In May 2026, an old rumor spread about football player Aaron Rodgers supposedly recalling an experience he had in Peru while high on ayuahasca, the plant-based hallucinogenic. According to the story, Rodgers said a shadowy "hat man" would sometimes appear in front of him holding a dead rabbit.
The claim first emerged in August 2022, when a Wisconsin News Today article claimed Rodgers had been seeing this figure for a few years:
Not much is known of the mysterious "Hat Man" except that Aaron Rodgers first started seeing the shadowy figure after his Ayahuasca fueled trips in Peru during the 2020 and 2022 offseasons. Aaron says:
"He will sometimes appear in the distance usually veiled by darkness holding the corpse of a dead rabbit and sometimes a blade."
Teammates are concerned for the quarterback who now fears being in the locker room alone, after he claims the lights "started to flicker and turn off one by one". He continued.
"It was behind me, not even breathing hard. I heard it's feet hitting the ground in a constant rhythm. I ran to my car, opened the door, slammed it behind me and locked it as fast as I could."
In early 2023, the site's Facebook account shared a TikTok video that appears (tongue in cheek) to take the story at face value. The account wrote: "It's goood to see people on Tik Tok taking our Hat Man story seriously. This is not a joke. Please be careful out there."
Rodgers has, in real life, spoken about his ayahuasca consumption in the past, saying his ego dissolved from the experience. "There's a lot of trust," he told Men's Health in December 2022 about the process, in which he consumed the hallucinogenic tea. That interview continued:
You have to surrender to the master plant teacher that is ayahuasca, and there's naturally some fear around that. And when you do, some pretty incredible things can happen, as was evidenced by night two of my most recent journey. Night one I was still a little resistant, and night two, I fully surrendered to the process and to the master teacher, and she was benevolent in her lessons. There's a lot of overall happiness that exists when you have a deeper love for yourself. It actually allows you, I feel, to give and receive love better and interact with people with less judgment and less projection. So that's one thing I've really been working on.
This is not the only satirical item from Wisconsin News Today about Rodgers. On Jan. 9, 2023, the site claimed Rodgers blamed a football game loss on the "hat man."
"I just kept throwing the ball to the Hat Man, he was always wide open, floating high above the rest of the players, it was so scary I just had to," the site claimed he said.
Again, Wisconsin News Today describes its content as satirical.