- The spirits of the people themselves who died,
the departed ones,
wander in the form of cats at night.
- They're often small, hairy objects.
There's even the famous jellyfish object
that's seen in the middle of a road.
- This bee wants to kill itself.
You can't intimidate them, you can't scare them.
They have decided their life is off no value
and they are gonna do the maximal damage.
- Could alien animals be roaming our planet?
And what's turned a humble honeybee into a vicious killer?
Animal X examines the weird world of animal mystery.
First, to Egypt,
home to an ancient cat cult
that still has followers today.
- The monuments left by the ancient Egyptians
stand silent witness to the kings who once ruled here,
and the mighty gods that watched over them.
For centuries, the mysteries of the ancient world
were locked away,
but from the middle of the sand-swept haze
have come incredible stories of the cat.
Nowhere was the cat more revered than in ancient Egypt.
The cat was worshiped as a goddess.
Kings built temples in her name,
and anyone reckless enough to kill a cat risked death.
A crowd is said to have viciously killed a Roman soldier
after he accidentally killed one.
Animal X traveled to the land of the pharaohs, Egypt,
to uncover the mysterious world of the cat cult,
a pagan religion
born among the great monuments around Cairo.
The kings who built the pyramids of Giza
were the first to domesticate wild felines.
They elevated the cat to the status of a goddess,
adorning their temples and homes with their image.
Bast, or Bastet, as she was known
was the daughter of Ra, the sun god.
Her son, Konshu, was God of the Moon.
She was the goddess of many things,
of love and joy,
and the fertility for the land and for women.
But she could also be a strong, fierce protector.
The Sphinx - half man, half lion -
stands guard at the entrance to the Great Pyramids.
But experts like Zahi Hawass
believe the cat had an even more important role here.
Evidence of the cat cult
was uncovered in the pharaohs' tombs.
Symbols in the pyramid revealed
half of Egypt came under her protection.
Pharaohs buried here were also guarded by the cat goddess.
- Sometimes the cat can be at the entrance of a gate.
Anyone who will come by to hurt the body of the king
in the pyramid, or to steal something from the pyramid,
the cat is ready to jump
and put its nails on the face of that human being
who's coming to disturb the peace of the pharaoh.
- In the modern world,
it's often said that cats have nine lives.
In ancient Egypt, Bastet was believed to be immortal.
Pharaohs sought to continue their power into the afterlife
with the help of the cat goddess.
- The idea is the continuation of life,
and the afterlife is the cat never died,
and the pharaoh is immortal,
and Bastet is immortal.
- Even more startling secrets about the cat cult
were uncovered deep in the Nile delta.
Archaeologists discovered a ruined city
dedicated to the cat goddess.
At Bubastis, the cat was the master of the gods.
- Per-Bastet is the name of the house of the cat.
Here we have the name of the cat,
here and Bastet, the name of the cat.
- 3,000 years ago,
cat worship reached its peak.
13 temples to the Per-Bastet,
each one built by a pharaoh to pay homage to the cat.
- This is a center,
the pharaoh's center for the cat in Egypt.
- Sacred cats were kept in the temples
and worshiped as Bast's earthly representative.
A huge cat cemetery was also found here.
Among the ruins, mummified cats.
The animal pride in every household
was embalmed to ensure its place in the afterlife.
Egyptian families made tremendous financial sacrifices
to ensure their pets receive the best burial available.
Egyptians would also make
physical sacrifices when a cat died.
Family members would shave off their eyebrows
as a sign of mourning.
All candles were extinguished.
The grieving household remained in silence,
and in darkness for three months.
At Bubastis, huge festivals were dedicated to the goddess.
Up to a million people would converge on this city
to drink, dance, and celebrate their love of the cat.
The cat cult didn't disappear forever
with the ancient Egyptians.
It's still alive today in America.
- My name is Paula Ashton.
I run House of the Open Eye.
It's a Kemetic temple located in San Jose, California.
- Animal X obtained this exclusive home video
of a pagan religion that still worships the cat.
Followers of the ancient Egyptian gods
are wary of outsiders.
We were refused permission to film the sect ceremony,
but their own images show
that the cat remains a spiritual guide.
Hundreds of Americans are thought
to worship the goddess Bast.
Some claim to have seen her, or heard her voice,
but many are too nervous to openly reveal
their link to the cat cult.
But in the privacy of their own homes,
the faithful light incense.
They give offerings and pray to the cat goddess.
It's a different story in Egypt today.
Of course religion still plays a vital role,
but the call to prayers attracts the faithful to the mosque.
Worshipers don't look to the animal world,
they look to the Koran as their guide.
The teachings of Islam
have replaced the ancient Egyptian religions.
The cat has lost its place as a mighty god.
Bast is confined to the souvenir stores in Cairo,
but the old worlds and the new blend into one
in this exotic land.
And some of the beliefs of the ancient rulers
have found their way into the superstitions
of the current residents.
Cats are widely believed to be connected to the dead.
Even the humble street cats have a supernatural aura.
- Spirits of the people themselves, who died,
the departed ones,
wander in the form of cats at night.
It's thought that all of Europe's cats
are descendants of the pharaohs' pets.
And even today,
Egyptian children are told never to beat a cat.
To do so is to disturb the dead.
While the ancient Egyptians have long since disappeared
from the valley of the Nile,
amongst the remains of their civilization,
the spirit of the cat goddess lives on.
- While some pay homage to the cat,
others look to the stars for answers
to the mysteries of the universe.
Could alien animals be among us?
Could they account for the many sightings
of strange beasts that defy the laws of nature?
We talk to those who believe we're not alone.
- It would have been about four-foot high.
- Crazy in looks,
he had really green swirly eyes.
- Very, very skinny,
his ribs sort of stood out a bit.
- He sort of made weird noises every now and then.
- It wasn't human.
Definitely wasn't from this world.
- For decades, humanity has been reaching
for the stars.
But it's not just men and women who we've put into orbit.
Before we risked human life in space,
we experimented with animals.
We may do the same again before landing a human
on a distant planet.
But maybe some other intelligent life is testing their
intergalactic travel systems,
by sending animals to our planet.
- Clearly E.T. will have a lot of biological company
on his own planet.
Somehow, in the movies and the TV shows,
you never see the other animals that share E.T.'s planet.
- Animal X investigates mysterious alien animal
sightings in Brisbane, Australia.
- I was pretty hot in bed
and I woke up sweating.
I could feel something in the room.
I was lying there
and something put its hand around my neck.
And I spun around and I saw it sitting on my bed head.
- Mom! Dad!
- Was this an alien animal
or the delusions of impressionable teenagers.
Those witnesses who wish to remain anonymous
are convinced that an alien animal exists.
Support for that belief comes from an unexpected source.
For years, NASA and other agencies have been conducting
scientific searches for extraterrestrial intelligence.
All we need to do is consider
the number of stars in the universe,
according to Dr. Seth Shostak.
- Well that's a lot of stars.
I mean, that's more stars than are grains of sand
on all the beaches of the earth.
So to think that this is the only grain of sand
that has something thinking on a planet around it,
is probably a little bit too egocentric.
- But he doesn't go as far as saying
they're already here.
- It's actually quite hard to go from star to star.
I mean to go from here to the next planet, like Mars,
that's not so difficult.
But the nearest star is ten thousand times farther than Mars
so that's a really difficult trip.
And it takes a lot of energy
if you want to do that in a short period of time.
- But spaceships may not be the only way
of moving between planets.
This and other theories are on the curriculum
at western Australia's
College of Technical and Further Education,
where ufology is one of the subjects.
- It might be that they have
too much electronic
so the quicker I can help educate people,
the quicker everyone can help educate each other.
- An animal, let's say, that comes from another dimension
could have come through another dimension
to get to planet Earth,
but still actually originate somewhere in our universe.
- Have these alien animals escaped,
or are they part of an intergalactic experiment?
- I don't think the aliens are just letting their animals
roam free without a reason.
It seems to be an agenda here,
testing them out in the wild.
- The animals on Earth
are part of this planet's evolution.
Other planets have also evolved.
- You can get some appreciation
for how diverse animals might be on another planet
by just considering our own planet.
We're on the clock of time backward,
three and a half billion years ago,
when the only life on Earth was small little bacteria.
Now let it run forward again,
but change a few things here and there.
A few more meteors hit the Earth,
a few less,
maybe the temperature's one degree warmer,
one degree cooler.
You wouldn't end up with the same identical set of animals
we have now.
65 million years ago, a big rock slammed into the Earth.
It wiped out the dinosaurs
and 90 percent of all other species.
If that asteroid had been two hours earlier getting here,
or two hours later, it would have missed the Earth.
We wouldn't be sitting here.
There'd be a bunch of dinosaurs running around.
E.T.'s planet will also be the result
of various circumstances,
none of which are particularly important,
but that result in a tremendous diversity
in the appearance of its critters.
- Brian Richards has been studying UFOs,
and their supposed occupants, for more than 20 years.
- They're often small, hairy objects.
There's even the famous jellyfish object,
seen in the middle of a road in the States.
- Brian and his colleagues
say there might be more to alien animals
than just the physical body,
which so many people on Earth claim to have seen.
- Whatever an alien might look like
might be either so frightening,
or so
peculiar
that we couldn't even recognize it.
- Perhaps there are many
strange animals on Earth,
which are really visitors from outer space.
- There are realms beyond the realms that we can see
with our eyes.
- Did these girls see an animal
from another planet?
Whatever they saw was very real to them
and has changed their lives forever.
In this universe of infinite space,
the final frontier,
perhaps ours are not the only animals out there.
- Alien animals,
science fiction or science fact?
After the break we investigate another bizarre story
that has all the makings of a sci-fi movie -
Killer bees.
Animal X talks to the victims of this swarm.
- He'd been stung by African killer bees.
Three thousand-three hundred and five times
- Welcome back to Animal X.
Most of us know what it's like to be stung by a honey bee -
painful but rarely life-threatening.
In the southern United States,
it's a different story.
These once productive insects have turned to vicious killers
known as kamikaze bees.
And the race is on to find a repellent.
- It has all the makings of a bad sci-fi movie,
but this is no far-fetched horror film.
This is for real.
From Latin America to Texas, Arizona,
and southern California,
people are taking cover from the swarm,
killer bees that so far have been blamed for the deaths
of more than 700 people, and countless animals.
And not only are they real,
they're unstoppable.
Animal X traveled to Tucsan, Arizona,
just one of the many cities caught in the grip of this
bizarre phenomenon.
The result of a biological disaster,
a scientific experiment gone wrong.
We went in search of residents whose lives have be shattered
by these flying freaks of nature,
officially known as Africanized honey bees.
- Just absolutely tears me up to even think about it.
It's such a horrible way to go.
- Like most people here,
Gary Donovan had heard about killer bees
but never thought he would encounter them.
That was until his cherished pet dog, Skippy,
was savagely attacked.
Gary had tied him up outside while he went to work.
He says he never saw the killer beehive
in an overhanging tree.
He had been stung by African killer bees
Three thousand-three hundred and five times.
And by virtue of the fact that he had been tied up,
there was nowhere for him to have gone.
No place to hide.
And
poor dog.
Just must have suffered incredibly.
It's just unbelievable.
- Gary believes Skippy must have upset
the aggressive bees by making noise.
They can sense vibrations up to 50 meters away.
- I imagine that he was jumping around and barking,
and it must have disturbed the hive.
The bees must have been really aggravated
by the noise he was making.
And that provoked the attack.
- Postmortems on both animal and human victims
show that when killer bees attack,
they go straight for the head,
targeting the eyes, nose, eyes, and mouth.
Experts call it genetic learning.
They say through trial and error,
the bees have discovered
that by stinging these vulnerable areas,
they can kill more quickly.
Sometimes in less than ten minutes.
Their sting is no more painful or lethal
than a normal European honey bee,
but they do attack more quickly
and in bigger swarms.
In fact, when provoked,
thousands of killer bees will come out within seconds
to defend their hive.
- Over 50 percent will come out,
which is a remarkable number because about 50 percent
are young bees that really can't defend anyway,
because their stings aren't hardened
and they don't have much venom.
So basically every bee that can sting and hurt
comes out in an Africanized colony.
Whereas in a European colony,
you may get one, two, ten.
- These natural-born killers
have a special way of calling in others to attack.
They release what's known as alarm pheromones
that act as a signal to swarm.
It's emitted when one bee is killed.
Dr. Schmidt says it's all part of what makes the killer bee
a kamikaze bee.
- This bee wants to kill itself.
If an animal has given up, or a person,
much like some of the terrorists who drive trucks and,
they don't care about their own life,
so it's very hard to stop them.
You can't threaten them, you can't intimidate them,
you can't scare them.
They have decided their life is of no value,
and they are gonna do the maximal damage.
Well that's essentially what
an attacking honey bee is doing.
- Hell bent on causing maximum damage,
this is the work of the killer bees on humans.
The parents of this two-year-old girl watched on helplessly
as she was stung more than 200 times
in an attack in Brazil.
Others haven't been so lucky.
In this attack in Rio de Janeiro,
a homeless woman was killed after disturbing a huge hive
in a train station.
So how did these once gentle, productive honey bees
turn into fierce and vicious creatures?
It all began back in 1957,
when a geneticist in Brazil
was conducting bee breeding research.
He wanted to cross-breed the aggressive African queen bee,
known for its high rate of honey production,
with its more docile European counterpart.
But disaster struck.
26 African queens accidentally escaped
and set up new colonies.
Today, killer bees are in four states bordering Mexico,
and still on the move.
- They're still expanding their reigns,
and we're just monitoring them -
I say we, the scientific community
and the regulatory community -
are monitoring them to see how far they go.
- The research takes Dr. Erickson and his team
out into the fierce heat of the Arizona desert.
There, they've set up and isolated area
where they can conduct tests on killer bees
well away from the public.
Danger signs warn off trespassers.
Special precautions are taken too, with their bee suits.
All openings are sealed up tight,
so the killer bees can find no way in.
Ducting tape is also used for added protection.
Once kitted out,
researchers can safely make their way into the compound.
So far they've had no luck in finding a repellent,
as the killer bees are extremely resilient
and more work needs to be done.
A light tap on their hive is enough to bring the insects
out in their thousands.
- Now you can see them and you can hear them.
- Within seconds, the bees are on the attack.
As well as noise, they dislike dark colors
and head for anything black.
Dr. Erickson uses a device,
which records the number of bee stings on a black ball
attached to his bee helmet.
It ticks over rapidly,
and after only a few minutes,
it records close to ten thousand stings.
He says his team has had some degree of success.
- The testing that we've done so far
shows that
we can
reduce the numbers of bees
attempting to sting us
by virtue of monitoring them by the temper tester.
The distance that we have to go
in terms of how far the bees will follow us,
we're reducing those by 95 percent.
I don't think we'll ever get to a point
where we reduce it 100 percent,
because there's simply too many bees out there.
- Until a bee repellent is found,
a simple solution of soapy water is seen as the most
cost effective way of killing
the ever growing number of bees.
Sprayed onto a hive, it drowns them on mass,
and they drop to the ground.
Fueled by fact and partly by Hollywood fiction,
the killer bee phenomenon certainly
has brought terror to many.
And as the swarms continue to defy the experts,
it appears these unwanted visitors are not going away.
They're here to stay.
- It's said there are stranger things
in Heaven and Earth than we can think of.
- The idea is a continuation of life,
and the afterlife.