
The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd
Starts Thursday, 3rd April at 9pm
The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd reveals the strangest-but-true stories in human history. The series airs Mondays at 10pm on Sky HISTORY as part of Mystery Season and opens up a cabinet of curiosities to reveal the most unbelievable stories in human history. From Boston’s Great Molasses Flood to a man who survived being struck by lightning seven times, these seemingly tall tales all really happened. It’s a bizarro barrage of people, places and events that prove just how weird our world can be.
Sky HISTORY sat down with Dan Aykroyd and talked food floods and spiritualism and found out why he's not looking forward to putting his proton pack back on when he reprises the role of Dr Raymond 'Ray' Stantz in the new Ghostbusters movie, Frozen Empire.
It is a compendium of some of the weirdest things that have ever happened to human beings. There are stories here that truly defy belief like the Mexican island of the dolls that is so haunted that people have died after visiting; the London Beer Flood of 1814 that killed eight people when 700 tonnes of fluid came gushing into the streets of St. Giles; and the Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919 when a wave of syrup demolished an entire neighbourhood. Then there are the stories that we all remember like Mike the headless chicken plus stories of survival and athletic feats.
The series is full of the bizarre, but the true. That's what appealed to me. It's not fantasy, it's not fiction, it all happened. It's true.
None of them! Some of them are absolutely hellish. Who would want to go anywhere near them? I love the show because I'm an armchair viewer myself. This is for the armchair viewer to sit back and say, 'Wow, this show is taking me to places that I'm fascinated about but never want to visit'.
There is so much great stuff. For instance, I learned that governments are interested very much in the unusual and the incredible. The Japanese government was looking for the serpent that was harassing fishing fleets off the coast of Japan. Between 1946 and 1951, nine ships disappeared in the Sea of Japan and it was due to this feathered underwater serpent that was apparently something like some kind of a Kraken.
My great-grandfather was an Edwardian spiritualist and seances were held frequently at the old farmhouse north of town. It was all passed down as a family interest.
The belief that spiritualists have is that the soul or soul energy survives after death and that the consciousness of the deceased survives to be able to reach back and contact those of us who are living. I believe that.
I've never seen a ghost but I have seen what I believe were tubes of ectoplasmic light. There is a great picture of my dad and me, in the old farmhouse. It's quite a vivid picture of an ectoplasmic tube.
No doubt. I'm from a family that believes in the afterlife and so that's what led me to eventually write it. I can tell you that the world did not know what ectoplasm was until that movie came out. Ghostbusters acquainted the entire world with the term 'ectoplasm'. And for that one reason alone, it's great the movie exists.
I believe that most of the ghost-hunting societies throughout North America are because we opened the world's consciousness to the real professional research that was done with ghosts over the centuries.
No. It weighs 150 pounds! It's a terribly arduous thing to wear that thing. I would rather they wrote a part where I have the smaller equipment. I've got the combat boots on and got the proton pack on. It weighs on the back, and it crushes the spine but I'm happy that people are still interested in what happens to the GBs old and new. I will not complain too much about getting into the jumpsuit, but you'll be hearing me moan if I do I have to put the pack on again. It's heavy.
The island of dolls. That could be a beautiful horror story. That's so creepy. There's a great survival story in 'Surviving the Impossible' with a guy who's trapped on an upside-down ship at the bottom of the ocean for three days.
Watch The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd, as part of Mystery Season from 19 February only on SKY History.