Mysteries at Bedtime

Shortly after midnight on the morning of Tuesday the 15th of November 1966, in the small Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the county of Mason, two young married couples in a black 1957 Chevrolet drove out along State Route 62 to see what there was to see at the abandoned munitions plant seven miles north of town. The plant had been decommissioned since the end of the Second World War. It was known, to everyone in Mason County, as the TNT Area. It consisted of several hundred acres of overgrown vegetation, crumbling concrete storage bunkers, and an abandoned power plant building. The four young people in the car were Roger Scarberry and his wife Linda, and Steve Mallette and his wife Mary. Roger was driving. It was a Monday night rolling over into a Tuesday morning. They had been out. On the drive back into town, they had decided to take the long way home, past the TNT Area. As they approached the abandoned power plant building at approximately five minutes past midnight, their headlights fell on what appeared to be two red points of light standing beside the road. Roger slowed the car. The four of them looked out through the windscreen. The two red points of light, they realised as they got closer, were not lights. They were eyes. The eyes belonged to a figure that was standing perfectly still at the side of the road, watching them. The figure was, in Roger Scarberry's later description to police, shaped like a man, but bigger. Approximately six or seven feet tall. It was covered in a dark grey substance that might have been feathers, or might have been skin, or might have been something else entirely. Behind its back, folded, were what appeared to be a pair of very large wings. For a moment, the four young people in the car sat and looked at it. Then the figure moved. The story of the 13 months that followed, in which more than 100 people across Mason County reported sightings of the same creature. Of the extraordinary investigation conducted by American paranormal researcher John Keel. Of the disturbing dreams that spread through Point Pleasant in the autumn of 1967. And of the terrible event that occurred, in the darkness of the early evening of Friday the 15th of December 1967, exactly 13 months and one day after the first sighting, that killed 46 people and, in a strange coincidence that has never been explained, ended the Mothman sightings entirely.

At approximately 11 o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 11th of October 1973, two men walked into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in the small Gulf Coast city of Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told the sheriff on duty that a few hours earlier, on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, they had been abducted by aliens. The older of the two men was Charles Hickson. He was 42 years old. He was a former military man. He was a shipyard fitter at the local Walker Shipyard. The younger was Calvin Parker. He was 19 years old. He was Hickson's co-worker. Neither of them, prior to that Thursday evening, had ever given a moment's thought to flying saucers. They had brought with them, to the sheriff's office, two catfish. They had, they explained, been fishing on the river when it happened. They had brought the catfish as evidence that the fishing part of their story, at least, was true. The sheriff, a man named Fred Diamond, listened to them describe a piercing sound in the air, blue lights on the water, an oval-shaped craft hovering silently at the edge of the river, and three creatures with grey folded skin, no visible eyes, and pincer-like claws for hands, who had paralysed them, floated them aboard the craft, and subjected them to a medical examination before returning them to the pier. Sheriff Diamond assumed, as any sheriff in Mississippi in 1973 would have assumed, that it was a hoax. He then, in the way that experienced law enforcement officers deal with suspected hoaxes, decided to test it. He put both men in an interview room. He ran a hidden tape recorder. He left them alone, expecting to catch them laughing. What he captured, on that tape, was two men, believing themselves to be unobserved, still absolutely terrified. Fifty-three years later, that tape has been recovered from a lost archive, listened to by researchers, and analysed alongside polygraph results, radiation testing, multiple corroborating witnesses, and the testimony of an American astronomer who had spent his career debunking UFO claims and who described this one, in careful language, as credible and deeply puzzling. The story of a night on the Pascagoula River in October 1973, of two ordinary men who reported an extraordinary experience, and of a mystery that has, in the 52 years since it happened, never been explained.

On the evening of Monday the 15th of August 1977, in a field outside the small town of Delaware, Ohio, a radio telescope the size of three football fields was listening to the sky. There were no astronomers present. The telescope could not be steered. It sat on the ground, pointed straight up, and let the rotation of the Earth do its work for it. As the planet turned, patches of the night sky drifted, slowly, across its stationary field of view. At approximately 22:16 that evening, the telescope was scanning a patch of sky in the constellation Sagittarius. At that moment, a signal reached it. It was narrow. It was strong. It was almost exactly at 1420 megahertz, which is the natural emission frequency of neutral hydrogen. The hydrogen line. The frequency that in 1959, two physicists at Cornell University had predicted, in the pages of the journal Nature, would be the exact frequency that any alien civilisation trying to contact humanity would logically choose. The signal rose in intensity over 36 seconds. It peaked at approximately 30 times the background noise of the surrounding cosmos. Then it fell in intensity over the following 36 seconds. And then, at 22:17, it was gone. Three days later, a former physics professor named Jerry Ehman, working at the observatory as an unpaid volunteer, sat down at his desk to review the printouts. He found a vertical column of numbers and letters that made him take his red ballpoint pen, circle the sequence, and write, in the margin, a single word. Wow! It is, as of 2026, the closest thing that any radio telescope on Earth has ever recorded to the exact kind of signal that scientists have, since 1959, expected an alien civilisation to send. It has never, in the 48 years since it was detected, been observed again.

At approximately 7:15 in the evening on Friday the 12th of September 1952, three young boys were playing in the schoolyard of Flatwoods Elementary School, in the small Appalachian town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. It was almost fully dark. One of them looked up. A bright, pulsating object was streaking across the sky. It appeared to descend and crash on a nearby hillside, on the property of a local farmer. The boys ran home to tell their mother, 27-year-old Kathleen May. Kathleen called on her 17-year-old cousin, a National Guardsman named Eugene Lemon. Two other local boys joined the group. The family dog, Rickie, came along. Seven of them altogether. Six boys, one mother, one dog. What they said they found in a clearing at the top of the hill has become one of the most persistently unsettling paranormal encounters in American history. They said they saw a creature. They said it was ten feet tall. They said its head was shaped like an ace of spades, glowing red and orange in the dark. They said it emitted a foul, sulphurous mist that burned their throats and eyes. They said it did not walk. It glided toward them. By the time they got back to the May family home, six of the seven witnesses were vomiting. Their eyes were red. Their throats were swollen. The dog was cowering. The local sheriff came. The local newspaper editor came, with a shotgun. Multiple neighbours reported strange lights that night. Nothing physical was ever found at the site. But for the rest of their lives, all seven witnesses would stand by exactly what they had seen. And nearly 74 years later, no one has ever definitively explained what it was.

On the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of August 1901, two English women stepped off a train at Versailles, near Paris, on holiday together. One was 55-year-old Charlotte Anne Moberly, the first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. The other was 38-year-old Eleanor Jourdain, her incoming Vice Principal. They toured the palace. They found it uninspiring. They opened their guidebook and decided to walk to the smaller chateau at the end of the grounds, the Petit Trianon, which had once been the private retreat of Marie Antoinette. They took a wrong turn at an unmarked lane. And over the following 30 minutes, in the gardens of Versailles, they would claim to have seen palace bodyguards in green-grey coats and three-cornered hats, an old plough beside a farmhouse that had long since been demolished, and a woman sitting on a terrace sketching, in an old-fashioned summer dress and a shady white hat. Moberly would come to believe that the woman was Marie Antoinette herself. Neither of them knew, at the time, that the date they had chosen was the 109th anniversary of the fall of the French monarchy. Sixty years of research followed. A book was published in 1911. It became one of the most famous ghost stories in the English language. And to this day, no one has ever been able to prove or disprove what the two women said they had seen.

On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. The slow, wet sound of a man breathing his last breaths from somewhere above the Earth. Over the following years, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia would record eight more transmissions just like it. Morse code SOS signals from spacecraft in trouble. A capsule drifting into deep space. A female voice, calm at first and then terrified, counting down numbers in Russian as her capsule appeared to burn up around her. They were the dying breaths of Soviet cosmonauts on missions that, officially, never happened. Or they were one of the most extraordinary fabrications of the Cold War. Sixty years on, no one has been able to decide which.

A young father in Vermont was changing his eighteen-month-old son's nappy when the little boy looked up at him and said something that no toddler should be able to say. Daddy, when I was your age, I used to change your nappies. His father searched his face for a smile. There was none. The little boy looked back at him with the calm certainty of a child stating a fact. And the strange thing was, his paternal grandfather had died eighteen months before the boy was born. The exact length of time it would take for a soul to return. In the months and years that followed, the little boy named Sam began saying things he could not possibly have known. About kitchen appliances. About cars. About a great aunt who had been murdered sixty years before. This is the story of one of the most studied cases of childhood past-life memory in modern science. Investigated, documented, and to this day, never explained.

High on a hillside above the River Esk in Cumbria stands one of the oldest occupied houses in England. Muncaster Castle has been home to the Pennington family for over 800 years. A king once sheltered here after losing his throne. A cruel jester named Tom Fool once stalked its grounds. A young carpenter was beheaded in its stables. A housemaid was murdered on the road outside its main gate. And in a quiet room at the end of a first floor corridor, where dark tapestries hang from the walls and iron fire dogs shaped like devils' heads guard the fireplace, an academic named James Cartland heard something in 1988 that he would never be able to explain. The sound of a child crying. The soft voice of a woman singing. And the slow realisation that the room he was sleeping in had once been a nursery, where a little girl had died over a century before.