Dan Aykroyd is a cultural icon for his unforgettable work on Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters. Perhaps a lesser known fact about the actor is that he doesn’t just mingle with unknowable beings in the 1984 classic — he’s exploring all things inexplicable in his History Channel series The UnBelievable With Dan Aykroyd, now in its second season.

Akyroyd is a Spiritualist who has long been interested in UFOs, spirits and different dimensions. In The Unbelievable, he narrates some eyebrow-raising, yet true, stories from the dawn of time to present day.

The show, which first premiered in 2023, explores some chilling, mystifying and, in some cases, unsolvable phenomenons throughout the ages. This season, Akyroyd and The UnBelievable team up the ante, delving into tales of fish falling from the sky, mysterious blobs taking over a town and even a couple being abducted by aliens.

While chatting with DECIDER about Season 2, Aykroyd said The Unbelievable transports people to “horrible events or ecstatic events or stories that we wouldn’t want to experience ourselves,” telling us, “It’s the armchair viewer who gets to see places they would rather not go in real life and meet maybe people they wouldn’t meet in real life or also encounter people that they would want to meet. Everybody loves to be surprised and be shocked and stimulated and informed.”

For more on Aykroyd’s own take on an infamous UFO case, what supernatural stories he wants to explore and even what he thinks about Dylan O’Brien‘s impression of him in the film Saturday Night, read our full discussion with Aykroyd below.

DECIDER: I’d love to know what the most shocking story you’ve encountered in the two seasons of The Unbelievable has been.

DAN AYKROYD: I think that’s the French king who didn’t like his chef’s recipes and had him killed. He killed him.

Pretty shocking.

That’s shocking. Like, “What? Whoa, whoa, he’s just a chef, fire him. Don’t him kill him.” I think the most astounding ones are the survival stories, about the woman who survived the three shipwrecks. She went in one marine disaster and then went back out to sea and then another and another. The guy who fell from the B17 ball turret, 33,000 feet without a parachute — and lived! There must be some divine intervention there. It makes you believe in a higher power when you see a story like that.

Some of the revenge and cruelty stories are quite shocking. We do revenge, we do military, hardware, we do unbelievable strange games. Rolling the cheese down the hill — and it’s dangerous, apparently. The wheel is big and it’s a serious, ancient sport. Cheese rolling. Some of the stuff is humorous and light. Then again, we get into some of our war stories that have a little more gravity and some of our stories of survival. And some of our unusual demise stories, also. So it’s varying, which is what I like about all the stories. There’s some that are lighter and then there’s some that have heavier content. And some that — well, all of them defy imagination. You know, the meteorites hitting people and people surviving, that’s something that quite defies imagination, but it really happened.

Yeah, that one was crazy. Is there anything specific in Season 2 that you’re excited for people to see that they wouldn’t have seen in Season 1?

Season 2, it’s all new stuff. We do some animal stuff in Season 2 that’s kind of sweet. The Bismarck, of course that famous battleship, was sunk by two British torpedo planes. It went down and then the HMS Cossack cruised in to survey the wreckage and they found a cat in the wreckage. They called him Oscar. There was also a dog that survived a battle and it toured around the world in World War II as kind of a mascot to troops everywhere, inspiring them. And these kind of are warm and wonderful stories.

Some of our military hardware stories — we didn’t do too much of them in Season 1, now we have some more of them. We’re kind of skewing towards that now, too. Unusual inventions. Scientists and engineers who came up with stuff like the slingshot, a plane with a slingshot that was thrown out of the back of a cargo plane and a commando, or a spy, or someone that you wanted to extract, from a runway or an airfield, would stand there and the plane would fly low and the slingshot would grab that person and whip them right into the back of the cargo bay. And it worked. The “Sky Hook” they called it. Plucking the operative right out of the battlefield and into the plane and away you go. So, we’re treating some of those military things this year that we didn’t touch in Season 1.

I watched the first episode of Season 2 and there were two stories in there that were unsolved: the fish raining from the sky and the Oakville blobs. I was curious if you had your own theories about any unsolved stories like those.

Well those two, specifically, the fish, sometimes a water spout can bring a fish fall up there and then they’re blown through the atmosphere and they rain down. But I think in that story, they weren’t near water, I think it was a desert event. And then the green blobs remind me of the Fort story. Mr. [Charles] Fort, he was a researcher and he had a case where a green mist came over lamp posts in Maine and ate the top off these lamp posts. [Charles] Fort — so he was one of the first at the turn of the century to research these frog falls, fish falls, metal falls, things falling from the sky. Really, most of them had no conventional explanation, that’s what makes them unbelievable. But the blobs and the green mist seem to be related phenomena. And [Charles Fort], you can get his journals, I think they’re re-published right now. He was the first guy to get into this stuff at the turn of the century; unbelievable stories that he’d search out in newspapers everywhere. People getting hit by lightning multiple times, which we treated in our first season.

The unsolvables will always remain such, unless science takes a more realistic interest in things of the supernatural and paranormal. I would like to see scientists try to figure out, how does a ghost materialize? How does that happen? There’s a tremendous amount of energy involved in materializing a ghost. The ghost of flight 401, Don Repo. Search it up. He appeared on an airplane to multiple staff of Eastern Air Lines. And how, how did he materialize his own form in 3-D so that he could be seen by a living human? There’s a tremendous amount of energy there. I think the unsolvable stories can maybe lead to scientific inquiry that needs to be done. What was the green blob? Was it atmospheric? Was it ectoplasm? Was it something supernatural? Let’s get real science and real scientists in there looking. That’s what I love about the History Channel. Their experts are high-quality, academic researchers and their interviewees are likewise, so you get that credibility in there that they’re such experts at.

Were there any experts you were especially excited about working with on this season?

I love Mitch Horowtiz. He’s great. And this year, we’ve got so so many of them, they’re all so great. But I kind of relate to him in a way. I just like his look, you know? They’re all very intelligent, they’re all smart.

I know you have your own interest and experiences with UFOs. I was curious what your take was on the Betty and Barney Hill story is.

I believe that it happened to them. There’s just too many elements and facts that point to it being real. Of course Ben Simons, the therapist who interviewed them, he said, “Well, it had to be a dream.” But it was a pretty vivid dream, and one that disturbed them for their whole lives, and Betty had other experiences afterwards. And just the whole thing with the keys and the leaves and the missing time and the fact that Betty was semi-conscious through it and remembered the little gray creature. It almost handed her a map. And the other one skittered in and said, “No. You can’t give her a map.” So, she remembered that. And then Marjorie Fish’s star map. I believe the Betty and Barney story. Why would they open their lives and expose themselves to media at the time when they were very private people if this didn’t happen. So, my take on it is that it’s real and they haven’t been the only ones. There’s thousands and thousands of stories that have similar credibility.

Was there anything specific within the supernatural, or UFOs, or anything paranormal that you would like to explore more?

I would like to look into the abductee phenomenon and sort of explore the work of John Mack. That’s one I’d really like to do. I’d like to keep going on the concept of weird inventors and weird science and weird inventions, inventions that work, that didn’t work. How they came about them. Anything military. I know there were stories like the airborne laser that was a 747 airliner with pods underneath with lasers powered by a bath of chemicals in the fuselage of the aircraft and manned by air force personnel. And the idea was these rotating laser cannons could shoot down missiles. And it’s a brilliant scientific concept and the fact that they did pull it off and built the thing. But there were certain elements of the theory — well, for instance, if you fire at a satellite or a missile with that laser and it misses, that laser keeps going, what’s it going to hit? And then the thing was 5 billion dollars and it just wasn’t practical. The fact that the air force applied the science to do it and they did get it made, even though it was such a far-fetched concept, is really entertaining to me.

I feel like most people know you from Ghostbusters and Saturday Night Live, but you have such an interest and depth of knowledge in all of these supernatural things that can’t be explained. How did you get into all of this initially?

Well, my family was a paranormal research family. My great grandfather was a spiritualist and he believed, as the family does, in the survival of the identity of the human, after the shell is dropped and also the survival of the consciousness after death. So, this was just part of growing up, accepting the fact that we do go on and that there are energies out there that can come back and visit. Spirits, dreams, ghostly apparitions. And it was just part of my family business, really, so I just grew up with it. My dad was into it and his father and then my great-grandfather. So there were three generations before me that were building an interest in it. It was just there when I grew up.

The Unbelievable only gets a few minutes to focus on each story in each episode, but is there any specific story that you would’ve liked to have spent more time on?

Well that’s difficult to say, all of them are great and they all would fare with further research and further exploration. I think that, you know in an episodic like this — what I might do there is to take one of these episodes and maybe dramatize it. That would be a way to do it. Take an episode and dramatize it and expand it a little like the History Channel does. If we could find one that would really hold attention. But, I’ve been satisfied with the depth that has been achieved in all the stories, again, by the superb researchers at History Channel and by this team that’s behind me that makes me sound good. And it’s fun for me to do it, and if I feel that there’s a subject that should be re-explored or a story that should be re-explored or more deeply explored, I’ll let them know, and they’ll respect me and they’ll do it. So far, things have edited really nicely. It clips along. That’s what I love about it. Your family can sit there. Your friends and relatives and family and it’s a big viewing thing on Friday nights for History Channel and it’s to be viewed with a group. Because every story is a conversation piece and stimulates so much. And so that’s what I’m loving about it is that families are getting around the TV again and watching.

When I was watching this I was thinking a lot about how shows like Unsolved Mysteries and any other show in this genre. Why do you think these types of shows have such an enduring appeal still?

Well, because we get to vicariously live experiences that might not be so pleasant. We get to experience vicariously horrible events or ecstatic events or stories that we wouldn’t want to experience ourselves. It’s the armchair viewer who gets to see places they would rather not go in real life and meet maybe people they wouldn’t meet in real life or also encounter people that they would want to meet. So everybody loves to be surprised and be shocked and stimulated and informed, if it’s entertainment. So I think what you get with History Channel’s Unbelievable is superb entertainment. Superb “infotainment,” I’d say.

I have to ask before we go, I saw your praise of the movie Saturday Night. How do you feel about Dylan O’Brien playing you in the movie?

Well, he did a good job, I hope he has a career after that, doing something else. I’m sure he will.

One more thing. Decider is a site that’s all about shows and movies. Is there anything in particular that you’re watching right now that you’re excited about?

Let’s see now. I’ve been watching a lot of older films, right now, a lot of good black and white movies that have great acting performances in them. As far as contemporary, right now, Inside Out 2 was the last thing that I saw and I thought it was outstanding. Superb.

It’s a good movie.

But I’m more watching the great actors and actresses of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Just, I don’t know, it keeps me inspired and also it keeps me grateful. I say, “I got to work in that profession.” I got to stand on a stage and be lit up and work with editors and cameramen and all the crews. Filmmaking is a wonderful life, as I watch all these old movies, I get to think to myself, “I did that myself.” Grateful for it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Unbelievable with Dan Aykroyd Season 2 airs Nov. 15 at 9/8c on The HISTORY Channel.