Encounters: The Hidden Truth is an hour-long television series that featured real-life stories of paranormal phenomena. The format featured a host (John Marshall) and a team of reporters presenting 3 or 4 stories per episode dealing with UFOs, crop circles, exorcism, prophets, psychics, reincarnation, and other supernatural phenomena, in a news/documentary film style. The stories unfolded through witness interviews and reenactments of the events. The host and reporters discussed their reactions to some of the stories.

Encounters aired on the Fox network and was used mainly as a summer replacement series and fill-in show for other canceled series. The show first aired Fridays at 8:00 pm during the summer of 1994. The show then aired sporadically with different nights and times. In the final 3 editions of the show, Steven Williams (The X-Files) replaced John Marshall as the host. Two of those episodes aired in November 1995 and the final episode aired on January 23, 1996.