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Deep beneath the city, a monster awakens. Have surveillance cameras disturbed a mutant life form. It looks like this red blob. Then it starts writhing. It starts pulsating. Experts have no idea what they're looking at. Some fear an invasion could be on the way. There's thousands of miles of sewers underneath our cities. What else is living down there? April 27th, 2009, Raleigh, North Carolina. Engineers perform a routine inspection of the city's sewer system. In charge of this underground network, Ed Bucken.
We serve roughly 560,000 people, but we also have 2500 miles of sewer line that we maintain. So that's enough mileage to go from Raleigh, North Carolina to Las Vegas. That much piping requires constant maintenance. As you might imagine, underground utilities are difficult to inspect. So we've devised a system by which we put a robotic camera down the pipe. Sewer engineer Q Brown has over 5 years experience with these robotic cameras. We use this type of system because it gives us more flexibility and more capability of getting in the pipe and actually seeing what's going on. As the robotic camera tracks through the sewer, the team comes face to face with something beyond comprehension.
It's slimy. It's just gooey looking. And it's almost like it's got a heartbeat like it's alive. When the light from the robot shined on it, it retracted and reacted to the light. The team often see creatures down here, but this alien encounter is something very different. You'll find all sorts of different animals in there. They usually range from snakes, lizards, rats to a plethora of insects like roaches and things like that. And they typically are going to run the other direction when they see a robotic device coming at them with a big light on it.
Whatever it is, this thing is not running away. It may react to the robotic lights, but it stands its ground. It seems impervious to dangerously high levels of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, toxic gases deadly to humans. Buckan and his team need to find out what this pulsating creature could be before it spreads or attacks. So, I initially searched online for other examples of what this might be and um really came up with nothing. I was privately hoping that somebody would say, "Oh, yeah. We've we've seen that all the time. It's been here." Blah, blah, blah. And we never got that.
All they have to go on is that this pulsing blob has suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The focus switches to possible entry points into the underground network. Maps of the sewer system reveal that part of the network runs close to medical research laboratories. They call this the research triangle. It's it's in an area known for cutting edge research. You have glow-in-the-dark bunny rabbits. You have mice with ears growing out of them. And you have research even combining pig embryos with human DNA. So, you never know what kind of crazy
things could be going on in these labs. The proximity of the research labs to the sewer is enough to send the web into frenzied speculation. Mysteries investigator Lyall Blackburn has an alarming theory. It's not hard to imagine that this pulsating ball was created by scientists and accidentally washed down the drain into the sewers. Could the entity in the sewers have been created in one of these research labs? This glistening blob is very pink and flesh colored. And you got to wonder if this red color isn't from hemoglobin, which is the chemical in our own blood that carries oxygen,
meaning it could be some kind of mutant tissue taking on a life of its own. Worse, the surveillance camera may have angered it. And right now, no one knows how many more are down there. Coming up, a UFO descends on this crowd. This is unbelievable, man. It's kind of terrifying, but also kind of thrilling. Surveillance cameras have captured what appears to be a mutant mammal in the sewers of Raleigh, North Carolina. But biologist Mark Martindale thinks there has to be another explanation.
I think that the problem is that it's living in uh unfavorable conditions for any type of mamalian tissue because it wouldn't be able to maintain its normal body temperature. And so living in a cold, dark, wet sewer uh if you came from a mammal is pretty hard to believe. Raleigh sewer engineers still have no idea what they're dealing with or how dangerous it could be. Marine biologist Joseph Ryan thinks the presence of tentacle-like protrusions offers a clue to the creature's possible identity. If you look at this thing and you're like, "Okay, what do we have to go on? It's gelatinous. We see its
habitat. What animals could fit the bill?" You could say maybe a jellyfish. Jellyfish belong to a group of animals called nidarian. They range from benign corals and anemmones to the deadly sea wasp or box jellyfish. These animals can be highly dangerous. A single sea wasp is armed with enough venom to kill over 50 people. If the monster in the sewer is some kind of mutant jellyfish, with the firepower of a sea wasp, there could be deadly consequences. Imagine an army of these
jellyfish pouring out of your faucet, stinging everything in sight. But Martindale notices something missing in the footage that may rule out the jellyfish theory. Water. They're called jellyfish for a reason because they don't really have any kind of internal or external skeleton and so they need to be particularly submerged in water otherwise the surface tension collapses the skin of the animal. So if it was a nidarian I'd really expect it to be shriveled up in some way. The pulsing motion in the surveillance footage gives biotech scientist Tim Wood an idea.
He thinks the sewer monster is not a single organism but many creatures joined together. It looks like a pulsing blob because when one contracts then it will cause all the others to contract as well. And then that wave of contraction moves through the blob. Wood believes he has the answer. He recognizes the writhing movement in the footage. It's a mass of worms. We call them tube of X worms. When they're in a clump like that, you don't see the individual worms. You just see a mass of red writhing. But these aren't regular worms. They live in some of the most hostile environments on Earth. Tube effects worms devour toxic metals like mercury and cadmium.
Raleigh's sewers are the perfect place for them to thrive. So, here we're talking about an animal that's almost indestructible. They can deal with some of the most toxic chemicals on Earth. A closer inspection of the tape reveals how a colony of superworms could be breeding underground. When you look at the footage, it appears that they are entering the pipe through um what appears to be a crack. If they got through the crack and into the pipeline, well, there's no soil anymore, so there's no place to go except to hang on to other worms that have escaped and eventually they would accumulate into that ball.
Raleigh authorities may believe the danger has passed, but all it takes is a crack in a pipeline and more may be coming. It's unnerving to think that something like those slime balls are down there breeding and multiplying undisturbed just a few feet below our city streets. For those who've come face to face with the hideous blob, it's something they'll never forget. I have never seen that many worms gather in one spot like that. And I hope in the next 5 years, me doing this, I don't come across nothing as disgusting as what's in that video.
