Seemingly Sane Celebrities With Bizarre Paranormal Beliefs

5 Megan Fox: Bigfoot Hunter

We kind of feel sorry for Megan Fox. It's like she wants to be taken seriously as an actress but keeps landing roles as "the boob interlude between explosions" in Michael Bay movies. Surprisingly, though, it turns out that her on-screen reputation as a cheap sex symbol isn't a source of much anguish for Fox -- what really grinds her gears is people not taking bigfoot seriously.

Fox's tendency to bring up her belief in Sasquatch on occasions that don't even remotely warrant it has become something of an inside joke among journalists. In an almost surrealistically bizarre interview with Esquire, she was asked about her favorite celebrities and proudly answered: bigfoot. Her favorite film? "Would you not be so much more interested in finding out that bigfoot existed than in watching a really good movie?"

Even at this year's Comic-Con, when Fox was approached by reporters for People magazine, she squandered the opportunity to promote Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in favor of rambling about her favorite podiatrically blessed cryptid.

It's tempting to presume that she's just playing some kind of longform prank on gossip journalists, but if her recent interview with MTV is anything to go by, it looks like she has zero sense of humor about it. When the interviewer brings up the topic of her "outlandish" beliefs, Fox rolls her eyes and immediately retaliates with a bunch of bigfoot "facts."

Of course, given that she also claims she could totally find the mythical creature herself but hasn't given it a go yet, we can assume that Fox is either fucking with us all or she's just really, really lazy.

4 David Bowie Lived in Constant Fear of Witches

If cocaine and not giving a fuck somehow managed to have a baby, that baby's name would be David Bowie. Over the years, the man has become the definition of the experimental, oddball musician, but you probably assumed that, even at its worst, Bowie's craziness was always of the creative, artistic variety. Definitely not something that involved, say, witches.

Surprise! It was witches -- as in, throughout the 1970s, Bowie lived in crippling fear that he was being stalked by witches who wanted to steal his sperm.

Biographers of Bowie's most fucked-up phase record that his obsession reached fever pitch at around the time he was working on his 1976 album Station to Station, which mainly involved snorting coke and reading every book in his house. Eventually, he got really into occult subjects like psychic-protection techniques, claiming that they prevented brides of Satan from breaking into his mind (see: coke).

Cameron Crowe, who was a journalist at the time, once encountered Bowie in his studio, fearfully lighting black candles after supposedly detecting a malevolent presence. He also carried a cross and a Jewish talisman, because, dammit, the witches had to be scared of at least one of them. He couldn't take any chances, you see. During that time, Bowie was convinced that witches were trying to get their hands on his semen to make a baby that they were going to sacrifice to Satan, like a glam-rock Rosemary's Baby.

In the following years, rumors abounded that Bowie was collecting his semen, urine, and other bodily fluids in jars and hiding them around the house (which we assume was due to the witch thing). Eventually, his paranoia came to an end when concerned friends hooked him up with a practicing good witch who agreed to perform an exorcism for him, after which Bowie finally stopped worrying about paranormal rapists. He also quit cocaine around that same time, but we're sure that had nothing to do with it.

3 Ariana Grande Fought Off Demons

Famed pop singer Ariana Grande has basically built a reputation for herself as a human version of a wine cooler: girly, nonthreatening, and mostly consumed by 15-year-olds. Everything that she does, from her music to her private life, is always so sane and sensible that when the magazine Complex jokingly asked Grande if she believed in ghosts during a 2013 interview, they were probably expecting a cutesy sound bite in reply. Instead, the artist started telling them about her second career as an amateur exorcist.

According to Grande, while in Kansas City, she and her entourage decided to visit Stull Cemetery, a local tourist attraction that's supposedly so haunted, the pope once refused to fly over it. That's when Grande reportedly started to feel sick and smell sulfur in the car, which the singer insists was "the sign of a demon," and not, as we would assume, the sign that one of her friends just cut a rancid fart. The final proof came when Grande spotted a fly in the car, or as she described it: "another sign of a demon."

Knowing she had to act fast, Grande rolled down the window and apologized to the entity "attacking" her for disturbing its peace, and because Satan's minions are very big on good manners, the evil spirit decided to let Grande and her friends live. Before they left, Grande says, she took a photo of the cemetery, accidentally capturing three demonic faces in it. No, you can't see the picture. She had to delete it because its file size was 666 MB, and don't you dare question her logic, because Grande knows more about the connection between Satan and computers than every person over 60 ever.

She admits to having had a folder on her computer titled "Demons" with all sorts of paranormal pictures in it, which she also had to delete because it was attracting tons of evil energy that made her hear a weird rumble-like noise and see disturbing red and black shapes around her. This, of course, leads to many questions, the most pressing of which is: are we sure that "demons" isn't just what Grande calls getting wasted on wine coolers?

Either way, at least she made it out of the situation unharmed -- the same can't be said for ...

2 Fran Drescher Believes She Was Abducted and Microchipped by Aliens

We've always suspected that popular '90s comedian Fran Drescher might be an alien experiment gone wrong, as it would explain why she possesses a voice that can lacerate human flesh. Interestingly, Drescher herself lends credence to that theory, because she firmly believes that when she was younger she was abducted by aliens who, instead of weaponizing her vocal cords, "programmed" her to meet and marry fellow abductee Peter Marc Jacobson.

We don't know what the context of the conversation could possibly have been, but Huffington Post reports that, during a 2012 interview with Drescher, the Nanny Named Fran opened up about her alien abduction. According to her, both she and Jacobson had separate UFO encounters in junior high, long before they met, which would explain why they have scars on their hands in the exact same spot. Reportedly, that's the location of the alien implants that somehow helped Drescher and Jacobson find each other later in life.

Jacobson disagrees with her interpretation of the scar and claims that she was injured either by a drill bit or scalding herself with hot water, but Drescher's response to this killjoy skepticism is, and we quote: "That's what the aliens programmed us to think."

Now, although it's romantic to believe that there are a bunch of galactic Cupids out there helping us find our soulmates through advanced brainwashing technologies, it's pertinent to note that they're apparently very bad at it. Drescher and her space lover did marry, but they eventually divorced in 1999 because, it turns out, Jacobson is gay. Hopefully, the aliens have since worked the kinks out of their gaydar.

1 Carter and Reagan's UFO Sightings Helped Shape Their Presidencies

The world tends to dismiss UFO sightings because the majority of them are reported by people in trailer parks who may or may not have been inebriated at the time. But sometimes, even respected, level-headed folks look up in the sky and see something they can't explain. In fact, not one but two U.S. presidents have had alien encounters of the weird kind, which for once isn't Secret Service code for the POTUS popping into a brothel during his European tour.

In 1969, while still a state-level politician in Georgia, Jimmy Carter reported sighting a UFO while hanging out outside a Lions Club. According to interviews, he said, "It seemed to move towards us from a distance, stop, move partially away, return," additionally describing the thing as bluish-reddish, luminous, and not solid.

To be fair, Carter has always maintained that what he saw was a UFO in the strictest definition of the term -- an unidentified flying object, which doesn't necessarily imply three-breasted Martian astronauts. But years later, the Gipper himself had a similar experience.

Ronald Reagan never officially reported a UFO encounter, but witnesses say he spotted weird lights in the sky at least twice in his life. Pilot Bill Paynter was there for the 1974 sighting. He and his passengers (including Reagan, then-governor of California) spotted a big light flying behind the plane and moving at high speed at a 45-degree angle. "Everyone on the plane was surprised," Paynter reports. "Governor Reagan expressed amazement."

So what? They both saw some weird lights. That doesn't mean they spent the rest of their lives with aliens on the brain, right?

Actually, after being elected president, both Carter and Reagan put extraterrestrial affairs on their electoral agendas. Carter promised to release every piece of information the country had about UFO sightings to the public, and to look into the whole Roswell UFO crash-landing. As for Reagan, he slipped a lot of puzzling remarks about aliens into his official speeches, including one memorable moment in 1987 when he mused that world peace might be achieved if, just hypothetically, we had to fight an alien invasion. Just, you know, putting it out there. Really, what president hasn't had that exact thought?

Whitmore 2016.

S Peter Davis is the author of Occam's Nightmare, a book about the history of conspiracy theories and weird ideas. Get it on Amazon, or visit his blog.

For more celebrity insanity, check out 4 Respected Celebrities Who Are Slowly Losing Their Minds. And then check out The 20 Most Eerily Convincing Paranormal Videos on YouTube.

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