Stories from the edge of explanation.
About 5 min readIn October 1869, workers digging a well in Cardiff, New York, unearthed a ten-foot ‘petrified man’. Within two months its maker, George Hull, had confessed: the giant was carved gypsum, buried a year earlier as a hoax.
About 5 min readIn 1917, two young cousins in Yorkshire photographed what appeared to be fairies in their garden — and fooled the creator of Sherlock Holmes. More than sixty years later, they admitted the photographs were faked with cardboard cutouts and hatpins.
About 5 min readNine experienced hikers died in the Ural Mountains in 1959, fleeing their tent into a freezing night for no clear reason. A reopened investigation and a physics study have now offered an answer — an avalanche, modelled in detail — and the case is counted as explained.