Where is Austin Tice?: The video
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
If the creation of the universe was translated into music, what would it sound like? Ideas about how to make sense of the incomprehensible.
Most of science in general
is actually intuitable.
That's on the TED Radio Hour Podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode includes some explicit language. Six weeks after Austin's disappearance in Syria, a video emerges online and it makes international headlines.
There is a new development this morning in the disappearance of Austin Tice.
A disturbing video clip appeared Monday on the frontline video clip showing him alive and held by gunmen.
Men who appear to be Islamist militants are shown leading Tice up a rocky hill, but it's not.
How did you find out about the video?
You know how you kinda just wake up and say something here is not quite right? А най вакян стар, а марк і ан на софа. White as a ghost. What is it? I don't wanna tell you. I said no. If you could see yourself, you would know that you need to tell me. It had actually been on YouTube for several days, I think, maybe even a week.
After speaking to her husband Mark, Austin's mother Deborah watches the video. It's grainy, poorly filmed, shaky, and just 46 seconds long. Three cars move along a dirt track against the backdrop of a remote mountainside. The last vehicle has its boot open. And there's a man inside.
Men wearing scarves known as kafirs clutch rifles. They're shoving a man in a ripped green shirt. Then his face comes into frame. Exhausted. He's blindfolded, hands back.
What new video sparked the investigation into Austin Tice’s disappearance?
He attempts to recite a prayer in broken Arabic.
This people have a lot of money off with me.
La Allah li alla hil rahme.
Oh Jesus, oh Jesus. La, yeah.
Then the video cuts. Austin looks like he's suffering. For his mum Deborah, the video is the only proof that she's had that Austin is alive since his abduction. It must have been incredibly difficult to watch that. I mean I've watched it and I find it hard.
Well, I mean for me I wanted to know everything about it. You know, it was clipped and put together. And the fact that they left in Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, I felt like that was very much a message to his mom. And that video had all the information we needed to get Austin.
The video appears to show Austin held by some kind of extremist group. But we've confirmed that Austin was held by the Syrian regime. So the video doesn't add up. Because he was in regime custody. Deborah has always believed the video contains clues about where Austin is. And she might be right. It just depends on what you choose to see.
When I'm watching this video, I see kind of the same things everyone else sees. The horror of this guy who's bound and blindfolded, being dragged up this mountainside. But I also see clues about where it was filmed, when it was filmed.
This is Thomas Bordeaux. He's an investigative journalist who specializes in open source intelligence. That means he pieces together fragments of publicly available data to get answers. He sees details that others
don't. When this video came out in twenty twelve, journalists applied the best tactics they had at a time to analyze it. But we have new tactics since. And applying those, we can find new things. By stabilizing it and combining all the frames from this shot, we can get a lot of actually really identifiable features. So there's 25 frames in every second of
video, 25 individual pictures. You've basically slowed down and analyzed.
Each individual frame. Exactly. You get a clearer view of a mountain range. road curving around some vegetation, this plowed field. And we know it was filmed about midday from the length of the shadows. They filmed this video. in a kind of terrain that's only really found in about twenty square miles of Syria. Are you serious? Yeah. There's specific arrangements of trees, there's angles of roads and the way they curb. And uh even when we get down to it, there's specific rocks. Are you serious? You can match rocks? Yeah.
Thomas doesn't think the video was filmed in an area controlled by anti-government forces.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:09
2
What new video sparked the investigation into Austin Tice’s disappearance?
2:09–5:34
3
How did the team verify that the video showed Austin being held by Syrian regime forces?
5:34–10:07
4
What open‑source intelligence techniques were used to pinpoint the video’s filming locations?
10:07–14:11
5
Why did the investigators travel to the remote mountain sites identified in the footage?
14:11–17:24
6
What clues in the terrain and landmarks confirmed the video’s regime‑controlled setting?
17:24–22:39
7
Who is Luna Shibel and what role did she play in creating the Austin Tice video?
22:39–29:38
8
How might the video have affected Austin Tice’s fate and the U.S. response?
29:38–34:20