Stories from the edge of explanation.
About 14 min readIn December 1980, American airmen at two Suffolk air bases reported strange lights in the forest between them, and their deputy commander put what he saw in writing.
About 4 min readA 40-ton boulder in the Taunton River bears carvings that have been “translated” as Phoenician, Norse, Portuguese and Chinese — each reading later demolished. The rock is real, the carving is real, and after nearly 350 years of argument, almost nothing else about it is certain. Who carved Dighton Rock, and what were they trying to say?
About 4 min readPeru’s Nazca Lines are world-famous; a few hundred kilometres away in Bolivia lies a network fifteen times larger — and almost nobody has heard of it. Thousands of ruler-straight paths, some twenty kilometres long, link shrines and burial towers across the high Altiplano. Who built 16,000 kilometres of road to nowhere, and why?
About 4 min readThe Great Farini walked into the Kalahari in 1885 and walked out with a story: a mile of ruined wall, a paved plaza, a Maltese cross in stone. A century of expeditions has found no brick, no pot, no trace of a city — only a dolerite formation that looks, at a glance, like masonry. Was Farini a discoverer, a showman, or a man fooled by geology?
About 4 min readFor centuries, a human skull has been kept inside Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, because legend says removing it brings storms, screams and death. In 1963, science examined the skull — and the legend fell apart in a way nobody expected.
About 5 min readOn the morning of 10 April 1834, a fire broke out in a grand house at 1140 Royal Street in New Orleans — and what the rescuers found inside ended the social reign of Madame Delphine LaLaurie and made her address the most notorious in America.
About 4 min readIn June 2011 a Swedish treasure-hunting team found a 60-metre circle on the floor of the Baltic Sea, at the end of what looked like a skid track. Tabloids called it a crashed flying saucer. Geologists who examined the rocks said something far more ordinary — and the team has never let anyone else look.
About 4 min readIn central Ohio stand the largest earthen enclosures on Earth — a circle, an octagon and a square built two thousand years ago to track the Moon’s 18.6-year cycle. For a century, part of it was a golf course.
About 5 min readIn 1886 a Montana rancher shot a strange animal chasing his geese — dark-furred, high-shouldered, with a hyena’s sloping back. It was stuffed, displayed as the ‘Ringdocus’, lost for decades, and found again in 2007. It has never been DNA-tested.
About 4 min readOn 1 October 1948, a decorated Second World War fighter pilot spent 27 minutes chasing a small white light over Fargo, North Dakota — out-turned, out-climbed, and twice flown at head-on. The Air Force called it a weather balloon.