February 22, 2001: Invisible Flying Creatures, Rods Revisited - Jose Escamilla
The program features over 15 video clips and multiple still photographs. A side-by-side comparison clearly distinguishes rods from birds and insects based on speed, structure, and movement patterns. Footage from a 1,250-foot cave in northern Mexico shows rods interacting with base jumpers falling at terminal velocity, with one rod matching a jumper's descent, executing a U-turn, and reversing course in a fraction of a second. Another clip captures a rod circling a young boy's waist before darting back toward the camera.
Escamilla describes three distinct varieties of rods identified so far, estimating their size at up to four or five feet in length and speeds ranging from 65 to 300 miles per hour. He reports that National Geographic footage shows rods entering the ocean, leaving bubble trails, and accelerating underwater without slowing. Two separate accounts describe captured rods disintegrating into fine dust upon contact. Native American elders, Escamilla notes, call these beings "arrows" and consider them spiritual in nature.
Key Moments
How rods were discovered, March 1994 Roswell: Escamilla recounts the origin moment: shooting follow-up UFO video nine miles south of Roswell on March 19, 1994 with an RCA CCD camera at 1/2000 shutter, he caught a snake-like object he first dismissed as a misfilmed insect.
Learning Channel accidentally captures a rod: While filming an unrelated segment at the Oregon Vortex, a Learning Channel crew caught a rod whizzing past their camera - their own editor noticed it and called Escamilla. He describes rods as soft-bodied creatures that swim through air at 65 to 300 mph.
Rod transitioning from sunlight to shadow: Escamilla walks Art through the base-jumper cave video where a four-to-five-foot rod crosses from sunlight into the cave's shadow with the tail still lit while the torso is shaded - photo-analyst Bruce Maccabee verified the size estimate.
Free-falling base jumper trailed by a rod: Fox/Channel 13 footage shows a rod descending alongside a base jumper at terminal velocity, then making a U-turn back up the cave. Escamilla argues this rules out any known bird or insect and suggests rods only notice us when we move fast enough to enter their world.
Rods enter the ocean without slowing: Escamilla cites National Geographic underwater footage showing a white rod descending through the sky, breaking the water surface, and accelerating - not slowing - through the water. Physicist Jack Casher told him this puts rods in a totally different physical realm.