About 15,000 light-years from Earth, something in our galaxy keeps switching on. For roughly two minutes, it becomes incredibly bright in radio waves, gives off X-rays on almost the same schedule, fades away, and stays quiet until the whole thing begins again. The cycle takes about 44 minutes, and astronomers can…
Late one night in October 2015, a long-haul truck driver was moving freight along US-93 through the Nevada desert when lights appeared ahead. After miles of black highway it looked like exactly what he needed: fuel, food, and a place to stop. He turned toward them without realizing that the location would make far…
Far out in the North Atlantic, scientists anchored a research buoy above nearly five kilometers of ocean. The system had been built specifically to survive the Gulf Stream, where powerful currents can drag against miles of line with enormous force. The first deployment lasted a full year without failing. Its…
On October 19, 2017, astronomer Robert Weryk noticed a faint object racing through telescope images from Hawaii. Its path immediately stood out because it was moving too fast to remain trapped by the Sun. Whatever it was, it had arrived from somewhere beyond our solar system. Astronomers named it 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua.…
In January 2017, a radiation monitor in northern Norway picked up something that should not have been drifting through the winter air. The material was iodine-131, a radioactive form of iodine used around nuclear reactors and in some medical treatments. The amount was tiny, but its presence immediately raised a…
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…
On August 2, 2024, a drone hovered over Bulwagga Bay on Lake Champlain while a small rowboat moved through the water below. Two actors were inside, filming a scene for a movie about Champ, the legendary creature said to live in the lake. Nothing about the moment seemed unusual. Nobody in the boat pointed toward the…
In February 2016, people in Forest Grove, Oregon, began waking to a noise that seemed to come from nowhere. Residents compared it to a giant flute played badly, distant steam brakes, or pressurized machinery screaming somewhere in the dark. Sometimes it lasted only seconds, while other episodes stretched on for…
Late one night in November 2018, a software engineer was driving north on Britain’s M6 through Staffordshire when a wall of greenish fog appeared across the motorway. It was thick enough to swallow the road lights ahead. He drove into it expecting to come out within seconds. Instead, the traffic disappeared. The…
In the summer of 2012, divers from a group called Ocean X went down into the dark water of the Baltic Sea. They were heading toward a strange shape that had already become famous online. A sonar scan made it look like a huge round object sitting on the seafloor. The shape was about 200 feet across. Some people thought…