

494
00:44:48,460 --> 00:44:50,460
Weird or what?

495
00:44:50,460 --> 00:44:52,460
Weird or what?

496
00:44:52,460 --> 00:44:54,460
Weird or what?