The UnBelievable: Encounters with Dan Aykroyd

The sky has never been as safe or as empty as we'd like to believe. During the darkest days of World War II, pilots flying missions over Italy radio back something that defies military logic: the unmistakable figure of Padre Pio suspended in the clouds above them. On a warm evening along the Pascagoula River in Mississippi, two unsuspecting fishermen are pulled from the riverbank and into an experience that shakes them to their core, becoming one of the most credible and unbelievable alien abduction cases ever documented. West Virginia's rural communities live in genuine fear when the Mothman appears: a massive winged predator with eyes like burning coals that seems to herald disaster wherever it goes. Twice in a row, the skies above Arkansas open up and rain thousands of dead birds down onto bewildered residents with no satisfying explanation ever given. And across rural America, something with an ancient wingspan targets children in their own yards. They came from above, they leave no clean answers, and these unbelievable encounters refuse to be dismissed.

Strange things can happen in the wake of a major disaster, and some aftershocks can't be measured by any instrument known to science. In Galveston, Texas, the children lost to one of history's deadliest hurricanes never quite leave the orphanage they once call home, their presence still unsettling visitors more than a century later. In the evacuated ghost towns surrounding Fukushima's nuclear exclusion zone, taxi drivers begin reporting silent passengers who vanish before ever reaching their destination. When thirty-three Chilean miners are finally pulled from the earth after sixty-nine days trapped underground, they emerge with something extraordinary to report—a mysterious 34th presence that keeps their spirits alive in the darkness. In the English town of Bungay, a violent storm unleashes something far more terrifying than lightning—a phantom black dog that tears through a crowded church, leaving death in its wake. And when Mount St. Helens violently tears itself apart, something massive and winged rises from the ash that follows. These aren't your typical disaster stories. They're the unbelievable paranormal aftershocks that linger in the rubble long after the world moves on and refuse to be explained away.

Some evils don't just surround a person, they burrow in deep and refuse to let go. Adolfo Constanzo builds a cartel empire along the U.S.-Mexico border that runs not just on violence and cocaine, but on dark ritual and genuine belief in demonic protection, making him one of the most terrifying and unbelievable criminal figures of the twentieth century. In a convent in Loudun, France, in the 1630s, an entire community of nuns falls into what is documented at the time as mass demonic possession; screaming, convulsing, and making accusations that send a priest to the stake in one of history's most disturbing and theatrical encounters with perceived evil. The Hope Diamond passes through the hands of kings, collectors, and socialites for centuries, leaving behind a trail of madness, ruin, and death so consistent and so well documented that even the most skeptical gemologists tend to handle its history with care. And then there is the boy, the real one, the quiet suburban child whose terrifying ordeal in the late 1940s is so extreme and so meticulously recorded by those who witness it that it becomes the blueprint for the most frightening film ever made. A cartel leader wrapped in demonic protection. A convent consumed by darkness. A diamond that destroys everyone it touches. These are the Evil Entanglements and they are as unbelievable as they are inescapable.

There's bad luck, and then there's something older and darker that no amount of good fortune can touch. James Dean is one of Hollywood's brightest stars when his Porsche Spyder carries him into a fatal collision on a California highway but the car's appetite for destruction doesn't die with him, continuing to wound and kill in a documented chain of events that leaves even the most rational observers deeply unsettled. Bela Lugosi makes a career out of playing monsters, but the yellow-eyed woman who follows him through his real life is no performance, she appears consistently enough, and is witnessed clearly enough, that those around him can't dismiss what they're seeing. In a North Yorkshire pub, the Busby Stoop Chair quietly accumulates a body count so undeniable that the only solution anyone can agree on is to take it out of reach entirely, suspending it from a museum ceiling where no unsuspecting visitor can make the last mistake of their life. Somewhere in early American history, a man who goes on to shape a nation finds himself locked in a grinding battle with an unseen force that embeds itself into his land like a splinter. And then there is the place, the location so thoroughly and irreversibly cursed that humanity's only answer is to build a fortress around it and never look back. These are the Hopelessly Hexed, unbelievable stories of curses with no exit and no end.

Some forces arrive uninvited and simply refuse to leave. In a quiet council house in Enfield, England, a single mother and her children become the center of one of the most documented and disturbing poltergeist cases in history: furniture moves on its own, voices come from nowhere, and investigators who arrive as skeptics leave as something else entirely. In the summer of 1955, a rural Kentucky family barricades themselves inside their farmhouse as small, luminous creatures besiege them through the night in what becomes known as the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, one of the most credible and unbelievable alien siege cases ever recorded. In the early 2000s, a man finds himself in a battle with something deeply malevolent that attaches itself to him and refuses every attempt to shake it loose. England's oldest prison has long been home to something that goes far beyond its living inmates, a ghost bear whose presence terrifies guards and prisoners alike for centuries. And somewhere in the corridors of Cold War military command, an alien visitor comes close enough to triggering a third world war to make everyone involved wish they could forget it ever happened. These are Hostile Takeovers…unbelievable stories of forces that grab hold, dig in, and on their own terms, never truly let go.

Some roads lead somewhere no map can prepare you for. In 1593, a Spanish soldier closes his eyes in Manila and opened them thousands of miles away with no explanation that satisfied anyone then or since. A woman pulling off the highway for a rest near the Sierra Nevada mountains finds herself face to face with something at the roadside that connects directly to one of the most tragic and disturbing stories in American history…the doomed Donner Party. On the fog-covered moors of England, a former police officer encounters a small grey creature that flees into the wilderness and left behind evidence that still hasn't been explained away. At a lonely Mississippi crossroads sometime in the 1930s, a young Blues musician named Robert Johnson allegedly made a deal that transformed him overnight into one of the most gifted guitarists who ever lived and cost him everything not long after. A nap at work teleports a man nine thousand miles. A pilot punches through a cloud bank and emerges decades in the past. A toddler carries the detailed memories of a World War II pilot he never could have known. Going off the beaten path has consequences and these unbelievable strange detours prove that some wrong turns change everything.

There are those who vanish, and then there are those who are taken. In Iceland, the belief in Huldufólk, a hidden race of elfin beings occupying an invisible parallel world is no relic of the distant past. These creatures are credited with swapping human babies for their own, a practice so widely acknowledged that modern Icelandic infrastructure bends around the spaces the Huldufólk are known to occupy. Albert Ostman goes to sleep under the stars in the British Columbia wilderness in 1924 and wakes up being transported through the darkness in the grip of something massive, beginning one of the strangest and most compelling Bigfoot captivity accounts ever documented. Antonio Vilas Boas is alone on his farm in Brazil in the early hours of October 1957 when he is taken aboard a craft, subjected to an encounter of almost indescribable strangeness, and returned to his field with a story that serious researchers find impossible to simply dismiss. Add to that the accounts of people plucked from their beds and carried into spacecraft hanging silently above cities that never sleep, and the ancient and disturbing tradition of burying a living person only to dig them back up and put them to work. The Snatched don't always get to come home the same as they leave, and these unbelievable stories of takings, trades, and returns will make you think twice about sleeping with the window open.

History is full of close calls but the most unbelievable ones are the encounters where death arrives in full and somehow still doesn't win. Off the coast of Pensacola in the early 1960s, a group of boys stumble into the kind of encounter with the deep that most people spend their lives hoping to avoid, coming face to face with something enormous and entirely unclassifiable that keeps researchers guessing for decades. The Beast of Gevaudan carves its way through rural France with a brutality and cunning that baffles hunters, soldiers, and scientists alike, killing over a hundred people across three years and leaving behind a mystery that no definitive explanation ever fully closes. A man standing at the threshold of the Titanic's departure feels something intervene — not a premonition exactly, but a voice, distinct and insistent, steering him away from the gangplank and almost certainly away from a watery grave in the North Atlantic. Near the base of Mount St. Helens, a seven-year-old boy begins telling his father they need to leave with a conviction and an urgency that no child his age should have access to, ultimately pulling them both clear of one of the most devastating volcanic eruptions in American history. And then there are the stories of a poltergeist that doesn't just haunt but attacks, a pilot who loses control of his aircraft to something that shouldn't be there, and a man who opens his eyes to find himself on an autopsy table. Death defying doesn't begin to cover it. These stories are flat out unbelievable.