Plot Synopsis

DARK MATTERS: TWISTED BUT TRUE profiles strange science and exposes history's most bizarre experiments by using cutting-edge CGI recreations of the pivotal moments when brilliant minds faced controversy or ethical crossroads on the fringes of science. Each 60-minute episode highights three different stories, including: UFO expert Morris Jessup, who tested invisibility and teleportation after receiving an extraordinary letter stating that the U.S. Navy had experimented with this very concept before; Soviet scientist Dr. Ilya Ivanov began performing disturbing experiments to crossbreed humans with apes in the 1920s; Thomas Edison conducted a number of unorthodox studies to meet this growing demand, performing experiments that would eventually lead to a dark creation that remains infamous today; people who investigated a fireball that streaked across the skies of Pennsylvania in 1965, trying to determine if it was a UFO or Nazi antigravity technology; Dr. Thomas Harvey, who stole Albert Einstein's brain after his death in 1955; Russian and American scientists who engaged in a top-secret psychic arms race during the Cold War; a talk show host who married a former model, who claims she was a brainwashed CIA secret agent; Dr. Robert White, who transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another; the 1.4-megaton H-bomb that the United States detonated in space; a 19th century Italian scientist, who believed he found a way to bring the dead back to life; journalist Hank Albarelli who believed he found a connection between a French town gone insane and the apparent suicide of an American scientist; a German woman who was attacked by her own hand in 1908; French scientist Vladimir Gavreau, who found his laboratory flooded with a mysterious energy; two radio buffs stumbled across a heart-stopping sound and believed the Soviets were covering up a space mission gone terribly wrong; Boston medic Dr. Duncan MacDougall who set out to scientifically prove the existence of the human soul by weighing a man at the moment of death; legendary Nikola Tesla, who claimed to have created a deadly ray in the early 20th century; scientist Wade Davis, who was obsessed with cracking the zombie secrets; and Dr. Horace Wells, who failed to invent anesthesia using laughing gas and experimented with chloroform.