All declassified documents — sorted by date
In 1535, Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm passed the highest imperial examination in the Mạc court at the age of forty-four. He had been born in 1491 in Trung Am, in what is n…
In January 2017, at the Close Encounters Conference in Byron Bay, Australia, a woman using the name Anna said she had been taken aboard a spacecraft. She said t…
On July 20, 1976, Viking 1 landed in Chryse Planitia. On September 3, Viking 2 reached Utopia Planitia, about 6,400 kilometres away. Each lander carried biologi…
In 1960, American counterintelligence officers set three objectives for a secret hypnosis program: place a person under suggestion quickly without that person k…
In the fifth lunar month of 1018, people in Luoyang, the Western Capital of the Song dynasty, described a hat-shaped object flying at night, entering houses, so…
On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon sat before a camera in the Oval Office and announced his resignation. He was the first American president to leave office befor…
In July 1861, the Xianfeng Emperor died at Rehe after the Qing court had lost Beijing in the Second Opium War. His successor was Zaichun, a six-year-old boy. Be…
In 1963, in the town of Derinkuyu in Türkiye’s Nevşehir Province, a resident renovating his house broke through a wall. A local account says his chickens kept d…
On 5 February 249 CE, the child emperor Cao Fang left Luoyang to visit Cao Rui's tomb at Gaoping. Cao Shuang, the regent running Wei, went with him, along with …
When European visitors reached Angkor in the nineteenth century, forest covered many of the temples. A familiar story followed: a giant empire disappeared after…
In the seventh month of 210 BCE, Qin Shi Huang fell ill at Shaqiu, many weeks from the capital at Xianyang. He was on his fifth inspection tour of the eastern e…
In 536 CE, while recording the wars of Emperor Justinian, Procopius stopped to describe the sky: the Sun still rose but shone like the Moon, as if an eclipse ha…
In October 2003, heavy rain collapsed the ground in front of the Feathered Serpent Temple at Teotihuacan, about 40 kilometers from Mexico City. Archaeologist Se…
Between Mars and Jupiter lies a gap that eighteenth-century astronomers refused to treat as an accident. In 1766, Johann Daniel Titius recorded a number sequenc…
In 2016, an aircraft crossed the Petén rainforest in northern Guatemala. From the air, a person could see only a sheet of green. The aircraft’s LiDAR instrument…
A small fired-clay figurine sits in the British Museum’s collection. It is only about 4.2 centimetres tall. It was found at Tell al-‘Ubaid in southern Iraq and …
In 221 BCE, Qin Shi Huang defeated the six rival states and created China's first empire. Later books say that he ordered a square jade seal to represent rule o…
In January 1939, children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport were called to meet a university student named Mary Tudor. They were told they were t…
On the night of August 31, 1944, Urban Raef, who lived in northwest Mattoon, Illinois, woke to a sweet, unfamiliar smell in his bedroom. He became nauseated and…
On April 5, 1909, the Arizona Gazette put a story about a city beneath the Grand Canyon on its front page. The article said an explorer named G. E. Kinkaid had …
In King Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, a clay fragment from the seventh century BCE records how to read signs on a sheep’s liver. The reader was not a stree…
On 12 March 2004, Pravda published a report about a Russian boy known as Boriska. He was about seven when he spoke at Medveditskaya Ridge, north of the Volgogra…
After the cremation at Kusinara in northern India, rival kingdoms demanded portions of the Buddha’s remains. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta says that a Brahmin divid…
On 18 August 1968, technician Emil Barnea stopped with his girlfriend and two friends in a clearing in Baciu Forest, just west of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Around o…
Mount Kailash rises above 6,600 metres in western Tibet. From a distance, its snow-covered summit presents four steep, almost symmetrical faces and stands apart…
In July 1983, an Indian newspaper claimed that AIDS had been created in a United States military laboratory, without a virus sample, research name or military d…
On February 10, 1891, the United States Patent Office granted US446054A to Elijah J. Bond in Baltimore. The patent called the object a game. The board had lette…
In June 2012, the University of Iowa announced a result that sounded like science fiction. A physics team led by Jack Scudder used data from NASA’s Polar spacec…
On the morning of April 23, 2006, a young man appeared on a street in Kyiv, Ukraine. He wore clothes associated with the Soviet era, carried an old film camera,…
On 29 August 2013, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo reported that singer Hyon Song-wol and other North Korean performers had been executed by firing squad for making p…
In 1940, German troops moved through France in marches that lasted for days. They carried rifles, ammunition, and rations, but many units also received Pervitin…
On the afternoon of 24 June 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold flew near Mount Rainier in Washington State. He saw nine bright objects in a line, moving past th…
In July 1999, television programmes counted down to the end of the world. They read a line from Nostradamus: “In the year 1999, seven months, from the sky will …
On 22 June 1633, Galileo Galilei, then 69 years old, knelt before the Roman Inquisition. He was forced to declare that the Sun did not stand still at the centre…
On 12 September 2023, at the San Lázaro Legislative Palace in Mexico City, a journalist named Jaime Maussan opened two boxes in front of lawmakers. Inside were …
Inside a chapel at Valencia Cathedral in Spain stands a brown-red stone cup. Its upper bowl is an old piece of quartz; its base, handles, and decorations were a…
On 6 March 1992, the Washington Post reported that dealers in Eastern Europe were offering “red mercury” for about $200,000 for a few pounds. They said it had b…
In 1958, a plain brown package travelled through the U.S. mail to the Smithsonian. Inside was not a military document or an ordinary exhibit, but a 45.52-carat …
On the night of 11 November 1979, TAE Flight 297 was carrying 109 people over the sea near Ibiza when a group of lights shifting between red, white, and green m…
On 19 September 1991, German hikers Erika and Helmut Simon saw part of a body sticking out of the ice on Tisenjoch Pass in the Ötztal Alps, near the border betw…
On the stone walls of Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank of Thebes in Egypt, a king’s name once appeared. The name was Maatkare Hatshepsut. Around the fifteenth c…
On February 12, 1912, a document of abdication was read inside the Forbidden City. The person named in it was Puyi, just over five years old and the last empero…
Visitors standing before Meridian Gate usually hear a short story: the Yongle Emperor, Zhu Di, ordered the Forbidden City in Beijing from 1406 to 1420, turning …
On the night of October 6, 1976, less than a month after Mao Zedong died, security officers drew four powerful figures into a meeting in Beijing and arrested th…
In November 1930, fur trapper Joe Labelle reached a camp beside Lake Angikuni in what is now Canada’s Kivalliq region. He had visited the place before to ask fo…
On July 11, 1970, a U.S. Air Force Athena test missile left the Green River launch site in Utah. It was supposed to fly toward White Sands in New Mexico, but it…
On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle. He wore a suit and black tie, ordered b…
On November 7, 1876, two grave robbers entered Abraham Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois. They carried a crowbar, an oil lamp and a horse-drawn wagon. The…
Genghis Khan died in August 1227 during the campaign against Western Xia. The Mongols knew he had died and that his body had to return to his homeland, but they…
In 1922, Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb and made the world believe that Egypt still held rooms no one had seen. On the Giza Plateau, however, the Sphin…
In July 1959, divers in Austria’s Lake Toplitz brought up wooden boxes filled with counterfeit British banknotes. The Bank of England confirmed that the notes w…
In 1462, a German story began circulating through Central Europe. It said that Vlad III of Wallachia ate among impaled victims, burned villages and killed tens …
In 866, the Tang general Gao Pian rebuilt Dai La at Tong Binh, in present-day Hanoi. The walls ran for more than 6 km and rose about eight metres. Records descr…
From the Thiên Y A Na legend and the warboats that crossed the sea, to the fall of Vijaya in 1471 and the maps of Minh Mạng, the story of a fleet rewritten as a…
In 1864, missionary Eugène Eyraud saw wooden boards covered in unfamiliar signs on Rapa Nui. Only two years earlier, Peruvian slave raiders had carried away man…
In the early hours of 8 March 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. There were 239 people on board. At 1:19 a.m., after leaving Ma…
At the end of the eighteenth century, British merchants bought tea, silk, and porcelain from China, while the Qing court demanded payment in silver. Silver flow…
A ship left Sicily, Spain, or England and disappeared in the Mediterranean. Months later, a family received a letter: their relative was alive, but held in Algi…
From 1962 to 1971, U.S. military aircraft sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The stated goals were direct: str…
In 1693, Isaac Newton spent months unable to sleep, eating poorly, and writing letters accusing friends of harming him. He had worked with alchemy for years, he…
On 27 August 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania. The well was about 21 metres deep and triggered an oil rush in the United States. Oil did…
On 20 March 1602, the States-General of the Netherlands created the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, known as the VOC. Its charter gave the company a 21-year …
On 6 August 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb. Japan did not surrender at once. On 8 August, the Soviet Union declared war. In the early hours of …
In 1405, a Ming fleet left the Longjiang shipyards in Nanjing. Zheng He commanded hundreds of vessels, nearly 28,000 people, and a working system that included …
On 5 December 1914, the ship Endurance left South Georgia and entered the Weddell Sea. Ernest Shackleton, 27 crew members, and 69 sled dogs were on board. They …
In 2021, news reports said that Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner were behind a new biotechnology company called Altos Labs. The company recruited leading scientists t…
Around the first century CE, in Alexandria in Roman Egypt, the engineer Heron described a device called an aeolipile. A boiler sent steam into a hollow sphere. …
On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto at a distance of about 12,500 kilometres. The images sent back to Earth showed a world that was no…
At Susa, in what is now southwestern Iran, archaeologists found more than 1,400 small clay tablets dated to roughly 3100–2900 BCE. The signs on them are known a…
On 2 March 1972, NASA launched Pioneer 10 away from Earth. Attached to its body was a gold-anodized aluminium plaque showing a man, a woman, a map of the Solar …
On 6 September 1522, the ship Victoria reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain. Only 18 men remained aboard. They had left Spain almost three years earlier with …
On 17 April 1936, twenty-seven London schoolboys and their teacher, Kenneth Keast, walked across Schauinsland in southern Germany. Five boys aged between 12 and…
On 12 April 1888, Ludvig Nobel died in Cannes. A French newspaper mistakenly published an obituary for his brother Alfred. The famous story says the headline ca…
In ancient Egypt, priests kept spell books, clay figures, and formulas meant to heal, protect the living, or curse an enemy. Across the centuries, the same kind…
On 30 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I signed a charter for 215 London merchants. The new body was called the “Governor and Company of Merchants of London Tradi…
In 1888, Thomas Edison already had generating stations, wires and direct-current customers in American cities. George Westinghouse sold a different system. Alte…
In French-ruled Vietnam, salt was not only kept in kitchens. It appeared in tax ledgers, customs warehouses and checkpoints on mountain roads. Coastal salt work…
In 1985, Michael Jackson paid $47.5 million for ATV Music Publishing. The catalogue contained nearly 4,000 songs, including most of the songs John Lennon and Pa…
On 9 December 1921, General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. added a new compound to an engine that was knocking. Tetraethyl lead stopped the noise and allowe…
On 1 January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared that Saint-Domingue was no longer a French colony and restored the name Haiti. The declaration followed the …
Mount Sinai, 40 days in the desert. Moses climbs the mountain alone, eats and drinks nothing, and comes back with a face so bright that the Israelites cannot lo…
In 214 BCE, the Qin state began linking older frontier walls after Qin Shi Huang unified China. Sections built by Qin, Zhao, and Yan were repaired and extended …
In 1886, pharmacist John Stith Pemberton sold a syrup in Atlanta as a tonic for the nerves and stomach. Its early recipe used coca-leaf extract and kola nut. Co…
On July 9, 1997, a hiker near Indian Lake in New York caught his foot on a piece of metal showing through the soil. He was far from a road or marked trail. Afte…
Across the cliffs of south-western China, hundreds of wooden coffins rest in cracks high above the ground. They are not buried in soil or placed in a cemetery b…
On 11 March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s Tōhoku region. More than 18,000 people died or remained missing, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant …
Before paper, a long Chinese document had to be written on bamboo slips or silk. Bamboo was heavy, awkward, and vulnerable to rot. Silk was easier to carry but …
On the evening of 21 October 1978, twenty-year-old pilot Frederick Valentich took off from Moorabbin Airport near Melbourne in a Cessna 182L registered as VH-DS…
On 18 November 1978, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan arrived at a small airstrip in Guyana to take people home from Jonestown. Families had told him that relatives we…
Grosse-Île sits in the Saint Lawrence River, about 50 kilometres from Quebec City. From the nineteenth century onward, immigrant ships stopped there for inspect…
Before dawn on 20 September 1977, people in Petrozavodsk saw a huge light moving across the sky. It looked like a glowing disc, then like a bright jellyfish. It…
On September 4, 1622, a Spanish fleet left Havana carrying silver, gold, and gems from the Americas to Europe. Less than two days later, a hurricane broke the f…
On the morning of July 2, 1951, landlady Pansy Carpenter went to Mary Reeser’s apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida. The doorknob was unusually hot. When the do…
On September 29, 1915, a Category 4 hurricane struck the Lake Pontchartrain area of Louisiana. Winds reached about 145 miles per hour, water rose more than four…
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. The photographs from the flight show blindingly bright ground, white suits, and a black sky without a single sta…
A nuclear missile system does not normally become "offline" at many positions at once. Ten missiles lose their ready status together only if something hits the …
On an evening in October 1969, while he was governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter stood with a group of guests at a club in Leary and saw a bright object changing c…
In 2003, heavy rain caused the ground beneath the Feathered Serpent Temple at Teotihuacan to collapse. Archaeologists found a tunnel about 103 metres long leadi…
On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State. He reported seeing nine bright objects moving in formation at …
Before dawn on 21 July 1968, El Fausto left El Hierro to return to Tazacorte on La Palma. The route was roughly one hundred kilometres, and three men aboard had…
In the western Tibetan Plateau, stone tombs stand on hilltops, settlements lie far from modern villages, and ritual sites preserve traces of a society that earl…
In 2025, the Hong Kong Police Organized Crime and Triad Bureau (OCTB) ran Operation Thunderbolt with police authorities in Guangdong and Macao, arresting 4,140 …
On October 28, 2021, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta. Mark Zuckerberg said the company would move from 2D screens toward the “metaverse”, a 3D space…
In 1679, more than 3,000 people sailed on roughly 50 boats from southern China to Đàng Trong. They were Ming loyalists who refused to serve the Qing, led by Trầ…
On the evening of 15 August 1977, Ohio State University’s Big Ear telescope scanned the sky as usual. It was not taking pictures. It was listening to narrow rad…
In 213 BCE, Chancellor Li Si asked Qin Shi Huang to collect and burn privately held books on poetry, history and teachings that could be used against the Qin st…
From above, the plain north of Xi'an looks like farmland broken by square hills with straight slopes and flat tops. Satellite images and drone surveys show grou…
In 1570, the Spanish official Diego García de Palacio passed through Honduras and recorded the great ruins of Copán. The city had already been abandoned for cen…
A book almost as large as a door sits behind glass at the National Library of Sweden. Codex Gigas means “giant book”. It is about 92 centimetres high, 50 centim…
Wolf Grigoryevich Messing was born on 10 September 1899 in Góra Kalwaria, near Warsaw, to a devout Jewish family. His father wanted him to study theology. The b…
In 1533, Spanish forces entered Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire. They found Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, with walls fitted so tightly that a blade c…
In 1743, a man arrived in England calling himself Count Saint-Germain. He openly said that Saint-Germain was not his real name, yet he refused to give his real …
At about 7:15 p.m. on September 12, 1952, four boys were playing near Flatwoods Elementary School in Braxton County, West Virginia. A red-yellow streak crossed …
Late in October 1982, a huge blast tore through an empty stretch of Siberia. No city vanished and no military convoy appeared on television, yet the fire was st…
On the night of December 29, 1972, an Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-1011 flew from New York to Miami. There were 163 passengers and 13 crew members on board. Dur…
On the desert of southern Peru, a monkey tens of metres long lies beside straight lines that run so far that a person on the ground cannot see them as a whole. …
At 7:35 a.m. on July 1, 1940, a shipment waited at Halifax harbour. On paper, it was fish. The dock was sealed, armed guards stood around it, and outsiders were…
In August 1945, as Japanese forces withdrew from Manchuria, a compound at Pingfang, south of Harbin, was destroyed in a matter of days. Buildings were burned, r…
On Gozo stands Ġgantija, a stone complex whose name means "of the giants", raised about 3600 to 3200 BCE, when Malta had no iron and no wheel. Gozitan legend sa…
In Arizona’s Grand Canyon, rock about 520 million years old rests directly on metamorphic basement more than 1.7 billion years old. There is no continuous set o…
In Exodus chapter 34, Moses comes down from Mount Sinai after forty days and forty nights without bread or water, the skin of his face so radiant that Aaron and…
On July 6, 1892, barges moved along Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River toward the Carnegie Steel works at Homestead. Aboard were roughly three hundred Pinkerton a…
In 1933 or 1934, Alberto Tulli, the curator responsible for the Egyptian collection at the Vatican Museums, was said to have seen a fragment of papyrus in a Cai…
Look at the back of a United States one-dollar note. An unfinished pyramid stands on the left, an eye inside a triangle floats above it, and rays spread around …
On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus’s ships sighted Guanahani in the Caribbean. Columbus gave the island a new name, raised the flag of the Spanish crown, …
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin sat inside Vostok 1 at Baikonur. The spacecraft made one orbit of Earth in 108 minutes. The Soviet Union announced that Gagarin …
At the end of August 30 BCE, Alexandria fell to Octavian. Mark Antony had died after hearing the false news that Cleopatra had killed herself. The queen was bei…
In 1917, in Orange, New Jersey, teenagers sat at long tables and painted tiny numbers on watch dials with a luminous mixture. The job was clean, paid well for y…
On January 18, 2017, the CIA placed more than 12 million declassified pages online. Before that release, many records could be viewed only at four computers in …
Inside Ranmasu Uyana in Anuradhapura stands a circular carving on a low rock face. Local usage calls it Sakwala Chakraya, a name close to “cosmic cycle.” The ca…
On December 29, 1610, Palatine György Thurzó led officials and soldiers to Čachtice Castle, now in Slovakia. Elizabeth Báthory, a wealthy widow from a powerful …
In 1838, Count Gusztáv Batthyány transferred his family library at Rohonc to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Among the more than 30,000 volumes in it sat a s…
In 1942, while Britain was preparing for a war for national survival against Nazi Germany, Porton Down scientists brought sheep to Gruinard Island off Scotland’…
On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m., a massive earthquake struck off northeastern Japan. Six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi were in different states: Units 1, 2, and…
In 1346, Caffa, also written as Kaffa or Kafa in other records, was under siege by the Golden Horde. These are not three different cities. Caffa is the name use…
On the afternoon of 27 January 1967, three astronauts sat inside the Apollo command module at Launch Complex 34 at Cape Kennedy. Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward Wh…
Shortly after midnight on 30 July 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis was sailing alone between Guam and Leyte. It had just completed a secret trip to Tini…
On February 28, 1995, Denver International Airport opened northeast of Denver, Colorado. It replaced Stapleton Airport and was built on about 136 square kilomet…
In 1994, the Sherman family moved to a ranch in Utah's Uintah Basin. They described a large wolf attacking their livestock without falling after several shots, …
Stand on Salisbury Plain in southern England as the summer sun rises. An earthwork avenue leads toward a stone circle. Two upright stones hold a lintel above th…
In the early hours of 26 April 1986, Pripyat in northern Ukraine was still asleep. A few kilometres away, Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was being …
Before dawn on 25 February 1942, Los Angeles went dark under an air-raid order. Sirens sounded across the city, searchlights swept the sky, and anti-aircraft gu…
On the eastern bank of the Nile, about 300 kilometres south of Cairo, a city lies almost abandoned in the desert. The ancient Egyptians called it Akhetaten, “th…
At 7:15 a.m. on 12 June 1962, an Alcatraz guard made the routine inspection of the cells. Three beds appeared occupied, but the men in them had been gone for ho…
At about 7 p.m. on 21 August 1955, Billy Ray Taylor walked to the well behind the Sutton farmhouse near Kelly, Kentucky. He saw a glowing object fly low and des…
On a mountainside above Peru's Urubamba Valley, six pink-granite blocks stand together on Temple Hill. Below are terraces, water channels, and a town that is st…
On 1 September 1909, America read Frederick Cook’s claim that he had reached the North Pole on 21 April 1908. Five days later, Robert Peary sent a telegram sayi…
On 19 May 1845, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror left Greenhithe, England. The two ships carried 134 people: Sir John Franklin, Royal Navy officers, sailors, engineers…
On 29 October 1969, a computer at UCLA sent the first characters to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute. The network had only four nodes. It was built…
No original manuscript, seven undocumented years, and a grave disturbed where the skull should be. From that came the reading that Shakespeare was only the name…
On the morning of 22 May 1999, Carl Herbert Landers left a camp near Lake Helen to climb Mount Shasta in California. The 69-year-old climber said he felt unwell…
On 11 February 1650, René Descartes died in Stockholm after several months working for Queen Christina of Sweden. He was only 53. The royal household and its do…
Every night, people see the same face of the Moon, and during a total solar eclipse the lunar disk almost exactly covers the Sun. NASA calls the match a geometr…
On the night of 25 January 1967, Betty Andreasson was in the kitchen of her home in South Ashburnham, Massachusetts, with her parents and seven children. The li…
On the afternoon of 9 December 1965, a blue light crossed the sky over the eastern United States and Canada. People in several states saw the fireball at the sa…
On the night of 1 October 1948, Lieutenant George F. Gorman flew his P-51 Mustang back toward Hector Airport in Fargo, North Dakota. The sky was clear, the foot…
On 12 August 1944, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s aircraft exploded over the English Channel during a bombing mission. He was 29 and had been chosen by his father as t…
In May 1951, two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, disappeared. They were not stopped at a border, left no message, and did not travel alone. T…
On November 4, 1922, Howard Carter's team found a step beneath the sand in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, and three weeks later Carter cut a small hole in the sea…
At the end of January 1945, as the Red Army approached Auschwitz, Josef Mengele gathered papers, research material, and anything that could help him disappear. …
On 26 August 1946, the United States Navy planned to send a huge force to Antarctica. Thirteen ships, 33 aircraft, and about 4,700 people were assigned to build…
On 20 July 1969, hundreds of millions of people watched Neil Armstrong step onto grey ground. He said it was one small step for a man and a giant leap for manki…
On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were inside the command bunker beneath the German Chancellery in Berlin. Soviet troops were closing in. Hitler had …
On 29 May 1925, from a place he called Dead Horse Camp in Brazil’s Mato Grosso, British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett sent his last letter to his wife. He was…
On the morning of 13 January 1996, people around Varginha in Minas Gerais, Brazil, reported a large object flying low and descending through white smoke. A univ…
On the evening of 27 July 1890, Vincent van Gogh returned to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, with a bullet in his chest. He covered more …
On the morning of 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea, for Howland Island in the central Pacific. Howland was on…
On the morning of 19 November 1961, Michael Rockefeller tied two empty fuel cans to his body and jumped from a capsized boat at the mouth of the Betsj River in …
In early 2015, a German reporter received a call from a person who used only the name "John", who would communicate only through encrypted data. Months later, B…
On 16 October 1923, Walt Disney signed a four-page contract in his uncle’s Los Angeles home. It allowed Walt and Roy Disney to produce the Alice Comedies. Nobod…
Around 1177 BCE, the great cities of the Mediterranean and the Near East burned one after another, emptied out, or lost their written machinery. The two names i…
On 5 December 1872, Captain David Morehouse saw a sailing ship drifting off course between the Azores and Portugal. It was the Mary Celeste, sailing from New Yo…
In 1913, former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon travelled through the Amazon to map an uncharted river. Accounts of the …
In April 1938, a German team crossed India and Sikkim to enter Tibet. It was led by zoologist Ernst Schäfer and included anthropologist Bruno Beger, geophysicis…
In 1912, American trader Fred Meyer Schroder travelled through Shaanxi with a local Buddhist monk. He wrote that he saw a large grey-white pyramid surrounded by…
On 18 September 1793, George Washington wore Masonic regalia and laid the cornerstone of the United States Capitol in Washington. Lodges from Maryland, Virginia…
In Book IV of Herodotus, written in the fifth century BCE, there is a story about offerings sent to Apollo. The Hyperboreans sent them south. The offerings pass…
At about 4 a.m. on 20 September 1977, the sky over Petrozavodsk in the north-western Soviet Union lit up: an object like a giant star sent shafts of light towar…
On 4 April 1922, neighbours broke into an isolated farm near Waidhofen in Bavaria and found six people dead. From footprints that entered the property and never…
At the end of the Second World War, as the Red Army advanced from the east and the Allies closed in from the west, Nazi Germany was not only withdrawing troops.…
On May 20, 1967, Stefan Michalak left a motel at Falcon Lake, Manitoba, at 5:30 in the morning. He was a Polish-born industrial mechanic who liked searching the…
On July 24, 1989, Hokkaido police used a helicopter to search for two hikers lost in Daisetsuzan National Park. From the air they saw a giant SOS sign made from…
In 1942, Germany’s A-4 rocket rose from Peenemünde and fell onto a target hundreds of kilometres away. It became known as the V-2, the first ballistic missile u…
On May 9, 2001, a room at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. hosted an unusual public briefing. Steven Greer and the Disclosure Project placed more tha…
In the granite hills north of Bihar, India, caves were cut directly into single blocks of rock. Inside Sudama Cave, curved walls are polished enough to reflect …
In 1987, archaeologists found a settlement on the steppe south of the Ural Mountains, in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast. From the ground, Arkaim looked like earth …
Why a piece of film retains traces of the whole scene, and how that led to the holographic-universe theory.
A two-outcome measurement becomes the starting point for many worlds, then a later story claims that experience always follows a surviving branch.
From a mouse that loses fear of cat smell to the gut microbiome, real studies show that organisms living inside the body can tune a host's behaviour in their ow…
At the end of the Second World War, Soviet and American forces rolled into Germany and opened up its mines, underground factories, and SS sites. What they found…
The story begins with North American mounds and bones said to have been sent to Washington.
On the afternoon of 21 June 1947, Harold Dahl was patrolling Puget Sound in Washington State. He said he saw six round objects over Maury Island. One descended …
In 2023, researchers from MIT and collaborating laboratories analyzed a roughly 2-centimeter fragment of Roman concrete collected at Privernum, Italy. The fragm…
The universe contains numbers that determine how matter behaves. The strength of gravity determines whether gas can gather into stars. Electromagnetism determin…
A person sits before a screen with a dot turning like a clock hand. They are told to choose any moment to flick a wrist. No one forces the timing. After each mo…
If memory appears with a brain, can it still prove a past?
In 1981, philosopher Hilary Putnam described a specific situation: a human brain is kept alive in a container of nutrient fluid and connected to a computer. The…
Loch Ness is a freshwater loch almost 37 kilometres long in the Scottish Highlands, a deep basin reaching about 230 metres with steep sides and dark peat-colour…
In 1970 Hannes Alfvén received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on plasma, and the Electric Universe movement builds on that foundation to retell…
DMT stands for N,N-dimethyltryptamine. It is a psychedelic in the tryptamine group. In research settings, DMT can quickly change images, body sensations, and th…