State of the Unknown | Documentary Stories of Real Unexplained Encounters

In the late 1960s, fairgoers were invited to look through the glass at a strange figure frozen inside a refrigerated coffin. It was tall, humanlike, and covered in dark hair. The exhibit became known as the Minnesota Iceman.

In this episode of State of the Unknown: Fragments, Robert Barber explores the alleged Bigfoot body that drew the attention of cryptozoologists, the Smithsonian Institution, and the FBI. Two respected investigators believed they had examined an unknown human relative, while questions about the figure’s origin, ownership, and disappearance only made the story stranger.

Was the Minnesota Iceman a genuine cryptid discovery, an elaborate sideshow hoax, or something caught between the two? And why did the one piece of evidence that might have settled the question remain out of reach?

State of the Unknown is a paranormal podcast about true paranormal stories, cryptids, unexplained mysteries, Bigfoot sightings, and the people who encounter the unknown.

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Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

Some Ouija board stories disappear as soon as the planchette stops moving. Others keep returning, attached to the same strange name.

In this episode of State of the Unknown: Fragments, Robert Barber explores the Zozo demon legend, a modern paranormal story involving Ouija boards, alleged demonic encounters, and people who believed they had contacted something they couldn’t explain. Where did the name come from? Why has it appeared in so many accounts? And what is really happening when people say they’ve encountered Zozo?

State of the Unknown is a paranormal podcast about true paranormal stories, unexplained encounters, haunted history, and ordinary people who find themselves facing the unknown.

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

The Eliza Battle ghost ship legend is one of the most enduring paranormal stories connected to the American South. Along Alabama’s Tombigbee River, people have passed down a story about a steamboat, a terrible night, and something that may still appear on the water.

In this episode of State of the Unknown: Fragments, host Robert Barber explores the history and folklore surrounding the Eliza Battle. As the story moves from a documented river tragedy into the realm of ghost stories and unexplained sightings, one question remains: Why have people continued to report the same strange presence on the Tombigbee?

Is the legend simply a story shaped by memory and local tradition, or is there something about the Eliza Battle that has never completely disappeared?

State of the Unknown is a documentary paranormal podcast telling true paranormal stories about real people who encountered something they couldn’t explain.

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

The Ryan Hammons reincarnation case is one of the most compelling paranormal stories involving a child who claimed to remember a past life. Beginning in Oklahoma around 2008, four-year-old Ryan started asking his mother to take him home. But he didn’t mean the house where they lived. He meant Hollywood—a place he claimed to remember from another life.

In this episode of State of the Unknown: Fragments, host Robert Barber explores Ryan’s reported past-life memories and the investigation conducted by Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia. When Ryan pointed to an unidentified man in a photograph from a 1932 Hollywood movie and said, “That’s me,” one question remained: Could the stranger be identified—and could Ryan’s memories be connected to a life that had actually existed?

Was Ryan creating an unusually detailed childhood story, or remembering something the rest of us have learned to forget?

State of the Unknown is a documentary paranormal podcast telling true paranormal stories about real people who encountered something they couldn’t explain.

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

On July 31, 2021, a driver traveling along Highway 210 in Pender County, North Carolina, spotted what appeared to be an injured man standing beside the road.

There seemed to be blood running down from his head.

Concerned that the man needed help, the driver called 911 and continued down the highway while giving the dispatcher his location.

Then, in the middle of the call, something hit his truck.

The dispatcher heard it.

Seconds later, the driver screamed four words that would eventually turn an otherwise routine 911 call into one of the strangest unexplained encounters to come out of North Carolina:

“That’s not human.”

The recording is real. The call was made while the incident was unfolding, and years later, the story behind it would finally become public.

So what happened on Highway 210 that night?

In this episode of State of the Unknown, we follow the encounter from the original 911 call through the investigation that followed, separating what was documented that night from the details and theories that emerged years later.

A special thanks to listener Nikkihens, whose suggestion sent me down the rabbit hole on this one.

Topics Covered

• The Pender County, North Carolina 911 call
• The mysterious roadside man on Highway 210
• The impact heard during the emergency call
• The driver's reported encounter
• The subsequent law-enforcement response
• Later accounts of the 2021 incident
• The theories surrounding the Pender County encounter
• What the available evidence can—and cannot—tell us

SEO Keywords

Pender County 911 call, That's Not Human 911 call, Pender County creature, Highway 210 encounter, North Carolina creature encounter, Pender County North Carolina, unexplained 911 calls, real 911 call, unexplained encounters, humanoid encounter, pale humanoid, paranormal encounters, North Carolina paranormal, State of the Unknown podcast

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

In 1996, Jonathan Reed said he went hiking in Washington’s Cascade Mountains with his golden retriever, Susie.

What he claimed happened in those woods would eventually become one of the strangest UFO stories of the 1990s.

Reed said he encountered a small humanoid creature, discovered a mysterious black object hovering nearby, and came away with something most extraordinary encounter stories never have: photographs and video.

But that was only the beginning.

Two years later, Reed’s story reached a massive late-night audience through Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM. And once people began looking more closely at the man, the evidence, and everything Reed said happened afterward, the case became much more complicated.

In this episode of State of the Unknown: Fragments, Robert Barber tells the remarkable and deeply disputed story of Jonathan Reed.

What happened in those woods?

And how far would you go to prove you’d seen something impossible?

Topics: Jonathan Reed, Jonathan Reed alien, Jonathan Reed UFO, Jonathan Reed alien encounter, Dr. Jonathan Reed, Art Bell, Coast to Coast AM, UFO encounter, alien encounter, extraterrestrial encounter, UFO evidence, alien photographs, alien video, Washington UFO, Cascade Mountains, black obelisk, UFO hoax, paranormal, unexplained mysteries, unexplained encounters, extraterrestrials, aliens, UFOs, UAP

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

Philip K. Dick spent his career writing about unreliable memories, artificial people, altered realities, surveillance, and the uneasy question of whether the world around us is really what we think it is.

After finishing the full Philip K. Dick episode of State of the Unknown, host Robert Barber kept researching. What he found only made Dick more fascinating: a writer whose ideas spread far beyond the page and whose work became deeply woven into modern popular culture.

In this episode of State of the Unknown: Fragments, Robert looks at who Philip K. Dick really was, why his imagination still feels so relevant decades later, and why the questions he was asking in the 1950s and 1960s can sound surprisingly familiar today.

And then there’s 1974.

Something happened to Dick that changed the way he thought about reality for the rest of his life.

That story is told in Episode 65: Fringe Theories: Philip K. Dick | “We Are Living in a Computer-Programmed Reality.”

So was Philip K. Dick simply an extraordinarily imaginative writer who was decades ahead of his time?

Or was he somehow seeing a future the rest of us hadn’t reached yet?

Topics: Philip K. Dick, science fiction, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, artificial intelligence, AI, simulation theory, altered reality, false memories, surveillance, paranormal, unexplained experiences, 2-3-74

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

Philip K. Dick spent his career writing about false memories, alternate worlds, and people discovering that reality wasn’t quite what they thought it was.

Then, in 1974, something happened to him.

Join host Robert Barber as we follow Philip K. Dick’s 2-3-74 experiences — a series of strange events that left him questioning memory, time, and the nature of reality itself.

Three years later, at a science-fiction festival in Metz, France, Dick would tell an audience:

“We are living in a computer-programmed reality…”

What happened to Philip K. Dick in 1974?

And how did those experiences lead him toward ideas that would later be compared to simulation theory?

This episode of State of the Unknown explores one of the strangest chapters in Philip K. Dick’s life and the mystery behind his belief that reality might not be as fixed as it appears.

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

In March 1876, residents near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky, reported one of the strangest events ever recorded in the state: pieces of what appeared to be raw meat falling from a perfectly clear sky.

Join host Robert Barber as he revisits the bizarre event that became known as the Kentucky Meat Shower—a case that drew attention from newspapers, doctors, scientists, and curious onlookers trying to understand what had happened.

The material was found scattered across the Crouch property, collected by witnesses, examined, debated, and—bizarrely—tasted by two men who thought it resembled mutton or venison.

What followed was a series of competing explanations, each trying to answer the same basic question:

How does something that looks like raw meat end up falling from a clear Kentucky sky?

In this Fragment, we return to Kentucky in 1876 and follow the surviving accounts of one of America’s strangest historical mysteries.

Fragments is the short-form companion to State of the Unknown—remarkable stories, forgotten accounts, folklore, and unexplained events that may not need a full documentary, but still deserve another telling.

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.

In April 1907, two miners in Leadville, Colorado, rented a small house and paid three weeks in advance.

Four nights later, they were done.

Join host Robert Barber as he follows a strange newspaper account of a paranormal encounter that frightened two working miners badly enough to abandon the house—and the money they'd already paid—rather than spend another night inside.

Their story soon spread through the neighborhood, where residents connected what the men reported to an older story about the property. Then another witness came forward with a strange experience of his own.

More than a century later, the original newspaper account survives. But separating the history from the stories surrounding one of Leadville's real hauntings is much more difficult.

What happened inside that house? And what could convince two men that three weeks of rent simply wasn't worth going back?

In this episode of State of the Unknown: Fragments, Robert explores one of the real paranormal stories preserved in an old newspaper account—and an unexplained mystery that still leaves more questions than answers.

State of the Unknown explores paranormal encounters, real hauntings, strange stories, folklore, and unexplained mysteries from across America.

Support the show

Support State of the Unknown

If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, you can become a Sasquatch Supporter for $3 a month. Your support helps cover the costs of researching and producing the show, website hosting, distribution, and helping more people discover State of the Unknown.

Membership is completely optional, and the show remains free for everyone.

Become a Sasquatch Supporter on Patreon

🔍 New episodes every Tuesday
🌐 Visit stateoftheunknown.com for show notes and to submit your own story.
📬 Questions, theories, or story ideas? Reach out at [email protected] or @stateoftheunknownpodcast.

Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.