Tonight we're going back to basics. Six encounter stories from six different states, told the way they were meant to be told. Around the fire. In the dark. The way witnesses have been sharing these experiences for generations.

You'll hear from Daryl, a long haul trucker who watched something cross Interstate Ninety in Montana back in nineteen ninety-seven. Something that stepped over a guardrail like it was nothing and looked back at him with eyes that held more intelligence than any animal he'd ever seen.

Wade was a deputy in rural Arkansas when he responded to a call about something stealing corn from an old farmer's field. What he saw standing at the tree line that September night in two thousand and twelve changed everything he thought he knew about the woods behind those farms.

Colleen spent eleven years as a park ranger in the North Cascades before she got a frantic call from a family trapped in a rental cabin. Something was circling their cabin at night. Pounding on the walls. Screaming in the darkness. She thought it was a bear until she pressed her flashlight to that back window.

Hank hunted the same Michigan property for thirty years. Opening day of rifle season in nineteen eighty-nine, something walked into his clearing. He had it in his scope. Finger on the trigger. And he couldn't pull it. He told me why, and his answer has stayed with me ever since.

Terry was hiking solo on the Oregon coast when she realized something was following her through the old growth. For twenty minutes it kept pace with her through the trees before it finally let her see it.

 What happened next surprised even her. And Earl, an eighty-one-year-old Kentucky farmer who wrote me a series of letters in nineteen ninety-six about something that came around his hollow back in seventy-three.

Something the old timers in those mountains had always known about but never talked about.

Six witnesses. Six encounters. Six lives changed forever.