Original subtitles

[tense music]

- What if I told you a 500-pound bear

helped take on the Nazi war machine?

[tank booming] [tense music continues]

- One day he goes into the showers,

and what's in the shower?

A German spy.

[spy screams]

- Or a pack of feral dogs raised a human child.

- What they discover is nothing they could have ever imagined.

- The police try and grab the child,

but she barks and snarls just like the dogs she's been with.

[dog barking]

- How about an elite force of drug-sniffing gerbils?

- Now, in prison, snitches get stitches

and the gerbils started getting whacked.

[intense music]

- These are beings so fantastic

they are truly unbelievable.

[suspenseful music]

[suspenseful music continues]

[suspenseful music fading]

- Some say when you rescue a stray dog,

they really rescue you.

That may sound like a cliche,

but for one battered battalion of American soldiers

during World War I, it's literally true.

[tense music]

In the muddy trenches on the Western Front,

a German spy sneaks his way towards the Allied command.

He is careful to stay low and keep silent.

[dramatic music]

Suddenly,

he hears the unmistakable growl of an attack dog.

- Pretty quickly, he realizes

I have to get away from this animal, but

the dog is having none of that.

And the next thing the German spy feels

is the teeth sinking into the back of his leg.

And pretty soon the dog is chewing anything it can reach

and barking hysterically.

[dog barking] [spy screaming]

- [Dan] For him, the war is over.

For his canine captor, it's just another

in a long series of battlefield triumphs.

His name is Sergeant Stubby.

[inspiring music]

- Your typical military working dogs

would be a German Shepherd or a Rottweiler,

but this is not your typical military working dog.

This is a 25-pound stray American lap dog.

- He's a sort of mixed breed

of more likely Boston Terrier.

They're basically meant to pal around with you

and be friendly.

- [Dan] Stubby's unbelievable journey

from stray to terror of the trenches

begins a year earlier in 1917.

[tense music]

- You have a young army private

by the name of John Robert Conroy

who's training at Yale University.

This small stray dog comes up to him

with a thumb-like tail.

And it's wagging as it comes up to him.

And for Conroy, it's love at first sight.

And he's like, I'm gonna call you Stubby.

[tense music]

- Even though the camp has a no-dog policy,

the 102nd Infantry 26th Yankee Division decides

to bring Stubby on as their official mascot.

He starts picking up tricks.

He even learns how to salute a superior officer.

- [Dan] Sergeant Stubby goes from mascot to active duty

when his unit is sent into combat in February of 1918.

[artillery booming]

- Disaster strikes Stubby early,

and he's injured by a mustard gas attack

that he's not supposed to survive.

Low and behold, not only does this not kill Stubby,

but he recovers with this new superpower.

He is able to sense mustard gas from miles away

where nobody else would even know it's coming.

[tense music]

- Stubby's newfound skills are put to the test

during an early morning attack.

While the men of the unit are asleep,

there's a mustard gas attack

and Stubby is the first one to smell it.

[tense music continues]

- [Dan] Thanks to Stubby, all 200 men

of the company survive the attack.

Whatever the task, Stubby somehow always delivers,

eventually becoming the first dog in U.S. Army history

to reach the rank of sergeant.

- By the end of the war, Stubby has fought

in 17 different battles.

He's earned the Purple Heart

and he's earned multiple medals with valor.

- He's a part of post-war parades.

Of course, he's the crowd favorite.

And then in 1926, Stubby passes away

in the arms of John Conroy, and his obituary

is printed in both

"The Washington Post" and "The New York Times."

- You could still see Sergeant Stubby today.

He is stuffed and mounted in the Smithsonian Museum.

Go see him sometime and give him a salute.

[dramatic music]

- If a 25-pound lap dog could strike fear

in the hearts of his enemies,

imagine what a 500-pound beast could do.

[artillery booming] [tense music]

It's the height of World War II.

The haggard and homesick soldiers

of Poland's 22nd Artillery Division are en route

to join the Allied forces in the UK

when they stop at a train station in Iran.

- Polish troops are bartering with the locals

when a young Iranian boy comes up with a sack,

in which there's something squirming around.

And when those Polish soldiers open that sack up,

what they see is a bear cub.

[tense music continues]

- For the soldiers who also feel orphaned,

it's love at first sight.

- [Dan] Smitten, they immediately make the trade

for the adorable orphan cub

and name him Wojtek, which means happy warrior.

[emotional music]

- They teach him how to salute.

They wrestle around with them.

He's a huge morale boost.

- And they're feeding it chocolate.

They're feeding it cigarettes,

which it eats as opposed to smoking them.

And the bear loves beer.

- Wojtek gets bigger and bigger,

and he's not a bear cub anymore.

He's a 500-pound apex predator.

- [Dan] Still, Wojtek keeps his lovable charm.

He learns to play fetch with oranges troops throw

for their grenade practices.

[tense music continues]

- They even developed this hazing ritual

where Wojtek takes a green recruit

and pulls them up in the air

and acts like he's about to eat them,

but it all ends up just being a prank.

- [Dan] By 1944, a full-grown Wojtek is ready to join

his brothers in arms on the front lines in Italy.

[intense music]

- The unit ultimately deploys to the Liri Valley

and is involved in the fighting at Monte Cassino.

And it's an environment of mountainous terrain

where they experience regularly

that advancing artillery ammunition, to the

guns that need it, is a big problem.

It's physically very taxing for the two-legged members

of the company to complete the mission.

And they find that quickly

what they can do is strap artillery ammunition to Wojtek.

- [Dan] Wojtek uses his brown bear super strength

to carry 100-pound crates

of highly-explosive artillery shells to the front line,

doing the work of at least 4 men in a single trip.

- He can move this ammunition uphill

and down valley with great ease,

and he does it throughout the campaign

to such an end that eventually,

within their distinctive unit insignia,

they feature a bear carrying ammunition.

- In fact, Private Wojtek is so successful

in his mission with the ammunition cases

that he earns himself a promotion,

and he is now Corporal Wojtek,

which has him outranking some of the many people

who serve with him.

- [Dan] Despite these successes,

Wojtek does have a few flaws.

- In war, supplies are limited.

And one of those limited supplies is water.

Wojtek's got this bad habit of breaking into the showers

and taking these long showers with all the team's water.

[tense music]

- One day he goes into the showers,

and what's in the shower?

A German spy.

[dramatic booming]

Who starts screaming at the top of his lungs

in being confronted this way,

and that, of course, alerts the entire camp.

And now the German spy has been captured,

care of Corporal Wojtek.

[tense music] [Wojtek growling quietly]

- When the war ends, an arrangement is made

by which Wojtek is transferred to a zoo in Scotland

where he lives out his remaining years.

[tense somber music]

[inquisitive music]

- It's unclear if the zoo

continued Wojtek's daily beer rations,

but I for one hope they did.

He certainly earned it.

- Even for highly-trained law enforcement personnel, there's

nothing more dangerous than going undercover.

Now imagine the risks

if you're an unarmed, four-inch-tall rodent.

[tense music]

- It's 1982 and there is a problem in the

Canadian penitentiary system.

They are plagued by contraband drug smuggling.

Most of the drugs are being smuggled in by visitors.

And so, as a result, the authorities wanna create

a sort of secret detection system that's going

to alert them when somebody is smuggling drugs in.

- [Dan] The system the authorities have come up with is

so innovative it's unbelievable.

- The Canadian prison system hires drug-sniffing gerbils,

and it's called Operation Probe.

- [Dan] How exactly are gerbils drafted for Operation Probe?

- A research lab called General Behavior Systems

discovers that gerbils have very sensitive noses,

far more sensitive than any of the equipment the lab has.

- They also learned that gerbils can detect spikes

in adrenaline, which,

if you're trying to bring drugs into a prison,

would understandably then reveal yourself.

- And they're a lot smaller than, say, a drug-sniffing dog.

So you're not gonna tip somebody off.

So these gerbils are perfect.

[tense music]

- So they test this device

at Warkworth medium-security prison.

- The gerbils are placed in a box that sits

next to the checkpoint guard.

If the gerbil smells drugs,

it hits a lever that lights up the red light.

If it doesn't smell drugs,

it hits a lever that illuminates the green light.

- As it turns out, they are quite successful

in sniffing out the various drugs

that were being smuggled in,

whether it be marijuana or hash or heroin or cocaine.

- [David] It's so successful

that they expand it to three other prisons.

- [Dan] But eventually, the program reveals a weakness.

- These gerbils, yes, they have a great sense of smell,

but they smell and their urine is particularly pungent.

That right there eliminates the clandestine element of this.

If you could walk up to this box

and you smell that there's a gerbil there,

now you know that they're using that

to sense drugs coming into the prison.

- [Dan] Then the initiative hits another much darker snag.

- Now in prison, snitches get stitches.

And once somebody figured out they were being ratted out

by these gerbils, they took 'em out in a prison hit.

- After the first team is killed,

a second box of gerbils is sent.

And that team is also killed.

- [Dan] An autopsy later confirms

that the tiny informants were poisoned.

- So the entire program only cost about $70,000.

But after the gerbils started getting whacked,

it became more and more expensive

to train more and more gerbils,

so they had to just shut down the whole program.

[intense music]

- After Operation Probe is shelved,

the surviving gerbils live out the rest of their lives

in relative obscurity,

unlike the celebrated heroes in our next story.

[tense music]

In January of 1925,

Alaska is experiencing one of its worst winters on record.

And in the middle of this, the remote town of Nome

is suffering from a deadly outbreak of diptheria.

- Diptheria is a nasty infection, which,

in the case of children and the elderly,

kills almost half the people it infects.

There's an antitoxin that can halt the infection.

The bad news for Nome is that it's really far away.

- [Dan] Because of the freezing temperatures,

officials realize there's only one way

to deliver the antitoxin:

by dog sled.

- If you had one dog sled team,

that trip alone would take about a month.

They don't have a month.

- [Dan] In these freezing conditions,

the serum will last just six days.

They'll have to come up with a way to

make the journey in record time.

[dramatic music]

- What the Alaskans decide to do

is to have several dog teams

that will take the medicine in legs,

one leg to the next,

all the way to this remote village.

- [Dan] 20 dog teams and their human handlers

volunteer for the treacherous journey.

- At the time of the mission,

the most well-regarded musher

is a man named Leonhard Seppala.

Leonhard has to decide of all of his dogs

who is gonna be the one to lead his team

on this arduous mission.

The typical work life for a Siberian husky is

normally around 8 to 10 years,

but he decides on his dog Togo,

who is a 12-year-old dog.

- [Dan] While the average distance for each team

is 50 miles,

Togo's leg will be a staggering 91 miles.

[tense music]

- Togo is old for this job,

but he has an unbeatable record.

The team of dogs always trust him

and Seppala just knows intuitively,

this is the dog to be able to lead this group.

This is like a lotta pressure on a dog.

[tense music]

- [Dan] The serum is picked up on January 27th

and makes its way to

Togo's team in less than 4 days.

Togo must now lead the most perilous leg

of the journey in record time.

- [Yohuru] Crossing the notoriously treacherous

Norton Sound, Seppala hears the ice crack

and knows his team's in trouble.

- [Dan] The crack widens,

making a gap the sled team can't cross.

- So panic naturally starts to set in.

So what Seppala does is he grabs a line,

he ties it around Togo, picks him up,

and he physically throws him across the ice.

Once Togo sticks the landing,

he immediately starts to pull on that line

to try to bring in the rest of the team.

But as Togo is pulling, the line snaps.

[snapping sound] [tense music]

- This is a complete nightmare,

but Togo does a pretty ingenious thing.

He snags the end of the rope that's loose

and he starts to roll it around himself, closing the divide,

which brings the entire crew to safety.

[dramatic music]

- [Dan] Together, Togo and the team complete

their critical 91-mile leg in just over a day.

[victorious music]

- The final leg of the trip is just 50 miles to Nome,

and musher Gunnar Kaasen,

he decides to go for speed

and endurance over experience,

and he will give the lead dog role to a three-year-old dog

that's never done anything like this before named Balto.

- It's a dangerous move.

This dog doesn't have as much experience,

and what if they hit a crevasse, will the dog know what to do?

It's risky.

[tense music]

- [Dan] Balto leads Gunnar and his team out of Bluff

as they head into chest-deep snow drifts

and unforgiving winds.

- At one point during the run,

the winds are so treacherous Balto and his team are actually

lifted airborne off the ground.

But when they land, Balto is able to keep his team together

and keep them moving toward their goal.

[awe-inspiring music]

- [Dan] In the early morning hours of February 2nd,

Balto and his team arrive in Nome,

a month-long journey completed in only five days

and just before the serum expires.

[tense music]

- The world has been following this story on the radio.

So everybody is in rapt attention.

And Balto is there, the face of the entire operation,

and he gets all of the love, all of the fanfare.

- [Sami] He gets a statue of him in Central Park,

4,000 miles away from Nome, Alaska.

There's an animated movie about Balto's heroics,

- But, ultimately, Togo does get some love.

He gets a statue of his own in New York City's Seward Park.

- Every March, sled dog teams from around the world

compete in the Iditarod

as they emulate the unbelievable life-and-death mission

pulled off by Togo and Balto.

[tense music]

- In the entertainment business, sibling acts have always brought

in big audiences.

From the Bee Gees to the Jonas Brothers,

even the Blues Brothers,

but no sibling act in history has shared a bond tighter

than the early 20th century performers,

Jean and Jacques Libbera.

[tense music]

- Coming outta the 19th century and going

into the early 20th, sideshows,

circuses, you name it,

entertainment is really taking off in a very new way.

- Of course, then you have Coney Island,

which has sword swallowers, fire breathers,

people walking on broken glass,

any number of unusual

and bizarre and strange performances.

- [Dan] But perhaps the strangest attraction

is known as the double-bodied man.

- So Jean steps out.

He's dressed immaculately in a tuxedo, looking good.

He has a shawl though that's draping over a part of him.

- [Dan] What's underneath is what makes

audiences gasp and even faint.

- [Greg] Jean has another person coming out of his abdomen.

- [Dan] His name is Jacques and he's Jean's parasitic twin.

[tense music]

- The incidence of parasitic

or vestigial twins is really rare.

Literally one in a million.

They form very similar to how identical twins form.

There's a moment when the fertilized egg splits

into two complete embryos.

But in the case of vestigial or parasitic twins,

that split is incomplete.

Because conjoined vestigial parasitic twins

often share organs with each other,

trying to separate them surgically

would've probably killed them both.

- So for Jean, things are quite difficult

because Jean, for all intents and purposes,

is a completely normal human being.

But Jacques, on the other hand,

has a very rudimentary nervous system,

so there is no consciousness

and there is no conscious or voluntary movement.

- As Jean would find out later in life,

Jacques's head is, in fact, embedded within his abdomen.

- And it's only approximately six centimeters

in circumference.

With a skull this small in size,

Jacques would not have any kind of consciousness

or any awareness of what was going on.

- In that era, it's pretty hard to find a job

when you have the condition that Jean Libbera has,

with his brother Jacques coming out of his abdomen.

[eerie music]

And pretty quickly, he's drawn

to the life that most people

of massive physical difference are drawn,

to the circuses and sideshows.

- [Dan] Soon, Jean and Jacques are performing

around the world, amassing a fortune

and dazzling audiences.

- Audiences are both thrilled

and terrified to see it,

especially when Jacques actually moves.

This is unique, it's terrifying.

It's all sorts of different emotions all at the same time.

- But in reality, given how

underdeveloped Jacques' brain is,

these probably weren't conscious movements,

but probably more reflexive.

- [Dan] Yet somehow the most shocking aspect

of their unbelievable life is

how normal Jean is able to make it.

- He's able to meet a woman, they fall in love.

They even have children.

- What's really remarkable is not his success

as a circus performer,

but the fact that he's walking around

with an entire person attached to him

and he figures out how to be normal.

I think that's amazing.

[inquisitive music fading]

- Unfortunately, not every sideshow performer finds

their happily ever after.

Consider the extraordinary tale of Julia Pastrana,

which begins in 19th-century Mexico.

[tense music]

- A group of herdsmen are out looking for their cattle.

They end up in a cave

and they find a young mother.

She has a baby, and the baby is very strange looking.

[ominous music]

- They realize something pretty quickly about the child.

She's covered completely in hair, just like a little wolf.

- They learn that her name is Julia Pastrana.

Her mother has been hiding her for two years

because of a myth in the region, the nahualli.

- So Julia's born and she's covered in hair.

This feeds right into the idea of the nahualli, shapeshifters,

a concept that goes back to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

So the village is terrified.

They're afraid that she's a shapeshifter

who can turn into a werewolf.

[tense music]

- The herders take pity on the situation.

They bring the mother and the child back down to the city.

But Julia Pastrana's mother dies

and she's placed in an orphanage.

- [Dan] Soon after, Julia is adopted

by the governor of Sinaloa, Pedro Sanchez.

- Governor Sanchez takes her and educates her.

She learns how to speak English and French,

in addition to Spanish, and he trains her voice.

She develops this beautiful mezzo-soprano voice,

and it is, in fact, very captivating.

[angelic music]

- Regretfully, the governor's intentions

are not the greatest.

Really he's investing in Julia in order

to make her into a sideshow.

- [Dan] In 1854, the governor sells

the 20-year-old Julia to a promoter

who takes her to New York.

- So now Julia's in the United States,

and she catches the eye of Theodore Lent,

a showman who knows how to make real money off of her.

- [Dan] Proving himself a master in 19th-century clickbait,

Lent advertises Julia

as the Ugliest Woman in the World, Bear Woman,

and a particularly cruel moniker, Baboon Lady.

- The audience goes expecting to see this beast woman,

and instead Julia is cultured and cultivated and charming.

And she puts on a beautiful show.

She sings, she dances, she's well dressed, and

Lent realizes he has a winner.

- [Dan] He even takes their relationship to the

next level by marrying Julia.

[curious music] [crowd clapping]

- The crowds show up. The money's pouring in.

Theodore now basically has all the control he needs and wants.

- [Dan] Soon the newlyweds are touring the world,

and selling out shows.

- Lent is not in love with Julia.

Lent is in love with money,

and he doesn't want anyone getting a peek

at Julia unless they've paid.

So he makes her wear a veil whenever she's in public.

- Following Lent and Julia's marriage,

eventually she's pregnant

and she gives birth to a son in Moscow.

[tense music]

And unfortunately, the son is dead within a few days

and Julia, because of difficulties of the birth,

is dead within a few days as well.

[somber music]

- [Dan] Shockingly, Julia's story

gets even more unbelievable.

- Lent, being every bit the monstrous showman that he is,

decides that he must keep the show going.

[ominous music]

So the way to do that, of course, is

to have Julia taxidermied,

along with his and her infant son.

[somber music]

- [Dan] Lent continues touring with the bodies

until he passes away in 1884.

- This still isn't the end of Julia's story.

Her body is passed around from sideshows to museums

for more than a century.

- It's not until 2013 that finally,

through some activist efforts,

she's returned back to her native Mexico and laid to rest.

And so finally, some very long overdue dignity is restored

to an at-rest Julia Pastrana.

[somber music continues]

- Coming up, dogs may be man's best friend,

but could they also be your parents?

- Of all the fantastic adventure tales ever sold to Hollywood,

few compete with the legend of Tarzan, king of the jungle.

They've made more than 50 of these movies in over a century.

But is the story of a boy raised by apes

in the jungle just fantasy?

Or is the legend of Lord Greystoke

based on a real person?

[tense music]

- Tarzan, we have all seen at least one.

And the reason why is that it's a really compelling story.

It is based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' book from 1912,

but Edgar Rice Burroughs is never very forthcoming

about where he got this idea.

So where this concept

came from is a little bit hazy.

- [Dan] Some even accuse him of stealing the idea

from Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book,"

including Kipling himself.

- In 1959, everything anyone thinks they know

about the Tarzan story gets a little flipped on its head

because a journalist named Thomas Llewellyn Jones writes an

an article for "Man's Adventure Magazine."

- Jones claims that he's come across a 1,500-page manuscript

that actually is the story of the real Tarzan.

William Charles Mildin, the 14th Earl of Streatham.

- [Dan] According to the manuscript,

the Earl of Streatham runs away from home at the age of 11

in search of adventures on the high seas.

- We're told he becomes a cabin boy on a steam ship.

Shipwrecked off the African continent,

the earl survives, makes it into the interior

where he is adopted by a family of apes.

- He not only lives with them,

he is fully integrated,

having to climb through the trees the way they do,

having to just basically survive in a jungle.

[dramatic music]

By the time he sees another European again,

he has a whole life for himself in the jungle.

- And although he has lost the power of speech,

is able to communicate with them and they rescue him

and take him back home

where he resumes his ancestral title.

- This tale is really compelling and fascinating.

But the thing that continues to divide people kind of 50-50 on

whether or not they think it's real is that we don't know how

Edgar Rice Burroughs allegedly got his hands

on this big honking manuscript to write from.

- Is it true?

Well, if anything, it speaks to our wish

to break out of the boundaries of civilized life

and get back in touch with our primate roots.

- Of course, Tarzan isn't the oldest tale

of wild animal parenting.

You may have heard the legendary story of Romulus and Remus,

twin sons of Mars, the war god.

They were abandoned near a river and suckled by a she-wolf,

before growing up to found the great city of Rome.

But could a child really be raised by wolves?

Consider the curious case of Oxana Malaya.

[tense music]

- In 1988, the police in a Ukrainian village are called to

investigate a report of child neglect,

and what they discover is nothing

they could have ever imagined.

[tense music] [dogs barking]

It appears to be a young girl

who is living with a pack of dogs.

- When they try to approach the girl,

the dogs take up a defensive posture.

They snarl, they bark,

they circle around her.

They're protecting her.

[dramatic music]

- The police distract the dogs with food

so they can try and grab the child,

but she's running away from them on all fours

and she doesn't talk.

She barks and snarls just like the dogs she's been with.

- [Dan] Police learn Oxana has been part of this pack

for five years.

- Her parents are very poor.

They have more children than they can feed.

They both have an alcohol problem.

When Oxana is about three years old,

they lock her outside in the cold.

But rather than perishing, Oxana seeks refuge.

These scrappy dogs which are semi-feral,

they allow the child to cuddle with them for warmth

and she stays there.

[somber music]

- She winds up living like the dogs.

She winds up walking like them,

communicating like them,

scratching like them,

scrounging for food scraps which keep them all alive.

[tense music]

- The authorities do manage to eventually collect Oxana,

but as she is being driven away to an orphanage,

she tells the story that one of

those dogs followed the car until it collapsed,

which probably broke her heart.

- [Dan] Sometime after she's discovered,

a local news crew captures shocking footage of Oxana.

- She laps up food with her tongue,

she doesn't have the power of speech,

and she remains a ward of the state,

living in different institutions and facilities

with the cognitive intelligence of a six-year-old.

- She is diagnosed as being a feral child,

which is something that is extremely rare.

It is so rare, in fact,

that there are only 100 documented cases

of this condition around the world.

- [Dan] Eventually, thanks to years of intervention,

Oxana learns how to speak fluent human.

- Oxana does achieve something like a normal life.

She has regained speech.

She works gainfully at a farm taking care of animals

whose company she attests to enjoy more than humans.

[dramatic music] [dog barking]

- Perhaps no world is more full of fantastic beings

than the one created by JRR Tolkien in "Lord of the Rings."

And the Hobbits might be the most beloved of all.

But what if these lovable little heroes

weren't just a legend?

[curious music]

- It is 2003

and Australian archeologists are excavating caves

on an island called Flores, east of Bali,

and they come upon a strange discovery.

- A skull emerges from the soil,

so small that they initially think it must be from a child.

To anthropologists, skulls and bones are like roadmaps.

They contain a lot of information

if you know how to read them.

- [Dan] As scientists continue excavating,

they find something even stranger.

- As more bones emerge from the soil,

it becomes clear that this skeleton is

from a fully-mature individual, probably a female,

that stood only 3 1/2 feet tall

and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 pounds.

- This is an ancient human,

but it's not like anything

they've seen before anywhere else.

Then they find more skeletons.

About 100 fossils, about 13 individuals,

and they're all the same size.

They're all tiny.

- [Dan] But not everything

about these ancient humans is tiny.

- There is no sign of disease or deformity,

though she does have rather large feet.

She appears to be a healthy, well-proportioned individual.

And as more and more of these small,

large-footed skeletons come to light,

people start calling them Hobbits.

- [Dan] Is it possible that Hobbits once truly existed?

- This is an unknown branch of the human family tree

that scientists named Homo floresiensis

after the island on which they were discovered.

- This is an incredible find,

but what would cause something like this to happen?

The leading theory is island dwarfism.

- [Dan] Island dwarfism argues

that large animals, isolated on islands,

evolve smaller bodies because they have limited resources

and no larger predators to defend themselves against.

- Historically, island dwarfism can lead

to unusual permutations,

from giant rats to tiny elephants,

and even perhaps

Hobbit-like humans.

- We may never know all the secrets of

these ancient little humans,

but what about a man unique in recorded history

who has been both unusually small and a giant?

[tense music]

- It's World War I. 1917.

Adam Rainer wants to join the troops,

and he's 18 so he can qualify.

But Adam has a small problem.

[tense music]

- [Dan] At just 4'6", Adam's well below

the Austrian Army's minimum requirement of 4'10".

[dramatic music]

He's rejected from service,

and doctors diagnose him with dwarfism.

- Strangely, Adam doesn't come from a

family with a history of dwarfism.

His parents and relatives are all normal height.

- But there's another strange anomaly.

His feet are incredibly large for his size.

He would wear the equivalent of a size 10.

- [Dan] Three years later,

the rest of his body starts catching up.

- Throughout his 20s,

Adam continues to grow.

By the time he's 31,

he is now over seven feet tall.

Adam goes from being an adult dwarf to a giant,

something never seen before

in all of recorded human history.

- But there are problems with Rainer's growth.

[ominous music]

His facial features are starting to deform.

He's developing aches and pains.

His spine is starting to curve.

- Ultimately, Adam reaches a height of 7'8",

and that's even with the painful curvature of his spine.

- [Dan] How could Adam go from being so small to so big?

For years, doctors are stumped.

- He finally meets some surgeons

who think they have pinpointed the cause.

They spot a benign tumor against his pituitary gland,

and one of the jobs of the pituitary gland is

to regulate growth.

And so they think that the pressure from this tumor

is causing the pituitary gland to constantly send

chemical signals to keep Adam's body growing.

[tense music]

- Rainer decides, rather intelligently,

that this tumor needs to come out.

- [Dan] He undergoes a surgery to remove the tumor

and his growing stops.

But unfortunately, the damage done to his body

from years of rapid growth cannot be reversed.

- Rainer passes away at the age of 51,

having been the only man in recorded history

to have gone from being a dwarf to a giant.

So despite that early demise,

there's that to be said for him.

- Doctors still have never seen another case like his.

[tense music]

- We've explored a range of fantastic beings

with incredible stories,

but sometimes what makes a person so remarkable

are the unbelievable circumstances

they are able to overcome.

Take the puzzling tale of Kaspar Hauser.

[tense music]

- In 1828 in Nuremberg, Germany,

suddenly a teenager arrives on the scene.

He is stumbling through the streets.

He looks a mess.

He can speak, but he speaks like a toddler.

- The only thing that this boy keeps repeating,

as though he's been trained to say it,

is that, "I want to be a horseman like my father."

- The authorities don't know anywhere else

they can possibly take this kid,

and so he ends up in prison.

It quickly becomes apparent

that Kaspar has a lot of really unusual characteristics.

He can only drink water, he can only eat bread.

Any other food, he starts to gag and spit it back out.

He is very sensitive to light.

He can handle whispers, but anything at like a normal tone

and certainly any sudden loud noise terrifies him.

- He begins to gain the power of speech and communication,

and he tells the story

of having been raised in a darkened cell.

[dramatic music]

He would fall asleep and wake up,

and there would be rye bread and water waiting for him.

Sometimes he would drink what he described as bitter water

and he would sleep particularly deeply,

during which time his nails

and his hair were apparently trimmed.

But beyond that, he really had no human contact.

- [Dan] The fact that Kaspar can communicate at all

after 16 years

in complete isolation is beyond fantastic.

It's miraculous.

- There are critical periods of time

where certain behaviors, certain knowledge can be gained.

And after those windows close, it's really impossible

to gain that knowledge again.

So for Kaspar, when he's stuck in that cell,

he never gets to learn some of the most basic things that other

humans learn, to talk, to even think the right way

about the world around him.

- Eventually, a schoolmaster

named Friedrich Daumer comes forward

as someone who is willing to take on Kaspar's case.

- Daumer actually finds Hauser to be incredibly intelligent,

and also, surprisingly, an accomplished artist.

[tense music continues]

- [Dan] Then things start to take a strange turn.

- One day when Daumer goes down to his basement,

he sees Kaspar on the ground, bleeding from his head.

Kaspar claims he's been attacked by a hooded man

who tells him he'll be dead

before he leaves Nuremberg.

- [Dan] Is it possible that someone is out to kill Kaspar?

And if so, why?

- Conspiracy theories

and speculative ideas rise up around him,

one of which is that he is a deposed prince.

- There are some interesting pieces of evidence that

start to build this rumor's veracity.

So one of the prevailing theories is

that a princess of Baden had a child

around the same time that Kaspar would've been born

that was maybe not going to survive.

And so that child is switched with another baby,

which means that there is now a stolen royal baby

and that maybe Kaspar is this stolen Prince of Baden.

- [Dan] But just when you think

this story can't get any more unbelievable,

consider what happens next.

[tense music]

- One day, Kaspar is found stabbed in a park

right in his chest.

[tense music continues]

To make matters all the more strange,

he's clutching a note which reads,

"I'll let Kaspar tell you who I am."

- [Dan] Sadly, three days later, Kaspar Hauser dies.

[dramatic music]

- Cut to 2002 when

some very enterprising scientists get

hair from brushes that Kaspar has used,

and they get mitochondrial DNA samples.

And from those, they are able to compare them

to a descendant of the House of Baden.

- [Dan] The descendant is

Astrid von Medinger nee von Zallinger zu Stillendorf.

That's a name much more royal than Kaspar Hauser.

- They find a partial match.

It's not absolute,

but it is significant enough

so that they cannot rule out a shared ancestry.

- When Kaspar is buried, his tombstone reads,

"Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time."

- The full answer to this unbelievable mystery

requires a complete DNA test

from a close House of Baden descendant.

But so far, no one has volunteered.

Kaspar Hauser remains an enigma.

Whether it's heroic animals saving lives

or humans beating the odds to survive,

there will always be fantastic beings

who defy nature's limits

and continue to challenge our own ideas

of what is truly unbelievable.

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