[bright music]
- What if I told you that an elderly woman
once took flight in her bathtub?
- There is a tornado descending on their very location.
- [Holly] They're gonna ride out this storm,
but ride means something very different in this case.
- Or that it rains something much weirder
than cats and dogs on a group of unsuspecting citizens.
- People are calling 911.
They're checking themselves into hospitals.
- The military obviously won't comment on this.
It's going to remain a secret.
- How about seeing an asteroid coming straight for you
during your morning commute?
- [Hakeem] The sky is filled
with this bright blinding light.
- [Randy] Why didn't we see this?
- These are the stories around events from above
that are so surprising, they are truly Unbelievable.
[suspenseful music]
Friday nights in October usually mean one thing,
high school football,
but on one Friday night in 1992,
fans witnessed something much more impactful.
- People are out in stadiums.
Everyone's cheering,
and this is a great night for football.
- It's 1992.
It's the camcorder age,
so people are gathered
and they're ready to film their kids
and their friends,
but what they're about to capture
they could not have expected.
[dark ambient music]
- Suddenly this fireball with green light
just streaks across the sky.
People are thinking like,
what the heck is this?
Is a plane crashing?
Is it a UFO?
An attack from some military enemy?
- Multiple stadiums worth of people
are watching the same big flashing ball of light
that they have no idea what it is.
- [Dan] The mysterious fireball is captured
by more than a dozen camcorders
as it blazes its way along the 450 mile stretch
from Kentucky to New York.
[tense music]
- Up in Peekskill, New York, there's a young lady,
18 years old, named Michelle Knapp.
She's just watching TV when suddenly she hears a crash
outside her house.
[object crashes]
And she thinks it's a car collision.
- But when she runs outside,
she realizes it's her Chevy Malibu,
which now has the trunk crushed in and a hole in it,
and in the bottom of that hole
is a little crater with a rock in it.
- [Dan] But as Michelle is about to discover,
this is no ordinary rock.
- When the police show up, they realize, oh no,
this is something we have to get experts in on.
- So the next day, the Museum of Natural History
gets involved
and immediately they know what it is
and they're extremely excited.
- [Dan] The mysterious object that lit up the sky
and put a hole in Michelle's Malibu
is a 28-pound, 4.4-billion- year-old meteorite.
- This meteorite, it's traveling at over
25,000 miles per hour when it enters our atmosphere,
but there is friction with the atmosphere and it slows down.
So it's traveling at 200 miles per hour
when it hits Michelle's car.
[meteor crashes]
- [Dan] But this meteor didn't just
demolish Michelle's car,
it beat the odds.
- Most meteorites skip off the atmosphere,
and among those that actually enter,
only 5% make it to the ground.
So to say this is a rare event
would be an understatement.
This rock becomes known as the Peekskill Meteorite.
Ultimately, she sells it for 50 grand
and then Michelle's car
becomes a celebrity in its own right.
She only paid $400 for the thing,
but once this story gets out,
a meteorite enthusiast pays her $10,000 for it.
- The car is so successful an attraction
that it tours internationally,
London, Paris, Tokyo.
It's going all over the world as this completely unusual
and bizarre attraction that had this one event occur to it.
- For an even closer encounter,
look no further than the strange story of Anne Hodges
and let's just say she would've happily sacrificed her car.
[suspenseful music]
November 30th, 1954,
34-year-old Anne Hodges is peacefully napping
under a pile of warm quilts in her Sylacauga, Alabama home
[loud bang]
when a loud bang startles her awake.
[dramatic music]
- She looks around, the house is full of dust,
her radio is busted apart.
- She removes the quilts off of her body
and she hears something just thud.
- And she looks under her coffee table
and right there is this grapefruit-size black thing.
She looks up and she sees a hole in her ceiling,
and that's when she realizes something has fallen
through my ceiling and somehow hit me.
- Anne's mom is also home,
hears all the commotion,
steps outside to try to understand what's going on
and sees a black streak of smoke.
- And she's starting to think, were we attacked?
Was it the Russians?
Was it aliens?
You gotta remember again, Cold War.
Paranoia is rampant in the United States.
- [Dan] Anne's mother quickly runs back
into the house and calls the police.
- They're not the only ones who show up.
The Air Force shows up
because they've heard reports of this streak
going across three different states.
- What it turns out to be is that Anne Hodges' roof,
radio and Anne Hodges herself are struck
by an eight-pound meteorite from outer space.
- [Garry Moore] I've Got a Secret!
- [Dan] But being hit by a meteorite
does have its perks.
- Now then let's have our
next contestant, please.
Will you come in?
- [Dan] Anne's rare cosmic encounter
turns her into an instant celebrity.
- You are not the lady
that the meteor fell on are you?
[audience applauds]
- [Paul] Anne holds the distinction
of the only person ever
in all of recorded human history
to be struck by a meteorite.
- Imagine you are lying in your bed
and this comes through the roof and hits you.
- [Dan] If you're wondering how Anne
survives an attack from space,
well, it's a matter of unbelievable luck.
- This rock falling through our atmosphere
probably would've killed her if it had been a direct hit,
but it wasn't a direct hit.
It split apart midair.
So it already lost about half of its weight coming
through the atmosphere
and it punched through her ceiling
and it lost a little bit of energy
and it ricocheted off of her radio console.
And because there was a chill in the air,
she had six heavy quilts layered on top of her
that gave her enough protection
that the only thing she got was a nasty bruise.
- [Dan] Over time, public interest
in Anne's amazing rock fades.
Undaunted, she finds a new use for it.
- This piece of rock has existed in space for billions
of years and it came crashing through our atmosphere
at tens of thousands of miles per hour,
spends its days as a door stop for her family.
- A grapefruit-sized meteorite crashing into your house
would certainly be terrifying,
but what if you saw something coming
that's the size of a six-story building?
[suspenseful music]
- Chelyabinsk, Siberia.
February 15th, 2013.
People are going to work, it's rush hour
and they're about to see something
that few humans have ever seen.
The sky is filled with this bright, blinding light.
This thing is brighter than the sun.
We're in a large flat area of Siberia for 60 miles around.
Everybody can see this.
- [Dan] For a moment, all is silent
and then-
[car horns sound]
[onlooker shouting]
- Buildings are shook.
Doors fly off.
Glass is shattered.
It's pure pandemonium.
[dramatic music]
- The shockwave that they experienced has been estimated
to be between 26 and 33 times
the shockwave that
occurred at Hiroshima,
so we're talking about an intense situation.
- [Dan] The shockwave was caused by something
completely unbelievable,
a massive asteroid,
nearly 60 feet wide.
- More than 7,000 buildings are badly damaged in this event,
and more than 1,500 people have to go to the hospital
from injuries because the wave of power
that has hit everything.
- [Dan] Even more remarkable,
while the city of Chelyabinsk
is home to over a million people,
not a single person is killed.
- This thing was somewhere in the neighborhood
of 10 to 15 tons moving at over 33,000 miles per hour.
And when it entered Earth's atmosphere
it's under extreme stresses, right?
There's the friction.
It has high pressure on the front,
low pressure on the back,
and all of those forces that caused it to explode
and it exploded 15 miles in the air, thankfully.
But had that sucker hit in Chelyabinsk,
Chelyabinsk would be Goneyabinsk.
- The big question here is why didn't we see this?
And the answer has to do with the trajectory that this rock
was following as it made impact on the Earth.
It was not a common path.
So our tracking systems aren't looking for it.
It's also coming in in the morning.
So the sun is actually kind of creating a blind spot
for our tracking systems as well.
- In the wake of this event,
the UN forms the International Asteroid Warning Network.
If we had some warning,
people would at least have known not to be by windows,
but there's no warning at all
and it underscores the importance
of tracking objects like this.
[ambulance siren]
- If the fear of falling meteors
doesn't make you wanna sleep with an eye open,
our next threat from above just might.
- In a scene practically ripped from the Wizard of Oz,
one unfortunate soul hitches a ride,
not to the Emerald City,
but right into the record books.
[thunder rumbling]
- A young man, 19 years old by the name of Matt Suiter
is visiting his grandmother in her trailer park home
when they start to feel the walls violently shaking.
- Missouri gets hit by a lot of tornadoes.
Some of the worst that we have on record
happened in Missouri.
One of the worst places that you can be
during a tornado is in a trailer.
[thunder cracks]
This tornado is a monster.
It cuts a swath 800 feet wide.
It destroys 17 houses,
and this trailer, unfortunately,
is ground zero for the tornado.
- The windows and the doors get sucked out into this funnel.
And then after that,
the very foundation of the trailer and the trailer itself
then start to get lifted up into this funnel.
- [Dan] As Grandma's trailer is being torn apart,
Matt is struck in the head by a flying lamp,
knocking him out cold.
- And amidst this mayhem and the roaring winds,
Matt is sucked out of the trailer.
He's tossed around like a ragdoll,
and when he comes to
he's nowhere near the house.
- [Dan] Dazed and confused
and still only wearing his boxer shorts,
he stands up in a field 1,307 feet away
from his grandmother's trailer.
- Matt starts making his way back to the trailer park
where his grandmother's trailer home is,
and when he gets to the trailer park
he finds that the trailer is completely gone.
Luckily, a neighbor informs him that his grandmother
ends up actually being just fine.
- [Dan] Amazingly, so is Matt.
- Matt Suiter, who was thrown the equivalent
of four football fields away from the trailer park,
has not a single broken bone in his entire body.
- [Dan] In fact, the only thing he breaks
that night is a Guinness World record.
- The 1,307 feet that he traveled in the tornado
is the longest distance that anybody has been carried
by a tornado and survived.
Now 1,307 feet is 10 times longer
than the Wright Brother's original flight,
and he doesn't even need a plane.
- 11 years later, a mother and son in Texas
give Matt a run for his money
with their own form of improvised travel.
- 75-year-old Charlsetta Williams and her son Ricky
are at home chilling, watching TV.
The news report tells them that nearby
there's a tornado in the town of Jefferson
and it has winds of up to 130 miles per hour
and it's cutting a swath through this town
heading in their direction.
- East Texas is a
part of Tornado Alley.
It's a stretch that goes
from Texas through Oklahoma
into Kansas and Nebraska.
90% of the world's tornadoes actually occur
within the United States,
and most of the tornadoes that occur in the United States
happen in Tornado Alley.
- [Dan] Then, just after 4:00 PM,
the unmistakable tornado warning siren
begins blaring outside.
[siren wails]
- It's a piercing loud air siren
that people immediately realize
they need to take action to save their lives.
- So Ricky wants to see what's happening.
So he runs to the window.
He looks into the distance, he doesn't see anything,
but then when he looks up,
he sees that there is a tornado descending
on their very location.
- [Dan] With no time to spare,
Ricky remembers something he had been taught as a kid.
The best place to seek shelter
during a tornado is in the bathtub.
- So he tells his mom,
"Mama, we need to get in the bathtub."
- The bathtub is a great place to hide.
It's got pipes that are coming up into it,
holding it down to the ground.
It's a big heavy object,
so it's not gonna be easily moved,
and it provides protection from other debris
smashing into you.
- So Ricky gets a quilt.
He also gets into the tub
and covers them completely with this quilt
where they are gonna ride out this storm
and ride means something very different in this case.
As they are sitting there in the dark under this quilt,
they can hear the house shaking apart around them.
- While they're in the tub listening
and waiting to see what's gonna happen next,
suddenly the rattling and the rumbling gets louder
and louder and the roof is torn off the house
and before they know it,
them and their bathtub,
they're all airborne.
[pulsating electronic music]
- As they're whipping around furiously in this wind,
they also both have the realization
that they need to make their peace with the possibility
that they're not gonna come through this.
- [Dan] As the pair brace for impact,
something unexpected happens.
[suspenseful electronic music]
- Instead of falling out of the sky in free fall,
they actually make a soft landing.
And Ricky experiencing this,
he feels like it's like two divine hands
have caught them and gently placed them on the ground.
- [Dan] Charlsetta peeks out from her bathtub.
She's in the woods next to where her house once stood.
20 feet away is Ricky
who incredibly is also uninjured.
- Miraculously, Charlsetta and Ricky
only suffer a few bruises and scratches.
The tub could have fallen on them.
They could have been struck by debris.
They could have fallen at a high speed.
They are really, really lucky.
- [Dan] Lucky, but not lucky enough
to beat Matt Suiter's record.
- When their family members and their friends
see what happened to her house
it seems completely unbelievable.
How could any two fragile human bodies survive
what has just rent completely apart an entire building?
- Ooh, whoo, whoo, whoo, boom.
- I have seen semi-trailer trucks
that have been rolled by tornado winds.
I have seen logs that have been shot through brick walls.
So to have something actually carefully set back down
onto the ground in one piece is amazing.
- Perhaps if Dorothy and Toto had been swept away
in a bathtub, the Wicked Witch of the East
might still be alive.
- Throughout history, there have been countless tales
of mysterious things coming down from the heavens.
Food, frogs, even pennies.
But for the people of Oakville, Washington,
they get something a little less welcome.
- It is the early hours of the morning on August 7th, 1994.
Police officer David Lacey is driving his cruiser
down the main street of Oakville, Washington
when out of nowhere
something hits his windshield.
- [Dan] When he turns on his wipers,
the mysterious rain leaves behind a jelly substance,
completely obscuring his sight.
- And Officer Lacey pulls over into a gas station
to check out what this mess is.
And what he realizes is is that
it's gelatinous little blobs
and they're squishy and vaseliney.
This is not normal rain.
This is something he has never seen before.
- [Dan] Even stranger, after returning to work,
he starts to feel off.
He's having trouble breathing, he's nauseous,
he's getting dizzy, and he ends up in the hospital
he's becoming so violently ill.
- [Dan] Officer Lacey is given antibiotics
and sent home.
- Meanwhile, across town from Officer Lacey,
Dotty Hearn is experiencing the same gelatinous rain
all over her patio,
which she cannot sweep away with a broom.
It's the same vaseliney substance
that Officer Lacey faced.
- [Dan] As Dotty heads to the house,
she too begins to feel sick.
- Later on, Dotty's daughter Sunny
finds her mother in the bathroom on the floor
in a bunch of pain.
She's suffering from just this raging ear infection.
- Sunny has the presence of mind
while she's waiting for the ambulance
to get a sample of one of those little blobs
that had been all over her mother's patio.
- [Dan] Sunny gives the sample to Dotty's doctor
for testing while her mom recovers,
but this isn't an isolated incident.
- It actually rains six more times
the same gelatinous mess.
People are calling 911.
They're checking themselves into hospitals.
Pets are dying.
- [Dan] Stumped, the doctor passes the samples
onto the State Department of Health.
They determine the cells contain two types of bacteria,
but still have no idea what the blobs are.
- So of course, one of the first things that happen
is a million and one theories
start coming out of the woodwork.
- The first theory is that this is military operations.
The 354th Fighter Squadron was conducting bombing operations
approximately 10 miles off the coast of Washington
during that time period.
The theory is that they're dropping bombs off the coast.
It splashes up jellyfish,
jellyfish fly up into the clouds.
From there, the jellyfish end up coming back down,
and that is potentially the mystery blob
that we're seeing in this area.
- [Dan] But the bombing theory stinks.
- The blobs do not smell like raw, stale seafood,
so that theory doesn't work.
- [Dan] Then an even more disturbing
military theory surfaces.
- What if the military is testing out a new bio-weapon
to see what would happen if this weapon
hits an isolated town?
The military obviously won't comment on this
because if the military wants to keep something a secret,
that's exactly what they're going to do,
it's going to remain a secret.
- Some offer a more celestial theory
that this goo is actually the primordial glue
that is falling from the heavens onto Oakville.
This type of phenomena off of meteors
has been reported ever since the 1400s.
- There was even an occurrence
that occurred over Harvard, Massachusetts
that was noted by academics back in 1833
of this kind of strange, translucent goo
falling from the skies.
Unfortunately, they don't give a cause for it.
So while we have a lot of accounts
of this kind of star jelly situation,
we still don't have a good explanation of how they occur.
- [Dan] Adding to the mystery,
all known samples of the Oakville blobs
seem to have vanished,
including the ones studied by the State Department.
- Which may be scientifically the take home message.
If mysterious blobs of goop start falling into your yard,
save them.
[eerie music]
- The folks in Oakville aren't the only ones
to experience a fishy phenomenon from above.
- James Aldrich and Brad Pratt are in their car dealership
when they hear rain on the outside on the tin roof.
[quiet creepy music]
- Texarkana is a place that actually has a really high rate
of precipitation throughout the year.
So it's not unusual,
but then they start hearing things
hitting the cars outside
and it doesn't sound like normal precipitation.
- So James and Brad run outside.
They're thinking that there's a hailstorm,
there's something wrong.
They're worried about their cars
and what do they see?
They see fish raining from the sky.
- Here's your laugh for today.
Somehow or another we got fish all in our [bleep].
They're [bleep] everywhere.
- And now the reports start coming in
from all over Texarkana
that fish are coming from the sky.
They're small, but they're piling up.
- [Bystander] They're everywhere.
There's fish every place.
They just fell outta the sky.
There's another one.
There's one right there.
- The most common theory that is used
to explain these kinds of events are waterspouts.
Waterspouts are tornado- like vortices of wind
that not only suck up the water of a lake or an ocean,
but they're gonna suck up the stuff that is in the water,
the fish, and when it moves over land,
it dumps out that water,
it dumps out the fish.
- [Dan] And while there are
a few large lakes near Texarkana,
there's one Texas-sized problem with this theory.
- The problem here in Texarkana is that the meteorologists
at the local weather service office
say that there was no activity to generate waterspouts
at that particular time.
So how the fish ended up in Texarkana
is still a big mystery.
- There are a lot of people that live in Texarkana
that have been there their entire lives.
They have never seen anything like this before.
So we really still don't understand what exactly happened
and why fish fell from the sky that day.
- [Bystander] I guess if you live long enough,
you see a whole lot of stuff, right?
- I have to wonder if all that damage
shows up on a Carfax.
- You're in London enjoying a rare sunny day
sipping a stout in your lounge chair.
Suddenly barreling down from the sky
is something the weather forecast didn't predict.
Something that will turn your sunny Sunday very dark indeed.
[dramatic music]
- There's a software engineer by the name of Will.
He's got this app that's on his phone
that if he points it at a plane that is flying in the air,
it will give you the model of the plane
and it will tell you where the plane was coming from.
As he's got his smartphone pointed at one specific plane,
he sees something start to fall.
- Will, of course, is thinking,
what the heck is that?
Is it the landing gear that's fallen off?
Has some luggage falling out of the plane?
But then he notices that it has limbs.
[suspenseful music]
It's a human.
- [Dan] Will takes a screen grab of the plane
and phones the authorities with details.
- It turns out that it's a Kenyan airline
that's flying into London from Nairobi.
It's been in the air for about eight hours and six minutes.
So with this information,
the authorities race to the scene
of where this body is going to land.
Turns out it's not that far from his house.
- Will jumps on his motorcycle and heads in the direction
that he's seen the person fall,
and as he's going there police pass by him,
so he thinks I'll just follow the police.
And when he gets to the location,
there is a man on the patio covered with blood
with a hundred-mile stare.
- [Dan] What the man tells the police
is mind boggling.
- The guy is John Baldock.
He's out sunning on his patio
when suddenly there's a big crash
and next thing he knows, three feet away from him,
there's a body
and suddenly he and his entire patio
are covered in blood and human parts.
- [Sami] Now luckily the body in question
that fell from 3,500 feet was already dead
before it hit the ground because upon inspection,
the body is completely frozen.
- [Dan] Authorities now have
a new mystery on their hands,
just whose body is it
and how did it fall from a plane?
- The airline is contacted,
there is no missing person on their manifest
nor any missing employees,
but they find a vital clue.
When they search the wheel well,
inside a small nook, they find a backpack,
and in the pack they find simple things
like bread, soda, water, some coins,
things a stowaway would bring.
- Turns out that somebody had snuck onto the tarmac,
climbed up the wheel of the plane
and tucked themselves into the wheel well
and remained there as it took off from Nairobi
and flew all the way to London.
- It takes somebody with a lot of gumption,
potentially somebody with some insider knowledge
to know exactly where to stow away
so that you're not harmed by that gear
when the gear comes up.
- Clearly he did not know what he was doing
because I don't think this is
the outcome he was looking for.
- A body falling from the sky is enough to scare anyone,
but this next story is a cautionary tale
for bald men everywhere.
[dramatic music]
- Aeschylus is a famous Greek playwright.
He is the Shakespeare of ancient Greek tragedies.
He restructures how Greek plays work
and he makes them more fun and more interesting.
He wins awards and contests all the time.
He is prolific and an absolute genius.
- [Dan] But one sunny afternoon,
something happens that seems like the plot
in one of his own stories.
- So one day Aeschylus is in the southern coast of Sicily
in a town called Gila, sitting on a rock,
gazing upon the ocean,
when all of a sudden a really hard object
hits him on the head.
- It turns out that there's a hungry eagle
that has been fortunate enough to obtain
a nice-sized tortoise and it's flying about
because it wants to find a nice big rock
so that it can drop it
and have the tortoise shell crack open and it can feast.
Unfortunately for him,
our playwright Aeschylus suffers from male pattern baldness.
So from the sky, from the eagle's perspective,
his nice shiny scalp appears to be the perfect rock.
- Aeschylus goes down in history,
not only as the father of tragedies,
but also as the only human being known
to have died from falling tortoise.
- At this point, I think it's fair to say
you just can't make this stuff up.
- There have long been stories of gods exacting revenge.
Usually it's punishment for disobeying an order
or not fulfilling a bargain,
but in a small African village in 1998,
they may have intervened for something much different.
- In the Democratic Republic of Congo,
they're serious about their soccer.
Two rival teams, Bena Tshadi and Basanga
are out on the pitch in the middle of a game
[crown cheers]
and they are tied.
- These two teams hate each other.
Fan bases don't like each other.
They're just waiting for that one moment
that's gonna make or break the game for either side.
- As it is in sports,
there's a lot of superstition.
People go through their little rituals,
so they jiggle change in their pocket,
they turn their hats backwards.
In this moment of desperation,
people are probably praying to the heavens
for their team to win
when suddenly out of nowhere
[thunder cracks]
there's a lightning bolt.
- And all 11 players of Bena Tshadi
collapse to the ground.
Basanga,
untouched.
- [Dan] Sadly, all 11 players
from Bena Tshadi are killed.
But is it just a stroke of unbelievably bad luck?
- The locals start to suspect
that something supernatural is brewing here
and that maybe someone on the opposing team
put a curse on the players.
- In this particular country,
this part of the world,
things like witchcraft are not thought of
as being completely ridiculous.
There are people that actually hire witch doctors
to cast spells to make sure their team is successful.
People carry their little talismans.
It is taken very seriously.
- [Dan] Could it be possible
this was the work of dark magic?
[thunder cracks]
- Lightning when it hits
isn't necessarily limited to just one thing,
one object, one person
because the charge when it hits one object
goes through that object and then spreads out.
So the fact that we had 11 players struck
by one stroke of lightning
isn't probably that surprising.
The surprising thing is that they
were all from the same team.
- [Dan] And it's not just the players
who get hit by lightning,
30 fans of the Bena Tshadi team are also struck.
- This is one of those stories that's completely mysterious,
but what I know is before I place any sports bets,
[thunder cracks]
I'm getting a witch doctor on speed dial.
- The Congolese soccer team may be the victims
of the most unlucky lightning strike in history,
but could there be such a thing
as the luckiest lightning strike?
62-year-old Edwin Robinson has been blind
for the last nine years after narrowly surviving
a big rig trucking accident.
- It's a tough life,
but something that does bring him joy
is his pet chicken
[chicken clucking]
who follows him around everywhere.
You might be thinking why a pet chicken
instead of a pet dog?
Well, pet chickens,
they're constantly clucking,
they're always making noise.
So I can imagine as a blind person,
this is a source of comfort and companionship
because you always know where your pet is.
- [Dan] And that beloved pet chicken
is about to change Edwin's life
in the strangest possible way.
[thunder crackles]
- This big summer storm rolls in
and the chicken scurries into the backyard
and he panics and chases after it.
- So he is standing under a tree
calling out for his pet chicken,
totally worried about him,
totally focused on finding this chicken in the thunderstorm
when he hears a loud crack like a gigantic whip
going off right on top of his head.
[thunder cracks]
- And he falls down face first unconscious.
And then he comes to and he is a little out of sorts
so he walks back into the house
and decides to lay down for a little bit.
So he sleeps for about 20 minutes,
and then when he wakes up
he notices that something has completely changed.
Edwin can see.
- [Dan] He can read the clock on the wall,
he can see his wife's face,
and perhaps most importantly,
he can see his lucky pet chicken.
But how can this be?
- Naturally, Edwin and his wife go and visit the doctor.
After a full examination the doctor says to him,
I don't fully understand it,
but your sight is restored.
You have normal 20/20 vision.
- Lightning strikes are very dangerous,
10% of them are fatal.
Lightning victims can suffer lots of problems.
You can have personality disorders,
you can have seizures,
and this is one of the very few circumstances
that I've ever seen where it actually can do some good.
- So it's almost like this lightning strike
was some form of electroshock therapy
that reestablished all the connections
and allowed Ed to see again.
- [Dan] Edwin's mysterious lightning strike miracle
reaches the press
and immediately electrifies audiences.
- He's getting all of these offers
to be on TV shows and in tabloids.
Religious groups want him to make speeches
about what they deem is a miracle.
- [Dan] Edwin's restored sight
isn't the only miracle.
- My favorite part of this story is not only
did this lightning strike restore his vision,
but he also didn't need his hearing aid anymore,
and the lightning made his hair come back.
This guy gained so much
from what's normally a horrifying accident,
but in this case,
like a super awesome one.
- What most couples want on their romantic vacation
is some privacy,
but for one couple,
their prized alone time
is about to be crashed by some unexpected visitors.
[suspenseful music]
- Barney Hill, who is a postal worker and his wife Betty,
who is a social worker,
are driving home from Niagara Falls
and they have decided that they are trying to get home
to New Hampshire as quickly as possible,
so they're gonna just drive through the night.
So as they're making this drive late at night,
they suddenly see lights on the horizon.
- [Dan] At first, they think it's just
a falling star until it suddenly swings around
to the back of their car.
[suspenseful music}
- And as they continue the light or the object
continues to get brighter and brighter
and he can't shake this bright hovering light
that's now following him and his wife.
- [Dan] Then the object descends
and begins hovering directly in front of them,
forcing Barney to stop the car.
- Barney decides to grab a handgun
that he had under the front seat
and he runs out of the car
to try to get a look at this thing.
- He sees something that he describes
as the size of a jet airliner.
It's huge, but it is flat and round and it has windows,
and he can see beings that look almost like
they're grinning, which has to be terrifying.
- [Dan] From here, things get even stranger.
- Feeling frightened, he directs the gun at this craft,
but some impulse tells him to hold his fire,
to back off.
- And he immediately gets a bit freaked out
because someone seems to have access to his inner thoughts,
and so he decides he's going to get back in that car
and drive like he stole it.
- They start hearing this rhythmic beeping
coming from somewhere in the back of the car,
and then all of a sudden they lose consciousness.
- [Dan] When Betty and Barney wake up,
they're 35 miles down the road
with no idea how they got there.
Dazed and confused they continue home.
- They get home and immediately
things seem a little strange.
Barney and Betty look at the clock
and they see that it's about 5:00 AM,
which is at least two hours later
than they projected getting home.
They realize they lost two hours.
- Betty notices that her dress is ripped
both the exterior fabric and the lining.
There's a weird pink powder on it.
Her earrings are missing.
There's some weird scuffs on Barney's shoes
that aren't normal wear-and-tear scuffs.
Things are just not adding up.
- And all this leads her to reach out to the Air Force
where she comes into contact with Dr. J. Allen Hynek,
who at the time, it must be noted,
is a skeptic of UFO phenomena.
- [Dan] But after hearing their story,
even the skeptical Dr. Hynek is stumped.
So the Air Force opens a file on the Hills
in a secretive program known as Project Blue Book.
- This program operates from 1946 through 1969,
and during this time the Air Force amasses 13,000
reports of UFO sightings and encounters.
- [Dan] While the government
secretly looks into the Hill's case,
Betty and Barney are still trying to cope
with the unsettling incident.
- So meanwhile, the Hills have become concerned
about this missing chunk of time
and what happened to them.
And so they decide to consult with Dr. Benjamin Simon,
who starts doing regression therapy with them.
And this is the kind of therapy
where you will find a repressed memory
and kind of relive it under hypnosis.
- [Dan] Dr. Simon decides
to record Betty and Barney's individual hypnosis sessions
and they reveal the terrifying details
concealed in the Hill's memories.
- If you listen to these recordings,
what's heard is absolutely blood chilling.
- The beings that they describe have a grayish skin,
large bald heads and probing oval-like eyes.
Now described today, this is our popular image
of what might be referred to as grays,
but the fact is, this is 1961,
that popularized image does not really exist then.
- Betty and Barney talk about what happens next
with these gray bipedal beings.
They're walked up a gang plank into this particular UFO
and then they're both examined.
- It's a humiliating and frightening experience.
Their bodies are probed, scraped.
Samples seem to be taken.
- [Dan] By 1965, the Hill's abduction story
gets picked up by a Boston newspaper
and it becomes an international sensation.
- And so documentaries start covering the Hills.
There is a really great 1975 movie
starring James Earl Jones as Barney that comes out.
Now there is actually a historical plaque on the road
where they claim that they had this encounter.
That plaque was put there by the New Hampshire
Division of Historical Resources.
So whether or not you believe them,
there is a historical marker for this event.
- [Dan] Betty and Barney's encounter
continues to stump skeptics to this day.
I, for one, am definitely a believer.
I have personally had four different
unambiguous sightings myself,
but those are stories for another day.
But while not all surprises from above are good ones,
whether it's goo blobs, dangerous meteors,
or even visitors from another planet,
they are all truly Unbelievable.