60 Minutes - 08/27/2023: Targeting Seniors, The Resurrection of Notre Dame, Sperm Whales

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Cyber con artists are using artificial intelligence, apps and social engineering to scam Americans out of $10 billion dollars a year. Sharyn Alfonsi reports. Four years after the Cathedral of Notre Dame was nearly destroyed by fire, Bill Whitaker returns to Paris to witness the resurrection of the medieval structure and powerful symbol of France. With brains six times larger than humans and most of their lives spent in the darkest depths of the ocean, sperm whales are largely misunderstood. Cecilia Vega searches the Caribbean Sea to find these massive mammals.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. Elizabeth, sorry, need my passport number because the Ukraine trip is on. Can you read that out to me? That's my voice, but that's not me. It's the digital result of a clever hacker and a cheap voice-altering app. Did you think it was me? Yes.

This is one of the scams that are costing American citizens $10 billion a year. And as you'll hear, people over 60 are the main target. It's like a death in the family almost. Well, she's worked so hard, you know. For my money. I sure have. Just over four years ago, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris caught fire and the world watched in horror. This spring, 60 Minutes was given rare access to the painstaking restoration of Notre Dame, as workers and artisans revived every part of this medieval masterpiece.

What's it like to be in the water with them? Magical. Tonight, 60 Minutes is eye-to-eye with the whale of Moby Dick legend. But Melville's novel was fiction. Sperm whales are especially maternal. Generations live together while taking care of their calves, and they have the biggest brain in the animal kingdom. And they sleep like this.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

More Americans than ever rely on alarm systems, gates, or doorbell cameras to help protect their families. But statistically, you are now more likely to be the victim of theft online than a physical break-in at home. A new report from the FBI reveals that Americans lost more than $10 billion last year to online scams and digital fraud. As we first reported in May, people in their 30s, who are among the most connected online, filed the most complaints.

But we were surprised to learn the group that loses the most money to scammers is seniors. Tonight, we will show you how cyber con artists are using artificial intelligence, widely available apps, and social engineering to target our parents and grandparents. It's like a death in the family almost. Well, she's worked so hard, you know, for my money. I sure have. Susan Monahan and her daughter Tamara are talking about how the 81-year-old was conned out of thousands of dollars in what law enforcement calls a grandparent scam.

Tell me about the call that you got. There was a young adult on the line saying, Grandma, I need your help. In a frantic voice, scared, saying, I was driving and suddenly there was a woman stopped in front of me. She's pregnant and I hit her and they're going to take me to jail. And Grandma, please don't call my mom and dad because I don't want them to know. I said, Brandon, it doesn't sound like you. He said, oh, I have a cold, grandma. You think it's your grandson? I do. And he said, grandma, a friend of mine has an attorney that we can use and that we can do something about me going to jail. And I said, yes, of course.

Monahan said the scammer, pretending to be a helpful attorney, got on the line. It was June of 2020 during the pandemic, and he promised to keep her grandson out of jail if she could get $9,000 for bail to him quickly. What other instructions were you given? I needed to make an envelope that was addressed to this certain judge that he was gonna coordinate this through and write on there and they gave me the name the address and everything else for this envelope. Did it sound pretty legitimate? Oh absolutely he had the legalese. Monahan is a tax preparer with an MBA.

The scammer kept her on the phone as she rushed to the bank. What did he say? He said, when you go there, make sure you tell them that it's for home improvements because they might question the fact that you're withdrawing $9,000. Minutes after Monahan got home with the cash, a courier showed up to take it. This is video from the doorbell camera. You can hear Monaghan on the phone with a scammer as she hands off the money. She said to move your butt because they're on a deadline. She says as soon as the courier left and the adrenaline left her body,

she was filled with a sick feeling she'd been scammed. It's just devastating. What did they do to your mom? Beyond the money, beyond taking $9,000 from her? Well, it's your livelihood. Sorry. It just gets you, like, in your gut. The Federal Trade Commission reports scams like these

skyrocketed 70% during the pandemic when seniors, home alone, went online to shop or keep in touch with family. How much money were you scammed out of? $11,300. $14,000. $7,600. Judy Adig and her husband Ron, a retired iron worker, were victims of the same grandparent scam as Susan Monahan. That's the view from their doorbell camera, as the same courier took off with $7,600 of their savings.

$7,600 hits hard. Well, that was for our, you know, if we wanted to go on a trip or something. It was terrible. I was a mess. Steve Savage, a retired scientist, was scammed when he opened a fake email from the Geek Squad. The email said that your bank account is being charged $399 for another year. And I'm like, wait a minute, I don't remember it being anywhere close to that. The customer service number went to a scammer posing as a representative of the company.

Savage was duped out of $14,000. Esther Maestret was scammed too. The retired nurse says an alarm sounded on her iPad with a message to call tech support. She did. He said that last night between 4 and 9 p.m. your bank account has been hacked. And your heart probably stopped. You know, I felt so nervous. But he said, I am going to transfer you to another guy who is a security at Chase Bank. That fake bank employee told her hackers might be able to access her bank account and instructed her to immediately withdraw money and deposit it into a new account for safekeeping.

Maestra did and lost $11,000. And have you been able to recover any of your money? Nothing. I'm the one that pulled the money out of the bank, so I won't be reimbursed. If your house gets broken into, you call the police. If this happens... There's no one to call.

Scott Pirello is a deputy district attorney who runs San Diego's Elder Justice Task Force and connected us to the victims you just heard from. He says studies show only one in every 20 seniors who've been scammed report it. Often, they're embarrassed. Most people who have not experienced this think, well, these people must have dementia or Alzheimer's. It's not the case. Our victims are sharp as a tack.

We had a woman, 66 years old. She came home. She got a message on her computer from Microsoft, and the message said that she had a virus on her computer, and then that virus had somehow infected her financial accounts. Within a matter of weeks, this victim had lost $800,000. Oh my gosh. The scariest part of these scams is that these victims have no recourse.

They're left bewildered. What typically happens? The seniors that have the courage to report that this has happened are being told that, I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do. And that is the reality, that a local police detective in Kansas City doesn't have the reach to go investigate a case that's being operated from the Caribbean or from Nigeria or Ghana. Investigators have also traced scams to Europe, Southeast Asia, and Canada. Under reporting.

To combat them, San Diego's Elder Justice Task Force has taken a new approach. Investigators collect every local fraud case, then collaborate with federal authorities to connect them. If we have a victim that lost $12,000 here in San Diego, there is without question dozens of other victims to the same scam and millions of dollars in losses. And then once we identify that the scam is part of something much larger, then we can deliver that to our federal partners with the reach to go around the country because these are networks. These are transnational, organized criminal networks. In 2021, Parello helped the FBI bring down a network of criminals who stole millions of dollars from elderly victims. Remember those doorbell videos from

the grandparent scam? The courier, a 22-year-old Californian, was the starting point for the FBI's case. She's serving time for her role. But the FBI says the scam's ringleaders, two Bahamian nationals based in Florida, fled the country before they could be arrested. If you don't know how a criminal thinks, then you really don't know how you can protect yourself online. Rachel Toback is what's called an ethical hacker. She studies how these criminals operate.

So ethical hackers, we step in and show you how it works. Toback is the CEO of Social Proof Security, a data protection firm that advises Fortune 500 companies, the military, and private citizens on their vulnerabilities. We hired her to show us how easy it is to use information found online to scam someone. We asked her to target our unsuspecting colleague, Elizabeth. Toback found Elizabeth's cell phone number on a business networking website. As we set up for an interview, Toback called Elizabeth but used an AI-powered app to mimic my voice and ask for my passport number. Oh, yes, yes, yes, I do have it.

Okay, ready? It's me. Toback played the AI-generated voice recording for us to reveal the scam. Elizabeth, sorry, need my passport number because the Ukraine trip is on. Can you read that out to me? Does that sound familiar? Yes. And I gave her... wow. I was sitting over there. What did it say on your phone? Sharon, how did you do that? So I used something called a spoofing tool to actually be able to call you as Sharon. So I was hacked and I failed. I failed. Everybody would

get tricked with that. Yeah. Everybody would get tricked with that. Everybody would. It says Sharon. Why would I not answer this call? Why would I not give that information? Toback showed us how she took clips of me from television and put it into an app that cloned my voice. It took about five minutes. I am a public person. My voice is out there.

Could a person who's not a public person like me be spoofed as easily? Anybody can be spoofed. And oftentimes, attackers will go after people. They don't even know who these people are, but they just know this person has a relationship to this other person. And they can impersonate that person enough, just by changing the pitch and the modulation of their voice,

that I believe that's my nephew, and I need to really wire that money. Toback says hackers no longer need to infiltrate computers through a back door. She says 95% of hacks today happen after a user clicks on a text, a link, or gives personal information over the phone. You were able to hack my colleague Elizabeth, who is a tech-savvy millennial. What does that tell you? Anybody can be hacked.

Anybody can fall for what Elizabeth fell for. In fact, when I do that type of attack, every single time the person falls for it. She said hackers armed with basic information, like a relative's name found online, or an app that can mimic a voice or change the caller ID, can create a convincing story. If you were to receive a phone call, a text message, an email,

and it's asking for something sensitive, urgent, or with fear, that's when the alarm bells have to go off in your head and they want me to give something to them. I'm going to take a beat and I'm going to check that this person is who they say they are. I call it being politely paranoid. Politely paranoid. Be politely paranoid. Politely paranoid? Be politely paranoid. Toback has worked as a consultant for Aura, a Boston-based technology company that created software to protect the identity,

passwords, finances, and personal data for entire families in one app. So here you can see a full footprint of everything that's happening inside the family. Hari Ravachandran is the CEO of Aura. He says their software can reroute scam calls away from grandparents. If the parent is getting a call and we are identifying using AI that the call is a potential scam call, then they can route that call to me. Does this stop the call from getting in? It does. So it just blocks the call? When the call comes in, it will have a recording that says, let me know who you are, what's your intent.

If it's an unknown person, if it's a known person that's already in your contacts, it'll go right through. Ravishandran says AI is also used to monitor finances and alert users of problems in real time. If I see a charge from my mom for $10 at Starbucks, that feels okay. But if there's a $500 charge from Starbucks, something's off kilter. So we try to figure out with AI contextually what's different. But if something is off pattern, you can look at that and say, okay, well, something's off here. I need to go take care of this. San Diego Deputy District Attorney Scott Pirello says more help is needed from law enforcement

and the banking and retail industries to protect seniors. The FBI reports over the past two years, the losses from digital theft have doubled. The trends and the data are horrifying. We have the senior population is growing exponentially every year. We have this dynamic of under-reporting. And then we have the technology coming. People are convinced that AI is playing a part in maybe pretending it's the grandchild's voice.

We're all just next on the conveyor belt and we all need to do a better job. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. Bayer Belt, and we all need to do a better job. history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. When the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris caught fire in April 2019, it was one of those moments that people around the world experienced together, staring in horror at live video on their smartphones and televisions.

For the people of France, it was especially traumatic, because Notre Dame has been a powerful symbol since medieval times. French President Emmanuel Macron immediately pledged that Notre Dame would be reopened by the end of 2024. It seemed at the time to be an unrealistic promise, but as we first reported in April, the resurrection of the great cathedral now seems within reach. Flames tore through the roof of Notre Dame on the evening of April 15th, 2019, and spread with incredible speed and ferocity, engulfing her 200-foot spire.

Everybody stops. Jean-Louis Georgelin is the man now in charge of restoring Notre Dame. And a lot of people in France cry because they feel that something very deep in the soul of France, in the spirit of France, was about to collapse. Only a heroic effort by the Paris fire brigade saved Notre Dame from collapse, as a few staffers raced through falling embers to rescue precious relics. Philippe Villeneuve, the cathedral's chief architect, was out of town that night and raced back to Paris. He was devastated by what he saw. I've said that the little boy who was in love with the cathedral and the architect who was in charge of it died that day. And another man took over and said, I have to save the cathedral.

It's my mission. It's my duty. Villeneuve now shares that duty. If he's the artist who knows every inch of stone in Notre Dame, retired army general Georges Lenne is the commander, called back to meet that five-year deadline. I will relax only when this will be done. What does this cathedral mean to the people of France?

The cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is in some way the heart of France. For the Catholic, of course, for the Christian, but for everybody. All the great events of France, in some way or another, took place here in the cathedral. Napoleon crowned himself emperor in Notre Dame in 1804. In 1944, as Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation, General Charles de Gaulle braved sniper fire to enter the cathedral.

In many ways, you could say that she's the people's palace. Agnès Poirier is a journalist and author who lives and works just across the River Seine from Notre Dame. She and her neighbors watch the most horrifying moment the night of the fire, the collapse of that imposing spire. I remember the scream of the crowd saying no, as if they couldn't conceive such a thing. That spire meant so much to Philippe Villeneuve that he had it tattooed on his arm. They say that I have Notre Dame in my skin, he told us. It's very practical because when I have to explain how the spire fell,

it's always better to show that from here to there it tipped over. The huge spire, made of oak and covered in lead tiles, crashed through two of the stone vaults which form the ceiling of Notre-Dame, leaving gaping holes at the top and heaps of broken stone and charred wood on the floor below. The top priority was to shore up the Grand Cathedral's weakened structure. Huge temporary wooden supports were placed under the surviving stone vaults of her ceiling and under the flying buttresses to save this prime example of medieval engineering. We have to check every stone in the cathedral, every pillar.

At the same time, a huge decontamination project was mounted to remove lead tiles that had melted from the burning roof and spire and all the toxic lead dust spread by the fire. Four years on, workers still take extraordinary precautions against lead poisoning. We had to wear disposable hazmat suits to enter the cathedral. Tons of rubble had to be removed. Paintings and stained glass windows were taken away for restoration, and twisted steel scaffolding erected for ongoing restoration work had to be dismantled. So you were in the process of restoring the spire when the fire broke out in 2019.

Did your restoration project have anything to do with the fire breaking out? An investigation is still underway, Philippe Villeneuve told us, and no cause of the fire has been identified. But personally, it's unbearable. This fire never should have happened, and it did. Inevitably, I feel responsible. So, you know... At that point in our interview,

Villeneuve switched to English with a rueful smile. In reality, I'm totally destroyed. Really? Yes. I so want to rebuild Notre-Dame it's because I want to rebuild myself. The fire's deeply emotional

impact on Philippe Villeneuve was mirrored around the world. Nearly a billion dollars in private donations have been pledged to rebuild Notre Dame, most of it from France, $50 million from Americans. I know many people in the United States contributed. They can contribute again.

They can continue to contribute. The cash is always running. If they want to give me money, I need. In the weeks immediately following the fire, all sorts of ideas were floated for how centuries-old Notre Dame might be given a touch of avant-garde. And all those architects throughout the world said, yes, let's have a roof garden, let's have a golden torch, let's have a titanium spire. You know, even I, for 20 seconds, I thought, hmm, to add some 21st century genius to Notre Dame, why not? Chief architect Philippe Villeneuve had a very simple answer, why not.

An historic monument, a cathedral, is not something to be played with, he told us. Notre Dame had been standing for 850 years with a wooden frame and a lead roof. So wood is the way to go. In the end, President Macron and a special committee agreed to rebuild Notre Dame exactly as she had been. And with the same materials. Stone, wood and lead. How is it that the traditionalists won out?

Well, I think wisdom won. Notre Dame's signature spire was a fairly recent addition. Images of the cathedral from the mid-1800s show her without a spire and in an advanced state of decay. The cathedral was in great disrepair, was it not? It was about to collapse, but of neglect, not of fire. There were even proposals to demolish Notre Dame before the cathedral crumbled on its own. Instead, the French government hired a young architect named Violette Leduc. He created that famous spire.

So you are rebuilding the spire exactly as Violette Leduc? Yes. Are you using his original drawings? We were lucky, he said, because it was extremely well documented. We have the drawings of Violette Leduc, the sketches, the surveys. We have everything needed to be able to remake it. A thousand French oak trees were felled for the new spire, then fine cut by carpenters in eastern France. In other workshops around the country, the cathedral's organ, the largest in France, and many of its stained glass windows were restored. How many workers and craftsmen do you have on this project?

If we take into account all the people in France, it's about 1,000 people. On the plaza in front of Notre Dame, a huge tent has been erected, where stonecutters and sculptors are recreating Gothic gargoyles and adornments damaged in the fire. Philippe Villeneuve supervises every detail. I'll make them put their fingers on the layers of the original sculpture, he said, and then on the layer they're sculpting. So he wants you to feel it, not just look at it. And that works? Yeah, I think so.

Danée Leblanc is just 23 years old, sculpting and chiseling to recreate a floral detail carved hundreds of years ago. We try to remake things identically, she said, but we are also trying to understand the intention of the original sculptors, so we look at the traces left by their tools. We were given rare access to the painstaking restoration of Notre Dame as workers and artisans revived the cathedral's exterior and her interior.

Oh, my God. The cathedral's great rose windows have been meticulously cleaned. Look at this. And every inch of stone coated with latex, which, when peeled away, leaves the surface gleaming. We found restorers, Mathilde Maire and Aude Massimi, working on painted stone sculptures, depicting scenes from the life of Christ.

How old is this? This part of the cathedral, she said, was built at the beginning of the 14th century. These sculptures are medieval. The restorers are carefully wiping every surface with small cotton swabs dipped in a water-based cleaning solution. So I think you have to have a lot of patience. Yes. Yes, she says, you have to be calm and know that it will take time. But it's a pleasure.

You can see she's wiping away the sentries. Yeah. A 600-ton maze of scaffolding has been built inside Notre Dame to support all the work, especially the rebuilding of the spire. General Georges Lannes took us up through it, two-thirds of the way on a construction elevator. We reached the top, climbing steps and ladders. This is incredible. We were standing 100 feet above the cathedral floor,

in exactly the spot where the flaming spire collapsed. Four years ago, there was nothing here but a vast hole. The drama took place here, and we have to rebuild the vault of the transept. The spire will be there, 66 meters high. At the top of the old 200-foot spire will be there, 66 meters high. At the top of the old 200-foot spire sat a copper sculpture of a rooster, the symbol of the French people. The day after the fire, Philippe Villeneuve found it on a lower roof,

a bit mangled but miraculously untouched by the flames. It has been left as it was found and will be put on display in the restored cathedral. Can I tell you, Villeneuve says, that I plan to put a new rooster on top of a new spire one year to the day before the reopening of the cathedral. There will still be scaffolding, but the frame of the spire will again be in the sky of Paris. And the spire will rest, repose. Rest? Rest on these four pillars you see here.

You see? Be magnificent. Magnificent, yes. For the glory of God and France. General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who led the effort to reconstruct Notre Dame for more than four years, died ten days ago while hiking in the French Pyrenees. He was 74.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that France had lost one of its great servants and Notre Dame the master manager of its renaissance and pledged to carry on the general's mission to have the Great Cathedral reopened by the end of next year. In December, nearly every member country of the United Nations pledged to protect at least 30% of the world's land and sea by 2030 to reverse the damage done by humans and protect vulnerable species. One of the animals at risk is also one of the largest in the ocean and among the least understood. Sperm whales are not the predators of Moby Dick legend. As we first told you earlier this year, they have brains six times larger than ours and spend most of their lives in the darkest depths of the ocean. It is difficult to describe their size without comparing them to a school bus.

We traveled with National Geographic explorer Enrique Sala to the Caribbean island of Dominica, where he's proposing protections for the hundreds of sperm whales living there. But first, we had to find them. You guys ready? Go, go, go! Go, go. Go, guys, go! Look in the water, coming straight to you, yeah.

Most of Enrique Sala's dives don't start like a fire drill, even though he has spent thousands of hours underwater as an explorer. Look down. Out the back of you, look, this way, this way. We came face to face with a pod of whales, but these are not the whales we traveled all this way to see. They are pygmy killer whales, known to threaten sperm whales. And because they are here, the sperm whales are not. These killer whales can grow up to eight and a half feet in size.

Sala told us seeing them up close almost never happens. You've never been able to get into the water with one of these. They're that elusive. They are very elusive. Why is that? Why do you not see them? They are very smart. They hunt like wolves. They hunt in groups. They don't care about interacting with humans. They are after the prey. We were off the coast of Dominica, a country in the eastern Caribbean. Residents call it Nature Island.

Those rainforest-covered volcanic peaks drop thousands of feet down to the seafloor below, which is why hundreds of sperm whales live in these waters. They are one of the deepest diving mammals on the planet. They are mostly females here, families made up of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who stay together for life, nursing and raising their young. When Enrique Sala was here in December, his National Geographic team filmed this. It is a pod of sleeping female sperm whales, vertical giants up to 40 feet long, suspended near the surface. Their nap lasts only about 15 minutes until the whales are ready to dive again in what can be an hour-long journey for squid thousands of feet down. Even to researchers, why they sleep like this is one of the great mysteries.

What's it like to be in the water with them? Magical. We have in our minds the legend of Moby Dick, these nasty, aggressive animals. But you jump in the water and they are so docile and gentle. They have never attacked humans. And they are so curious, especially the babies. So it's one of the most amazing wildlife encounters that one can have on the planet.

Your official title is Explorer in Residence. Not bad. It's an oxymoron. Explorers are not supposed to be in residence. True, you're not supposed to be sitting in one place. What does that mean to be an explorer in the year 2023? Very different from what an explorer of the 19th century was. I can dedicate my life and work with an amazing team of scientists, policy experts, filmmakers, storytellers, to work with local communities, governments, indigenous peoples, to assess the health of ocean places and help to protect them. He grew up north of Barcelona, Spain, near the coast.

His first dive was in a marine reserve. It drove everything that I have done afterwards. If we give the ocean space, it can heal itself. Salah moved to California, where he was a professor of marine ecology for seven years at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. You have had a long career in academia at a top university, and you try that and decided, not for me, you walked away. I walked away because my job was to study

the impacts of humans in the ocean, the impacts of fishing and global warming. And one day I realized that all I was doing was writing the obituary of the ocean. Writing the obituary of the ocean? Yeah, I felt like the doctor who's telling you how you're going to die with excruciating detail, but not offering a cure.

Have you found that cure? There is one solution that is proven. It's a success story everywhere in the world, which is marine reserves or marine protected areas, areas where damaging activities are banned and marine life can come back. He founded the Pristine Seas Project in 2008. It combines sea exploration, scientific research, and public policy,

and has worked with 17 countries to turn these large swaths of the ocean into marine-prot protected areas. In Dominica, scientists estimate the sperm whale population declines by 3% each year. Sala says a preserve would protect them from their greatest threats. Not those pygmy killer whales we saw, or whaling, which has been banned for decades, but plastic trash, ocean noise pollution, and ship strikes. If they continue with the status quo here, what happens? If nothing is done, the population will probably continue declining. So reducing those threats, hopefully, will allow the sperm whale population to rebound. And the more whales there are, the more benefits Dominica and the local communities will obtain.

Hurricane Maria devastated those communities in 2017. Today, the island is continuing to rebuild and prepare for the future. Francine Baron heads the agency in charge of that effort. What was it about Hurricane Maria that made the leaders of this country say, we have to do something, we really have to act? We suffered the equivalent of 226% loss of GDP. So we could see the trend, and we realized that we needed to become much more resilient. When Enrique Sala came to you with this idea of creating a sanctuary for these whales, what was his pitch to you?

We see whale watching as an important part of our tourism product, and it's something that needs to be protected. And the idea of creating greater protection for the whales is something that Dominica is very open to, and we were very pleased with the suggestion that Enric made to create a recognized sanctuary for the whales. Enric Sala compares it to a model that has worked in Rwanda, where protecting mountain gorillas helped bring tourism dollars to the local economy. You going to find us some whales?

Sure. All right. Captain Kurt Benoit was born and raised in Dominica and has been in the whale tourism business for more than two decades. We set out on his 38-foot Lady Rose from a small fishing village on the West Coast. Our government permit to swim with the whales was good for six days. Captain Benoit uses a homemade device that picks up the distinct clicking of sperm whales as far as 11 miles away.

We got whales in the south. Every three miles, we check to see if we were getting closer. It's come to papa. Daddy's here. Tell me about this really high-tech device you've got here. You have an underwater microphone which picks up sound from 360. So what I did, I took a salad bowl with neoprene. So the hydrophone is kind of hidden. So as it goes out, it actually brings you straight to wherever you hear the sound.

So this is a salad bowl from your house? Yes. What do the whales sound like? It's like a horse is galloping on a hot surface. So if you hear several of them, that means there's a lot of whales there. Let's keep on going, man. I'm going to find these guys. All right. On the second day, a water spout.

See it? It's right here. Look, guys. See him? You can see its top. Look at him. Oh, my gosh. Go! Swimmers in the water! Males here live with their families until their teen years. Then they roam mostly alone, swimming thousands of miles away. Caribbean male sperm whales have been found as far away as Norway, returning here only to mate. Our cameraman got lucky enough or unlucky enough to have the whale poop on him.

So the whales go down, they hunt squid, they come back to the surface, they breathe, they rest, and they poop. And that poop is full of nutrients, which fertilizes the shallow waters. So a good thing, I guess. It's a good thing. Come on, people, we're looking for spouts. But our luck didn't last. Okay, guys, nothing is here.

We spent the next day searching for sperm whales, and the next. Nothing at all? Nothing at all. And the next. Not a single click. Okay, guys, it's pretty quiet. And then, in the last hour of the last day of our trip...

There are lots of animals in the area, guys. Whoo! They're coming back. But I'm getting songs 360. So that means the whales, we are above them. We're right there. Yes, it blows! Yes, it blows! Yes, it blows! Yes, it blows! Go! Go! And stay there! It's coming to you! It's coming to you!

We jumped in the water, and a young female swam right to us. She came within feet. At first, her size was terrifying. She made a sound like a creaking door hinge. It's one of the ways whales communicate and socialize. With eyes on the side of her head, she stared right at us. She had squid in her mouth, left over from lunch thousands of feet below. She stayed and rolled around, and her jaw was wide open. She was using echolocation, bouncing those clicks off of us, trying to figure out what we were. You could hear the clicking. You could hear her. Once you were really close to her, you could hear that so loudly. I could feel it in my bones.

You grabbed my hand. You could tell I was nervous. I was excited too. You were? They are huge. You have to respect them. You have to respect them. There is a sense of awe that comes with being in there. She was looking right at us. And she left us a souvenir. A piece of squid.

Sperm whales live in... Shane Guiro is another National Geographic explorer. He started the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, and over the past 18 years, he's identified more than 35 families. Did you recognize the whale that we saw? The animal you met belongs to the EC2 clan, the other clan of whales that we've known exists in the Caribbean, but we haven't seen all that much.

And those groups identify themselves by making specific patterns of cliques called codas. It's a part of who they are, where their grandmother grew up, and so it really ties the animals and the place together. What does the coda of the EC2 sound like? They make the 5R3 coda and it sounds like this. Five slow clicks. And she came up to you and made this

5R3 coda saying, I am from the EC2 clan, are you? She was rolling around and she kept coming back, but is that me assigning human characteristics to a whale or is she actually a playful animal? These are the animals that are holding the largest brain to ever exist, maybe in the universe. And they use that for complicated thinking and behavior. Absolutely, this was an animal that was playful. And that curiosity of the animal actively coming towards you just shows that this is an animal that's investigating something in its world. Back on the dock, Enrique Sala says it's that world he's trying to protect.

Being in the water with sperm whales is a magical experience. There's something spiritual there. This is more than science and data. Sense of awe and wonder that is unavoidable when you are in the water with these gentle giants. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.