Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Worldwide,

36 billion cameras are watching us.

On our streets, at work,

and in our homes, they capture things

that seem impossible.

Science says this shouldn't happen.

MAN: Do you see that?

NARRATOR: Experts carry out forensic analysis

of these unusual events,

Wow! What a blast!

[screaming]

This doesn't make sense.

[screaming]

There has to be some sort of explanation.

What else is going on here?

NARRATOR: Coming up, an American street

mysteriously explodes.

This is incredible.

It looks like something out of "War of the Worlds."

NARRATOR: A woman dreams of being abducted by aliens.

Her husband sets up a nighttime camera

and captures this.

She's gone. She's not there anymore.

SZULGIT: It almost looks like she just

melts into the bed or evaporates.

NARRATOR: And has this office building been booby trapped?

I can't imagine the amount of damage that can

do to someone's face.

NARRATOR: Matt Kutcher and a volunteer investigate.

There you go.

With enough wind, we could get these doors to slam shut.

Violent.

NARRATOR: Bizarre phenomena...

Oh, my gosh. [gasps]

...mysteries caught on camera.

[screams]

NARRATOR: What's the truth behind this strange evidence?

Droitwich in the United Kingdom.

December 9th, 2010.

A surveillance camera is trained on

a sleeping couple in an ordinary suburban home.

Then, at 3:34 AM...

Oh! Oh, my goodness.

She's gone. She's not there anymore.

It almost looks like she just melts

into the bed or evaporates.

NARRATOR: The woman vanishes without a trace

while her husband sleeps next to her.

If there's a physical cause for night terrors,

this would be it.

This gives a whole new meaning to waking

up on the wrong side of the bed.

NARRATOR: Then, 12 minutes later...

Oh! Wh -- she's back.

LOVELL: Wow, that is incredible.

So it looks like she just re-materialized.

The husband's rolling over to give her

a hug as if nothing ever happened.

What strange force could make

somebody disappear and then reappear?

NARRATOR: Engineer Nick Householder thinks it's strange

that this film even exists.

Why is there a camera in this bedroom?

Were they expecting something weird to happen?

NARRATOR: Karen Bellinger discovers a bizarre

explanation for the camera's presence.

The woman says that while her husband sleeps peacefully

beside her, she is abducted by aliens

and subjected to medical tests on a UFO.

Later, she reports being returned to her bed,

next to her still-sleeping husband.

It turns out the reason why this camera was where it was

is because the husband had set it up

to try and provide his wife with some reassurance that

nothing was going on in the middle of the night.

But, in fact, the footage shows us the exact opposite.

There is something very strange going on here.

NARRATOR: The U.S. government has confirmed

the existence of unidentified aerial phenomenon,

objects spotted in the skies by trained military personnel

that cannot be explained by any technology on Earth.

Thousands of people around the world,

like this woman, claim

to have been abducted, sometimes by some kind

of teleportation.

They often say they have been subjected

to terrifying surgical experiments performed by

humanoid beings.

There is a strange pattern of

alleged alien encounters happening in this area.

Police records reveal that within a 30-mile radius of

this incident, there had already been

three reported cases involving aliens

or alien abductions, and the following year,

there were eight more cases.

NARRATOR: A survey in 1991 found 119 Americans out of

a sample of 6,000 claimed to have suffered an alien

abduction experience.

If true, a huge swath of

Earth's population is being secretly experimented on.

But mainstream science says these abductions exist only in

the heads of the people who claim to experience them.

As many as 60 percent of all

alien abduction reports are linked to sleep.

Scientists now believe that the victims are suffering

from a condition called awareness

during sleep paralysis.

NARRATOR: During sleep, the brain temporarily paralyzes

the body by releasing gamma aminobutyric acid and glycine.

These chemicals turn off cells in the brain that

control muscle activity so that our bodies can rest.

But in awareness during sleep paralysis, something misfires

in this process, and your body

goes into this state of paralysis just as you're waking

up or just as you're falling asleep.

It's really terrifying, because, as you can imagine,

you find yourself in a semi-conscious state

but unable to move.

People who experience this frightening condition

often suffer also from hallucinations.

BELLINGER: These hallucinations could be something auditory,

so, for example,

you could hear a buzzing or footsteps,

or it could be something that's visual --

lights or a strange figure, outlined.

And pop culture has already

seeded our subconscious with things like strange gray

little men abducting us in our sleep.

NARRATOR: But this video seems to prove

that whatever is happening to this woman

occurs to her body as well as her mind.

What we see in this video is a woman literally disappearing.

So something else must be going on here.

NARRATOR: Magician Ben Nemzer studies the footage.

The lady's disappearing act reminds him

of a well-known magic trick.

NEMZER: Magicians have been making people

disappear underneath cloths for years.

You can still see it today in any modern illusion show.

NARRATOR: Nemzer looks for signs that

a similar illusion is being performed in this video.

After studying this video,

I don't think it's possible that that's what they were

doing, because in the methods that I know,

there's actually no way to make the person reappear.

NARRATOR: If this is the work of a trickster,

it is unlike anything Nemzer has ever encountered.

If these people are doing something that

the magic community doesn't know about yet,

well, this is a pretty close-guarded secret.

NARRATOR: Coming up, has this woman been eaten

by her own bed?

The truth is, beds can be very dangerous places.

NARRATOR: And has a techno weapon of terror been unleashed

on a town?

Whoa!

HOUSEHOLDER: This is terrifying.

There's a pulsing blue light on the horizon.

NARRATOR: A CCTV camera captures the shocking moment when

a sleeping woman vanishes from her bed, and then

mysteriously reappears 12 minutes later.

Physicist Chad Orzel considers

a troubling explanation for the woman's disappearance.

If this hasn't been done on purpose,

how could this woman just disappear out of sight?

Has the bed consumed the woman?

NARRATOR: Over 1,000 Americans are killed falling

out of their beds every year.

The truth is, beds can be very dangerous places.

In the summer of 2020, a woman

in England was trapped inside a foldaway bed.

[laughing]

That case ended with a laugh,

but this could have been very serious.

BELLINGER: In 2008, an elderly Spanish woman bought

a Murphy bed to save space in her tiny apartment.

Now, she went missing one day, and people came through,

they looked for her, and all seemed to be in order.

Nothing out of place.

It wasn't until a few days later that they thought to pull

down the foldaway bed, and there she was.

A terrible way to die.

Is it possible we're seeing a woman

get trapped inside of her own bed temporarily?

NARRATOR: But the husband and wife say

the bed is an entirely ordinary double mattress.

The woman insists it's not a trick, and indeed,

she hasn't sought any fame or fortune out of it.

She just wants to know what's the explanation?

NARRATOR: Experts can't show this footage is fake.

They're also unable to explain what is happening.

The woman insists it's proof

she has been abducted by extraterrestrials.

But until more evidence emerges,

the bizarre film remains a mystery.

This footage shows that some really strange things can

happen when we're at our most vulnerable -- asleep.

NARRATOR: Now, Kenner, Louisiana.

December 27th, 2018.

A man films as a mysterious glow appears.

[explosion blasts]

Whoa!

HOUSEHOLDER: This is terrifying.

There's a pulsing blue light on the horizon.

NARRATOR: Whatever it is, it gets closer...

It's spreading! It's getting bigger and bigger.

It's lighting up the entire sky.

...and unleashes havoc and destruction

on the street.

MAN: That's crazy!

BELLINGER: They're scary,

and they are explosive -- they're ferociously energetic.

This is incredible.

It looks like something out of "War of the Worlds."

NARRATOR: The man filming this explosive display

seems oblivious to the danger he's in.

WALLACE: You've got a gas station sitting here,

and you get a big spark

that hits it, and you ignite the gas --

now you got a flaming inferno, which could very quickly

turn into a disaster, which takes out an entire area.

I know I would be running, because

this thing could explode at any time.

NARRATOR: Investigators discover that Kenner is home

to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

This wouldn't be the first time that

a major air crash has occurred near this airport.

NARRATOR: At 4:09 PM on July 9th, 1982,

disaster strikes.

Pan Am Flight 759 takes off from New Orleans

on the way to Las Vegas, Nevada,

and no sooner does it get into the sky,

than it crashes back down.

The black box recorder reveals that just one minute

into the flight,

the captain is saying to his first mate, "You're sinking,

you're sinking, come back."

All 145 people on board the aircraft die,

in addition to eight people on

the ground, and six houses are destroyed.

It's a terrible accident.

NARRATOR: The scene on the ground is described

as being like a war zone.

I actually had an uncle who was one of

the firemen at the time who worked the scene of

the accident -- he said there was

body parts laying around the area,

you know, just destruction and death everywhere.

Although this air crash occurred in the middle

of summer, it was really terrible weather.

There were swirling winds and giant storms

that were in the area.

Investigators conclude that the crash

was caused by a microburst.

What a microburst is, is a very confined,

very intense downdraft of air,

and that downward force of wind

can actually push jumbo jets from the sky.

Microbursts are formed in

the turbulent conditions found inside thunderstorms,

and approaching microburst can travel at speeds of up to

60 miles per hour but would be invisible

to an airline pilot.

There would be no warning, giving the pilots no time

to react.

A microburst is catastrophic for

any aircraft caught in its wake.

The type of hot, humid weather that is experienced in

Louisiana lends itself to

the creation of these massive thunderstorms, and with these

thunderstorms, we get these types of microbursts.

NARRATOR: Martin Morgan investigates current

flight safety rules and doubts that an air crash could

be the cause of these strange explosions.

Since the 1980s, there's been an enormous amount of research

into microbursts, and that research has made

the skies much safer.

There's no way in this day and age that an aircraft would

be allowed to take off under thunderstorm conditions that

would cause a microburst.

So it's not an air crash.

There's got to be something else going on.

NARRATOR: Coming up, do these explosions point

to a plot to destabilize the U.S. power network?

Unfortunately, the United States

power grid is really vulnerable.

And in a Midwestern cemetery, a ghoulish grave digger.

GIRL: Super weird!

It's digging at this frenetic pace, like it's

madly trying to get something out of the ground.

NARRATOR: A man films as a street in Kenner, Louisiana,

violently explodes.

Authorities blame the weather,

but the recorded maximum wind speeds of 51 miles per hour

shouldn't wreak havoc on the electrical grid.

HOUSEHOLDER: Is this a result of

the weather or are there sinister forces at work?

These systems are designed with breakers in line

so that when this starts happening,

it's a giant fuse that bursts and prevents

this sort of cascading reaction.

But this event we're seeing is just going

on and on, and the fuses aren't popping.

If it was just one or two power lines,

you could write it off as being an isolated incident.

But this is going on and on and on.

It almost suggests the possibility of being

the result of some kind of an attack.

NARRATOR: The United States is one of

the most energy hungry nations on the planet.

It eats up around 17 percent of the world's total energy,

despite having less than 5 percent of the population.

It's used to light and heat homes, power businesses,

keep transportation moving, and hospitals operating.

The United States today relies almost

entirely on its electrical power grid.

So if it goes down even for an hour or two,

the consequences are immediate.

When we lose the power, it's almost

like going back into the Dark Ages.

NARRATOR: In 2003, tree branches

felled power lines in Ohio.

As a result, 50 million people lose power

for up to two days across the Northeast.

WOMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, the passengers in this train

are being evacuated.

Accidental deaths doubled during that time.

Non-accidental deaths went up by 25 percent.

That's just a one-day figure.

Imagine if the blackout had persisted.

The mortality rates would be insane.

NARRATOR: America's enemies know that a blackout would be

an incredible weapon against the world's most

technologically advanced society.

WOLSHON: To have the ability to cause these types of

power outages would give somebody an enormous amount

of power -- they could really do tremendous

damage and cause enormous mayhem.

NARRATOR: American nuclear power plants

have suffered 57 incursions

by unknown drones between 2015 and 2019 alone.

Could these mysterious flying machines be

scanning and testing these sites for weaknesses?

WALLACE: Unfortunately, the United States' power grid

is really vulnerable.

Today, everything is tied together through computers,

and it's networked into the Internet,

and now you have the possibility of attacking

the system from outside.

WOLSHON: It's really a terrifying idea

to think that a group could

actually hack in and disrupt power

not just to one city, but to an entire region of the country

for hours or even days.

NARRATOR: A Russian- or Chinese-inspired

coordinated attack against the U.S. power grid

could leave major cities blacked out for days,

or even weeks, leading to mass civil unrest and disorder.

Everyone would be affected by these blackouts.

NARRATOR: Shops would soon run out of food

as supply chains collapsed,

and the state itself would be unable to function.

Your water treatment systems go down, your sewage systems

go down, your communications are out --

no radio, no phone, no TV -- everything's gone.

Without power, we might as well

just kiss our modern ways of life goodbye.

NARRATOR: Authorities in Kenner continue to insist

the explosions were caused by

a transformer on the street blowing up in a bad

electrical storm.

But whether accidental or deliberate, 10,000 people in

the New Orleans area were left without power

for several hours.

So an event like this really shows you how vulnerable

our power grid is

and the necessity of making it stronger and innovating it

to protect against this type of situation.

NARRATOR: Now, Akron, Ohio.

June 2017.

Two girls drive through one of the town's cemeteries when

a strange movement catches their attention.

GIRL: Super weird!

What is that thing?

It's hiding out back of the cemetery building,

but what is it doing?

It looks like someone or something

is digging up a grave.

NARRATOR: The girls are terrified

and don't get any closer.

This is clearly

no ordinary cemetery worker.

It's digging at this frenetic pace, like it's

madly trying to get something out of the ground.

Whatever this is, it's completely

out of place and completely shocking.

Cemeteries are creepy enough by themselves,

but to have this crazy-looking creature

digging around and disturbing the dead --

whatever this thing is,

those girls need to get heck out of there.

NARRATOR: The digging figure is humanoid in shape,

but oddly animal-like in its actions.

Many Ohioans are reminded of a powerful local legend.

Tales of strange dogs too big

to be a domestic dog, walking on

their hind legs and moving at tremendous speeds

have spread fear into the Midwest.

NARRATOR: These so-called dog men are like werewolves,

but are encountered almost exclusively in this part

of the United States.

These things were reported back in

the 1930s by loggers in Michigan.

The more modern sightings have occurred in Ohio,

starting in the 1970s and going forward.

[howling]

FOX: One of the first incidences were two

railroad workers who were attacked

in Defiance, Ohio.

NARRATOR: Ted Davis, one of the workers,

describes being struck on the shoulder

and then turning to see

a hairy canine beast with fangs and claws

towering over him.

A week later, a local grocer

claims to encounter a similar beast.

FOX: Sightings were reported in

the newspaper, and children were kept indoors.

The police took it seriously,

and they combed the neighborhoods at night.

Today, there are hundreds of sightings across

several states.

Locals have reported being chased down dark country roads,

and farmers have even fought off

these things when it maims or kills

their livestock.

Look, there's something out there,

and it's scary as hell.

NARRATOR: Coming up, is this ghoulish grave digger

hungry for flesh or greedy for gold?

When you're buried, you're meant to be laid to rest.

To think that your body could be desecrated like this

is disgusting.

NARRATOR: And in a country famous for booby traps...

The revolving door just collapses in on itself.

How in the world does this happen?

NARRATOR: Two girls traveling through an Ohio cemetery film

a demonic figure appearing to dig up a grave.

Mallie Fox thinks this isn't some predatory wild animal

but a human disguised in black to commit a grim

and ghoulish crime.

Could this be a grave robber

brazenly digging up for riches?

NARRATOR: There are more than 140,000 cemeteries

scattered across the United States,

and each year, over a million Americans are buried in them.

But as we lay our loved ones to rest,

little do we suspect that their corpses

could be a target for twisted thieves.

Humans are often buried with all sorts of valuables.

So as long as we've had a human burials,

we've also had human grave robbers.

NARRATOR: Some people have been buried with fantastic wealth.

Whitney Houston was buried in 2012, encased in thick

concrete to protect

the $500,000 worth of diamonds

that she was buried with.

NARRATOR: Comedian Benny Hill was one of Britain's

wealthiest entertainers when he died in 1992.

That year, ghouls dug up

his grave in Southampton, England,

after rumors that he was buried

along with a vast trove of jewelry.

But a grave robber doesn't need to find diamonds

to strike it rich.

This isn't just people who have recently been

buried, either -- so if you think about,

for example, someone who is buried

in a Civil War uniform,

those buttons that are on their coat are incredibly

valuable today and would have

withstood the test of time, and these are easy targets for

someone who might be looking for valuables.

NARRATOR: One single Civil War coat button can fetch as much

as $750.

Heartless looters ransack and vandalize graves

across California, Virginia, and Kentucky

in the run up to the Memorial Day weekend

of 2020.

In the worst incident,

robbers dug up and stole relics from the Petersburg

National Battlefield, where more

than 1,000 Confederate and Union soldiers died.

When you're buried, you're meant to be laid to rest.

To think that your body could be desecrated

like this is disgusting.

NARRATOR: Jade Lovell examines the video.

She doubts this is a professional grave robber.

LOVELL: This doesn't look like someone who

should know how to dig a grave.

They're not using tools, they don't have a shovel,

no spade, and they're digging

with this strange backhand motion,

like they're pushing the soil instead

of digging in the soil.

NARRATOR: Lovell finds a troubling new trend

in grave robbery that could explain

this digger's unconventional methods.

Tragically, since the early 2000s, there has been

a rise in drug addicts robbing graves,

unearthing people, and also robbing archaeological sites,

looking for valuables that are easily tradable for more drugs.

NARRATOR: An authentic Native American

war ax can fetch over $600.

Drug addicts have been blamed for the desecration

and looting of important Native American and other

archaeological sites.

Many archaeologists report having to flee

from armed confrontations with violent plunderers.

It's been described as an epidemic of looting.

a nation's priceless history is going up in meth smoke.

We could be looking at a drug addict frantically

digging for valuables in order to score his next hit.

NARRATOR: Does this video show the moment a desperate,

drug-crazed digger was disturbed?

When you look at the hole that was left behind,

it doesn't look like whoever was doing this digging managed

to unearth what they were looking for.

It's still quite a shallow hole,

and it begs the question if they were interrupted

this time, will they be back again?

NARRATOR: Now, Brussels, Belgium.

Winter, 2008.

A CCTV camera captures a building lobby

at the end of an ordinary working day.

People are leaving the office for the day, and they're taking

their time going through the revolving door.

WOLSHON: And there is a group of men.

It looks like they're entering one at a time.

NARRATOR: Then, as the first man enters the door...

Bam! Just explodes!

Whoa!

NARRATOR: The door is savagely snapped shut on

the man, showering him in glass.

The revolving door just collapses in on itself.

How in the world does this happen?

It's unclear from the footage if he's seriously hurt.

The guy's in shock.

He's staggering over to the front desk, and he's got to

be a lacerated everyone.

I can't imagine the amount of

damage that could do to someone's face.

NARRATOR: But what caused these doors to close around the man?

Maybe this is what we mean by being at death's door.

WOLSHON: There's glass that's been thrown everywhere.

Is this some kind of an attack?

NARRATOR: Coming up, Matt Kutcher

and his team have a shattering experience.

I feel a storm coming.

NARRATOR: And a terrifying thing emerges from the toilet.

That is literally the stuff of nightmares.

NARRATOR: A surveillance camera captures

a revolving door exploding on an office worker.

Man, that poor guy.

It's like the garbage compactor from Star Wars.

NARRATOR: The office can be a dangerous place.

More than 5,000 Americans are killed

by fatal work-related injuries every year.

But data analyst Liberty Vittert wonders

if this is really an accident.

Doors shouldn't spontaneously explode like this.

So, my first thought is that it

might be some sort of booby trap.

NARRATOR: In America,

over 15 perfect of all workplace fatalities are intentional,

some carried out by vengeful workers or ex-employees.

And here in Belgium, there's a history of

people creating booby traps with deliberate malice in mind.

In 2002, a retired Belgian engineer

filled his entire home with booby traps.

NARRATOR: Investigation of the man's three-story home

reveals a total of 19 death traps,

including a harmless-looking but lethal pile of

dinner plates and an exploding crate of beer.

It's like a really brutal version of "Home Alone,"

where the traps are deadly.

The booby traps were intended to kill his entire family.

However, he was discovered by police after being

the victim of one of his own traps.

Poetic justice, if you ask me.

Revolving doors don't just collapse on

themselves randomly.

Could this have been intentional?

NARRATOR: But Greg Szulgit takes a closer look at the footage

and sees a detail that seems to rule out a trap.

We see the woman walk through the door just prior.

So, if it were a booby trap, it should have sprung on her.

There must be something else going on here,

NARRATOR: Szulgit discovers that the revolving door, invented in

Philadelphia in 1888, has a history of gruesome accidents.

Many deaths have actually been caused by revolving doors,

where the person gets trapped,

but the mechanism keeps going forward.

Usually, the types of injuries that we would see

in a revolving door would be brain or head injuries.

It's often children who are the most vulnerable.

In 2004, a six-year-old boy ran ahead of

his mom and got into one of these revolving doors.

He managed to get his head stuck.

NARRATOR: The infrared safety sensors failed to detect

the boy, and the door keeps turning.

Tragically, he was crushed to death.

Considering the checkered past of revolving doors,

it's not surprising that something

like this could happen.

NARRATOR: But this bizarre incident isn't caused by

the doors continuing to revolve as a person is trapped.

the doors snap in on each other, enveloping

the man stuck inside.

[explosion blasts]

Matt Kutcher is a Hollywood explosives and special

effects expert with over 20 years experience.

Action!

NARRATOR: He suspects that some kind of powerful external force

could have caused the door to explode around

the unfortunate office worker.

It all looks pretty normal.

Just another day at the office there --

or trying to leave the office.

Oh! [laughs]

That looks pretty wild, man.

You know, something hits the glass here, and you can

tell it's tempered, because the way it all shatters

into pieces, right?

Look at that -- the glass just explodes around the guy.

It actually snaps this far outer one,

and it slams into the secondary.

NARRATOR: Kutcher notices the people in the video are

wearing heavy coats, as if prepared for severe weather.

You know, do you think it's windy enough outside there that

a high wind could slam these doors hard enough

to get them to smash like that?

I think it's possible.

NARRATOR: Modern buildings are designed to withstand

ferocious weather, but could a safety design

feature have gone horribly wrong?

It seems like they built in a safety feature

there that allows the doors to, like, spring shut quickly,

so they could get out, like in the case of a fire.

But in this case, I think the wind and the pressure --

safety became an accident.

NARRATOR: Kutcher wants to test his theory.

KUTCHER: We're gonna have to generate some wind

to create that kind of force, something like

130 pounds or so, in order to get

our tempered glass to break like this.

You know what?

We ain't gonna know till we let it blow.

NARRATOR: Kutcher's team builds a replica of

the revolving doors seen in the video,

while Matt brings in the storm --

an industrial wind machine capable of generating

70 mile-per-hour gusts.

The tempered glass doors are designed to

fail when 130 pounds of pressure is applied.

The setup is ready.

All that's needed is a volunteer.

There you go.

Okay, Mr. Harris, let's get you into position.

Matthew, let's get the wind ready.

All right, son, turn on the wind.

NARRATOR: Kutcher waits for the wind machine

to rev up to speed.

All right, and let her rip

in 3, 2, 1 -- go!

NARRATOR: The 70-mile-per-hour wind

hits the doors, which act like a ship's sail,

catching the blast of air and putting pressure on

the safety mechanism until it fails,

triggering a violent explosion of glass.

Wow, man, that's pretty cool.

-Glass everywhere. -Yeah, at least it didn't

shatter your expectations.

You've been waiting to say that all day, haven't you?

NARRATOR: The collapse of Kutcher's door closely

matches the CCTV footage from the lobby.

Well, there's one thing we've proved here -- with enough wind,

we can get these doors to slam shut, and violently.

That mechanism on the door was

totally overpowered by the wind, wasn't it?

We definitely proved that here with the fan.

Absolutely.

NARRATOR: Kutcher's experiment demonstrates how

a well-intentioned safety feature can

quickly turn a revolving door into snapping jaws of death.

You know, I think from here on out,

I'm gonna avoid all these revolving doors.

NARRATOR: Now, Alor Setar, Malaysia.

October 6th, 2017.

A man finds a pulsating black beast inside his house.

Ugh! just looking at that gives me creeps.

Ah, that's disgusting.

What is that?

NARRATOR: Its dark color almost seems to absorb the light.

That is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.

That is literally the stuff of nightmares.

NARRATOR: This slithering creature looks like

nothing encountered by humans before.

MONTANARI: Why is it coming towards them?

You'd expect a wild animal to be scared of humans.

NARRATOR: It appears to probe the floor as it goes,

as if in search of a meal.

If this thing came out of my bathroom,

I would be gone.

NARRATOR: As if this strange, writhing object

wasn't scary enough,

the family discovers this thing in a room

with a locked door.

If this room was locked,

how on earth did a creature of

this size manage to get inside?

NARRATOR: The doors were bolted.

The windows were closed, but the seat of the toilet was up.

It's easy to think that this is just a one-way passage,

but in reality, it's not.

NARRATOR: Coming up, slithering beasts

that slide out of the sewers.

VITTERT: If man-eating animals can invade our houses

through the toilet,

then every man, woman, and child is in danger.

NARRATOR: A frightened family film as

a terrifying thing emerges from their toilet.

Liberty Vittert discovers that our toilets make

a convenient porcelain portal for opportunistic

home invaders.

VITTERT: If a creature can fit in the drain pipes,

they can get in your house -- in 2008,

a woman in London was bitten by a rat while sitting on

the toilet.

She falls to the floor in agony, saying it felt like

she was jabbed by a needle.

And there was a rat, about 9 inches long,

and I've got a plunger

and a bottle of bleach, trying to push it down,

because there was a couple of others there, as well.

She called the exterminator for help, but was told there

was a three-week wait list.

NARRATOR: But this is no rat.

It really pays to look twice before you sit on the john.

NARRATOR: Biologist Carin Bondar suspects this might be

a dangerous creature that has

made itself at home in sewers all across tropical parts

of the world.

Snakes can actually navigate the entire sewer system.

They can fit easily into pipes and crevices and small places,

and what's more, they really like it there.

NARRATOR: Some snakes can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes,

meaning a sewer's

water-filled pipes are no obstacle.

And this wouldn't be the first case

of a snake in the sewage system.

There was a case as recently as 2020 in Thailand where

a woman sat down on the toilet and was bitten by a python.

They talk about having a snake in the grass --

how about a snake in the toilet?

LOVELL: What's particularly creepy about the idea of a snake

in the toilet bowl is that they're catching us

at our most vulnerable, with our pants down.

NARRATOR: But this creature's flaccid appearance is unusual

for a snake.

MONTANARI: This doesn't look like your run-of-the-mill snake.

Its body is wide, and its skin looks

like it's a little bit baggy for its body.

NARRATOR: Although most species of snake have sleek,

streamlined bodies,

there are some that are wrinkly.

You only actually see this characteristic

on a small number of snake species,

and there's only one indigenous to this region that

has this characteristic.

That is the elephant trunk snake.

NARRATOR: The elephant trunk snake is an eight-foot

aquatic species that spends most of its life underwater.

This is a snake that would feel

right at home in your toilet bowl.

Their baggy skin gives them a lot of flexibility to

swim through the water, and they're covered

in pyramid-shaped scales.

NARRATOR: This unusual skin doesn't just make

the elephant trunk snake a good swimmer.

It also makes them formidable hunters.

KASKY: These snakes are not venomous,

but they don't have to be.

Their pointy scales means that when they start to

constrict their prey, there is no escape.

NARRATOR: These scales act like a natural bear trap that holds

the prey in place while the snake coils its powerful

muscles around them.

Even pythons don't have that kind of extra leverage.

NARRATOR: Although most people have a fear of venomous snakes,

their constrictor cousins can be just as lethal.

Large snakes, when they captured their prey,

they don't have teeth designed to crush their prey,

so they have to swallow their prey whole.

NARRATOR: Unlike a mammal's jaw that is built for brute force,

a snake's jaw is rigged with tendons,

ligaments, and muscles that allow it to stretch and flex in

order to consume large prey.

They've even been known to swallow other

large apex predators.

Scientists x-rayed a python after it had eaten an entire

alligator and found that it

took one week for it to turn the entire animal,

plus its scales, to mush.

NARRATOR: Breaking down an entire alligator in just

a matter of days

places an enormous strain on the snake.

The snake's heart, kidneys, and small intestines grew

to double the size to help with digestion.

NARRATOR: A large python can swallow an adult

human being in less than an hour.

In 2017, 25-year-old

Akbar Salubiro from Indonesia suffers

this grim fate after

his friends discover his body

inside the stomach of a 23-foot-long

reticulated python.

Although a python this size could squeeze

the life out of someone in minutes,

they have been known to swallow

their prey while it's still alive.

I mean, what a horrific way to go.

You wake up incapacitated, inside the body of a snake.

That's not a good way to go.

NARRATOR: Elephant trunk snakes are normally shy

and elusive, but this one seems to be making

a beeline for the family.

A snake on its own is terrifying enough.

But if this one is extra bloodthirsty,

those people need to get out of there.

NARRATOR: The man risks his safety to cajole

and steer the snake out of his home.

He and his family escape unharmed,

but fear that this giant from the toilet could return.

If these creatures can break into our homes through

our toilets, who's to say

they can't slither into our bedrooms while we sleep?

I don't know if I'll be able to go to the bathroom

alone ever again.