Original subtitles

[mysterious music]

Imagine heading out for some fresh air

and walking straight into an unexpected crime scene.

- Their internal organs are on the outside,

protruding from their torso.

- This is definitely not normal.

Toads have natural predators, but they'd eat them,

not blow them up.

- Or being terrorized in your home by an uninvited guest.

- [Nick] All sorts of objects fly around their house.

- Plates are sliding off of tables

and crashing to the floor.

- They can't find an explanation for this.

So at this point, the family is pretty freaked out.

- How about an animal apocalypse

straight out of a horror movie?

- Areas that were once covered with vegetation,

these rabbits are wiping that out.

- Entire livelihoods are vanishing.

So the government does something

that no government has ever done before.

It declares war on rabbits.

- These are the stories of encounters so wild

they can only be called unbelievable.

[dramatic music]

For generations, people have looked to the heavens,

hoping for a little divine intervention,

a sign, a miracle, maybe even a blessing from above.

But what falls on a tiny Kentucky town in the 1800s

isn't exactly a gift from God.

[tense music]

- It's a seemingly normal day in Bath County, Kentucky,

in the year 1876.

Allan Crouch and his wife

are going about their chores on their farm.

The wife is there outside making soap,

when suddenly she starts hearing these little thuds

all around her on the ground.

At first, her mind goes to raindrops.

But these thuds sound a bit heavier.

[dramatic music]

- Some of the pieces are four inches in length.

They're pelting rooftops.

Mrs. Crouch examines this substance, even sniffs it.

- She's trying to figure out what it is,

and then it hits her.

The thing that is falling from the sky is chunks of meat.

- [Hakeem] Mind you, this is the 19th century.

There are no human flying machines,

so there is just no obvious reason

for flesh to be dropping from the heavens.

- [Dan] Witnesses collect pieces,

hoping someone can identify exactly what it is.

- Everyone agrees that these chunks

look like pieces of raw meat.

And the local newspaper reports

that two gentlemen who taste it

say that it tastes like mutton or venison.

- [Dan] Taste is of course subjective,

so samples are sent to a lab

for a more thorough investigation.

- Two separate medical doctors,

Arthur Mead Edwards and J.W.S. Arnold, study the specimens,

and both find muscle fiber and tissue from a mammal.

However, they disagree on exactly what kind.

- [Hakeem] According to them, and I quote,

they can't tell if it's from a human infant or a horse.

And when that's the range you're looking at,

that doesn't inspire confidence.

- [Dan] As the debate over what fell continues,

Louisville chemistry professor L.D. Kastenbine

decides to get down to the bottom of it once and for all.

- [Brian] Kastenbine runs a few tests on the samples.

When he holds a piece over a flame,

he's hit with a smell he instantly recognizes,

rancid cooked mutton.

Combined with the bits of muscle, lung, and ligament

that he finds under the microscope,

clearly point to scavengers.

Vultures can stumble across any kind of dead animal

and eat every scrap left.

They're voracious.

They can never be sure

when they're gonna stumble upon another meal,

so they gorge themselves.

- When they're startled,

they have this built-in defense mechanism.

They throw up.

When they vomit, they lighten their load

so that they can take off more quickly.

This leads him to a very strange explanation.

A whole flock of vultures has descended on a dead animal

and they're gorging themselves,

and then suddenly they're startled

maybe by the predator coming back and take to the air.

One of them starts to vomit,

and the rest of them all follow suit.

So this meat rain could well have been

a mass vulture vomiting event.

[dramatic music]

- [Dan] While the vulture vomit theory may sound farfetched,

no one's come up with a better one.

Now, if you think chunks of meat

falling from the sky is unsettling,

wait until you see what falls at the feet

of one frightened boy in Brazil.

[lighthearted music]

- It's August 20th, 1966 in Niterói, Brazil,

right across the bay from downtown Rio de Janeiro.

A boy is flying his kite in the hills overlooking the water

when he's stopped dead in his tracks

by a strange and disturbing sight.

- He spots two men lying motionless in the grass,

wearing business suits, undisturbed and non-disheveled,

with what looks to be metal goggles or masks on their face,

staring up at the sky.

- [Paul] The more he stares at them,

the more eerie the whole thing gets.

First, their personal belongings,

towels, a water bottle, and notebook,

are scattered randomly around them.

And yet there's no sign of a struggle.

Everything's pristine.

[dramatic music]

- [Dan] Terrified, the boy runs for help.

And within hours, police are on the scene,

launching one of the strangest investigations

in Brazilian history.

- Two things stand out immediately:

these strange metallic masks

secured around their eyes with wire.

You can't see through them.

They seem to be made out of lead.

- [Adam] There are other odd items surrounding them as well,

wet towels, a water bottle, a notebook.

The investigators see the notebook and think,

"Okay, this will clear up the whole mystery."

- One note says, "At 4:30, we are in the determined place.

At 6:30, take the capsule with orange.

After the effect, protect the face with lead masks.

Wait for the agreed signal."

This raises more questions than answers.

What is the agreed upon place?

What is in these capsules?

Why the lead masks?

And who are these guys and what killed them?

- [Dan] The two masked men are identified

as Miguel José Viana and Manoel Pereira da Cruz,

two electronics repairmen from a nearby village.

- [Paul] When police search Miguel Viana's workshop,

they find a book called "Scientific Spiritualism,"

with pages marked describing intense light.

- Intriguingly, the day the bodies are found,

multiple residents report seeing strange lights in the sky,

including one account of a luminous flying saucer.

- [Dan] Suddenly, investigators consider

an extraordinary possibility.

Were these men attempting to make contact

with something not of this world?

- [Adam] Brazil has actually been

a UFO hotspot since the 1950s.

And by the 1960s, the Brazilian government

takes up official investigations.

Many Brazilians are actually rather eager to prove

that they can make contact with extraterrestrials.

Police question an acquaintance of Miguel and Manoel,

someone by the name of Elcio Gomez.

He tells the police that the three of them

were conducting an experiment with an electronic device

near their home in Campos dos Goytacazes.

- [Tore] They wonder if this was some kind of attempt

to open some sort of dimensional portal.

Then maybe that would explain the lead masks,

meant to protect them from some kind of intense energy

or light coming out of this experiment.

- [Dan] Despite countless theories,

from alien contact to electrical misadventure,

the official cause of death has never been determined.

- The closest that we get to an official word

comes from the lead detective on the case, Idovan Ferreira.

He says, "I have no doubt they died

of an experiment with psychic forces

for which they were ill-prepared

and which turned out to be fatal."

- The man in Brazil may have been reaching

for something beyond this world,

but a man in Australia just wanted a little piece of home,

and almost broke an entire ecosystem doing it.

- Nature can take millions of years

to set up its delicate balance.

And it only takes one man and one open cage to destroy it.

This is the story of how a few fluffy fugitives

became an army of ecological destruction.

- Over 100 million years ago, the continent of Australia

begins breaking off of the supercontinent of Gondwana,

drifting on its own to become

one of the most isolated land masses on Earth.

That isolation turned it

into a living laboratory for evolution.

Almost 90% of the animals in Australia

are found nowhere else,

things like kangaroos, and wombats, and koalas,

and Tasmanian devils.

One thing that did not evolve in Australia,

the bunny rabbit.

Millions and millions of acres of potential habitat,

and not a single rabbit.

- [Dan] At least not until 1859,

thanks to a man by the name of Thomas Austin.

- [Hakeem] Thomas Austin is originally from England.

He's a successful livestock farmer.

He is also a part

of what's called an acclimatization society.

Their goal is to bring in animals

from England and other places

to provide food and create other products.

Their motto is, "If it lives, we want it."

So they don't put in a lot of thought

to how these new species might impact the local ecosystem.

- Thomas Austin has some fond memories

of rabbit hunting in England,

so he arranges for two dozen rabbits to come to Australia.

24 rabbits, it's not a big deal.

Like, what could go wrong?

- [Dan] On December 25th, 1859,

Austin's 24 rabbits arrive at his estate in Geelong.

And it doesn't take long for his Christmas present

to become a massive problem.

- One day, 13 of the rabbits get out of their hutch

and into the wild.

Rabbits are prolific breeders,

but it's shocking how fast it can happen.

Within a year, one rabbit

can produce somewhere around 40 rabbits.

In four generations, the offspring of those original

are in the hundreds of thousands.

- [Dan] Thousands turn to millions,

and within 50 years, rabbits have spread

all over the entire continent

in the fastest mammal colonization in history.

- [Hakeem] Only about 4% of Australia's land

is suitable for farming,

and these rabbits are wiping that out fast.

Areas that were once covered with vegetation,

they reduce to what looks like the surface of the moon.

Even the roots of the native plants disappear.

So if this continues, we're talking famine.

- [Thor] Entire livelihoods are vanishing.

So the government does something

that no government has ever done before.

It declares war on rabbits.

[dramatic music]

- [Negin] In 1907 alone, 78 million rabbits are killed.

But that doesn't even scratch the surface.

That's how quickly these rabbits can reproduce.

- [Richard] By 1920, some estimate a billion rabbits

ravaging Australia.

All of them descended from those original escapees

from Thomas Austin's farm.

- [Dan] At this scale, the Australian government

decides if you can't beat them, contain them.

- [Hakeem] They start building so-called rabbit-proof fences,

which are each hundreds of miles long.

By the time they're done,

it's the longest fence system in the world.

And the worst part is the rabbit-proof fences

are anything but.

The rabbits are still getting through them.

- [Dan] By the 1950s,

scientists are at the end of their ropes,

so they take a radical approach.

- They release the Myxoma virus,

a pathogen that only infects rabbits of European origin.

The first year, it kills an estimated 90%

of the rabbits that contract the virus.

This does not fully solve the problem

because the 10% that survive continue to breed.

And their offspring begin to develop

a herd immunity to the virus.

To this day, scientists have to continually develop

new strains of the virus.

Otherwise, Australia will be right back where it started,

a continent overrun with billions of bunnies.

- It's bad enough when the government

can't stop an animal that's destroying your land.

It's even worse when the law says you can't stop it either.

For one woman in Scotland,

that law turns her dream farmhouse

into a living, screeching nightmare.

- [Adam] Anne-Marie Murchie is living the dream.

She's got a beautiful 19th century farmhouse,

and summer is her favorite season.

However, she's got a problem.

There's a smell,

the kind of smell that all homeowners dread,

sort of ammonia mixed with the smell of decay.

- Anne-Marie is worried

that some large rodent or other animal

has gotten into the walls of her house and died.

Short of taking a hammer to the wall and digging it out,

the only thing she can do is wait.

- [Dan] But the horrible smell does not go away,

and it is soon accompanied by equally unpleasant sounds.

- Her walls are coming alive with noises.

Anne-Marie is struggling to sleep.

It almost sounds like water running,

but then she also hears scratching

and squeaking coming from inside the walls.

[animals squeaking]

- One morning,

after an especially fitful night of sleep,

she's going about her normal bathroom routine.

In a sleep-deprived haze, she grabs for the toilet paper,

and that's when she feels something crawling up

onto her hand.

- It's a bat.

She flings the little beastie off of her hand

and she runs the hell out of the bathroom.

- When her heart stops pounding,

she composes herself and gets on the phone

with NatureScot,

which is Scotland's government environmental agency.

- The investigator realizes at once what the smell is.

It's bat guano, bat poop in the house.

Anne-Marie is freaking out,

but the guy from NatureScot says,

"Let's just set up some infrared cameras

and see just how many bats we're dealing with."

- [Richard] It is not a few bats.

It's hundreds.

Swarms of six to 800 bats surround her house every night.

Their only job is to eat insects,

poop, and make more bats.

- [Dan] When she asks what she can do to get rid of them,

the answer is shocking.

Nothing.

Under Scottish wildlife law,

anywhere the bats choose to roost is legally protected.

- She can't evict these bats.

She can't even disturb them or she faces massive fines.

Basically, they're her tenants now,

and they have more rights than she does.

- [Richard] It seems that in the summer,

it's not uncommon for a few bats

to set up a little maternity ward in old houses

because they often have cracks in the roof line

that allow them in.

Once the bats finally leave, she's allowed to hire a workman

to fill in the cracks and bat-proof the house.

So she's hoping this should be the end of it.

But that's not the end of it.

- [Hugo] It seems that in 2025, the bats return,

busting their way back in

to Anne-Marie's beautiful farmhouse.

They're not gonna let a little caulk and trim

keep them from their perfect roost.

Looks like Anne-Marie's house

has permanently become Club Med for bats.

- [Dan] The moral of the story?

If you're house hunting in Scotland,

go during bat mating season.

That way you can see and smell what's really included.

- We like to think we're safe from the wild,

protected by our homes, our neighborhoods,

our picket fences.

But every so often, something strange finds a way through.

[lighthearted music]

- [Mitch] In 1958, Seaford, Long Island

looks like your quintessential post-war suburban town.

The Herrmann family, James Sr. and Lucille,

whose son and daughter have the same names,

live on a lovely, quiet, tree-lined street.

Everything about this setting

reads normal, happy American life.

[phone ringing]

- [Dan] But that all changes one day

when James Sr. gets a frantic call from his wife.

- [Mitch] Lucille has been hearing popping noises

all over the house.

When she goes to investigate, she finds that perfume,

nail polish remover, bleach and detergent,

household cleaners, the caps are missing

and the contents are scattered everywhere.

They've all exploded.

[tense music]

- [MJ] Dad is a pretty practical guy,

and he's not the kind of person to jump to conclusions.

He thinks that maybe it's humidity in the atmosphere

or the barometric pressure changes.

But in just a few days, when James Sr.

is talking to his son while he's brushing his teeth...

[tense music]

Two bottles in the bathroom

move almost in opposite directions.

Well, that indicates to him something weird is going on.

- [Dan] Unfortunately for the Herrmann family,

the strange activity is just the beginning.

- In the following days,

there's all sorts of loud banging noises.

[tense music]

The top pops off a bottle of holy water

and it topples to the floor.

When she picks it up, it feels warm to touch.

- They even experience strange interference

on their television, with these odd, garbled voices

that don't seem human.

- [Dan] At a loss, the Herrmanns turn to the police.

Nassau County Detective Joe Tozzi is sent out to investigate

what may be the oddest case of his career.

- [Mitch] Any cop who starts hearing stories

about flying objects

is naturally going to be critical.

He walks in thinking this is a hoax,

or these people are crazy,

or it's just some misunderstanding.

And then suddenly...

[bowl rattling and shattering]

A sugar bowl explodes,

spilling the contents all over the room.

[dramatic music]

He's not ready to attribute it to the supernatural,

but he does go on the record

saying that there is no human hand

that could have touched that sugar bowl.

- [Nick] Soon, the house is full of visitors,

from structural engineers to journalists.

One reporter for Newsday, Dave Kahn,

is sitting in the living room by himself

after the family has gone to bed.

A globe comes flying out of the bedroom

and then lands at his feet.

He rushes into the bedroom and turns on the light.

But all he sees is the kid fast asleep.

- [Dan] When no natural cause is identified,

people start considering an unnatural one.

- [MJ] The Seaford case is when the term poltergeist

is brought into the American pop culture lexicon.

It literally translates to a noisy spirit or noisy energy.

- [Mitch] Some people theorize that it's the kind of thing

that could be caused by leftover energy

or emotional trauma following a death.

- [Dan] Others suspect the source

might not be coming from beyond, but within.

- [Mitch] The investigators pay special attention to James Jr.

They theorize that this could be a case of RSPK,

Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis.

- [Tore] This is the theory

that people undergoing high levels of stress

or powerful emotions

can unintentionally redirect this energy

into the world around them.

Adolescence can be a particularly tumultuous time.

They wonder if this could all be coming from James Jr.

- [Dan] In the end, no one finds a definitive answer

or a way to make it stop.

- [Nick] The Herrmanns,

tired of whatever is causing these objects

to fly around their house, end up moving.

If the strange phenomenon followed them,

they didn't talk about it.

To this day, Detective Tozzi's case

has not been officially closed.

- [Mitch] This was not the last that the world heard

of what the Herrmanns experienced.

The Seaford events went on to inspire

the Steven Spielberg movie "Poltergeist."

[dramatic music]

- Our next wild encounter

takes us far from the comforts of home

and makes the paranormal look tame.

[pensive music]

- [Jenny] In 1862, Mary Kingsley is born into a family

of well-known writers and travelers.

Her uncle is Charles Kingsley, who's a priest,

a professor, and a novelist.

And her dad is a widely respected doctor and writer

named George Kingsley.

Mary's really smart,

but she spends most of her time caring for her parents

because it's 1862.

So she's not allowed to go to school,

she's not allowed to vote,

she's not allowed to do anything.

- [Thor] By the time she's 30,

both of Mary's parents have passed away.

She receives a sizable inheritance

and decides that this is her chance

to finally get out and explore her interests

and the world at large.

- [Dan] But Mary isn't going on a pleasure cruise

or sightseeing in Paris.

She's setting sail for one of the most exotic

and dangerous frontiers of the time, West Africa.

- [Richard] The European publications at the time

describe Western Africa as being like another planet.

There's wild open landscapes

full of beautiful but ferocious animals.

It's the complete opposite

of the prim and proper London society Mary's born into.

And for a woman to travel there alone

is absolutely unheard of.

- [Dan] So in 1893, she sets off for West Africa

on the adventure of a lifetime.

And while she may look the part of a gentle Victorian lady,

Mary's not afraid to rough it.

- She's exploring the jungle, she's climbing mountains,

and she's doing it all in full Victorian fashion.

- [Hakeem] Mary's also extremely fearless.

[leopard snarling]

One day, a leopard comes into the camp

and attacks a hunting dog.

[leopard snarling] [dog barking]

And Mary jumps into action.

She grabs a stool and hurls it at the big cat.

[dramatic music] [leopard snarling]

When that doesn't work,

she decides she's gonna engage the leopard at close range.

She grabs a ceramic water pitcher

and smashes it on the leopard's head.

And that scares the leopard and it runs away in fear.

- There's another incident where she's crouched down,

hiding in the bush with a few of her camp mates.

They're observing a troop of gorillas.

Suddenly one of her camp mates sneezes.

[tense music]

The female gorillas scurry off,

but this giant male charges her.

[gorilla roaring]

As he tears back the branches, Mary freezes.

[gorilla roaring]

- After a tense moment and a long look

at this unfamiliar and strangely dressed primate,

the gorilla turns and disappears back into the brush.

- [Dan] For most explorers, a gorilla encounter

would be the story of a lifetime.

For Mary Kingsley,

it's just one of many brushes with danger.

- Once, she was staying in the Congo

among a tribe of hunters,

and she finds herself walking on a narrow trail

through the jungle.

But suddenly, the ground beneath her just caves in

and she drops 15 feet straight down.

- Just as she's about to hit the ground, she feels a jolt,

as if something has grabbed her.

And she looks down and realizes she is suspended

over a bunch of pointed wooden spikes.

It's an animal trap.

She looks up and realizes that her skirts

have caught on some sticks

that are sticking out of the side of the pit.

They stop her there in midair,

a few feet above certain death.

- She is eventually pulled out.

And she says later, in her typical unflappable spirit,

"It's times like these

you realize the blessings of a good, thick skirt."

- Mary's close call reminds us that sometimes fashion

can be a matter of life or death.

- Most people put up fences, locked doors,

or hang "keep out" signs to protect their privacy.

But there's one group in the Indian Ocean

that takes their privacy to the extreme.

[pensive music]

- [Don] It's before dawn on January 26th, 2006,

and two Indian fishermen, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari,

are asleep on their boat

just off the shore of North Sentinel Island

in the Bay of Bengal.

By law, no one's supposed to get

within five miles of the island.

The Sentinelese are a protected tribe

and notorious for attacking anyone who tries to come ashore.

It is one of the few places on Earth

that has zero contact with the outside modern world.

But the fishermen, they got a bit drunk and passed out,

so drunk they haven't noticed that their anchor has pulled

and they are slowly drifting onto a reef

on the island's shore.

- They realized their mistake when the boat's cabin

starts to get pummeled with arrows.

[arrows banging]

Then all of a sudden,

men with hatchets bust in through the door,

and they start getting hacked to pieces.

- [Dan] The killing of the two fishermen

is just one in a long history

of violent encounters with the Sentinelese.

But despite decades of warnings

and the very real risk of death,

curiosity keeps drawing people in.

- In 2018, an American missionary, John Allen Chau,

bribed some local fishermen to get him on the island

so that he might be able to convert

the Sentinelese to Christianity.

Unfortunately, as he's standing on the beach, singing hymns,

the tribe attacks him with bows and arrows.

- [Dan] The incident makes world news

and should stand as a stark warning,

yet it doesn't stop the next intruder.

- In 2025, an American YouTuber

named Mykhailo Polyakov

decides that he's going to film himself going to the island

and meeting the Sentinelese, despite the fact that he knows

that everyone else who does this ends up dead.

- He lands on an empty part of the beach

and blows a whistle to get their attention.

[Mykhailo whistling]

- [Dan] Luckily for him, the Sentinelese don't greet him

with their usual volley of arrows.

But that doesn't mean he's off the hook.

- Soon after, he's arrested

for trespassing on the protected island.

The penalty for anyone even attempting to visit

is five years in prison.

Not too bad when you consider actually going to the island

will almost certainly land you a death sentence.

- Some gruesome deaths send a direct message,

but a string of baffling fatalities in Hamburg

leave only questions.

- [Hugo] In the spring of 2005, in Hamburg, Germany,

a group of friends is strolling through a park in Altona.

As they near a picturesque pond,

they come across a very disturbing sight.

The ground before them is littered with dead toads,

and it does not look like they died of natural causes.

- [Negin] Their internal organs are on the outside,

protruding from a hole in their torso.

It just looks like they exploded from the inside out.

- [Dan] Before long, the body count skyrockets

to nearly a thousand toads, all found around the same pond,

their insides blasted out

as if they'd spontaneously detonated.

So scientists race to figure out the source

of this gruesome phenomenon.

- So they start doing hundreds of toad autopsies.

First, they noticed there's like a circular incision

on all of their backs and that the guts are out,

but not all of the guts.

Their livers are missing.

- It sounds crazy,

but it looks like deliberate organ harvesting

of just the toads' liver.

And it's on an unbelievably large scale.

- [Thor] Finally, a veterinarian and amphibian expert

from Berlin, Dr. Frank Mutschmann,

comes up with a theory.

- Dr. Mutschmann says that a super intelligent flock,

or murder of crows, just in this one area,

has learned how to prey on toads

in a way that's just genius.

- Toads secrete a toxin through their skin

as a natural defense.

But these crows figured out

that if they attack a specific spot on the toad's back,

they can directly hit the protein-rich liver

and pluck it out to eat.

And if they only eat the liver,

they can avoid ingesting the toad's poison.

This liver stealing has a bizarre side effect.

- [Hugo] When threatened,

toads can swell their bodies really large.

It makes them appear more threatening.

It also makes them harder to swallow.

- [Paul] So the crow attacks the frog and steals the liver.

But its defense mechanism still kicks in,

so it takes one big breath to try to inflate

and it pushes all the remaining guts

out through the hole in its back.

- What may be even more amazing

is how well the crows communicate.

The reason that there are a thousand exploded toad corpses

and not just a few is that the smart individuals

that figured out this trick

have taught the others in the flock.

Bad news for toads perhaps,

but a testament to

the intelligence of these amazing birds.

- [Dan] Normally, when you see a crow,

you don't immediately think skilled assassin.

But now you might.

Let's just hope they don't figure out how to do that

with human livers.

- When it comes to surprises on the highway,

American commuters must be vigilant.

Drunk drivers, brake checks, sleepy truckers,

danger lurks at every turn.

But nothing could have prepared one woman

for this wild threat from above.

[dramatic music]

- [Don] Melissa Schlarb is commuting to her bank job

in North Carolina,

and she can see this majestic bald eagle in flight.

From a distance,

she thinks she can spot the eagle's breakfast

clamped in its talons.

But it's tough to say.

- And then boom, out of nowhere,

something crashes into her windshield

and she is scared half to death.

- [Hakeem] Glass, fur, blood, that's all she sees

as she struggles to pull over.

When she catches her breath, she sees that it's a cat

that has plummeted from the heavens, hit her car,

gone through her windshield, and landed inside.

It's an image that just doesn't make any sense.

- [Dan] That's when it hits her.

The bird she'd been watching from afar

just lost its meal midair, straight through her windshield.

- A bald eagle just dropped a cat

through my [bleep] windshield, look.

- [Thor] Bald eagles are powerful birds

with six-foot wingspans.

They're fully capable of carrying off prey

as heavy as a house cat.

But even apex predators sometimes lose their grip.

- This next strange encounter is not as easy to explain.

- In the late 1940s, Clearwater, Florida

is a kind of sleepy post-war town.

The population is around 15,000 people,

and the tourist industry really hasn't taken off yet.

- [Dan] But that quiet doesn't last.

One morning, in 1948,

beach goers discover something unusual,

footprints unlike anything they've ever seen.

- [Brian] The footprints are 14 inches long and 11 inches wide

and pressed several inches deep into the wet packed sand,

which indicates something very heavy made them.

They emerge from the ocean

and lead down the beach a short distance

before returning to the water.

- [John] Florida has tons of wildlife,

so the first thought is that it's some kind of reptile.

But there's no drag marks from a belly or a tail.

Also, the tracks show a three-toe pattern,

whereas any reptile is gonna have four toes.

There's also something else.

Based on the length of the strides,

it appears that whatever made these tracks

is bipedal, walking upright.

- [Dan] It's dubbed the Clearwater Monster,

and its strange footprints draw the attention

of British zoologist Ivan Sanderson.

- [John] He has a legitimate background in animal studies,

but one of his real interests is cryptozoology.

That's a sort of fringe area

that focuses on the study of undiscovered

or theoretical species.

- [Brian] He sees these three-toed prints

and thinks this isn't a reptile or a sea monster.

It actually looks much more like the print

of a large waterfowl, a very large waterfowl.

- [Dan] For Sanderson, this could only mean one thing:

an enormous, prehistoric penguin.

- [Thor] Sanderson's theory sounds ridiculous now,

but 35 million years ago,

there was a penguin species that fit the bill perfectly.

Palaeeudyptes stood over six feet tall

and weighed as much as 250 pounds.

- [Nick] Fossils have been discovered in New Zealand

of these massive flightless birds dubbed Mega Penguins.

Sanderson is extremely confident in his theory

and is certain that the footprints are not a hoax.

- [Dan] Sanderson's theory is put out in the news.

And as more footprints keep appearing over the years,

the Clearwater Monster, or Mega Penguin,

becomes a local legend.

- [Brian] Intrigue builds for years and then decades,

until finally the definitive answer reveals itself.

It's not what Dr. Ivan T. Sanderson wanted to hear.

- In 1988, a local man comes forward,

his name is Tony Signorini,

and admits that he's the one who made these prints

for the last 40 years.

- Initially, he used just plaster,

but the prints didn't sink deep enough into the sand.

So he filled them with lead,

and each shoe weighed around 30 pounds.

This made creating 100 yards of giant penguin footprints

no small feat.

- [John] Is it a buzzkill?

Sure.

But at least people can stop having to worry

about the world's largest and loneliest penguin.

- Still to come,

one hunky monkey that drives the ladies wild.

- What exactly makes someone attractive?

Is it good looks, talent?

Perhaps a great sense of humor

and an uncanny knowledge of paranormal history.

But one celebrity proves

that sometimes it's just plain old animal magnetism.

[dramatic music]

- [Dan] Nagoya, Japan is home

to one of the world's biggest pop idols.

And he is not a movie star, a singer, or even a royal.

He's a gorilla, a bizarrely attractive gorilla.

His name is Shabani.

- He's been compared to George Clooney, Hugh Jackman,

even Japan's own Ken Watanabe.

- Shabani came to the Higashiyama Zoo in 2007.

But it wasn't until 2015, when he's 18 years old,

that people started noticing

there was something really special about him.

- His fans start posting photos and videos of him posing

and gazing into the camera.

Since then, crowds at the gorilla enclosure have doubled.

On a typical day, he'll have around a hundred people

jockeying for position to get a good look at him.

- No one really knows

why people find this particular gorilla

to be so good-looking.

Zoo officials have acknowledged that he is more buff

than your average gorilla and has a chiseled jawline.

But a lot of his fans say it's something else.

He just exudes masculine sex appeal.

- [Don] But unfortunately, for all his lady fans,

Shabani is taken.

He's happily married to his two wives,

who apparently do not take well to other females

getting near their man.

- While Shabani enjoys the comforts of domestic life,

another ladies' man is dedicated to playing the field,

the entire field.

[pensive music]

- [Paul] Just south of Birmingham, England,

there's this wonderful family attraction

called Hatton Adventure World.

The main attraction is the Guinea Pig Village.

It's a cute little mini village filled with Guinea pigs

that kids can explore and even give them a pet.

It's so wholesome.

- [Dan] But to keep it wholesome and under control,

there have to be some strict rules and regulations.

- All the male and female guinea pigs

are intentionally kept separate in two different pens.

The reason, of course,

is to keep the populations under control,

'cause we all know that guinea pigs love to reproduce.

- [Jenny] One morning, while one of the workers

is doing a routine guinea pig check,

he notices something a little strange.

All 100 of the female guinea pigs are pregnant.

- [Paul] All morning, the staff are confused.

How could this possibly happen?

They would've obviously noticed the male guinea pigs

that somehow gotten into the female enclosure.

Then they find their answer.

One lone male guinea pig, exhausted and emaciated,

laying in the corner of the female enclosure.

Somehow this one little fuzzy Casanova

either escaped or was misidentified

and spent the next several weeks

impregnating all 100 females.

- [Dan] The promiscuous little lover

is quickly named Randy for obvious reasons.

- Since female guinea pigs

can give births up to three to four pups per litter,

Hatton Adventure World has to prepare

for up to 400 new guinea pigs.

- Randy, of course, has returned

to the all boys side of the enclosure,

where presumably he spends the next few years

bragging about his escapades.

- Whether it's raining meat, exploding toads,

or a flying cat carcass when you least expect it,

these are the encounters so wild

they are truly unbelievable.