The Waratah Entered a Storm With 211 People—and Left No Verified Wreckage
On the morning of July 26, 1909, the cargo-passenger liner SS Waratah departed Durban on the South African coast and headed south toward Cape Town. The weather…
The Jar Can Produce Voltage—But Was It Ever Used as a Battery?
Somewhere in the storerooms of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, there is a ceramic jar about the size of a large fist. It is undecorated, slightly ovoid,…
The Crystal Skulls Look Ancient—Their Tool Marks Do Not
The skull sits inside a glass case under controlled museum lighting. It is carved from a single block of clear quartz, roughly life-sized, polished to an almost…
The OSS Bombed Mail Trains—Then Added Forged Letters to the Wreckage
Sometime in the final winter of the Second World War, a German postal worker sorting recovered mail from a disrupted train may have picked up an envelope…
Two Americans Parachuted Onto Drifting Ice—Then Escaped by Skyhook
The station had already been abandoned when someone noticed it was still moving. Soviet ice station NP-8 had gone quiet in the spring of 1962. Its crew…
The Jersey Devil Began as the Leeds Devil—Before It Became a Monster
Somewhere in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, the trees grow close enough to block the moon. The roads that cut through them are old, and…
New York Has Found Stray Alligators—But Not a Hidden Sewer Colony
The story always starts somewhere dark and damp. A maintenance crew descends into the tunnel system beneath Manhattan, flashlights cutting through the steam. Something moves in the…
The Wow! Signal Lasted 72 Seconds—Why Was It Never Heard Again?
On the night of August 15, 1977, a radio telescope in Delaware, Ohio was doing what it had done thousands of times before—scanning the sky in a…
Vienna’s Holy Lance Is Medieval—So Where Did Its World-Conquering Power Story Come From?
It sits in a glass case inside the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, surrounded by crowns, scepters and reliquaries that once defined the authority of the Holy Roman…
The Golem Guarded Prague in Legend—But When Was the Story Attached to Rabbi Loew?
The Old-New Synagogue has stood in Prague’s Josefov quarter since the thirteenth century. Its Gothic gables and worn stone steps predate every version of the story most…