You Won't Believe What Happened to This Nobel Prize Winner

Kary Mullis’s Unexplained Experiences

The video recounts a series of strange experiences described by Kary Mullis, the biochemist who later won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The Glowing Raccoon

In 1985, Mullis arrived at his remote cabin in Mendocino County and went outside to use the toilet. Along the trail, he saw what looked like a glowing raccoon. When he shone his flashlight at it, the animal’s light seemed to overpower the beam—and it greeted him: “Good evening, doctor.”

Mullis remembers replying, but then nothing until morning. He found himself walking along a road, with no idea how he had gotten there. His groceries were still on the kitchen floor, the light had drained his cabin batteries overnight, and both the raccoon and his heavy flashlight had vanished.

Afterward, Mullis developed an intense fear of part of his property. He couldn’t bring himself to enter the woods there, despite having previously enjoyed being outside at night. Eventually, in what he called “self-administered psychotherapy,” he strapped a flashlight to an AR-15, shouted threats into the darkness, and fired into the woods. The narrator dryly notes that this may not have been the wisest approach, but Mullis later managed to return to the area.

The Nitrous Oxide Incident

The video then jumps back to a near-fatal incident in 1974. After taking an antihistamine, Mullis inhaled nitrous oxide and blacked out while the gas continued hissing. He woke to find the frozen tube on the floor and had severe frostbite on his lips and tongue. He recovered without lasting damage.

A friend at the hospital pointed out a mystery: Mullis had apparently been unconscious, yet the tube was no longer in his mouth. How had it moved?

Years later, a woman named Catherine, whom Mullis had just met, asked him about the incident. She claimed she had been there, removed the tube, and made sure he was breathing—despite having never met him at the time. Catherine said she could travel on an “astral plane.”

Catherine later became ill with aggressive cancer and asked Mullis for help obtaining a drug from his lab. He couldn’t provide it, and she died soon afterward.

Other Accounts

Mullis’s daughter Louise reportedly experienced a similar unexplained disappearance at the family property. She was missing for about three hours and next remembered walking along the same road where her father had awakened years earlier.

The narrator also connects the story to Mullis’s reaction to The Communion, Whitley Strieber’s book about alleged encounters with nonhuman beings.

Mullis and the Story’s Uncertainty

The video identifies “Carey” as Kary Mullis, the scientist who developed PCR, a method for making many copies of a tiny amount of DNA. Mullis said LSD helped spark the idea.

The narrator emphasizes that the glowing-raccoon story came from Mullis’s own memoir, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, but could not be scientifically tested or reproduced. Whether the encounter was paranormal, a misremembered event, or something else remains unresolved.

Personalities mentioned: Kary Mullis, Cynthia, Catherine, Mark, Louise, Whitley Strieber, and the video’s narrator.