Scandals, Tragedies, Eccentric People, the Unexplained, Disappearances, Conspiracies, Coincidences, Murderers, Cannibals, Novelties, Superstitions, interesting Places, Theories, Hoaxes...
I decided to publish my personal list of wiki articles for the greater good after my misguided attempt at an Android app wikiWEIRDia. After wrangling Android Studio and Java, I had an app that worked, but little did I realise the real challenges lay within Google's convoluted and frustrating publishing hurdles for the Play Store.
Through sheer determination, the app was approved and listed, only to die a death-by-algorithm. Searching for its exact, unique name in the Play Store would instead show all kinds of random and unrelated apps, with my app way down the list.
If you find this page entertaining, useful, or even a complete waste of time (in a good way) and want to donate - you can here!
| Article | Description | Tag(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. is the abbreviated name of a German-born American typesetter who has held the record for the longest personal name ever used. Hubert's name is made up from 27 names, including a 666-letter surname. | ||
| 100 year film | ||
| 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning | A mass poisoning in 1951, in the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France. More than 250 people were involved. | |
| 1966 Palomares B-52 crash | A B-52G bomber of the United States Air Force's Strategic Air Command collided with a KC-135 tanker during mid-air refueling at 31,000 feet (9,450 m) over the Mediterranean Sea. | |
| 1994 Cobo Arena attack | American figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was struck on the lower right thigh by assailant Shane Stant as she walked down a corridor in Cobo Arena in Detroit, Michigan. Kerrigan had been practicing skating on an ice rink in the arena shortly beforehand. The attack was planned by fellow American figure skater Tonya Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and his co-conspirator Shawn Eckardt. | |
| 21 Grams Experiment | The 21 grams experiment refers to a scientific study published in 1907 by Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts. MacDougall hypothesized that souls have physical weight, and attempted to measure the mass lost by a human when the soul departed the body. MacDougall attempted to measure the mass change of six patients at the moment of death. One of the six subjects lost three-fourths of an ounce (21.3 grams). | |
| 27 Club | A list consisting mostly of popular musicians, artists, or actors who died at age 27. | |
| 4'33" | 4'33" (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds") is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs performers not to play their instruments during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. | |
| 52-Hertz Whale | The 52-hertz whale is an unidentified whale which calls at the very unusual frequency of 52 Hz. It has been described as the loneliest whale in the world. It has been detected since the 1980s. | |
| 555 (telephone number) | The telephone number prefix 555 is a central office code in the North American Numbering Plan. It has traditionally been used only for the provision of directory assistance. The 555 prefix is also used for fictitious telephone numbers in North American television shows, films, video games, and other media in order to prevent practical jokers and curious callers from bothering telephone subscribers and organizations by calling telephone numbers they see in works of fiction. | |
| 7 wonders of the ancient world | The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is a list of remarkable constructions of classical antiquity given by various authors in guidebooks or poems popular among ancient Hellenic tourists. | |
| 900 Stewart Avenue (Ithaca, New York) | 900 Stewart Avenue is a building in Ithaca, New York, noted for its unique Egyptian Revival architecture, its dramatic placement partway down a cliff, and being the residence of astronomer Carl Sagan. The building is on a ledge about 50 feet (15 m) below street level, overlooking Fall Creek and Ithaca Falls. | |
| Acco Super Bulldozer | The largest and most powerful tracked bulldozer ever made. It was built in Portogruaro in northern Italy, by the Umberto Acco company. | |
| acoustic kitty | Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology, which in the 1960s intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. In an hour-long procedure a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull and a thin wire into its fur. | |
| Action Park | Action Park was an amusement and water park located in Vernon Township, New Jersey, United States. Action Park's popularity went hand-in-hand with a reputation for poorly designed rides, under-trained and under-aged staff, intoxicated guests and staff, and a consequently poor safety record. At least six people are known to have died as a result of mishaps on rides at the park, and it was given nicknames such as "Accident Park", and "Class Action Park". | |
| Adages | ||
| Albert C. Geyser | Albert C. Geyser is known for creating the Cornell Tube in 1905. The Cornell Tube was made of heavy lead glass through which no x-rays were thought to be emitted. He was known for promoting x-ray to eliminate excessive hair to achieve faultless skin. Unfortunately, Geyser's experimentation forced the amputation of all the fingers, metacarpal bones, and one row of carpal bones on his left hand to stop the spread of cancer. He later lost his right hand to ulcers. | |
| Alferd Packer | ||
| Alien Hand Syndrome | A category of conditions in which a person experiences their limbs acting seemingly on their own, without conscious control over the actions. | |
| Amber Room | The Amber Room was a chamber decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors, located in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg. Constructed in the 18th century in Prussia, the room was dismantled and eventually disappeared during World War II. Before its loss, it was considered an "Eighth Wonder of the World". | |
| Analog hole | ||
| Ancient Astronauts | "Ancient astronauts" is the idea that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most, if not all, religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans. | |
| Andre the Giant | André René Roussimoff, better known as André the Giant, was a French professional wrestler and actor. Roussimoff stood around seven feet tall, which was a result of gigantism caused by excess growth hormone, and later resulted in acromegaly. Roussimoff has been unofficially crowned "the greatest drunk on Earth" for once consuming 119 12-US-fluid-ounce (350 mL) beers in six hours. His likeness is used in the OBEY logo. | |
| Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition | Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was an effort to reach the North Pole in which all three Swedish expedition members – S. A. Andrée, Knut Frænkel, and Nils Strindberg – perished. Andrée, the first Swedish balloonist, proposed a voyage by hydrogen balloon from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, which was to pass, with luck, straight over the North Pole on the way. The scheme was received with patriotic enthusiasm in Sweden, a northern nation that had fallen behind in the race for the North Pole. | |
| Andy Kaufman | Andy Kaufman (January 17, 1949 – May 16, 1984) was an American comedian, wrestler, and performance artist. He has sometimes been called an "anti-comedian". He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood. Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35. Because pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax. | |
| Anglo-Zanzibar War | The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history. | |
| Animal suicide | ||
| anna delvey | ||
| Annie Oakley | ||
| Anosognosia | ||
| Anthropodermic bibliopegy | ||
| Antikythera mechanism | The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek hand-powered orrery, described as the first analogue computer, the oldest known example of such a device used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. | |
| Anti-Mask League of San Francisco | Anti-Maskers were a thing 100 years before COVID-19! | |
| Anton–Babinski syndrome | A rare symptom of brain damage, leads the sufferer to believe they can see despite being blind. | |
| António Egas Moniz | António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz GCSE GCIB (29 November 1874 – 13 December 1955), was a Portuguese neurologist and the developer of cerebral angiography. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern psychosurgery, having developed the surgical procedure leucotomy—known better today as lobotomy. | |
| Antonov an-225 mriya | The Antonov An-225 Mriya is an aircraft that was designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet Union during the 1980s. It is powered by six turbofan engines and is the heaviest aircraft ever built, with a maximum takeoff weight of 640 tonnes. It also has the largest wingspan of any aircraft in operational service. | |
| Aokigahara | Aokigahara is a forest on the northwestern flank of Japan's Mount Fuji, thriving on 30 square kilometres (12 sq mi) of hardened lava laid down by the last major eruption of Mount Fuji in 864 CE. Parts of Aokigahara are very dense, and the porous lava absorbs sound, helping to provide visitors with a sense of solitude.In recent years, Aokigahara has become known as "the Suicide Forest", one of the world's most-used suicide sites; signs at the head of some trails urge suicidal visitors to think of their families and contact a suicide prevention association. | |
| Apollo 11 Missing Tapes | The Apollo 11 missing tapes were those that were recorded from Apollo 11's slow-scan television (SSTV) telecast in its raw format on telemetry data tape at the time of the first Moon landing in 1969 and subsequently lost. The data tapes were used to record all transmitted data (video as well as telemetry) for backup. | |
| Arch Deluxe | A hamburger sold by McDonald's in 1996 and marketed specifically to adults. It was soon discontinued after failing to become popular despite a massive marketing campaign and now is considered one of the most expensive flops of all time. | |
| Armin Meiwes | Armin Meiwes is a German former computer repair technician who achieved international notoriety for killing and eating a voluntary victim in 2001, whom he had found via the Internet. After Meiwes and the victim jointly attempted to eat the victim's severed penis, Meiwes killed his victim and proceeded to eat a large amount of his flesh. | |
| armored bulldozer | The armored bulldozer is a basic tool of combat engineering. These combat engineering vehicles combine the earth moving capabilities of the bulldozer with armor which protects the vehicle and its operator in or near combat. Most are civilian bulldozers modified by addition of vehicle armor/military equipment, but some are tanks stripped of armament and fitted with a dozer blade. | |
| Aron Ralston | Aron Lee Ralston (born October 27, 1975) is an American outdoorsman, mechanical engineer and motivational speaker known for surviving a canyoneering accident by cutting off his own arm. | |
| atari video game burial | The Atari video game burial of 1983 was an infamous event in video gaming history, in which Atari dumped thousands of video game cartridges, allegedly including a large number of copies of its video game adaptation E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600, into a New Mexico landfill. It was one of the consequences of the North American video game crash of 1983. | |
| Audie Murphy | Audie Leon Murphy (20 June 1925 – 28 May 1971) was an American soldier, actor, songwriter, and rancher. He was one of the most decorated American combat soldiers of World War II. He received every military combat award for valor available from the U.S. Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism. After the war, Murphy embarked on a 21-year acting career. He played himself in the 1955 autobiographical film To Hell and Back, based on his 1949 memoirs of the same name. | |
| Auditory illusion | ||
| Autonomous sensory meridian response | ||
| AVE Mizar | The AVE Mizar was a roadable aircraft built in the 1970s, by pairing a Ford Pinto with a Cessna aircraft. | |
| Backmasking | Backmasking is a recording technique in which a sound or message is intentionally recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward. In 1969, rumors of a backmasked message in the Beatles song "Revolution 9" sparked the Paul is dead urban legend. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Christian groups in the United States alleged that backmasking was being used by rock musicians for Satanic purposes, leading to record-burning protests and proposed anti-backmasking legislation. | |
| Bagger 293 | Bagger 293, previously known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a giant bucket-wheel excavator made by the German industrial company TAKRAF, formerly an East German Kombinat. It owns or shares some records for terrestrial vehicle size in the Guinness Book of Records. Bagger 293 is 96 metres (314.9 feet) tall and 225 metres (738.2 feet) long and weighs 14,200 tonnes (31.3 million pounds). | |
| Baghdad Battery | The Baghdad Battery or Parthian Battery is a set of three artifacts which were found together: a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod of iron. It was discovered in modern Khujut Rabu, Iraq, close to the metropolis of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian (150 BC – 223 AD) and Sasanian (224–650 AD) empires of Persia, and it is believed to date from either of these periods. | |
| Bald%E2%80%93hairy | ||
| Bat bomb | Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. | |
| Battle of Los Angeles | The Battle of Los Angeles, also known as the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, is the name given by contemporary sources to a rumored attack on the mainland United States by Japan and the subsequent anti-aircraft artillery barrage which took place from late 24 February to early 25 February 1942, over Los Angeles, California. | |
| Belphegor's prime | Belphegor's prime is the palindromic prime number 1000000000000066600000000000001 (1030 + 666 × 1014 + 1), a number which reads the same both backwards and forwards and is only divisible by itself and one. | |
| Benjaman Kyle | Benjaman Kyle was the chosen name of a man with amnesia, found in 2004 next to a dumpster. While his identity was eventually discovered in 2015, a gap of more than 20 years of his life remains undocumented/unknown. | |
| Big Chicken | The Big Chicken is a KFC restaurant in Marietta, Georgia, which features a 56-foot-tall (17 m) steel-sided structure designed in the appearance of a chicken rising up from the top of the building. | |
| Big Lizzie | Big Lizzie is thought to be the largest tractor in the world, at 10m (34ft) high by 5.5m (18ft) wide. It was built in 1916 and is located in Red Cliffs, Australia | |
| Big Muskie | Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline excavator owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company (formerly a division of American Electric Power), weighing 13,500 short tons (12,200 t) and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It operated in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991. | |
| Bigfoot Trap | What is believed to be the world's only Bigfoot trap is located in the Siskiyou National Forest in the southern part of Jackson County, Oregon, a few miles from the California state border. It was designed to capture a Bigfoot (or Sasquatch), the legendary hominid that is said to live in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. | |
| Bill Gaede | ||
| Birthday effect | ||
| Black fax | The term black fax refers to a prank fax transmission, consisting of one or more pages entirely filled with a uniform black tone. The sender's intention is generally to use up as much of the recipient's fax ink, toner, or thermal paper as possible, thus costing the recipient money, as well as denying the recipient use of their own machine (similar to computer-based denial of service attacks). This is made easier because fax transmission protocols compress the solid black image very well, so a very short fax call can produce many pages. | |
| Black-eyed children | Black-eyed children (or black-eyed kids) are an American contemporary legend of paranormal creatures that resemble children between ages 6 and 16, with pale skin and black eyes, who are reportedly seen hitchhiking or panhandling, or are encountered on doorsteps of residential homes. | |
| Bloop | Bloop was an ultra-low-frequency, high amplitude underwater sound detected 1997. By 2012, earlier speculation that the sound originated from a marine animal was replaced by NOAA's description of the sound as being consistent with noises originating from glacial movements such as ice calving, or through seabed gouging by ice. | |
| Boss Key | A boss key is a special keyboard shortcut used in PC games or other programs to hide the program quickly, possibly displaying a special screen that appears to be a normal productivity program (such as a spreadsheet application). | |
| Boy in the Box (Philadelphia) | The Boy in the Box is the name given to an unidentified murder victim, a 4-to 6-year-old boy, whose naked, battered body was found in a bassinet box in the Fox Chase section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 25, 1957. He is also commonly called "America's Unknown Child." His identity has never been discovered, and the case remains open. | |
| Boyd Massacre | The Boyd massacre occurred in December 1809 when Māori residents of Whangaroa Harbour in northern New Zealand killed and ate between 66 and 70 Europeans. It is one of the bloodiest instances of cannibalism on record. The massacre is thought to have been in revenge for the whipping of a young Māori chief by the crew of the sailing ship Boyd. | |
| Brazen Bull | The Brazen Bull was allegedly a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece. Shaped like a bull, it had an acoustic apparatus that converted screams into the sound of a bull. The condemned were locked inside the device, and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until the person inside was roasted to death. | |
| Broadcast Signal Intrusion | A broadcast signal intrusion is the hijacking of broadcast signals of radio, television stations, cable television broadcast feeds or satellite signals. Hijacking incidents have involved local TV and radio stations as well as cable and national networks. | |
| Bubbly Creek | Bubbly Creek is the nickname given to the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River. It runs entirely within the city of Chicago, Illinois, U.S. It marks the boundary between the Bridgeport and McKinley Park community areas of the city. The creek derives its name from the gases bubbling out of the riverbed from the decomposition of blood and entrails dumped into the river in the early 20th century by the local meatpacking businesses surrounding the Union Stock Yards directly south of the creek's endpoint at Pershing Road. It was brought to notoriety by Upton Sinclair in his exposé on the American meat packing industry titled The Jungle. | |
| Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo... | "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English, often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought. | |
| bullet ant | Paraponera clavata is a species of ant, commonly known as the bullet ant, named for its extremely potent sting. It inhabits humid lowland rainforests from Nicaragua and the extreme east of Honduras and south to Paraguay. | |
| Burke and Hare murders | The Burke and Hare murders were a series of 16 killings committed over a period of about ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were undertaken by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses to Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures. | |
| Byford Dolphin | Byford Dolphin is a semi-submersible, column-stabilised drilling rig operated by Dolphin Drilling, contracted by BP for drilling in the United Kingdom section of the North Sea for three years. The rig has suffered some serious accidents, most notably an explosive decompression in 1983 that killed four divers and one dive tender, and badly injured another dive tender. | |
| candace newmaker | Candace Elizabeth Newmaker (born Candace Tiara Elmore, November 19, 1989 – April 18, 2000) was a child who was killed during a 70-minute attachment therapy session purported to treat reactive attachment disorder. The treatment, during which Candace was suffocated, included a rebirthing script. | |
| Candy Jones | ||
| Cargo Cult | A cargo cult is a millenarian belief system in which adherents perform rituals which they believe will cause a more technologically advanced society to deliver goods. These cults were first described in Melanesia in the wake of contact with allied military forces during the Second World War. | |
| Carl Tanzler | Tanzler was a German-born radiology technologist who developed an obsession for a young tuberculosis patient, Elena Milagro de Hoyos. In 1933, almost two years after her death, Tanzler removed Elena's body from its tomb and lived with the corpse at his home for seven years until its discovery by Hoyos' relatives and authorities in 1940. | |
| cat poo coffee | ||
| Catacombs of Paris | The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people in a small part of a tunnel network built to consolidate Paris' ancient stone quarries. | |
| Category - Unidentified People | This category contains people who are known by their reputation or acts, but their names have remained unidentified. | |
| Centennial Light | The Centennial Light is the world's longest-lasting light bulb, burning since 1901, and almost never switched off. It is at 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California, and maintained by the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department. | |
| Chalkboard scraping | ||
| Champawat Tiger | The Champawat Tiger was a Bengal tigress responsible for an estimated 436 deaths in Nepal and the Kumaon area of India, during the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century. Her attacks have been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest number of fatalities from a tiger. She was shot in 1907 by Jim Corbett. | |
| Charles Domery | Charles Domery (c. 1778 – after 1800), was a Polish soldier noted for his unusually large appetite. He was recorded as having eaten 174 cats in a year, and would eat 4 to 5 pounds (1.8 to 2.3 kg) of grass each day if he could not find other food. During service on the French ship Hoche, he attempted to eat the severed leg of a crew member hit by cannon fire, before other members of the crew wrestled it from him. | |
| Charles Ingram | ||
| Charles Whitman | Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 - August 1, 1966) was an American mass murderer who became infamous as the "Texas Tower Sniper". On August 1, 1966, he used knives to kill his mother and his wife in their respective homes, then went to the University of Texas in Austin with multiple firearms and began indiscriminately shooting at people. | |
| Chauvet Cave | This cave was discovered in France in 1994 that contains some of the best-preserved figurative cave paintings in the world, as well as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life up to 30,000 years old. | |
| Chernobyl Exclusion Zone | The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is an officially designated exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster. It is also commonly known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the 30 Kilometre Zone, or simply The Zone.Established by the Soviet Armed Forces soon after the 1986 disaster, it initially existed as an area of 30 km (19 mi) radius from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant designated for evacuation and placed under military control. Its borders have since been altered to cover a larger area of Ukraine. | |
| Chip Art | Chip art refers to microscopic artwork built into integrated circuits, also called chips or ICs. Since ICs are printed by photolithography, not constructed a component at a time, there is no additional cost to include features in otherwise unused space on the chip. Designers have used this freedom to put all sorts of artwork on the chips themselves, from designers' simple initials to rather complex drawings. Chip graffiti is sometimes called the hardware version of software easter eggs. | |
| Christine Chubbuck | Christine Chubbuck (August 24, 1944 – July 15, 1974) was an American television news reporter who worked for WTOG and WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida. She was the first person to commit suicide on a live television broadcast. | |
| Christopher McCandless | Christopher Johnson McCandless (February 12, 1968 – c. August 1992), was an American hiker who sought an increasingly itinerant lifestyle as he grew up. McCandless is the subject of Into the Wild, a nonfiction book that was later made into a full-length feature film. After graduating from Emory University in Georgia in 1990, McCandless traveled across North America and eventually hitchhiked to Alaska in April 1992. There, he entered the Alaskan bush with minimal supplies, hoping to live simply off the land. | |
| cicada 3301 | ||
| Clock of the Long Now | The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a mechanical clock under construction that is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Musician Brian Eno gave the Clock of the Long Now its name and collaborated with Hillis on the writing of music for the chimes for a future prototype. | |
| Cocktail party effect | ||
| Confabulation | ||
| Controversies | A list of controversies including hoaxes, political correctness, censorship and conspiracies. | |
| Coolest Cooler | The Coolest Cooler was a multi-function cooler that was initially funded through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Currently, it's widely considered to be one of the largest disasters in Kickstarter history. In the summer of 2014, Ryan Grepper raised over $13 million, making it the most funded Kickstarter campaign of 2014. Crowdfunders were offered the product at a discounted rate but eventually due to corporate failure not all backers received a product. | |
| Cosmic Latte | Cosmic latte is the average color of the universe, found by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the average color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper in which they reported that their survey of the light from over 200,000 galaxies averaged to a slightly beigeish white. | |
| Coso artifact | ||
| Cotard delusion | ||
| Cottingley Fairies | The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright (1901–1988) and Frances Griffiths (1907–1986), two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. It wasn't until the 1980s that the cousins admitted they were faked, although they maintained the fifth photo was geniune. | |
| Crash at Crush | The Crash at Crush was a one-day publicity stunt in the U.S. state of Texas that took place on September 15, 1896. William George Crush, general passenger agent of the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad, conceived the idea in order to demonstrate a staged train wreck as a public spectacle. The event planned to showcase the deliberate head-on collision of two unmanned locomotives at high speed; unexpectedly, the impact caused both engine boilers to explode, resulting in a shower of flying debris that killed two people and caused numerous injuries among the spectators. | |
| Crystal Pepsi | ||
| D.B. Cooper | Dan Cooper is the pseudonym of an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in United States airspace between Portland and Seattle on the afternoon of November 24, 1971. The man purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper but, because of a news miscommunication, became known in popular lore as D. B. Cooper. He extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,260,000 in 2019) and parachuted to an uncertain fate. | |
| Dagen H | Dagen H (H day), was the day on 3 September 1967, in which the traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.The "H" stands for "Högertrafik", the Swedish word for "right traffic". It was by far the largest logistical event in Sweden's history. | |
| Dancing Plague of 1518 | The dancing plague (or dance epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (now modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire in July 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for days. Controversy exists over whether people ultimately danced to their deaths. | |
| Danger Music | Danger music is an experimental form of avant-garde 20th and 21st century music and performance art. It is based on the concept that some pieces of music can or will harm either the listener or the performer, understanding that the piece in question may or may not be performed. | |
| Dark Side of the Rainbow | Dark Side of the Rainbow – also known as Dark Side of Oz or The Wizard of Floyd – refers to the pairing of the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. This produces moments where the film and the album appear to correspond. Members of Pink Floyd have denied any intent to connect the album to the film. | |
| David Hahn | David Charles Hahn (October 30, 1976 – September 27, 2016), sometimes called the "Radioactive Boy Scout" or the "Nuclear Boy Scout", was an American man who built a homemade neutron source at the age of seventeen. | |
| day the music died | ||
| Dead Hand | Dead Hand is a Cold War-era automatic nuclear weapons-control system that was used by the Soviet Union. General speculation from insiders alleges that the system remains in use in the post-Soviet Russian Federation as well. It can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by sending a pre-entered highest-authority order if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity, and pressure sensors. | |
| Death from Laughter | Death from laughter is a rare form of death, usually resulting from either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation, that has itself been caused by a fit of laughter. Instances of death by laughter have been recorded from the times of ancient Greece to modern times. | |
| Death of Garry Hoy | Garry Hoy (January 1, 1955 – July 9, 1993) was a lawyer for the law firm of Holden Day Wilson in Toronto who died when he fell from the 24th floor of his office building in Toronto. In an attempt to prove to a group of prospective articling students that the glass windows of the Toronto-Dominion Centre were unbreakable, he threw himself against the glass. The glass did not break, but the window frame gave way and he fell to his death. | |
| Deathbed Phenomena | Deathbed phenomena refers to a range of experiences reported by people who are dying. There are many examples of deathbed phenomena in both non-fiction and fictional literature, which suggests that these occurrences have been noted by cultures around the world for centuries, although scientific study of them is relatively recent. In scientific literature such experiences have been referred to as death-related sensory experiences (DRSE). Dying patients have reported to staff working in hospices they have experienced comforting visions. | |
| Deep Note | ||
| Deepwater Horizon | ||
| Demon Core | The demon core was a spherical 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium, manufactured during World War II by the United States that was involved in two accidents. The device briefly went supercritical during two separate experiments resulting in the acute radiation poisoning and subsequent deaths of scientists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. After these incidents the spherical plutonium core was referred to as the "demon core". | |
| Dihydrogen monoxide parody | The dihydrogen monoxide parody involves calling water by an unfamiliar chemical name, most often "dihydrogen monoxide" (DHMO), and listing some of water's effects in a particularly alarming manner, such as accelerating corrosion (rust) and causing suffocation (drowning). The parody often calls for dihydrogen monoxide to be banned, regulated, or labeled as dangerous. | |
| Dinosaur Size | Dinosaurs show some of the most extreme variations in size of any land animal group, ranging from tiny hummingbirds, which can weigh as little as three grams, to the extinct titanosaurs, which could weigh as much as 80 t. Scientists will probably never be certain of the largest and smallest dinosaurs. This article shows dinosaurs of these size extremes. | |
| Disappearance of Ben McDaniel | On August 20, 2010, employees in the dive shop in Florida, United States, noticed that a pickup truck had remained in the shop's parking lot for the previous two days. It belonged to Ben McDaniel (born April 15, 1980), a Tennesseean who had been diving regularly at the spring. He had last been seen on the evening of August 18, on a dive entering a cave 58 feet (18 m) below the water's surface. While he was initially believed to have drowned on that dive, and his parents still strongly believe his body is in an inaccessible reach of the extensive cave system, no trace of him has ever been found. | |
| Disappearance of Bobby Dunbar | ||
| Disappearance of Frederick Valentich | ||
| Dolly (Sheep) | Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 February 2003) was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer. | |
| Donald Ewen Cameron | Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901 – 8 September 1967) was a Scottish-born psychiatrist who served as President of the American Psychiatric Association (1952–1953) among others. In spite of his high professional reputation, he has been criticized for, among other things, administering electroconvulsive therapy and experimental drugs, including poisons such as curare, to patients and prisoners without their informed consent, and his role in the history of the development of psychological and medical torture techniques. | |
| Donner Party | The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who migrated to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the bodies of those who had succumbed to starvation, sickness and extreme cold. | |
| dr death | ||
| Duga Radar | Duga was a Soviet radar system used as part of the Soviet missile defense early-warning radar network. The system operated from July 1976 to December 1989. Two operational Duga radars were deployed. The Duga systems were extremely powerful, over 10 MW in some cases. They appeared without warning, sounding like a sharp, repetitive tapping noise by shortwave listeners the Russian Woodpecker. The random frequency hops disrupted legitimate broadcasts, amateur radio operations, oceanic commercial aviation communications, and utility transmissions, resulting in thousands of complaints by many countries worldwide. | |
| Dutch Uncle | ||
| Dyatlov Pass Incident | The Dyatlov Pass Incident was an event in which nine Russian hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains between 1 and 2 February 1959, in uncertain circumstances. During the night, something caused them to cut their way out of their tents and flee the campsite while inadequately dressed for the heavy snowfall and subzero temperatures. | |
| Dyson's Eternal Intelligence | Dyson's eternal intelligence concept (the Dyson Scenario), proposed by Freeman Dyson in 1979, proposes a means by which an immortal society of intelligent beings in an open universe may escape the prospect of the heat death of the universe by extending subjective time to infinity even though expending only a finite amount of energy. | |
| Early Flying Machines | Early flying machines include all forms of aircraft studied or constructed before the development of the modern aeroplane by 1910. The story of modern flight begins more than a century before the first successful manned aeroplane, and the earliest aircraft thousands of years before. | |
| Easter Egg (media) | Easter egg is a term used to describe a message, image, or feature hidden in a video game, film, or other, usually in electronics, medium. The term used in this manner was coined around 1979 by Steve Wright, the then Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure, in reference to an Easter egg hunt. | |
| Ed Gein | Ed Gein was an American convicted murderer and body snatcher who exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. The films Psycho, Silence of the Lambs and Leatherface were inspired by Gein, with some details omitted as they were deemed too unrealistic. | |
| Egg of Columbus | An egg of Columbus refers to a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. The expression refers to an apocryphal story, dating from at least the 15th century, in which it is said that Christopher Columbus, having been told that finding a new trade route was inevitable and no great accomplishment, challenges his critics to make an egg stand on its tip. After his challengers give up, Columbus does it himself by tapping the egg on the table to flatten its tip. | |
| Eighth Wonder of the World | Eighth Wonder of the World is an unofficial title sometimes given to new buildings, structures, projects, or even designs that are deemed to be comparable to the seven Wonders of the World. | |
| Elephant Bird | Elephant birds are members of the extinct ratite family Aepyornithidae, made up of large to enormous flightless birds that once lived on the island of Madagascar. They became extinct, perhaps around 1000–1200 CE, probably as a result of human activity. Elephant birds comprised the genera Mullerornis, Vorombe and Aepyornis. While they were in close geographical proximity to the ostrich, their closest living relatives are kiwi (found only in New Zealand), suggesting that ratites did not diversify by vicariance during the breakup of Gondwana but instead evolved from ancestors that dispersed more recently by flying. | |
| Elm Farm Ollie | Elm Farm Ollie was the first cow to fly in an airplane, doing so on 18 February 1930, as part of the International Air Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. She also became the first cow milked in flight. This was done ostensibly to allow scientists to observe midair effects on animals, as well as for publicity purposes. | |
| Elvis Sightings | Sightings of singer Elvis Presley have sometimes been reported following his death in 1977. The conspiracy theory that Presley did not die and instead went into hiding was popularized by Gail Brewer-Giorgio and other authors. | |
| Emu War | The Emu War was a nuisance wildlife management military operation undertaken in Australia over the later part of 1932 to address public concern over the number of emus said to be running amok in the Campion district of Western Australia. The unsuccessful attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with Lewis guns - leading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident. | |
| Engineering Failures | A list of engineered systems that failed in a spectacular, historic or edifying way. | |
| Enron Scandal | The Enron scandal was an accounting scandal involving Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas. Upon being publicized in October 2001, the company declared bankruptcy and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen – then one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world – was effectively dissolved. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in U.S. history at that time, Enron was cited as the biggest audit failure. | |
| Environments (album series) | ||
| EPA list of extremely hazardous substances | This is a list of extremely hazardous substances defined in Section 302 of the U.S. Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. | |
| EURion constellation | The EURion constellation is a pattern of symbols incorporated into a number of secure documents such as banknotes and ownership title certificates designs worldwide since about 1996. It is added to help imaging software detect the presence of such a document in a digital image. Such software can then block the user from reproducing banknotes to prevent counterfeiting using colour photocopiers. | |
| Euthanasia Coaster | The Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical roller coaster designed to kill its passengers. In 2010, it was designed and made into a scale model by Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas. Urbonas, who has worked at an amusement park, stated that the goal of his concept roller coaster is to take lives "with elegance and euphoria." As for practical applications of his design, Urbonas mentioned "euthanasia" or "execution." | |
| Exploding Animals | A list of animals that have been known to explode for various reasons, including an ant that can voluntarily explode as a defense mechanism. | |
| Exploding Head Syndrome | Exploding head syndrome (EHS) is an abnormal sensory perception during sleep in which a person experiences unreal noises that are loud and of short duration when falling asleep or waking up. The noise may be frightening, typically occurs only occasionally, and is not a serious health concern. People may also experience a flash of light. | |
| Explosive Rat | The explosive rat, also known as a rat bomb, was a weapon developed by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in World War II for use against Germany. Rat carcasses were filled with plastic explosives, and were to be distributed near German boiler rooms, where it was expected they would be disposed of by burning, with the subsequent explosion having a chance of causing a boiler explosion. | |
| Extreme points of Earth | This is a list of extreme points on Earth, the geographical locations that are farther north or south than, higher or lower in elevation than, or farthest inland or out to sea from, any other locations on the landmasses, continents or countries. | |
| Fads | A fad, also known as a craze, refers to a fashion that becomes popular in a culture (or subcultures) relatively quickly, remains popular, often for a rather brief period, then loses popularity dramatically, as it either fades into obscurity, or becomes a regular part of a society's culture. This is a comprehensive list of fads. | |
| Fan Death | Fan death is a belief that running an electric fan in a closed room with unopened or no windows will cause death. Despite no concrete evidence to support the concept, belief in fan death persists to this day in Korea, and also to a lesser extent in Japan. | |
| Federal Express Flight 705 | On April 7, 1994, Federal Express Flight 705, a cargo jet carrying electronics equipment across the United States from Memphis, Tennessee to San Jose, California, was involved in a hijack attempt by Auburn R. Calloway. Calloway, a Federal Express employee, was facing possible dismissal for lying about his flight hours. He boarded the scheduled flight as a deadhead passenger carrying a guitar case concealing several hammers and a speargun. He planned to crash the aircraft hoping that he would appear to be an employee killed in an accident. Calloway's efforts to kill the crew were unsuccessful. | |
| Festivus | Festivus is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as an alternative to the pressures and commercialism of the Christmas season. Originally created by author Daniel O'Keefe, Festivus entered popular culture after it was made the focus of the 1997 Seinfeld episode "The Strike", which O'Keefe's son, Dan O'Keefe, co-wrote. | |
| Filmed Deaths | This category features disasters and people who have died or received fatal injuries while being filmed, videotaped, broadcast, or otherwise recorded. | |
| Fitzcarraldo | ||
| Ford Nucleon | The Ford Nucleon is a concept car developed by Ford in 1957 designed as a future nuclear-powered car, one of a handful of such designs during the 1950s and '60s. The concept was only demonstrated as a scale model. | |
| Ford Seattle-ite XXI | The Ford Seattle-ite XXI was a 3/8 scale concept car displayed on 20 April 1962 o at the Seattle World's Fair. The car had six wheels and contained novel ideas that have since become reality: interchangeable fuel cell power units; interchangeable bodies; interactive computer navigation, mapping, and auto information systems; and four driving and steering wheels. | |
| Forest Swastika | The forest swastika was a patch of larch trees covering 0.36 ha (0.89 acres) area of pine forest near Zernikow, Uckermark district, Brandenburg, in northeastern Germany, arranged with their light colors to look like a swastika. | |
| Frank Richards (performer) | Frank "Cannonball" Richards (February 20, 1887 – February 7, 1969) was an American performer whose act involved taking heavy blows to his stomach. This included being shot by a 104-lb. (47 kg) cannonball from a spring-loaded 12 ft. (3.6 m) cannon twice a day. | |
| Franz Mesmer | ||
| Fred Dibnah | Frederick Travis Dibnah, MBE (29 April 1938 - 6 November 2004) was an English steeplejack and television personality. In 1978, while making repairs to Bolton Town Hall, Dibnah was filmed by a regional BBC news crew. The BBC then commissioned a documentary, which followed the rough-hewn steeplejack as he worked on chimneys, interacted with his family and talked about his favourite hobby - steam. | |
| Fred West | Frederick Walter Stephen West (29 September 1941 – 1 January 1995) was an English serial killer who committed at least twelve murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, the majority with his second wife, Rosemary West. | |
| Fritz Haber | ||
| Fruchschoppen | ||
| Fyre Festival | Fyre Festival was a fraudulent luxury music festival founded by Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media Inc, and rapper Ja Rule. It was created with the intent of promoting the company's Fyre app for booking music talent. The festival was scheduled to take place on April 28–30 and May 5–7, 2017, on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma. | |
| Galloping Gertie | ||
| Ganzfeld effect | The Ganzfeld effect is a phenomenon caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field. The effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals. The ganzfeld effect can also elicit hallucinations percepts in many people, in addition to an altered state of consciousness. | |
| Gate Tower Building | Gate Tower Building is a 16-floor office building in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Japan. It is notable for the highway offramp of the Ikeda Route that passes through the building. | |
| General Motors Streetcar conspiracy | The notion of a General Motors streetcar conspiracy emerged after GM and other companies were convicted of monopolizing the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and its subsidiaries. | |
| Genie (feral child) | Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology. | |
| George R. Price | ||
| GG Allin | ||
| Ghoti | Ghoti is a creative respelling of the word fish, used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. | |
| gimli glider | Air Canada Flight 143 was a Canadian scheduled domestic passenger flight between Montreal and Edmonton that ran out of fuel on July 23, 1983, at an altitude of 41,000 feet (12,000 m), midway through the flight. The flight crew successfully glided the Boeing 767 to an emergency landing at a former Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba that had been turned into a motor racing track. | |
| globster | A globster or blob is an unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water. A globster is distinguished from a normal beached carcass by being hard to identify, at least by initial untrained observers, and by creating controversy as to its identity. | |
| Gloomy Sunday | "Gloomy Sunday", also known as the "Hungarian Suicide Song", is a popular song composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933. There have been several urban legends regarding the song over the years, mostly involving it being allegedly connected with various numbers of suicides, and radio networks reacting by purportedly banning the song. | |
| Glyptodon | Glyptodon was an ancient American armadillo the size and weight of a Volkswagen Beetle. Early hunters may have used Glyptodon shells for shelter. | |
| Goiânia accident | The Goiânia accident was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, in the Brazilian state of Goiás, after a forgotten radiotherapy source was taken from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated. | |
| Goop (company) | ||
| Great Blue Norther of November 11, 1911 | The Great Blue Norther of November 11, 1911 was a cold snap that affected the central USA on Saturday, November 11, 1911. Many cities broke record highs, going into the 70s and 80s early that afternoon. By nightfall, cities were dealing with temperatures in the teens and single-digits on the Fahrenheit scale. One city recorded a record temperature difference of 67 °F (37 °C) in 10 hours. | |
| Great Molasses Flood | The Great Molasses Flood, occurred in 1919 in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million US gal (8.7 million liters) of molasses burst, and the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km/h), killing 21 and injuring 150. Residents claimed for decades afterwards that the area still smelled of molasses on hot summer days. | |
| Great Stink | The Great Stink was an event in Central London in July and August 1858 during which the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent that was present on the banks of the River Thames. | |
| green bicycle murder | ||
| Green Boots | Green Boots is the name given to the unidentified body of a climber that became a landmark on the main Northeast ridge route of Mount Everest. | |
| Grey goo | ||
| H. H. Holmes | ||
| Hashima Island | Hashima Island is an abandoned island of Nagasaki, lying about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the center of the city. It is one of 505 uninhabited islands in Nagasaki Prefecture. The island's most notable features are its abandoned concrete buildings, undisturbed except by nature, and the surrounding sea wall. | |
| Hate Watching | ||
| Hauntology (Music) | Hauntology is a genre or loose category of music that evokes cultural memory and the aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians, and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1940s to the 1970s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films, often through the use of sampling. | |
| Havana syndrome | Havana syndrome is a set of medical signs and symptoms experienced by United States and Canadian embassy staff in Cuba. Beginning in August 2017, reports surfaced that American and Canadian diplomatic personnel in Cuba had suffered a variety of health problems, dating back to late 2016. | |
| Head Transplant | A head transplant is an experimental surgical operation involving the grafting of one organism's head onto the body of another; in many experiments the recipient's head was not removed but in others it has been. Experimentation in animals began in the early 1900s. As of 2021, no lasting successes have been achieved. | |
| Heart Attack Grill | The Heart Attack Grill is an American hamburger restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada that makes a point of serving food that is very high in fat, sugar, and cholesterol; in other words, food that, if eaten regularly, could cause a heart attack, hence the name. On February 11, 2012, a customer suffered what was reported to be an apparent heart attack while eating a "Triple Bypass Burger" at the restaurant. | |
| Hedy Lamarr | ||
| Henry Molaison | ||
| Highest Unclimbed Mountain | An unclimbed mountain is a mountain peak that has yet to be climbed to the top. Determining which unclimbed peak is highest is often a matter of controversy. In some parts of the world, surveying and mapping are still unreliable. | |
| High-Heel Wedding Church | The High-Heel Wedding Church is a high-heel-shaped building in Budai Township, Chiayi County, Taiwan. It is managed by Southwest Coast National Scenic Area Administration. The church received the Guinness World Records certification as the world's largest high-heel shoe-shaped structure. | |
| hindenburg | ||
| Hinterkaifeck murders | ||
| Hiroo Onoda | Hiroo Onoda (19 March 1922 – 16 January 2014) was an Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer who fought in World War II and was a Japanese holdout who did not surrender at the war's end in August 1945. After the war ended Onoda spent 29 years hiding out in the Philippines until his former commander travelled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty by order of Emperor Shōwa in 1974. | |
| Hoaxes | This category includes notable proven hoaxes and incidents determined to be hoaxes by reliable sources. | |
| Hold Your Wee for a Wii contest | On January 12, 2007, KDND's morning show, the Morning Rave, held an on-air contest entitled Hold Your Wee for a Wii, in which contestants were asked to drink as much water as they could without urinating. The contestant able to hold the most water would win a Wii video game console; at the time, the Nintendo console was a very popular and sought-after item, but was nearly impossible to find in stores in North America. A 28-year-old contestant, Jennifer Strange, died of water intoxication hours after taking part in the contest. | |
| Hot Coffee (minigame) | ||
| Howard Dully | Howard Dully (born November 30, 1948) is one of the youngest recipients of the transorbital lobotomy, a procedure performed on him when he was 12 years old. Dully received international attention in 2005, following the broadcasting of his story on National Public Radio. Subsequently, in 2007, he published a New York Times Best Seller memoir, My Lobotomy, a story of the hardships of his lobotomy, co-authored by Charles Fleming. | |
| Howard Hughes | ||
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irom_Chanu_Sharmila | ||
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edwards#Legal_career | ||
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect | ||
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_shows_notable_for_negative_reception | ||
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft | ||
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Edward_Coneys | ||
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_T%C3%A9n%C3%A9r%C3%A9 | ||
| Hughes H-4 Hercules | The Hughes H-4 Hercules (commonly known as the Spruce Goose; registration NX37602) is a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. Built from wood because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, the aircraft was nicknamed the Spruce Goose by critics. The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built. | |
| Humanzee | The humanzee is a hypothetical hybrid of chimpanzee and human. Serious attempts to create such a hybrid have been made. There have been no scientifically verified specimens of a human–chimp hybrid, but there have been substantiated reports of unsuccessful attempts at human/chimpanzee hybridization in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and various unsubstantiated reports on similar attempts during the second half of the 20th century. | |
| Hungarian pengő | The worst inflation in history caused this currency to be replaced with another that was 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times its value. | |
| Hypnagogia | ||
| Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov | Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (August 1 1870 – March 20, 1932) was a Russian and Soviet biologist who specialized in the field of artificial insemination and the interspecific hybridization of animals. He is famous for his controversial (and failed) attempts to create a human-ape hybrid by inseminating three female chimpanzees with human sperm (with no result). | |
| Impossible Colors | Colors that do not appear in ordinary visual functioning. While some such colors have no basis in reality, phenomena such as cone cell fatigue enable colors to be perceived in certain circumstances that would not be otherwise. | |
| Inedia | Inedia or breatharianism is the claimed ability for a person to live without consuming food, and in some cases water. Breatharians claim that food (and sometimes water) is not necessary for survival, and that humans can be sustained solely by prana, the vital life force in Hinduism. | |
| Infinite Monkey Theorem | ||
| Insects as Food | Insects as food or edible insects are insect species used for human consumption, e.g., whole or as an ingredient in processed food products such as burger patties, pasta, or snacks. | |
| Intentionally Blank Page | An intentionally blank page is a page that is devoid of content and may be unexpected. Such pages may serve purposes ranging from place-holding to space-filling and content separation. Sometimes, these pages carry a notice such as "This page intentionally left blank." | |
| Irukandji syndrome | ||
| Island Gigantism | Island gigantism, or insular gigantism, is a biological phenomenon in which the size of an animal species isolated on an island increases dramatically in comparison to its mainland relatives. | |
| Ivan Pavlov | ||
| Ivy League nude posture photos | ||
| Jack Parsons (rocket engineer) | John Whiteside Parsons (October 2, 1914 – June 17, 1952) was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets. | |
| James Miller (parachutist) | ||
| Jeanne Calment | Oldest person (122y) | |
| Jenny | ||
| jeremy wilson | ||
| Johannes Vermeer | Vermeer was a Dutch artist in the 1600s who was able to create photorealistic paintings, and nobody knows exactly how | |
| John Bosley Ziegler | ||
| John F. Kennedy autopsy | The autopsy of president John F. Kennedy was performed at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The autopsy began at about 8 p.m. EST November 22, 1963 (on the day of his assassination) and ended at about 12:30 a.m. EST November 23, 1963. | |
| John Titor | John Titor is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war, none of which came true. | |
| Johnston Atoll | For nearly 70 years, the Johnston Atoll was under the control of the U.S. military. During that time, it was variously used as a naval refueling depot, an airbase, a testing site for nuclear and biological weapons, a secret missile base, and a site for the storage and disposal of chemical weapons and Agent Orange. Those activities left the area environmentally contaminated, and remediation and monitoring continue. | |
| Jonestown | ||
| Jos%C3%A9 Manuel Rodriguez Delgado | A Spanish professor of neurophysiology at Yale University, famed for his research on mind control through electrical stimulation of the brain. | |
| Joseph Goldberger | ||
| Joseph James DeAngelo | Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. (born November 8, 1945) is an American serial killer, serial rapist, burglar, and former police officer who committed at least 13 murders, 50 rapes, and 120 burglaries across California between 1973 and 1986. He was known as the Visalia Ransacker , East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker before his arrest decades later in 2018. | |
| Joseph Merrick | Joseph Carey Merrick (5 August 1862 – 11 April 1890), was an English man known for having severe deformities. He was first exhibited at a freak show as the "Elephant Man", and then went to live at the London Hospital after he met Frederick Treves, subsequently becoming well known in London society. | |
| Joyce Vincent | Joyce Carol Vincent (15 October 1965 – 21 December 2003) was a British woman whose death went unnoticed for more than two years as her corpse lay undiscovered in her north London bedsit. | |
| Juliane Koepcke | As a teenager in 1971, Koepcke was the sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, then survived ten days alone in the Amazon rainforest. She survived a fall of 3,000 meters (9843 feet), still strapped to her seat. | |
| Karl Bushby | A British ex-paratrooper, walking adventurer and author, currently attempting to be the first person to completely walk an unbroken path around the world. | |
| Karl Patterson Schmidt | Karl Patterson Schmidt (June 19, 1890, Lake Forest, Illinois – September 26, 1957, Chicago) was an American herpetologist. Schmidt died in 1957 after being bitten by a juvenile boomslang snake. He wrongly believed that it could not produce a fatal dose. Following the bite, he made detailed notes on the symptoms he experienced, almost right up to the end. Schmidt was asked just a few hours before he died if he wanted medical care, but he refused because it would upset the symptoms he was documenting. | |
| Kee Bird | The Kee Bird was a United States Army Air Forces Boeing B-29 Superfortress, serial 45-21768, of the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron, that became marooned after making an emergency landing in northwest Greenland during a secret Cold War spying mission on 21 February 1947. While the entire crew was safely evacuated after spending three days in the isolated Arctic tundra, the aircraft itself was left at the landing site. It lay there undisturbed until 1994, when a privately funded mission was launched to repair and return it. During the attempted recovery, a fire broke out, resulting in the destruction and loss of the airframe on the ground. | |
| kennedy curse | The Kennedy curse refers to a series of premature deaths, accidents, and other calamities involving members of the American Kennedy family. The alleged curse has primarily struck the children and descendants of businessman Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., but it has also affected family friends, associates, and other relatives. Political assassinations and plane crashes have been the most common manifestations of the "curse". | |
| Kentucky Meat Shower | The Kentucky meat shower was an incident occurring between the hours of eleven and twelve o'clock for a period of several minutes on March 3, 1876, where what appeared to be chunks of red meat measuring approximately 2 by 2 inches (5 cm × 5 cm); with at least one being 4 by 4 inches (10 cm × 10 cm) fell from the sky in a 100-by-50-yard (91 by 46 m) area near the settlement of Rankin in Bath County, Kentucky. | |
| Kim Peek | Laurence Kim Peek (November 11, 1951 - December 19, 2009) was an American savant. Known as a "megasavant", he had an exceptional memory, but he also experienced social difficulties, possibly resulting from a developmental disability related to congenital brain abnormalities. He was the inspiration for the character Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 movie Rain Man. | |
| Kola Superdeep Borehole | The Kola Superdeep Borehole is the result of a scientific drilling project of the Soviet Union in the Pechengsky District, near the Russian border with Norway, on the Kola Peninsula. The project attempted to drill as deep as possible into the Earth's crust. With a depth of 12,262 metres (40,230 ft), it has been, since 1989, the deepest artificial point on Earth. | |
| Kryptos | Kryptos is a sculpture at the CIA headquarters, bearing 4 encrypted messages. While 3 have been solved, the fourth one remains one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. | |
| Lady Be Good (aircraft) | Lady Be Good is a USAAF B-24D Liberator that disappeared without a trace on its first combat mission during World War II. The plane, which was from 376th Bomb Group, was believed to have been lost—with its nine-man crew—in the Mediterranean Sea while returning to its base in Libya following a bombing raid on Naples on April 4, 1943. However, the wreck was accidentally discovered 710 km (440 mi) inland in the Libyan Desert by an oil exploration team from British Petroleum on November 9, 1958. | |
| Language Deprivation Experiments | Language deprivation experiments have been claimed to have been attempted at least four times through history, isolating infants from the normal use of spoken or signed language in an attempt to discover the fundamental character of human nature or the origin of language. The American literary scholar Roger Shattuck called this kind of research study "The Forbidden Experiment" because of the exceptional deprivation of ordinary human contact it requires. | |
| Last Meal | A condemned prisoner's last meal is a customary ritual that precedes execution. In many countries, the prisoner may, within reason, select what the last meal will be. Includes a list of last meal requests. | |
| Lawnchair Larry Flight | On July 2, 1982, Larry Walters (April 19, 1949 – October 6, 1993) made a 45-minute flight in a homemade airship made of an ordinary patio chair and 45 helium-filled weather balloons. The aircraft rose to an altitude of over approximately 15,000 feet (4,600 m) and floated from the point of takeoff in San Pedro, California, into and violating controlled airspace near Long Beach Airport. | |
| Lead Masks Case | The Lead Masks Case involves a series of events which led to the death of two Brazilian electronic technicians, Manoel Pereira da Cruz and Miguel José Viana, who had last been seen by their families on August 17, 1966. Their bodies were discovered on August 20, 1966, both wearing a formal suit, a lead eye mask, and a waterproof coat. The cause of their deaths has never been determined. | |
| Lenna | ||
| Leon Theremin | ||
| Levitin effect | ||
| List of air rage incidents | This is a list of air rage incidents in commercial air travel that have been covered in the media. Air rage occurs when air travelers or airline personnel act violently, abusively or disruptively towards others in the course of their travel. | |
| List of banned films | This is a list of banned films. Many countries have government-appointed or private commissions to censor and rate productions for film and television exhibition. While it is common for films to be edited to fall into certain rating classifications, this list includes only films that have been explicitly prohibited from public screening. | |
| List of common misconceptions | This is a list of common misconceptions. Each entry is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries of the main subject articles, which can be consulted for more detail. | |
| List of cryptids | This is a list of cryptids, which are animals presumed by followers of the cryptozoology pseudoscientific subculture to exist on the basis of anecdotal or other evidence considered insufficient by mainstream science. | |
| List of helicopter prison escapes | A helicopter prison escape is made when an inmate escapes from a prison by means of a helicopter. This list includes prisoner escapes where a helicopter was used in an attempt to free prisoners from a place of internment, a prison or correctional facility. | |
| List of incidents at Disney parks | This incomplete list of theme park accidents in Disney Parks provides a chronological picture of theme park accidents in the theme parks Disneyland Paris, Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Resort, Tokyo Disney Resort, Hong Kong Disneyland Resort and Shanghai Disney Resort over the years. | |
| list of inventors killed by their own inventions | This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed. | |
| List of mass hysteria cases | In sociology and psychology, mass hysteria (also known as mass psychogenic illness, collective hysteria, group hysteria, or collective obsessional behavior) is a phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population and society as a result of rumors and fear. | |
| List of methods of torture | A list of torture methods and devices | |
| List of missing aircraft | ||
| List of missing treasures | A list of notable treasures that are currently lost or missing. | |
| List of places blurred out in google maps | This is a list of satellite map images with missing or unclear data. Some locations on free, publicly viewable satellite map services have such issues due to having been intentionally digitally obscured or blurred for various reasons of this. For example, Westchester County, New York asked Google to blur potential terrorism targets (such as an amusement park, a beach, and parking lots) from its satellite imagery. | |
| List of poisonous plants | Poisonous plants are plants that produce toxins that deter herbivores from consuming them. Plants cannot move to escape their predators, so they must have other means of protecting themselves from herbivorous animals. Some plants have physical defenses such as thorns, spines and prickles, but by far the most common type of protection is chemical. | |
| List of Practical Joke Topics | This is a list of practical joke topics (also known as a prank, gag, jape or shenanigan) which are mischievous tricks or jokes played on someone, typically causing the victim to experience embarrassment, perplexity, confusion, or discomfort. | |
| List of Star Extremes | A star is a spherical gaseous object comprising mainly hydrogen and helium, assembled under its own gravity, and able to produce energy through nuclear fusion. Stars exhibit great diversity in interesting properties such as mass, volume, space velocity, stage in stellar evolution, and distances from earth. This list contains many whose properties might be considered extreme or disproportionate. | |
| List of unexplained sounds | A list of unidentified, or formerly unidentified, sounds. All of the sound files in this article have been sped up by at least a factor of 16 to increase intelligibility by condensing them and raising the frequency from infrasound to a more audible and reproducible range. | |
| List of unusual deaths | This list of unusual deaths includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history, noted as being unusual by multiple sources. | |
| List of urban legends | This is a list of urban legends. An urban legend, myth, or tale is a modern genre of folklore. It often consists of fictional stories associated with the macabre, superstitions, cryptids, creepypasta, and other fear generating narrative elements. Urban legends are often rooted in local history and popular culture. | |
| Lists of most expensive items by category | An index of lists of most expensive things. | |
| Lists of people who disappeared | Lists of people who disappeared include those whose current whereabouts are unknown or whose deaths are not substantiated. Many people who disappear are eventually declared dead in absentia. Some of these people were possibly subjected to forced disappearance, but there is insufficient information on their subsequent fates. | |
| Literary Forgeries | This category contains a list of known literary forgeries throughout history. | |
| Lizzie Borden | ||
| Lloyds bank coprolite | ||
| London Hammer | ||
| Long-time nuclear waste warning messages | Long-time nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the Human Interference Task Force in 1981. | |
| Lorem Ipsum | ||
| Lost Artworks | ||
| Lost Cosmonauts | The Lost Cosmonauts or Phantom Cosmonauts are subjects of a conspiracy theory alleging that some Soviet cosmonauts went to outer space, but their existence has never been publicly acknowledged by either the Soviet or Russian space authorities. Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory argue that the Soviet Union attempted to launch human spaceflights before Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight, and the cosmonauts onboard died in those attempts. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin, has been the subject of allegations to have landed off course and been held by the Chinese government. The Government of the Soviet Union supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of the Cold War. | |
| Lost film | ||
| Lost inventions | ||
| Lost Literary Work | ||
| Louis Pasteur | ||
| Louis Slotin | ||
| Love is in the Bin | Love is in the Bin is a 2018 art intervention by Banksy at Sotheby's London, with an unexpected self-destruction of his 2006 painting of Girl with Balloon immediately after it was sold at auction for a record £1,042,000. According to Sotheby's, it is "the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction." | |
| Lysenkoism | ||
| Magic Roundabout (Swindon) | ||
| Maillard reaction | The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that gives browned food its distinctive flavor. Seared steaks, fried dumplings, cookies and other kinds of biscuits, breads, toasted marshmallows, and many other foods undergo this reaction. | |
| Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 | ||
| Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 | ||
| malbone street wreck | ||
| Man of the Hole | The Man of the Hole (also known as "Indian of the Hole" ) is a man indigenous to Brazil who lives alone in the Amazon rainforest. He is believed to be the last surviving member of his tribe. It is unknown what language he speaks or what his tribe was called. The term "Man of the Hole" is a nickname used by officials and the media; his real name is unknown. | |
| Marvin Heemeyer | ||
| Mary Mallon | Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), also known as Typhoid Mary, was an Irish-born cook believed to have infected 53 people with typhoid fever, three of whom died, and the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the disease. Because she persisted in working as a cook, by which she exposed others to the disease, she was twice forcibly quarantined by authorities, and died after a total of nearly three decades in isolation. | |
| Mary Toft | Mary Toft (née Denyer; c. 1701–1763), also spelled Tofts, was an English woman from Godalming, Surrey, who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy when she tricked doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits. | |
| Max Headroom signal hijacking | On November 22, 1987, the television broadcasts of two stations in Chicago, Illinois were hijacked in an act of video piracy by a video of an unknown person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume, accompanied by distorted audio. | |
| McDonald's Monopoly | ||
| McDonald's sign (Pine Bluff, Arkansas) | The McDonald's Sign, also known as McDonald's Store #433 Sign, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, United States, is one of only two surviving examples of a single-arch McDonald's sign. The sign was erected in 1962. | |
| Michael Cicconetti | Michael Cicconetti (born 1951) is a retired Municipal Court judge who presided in Ohio, United States, dispensing a unique brand of what he calls creative justice. The judge often left the choice of penalty to the defendant, who was faced with spending time in jail or undergoing one of Cicconetti's unusual punishments. Famously he offered 26-year-old Ohio housewife Michelle Murray the option (in return for a reduced prison sentence) of spending a night in the woods for abandoning 35 kittens in a forest in wintertime. | |
| Michael Fagan (intruder) | Michael Fagan (born 8 August 1948) is a British man who entered the Queen's bedroom in Buckingham Palace in 1982. | |
| Michael Malloy | ||
| Michel Lotito | Michel Lotito (June 15, 1950 – June 25, 2007) was a French entertainer, born in Grenoble, famous for deliberately consuming indigestible objects. He came to be known as Monsieur Mangetout ("Mr. Eat-All"). Lotito's performances involved the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and other materials. He disassembled, cut up, and consumed items such as bicycles, shopping carts, televisions, and a Cessna 150, among other items. | |
| Midgetville | Midgetville refers to real or legendary communities of "midgets", people with forms of dwarfism who are normally proportioned, or collections of small "midget-sized" houses. Real or legendary, they are at times given fanciful qualities (see Little people (mythology)). | |
| Mike the Headless Chicken | Mike the Headless Chicken (April 20, 1945 – March 17, 1947) was a Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off. After the loss of his head, Mike achieved national fame until his death in March 1947. | |
| Mobro 4000 | The Mobro 4000 was a barge owned by MOBRO Marine, Inc. made infamous in 1987 for hauling the same load of trash along the east coast of North America from New York City to Belize and back until a way was found to dispose of the garbage. During this journey, local press often referred to the Mobro 4000 as the "Gar-barge". | |
| Modern Flat Earth Beliefs | ||
| Molly's nipple | ||
| Mondegreen | ||
| Monowi, Nebraska | Monowi is an incorporated village in Boyd County, Nebraska, United States. According to the 2010 census, it has a population of 1. It is the only incorporated municipality in the United States with such a population. The sole resident, Elsie Eiler, is the mayor as well as librarian and bartender, and has thus been the subject of various human interest stories. | |
| Monster Study | The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment performed on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa in 1939. It was conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Half of the children received positive speech therapy, praising the fluency of their speech, and the other half, negative speech therapy, belittling the children for speech imperfections. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects, and some retained speech problems for the rest of their lives. | |
| Monty Hall problem | The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle, loosely based on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed (and solved) in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975.T he scenario is such: you are given the opportunity to select one closed door of three, behind one of which there is a prize. The other two doors hide "goats" (or some other such "non-prize"), or nothing at all. | |
| Murder Hole | ||
| Murder of Brian Wells | ||
| Murder of Junko Furuta | Junko Furuta was a Japanese high-school student who was abducted, severely tortured, repeatedly raped, and murdered in the late 1980s. Her murder case was named "Concrete-encased high school girl murder case". Approximately 100 people knew about Furuta's captivity, but either neglected to report it or themselves were involved in the torture and murder | |
| Murder of Sylvia Likens | ||
| Music and sleep | ||
| Musical ear syndrome | ||
| N ray | N rays (or N-rays) were a hypothesized form of radiation, described by French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot in 1903, and initially confirmed by others, but subsequently found to be illusory. | |
| Nathaniel Bar-Jonah | Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah (February 15, 1957 – April 13, 2008) was an American convicted child molester, suspected serial killer and cannibal who was sentenced to a 130-year prison sentence without the possibility of parole in Montana after being convicted of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and sexual assault of various children. | |
| Nazi gold train | The Nazi gold train or Wałbrzych gold train is an apocryphal train laden with gold and treasure that was buried by the Nazis in a tunnel in modern day Poland during the last days of World War II. Many searches for the train have been made, including by the Polish Army during the Cold War. According to historians, there is no proof the train ever existed. A search for the train between 2015 and 2018 received global media interest. The search culminated in a dig involving the Polish military, state officials and privately funded individuals. | |
| Nazi gold | Nazi gold is gold possessed by Nazi Germany. Much of the focus of the discussion is about how much of this was transferred by Germany to overseas banks during World War II; the ruling Nazi party executed a policy of looting the assets of its victims (nationally and internationally, including from those in concentration camps) to accumulate wealth, at least partly to finance the war efforts. Because gold stores are often private, exact details of transactions and storage are difficult to precisely identify. Gold that was collected was stored at least in part in central depositories. The transfer of gold in return for currency took place in collusion with many individual collaborative institutions. Although Swiss banks have been commonly identified as holding ill-gotten Nazi gold (although a nominally neutral party to the conflict, this in essence helped fund the Nazi war effort), the exact identities of the foreign banking institutions as well as the exact extent of the transactions remains unclear. | |
| Nazi UFOs | In ufology, conspiracy theory, science fiction, and comic book stories, claims or stories have circulated linking UFOs to Nazi Germany. The German UFO theories describe supposedly successful attempts to develop advanced aircraft or spacecraft prior to and during World War II, and further assert the post-war survival of these craft in secret underground bases in Antarctica, South America, or the United States, along with their creators. | |
| Near-birth experience | A near-birth experience (also known as a pre-birth experience or pre-mortal experience) is an alleged recollected event which occurred before or during one's own birth, or during the pregnancy, an alleged remembering of one's own pre-existence, or an alleged encounter with the unborn child (usually via dream) experienced by relatives or close family friends. | |
| Near-death experience | A near-death experience (NDE) is a profound personal experience associated with death or impending death which researchers claim share similar characteristics. | |
| News International Phone Hacking Scandal | ||
| nikola tesla | ||
| Nina Kulagina | Nina Kulagina, Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina (30 July 1926 – 11 April 1990) was a Russian woman who claimed to have psychic powers, particularly in psychokinesis. Academic research of her phenomenon was conducted in the USSR for the last 20 years of her life. | |
| Nonexistent people | Nonexistent people, unlike fictional people, are those somebody has claimed actually exist. A nonexistent person may be 'created' as part of a practical joke, a hoax, a fraud, or even a copyright trap. Others, such as Praxedes and Prester John, were once thought to be historical individuals but are now viewed as legendary. | |
| North Sentinel Island | North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal which also includes South Sentinel Island.[8] It is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous people in voluntary isolation who have defended, often by force, their protected isolation from the outside world. | |
| Novelty architecture | Novelty architecture, is a type of architecture in which buildings and other structures are given unusual shapes for purposes such as advertising or to copy other famous buildings without any intention of being authentic. Their size and novelty means that they often serve as landmarks. They are distinct from architectural follies, in that novelty architecture is essentially usable buildings in eccentric form whereas follies are non-usable, ornamental buildings often in eccentric form. | |
| Numbers Station | A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries. Most identified stations use speech synthesis to vocalize numbers, although digital modes such as phase-shift keying and frequency-shift keying, as well as Morse code transmissions, are not uncommon. | |
| Nut Rage Incident | The nut rage incident, was an air rage incident that occurred on December 5, 2014, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Korean Air vice president Heather Cho, dissatisfied with the way a flight attendant served nuts on the plane. After a heated confrontation, Cho assaulted him and ordered him off the plane, requiring a return to the gate and delaying the flight about 20 minutes. | |
| Nutty Putty Cave | ||
| OK Soda | ||
| Old Man of the Mountain | This was a series of five granite cliff ledges on Cannon Mountain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, United States, that appeared to be the jagged profile of a face when viewed from the north. | |
| One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge | The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge was an offer by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) to pay out one million U.S. dollars to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria. A version of the challenge was first issued in 1964. Over a thousand people applied to take it, but none were successful. The challenge was terminated in 2015. | |
| Open Problems | In science and mathematics, an open problem or an open question is a known problem which can be accurately stated, and which is assumed to have an objective and verifiable solution, but which has not yet been solved (i.e., no solution for it is known). | |
| Operation Wandering Soul | ||
| Out-of-place artifact | An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in an unusual context, which challenges conventional historical chronology by its presence in that context. Such artifacts may appear "too advanced" for the technology known to have existed at the time, or may suggest human presence at a time before humans are known to have existed. Other examples may suggest contact between different cultures that is hard to account for with conventional historical understanding. | |
| Pain Scale | A pain scale measures a patient's pain intensity or other features. Pain scales are a common communication tool in medical contexts, and are used in a variety of medical settings. | |
| Pam Reynolds case | Pam Reynolds Lowery was an American singer-songwriter. In 1991, she stated that she had a near-death experience (NDE) during a brain operation. She claimed to have made several observations during the procedure which later medical personnel reported to be accurate. | |
| Paradoilia | Pareidolia is the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer. Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music, in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans. | |
| Paradoxes | This is a list of paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article on Wikipedia. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are simply based on fallacious reasoning (falsidical), or an unintuitive solution (veridical). Informally, the term paradox is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result. | |
| Paris Syndrome | Paris syndrome is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting or going on vacation to Paris, who feel that Paris is not as beautiful as they had expected it to be. The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms. | |
| Perpetual motion | Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, as it would violate the first or second law of thermodynamics. | |
| Perverse incentive | ||
| Phantom eye syndrome | ||
| phantom islands | A phantom island is a purported island which appeared on maps for a period of time (sometimes centuries) during recorded history, but was removed from later maps after it was proven not to exist. | |
| Phantom Kangaroo | A phantom kangaroo is a report of kangaroos, wallabies, or their accompanying footprints in areas where there is no native population. Some explanations put forth are escaped zoo or circus animals (as in the UK), or publicity stunts by local businesses using photographs from Australia. | |
| Phantom Time Hypothesis | The phantom time hypothesis is a historical conspiracy theory asserted by Heribert Illig. First published in 1991, it hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retrospectively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto's claim to the Holy Roman Empire. | |
| Philadelphia Experiment | The Philadelphia Experiment is an alleged military experiment supposed to have been carried out by the U.S. Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, sometime around October 28, 1943. The U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge was claimed to have been rendered invisible to enemy devices. | |
| Philipp Lenard | ||
| Phineas Gage | Phineas P. Gage (1823 - 1860) was an American railroad construction foreman remembered for his improbable survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life—effects sufficiently profound that friends saw him (for a time at least) as "no longer Gage". | |
| Pig Beach | Pig Beach located on Big Major Cay (also known as Major Cay) is a beach on an uninhabited island (or cay) located in Exuma, the Bahamas. The island takes its unofficial name from the fact that it is populated by a colony of feral pigs which live on the island. It has become a tourist attraction in modern times. | |
| Piltdown Man | The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its authenticity virtually from the beginning, the remains were still broadly accepted for many years, and the falsity of the hoax was only definitively demonstrated in 1953. | |
| Pit of Despair | ||
| Polybius | Polybius is an urban legend concerning a fictitious 1980s arcade game. The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon during 1981. Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. | |
| Pompeii | ||
| Potoooooooo | Potoooooooo or variations of Pot-8-Os (1773 – November 1800) was an 18th-century thoroughbred racehorse who won over 30 races and defeated some of the greatest racehorses of the time. He went on to be a sire. He is now best known for the unusual spelling of his name, pronounced Potatoes. | |
| Principality of Sealand | The Principality of Sealand is a micronation that claims HM Fort Roughs (also known as Roughs Tower), an offshore platform in the North Sea approximately 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) off the coast of Suffolk, as its territory. Roughs Tower is a Maunsell Sea Fort that was built by the British during World War II. Since 1967, the decommissioned Roughs Tower has been occupied and claimed as a sovereign state by the family and associates of Paddy Roy Bates. Bates seized Roughs Tower from a group of pirate radio broadcasters in 1967 with the intention of setting up his own station there. Sealand was invaded by mercenaries in 1978, but was able to repel the attack. | |
| Project MKUltra | ||
| Prometheus (tree) | Prometheus was the oldest known tree, at up to 5000 years old. It was accidentally cut down in the 1960s by a graduate student and the US Forest Service. | |
| Pruitt–Igoe | Pruitt–Igoe were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in the US city of St. Louis, Missouri. Living conditions in Pruitt–Igoe began to decline soon after completion in 1956. By the late 1960s, the complex had become internationally infamous for its poverty, crime and racial segregation. | |
| Publius Enigma | The Publius Enigma is an Internet phenomenon and an unsolved problem that began with cryptic messages posted by a user identifying only as "Publius" to the unmoderated Usenet newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd through the Penet remailer, a now defunct anonymous information exchange service. The messenger proposed a riddle in connection with the 1994 Pink Floyd album The Division Bell, promising that the answer would lead to a reward. | |
| Radium Girls | The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. The painting was done by women at three different United States Radium factories, and the term now applies to the women working at the facilities: one in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917; one in Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s; and a third facility in Waterbury, Connecticut. | |
| Randy Gardner (record holder) | ||
| Raymond Robinson (Green Man) | Raymond Robinson (October 29, 1910 – June 11, 1985) was a severely disfigured man whose years of nighttime walks made him into a figure of urban legend in western Pennsylvania. Robinson was so badly injured in a childhood electrical accident that he could not go out in public without fear of creating a panic, so he went for long walks at night. | |
| Recovery from Blindness | Recovery from blindness is the phenomenon of a blind person gaining the ability to see, usually as a result of medical treatment. As a thought experiment, the phenomenon is usually referred to as Molyneux's problem. The first published human case was reported in 1728 by the surgeon William Cheselden. Patients who experience dramatic recovery from blindness experience significant to total agnosia, having serious confusion with their visual perception. | |
| Red Rain in Kerala | The Kerala red rain phenomenon was a blood rain event that occurred in Wynaad (Ambalavayil area) region of Malabar on Monday, 15 July 1957 and the colour subsequently turned yellow and also 25 July to 23 September 2001, when heavy downpours of red-coloured rain fell sporadically on the southern Indian state of Kerala, staining clothes pink. | |
| Reincarnation | Reincarnation, also known as rebirth or transmigration, is the philosophical or religious belief that the non-physical essence of a living being begins a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death. Resurrection is a similar process hypothesized by some religions, that involves coming back to life in the same body. | |
| Revenge dress | ||
| Ricardo Lopez (Stalker) | Ricardo López (January 14, 1975 – September 12, 1996), also known as the "Björk stalker", was a Uruguayan-American pest control worker who attempted to kill Icelandic musician Björk in September 1996. | |
| Richard Lee McNair | Richard Lee McNair (born December 19, 1958) is a convicted murderer known for his ability to escape and elude capture. In escape, he successfully mailed himself out of prison. | |
| Roanoke Colony | ||
| Robert E. Cornish | Robert E. Cornish (December 21, 1903 – March 6, 1963) was an American biologist and writer, best known for his resuscitation experiments. In 1932 he became interested in the idea that he could restore life to the dead. Cornish decided to perfect his method on animals and managed to revive two dogs (Lazarus IV and V) clinically put to death on May 22, 1934 and in 1935. | |
| Robert J. White | An American neurosurgeon best known for his head transplants on living monkeys. | |
| Robert Shields | Reverend Robert William Shields (May 17, 1918 – October 15, 2007) was an American minister and high school English teacher who was best known for writing a diary of 37.5 million words, which chronicled every five minutes of his life from 1972 until a stroke disabled him in 1997. | |
| Robert Wadlow | An American man who was the tallest person in recorded history for whom there is irrefutable evidence. Wadlow reached 8 ft 11.1 in (2.72 m). | |
| Robert Williams | Robert Williams (May 2, 1953 – January 25, 1979) was an American factory worker who was the first known human to be killed by a robot. While working at the Ford Motor Company Flat Rock Casting Plant, Williams was killed by an industrial robot arm on January 25, 1979. | |
| Rogue Wave | Once considered mythical and lacking hard evidence for their existence, rogue waves are unusually large, unpredictable and suddenly appearing surface waves that can be extremely dangerous to ships, even to large ones. One example includes the Fastnet Lighthouse which was struck by a 48-metre (157 ft) wave in 1985. | |
| Rope-A-Dope | The rope-a-dope is a boxing fighting technique most commonly associated with Muhammad Ali in his 1974 Rumble in the Jungle match against world heavyweight champion George Foreman. In many competitive situations, "rope-a-dope" is used to describe strategies in which one contender draws non-injuring offensive punches to let their opponent fatigue themself. This then gives the contender an advantage as the opponent becomes tired, allowing the contender to execute devastating offensive maneuvers and thereby win. | |
| Ruth Belville | Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (5 March 1854 – 7 December 1943), also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from London. She, her mother Maria Elizabeth, and her father John Henry, sold people the time. This was done by setting a Belvilles' watch to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by the Greenwich clock, each day and then "selling" people the time by letting them look at the watch and adjust theirs. | |
| Safety Coffin | A safety coffin or security coffin is a coffin fitted with a mechanism to prevent premature burial or allow the occupant to signal that they have been buried alive. A large number of designs for safety coffins were patented during the 18th and 19th centuries and variations on the idea are still available today. | |
| Salem witch trials | The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail. | |
| Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries | Since August 20, 2007, at least 20 detached human feet have been found on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington, US. The first discovery, on August 20, 2007, was on Jedediah Island in British Columbia. Feet have been discovered on the coasts of islands in British Columbia, and in the US cities of Tacoma and Seattle. | |
| Sam Kee Building | The Sam Kee Building, located at 8 West Pender Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is the "narrowest commercial building in the world" according to the Guinness Book of Records. | |
| Satellite map images with missing/unclear data | This is a list of satellite map images with missing or unclear data. Some locations on free, publicly viewable satellite map services have such issues due to having been intentionally digitally obscured or blurred for various reasons of this. | |
| Schmidt sting pain index | The Schmidt sting pain index is a pain scale rating the relative pain caused by different hymenopteran stings. It is mainly the work of Justin O. Schmidt (born 1947), an entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Arizona, United States. Schmidt has published a number of papers on the subject, and claims to have been stung by the majority of stinging Hymenoptera. | |
| Scientific misconduct | Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research. | |
| Scunthorpe problem | ||
| Seattle windshield pitting epidemic | The Seattle windshield pitting epidemic is a phenomenon which affected Bellingham, Seattle, and other communities of Washington state in April, 1954; it is considered an example of a mass delusion. It was characterized by widespread observation of previously unnoticed windshield holes, pits and dings. It was originally thought to be the work of vandals but the rate of pitting was so great that residents began to attribute it to everything from sand flea eggs to nuclear bomb testing. | |
| Seawise Giant | The longest ship ever constructed, at 458.45 m (1,504.1 ft), longer than the height of many of the world's tallest buildings. It possessed the greatest deadweight tonnage ever recorded. Fully laden, its displacement was 657,019 tonnes. | |
| Sedlec Ossuary | The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have, in many cases, been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel. The ossuary is among the most visited tourist attractions of the Czech Republic, attracting over 200,000 visitors annually. | |
| Self-experimentation in medicine | Scientific experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on her- or himself. | |
| Semantic Satiation | Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a lengthy period of time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect. | |
| Simo Häyhä | Simo "Simuna" Häyhä (17 December 1905 – 1 April 2002) was a Finnish military sniper in the Second World War during the 1939–1940 Winter War against the Soviet Union. He used a Finnish-produced M/28-30, a variant of the Mosin–Nagant rifle, and a Suomi KP/-31 submachine gun. Häyhä is believed to have killed over 500 men during the Winter War, the highest number of sniper kills in any major war. | |
| simulation hypothesis | ||
| Skeleton Coast | The Skeleton Coast is the northern part of the Atlantic coast of Namibia and south of Angola from the Kunene River south to the Swakop River. The winds blow from land to sea, rainfall rarely exceeds 10 millimetres (0.39 in) annually and the climate is highly inhospitable. There is a constant, heavy surf on the beaches. In the days before engine-powered ships and boats, it was possible to get ashore through the surf but impossible to launch from the shore. The only way out was by going through a marsh hundreds of miles long and only accessible via a hot and arid desert. | |
| Slab City, California | An unincorporated, off-the-grid squatter community in the Salton Trough area of the Sonoran Desert, in Imperial County, California. Slab City is known for a lifestyle that contradicts ordinary, civilized lifestyles. | |
| South-up map orientation | Research suggests that north-south positions on maps have psychological consequences. In general, north is associated with richer people, more expensive real estate, and higher altitude, while south is associated with poorer people, cheaper prices, and lower altitude (the "north-south bias"). | |
| Spanish Flu | ||
| Special Atomic Demolition Munition | The Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM) was a family of man-portable nuclear weapons fielded by the US military in the 1960s, but never used in combat. US Army Green Light Teams or Engineer Atomic Demolition Munitions Specialists, planned to use the weapon to destroy, irradiate and deny key routes of communication through limited terrain such as the Fulda Gap in the event of a soviet invasion. | |
| Speech-to-song illusion | ||
| Spite House | A spite house is a building constructed or substantially modified to irritate neighbors or any party with land stakes. Because long-term occupation is not the primary purpose of these houses, they frequently sport strange and impractical structures. | |
| Spontaneous Human Combustion | Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is the concept of the combustion of a living (or recently deceased) human body without an apparent external source of ignition. In addition to reported cases, descriptions of the alleged phenomenon appear in literature, and both types have been observed to share common characteristics in terms of circumstances and the remains of the victim. | |
| Springfield Three | ||
| Stanford prison experiment | The Stanford prison experiment was a social psychology experiment that attempted to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers. It was conducted at Stanford University on the days of August 15–21, 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students. Volunteers were assigned to be either "guards" or "prisoners" in a mock prison. Early reports on experimental results claimed that students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture, while many prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers' request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. | |
| Stanislav Petrov | ||
| Starfish Prime | ||
| Stephenson 2-18 | ||
| Stratolaunch | ||
| Streisand effect | ||
| sun death | ||
| Svalbard Global Seed Vault | A secure seed bank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. | |
| Synesthesia | ||
| Tadeusz Ko%C5%9Bciuszko | ||
| Tamam Shud Case | The Tamám Shud case, also known as the Mystery of the Somerton Man, is an unsolved case of an unidentified man found dead in 1948 on the Somerton Park beach, just south of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. The case is named after the Persian phrase tamám shud, meaning "ended" or "finished", which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man's trousers. | |
| Target Fixation | ||
| Tarrare | ||
| Taumata (abbreviated) | A hill near Porangahau, south of Waipukurau in southern Hawke's Bay, New Zealand.The hill is notable primarily for its unusually long name, which is of Māori origin. | |
| Teapot Dome Service Station | ||
| Ted Kaczynski | ||
| Test Card F | ||
| thalidomide | ||
| The areas of my expertise | The Areas of My Expertise is a satirical almanac by John Hodgman. It is written in the form of absurd historical stories, complex charts and graphs, and fake newspaper columns. Among its sections are a list of 700 different hobo names and complete descriptions of "all 51" US states. | |
| The Boy jones | Thomas Jones (1824 – 26 December 1893), nicknamed "the boy Jones" by newspapers of the time, was a British teenager who became notorious for breaking into Buckingham Palace multiple times between 1838 and 1841. | |
| The Crow (film) | The Crow is a 1994 American superhero film directed by Alex Proyas. The lead actor, Brandon Lee, was accidentally wounded on set during filming by defective blank ammunition and later died in the hospital during surgery. With only eight days left of production, unfinished scenes that were to feature him were dealt with using a rewritten format in the script, a stunt double, and digital special effects. | |
| The Hum | The name often given to widespread reports of a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming, rumbling, or droning noise not audible to all people. Hums have been reported in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada. | |
| The Lonaberger Company | ||
| The Loretto Chapel | The Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, is known for its unusual helix-shaped spiral staircase. The Sisters of Loretto credited St. Joseph with its construction. It has been the subject of legend, and the circumstances surrounding its construction and its builder were considered miraculous by the Sisters of Loretto. | |
| The Mad Pooper | The nickname given to an unidentified woman in Colorado, United States, who repeatedly defecated in public while jogging in 2017. | |
| The Oak Island Mystery | The Oak Island mystery refers to stories of buried treasure and unexplained objects found on or near Oak Island in Nova Scotia. Since the 19th century, a number of attempts have been made to locate treasure and artifacts. Theories about artifacts present on the island range from pirate treasure, to Shakespearean manuscripts, to possibly the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant. | |
| The Turk | The Turk was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. | |
| The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility | The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility is a novella written by Morgan Robertson and published as Futility in 1898, and revised as The Wreck of the Titan in 1912. It features a fictional British ocean liner Titan that sinks in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg. Titan and its sinking are famous for similarities to the passenger ship RMS Titanic and its sinking fourteen years later. After the sinking of Titanic the novel was reissued with some changes, particularly in the ship's gross tonnage. | |
| Theranos | Theranos was a privately held health technology corporation. It was initially touted as a breakthrough technology company, with claims of having devised blood tests that required only very small amounts of blood and could be performed very rapidly using small automated devices the company had developed. However, the claims later proved to be false. | |
| Thic Quang Duc | Thic Quang Duc was a Buddhist monk who burned himself to death protesting the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese Roman Catholic government. He was re-cremated during the funeral but his heart remained intact; it was considered to be holy and placed in a glass chalice. | |
| Thomas Midgely Jr | Thomas Midgley Jr. (May 18, 1889 – November 2, 1944) was an American mechanical and chemical engineer. He played a major role in developing leaded gasoline and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), aka Freon; both products were later banned due to their impact on human health and the environment. He is remembered as having "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history" | |
| Thomas Stoltz Harvey | Thomas Stoltz Harvey (October 10, 1912 – April 5, 2007) was a pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Albert Einstein in 1955. Harvey later kept Einstein's brain without permission for decades. | |
| Three Wolf Moon | Three Wolf Moon is a T-shirt featuring three wolves howling at the moon. The numerous satirical reviews for this on Amazon.com have become an Internet phenomenon. The T-shirt was designed by artist Antonia Neshev. | |
| Time travel claims and urban legends | There have been various accounts of persons who allegedly travelled through time reported by the press or circulated on the Internet. These reports have generally turned out either to be hoaxes or to be based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact, many being now recognized as urban legends. | |
| time travel | Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a widely recognized concept in philosophy and fiction, particularly science fiction. The idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine. | |
| Timeline of the far future | While the future cannot be predicted with certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia. | |
| Timothy Dexter | ||
| Timothy Treadwell | Tim Treadwell was an American bear enthusiast, environmentalist, and documentary filmmaker and founder of the bear-protection organization Grizzly People. He lived among grizzly bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska for 13 summers. At the end of summer 2003, at 46 years old, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and almost fully eaten by a 28-year-old brown bear, whose stomach was later found to contain human remains and clothing. | |
| Toast Sandwich | A toast sandwich is a sandwich made with two slices of bread in which the filling is a thin slice of toasted bread, which may be heavily buttered. | |
| Tobacco bowdlerization | Tobacco bowdlerization occurs when a publisher or government agency expurgates a photograph, text, or video document to remove images and references to consuming tobacco products. It often occurs in conjunction with traditional restrictions on tobacco advertising, and is most commonly seen on works that are aimed at children. | |
| Toilet Paper Orientation | This article includes studies based on the under vs over preference for hanging toilet paper. | |
| Topsy (elephant) | ||
| torture | ||
| Tourist guy | The "tourist guy" was a hoax that featured a digitally altered photograph of a tourist on the observation deck of the World Trade Center, supposedly on the day of the September 11 attacks, showing a plane about to hit the tower in the background. The photo became an Internet phenomenon as many manipulated pictures spread online. | |
| Tree That owns itself | The Tree That Owns Itself is a white oak tree that, according to legend, has legal ownership of itself and of all land within eight feet (2.4 m) of its base. The tree, also called the Jackson Oak, is at the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens, Georgia, United States. | |
| trypophobia | Trypophobia is an aversion to the sight of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps. It is not officially recognized as a mental disorder, but may be diagnosed as a specific phobia if excessive fear and distress occur. People may express only disgust to trypophobic imagery. | |
| Tunguska event | A massive explosion that occurred in Russia, on the morning of 30 June 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest. | |
| Turboencabulator | ||
| Tuskegee Syphilis Study | The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, was an unethical natural history study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African-American men who participated in the study were told that they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the United States. | |
| Ultimate fate of the universe | ||
| Uncanny valley | ||
| Uncontacted peoples | Uncontacted peoples are communities or groups of indigenous peoples living without sustained contact to neighbouring communities and the world community, and includes "indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation". In 2013 there were thought to be roughly 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, half of whom live in the Amazon rainforest. | |
| United Airlines Flight 976 | This flight is known for featuring what has been called the worst ever case of air rage. | |
| Unrecovered/unusable flight recorders | Most flight recorders are equipped with underwater locator beacons to assist searchers in recovering them from offshore crash sites, however these beacons run off a battery and eventually stop transmitting. For various reasons, a flight recorder cannot always be recovered, and many recorders that are recovered are too damaged to provide any data. | |
| Unusual Articles | Of the over six million articles in the English Wikipedia there are some articles that Wikipedians have identified as being somewhat unusual. These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. | |
| Unusual eBay listings | A man from Brisbane, Australia tried to sell the country of New Zealand on eBay. | |
| Unusual Place Names | ||
| Vladimir Gavreau | A French scientist making experiments on the biological effects of infrasound. | |
| Volkswagen emissions scandal | Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing which caused the vehicles' emissions to meet US standards during regulatory testing, but produce up to 40 times more emissions in real-world driving. | |
| Wade Davis | ||
| Wanda Tinasky | ||
| War of the currents | ||
| Watergate Scandal | ||
| Weeping statue | A statue which has been claimed to have shed tears or to be weeping by supernatural means. Statues weeping tears which appear to be blood, oil, and scented liquids have all been reported. | |
| WeWork | ||
| William Beaumont | ||
| William Langston | ||
| World Chess Championship 1972 | The World Chess Championship 1972 was a match for the World Chess Championship between challenger Bobby Fischer of the United States and defending champion Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. | |
| Yuba County Five | The Yuba County Five were all young men from Yuba City, California, United States, all with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions, who attended a college basketball game at California State University, Chico on the night of February 24, 1978. Four of them were later found dead; the fifth, Gary Mathias, 25, has never been found. | |
| Yugo | The Yugo is a subcompact car hatchback. The car has been subjected to much criticism over its design and reliability; the historian Jason Vuic has called it "the worst car in history." | |
| Zhengzhou Airport Riot | In 2014, passengers at the airport in Zhengzhou, capital of the Chinese province of Henan, angry over lengthy delays due to snowy weather, smashed computers at airline check-in counters and destroyed information kiosks. It has been estimated that as many as 2,000 people took part over two days before police were able to restore order. |