For more than 500 years, a strange illustrated manuscript has guarded a secret nobody has managed to uncover. Its pages are filled with an unknown language, drawings of plants that seem to come from another world, and mysterious figures bathing in pools connected by twisting pipes. Now two researchers believe they’ve found an important clue, … Read more
Every night, shortly after dark, residents of a small Indian village began hearing stones slam into the roofs of their homes. Sometimes the impacts came just minutes apart. People went looking for whoever was throwing them, but nobody could figure out where the rocks were coming from. By early October 2026, the strange incidents had … Read more
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did not disappear from the world in one instant. On March 8, 2014, the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and initially behaved like an ordinary passenger flight. Over the next several hours, however, the systems that normally told people where the aircraft was…
At 1:25 in the morning on May 21, 2022, a game camera outside the Amarillo Zoo quietly snapped a photograph. There had been no alarm, no escaped animal and no report of anyone trying to break into the property. The grounds were dark and still until zoo employees later looked at the image and realized something unusual…
On March 4, 1918, one of the largest ships in the United States Navy left Barbados and headed north toward Baltimore. USS Cyclops was a 542-foot collier carrying roughly 11,000 tons of manganese ore, along with 306 crew members and passengers. She was expected home within days, but somewhere in the Atlantic the ship…
In 1986, workers on the highway between Caracas and Venezuela’s international airport noticed a black patch spreading across the pavement. At first it was only about 50 yards long, the sort of stain that should have disappeared after a cleanup or been traced to a leaking truck. Instead, it grew. Drivers soon knew it…
Far beyond Neptune, the solar system stops behaving quite the way astronomers expect. Small frozen worlds travel around the Sun on enormous stretched-out paths, some taking thousands of years to complete a single orbit. A few of the most distant objects seem to point in strangely similar directions, as though…
On October 31, 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto appeared on a cryptography mailing list with an idea that would eventually shake the financial world. A nine-page paper described Bitcoin, a digital money system that could operate without a bank standing in the middle. A few months later, the network was…
In 2019, navigation systems watching traffic along the Texas Gulf Coast began showing something that should not have been possible. Ships still moving normally through familiar waters appeared on tracking screens to swing into strange circles miles offshore, while aircraft routes bent into shapes that did not match…
In May 2017, two hikers were following a GPS route through California’s Anza-Borrego Desert when the landscape ahead began changing. The narrow canyon opened into a broad, pale basin that neither of them expected to find there. Their navigation still showed them on course, so they kept walking. For roughly forty…