00:02Of all the rabbit holes I get stuck in on the internet
00:04I don’t know any quite as powerful as Google Earth.
00:12Seeing beautiful patterns from above...
00:15Dropping down into street view...
00:17And seeing the planet in ways I would never get to see in person.
00:22So when I came across this post on Reddit, I was fascinated.
00:26It described “undocumented markings” in Algeria, in the middle of the Sahara
00:30near a location called “Tebalbalet tomb.”
00:33Visible on Google Earth.
00:36There were 22 of them, each with 12 “surrounding things”, 42 meters in diameter
00:41420 meters apart, at longitude 4'20 East.
00:45It almost sounded like a joke.
00:47But then I copied the coordinates and I looked.
00:52There they were: identical circles in an almost perfect line.
00:56160 kilometers from any signs of life in the world’s largest desert...
01:01in the middle of the biggest country in Africa.
01:06This is a story about the limits of what you can find out on the internet.
01:10About all the different ways of looking at the same thing.
01:13And about going all the way there.
01:16Over the course of the last 20 weeks, we filmed every step of the process
01:20as we tried to figure out one thing...
01:23What could these circles be?
01:28So this whole story starts back in September 2021
01:31when I first saw the Reddit post.
01:33I wanted to figure out what these “markings” were
01:36and make a video out of the entire reporting process.
01:39No matter how long it took.
01:40Because the answer had to be out there.
01:42And, step one, I knew I was going to have to send some emails.
01:45For weeks, I reached out to everyone I could think of:
01:48Algerian experts, officials, tour groups...
01:51even the closest hotel, in a city called AĂŻn Salah.
01:54I read up on the town the circles were located closest to: Foggaret Ezzaouia.
01:57I asked the commenters on the Reddit post...
01:59and we even tracked down a Twitter account we thought was the same Will K
02:03who posted this question to several subreddits before deleting his Reddit account.
02:07I tried English and French...
02:09organizations, academics, locals...
02:16But there was one easy thing to clear up first.
02:19Were these circles real?
02:21Or were they just some kind of satellite imaging glitch?
02:25So I asked a teammate who works with maps a lot:
02:27Sam, he produces our series Atlas.
02:29And he pointed me to the company that takes a lot of the satellite pictures
02:32for Google Earth: Maxar Technologies.
02:38I feel very confident that those are indeed on the ground
02:41because we see them in multiple images over multiple years.
02:44So, I know it wasn't an artifact of the processing that Google might have done with our imagery.
02:49And then a colleague of mine who has spent a decent amount of time studying this area
02:54said, “You know, this is a very rich area for oil and gas.”
02:58“This looks very similar to what we see when they're doing oil exploration.”
03:03Oil radically changed the course of Algeria’s history.
03:06\"Oil from the wastelands of the desert...\"
03:08\"And it's believed that the Sahara is immensely rich in it.\"
03:11When oil and gas were discovered there in 1956, companies flocked to the region
03:16against the backdrop of a brutal decolonization war with France.
03:20Today, Algeria is one of the world’s top exporters of natural gas.
03:23What Steve is talking about here is seismic surveys
03:26where geophysicists analyze the Earth’s surface by sending shock waves into the ground.
03:31Depending on how those seismic waves bounce back
03:34researchers can tell what resources can be extracted from underground.
03:38Steve thought that, maybe, seismic pulses from a specialized vehicle
03:42could produce something like this.
03:46So, we had a hypothesis.
03:48But I wanted a second opinion.
03:50So I asked Bob Hardage at the University of Texas
03:53one of the world’s leading experts on seismic imaging.
03:56He responded by email:
03:58”I can assure you with 100-percent confidence that
04:01the features in this imagery are not seismic arrays
04:04used in oil and gas exploration.”
04:06First, the shapes themselves weren’t right.
04:09“...there will be hundreds of thousands of receivers positioned
04:11as either a single straight line
04:13or as hundreds of parallel straight lines.”
04:15I looked up pictures from NASA of seismic surveying
04:18and you can see what he means.
04:19Second: the fact that we could even see them meant they probably weren’t a seismic survey.
04:24“... the objective is to leave the landscape like you found it.\"
04:27\"If a seismic crew created something like these features
04:30a return visit would be made to restore the landscape.”
04:33“I have no idea what the circles in the satellite image are.\"
04:36\"Whatever they are, the people who created them
04:39wanted those features to be permanent.”
04:42“Closeout: I don’t think we need to chat.”
04:49I found geotagged pictures from the nearest municipality, Foggaret Ezzaouia
04:53on a site called mapio.net.
04:56These old stone wells sorta looked like they could be arranged in a circle.
04:59But reverse image searches were a dead end.
05:02I didn’t know what to do next.
05:04So we looped in Vox video’s senior researcher, Melissa, to help me out.
05:08So, I was trying to find what this thing was.
05:09I don't know if you remember from his original post
05:13he calls it the Tebalbalet tomb.
05:16Do you remember that?
05:17So I found this article.
05:20This is from like 1985 — I mean, not 1985: 1885.
05:26The “Well of Tebalbalet” is at the latitude 27°20 and longitude 4°38.
05:35And that's approximately where what we're looking at is.
05:39And it says there are two circular tumuli.
05:43I had to Google that, I don't know that word.
05:50It's an ancient burial mound.
05:52Which seems... that sounds about right.
05:56“... encompassed by two concentric mounds in the form of rings, all of great regularity.\"
06:02\"The two rings are respectively 30 and 21 meters in diameter, from crest to crest.”
06:08So a document from 1885 said that, around this same area, there were
06:131) a bunch of wells, and
06:152) tombs with “rings of great regularity.”
06:19Now, the sketches weren’t an exact match.
06:21But they got us thinking: what if these things were actually really old?
06:26So I sent the pictures to a Tunisian archaeologist who had done research in this area.
06:30We spoke in French because of decades of French occupation in the 19th and 20th centuries
06:35French is still used in many contexts in Tunisia and Algeria.
06:39And she had a new clue.
06:41[in French] These monuments, they are without a doubt
06:43[in French] because I know AĂŻn Salah very well...
06:45[in French] These monuments are related to...
06:50[in French] It's a desert environment, it's the Sahara.
06:53[in French] It is practically the hottest place in the Maghreb.
06:57[in French] It’s an area which is very well known
07:00for the difficulties of this heat there, and for the water harvest.
07:04[in French] So the people, they dig.
07:05[in French] It has a name: the Foggaras.
07:11It’s the North African name for a 2,500-year-old style of irrigation system
07:15that goes by many names, but is often called a qanat.
07:19Builders dig a well at an elevated point on a slope
07:21deep enough to tap into groundwater.
07:24They then dig parallel shafts at regular intervals.
07:26These provide air flow for diggers as they create an underground channel
07:30all the way back to the main well.
07:32With a slope of 1 or 2 degrees, the channel carries water long distances
07:36powered by gravity alone.
07:38In a part of the world with barely any rain and no running rivers
07:42this technology can provide water for crops, livestock, and people
07:47making human-made oases possible.
07:50[in French] It's curious, eh?
07:53This was the most promising lead yet.
07:55It explained the desert location, the circular shape, the regularity, and spacing.
07:59Even the closest municipality’s name, Foggaret Ezzaouia, is named after foggaras.
08:04And those mapio pictures of wells started to make sense.
08:07But I wanted to run it by more people who had studied qanats.
08:11Qanats are actually more than just water infrastructures.
08:15I think they are the very raison d'etre:
08:17the basis of habitation in such harsh climates.
08:20They start from outside of the city, but then they usually end up
08:25into the city or into agricultural lands.
08:27But when it came to our circles...
08:29I have no take on it, honestly.
08:34I'm looking at it now.
08:37Okay, that's interesting.
08:38There's something like 20 of them in a row.
08:40Yeah. So that's definitely a foggara.
08:43So at the end of that, there should be a town.
08:45There should be an oasis or something.
08:48But if there isn't, that means that probably the water in the qanat
08:51or foggara has dried up since a long time.
08:53You should talk to Dale Lightfoot.
08:55He is the American geographer
08:57who knows everything about qanats.
08:59These are what we're looking at.
09:02I couldn't even say with confidence whether these are related to water collection.
09:07But I can tell you they're definitely not qanats.
09:11We also found these pictures.
09:13Do you think these could be what the circles are?
09:17What you're showing me pictures of here looks a lot like animal-drawn wells.
09:23I've seen these in a lot of places.
09:25To me, this is not the same thing.
09:27I think you're back to square one.
09:29Back to square one, indeed.
09:31Don't rule out space aliens.
09:32I've heard they do crazy things, too.
09:37So they might be wells, but probably not a qanat.
09:40And maybe not even related to water at all.
09:43Could we at least rule that out?
09:45That’s when Melissa found a database of oases in the Sahara.
09:48With lists of the people who help manage their water supply.
09:51Like Mohammed Brik, a farmer in Laghouat, Algeria.
09:55I don't think it was done to fetch water.
09:59Because the point of going out to look for water
10:01is to meet the needs of the population
10:06If there’s nothing for 160 kilometers
10:10then that’s not a valid hypothesis.
10:13Right. Because there is no village, no...
10:16There’s no village.
10:17There’s no garden.
10:19There's nothing planted.
10:20There's no population.
10:24We were three months in and it seemed like our most promising hypothesis yet
10:31Then I got an email.
10:33Back in early October, Steve Wood promised to send me
10:35high-res images from Maxar’s archive.
10:38Finally, we had them.
10:43It was the clearest look we'd had yet.
10:46And Steve believed it showed a new detail: tire tracks.
10:50If that was right, it would mean someone had been there within the last century.
10:55I kept asking people.
10:57Algerian officials...
10:59And nearby residents...
11:01But after a while, I felt stuck.
11:04Like we had exhausted what we could find out on the internet.
11:06And there was nowhere else to go from here...
11:09except to the circles themselves.
11:13The longer this project went on, the more I realized that we had a choice to make.
11:17We could keep interviewing more and more people, get more and more theories
11:20and ultimately have no way to back them up.
11:24Or... we could figure out a way to get someone there...
11:28and then, maybe, we could know for sure.
11:33So I asked my teammate Christina — who works with journalists all over the world
11:37if she knew anyone in Algeria.
11:39And that led us to Samir Abchiche, a video journalist in Algiers.
11:42I’m about to be a dad.
11:44So no more adventures for me after this.
11:47We hired Samir to be our on-the-ground journalist...
11:49to use his expertise in the area to help us solve this mystery.
11:53The next part took months.
11:58We knew this wasn’t going to be an ordinary video shoot.
12:00We were asking him and his team to travel incredibly far
12:03to go do something potentially dangerous.
12:06But Samir took this story into his own hands.
12:08He was obsessing over every hypothesis, establishing local contacts
12:11figuring out all the details of how to get a team of people from Algiers
12:1515 hours away by car to AĂŻn Salah
12:17and then deep into the desert where no roads go.
12:20Finally, Samir figured out how to make it happen.
12:23And at 7 pm on a cool February night, he and his second cameraman Abdelate...
12:44We can't find a hotel.
12:46And we're going to try Hotel El Djanoub.
12:48We have the Royal Suite.
13:01It's starting to get super hot.
13:07It's yellow everywhere.
13:09But it’s beautiful.
13:09Yeah, but it’s beautiful.
13:15Which way to Ain Salah?
13:15300 km to Ain Salah.
13:18All we've seen is the horizon.
13:25They'd already spent 24 hours driving to get here.
13:28Now, they had to go another 160 km from AĂŻn Salah into the desert.
13:36But they had to pick someone else up first.
13:38Farid Ighilahriz, an archaeologist who used to lead Algeria’s
13:41national archaeological research center
13:44and managed one of Algeria’s largest national parks.
13:48He’s here to help the team identify whatever they come across.
13:51How are we going to do this without cell service?
13:52No no, I made a map.
13:56From there, they prepared.
14:00They got groceries...
14:02Interviewed local officials...
14:04Planned the GPS route...
14:05And they assembled a team.
14:07A driver, an archeologist
14:09an assistant, and a desert guide.
14:14It’s right about here that I lost communication with Samir.
14:17And I wouldn’t be able to hear from him until he was back in town...
14:20With, hopefully, a definitive answer.
14:40No sandstorms, so that's good.
14:43That was making us nervous yesterday.
14:44It's still a bit risky,
14:46because nobody passes through this way.
14:51And we're just two SUVs.
14:53This one is reliable,
14:55the other one, we don't really know.
15:12What’s weird is that as the crew got closer and closer...
15:15They started finding signs pointing to every one of our theories.
15:21First, tire marks from seismic survey trucks…
15:25Then, a well system...
15:26Water is always just three meters below.
15:28And finally, ancient tombs.
15:31We just saw something from far away.
15:36There’s another one.
15:38So this is a tumulus.
15:40It's one of the oldest kinds of funeral monuments.
16:05And on the morning of day two, they checked the map, and…
16:08We're going roughly in the right direction.
16:12So we're 11 km from the first ones.
16:14I think we found them...
16:24Did you see? We are approximately 500 meters from that place.
16:31We got really excited, but they weren't there.
16:35Apparently they're just 500 meters away.
17:01Right there, you can't see anything.
17:04You can't see anything.
17:1510 ... 11 ... 12 .... There we go, we have all 12.
17:28After 160 kilometers of driving off-road in the desert...
17:33The 22 circles, all in configuration.
17:38They were surprisingly faint.
17:40You might not notice them if you happened to be passing by.
17:43As Samir and the team explored the area, they found the next set.
17:48This one's a bit clearer.
17:52The hole comes out of the ground.
17:55And a lot of them had something in common...
17:59They’re connected.
18:01Come see up close...
18:05...they run underground.
18:14So maybe they dug just a little bit...
18:20Under these little mounds was dynamite.
18:24But here we have something else, too.
18:26We call these \"attachments.\"
18:29It's what you'd put around a wooden crate.
18:32That's how they must have brought in the dynamite.
18:35That inscription reads SOTEMU — that’s a French acronym for
18:38the “Tunisian company of explosives and ammunition.”
18:43But one of the wires looked different than the others.
18:45It still had a yellow plastic coating.
18:49This is where it got a little scary.
18:53Was this one not detonated yet?
19:01Well get out of there, don't stand there.
19:05We gotta tell everyone to be careful.
19:08Eventually they decided that the dynamite — if there was any left
19:11was probably harmless, because it would have needed a detonator to go off.
19:16So they started to dig.
19:22It must go down at least a meter.
19:24But it was buried quite deep.
19:26So, at some point, to be safe, they stopped.
19:30And then they found a clue no one could have expected.
19:53Old cans of sardines and tuna.
19:56Here we found a little tin can.
19:58That was used for food...
20:00...by those who worked here...
20:02...who carried out this exploration.
20:04Oh, there’s color.
20:14This could be the solution.
20:20So we knew what it was: dynamite, buried underground.
20:23And when Samir and the crew finally got home...
20:26I called him to hear all the details.
20:29My English, is it work for this?
20:32We think that we have--we know the solution.
20:36So it's a method of searching for petroleum.
20:41But it was an old technique.
20:45At the very beginning of this journey, that’s one of the first things
20:48that anyone ever suggested.
20:51Is that it had to do with searching for petroleum.
20:54Which is crazy that it’s finally confirmed.
20:56It's the same thing that they do today just with dynamite
21:01instead of more finely tuned technology.
21:04This is crazy, this is so much more wild than I expected.
21:09Ironically, it put us right back right where we started.
21:14The circles are the remnants of surveyors looking for resources underground.
21:19This whole time, that first guess was right.
21:23Because Bob Hardage at the University of Texas was right when he said in that email
21:27that this doesn’t remotely resemble seismic surveying…
21:29Because this isn’t how seismic surveying works today.
21:32It’s an older technique, from the early days of surveying
21:35that uses dynamite explosions instead of vibration machines.
21:39The explosions would provide the seismic waves that would reflect and refract off of the
21:45and that would tell surveyors that something — potentially something valuable, like oil
21:50was underground and worth digging for.
21:53The circles looked like this because of the force of those dynamite explosions
21:57happening underground.
21:58From this moment, a new question came.
22:01Who did this and when?
22:04Knowing it was a seismic survey wasn't enough.
22:07But we had one other clue from the desert to turn to...
22:13I reached out to Saupiquet
22:14which seems to be the only one of these companies that still exists
22:18but they said they couldn’t identify their age by photos.
22:20So I found someone who’s been collecting sardine cans
22:22for over 40 years: Philippe Anginot.
22:26He even made a museum out of it.
22:27And I showed him the pictures.
22:29What we have here is what's called a three-body can.
22:34So these are typical cans from the 1960s.
22:39the “Arsène Saupiquet Cannery”
22:41became the “Saupiquet Company.”
22:44When it's still labeled \"Arsène,\" it's from before 1960.
22:49So because this can was labeled Arsène Saupiquet, we know that it was manufactured before they
22:53changed their name in 1960.
22:56Because of its 60s-style “three-body” design, we know it’s probably from the very
23:01Granted, this is canned food, so it’s possible that it was purchased years before it was
23:06But I think we can safely guess that these cans were left behind
23:08by an oil exploration crew sometime in the late 1950s.
23:13All that was left was to figure out who those people were.
23:18Before going into the desert, Samir recorded interviews with the experts that they met
23:23And there was one interview with someone who actually would have been there
23:27The father of the desert guides, who used to work as a guide himself.
23:32Here are the photos, Belhadj.
23:38I see the small holes placed like the hands of a watch.
23:41When did the drilling of [that area] take place?
23:43In 1953, the vehicles came to Djebel Beida to go to the probe.
23:52So this place existed and a company was working there.
23:56What were they doing.
24:00I know that they were digging, that's all.
24:02What was their name?
24:04I no longer remember.
24:05But I believe CREPS.
24:07I know that, at that time, CREPS was working.
24:12CREPS — a French acronym for the Sahara Petroleum Research and Exploitation Company
24:17was a joint venture between the French government and Shell.
24:21CREPS had a permit to explore and extract oil in this entire expanse of the Sahara
24:29Lining up that map with Google Maps shows that the circles are inside that CREPS sector.
24:34And according to these French Senate records they started geological surveys right away.
24:38Within that time, CREPS became the first company to strike oil in the Sahara,
24:45This spurred a rush of oil companies into the region.
24:48And the struggle over control of Saharan oil became a centerpiece of France’s brutal
24:52war against Algerian Independence.
24:54\"It was the end of nearly 8 years of bloodshed.\"
24:57\"And the African nation won its freedom after 132 years.\"
25:01Even when Algeria won its independence in 1962
25:04France maintained rights to Saharan oil for years to come.
25:08These circles are the scars of colonialism.
25:10They're evidence of one country’s attempts to take the resources of another.
25:15And they’re only as isolated as they are because oil wasn’t found there.
25:19Everywhere that it was, was transformed forever.
25:26So, we figured it out.
25:29These circles in the Sahara were made by French CREPS employees looking for oil.
25:34They were made by underground dynamite explosions
25:37arranged in circles along a straight line through the desert.
25:40And based on the dates of the CREPS permit, and the types of cans they left behind
25:45we can safely say they were there around 1957 or 1958.
25:51When we figured it all out, I emailed Bob.
25:56\"You have certainly done a persistent and thorough investigation.\"
25:59\"I am comfortable with the conclusion that your features are remnants of decades-old, first generation
26:04analog recording of seismic data.\"
26:07\"An unbelievable preservation.\"
26:09\"Comparing 1950s seismic equipment and today's seismic equipment
26:13is similar to comparing propeller airplanes and deep space rockets.\"
26:17\"Essentially, there is no comparison
26:19but two different worlds.\"
26:28We only know this thanks to the help of dozens of people
26:31someone’s sixty-five-year-old trash, a lot of time on the internet
26:35and a long, brave journey into the desert.
26:38Of course, a story like this could always keep going, more and more specific.
26:44to finish a story, we have to ask ourselves if the answer we have is satisfactory.
26:50And I think this one is.
