What on Earth?

The series started out OK but has since degenerated into Enquirer-level sensationalism. The show has likely run out of ideas and is now willing to present known and already-explained phenomena as unsolved mysteries.

An example: satellite photos and video show an enormous 3,000-mile wide shadow moving across the planet! What on earth could it be?!?

1. Is it secret gov't technology deployed into space to cool a too-warm earth? Evidently, according to our scientists, we don't have the capability to do it or keep it secret.

2. All right, how about a huge insect swarm? The largest swarm ever documented covered about 75 square miles. But this shadow is way bigger and moving at 2,000 miles per hour! Can insects fly that fast? Who knows. Let's check with our scientists!

3. OK, insects are out. So what if the shadow was caused a huge alien ship like the one in Independence Day? And the gov't is covering it up? Let's ask our scientists if its possible to hide an alien spacecraft the size of Australia.

4. Ok, alien ships are out, at least for now 'cuz we ain't entirely convinced. But what else could have caused this shadow?

We're outta ideas so how can we figure this out? Should we consult NASA since they provided the satellite data? They can't be much smarter than our own scientists, but fine, we'll ask 'em during the commercial break ... and, we're back and, OMG, NASA claims the shadow was caused by ... THE MOON? Are they sure? Could this be another cover-up? And NASA "claims" lunar eclipses are 100% predictable? Well, maybe we'll figure all this out someday but for now ... ITS A MYSTERY!

Coming up next: Crop circles!

At first I was super excited to see the show thinking hey maybe they will have cool top secret things that we don't really know. It turns out they just show really stupid things with increasingly stupid reasons for why its there. Not only that but they have fake scientists that take forever to get to the point and if that weren't bad enough, they jam the EXACT SAME content into "new"episodes. It's abysmal that they can even get away with calling them new episodes. Such a shame that they fail miserably at what could be a good show. Just wiki search weird Google map photos and you will get to the point faster and get better answers than this show will give you.

This show has great locations but please the way you zero in on the location treats average people like they are dumb. The episode that had Centrailia Pennsylvania in it you used Fort Detrick as a suspect and one on a video of a sea monster in norway i think you cited aan old nazi sub's torpedo this is crazy. People who watch the show are pretty knowledgable to begin with. Please look at this thank you

Everyone above this comment hit the nail on the head. This is a waste of time to anyone truly interested in science. The ridiculous argument before explaining what is obvious to a lot of learned people is really insulting. I was watching another show called NASA's Unexplained Files and the premise was as ridiculous as the one for What on earth, checked out the production company... guess what?? same guy... When I'm looking on the program guide and see these two programs I feel sad because the channels that are normally watch for science stories and interesting stuff are busy showing this garbage. I guess it's a cheap show and that's why they use it, I don't know. Here's is to missing The Learning Channel 20 years ago when it started (The Operation anyone? that was so cool!!). I guess everything gets lowered to the minimum common denominator or whatever sells to the masses... really sad.

Allow me to give you a couple excerpts from a few different episode descriptions: •S4Ep5 - "A Possible sighting of Genghis Khan's tomb" •S3Ep6(Titled "Hidden Tomb of Genghis Khan") •S4Ep3 - "Strange spiral markings in an African desert" •S3Ep3 - "Strange spiral markings in the remote African desert." •S2Ep2 - "Weird barren rings in the Namib Dessert." (If you didn't guess it, The Namib Dessert is a remote African dessert...)

Do you see the pattern? they are just recycling entire episodes or segments from the previous season and calling it new.

Naturally one may think that xfinity has just messed up the descriptions, but nope. I watch them every week, Wednesday morning on my DVR, and it is all stuff they have shown already just called season 4 -_- talk about lazy. It's not even like they are giving the topics another look, or introducing new findings or theories to the story. It is word for word, scene for scene, exactly the same!

I mean the stories are decent, sometimes they really try and play them up to make the incredibly mundane seem interesting until a scientist says it's just some natural phenomenon, but aside from that, and the fact that nothing new has been in any of the episodes in the last few months, I'd still rank it as sub-par compared to some other shows of the same variety, even ones appearing on the science channel.