the fbi investigating an explosion at rainbow bridge near niagara falls. the car obliterated. a source says the two people in the car dead. a border patrol officer injured. the white house, homeland security on all ends responding to it. with the holiday in mind, law enforcement on alert. welcome. i'm edward lawrence in for neil cavuto, this is a special edition of "your world." let's go to alexis mcadams in new york with what we know at this hour. alexis? >> sources say that they believe this was a terrorist attack at that border crossing at the rainbow bridge. we've been making calls. now they're out of the meetings and now we're getting new information that a car had two men in it in the passenger seat and driver's side. they were trying to cross in the u.s. in to canada and trying to avoid border patrol agents according to this source that got this update. that car started going at a high rate of speed and crossed over the median to get away from the border patrol agents. the car went up in to flames. the bomb techs thought that this was an explosive, that the car i was told had explosives in it. now they're backing that up saying the it was the kay the car landed that caused such an explosion. the bomb techs said they never saw an explosion with a vehicle like that. they're trying to figure this out and replaying the video. they've gone back in to more meetings. these are high level officials that are talking about this. it comes in to the play that they've had such a heightened security and such a heightened awareness that there's possible attacks. as we are now heading into the busy holiday weekend, so many people on the bridge and at the border crossing that when they saw those flames and that impact and that noise, they were told to investigate this as a possible terror attack. we know the governor of new york is heading there now. she's going to be briefed as well. the bomb techs are still on scene. we know one cbp officer was hurt after that explosion. and also just trying to figure out what else played out there. they were also going to call hazmat investigators to the scene. when it went airborne and crashed, they said there was debris everywhere. the debris field was huge. so big for such a small car. we don't know who the people were in that vehicle. there's been reports, edward, that there was a nearby area that at a 7-11 that might have played in to this. i'm told this was a stolen vehicle, two men now dead that tried to avoid border patrol at the crash and causing a massive explosion. that's what we know as of now. edward? >> alexis, you mentioned the 7-11. there has to be security video of this car either at the 7-11 or on its way -- there's a ton of cameras at the crossing there. sources are collecting this evidence, aren't they? >> yeah, the thing to point out here, when we were told this was being investigated as a terror attack, it's because of the explosion and the size of the explosion that it caused them to evacuate government buildings in an around that area. and also to close the airport down. when i checked back in with these investigators out there working the scene, they said that is not a typical response to something that would have been a car explosion. that's why that information came in as it did. we started to see the conflicting reports. that's what happens with breaking news. as of now, they walked back it was a possible terrorist attack but have never seen a car explode in that way. so more investigating that need thats to go on. >> thanks, alexis. the fbi taking the lead on this. let's bring in the retired fbi supervisory agent of the joint terrorism task force. jack, you know, seems a little odd that, you know, this could be a target of a border crossing. makes sense that they're going to look at this. you saw the video. i don't know if you saw it of the explosion that happened. that was a sizable explosion. when you see something like that, the natural reaction is to think we need to look at this, right? >> yeah, sure. and you're correct. listen, this investigation is very early on. as you said, the fbi will take the lead on this. the joint terrorism task force is out there. fbi evidence response team is out there, the bomb teches are out there. they'll put this whole crime scene back together again. what a lot of people don't realize the fbi and the united states government, we have a lot of experience of putting vehicles back together again after they have been involved in what we call a vbied. that's a vehicle-born explosion. our guys are that good at putting that vehicle back together. they will get to the bottom of it. there's a lot of speculation out there -- i've wants an answer tomorrow. >> trace: i want to drill down on that. we're told the car was obliterated. you can see the explosion there. where do you start to put this car back together? and can you get the plates off of video cameras? is that where you start? you try to find them? >> correct. >> how do you put it back together if it's completely destroyed? >> exactly your point. you look at all video surveillance leading up to that bridge and to the entry point. they probably hit a bunch of other cameras as well. when i told you they can put trace evidence pack together of the vehicle, they will take every piece of that vehicle, send it to quantico and quantico will evaluate it all. it was a large field of evidence. they will work their way outwards, inwards and collect every single spec of evidence that is on the ground there. >> do you feel like right now the fbi know whose the car belongs to? we won't know who the two individuals inside are as of yet. do you think they know at least who the car belongs to? >> may or may not. we'll know who the car was registered to. but that doesn't mean that that was those individuals. >> edward: so there's thanksgiving day parades and other events across the united states. does this explosion cause -- cancel vacations for fbi? does it cause them to relook at data and tips coming in? >> i can tell you this. the buffalo division of the fbi will not be celebrating thanksgiving in a typical fashion. as one of your other earlier guests had mentioned, every fbi office is, believe it or not, involved in this. leads will go out to other office us. command posts will be stood up. we always typically did this anyway. when i was a supervisor at the joint terrorism task force in new jersey, there wasn't a holiday that we were not ramped up after 9-11. it was thanksgiving, christmas, new years. four or five years in a row at new year's, i never went home. it is such a collaboration of local, state, county, federal law enforcement, all working together. it's a huge effort. a lot of people don't see it. >> edward: you also have the canadians involved in this. justin trudeau talked about this why making another speech in canada. listen to this. >> this is a very serious situation in niagara falls. there was a vehicle explosion at the rainbow bridge crossing. i've been briefed by the nsia and the minister of public safety. cbsa, rcmp and transport canada are fully engaged and providing the necessary support. a lot of questions and we're following up to try to get as many answers as rapidly as possible. >> edward: so you have two nations also looking into this. what is that coordination with local and state authorities? >> i can tell you this: i worked very closely with canada on past terrorism investigations with rcmp, with their different various agencies up there. they couldn't be a better friend to the united states. they're extremely professional. they are extremely good at what they do as well. i have full confidence the canadians are working directly with our people hand and hand. it will be a joint investigation. we need help from both sides of the border. >> edward: how quickly do you think this will be unravelled among law enforcement? we might not hear the information about it but among law enforcement to determine if this was a terrorist attack or if this was just someone trying to get away or evade border patrol agents? how quickly do you think law enforcement will understand that information? >> i mean, listen, there's a lot of speculation out there very quickly. people are making statements quickly. certain eye witnesses saw things. yes, a massive explosion, it unusual for a vehicle like that. but that being said, law enforcement is going to get it right. they're going to take their time methodically go through this. it might be days and it might be a week, might be two weeks. listen, we're also scouring social media. is anybody taking responsibility for this. is anybody talking about this on line. there's a lot of different avenues that are being looked at. that's why i said the fbi laboratory, fbi evidence response team, bomb techs, they're all involved but working hand and hand with the locals and everybody else that can add to this. they're going to come to a conclusion. you know, i always hesitate to rush to a conclusion. >> edward: jack jupin, i appreciate your insight in all of this. this is something we're going to be looking at the next hour or more and the rest of the day today. thank you, jack. so now the fbi taking the lead investigation on this car explosion near the u.s.-canada border. david spunt has more on what the agency is saying from washington. david? >> i'm going to begin by saying the fbi is on high alert. state police, border patrol, atf, all on high alert given what happened in israel on october 7. we don't know if this was inspired by anything in israel at this point. but authorities are cautioning me and others that this is all very preliminary. there's not a lot of information right now. the main reason is because the car is obliterated. we've shown the video of the car rashing at a high speed. you can see it going through there and the big explosion at the rainbow bridge there. the car was in the united states heading wards the canada side. never made it to the canada side. authorities don't believe at this point that there were explosives in the car. there was concern originally by authorities given the fact that they saw an explosion like this. as i said, the fbi has been on high alert. the other agencies have been on high alert. what we have been told by the attorney general, the president of the united states, the fbi director all receiving full briefings on this. at some point soon, we're hoping and expecting to hear from governor hochul to provide some official updates. edward? >> edward: what -- where is this on the priority level, do you believe, as we have so many things going on across the united states? where within the department of justice has this reached on the priority level, to figure out what happened here? >> i think high priority obviously when this first originally happened and still high priority given the fact that the airport in buffalo affected by this. the border was closed at that specific point for a while. the fact that all of the fbi field offices across the country are involved. the canadian prime minister, justin trudeau as we just saw speaking about it. when something like this originally happens, people jump in to high gear on the law enforcement side to try to rule out that it could be any type of terrorism nexus. at this point, authorities not willing to go that far. they're cautioning this is early on in the process. they were concerned when they saw that explosion happen at that high rate of speed. certainly this is high priority right now given the fact that, you know, we're in an atmosphere where people are concerned. so certainly a high priority right now. another official i was on the phone with about ten minutes ago cautioned me that when governor hochul comes out or other officials come out, it's not like we'll get all the answers right now. again, this car is gone. and the evidence is going to take a long time to connect the dots here. so don't expect that the governor is going to come out and officials will come out and say a, b, c and d happened. with certainly, everybody go home. this will take awhile for this investigation to matriculate. >> edward: excellent reporting. we'll let you work the phones. thanks for joining us. now is homicide d.c. -- former detective ted williams joining us here. so when you have a car that is like this, you have worked homicides. how do you track down the people inside and backtrack where they were? i assume that's what's happening right now. trying to figure out where they had been. >> yeah, edward. they are. the law enforcement clearly is trying to backtrack and try to learn as much as it can about that vehicle and the occupants of that vehicle. so what they're going to do in that area that they're in around that rainbow bridge is to use all of the video feeds that are in that area. those video feeds hopefully will help law enforcement to make a determination there as to who the two individuals are in that automobile that died and what that automobile actual belonged to. so this is all part of the investigation. that entire area, edward is a crime scene. but let me be very clear here. there are people that are home grown terrorists in this country that want to harm us. so at this stage as a result of the israeli-palestinian matter, we're on a heightened state of alert. the fbi director recently put us on as much of an alert as he could. so when these incidents happen, naturally we think terrorism. i have to tell you, when i look at this incident at that bridge, the first thing i thought about was when that vehicle went in to the air and the impact of that vehicle, that it appears to me to have been a gasoline explosion. so there's a lot of work that they're doing there quickly. >> edward: we don't have an official designation as to what this is. we see it's an explosion. that's what we're calling it at this moment. ted, we can figure out from the license plate who the car is registered to. how quickly are investigators going to interview those folks, friends or family of somebody that owned the car to try to figure out who was in the car and who might know why the car did what it did? >> the moment that they started backtracking and if they have gotten any information whatsoever identifying who that vehicle belonged to, you can rest assure that law enforcement are already at that location talking to the persons who are associated with that vehicle. but when you look at this and you think about it, that this vehicle was traveling toward canada from what all indications are and that it had been in one lane and gotten in to another lane and all of a sudden there was an acceleration at a high rate of speed, that leaves me to believe that it may not have been intentional, may have been something medically going on here or it may very well have been some individuals that were trying to flee from law enforcement. so all of these things that i am seeing are part and parcel of the investigation that's being conducted at this time by law enforcement. >> as a detective, you listen to witnesses. we're starting to hear from those witnesses at the scene. i want you to listen to this witness and get your take on the other side. listen to this. >> there's two witnesses i know of myself and another guy. i came down to the one niagara building to see how the sales guy was doing. i close the door to my car. about 30 feet from me, i seen something airborne. first thought it was an airplane. looked like slow motion. i said, my god, it's a car. it's a vehicle and it's flying through the area. he hit the concrete barrier probably right at the signal. god knows how many thousands of feet before the bridge. it went airborne. it wendt something overhead and hit something over there. my prayer was please don't let it -- any of the officers get hit over there. all of a sudden, black smoke, no explosion. we heard -- the people in the building heard it. then i saw black smoke and fire. there was no explosion. just the black smoke. there was so much smoke it was unbelievable. >> edward: you hear witness testimony. different people see different things. how reliable when you hear someone so close to where this happened, how reliable do you take something like that as you're an investigator looking into this? >> well, you look at it through the lens of the person that saw it who believed what they saw. you try to mesh that up with possible video feed in that area. when you listen to what that witness said, you come away with the fact that this was a high energy impact. once that vehicle after flying through the air according that witness, when it impacted with that concrete barrier, it's believable that at that stage while he saw only smoke that that led to the explosion because, remember, this is from all indications, a gasoline vehicle. it was, then you'd have possibly a good explosion as a result of the impact. that becomes part and parcel of the investigation and on the scene there, you have alcohol and tobacco, they're on the scene, the fbi on the scene and the state police on the scene and a lot of local law enforcement officers. i can tell you, all of these agencies are working together and they will get it right. we will know a lot more, maybe not right away, but we will know more about who these individuals were, why that car was at that location and even may know why it sped up the way it did and why you had the high impact in which we know where two people died. >> edward: thanks, ted. inside the mind of an investigator. that helps us as we piece this together along with investigators. we're learning. thanks for your insight on that. joining us now is a former fbi investigator, bill daly. let's start where we left off with the people inside that car. how do you now figure out who those individuals are and what their intent was? >> you know, actually those are two separate but connected issues. the first is identifying who they are. i think as ted was speaking about identifying the vehicle, certainly what law enforcement investigators are are looking at is backtracking everything not just from the license plates but possibly the vin numbers on the vehicle. different parts on the vehicle. that had been used in the 1993 world trade center bombing where they found the axle of the vehicle and found it was a rental vehicle. they'll backtrack the ownership and see if they can connect the occupants to that vehicle. the way they would do that is two fold. one if there's any debris at the scene, whether it's remnants of a phone, happens to be pieces of a wallet or something else that gives any individual identification. but also we can go back and take a little time, if there's video of them going in halfway in to the 7-11. now we're hearing this through hearsay. so if we take that bit of information and say there's video from there, you can glean in the video is strong enough and clear enough some facial recognition and run that against various databases and other various databases before going out with lawrence to the more publicly available databases. glean to see if you can identify people through that mechanism. then ultimately and it will take awhile to look at any biological data and compare that to any dna may already been in repositories to compare against. >> edward: is one of the things to do is to see if there were explosives in the car or why the car caught fire and exploded as we saw in that video? >> right there a couple more things that they would look at. one, initially because of what's been kind of explained as an explosion. to others, may be a severe car crash. when cars crash and we've seen horrific crashes on our nation's highways, is that, you know, an explosion like that may or may not indicated there's anything else incendiary in the vehicle or explosive in the vehicle. they'll start to do tests and bring in swaps, take examples of the remnants and run