Original subtitles

[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.