[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: This professor stalks a monstrous ape man
in these shadowy forests, but is there
really a wild man in Russia?
What awful calamity befell the people
of Greenland's Viking villages?
Did unknown forces kill their colonies?
And can a monster have survived in the depths
of this Swedish lake for 900 years?
This man believes he saw it.
It must be the lake monster.
What else?
NARRATOR: Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
Author of "2001" and inventor of the communications satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
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[TRAIN HORN WHISTLING]
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: We're taking the morning train to the hills
in the heart of Sri Lanka.
This journey is an old tradition from the days
of the British Empire.
Every year as the tropical heat grew unbearable in Colombo,
the British headed up this line in search
of the healthier, cooler climate 6,000 feet up
in the hill country.
From railway carriages like this one
they could watch the wonders of the local landscape--
mountains, rocks, and waterfalls and the lush green terraces
of the tea plantations.
As they climbed up and up, they noticed changes.
Dry plains turned to fertile pastures,
flowers bloomed that would have withered on the coast.
The turbulent weather of the tropics
gave way to the soft, temperate breezes of an English summer.
So what better place for me to take a cool look at mysteries
from our world's far north?
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NARRATOR: The land mass of the old Soviet Union
made up 1/6 of the surface of the Earth.
For years, imminent biologist Valentin Sapunov
has been traveling to its remotest corners
on the track of the elusive Russian Wildman.
He's searching for any traces of the ape-like creature's
presence.
This tree is very interesting.
As far as I know, there is no one animal
in this region that is able to make
such a damage for the tree.
I think that while man looked for insects,
it's a very typical food.
I am not sure that it as the result of action of wild men,
but maybe it is so, maybe.
NARRATOR: After each expedition, Sapunov returns
to his base in St. Petersburg.
His travels have yielded weird and tantalizing trophies.
This is footprint that we detected of wild man.
Studying footprints of wild man, we
may suggest many ideas about its image,
about its biological construction.
And according to our data, it has
weight from 200 to 300 kilograms and height
from two to three meters.
This piece of tree was cut by me and my friends
near St. Petersburg in the forest of Karelian Isthmus.
And as far as we understand, this tree
was marked by wild man.
You may see the horizontal line.
That was made by somebody having strong fingernails.
NARRATOR: But Sapunov claims the only creature known to science
that could have made such marks is a gorilla.
As far as we know, there is no gorilla in Leningrad district.
That's why I am sure that this tree was damaged by wild man.
NARRATOR: This hair is said to come from a wild man.
From evidence like this, Sapunov has
made models of what he thinks a wild man couple looks like.
Through detailed examination of the wild man's footprints,
Sapunov has worked out how he walks.
He thinks the creature normally travels on two legs and moves
at about 10 kilometers per hour.
But he says it's capable of an alarming 70
kilometers per hour.
Professor Sapunov has built up his picture of the wild man
from interviews with the lucky few who claim to have seen it.
Igor Radimov was a medical officer
at a now deserted army base in the forests
outside Saint Petersburg.
While the base was active, the soldiers
reported frequent sightings of the wild man.
It was even known to peer in through the windows
of the barracks.
Radimov believes the stories because he, too,
had an unnerving encounter.
INTERPRETER: Well, the first thing we saw
was this huge shadow.
As he came closer to the light, his front was sort of lit up,
illuminated.
Because of this we could make out that he was
covered with light gray fur.
It was rather glittery.
The soldiers said they had noticed the palms of his hands
were dark and he had some dark stripes on his belly.
I was reminded of his screams when I visited
the zoo with my daughter.
I heard sounds coming from the monkey house
where the baboons and orangutans are kept.
They were the same as our wild man made.
NARRATOR: A metro station in Saint Petersburg
is the starting point for Sapunov's latest
forensic foray.
Olga Zachesova is convinced that she
met the wild man in the forests outside the city.
She is taking Sapunov to show him where it happened.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
INTERPRETER: Now, Valentin Borisovich,
we're coming close to the place where I met the wild man.
I'll show you precisely.
I'll put you exactly on the spot where he stood.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Valentin Borisovich, now we're almost standing on that place.
Yes, not almost.
he was standing there where you're standing now.
This creature was about three meters tall.
It had very beautiful fur which looked a bit like a bear's fur
but was very thick.
It was shining with gold and was well combed.
His head was rectangular shaped, looking
very similar to a bucket.
Valentin Borisovich, here is something I do at home.
Perhaps it will help you to imagine what I saw.
His eyes were a reddish color.
He had almost no neck, massive shoulders.
I could feel that he was frightened of me.
And I was scared of him.
NARRATOR: But Sapunov's determination
overcomes all fears.
However long it takes to catch a glimpse
of his mysterious quarry, his need to find
the truth for science burns on.
Greenland is one of the most inhospitable
countries in the world.
Lying on the Arctic Circle, it is covered in ice
except for the coastal edges, which can support crops only
in the short Arctic summer.
It was here that in the Middle Ages
Viking explorers landed and settled.
At their peak, the two colonies had
4,000 people, 16 churches, two monasteries,
and their own bishop.
They farmed the land, and for 500 years
the communities thrived.
But suddenly, at the end of the 14th century,
the colonists disappeared.
Today the only evidence of their existence
is the stones of the deserted houses
alongside mass graves of some of those who lived there.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In Copenhagen, Denmark, forensic anthropologist Nils Lynnerup
has examined more than 450 Norse skeletons from Greenland.
The evidence he has found suggests
that they had been forced to abandon
their usual food supply.
We surveyed all the Norse material and evidence
for a diet change can perhaps be found in these very strange
bony growths which we find in the jaws of the Norse,
especially in the later settlement period.
And according to some new interesting research,
these bony growths could be caused by a predominantly
marine diet-- that is, they lived more and more
off fish and sea mammals.
NARRATOR: The evidence suggests the settlers could not
make a living from the land.
Other parts of the skulls told Lynnerup that their health
was declining.
He found more and more instances of middle ear disease.
We tried to compare the results from the early settlement
period with the results from the late settlement period,
and this seemed to indicate an increase
in the frequency of middle ear disease
in the late settlement period.
And this could perhaps point to a general decline
in health conditions.
I think we're looking at a reversal
of the colonization situation.
In the 15th century we know that Iceland and also Norway was hit
by the plague, which left a lot of land available
and probably this tempted a lot of the Norse
in Greenland to move back to Iceland or Norway.
NARRATOR: Lynnerup's results speak of an increasingly
intolerable life in these spartan homesteads,
but they do not explain the complete disappearance
of the colonists.
Archaeologists searching for clues
have turned to every discipline of science.
From beneath the buildings they have taken
soil samples for analysis.
The Vikings covered their floors with layers of straw,
which became deeper every year.
From one of the last inhabited farm houses,
samples have been taken from different levels.
Entomologist Peter Skidmore studied
flies taken from the floor.
He found the unhatched pupa of one called [INAUDIBLE].
There was no way this could have survived in Greenland
without human assistance.
It would appear in areas where there were huge concentrations
of human or dog excrement.
It breeds also in the darkest sort of environments.
It won't breed in light conditions.
So what it's telling us about the actual environment
is that it was nice and warm, a bit smelly, but cozy.
NARRATOR: Skidmore then turned to the flies
taken from the top layer of the floor.
The next sample, that was taken from the bedroom,
indicated a stark change.
[INAUDIBLE] virtually disappeared.
Its place was taken by another fly, [INAUDIBLE].
It would indicate not so much excrement as actual decaying
corpses, possibly human.
So briefly, the bottom level is nice and cozy bedroom,
the top level something terrible has happened.
The temperature has dropped and this fly, a carrion feeder,
corpse feeder, has taken over.
NARRATOR: Skidmore concludes the Norse died in their beds.
Well, Mark, you ready to go in the freezer again today?
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
NARRATOR: Scientists agree that living conditions in Greenland
worsened dramatically.
Glaciologist Paul Mayewski believes that he
knows exactly what happened.
In the heat of the New Hampshire summer
he spends his working day at temperatures
of minus 15 degrees in a giant refrigerator
in the university car park.
These tubes contain ice cores collected
from all over the world.
They have recorded almost every change in the planet's climate.
Mayewski's team have taken specific cores from Greenland.
Working in the most inhospitable conditions,
the drill penetrates nearly two miles into the ice cap
and brings to the surface a tube of frozen history.
Encased in the cores are particles from the air
of ancient times that speak volumes to science.
The expert eye can detect faint layers in the cores.
Each one represents a single year's snowfall.
So every piece of ice can be precisely dated.
By doing a series of analysis we can describe
the environment at that time.
For example, we know by looking at the oxygen isotopes
for that period of time that conditions
were considerably colder than they had
been in the previous decades.
We know that the sea ice extent, number two,
was much greater than it had been in previous decades
and we can verify this with our measurements of chloride.
So detailed is the analysis that even tiny particles
of potassium were detected.
Mayewski knows these could only have
come from around the Himalayan mountains.
So the icy Arctic winds had swept
much further south than before.
The cold air mass that normally sits over the high Arctic
was significantly moved farther southward,
plummeting much of the Northern Hemisphere
into colder conditions throughout the year
than it would have been in the previous decades.
Immediately following, within the next several years,
the climate began to get milder again
and it stayed milder for about 50 to 70 years.
Suddenly, however, around AD 1400 to 1410,
conditions became significantly colder and this part
of the Northern Hemisphere plummeted into one
of the coldest periods that it had experienced
over the last 12,000 years.
NARRATOR: The timing of these cold spells
corresponds with the years when the two Norse settlements
in Greenland disappeared.
Mayewski believes they were frozen out of existence.
It's highly probable that the Norse
settlers would have no longer been able to till their fields.
They probably wouldn't have been able to go into the ocean
to fish.
But chances are because they were never
see him again they did die in the cold period
that finally marked the beginning
of the Little Ice Age.
NARRATOR: Even at its best, life in Greenland
must have been grim.
Nils Lynnerup wonders if there's another intriguing puzzle.
Well, I think that the main question about the Norse
is not, why does the Norse disappear from Greenland,
it's rather, how did the Norse manage to stay
on in Greenland for 500 years?
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: I wonder if the disappearance
of those colonies is the earliest case of an advertising
campaign going wrong.
As we've seen, Greenland is an icy,
bleak, and inhospitable place.
Legend has it that it was given its name to make
it sound more attractive.
Perhaps the Norse settlers woke up one day and realized
they'd been conned.
NARRATOR: The sunrise is late over Lake Storsjon in Sweden.
Its waters are bitterly cold even in summer and many meters
deep.
The lake is said to harbor a massive monster
unknown to science.
Olle Mattsson collects eyewitness reports.
Gote Perssen recalls walking by the lake with his girlfriend.
INTERPRETER: Then she suddenly screams, the big monster.
So then I look down and about 10 or 15 meters away from me,
I can see this long monster swimming towards the shore.
The size of the monster, about five to six meters.
The first time you see the monster you get a little shock,
you start shaking.
We followed the monster along the shore
and we ran up a hill so we could see where
it was going all the time.
It followed the shore and then by the jetty
it turned and went back out into the lake.
We could see it come up and we could see three humps as well.
It lasted about 20 minutes and we could
see the monster all the time.
I know what I've seen and nothing can
convince me otherwise anyway.
I believed it before, but now I'm completely sure.
There is something down there.
The town of Ostersund sits right on the lake's edge.
Olle Mattsson is curator of the local museum.
He has discovered that reports of the lake monster
date back for centuries.
There is even one on this ancient rune stone.
The rune stone is about 800, 900 years old.
And here you can see the monster.
Here are the eye and the head of the monster
and here the snake, or the monster,
goes around the stone and back to the tail.
And he has a tail in his mouth.
NARRATOR: The runes say that when they are interpreted,
the monster will appear in the lake.
They were first understood in the 16th century
and there have been reports of the monster ever since.
Stig Nilsson and his wife saw what looked like three car
wheels in the water when they were driving
over a bridge across the lake.
We saw it about a half minute.
It looked like three car wheels rolling after one from us.
It was about 100 meters from the bridge and about
30 meters from the shore.
Both my wife and I were sure that it
most be the lake monster. What else?
Olle Mattsson knows of hundreds of sightings such as this.
Each one is shown by a dot on this map of the lake.
There are photographs which appear
to show an enormous creature in the water.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
A fishing boat recorded a huge underwater shape
with its sonar equipment.
People thought it must be the monster.
It's one of the-- the evidence is not so common thing.
But the evidence together really shows that there
is something in the lake.
NARRATOR: Danish zoologist Lars Thomas
began his studies of the Storsjon monster
hoping to believe in it.
One famous report came from two girls
who were frightened into a tree by a monster they
said had huge bat-like ears.
There's been about 30 sightings where people have described
the years, have compared them to kind
of very big, wide bat wings.
And that sounded very strange to me
because most other lake monsters haven't got any ears at all.
In my mind, this points to the fact
that the Storsjon monster is, in fact, sightings of moose.
Not many people realize that moose are excellent swimmers.
The two moose behind me have actually--
they're Swedish moose.
They have swam across from Sweden to Denmark.
And at the narrowest place there's five kilometers
of sea with a very strong current,
and that takes a very strong swimmer to cross that.
But this one did.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I think that the big whitish ears of the monster
is, in fact, this, the antlers of the moose.
Because when you see they look-- they are white,
they have spikes all along the edges,
and they could look like very peak whitish bat wings.
The fact that the Storsjon monster has ears looking
like this and the Storsjon is located in an area of Sweden
with a very big population of moose
makes it in my mind very likely that the Storsjon monster
is, in fact, a swimming moose.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Lars Thomas' theory may well explain at least some
of the sightings on the lake's surface,
but that has been at least one underwater meeting.
Karl-Arne Karlsson ran a commercial diving firm.
He was deep in Lake Storsjon making repairs to a water pipe
when he came face to face with a huge creature over 3 meters
long.
He describes it as having a hook on its head
and a long tongue which seemed to flick
in and out as it breathed.
I'm very sure about what I saw.
He had a hook and like a snake tongue
and I think he's breathing and the snake tongue moved.
NARRATOR: Karle-Arne has told fish experts of his meeting.
He says that none of them could tell him of any creature
that big that could live in such deep and cold wates.
Before I see the great monster I don't believe it.
But now after I believe it's some mystery in the lake.
After all my years of studying the monster
I believe it's something in the lake.
We don't understand what it is, but I know there is something
in the lake we can't explain. It's a mystery.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: These northern mysteries, like all the others
in our series, will continue to make
me wonder but nothing could induce me to go
and investigate them in person.
After 40 years in the heat of Columbo,
I'm even finding the hill country uncomfortably cold.
So I'll settle for mysteries I can
investigate in the sunshine.
Then they can send shivers of enjoyment down my spine and not
shivers of cold.
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