Original subtitles

Throughout history, people have gone missing.

But some of those people insist they didn't simply disappear,

they were taken.

Like the man who wakes up in the wilderness

surrounded by huge, hairy creatures.

Albert is awakened to something

picking him up

inside the sleeping bag itself.

He's too scared to scream

and he can tell from the rhythm of the stride that whatever has him

is walking upright on two feet.

Or the farmer yanked off his tractor

into a close encounter he would never forget.

Antônio is shivering in fear

and wondering what's gonna happen next.

He says this female-being-type thing enters the room,

and she's not wearing anything.

Before he knows it,

he is engaged with her...

twice.

How about a man who comes back

from the dead?

This sorcerer dug up Clairvius

and pulls him out of his coffin.

And then, he forces Clairvius

to swallow this strange, burning paste.

He falls into a dreamlike state

where he has no will of his own.

These are the encounters of people who say they were snatched,

stories so strange they can only be

unbelievable.

As a rule, I'd put elves on my list of adorable things.

They help Santa.

They even make delicious cookies in tree stumps.

But back in Iceland,

there are centuries-old tales of hidden elves

that have a much, much darker side.

For centuries, Icelanders have told the story

of this new young mother who lives on a farm.

She lays her baby in a cradle

and ducks out to do some chores,

maybe pick some eggs, that kind of thing.

When she comes back,

she starts interacting with her baby, but she can kinda tell

something is off.

But she can't quite put her finger on it.

According to the tale,

the mother looks her baby in the eye.

She expects to see the usual

soft, joyful, happy gaze from her baby.

Instead, this baby's eyes

are sort of tracking her

with this unsettling gaze.

When the baby cries,

he's got this raspy, older voice

that she doesn't recognize.

So, being a good mother, she lifts her baby up

to try to comfort it, and she has to catch her breath because, suddenly,

the child's a lot heavier than it should be.

As the days pass,

more odd things continue to happen.

The baby stares up at the rafters

and just bursts out laughing.

But it's not the chuckles of a sweet little baby.

It's like a cackle of an old man.

She's really suspicious.

And she's, you know, staring this kid in the eyes,

and she says to herself...

"This is not my baby."

When the neighbors come to visit to see the baby,

one of them mutters the words everyone's dreading...

"Skiptingur."

This is an Icelandic word that means "changeling."

It seems somebody or something has swapped her baby

for a pint-sized impostor.

The mother knows exactly who to blame...

the Huldufólk.

AKA, "the hidden people."

Now, in Icelandic folklore,

these are elves that the local people say

live in Iceland's rocks and hills.

They look human-like.

They have their own families and homes.

They herd animals, they farm.

But the big difference is,

is that when these hidden people have cause,

they're known to wreak havoc on the humans.

Sometimes, the parents might have just offended the Huldufólk,

moved their rock homes, knocked down their tree, or,

or something so that the elves might seek some sort of retribution.

So, the way the story goes,

is that these hidden folk will steal a baby from a cradle...

...and they will leave behind an elf,

that is typically sickly or elderly,

disguised as the original baby.

So what's a mom to do when her kid's been hijacked by the Huldufólk?

Now, the remedy, according to tradition,

is pretty extreme.

You're supposed to frighten the changeling,

threaten it, or maybe even expose it to extreme heat or cold.

The goal is to make the changeling so uncomfortable

that it reveals itself.

What this mom does,

is make a ridiculous, unpleasant meal of gruel

in eggshells,

and gives that to the baby to eat.

The baby takes one look at this ridiculous meal

and starts to complain,

and that's when she's got 'em.

The elves then have to return her baby

and take this one back.

Stories like this may sound like ancient superstition,

but belief in the hidden people remains

very much alive and well.

Some surveys show

that more than half of Icelandic citizens

still believe in the Huldufólk, today.

They take great pains

so as not to incur the wrath of the Huldufólk.

But the hidden people aren't just feared.

Some believe they can also be surprisingly generous.

People do believe that if you treat the Huldufólk right,

you might be rewarded.

Your livestock may thrive,

the fishing may improve,

and you might even get that big promotion.

But if you treat the Huldufólk wrong,

you might come home one day,

go to your kid's Pack 'n Play,

and see a stranger looking right back at ya.

Moody elves snatching babies might sound like bad luck,

but imagine a creature powerful enough

to carry off a grown man in his sleep?

In the summer of 1924,

prospector Albert Ostman decides to take a little vacation

that's gonna consist of some fishing,

some hunting, and some panning for gold.

He sets up camp,

tucks into his bedroll, conks out,

dreaming of striking it rich.

Albert is awakened to something

picking him up

inside the sleeping bag itself.

He's being carried,

and he's moving,

but he's not being dragged like a bear would do.

He is on something big and strong enough

to carry a full-grown man.

He's too scared to scream,

and frankly, can't even spare the breath.

And he can tell from the rhythm of the stride

that whatever has him is walking upright on two feet.

After what feels like several hours to Albert,

the movement suddenly stops.

And he hits the ground with a thud.

That's when he sees the silhouette

of this eight-foot tall creature.

It's large, covered in hair,

and is incredibly muscular.

But as he looks around,

he realizes the creature isn't alone.

He describes four different creatures...

two large ones and two small ones.

Speaking in some sort of strange,

unknown language,

like they're almost angry.

Albert suddenly blurts out,

"Hey! What do you want with me?"

They don't answer.

But they seem to be getting more angry.

Albert has spent years in the British Columbia forest,

and he's never seen anything like this.

But he does recall hearing a legend.

On a previous trip, his guide told him about

a creature from local lore called the "Sasq'ets,"

or Sasquatch.

In the Halkomelem language,

that means, "hairy man,"

or, "wild man."

At the time, Albert scoffed at the idea of the mountain giants.

But he's not laughing now.

And he doesn't want to wait around

to find out why they took him.

Albert notices that the big creature who took him

also grabbed his supplies.

In his pack, Albert has a full can of snuff.

And snuff packs a serious nicotine punch.

And so, he takes it out and makes kind of a show of like,

"Ooh, this is really good! This is amazing!"

So, this creature takes the tin and he downs the entire thing.

Albert says that he sits back and watches the big guy,

and, sure enough, in a short time,

he looks like he is pumped up on nicotine

and getting worse.

The Sasquatch starts wailing, screeching,

and it starts going towards the water source.

And, of course, the other three follow.

Well, Albert said, "This is my chance."

So he jumps up, grabs his rucksack,

grabs his gun, and goes to run off,

but the mother gets in his way to stop him,

giving enough time to shell one bullet

and fire just above her head.

And that freaks her out enough to get out of his way.

And he essentially just starts running.

Albert eventually hears the sound of a motor in the distance.

So, he beelines it towards that motor

and stumbles into a logging camp.

The loggers help Albert,

but he keeps his mouth shut about the Sasquatch kidnapping

because he's afraid that they're gonna think he's insane.

Albert Ostman keeps his story to himself

for decades...

until Bigfoot fever grips America.

In 1957,

various "Sasquatch sighting" reports

start being published in newspapers in British Columbia.

And when Albert's reading these reports he goes, "Wait a minute,

that's those things that captured me back in 1924."

So, he decides to come forward and tell his story.

The local press loves it, and the story goes public.

The local government officials

even ask Albert to make a statement about his encounter.

Albert never changes the story,

never backs down.

Until his death in 1975,

he maintains that he was kidnapped by Sasquatch.

Getting kidnapped by Bigfoot

is not exactly the wilderness experience most people are looking for.

Coming up, one man loses his life

without ever dying.

He can hear the doctors.

He can hear his family, wailing.

And he can definitely feel the coffin being lowered into the ground,

and hears the dirt being piled on top.

Most consider death a final goodbye.

But it's not that way for everybody.

Imagine being snatched and trapped in limbo

between life and death for years.

Witness the unbelievable story of Clairvius Narcisse.

It is 1980,

in the village of L'Estère in Haiti,

and Angelina Narcisse

is making her usual rounds in the town marketplace.

And she notices that there's a man lingering behind her.

She tries to ignore him, but then he speaks.

And he calls her by her childhood nickname,

which is a name that she hasn't heard in years.

So, she takes a closer look at the guy,

and sees that he doesn't look healthy at all.

He's gaunt with hollow cheeks.

But she recognizes something...

"Oh, my God, this is my brother, Clairvius!"

Except that's impossible,

because Clairvius died

eighteen years earlier.

Angelina saw the pallbearers

lowering her brother's coffin into the ground.

So, this had to be someone else.

The man in front of her starts trying to prove his identity,

and he describes episodes

that only a close family member would know,

things that happened to them when they were little kids.

It's the kind of detail

that just cannot be faked.

When Angelina asks how this could be possible,

Clairvius tells her the story starts 18 years earlier.

So, her brother rewinds back to April of 1962.

That's when Clairvius had this bitter fight

with her other brother over some inherited land.

By this time,

Clairvius has been struck by a violent illness.

He's got fever, body aches, and bloody coughing fits.

He slips into a coma,

and things just get worse from there.

In May 1962,

Clairvius Narcisse is pronounced dead

by two American-trained physicians.

His body stays in the morgue for about 20 hours,

and then it's placed in a coffin and sent to the cemetery.

But, Clairvius says that his mind

never shuts down.

He's immobile,

but conscious.

He can hear the doctors.

He can hear his family, wailing.

And he can definitely feel the terror

as he experiences the coffin being lowered into the ground

and hears the dirt being piled on top.

After several hours,

suddenly Clairvius hears scraping.

And then, the coffin opens.

He finds himself staring at a bokor,

which is a Vodou sorcerer.

So, this sorcerer dug up Clairvius,

and just reaches in and pulls him out of his coffin.

And then, he forces Clairvius to swallow this strange, burning paste.

Clairvius says he falls into a trance

or dreamlike state

where he has no will of his own.

In Haitian Vodou,

a zombie isn't like what you see in the movies:

a dead person that's come back to life and want to eat brains.

It's a living person

whose body and soul have been captured

and enslaved.

He says that he's transported to a sugar plantation

among other workers who are in this state

of just silence.

From sunrise to sunset,

Clairvius and all of these others

are just working nonstop.

Clairvius remains a prisoner

for two long years,

until a shocking turn of events.

One of the zombies is able

to break out of the trance temporarily

and kill the bokor.

And once the sorcerer is dead, the spell collapses.

Clairvius and the other workers are now just running off into the night.

And as Clairvius gets his faculties back,

he starts to realize that

this was all done to him on purpose.

He believes that the bokor was hired to kill him

or turn him into "a zombie."

And Clairvius comes to the conclusion

that the person who hired the bokor

was his own brother

who he had that inheritance fight with.

And when Clairvius learns that his brother has died,

he feels like it's safe

to go back home.

And that's how he ends up back in the marketplace

calling his sister by her childhood name.

Clairvius' bizarre story inspires the novel

The Serpent and the Rainbow,

which is later made into a film by director Wes Craven.

Although Clairvius lives for another 14 years,

he can never get back the two years he lost

as one of the undead.

But Clairvius isn't the only person to return from the brink of death

with an incredible story to tell.

It's the winter of 1943...

...and a young Austrian soldier

by the name of Karl Skala

is curled up as tight as he can in his foxhole

as hot metal death

rains down around him.

Skala and his unit

are fighting along the Eastern Front,

and it is brutal.

Skala has seen men frozen to death in foxholes.

He has witnessed entire units wiped out in tank assaults.

He has seen all the brutality of war.

By this point, Karl is so battle-weary,

he thinks there's nothing that can shock him anymore.

But what happens next

will stay with him for the rest of his life.

A Soviet artillery shell lands very close to their foxhole.

Karl is smashed by the blast wave,

but his buddy fares much worse.

There's nothing Karl can do

but hold his friend

and watch him breathe his last.

Then, just as his friend takes his final breath,

Karl undergoes a profound experience of his own.

Allegedly, Karl feels something twist

inside his chest and then snap.

And then there's this dramatic feeling of being yanked upwards.

It's like he's been grabbed from his foxhole

by an unseen force.

That's when Karl realizes

he's not floating alone.

Not only can he see his comrade

down in the foxhole bleeding to death,

but the man is actually right next to him...

except he looks perfectly fine.

He seems peaceful.

Karl says he watches his friend

continue to float upward

and disappear in what seems like

a burst of bright color in the sky.

Karl describes wanting to follow his friend,

to get away from the war and the brutality

and continue upward into this beautiful light.

Karl wants to follow his friend.

But he says there's something inside of him that prevents him.

It's not his time.

He belongs here.

According to Karl, it's at that moment

that he feels himself

sucked back into his body.

And he's immediately right in it again.

All the sounds, the explosions, the screams,

the machine gun fire,

the noises of battle.

Karl says that maybe he imagined it.

But then, he takes note of his surroundings,

the position of his friend's body.

Everything that he saw from the air

is now confirmed on the ground.

Karl Skala survives The Great War with minor injuries

and a major tale to tell.

So, what exactly did Karl experience in that foxhole?

These days, experts have a name for it...

a "Shared Death Experience."

This is when a living person

experiences the sensations of someone else's death.

There are documented cases going back to the 1800s

where people have experienced another person's death

and were snatched from the world of the living

into the world of the recently deceased.

Most commonly,

this comes from people who share a very intimate relationship.

But, occasionally, the shared death experience

is with someone who is just in the wrong place

at the right time,

like a doctor, or a nurse, or a paramedic.

Incredibly, there are even more modern accounts

of people who say they've endured this.

In 2000,

end-of-life therapist William Peters

is reading to a hospice patient

when he undergoes the experience of floating out of his body

and above the scene below.

To his astonishment,

the patient is floating alongside him,

and the patient looks at him very serenely.

And then, Peters is suddenly sucked back into his own body.

When he looks at the patient now lying silently in bed,

he realizes that the patient has just now passed away.

As terrifying as it might sound

to be yanked into this ride to the Great Beyond,

most people who claim a shared death experience

say they now go through life without a fear of death.

Whatever you call it,

riding shotgun toward the Great Beyond

still sounds pretty harrowing.

Coming up,

it's not a bird,

it's not a plane,

and it's definitely not Superman.

There she is, levitating

twelve stories

above Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Witnesses even reported seeing

a woman in a white nightgown

hovering above the streets.

Farmers are used to strange sights out in their fields...

lights in the sky, animals behaving oddly,

maybe the occasional unexplained crop circle.

But Brazilian farmer Antônio Vilas-Boas

claims that something far stranger happens to him

in the fall of 1957.

Antônio Vilas-Boas

is out on his farm plowing with his tractor.

October is springtime in Brazil,

but it's already scorching hot during the day.

So, a lot of farmers work in the evening and at night to avoid the heat.

As Antônio plows,

he says he spots a bright red light in the sky.

At first, it's like the size of a star.

But then, it comes in closer and closer

and getting larger and larger.

The light dives down

and stops in front of him about 50 feet in front of his tractor.

And this is the first time

that Antônio can really get a good look at it.

Suddenly, he's facing

this egg-shaped, elongated object.

At that point, he tries to start his tractor.

The tractor doesn't start.

According to Antônio, he jumps up,

and starts running away as fast as he can.

Just as Antônio attempts to flee,

several beings snatch him from behind.

And then drag him, kicking and screaming, into their craft.

Once inside, they bring him into a room

that looks very much like a medical examination room.

So then, he claims these things

scrub this weird, thick space goop all over him.

At this point,

Antônio is shivering in fear

and wondering what's gonna happen next.

And that's when he says that this female-being-type thing

enters the room, and just like him...

she's not wearing anything.

And according to Antônio,

the woman approaches him, before he knows it,

he is engaged with her, physically...

twice.

After a night he'll never forget,

or fully understand,

Antônio loses consciousness.

When he comes to, he's back in the field,

forever changed by his strange experience.

Antônio reports having a range of symptoms

over the next few weeks...

nightmares, headaches,

nausea, fatigue.

His body breaks out in strange lesions.

So, he goes to this doctor named Olavo Fontes.

He reports this encounter,

and then he starts to describe his symptoms.

Well, this doctor thinks that these symptoms

sound like radiation sickness,

and he believes Antônio's story.

Thanks to Fontes, reports of the alleged encounter

quickly become international news.

Antônio's alleged encounter occurred in the year 1957,

which makes it one of the first, if not the first,

alien abduction stories

that becomes widely known.

This is a full four years

before the Barney and Betty Hill abduction story

that broke in the United States.

Many of the characteristics

that have come to be associated with alien abduction stories,

the shape of the head,

the exam table,

the reproduction experiments,

they're already present in Antônio's story.

He might be "abductee zero."

Being abducted from a remote farm

with no witnesses is difficult to prove.

But imagine being snatched

right in the middle of the city that never sleeps?

It's a clear night on the Lower East Side of Manhattan

just after 3:00 a.m.

Linda Napolitano is asleep in her apartment.

She's woken up suddenly

by what she says is a very bright white-blue light

coming through her bedroom window.

As the light intensifies,

and out of the corner of her eyes,

she sees four small beings

come out from behind her bedroom curtain.

She describes them as having gray skin, large black eyes,

and narrow, expressionless faces.

According to Linda,

she suddenly just starts to levitate.

She floats to the window.

And this is particularly terrifying

because she lives on the 12th floor,

and she just floats straight through it.

So, there she is levitating,

in her nightgown,

twelve stories above

Manhattan's Lower East Side.

She says she is drawn up

into some sort of completely silent,

disc-shaped craft.

The bottom opens,

and she is taken inside the craft,

which then initiates a series of tests.

And the beings use these small, luminous wands

to scan and probe her

as they please.

Linda says that these beings

seem to communicate with her telepathically

and tell her,

in what must be an impossible instruction,

to stay calm.

After this encounter,

she says that she is lowered down out of the craft,

sent back through her window,

and back to her bed.

Desperate for answers,

and someone who might actually believe her,

Linda turns to UFO investigator Budd Hopkins.

The first thing Hopkins does

is to see if he can find any other witnesses

to what occurred outside Linda's apartment that night.

Budd reports that he gets responses

from 20 different people

who say they also saw strange lights

on the same night that Linda reported her abduction.

Budd says some of his witnesses

even reported seeing a woman in a white nightgown

hovering above the streets.

The natural question is,

why nobody phoned this in to the police.

And according to Budd,

people were afraid of looking crazy.

Hopkins spends years investigating Linda's case

and collecting the witness accounts.

He compiles everything he has

into a book called Witnessed.

Budd and Linda hit the talk show circuit

to promote the book.

A story as strange as this brings a tidal wave of mockery,

but they stick to their story.

They are unwavering.

They took me.

And they were your classic... greys.

There are obviously skeptics,

but if eyewitnesses are authentic,

this episode would have to be counted

among the most heavily witnessed UFO incidents in modern history.

Whether or not she was really abducted by aliens

in a city like New York,

it still might not be the strangest thing anyone's seen.

Linda never backs down on her tale,

even in the face of controversy,

right until she passes away in 2025.

Coming up,

a group of America's finest pilots

snatched from the skies.

The search crews don't find anything.

There's no wreckage, no oil slick,

no life rafts, there are no bodies.

That just doesn't happen.

For centuries, the Atlantic Ocean has swallowed ships, planes,

and people without warning.

Storms roll in.

Icebergs pop up out of nowhere.

Equipment fails.

But on one December afternoon in 1945,

the trouble starts with a single distress call.

Lieutenant Robert Cox,

a US Naval flight instructor,

is returning from a training mission from over the Bahamas

when over the radio, he hears

a crackling but very frightened message

from another Naval team

out on a similar training mission.

What he hears through the static is a voice that says,

"Both of my compasses are out,

and I'm trying to find Fort Lauderdale."

So, Cox alerts the Navy Air Station at Fort Lauderdale.

A few minutes later,

air traffic control receives another ominous message...

"We cannot be sure where we are.

"Repeat.

We cannot see land."

The voice on the radio belongs to Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor,

a flight instructor at the stick of his TBM Avenger Torpedo bomber.

Their mission is to fly east

to a bombing range in the Bahamas,

leave there and head north,

and then, turn back west to Florida.

There are a total of 14 airmen

spread across these three-seater bombers,

making up a group called "Flight 19."

Records show that the first leg of the exercise

is totally routine.

Planes drop their dummy bombs over the Bahamas,

and then they begin the return journey.

But the panicked radio transmissions prove

this routine training mission

has become anything but.

It's just before 4:00 p.m.

Air traffic control hears from one of the trainees

who sounds borderline hysterical.

He tells them, "We can't find west.

Everything looks strange, even the ocean."

If it's just one pilot becoming confused

or is fatigued and getting brain fog,

that's understandable.

But five pilots

across five different aircraft becoming confused and lost

at the same time?

That just doesn't make sense.

The Navy knows that Flight 19

can't stay in the air indefinitely.

The clock is ticking.

And then, the panicked voice of one of the trainees

comes over the radio, saying,

"It looks like we're entering white water.

We're completely lost."

The final message comes in at 6:20 p.m.

from Taylor's bomber, he says,

"All planes close up tight.

"We'll have to ditch unless landfall.

We'll all go down together."

What Taylor is telling his men

is that they're gonna attempt a water landing.

And by ditching their plane in a group,

that makes it a lot easier

for rescuers to find them.

There's more static...

and then, nothing.

All five bombers just vanish.

The Navy scrambles rescue aircraft

to Flight 19's last known position,

sending two Martin Mariner flying boats

to search for the men.

But an hour after the rescue planes take off,

the unthinkable happens.

One of the other planes goes radio silent, too!

One Martin Mariner returns, but the other just vanishes.

This is where all kinds of hell breaks loose.

With six aircraft now missing, the Navy responds

by launching one of the largest air and sea searches in history,

combing more than 250,000 square miles of Atlantic Ocean

and overland coastline.

The search crews don't find anything.

There's no wreckage.

There are no life rafts.

There are no bodies.

The planes seem to disappear without a trace.

For decades, the loss of Flight 19

remains one of aviation's most baffling mysteries.

How do six aircraft

and 27 men simply vanish?

Eventually, in 1964,

one writer offers a radical answer.

Vincent Gaddis publishes an article in Argosy magazine.

In the article, Gaddis describes a region of the Atlantic Ocean

where ships and planes have been disappearing

under pretty strange circumstances.

This area is bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico.

And the vanishings of Flight 19

are the centerpiece of the story.

It's in this article where Gaddis coins the phrase

"The Bermuda Triangle."

In 1974, the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle

explodes into public consciousness

when the author Charles Berlitz

writes a best-selling book on the subject.

A documentary soon follows the book,

and both of them talk about the subject of Flight 19,

which turns the topic into a global phenomenon.

Later, writers suggest that maybe it's time warps

or dimensional distortions in the triangle

that cause these planes to just vanish.

Some have even speculated

that maybe extraterrestrials

have just snatched the planes or the boats

out of the air and the water

and taken 'em off the planet.

There's all of these wild ideas that just cover the gamut,

but none of them really have any proof.

Military aircraft go down all the time

and there are mechanisms in place to find them.

But in this case, there is nothing available.

So we cannot even make a good guess as to what happened.

Coming up,

if you think losing five bombers is strange,

wait until you hear what one fisherman claims he caught.

The thing's like 100 feet long.

The men stab it with the harpoon.

It goes nuts.

They are in for a fight.

Not every strange encounter ends with humans being taken.

Sometimes we're the ones doing the taking.

And in 1852, one sea captain set out to capture something so massive,

it would make him a legend.

It's January 1852,

and Captain Charles Seabury is the captain of the whaling ship Monongahela.

She's in the doldrums around the equator and the Pacific,

when the watchman calls out

they've seen some white water.

They assume, being a whaling vessel,

that it's a whale.

And as they're getting closer,

they're like, "Whoa, this thing seems much bigger than a whale."

Thing's like 100 feet long or more.

And it goes under at one point,

and when it surfaces, they get a little bit better look at it.

And it is unlike anything

that Captain Seabury has ever seen.

This creature is two to three times as long as a typical whale.

And he says it moves in a strange, serpentine motion.

Most captains would turn rudder and run,

but Seabury does not.

To Seabury, it just sort of dawns on him

that this is his opportunity.

That if he can kill this sea monster,

then that will be his claim to fame.

But he knows he has to be able

to bring it back, or else he'll just get laughed right off the docks.

Without a body, this is just another fish story.

He orders the longboats into the water,

and the men are armed with harpoons.

They take along extra line

because you have no idea how deep this thing might dive.

So, the men paddle the longboats close to the creature

and then stab it with the harpoon.

It goes nuts.

They are in for a fight.

Chaos ensues.

Some of the boats get swamped,

and whalemen get tossed in the froth.

The men are able to get their lines to the Monongahela.

The creature is diving deep,

but it has harpoons stuck in its skin,

and those are lashed to the boat and it can't get away.

After a long battle,

the creature eventually becomes so exhausted,

it comes to the surface.

And when they pull it up to the side of the boat,

it is bigger than the boat itself.

It is about 130 feet long.

According to Seabury's account,

it's got a relatively wide body,

but it's tapered at the head and the tail.

And at the top of its crocodile-like head,

he says there are two blowholes showing that it is an air-breather,

like a whale.

Captain Seabury's description continues

that there's 100 or more teeth inside of its mouth.

The creature's way too big to bring back in one piece to port.

So the head is pickled

and preserved for the trip.

The men are ordered to take the body,

boil all the blubber and whatnot away,

in hopes of actually taking the bones and keeping those.

But the Monongahela never makes it home.

It's lost somewhere near Alaska.

Its name board is the only piece of wreckage that is ever recovered.

So, any proof of this sea monster

apparently went to the bottom of the ocean

along with the crew of the Monongahela.

So, how did this tale survive the sinking of the Monongahela?

Before the Monongahela is lost,

they encounter another ship called the Gypsy,

which is headed back to New Bedford.

And Seabury asked them to carry his mail back,

including the written description of his encounter.

And that's how the story gets out.

It's published in newspaper outlets throughout the world.

When the news of this hits the press,

it runs like wildfire.

It's an extraordinary account.

But many people consider this

just to be the ultimate fish story

because any evidence or proof of what happened

went down with the Monongahela,

which is, ironically, exactly what Seabury was afraid of

and the reason that he went to such efforts to preserve those pieces.

But then, according to experts,

after reading the descriptions,

what they may have caught is a Basilosaurus,

which is known as the serpent whale.

According to the fossil record,

the Basilosaurus existed about 50 million years ago.

And so, it's unlikely they're still around,

but not impossible?

Unfortunately, with no body,

no evidence that we can haul up onto the dock,

the truth is probably lost forever.

Surviving a sea serpent

just to get crushed by ice.

Sometimes the ocean fights to keep its secrets

one way or another.

Coming up,

a seaside paradise

hides a dark underground mystery.

Both men recalled seeing local boys who wouldn't be missed

being taken in and experimented on.

All of these boys are hooked up to strange machines and electrodes.

Fans of Stranger Things

might wonder how somebody could dream up a crazy story

of government experiments that target kids.

Well, sometimes truth

can be darker than fiction.

It's the early '80s in Montauk, New York.

It's a quiet vacation spot,

and kids have free run of the place.

This is the age before cell phones.

These kids don't need to check in with anybody.

They can just ride around all day on their BMX bikes,

and it's okay as long as you're home before dark.

Joe Loffreno, a 13-year-old boy,

is meeting up with a new buddy at the town arcade

where they're going to blow their allowance

playing Pac-Man and Space Invaders.

Joe's friend convinces him that they should get on their bikes

and ride out to this old abandoned Air Force base

called Camp Hero.

Joe's buddy is trying to coax him into going onto the base,

and Joe doesn't wanna look like a wimp,

so he agrees.

As they're exploring, he notices that

one of the doors on the concrete bunkers isn't locked.

According to Joe, they pry open that door,

and they go deep into this concrete bunker to explore.

It gets dark very quickly inside this bunker.

As the two boys go in, they get separated.

Joe starts calling out,

and he doesn't hear anything.

Suddenly, two grown men

come out of the darkness,

and they grab him,

and they drag him deeper into the bunker.

At this point,

Joe claims his memories become hazy,

pulled from scattered cubist flashes of terrifying images.

Joe says he remembers

being led into this really sparse examination room.

He says he sees other boys in this room,

and all of these boys are hooked up to strange machines and electrodes.

He doesn't remember much,

but he knows that he is petrified.

Joe is not the only young boy

who retains flashes of images from this strange experience.

And some report them in much greater detail.

There's another boy, Stewart Swerdlow,

who claims he was taken to Montauk

before he was even 10 years old.

According to Stewart,

he's subjected to cruel, even painful experiments.

Stewart comes to believe

that what these researchers are trying to do

is to break down his psyche

in the hopes of releasing some sort of special powers,

like remote viewing,

telekinesis, astral projection,

even time travel.

It may sound farfetched,

but some of the powers Stewart believed researchers were trying to unlock

were the subject of other real Cold War experiments.

There were verified military psyops,

psychic soldier programs taking place

in Fort Meade, Maryland at the time.

One was called Stargate,

and they trained in things like remote viewing and telekinesis.

But according to Preston Nichols

and Alfred Bielek,

official programs like Stargate were just the tip of the iceberg.

Preston and Alfred claimed

that they were working on something called the "Montauk Project,"

and while they were working on that project,

they witnessed these experiments being performed on these boys.

These witnesses say that young kids were used

because their brains are still forming,

so they'd be more susceptible.

Both Joe Loffreno and Stewart Swerdlow

say that they were returned home with no memory of these experiments.

And that those memories only came years later

after a lot of therapy and hypnosis.

In the end, Swerdlow and Nichols claim

that there were thousands of children subjected to these experiments.

The government has never really commented

on the idea that there are these bizarre experiments

going on at Montauk,

but they do insist that the radar tower

and the base are exactly what they appear to be,

just abandoned Cold War relics.

The bizarre legend of the Montauk boys

later inspires the creators of Stranger Things

to make this hit series,

which, of course, centers on government experiments

designed to exploit children's enhanced psychic abilities.

When that series was first announced,

it was called "The Montauk Project."

We've seen bloodthirsty beasts

that treat humans like takeout,

baby-swapping elves that wreak havoc,

even amorous aliens that demand extra close encounters.

These are the terrifying encounters

you might not make it back from.

Abductions so strange,

they are truly unbelievable.