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Now, surveillance cameras capture a traffic accident that defies the laws of physics. Vehicles weighing thousands of pounds being tossed in the air like small toys. It almost looks like there's no gravity. It's truly bizarre. Could a powerful energy force be on the verge of unleashing chaos on the streets? There's got to be some kind of mechanism. But what could it be? Ching Thai, China, an industrial powerhouse and home to 7 million residents. 20,000 surveillance cameras monitor the morning commute. But then one camera captures something extraordinary.
All of a sudden, these cars levitate in the air and move about like something supernatural is going on. In my career, I've seen a lot of traffic accidents, but I've never seen anything like this before. It's almost graceful in a way. The gravitydeying stop is no ordinary traffic collision. The cars didn't seem to strike each other at all. This seems like there's something almost magical happening here. Whatever it is, it has the power to take control of the vehicles and lift them clean off the ground. An invisible force appears to be at work here, but what could it be? Experts are stunned by the world's weirdest traffic accident in one of China's busiest
cities. The questions that immediately spring to mind is, is this a fake or is there some sort of elaborate trick? Chinese authorities confirm the video is real. Experts consider the possibility that the invisible force may originate underground. Seismologist Quanju from the Palace Museum in Beijing keeps a close watch on the ground under Ching Thai. Ching Thai sits on a 250 m long active fault line. In March 1966, the city is rocked by a series of five massive earthquakes.
The ground shakes for 20 days. 5 million homes are destroyed. Over 8,000 residents lose their lives. The fact there has been some very big and very deadly earthquakes here in the past. When we start to see vehicles moving very violently like that, you might immediately think, "Oh, okay. We're going in for one of these big earthquakes." Again, earthquakes don't usually make things levitate. But further investigation reveals there is one rare type of quake that could be the culprit. It's called a surface wave, similar in behavior to rippling water. These surface waves can cause the ground to roll vertically and horizontally. And it's that type of motion that could cause cars to be flipped up into the air.
Ching Thai residents live in fear of the next big one. The surveillance footage may be the sign that another deadly natural disaster is imminent. But material scientist Kosure Hari notices something about the way everything else in the video reacts that cast doubt on the quake theory. All of the other items around the cars, the pedestrians walking across the street, the other cars suffer no motion whatsoever. It would be nearly impossible for an earthquake to be localized just in these three cars. So at this point, I can't imagine it was an earthquake. Yet experts are convinced that whatever the invisible force is, it must originate beneath the ground. Engineer Brian Walsh suspects some kind of pressure may be rising up.
It almost looks like there's air rushing up from under these vehicles to pick them up off the roadway. People don't think of air as being dangerous, but when you compress air, it can actually lift anything that's above it, even a car. I mean, tornadoes lift things all the time. The most powerful tornadoes have wind speeds in excess of 200 mph. They can lift vehicles and buildings hundreds of feet into the air. Geologist Cyan Proctor believes a blast of air rushing up from the underground sewer system could be powerful enough to lift the vehicles.
Flood water entering the system provides the force to thrust the air up. What's going to happen is all the air that was already in the sewer system is going to become compressed. If the theory is right, high pressure air should blast out wherever there's an opening to the surface. Maybe it has the power to lift those automobiles. Proctor builds a rig to test the concept. This is my sewer system. It's just turned vertical. And at the bottom here, I have a hose that is going to put water in. A disc seals the other end of the pipe. So, water is now going to start coming in from the base into our cylinder and it's filling up and it's compressing all of this air ahead of it.
The water squeezes the air to half its original volume. Oh, here it goes. Whoa. The pressurized air blasts the disc off at over 100 mph. So, wow. You can see the force that compressed air has. And if you take that and you apply it to a city, you can imagine that it's enough air that is being compressed to actually lift a car up off the ground. But Kashor Hari spots an inconsistency. He focuses on the action of the vehicles. If air was rushing out of the ground at a rapid rate, first of all, we'd see some sort of visual sign of that air coming out. But second of all, it would push in the same direction. Both the
cars would have a similar effect of being either pushed apart or sort of pushed together as that air came in contact with them. Scientists discover a vital clue in their search to explain the mysterious levitating cars in China. Physicist Diana Cow notices there's an order to the vehicle's strange acrobatics. The van on the left gets caught first and then the van just to the right of that and then the car on the far right. So, it's like boom right in order. They're getting hung up on something. The cars definitely seem to hang in place for the briefest moment
before changing direction. It's almost as if it hits a trip wire. And I think that's what we have here. Enhancing the surveillance tape reveals a cable lying across the road just before the cars lift off the ground. One end of the cable is attached to a post by the roadside. The other end snags in the spinning brushes of a road sweeper on the opposite side of the road. The sweeper is actually pulling that cable taut, lifting it up in the air. The minivan approaches the junction and drives right into the invisible wire. Then after that, we see a chain reaction that literally lifts all of those vehicles into the air.
The thin cable creates a perfect illusion. One of the things that makes this mystery really hard to solve is that the low resolution that we have doesn't allow us to see the wire attached to the street sweeper itself. Ching Tai's gravity appears to be intact, but the laws of physics can still create incredible events. Steel wire being able to lift three cars. That's impressive.
