Encounter with the Unknown 1972

The film presents three seemingly true stories of the supernatural, each weaving a quiet, unsettling thread through ordinary life and leaving a lingering sense that some patterns may be more than coincidence. The framework centers on a researcher, Dr. Jonathan Rankin, and on Rod Serling, who narrates the tales with a calm, eerie cadence that nudges the audience to question what they’re seeing.

The Heptagon unfolds at the funeral of college student Johnny Davis. In attendance are his friends Dave Terrell [Tom Haywood], Frank, and Randy Powell [John Leslie], who confess to a prank that went tragically wrong: they lured Johnny to a certain address for a date, but an elderly woman living there shot him accidentally. As the service ends, Johnny’s mother, the seventh daughter of a seventh son, whispers a cryptic curse to the three men, “One by land, two by sky… seven times around go the three of you, and may your reward be just and true.” The tension lingers as Frank recounts the incident to Father Duane [Robert Ginnaven] on a plane. He explains that Dave was killed seven days after the funeral, and the priest tries to reassure him that it could be a coincidence. Yet destiny seems to tighten its grip: after Father Duane leaves the aircraft, it crashes on takeoff. On the runway, as a dying Frank is comforted by the priest, Frank reveals that exactly fourteen days have passed since Johnny’s burial. The story’s pattern deepens when the priest, now doubting mere chance, is advised to contact the remaining survivor, Randy, who has gone skydiving. The narrative moves forward to twenty-one days after Johnny’s burial, and the ominous prophecy appears to point toward two of the young men perishing by sky.

The Darkness shifts to rural Missouri in the early twentieth century, where a boy’s dog disappears near a mysterious hole in the ground. The father volunteers to be lowered down the rope to recover the dog and to uncover the source of the eerie moaning. What begins as a rescue mission devolves into a nightmarish moment as a terrifying scream echoes from the pit and the father returns to the surface a raving lunatic. The mystery of the hole remains unsolved, and the tale closes with the revelation that the father spent the rest of his life locked away in a mental institution.

The Girl on the Bridge centers on a strange, disoriented young woman who is picked up by an Arkansas state senator [Michael Harvey] and his wife, who try to take her home. Much of this segment unfolds through the girl’s flashbacks. When they reach the address she described, the girl vanishes from the back seat. The elderly father who answers the door reveals a painful truth: his daughter died years earlier in a car accident when she and her boyfriend were planning to marry, a union he had publicly opposed and in his harsh grief would have preferred never to see come to pass. The segment ties the present to a long-told urban legend—the Vanishing Hitchhiker—reinforcing the sense that some stories live on in ways that blur memory and reality.

Throughout the film, the framing narration attributes the events to the research of Dr. Rankin, a parapsychologist whose name, in-universe, lends the tales a veneer of study rather than superstition. Rod Serling serves as the main narrator, guiding each segment with a steady, mythic cadence, while an additional, uncredited voice appears in opening and closing frames, adding an extra layer of distance between the characters on screen and the audience’s interpretation of their fates.

“One by land, two by sky… seven times around go the three of you, and may your reward be just and true.”

As the stories unfold, the camera lingers on moments of quiet consequence: the grief of a mother who speaks in coded rhythms, the shock of a father who loses his grip on reality, and the unsettling calm of a state senator who cannot escape the strange woman’s final disappearance. The film refuses neat explanations, instead presenting a mosaic of hauntings that feel personal, intimate, and disturbingly plausible. The tales maintain a restrained, almost documentary tone that invites viewers to weigh the boundaries between fate, coincidence, and belief, while the legends themselves remain stubbornly open to interpretation.