The Green Children of Woolpit

English folklore is filled with green people – the Green Knight, green fairies, the Green Man and Jack-in-the-Green. Two of the smallest were the Green Children of Woolpit.
Discovery
Depending on whom you read, the Green Children first appeared during the reign of Stephen (1135-1154) or that of Henry II (1154-1189).
One year during the harvest in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England (about 10 miles from Bury St. Edmunds), reapers working near old wolf pits (deep ditches dug to trap wolves) discovered two apparently lost young children – a girl and boy.
Most accounts agree that the children had green-tinged skin, wore strange clothes, spoke an unfamiliar language, were siblings, the boy was younger, and both refused to eat regular food like bread (at least at first). Some narratives describe the children as wearing “clothes of a strange colour, made from unfamiliar materials,” while others noted:

It was as if they had been skillfully fashioned from summer leaves or soft meadow grass, for just like their clothes, and even the strange hue of their eyes, their skin was green!

Each version recounts that the children were eventually taken to the local bigwig, Sir Richard de Calne, who was equally baffled by the children. Attempts were made to feed them, but none were successful until bean plants were introduced. By some accounts:

When the shoots were handed to them . . . [the children] amazed their observers by ignoring the bulging pods . . . and splitting open the stalks instead . . . they did not discover any beans . . . until they were shown that the beans were contained in the pods. At once they began eating the beans, and from their evident delight it was clear that these were a familiar food to them.

All narratives agree that the boy eventually became sick and died, with some associating his decline with depression. All accounts also agree that the girl remained healthy, “began to eat other food and lost her green coloring.”
There is no dispute that she learned English, was baptized, eventually “married a man from King’s Lynn,” in Norfolk, and at some point took the name of Agnes Barre. In at least one account she was rumored to have become “rather loose and wanton in her conduct,” while in another, she was alleged to have married a diplomat, Richard Barre.
The Girl’s Tale
Having learned English, eventually she told her story, which by its lack of detail and fantastic elements, indicates that she (and her brother) were likely very young when discovered:

She asserted that the inhabitants, and all they had in [their home] country, were of a green colour, and that they saw no sun, but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset . . . . that [she and her brother] were following their flocks [when] they came to a certain cavern, on entering which they heard a delightful sound of bells . . . they went . . . wandering on through the cavern, until they came to its mouth when . . . they were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun and . . . thus they lay for a long time. Being terrified . . . they wihsed to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cavern before they were caught.

In other retellings, apparently she said that the two:

Are folk of St. Martin’s Land . . . and remember only that one day we were feeding our father’s flock in the field when we heard a great noise like bells . . . And on a sudden we were both caught up in the spirit and found ourselves in your harvest field. . .  Among us no sun rises . . . . Yet there is a land of light to be seen not far from us, but cut off by a stream of great width.

Truth or Fantasy?
Two contemporary scholars recorded the story: a Benedictine abbot, Ralph of Coggeshall, contributor to Chronicon Anglicanum, and William of Newburgh, author of Historia rerum Anglicarum.
Abbot Coggeshall named Sir Richard de Calne as his source, noting “that he had frequently heard the story” from him, while the historian from Newburgh noted that he believed the story because of “the weight of so many and such competent witnesses.”
Where Did They Come From and Why Were They Green?
Assuming the story was true, many have theorized as to the origin of the children and their green color, including that they were space aliens (of course) or that they came from another dimension.
Green Skin
Some have posited that arsenic poisoning could account for the children’s green coloring (as well as their lack of appetite and the boy’s poor health). Arsenic has been used in the production of green dyes, and it apparently will discolor the skin in a green-dotted rash. However, if the children presented with a rash, it seems unlikely the villagers would so eagerly take them in rather than fear deadly diseases like leprosy, measels and smallpox.
A more likely cause of the tinge could be chlorosis, a form of anemia characterized by a greenish tint to the skin. Well-known in earlier years, it was common at the turn of the 20^th century “among ill-fed, overworked girls” until iron supplements were used to treat it. In any event, it is easy to imagine how two young medieval children, who did not even know how to get beans from a pod, would be nutritionally (and iron) deficient.
Possible Origin
Writer and editor Paul Harris has proposed a plausible scenario. He opines that the children were Flemish immigrants whose parents were killed during persecutions in the area during the latter half of the 12^th century (including in the battle at Fornham in 1173).
Fornham, today known as Fornham All Saints, was apparently also known as Fornham St. Martin then, and is only two miles from Bury St. Edmunds. The church in St. Edumunds, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, had bells that were known to “make a great noise . . . as when . . . they all peal together.”
In addition, the River Lark runs near Fornham St. Martin, and the area around Bury St. Edmunds is riven with underground passages from flint mines that had been in the area for thousands of years.
Detractors note that the Flemish persecuted during Henry II’s reign were mercenaries, paid to fight the King and who “would hardly have brought their families with them.” In addition, these Flemish had been in the country for a while, and it is unlikely that no one in Sir Richard’s household would have recognized the children’s language.
Furthermore, although there may be passages nearer Woolpit, the major flint mines, Grime’s Graves, are located 20 miles north of Bury St. Edmunds.
In rebuttal, proponents assert that the children could have been English but, like many at the time, only spoke their village’s unique dialect, many of which were unintelligible to outsiders. In support of this scenario, they argue that the children were poisoned (arsenic) or abandoned (chlorosis) by their evil caretakers and point to:

A centuries-old East Anglian legend [that] tells of how two young children, heirs to the estate of their dead parents, were poisoned with arsenic and then abandoned by their evil guardian in the depths of Wayland Wood.

The Origin of the Bigfoot Legend

Stories of a giant, hairy creature that appears half man and half ape have existed in various parts of the world for many centuries. In fact, the only continent not to have stories of “wild men” is Antarctica. In the Himalayas, it’s the Yeti. In Canada, it’s the Sasquatch. And in the northwest United States, it’s Bigfoot. Bigfoot is described by believers as being between six and eight feet tall with a large forehead and pronounced brow, like a cave man’s, and a rounded, crested head like a gorilla’s. He is covered in brown or red hair and has enormous feet that are his namesake, with the biggest estimation at a whopping two feet long by eight inches wide. Some “witnesses” claim that the five-toed Bigfoot prints they saw on the ground were accompanied by claw marks (not unlike a five-toed, clawed paw print of a bear—but rational explanations aren’t as fun).
Stories of a “wild man” existed among the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest long before white colonists moved in. Versions of Bigfoot ranged from harmless giants who stole fish from fishermen’s nets, to cannibalistic monsters living on mountain peaks. These stories varied from tribe to tribe, and even from family to family, which meant that Bigfoot had a lot of different names. In the 1920s, J.W. Burns compiled the local legends for a series for a Canadian newspaper, coining the term “Sasquatch” in the process.
It wasn’t until 1958 that the Bigfoot legend really started to kick off in the United States. That year, a man named Gerald Crew found a set of large footprints at a construction site where he worked in California. He had his friend make plaster casts of the prints. The story gained a lot of attention after being published in the Humboldt Times, and was picked up by the Associated Press, drawing international attention.
Turns out, the footprints were a hoax (surprise, surprise). After the death of a man named Ray Wallace—the brother of the man in charge of the construction site where the prints were found—his family stepped forward to say that he was responsible for faking the prints. Scoop Beal, the editor of the Humboldt Times, is also said to have been involved. Nevertheless, the 1958 prints find brought the first “Bigfoot Hunters” to the area.
In 1967, the “Patterson-Gimlin film” was captured. The film shows a tall, hairy “Bigfoot” walking through the forest. Believers in Big Foot note the creature’s inhuman way of walking is a major point toward the film being real. Patterson also claimed to have taken the film to a group of people working in the special effects department at Universal Studios who supposedly said,

We could try (faking it), but we would have to create a completely new system of artificial muscles and find an actor who could be trained to walk like that. It might be done, but we would have to say that it would be almost impossible.

However, a number of factors lead to skeptics believing it’s a hoax: people who knew Patterson have described him, frankly, as a liar; Patterson’s version of events—including an estimate of how tall “Bigfoot” was— also changed and escalated over time.  More to the point, a man named Bob Heironimus claimed to have worn the Bigfoot costume for the making of the film. Most likely, and not too surprisingly, the film was a hoax.
The most common explanation for Bigfoot sightings is that people are playing pranks. There was even once a thriving market for “Bigfoot feet” to create your own prints to trick your family and friends. People still even dress up in ape costumes and ghillie suits in order to perpetuate the legend.
Some sightings are also simply misidentified animals. In 2007, a photo was snapped in Pennsylvania using an automatically triggered camera hanging from a tree. While believers claimed the blurry photo—showing a large, hairy creature standing on all-fours—was that of a “juvenile sasquatch,” the Pennsylvania Game Commission said the creature was most likely “a bear with an extreme case of mange.”  Looking at the picture, it could also just as easily been a human in a suit.
One of the big questions posed to believers in Bigfoot is if there are enough of the creatures to maintain a stable breeding population, and over a reasonably large area given all the supposed sightings—which there must be, unless they have extraordinarily lengthy lives—then why has a body of Bigfoot never been found? In 2008, Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton claimed to have solved this problem after they supposedly found a Bigfoot body, posting a video of it on YouTube. The body was nearly eight feet tall and weighed over 500 pounds. Despite even some Bigfoot experts doubting the young men’s story, the discovery was covered by CNN, ABC, Fox, and BBC News, and the pair received $50,000 from Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. as “a measure of good faith.” However, when the body arrived in a block of ice and was thawed and examined, researchers found that the “body” was made up of rubber feet, fake hair, and a hollow head. Not exactly convincing. Dyer and Whitton later admitted that it was a hoax. (shocker)
While the idea of a real Bigfoot is pretty unconvincing, the stories have caught on and are so prevalent in pop culture that it’s unlikely the idea of Bigfoot will fade away any time soon. As with everything, treat the stories and information you hear or read with a healthy dash of skepticism. Someday real, solid proof of Bigfoot might emerge, but I’m not holding my breath.
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Bonus Facts:

• The term “sasquatch” comes from the Halkomelem word “sasq’ets” which is just a name for “wild men”, essentially referring to bigfoot-like creatures.   Halkomelem was a language spoken by a small group of Native Americans on the border between British Columbia and Washington.
• While most scientists believe that Bigfoot is a legend, or a combination of hoaxes and misidentification, a few scientists—including Jane Goodall—have shown some amount of belief that such a creature could exist.
• Nearly one third of all Bigfoot sightings are in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with the rest of the sights spread out across the remainder of the states.

What are the greatest hidden treasures found across the world?

1. Lost Adams Diggings
To find a canyon wall that cries tears of gold you will need to map yourself a route to the Lost Adams Diggings in western New Mexico. It was in the early 1860s when Adams made his trek to the area. Guided along the White River and into the White Mountains, Adams and his crew of miners found gold nuggets that hidden “in a corn-grinding basin.” Although Adams left the mine on the second night, the miners stayed when they were brutally attacked and killed by Apache Indians. Tales say that Adams was never able to find his gold canyon again.

2. Apache Indian Treasures
There is an abundance of real lost treasures, some of which belonged to the Apache Indians. Rumor has it that after attacking a wagon train the Apache Indians hid their stolen fortune of silver coins and gold dust in a Dutch oven. This oven, which contains the lost treasure, is hidden behind rocks at a point on Winchester Mountain in Arizona. Those in search of the treasure claim the point is cursed but that has not stopped treasure hunters from trying their luck.

3. Lost treasures of Antilla
Those seeking the lost treasures of Antilla, the German fighter wreckage, will need to dive along the North Point of Aruba. There’s a tale that claims the Antilla was anchored along the North Shore when authorities rowed out to sea and asked for its surrender. While the skipper contemplated his options on shore, he left the ship’s seacock open, this sank the ship. Instead of surrendering and losing his treasure, the ship exploded and sank. This ghost ship, as the locals call it, remains a tribute to the German soldiers from WWII.

4. SS Islander’s Evasive Gold
In a bit of irony the SS Islander that sank in 1901 was recovered in 2012-without any gold. Why is it on the list? Well the Mars Company, the expedition, crew thinks the gold may be on the sea bed as a result of moving the ship. They did find gold dust and pieces of gold on the recovered ship but that’s about it. Mars Company estimates the treasure will be valued at over $250 million therefore they are planning another expedition. You can see part of the ship on the banks of Admiral Island while the rest is in Seattle.

5. Santissima Concepcion
Hurricane season in Florida has led to many shipwrecks throughout history. One notable shipwreck that fell prey to the tumultuous southern hurricane season was the shipwreck of Santissima Concepcion or “El Grande.” The record listed 500 people on board, but various reports have identified anywhere between 4 to 190 people who survived to describe their ordeal. Beyond the crew the record also lists 1,800,000 pesos in treasures, “77 chests of pearls and 49 chests of emeralds.” There have been numerous attempts to locate the treasure yet most have proved fruitless. It is believed the Sir William Phipp found about 25% of the treasure during his 1687 expedition.

6. Genghis Khan Issyk-Kul’s Treasure
There are a variety of legends surrounding Lake Issyk-Kul. From the idea that Templar Knights and Christians buried treasures of the Templar there to lost jewels forming a golden path, many legends persist about the area. One of the most notable legends is of Commander Genghis who is supposedly buried with his treasures. Some legends have his treasure in the lake and others admit the location is unknown. Reports indicate that his soldiers killed everyone that knew the tomb’s location and when they returned from the burial site, they were killed as well.
Commander Genghis amassed his fortune by “capturing most of central Asia and China,” in the 13-century, of which “the booty yielded by his conquests was incalculable.” Digs in the ’20s failed due to the instability of the political environment. Since then there have been more attempts including expeditions by the Japanese and a recent attempt by American researchers who believe they have located Genghis Khan’s tomb, but there is no treasure to date.

7. White City, La Ciudad Blanca
A rumored city of gold has been the fascination of many for some time. Herman Cortes stumbled upon it in 1526, then Cristobol de Pedraza in 1544. Archeologist William Strong noted ‘archeological mounds’ near Rio Patuca and Rio Conquirre in 1933, providing more fuel for a growing legend where “nobles there ate from plates of gold.” As recently as February this year, archeologists and other researchers from the National Science Foundation and the University of Houston have used advanced technology such as mapping light detection and Light detection and Ranging (LIDaR) to map the ancient ruins. The verdict is still out if this area holds treasures of gold.

8. Lue Treasure Map
The only legendary treasure to have a map that directs you to 14 tons of gold is the Lue. As mystifying as the code is, it has long been assumed the only tools needed to decode the Lue is a one dollar bill, a key and a sound understanding of Masonic symbolism. Published by Karl Von Mueller, some speculate the “map” consists of various mathematical formulas.
Believed to be in the United States, the legend of the Lue claims the treasure is 14 tons of gold. The gold was brought to the US by the Nazis in a plan to sabotage the US economy and prevent Americans from entering World War II. After hearing the plan, the Gold Act was instituted to circumvent the Nazis’ plan. Failing to prevent the US from entering the war wasn't the only failure in Nazis’ grand scheme. They also failed to decipher the Lue and the Nazi loyalist that created had died. Ultimately they were unable to retrieve the treasure and returned to Germany.

9. Treasure Chest of the Church of Pisco
Four soldiers of the Peruvian Army in the mid-1800s devised a plan to outwit priests after learning about their treasures. Luke Barrett, Arthur Brown, Jack Killorain and Diego Alvarez, gained the confidence of the Pisco Church in Peru and managed to sail away with over 14 tons of gold and other treasures after killing the priests. Unfamiliar with the area, the four drew a map, ditched the loot and headed to Australia; with the hope of eventually returning and recovering their booty. Unfortunately, prior to returning for their treasure, two were killed and the other two were arrested. Only Killorain survived the jail stint. Before he died he told Charles Howe about the Pisco Church heist and where the treasure was stashed. When Howe found the treasure, he was not equipped to move the treasure. He left the treasure hoping to return and collect. Out of money, Howe failed to return to collect the treasure but he had disclosed the location to George Hamilton who eventually went looking for the treasure but never found it because he couldn't understand the map.

10. Yamashita’s Treasure at Bacuit Bay
In Palawan, Philippines, Bacuit Bay is an island that on its own should be considered a treasure. Bacuit Bay is small, yet boasts a legendary story about Tomoyuki Yamashita’s lost treasures. A decorated general for the Japanese Army, it is speculated that Yamashita hid treasure in the caves of Bacuit Bay in the 1940s. Yamashita obtained his treasures by looting many bordering countries during the 30s until World War II. Yamashita’s treasures includes loot from Malaysia, India, Thailand and Burma, which were all shipped to the Philippines prior to their final destination—Japan. Unfortunately for Yamashita, Japan surrendered while he was still in the Philippines. Prior to being captured and hung, Yamashita hid his treasure in 172 different places on the island. He and his crew assumed they would eventually come back for the treasure. Some sources estimate that Yamashita’s treasures could be worth billions today. In the 70s, Rogelio Roxas found part of the treasure. Unfortunately President Ferdinand Marcos confiscated his findings and the remaining treasure located in that particular tunnel. Roxas sued and was awarded $22 billion dollars. Although the Marcos and Roxas family continue to battle in court, based on the story, there are more caves filled with Yamashita’s other treasures.

5 Real Buried Treasures That Can Make You Rich (Or Kill You)

How many of you used to love stories about buried treasure when you were kids? Well, those stories got started for a reason: There is lost treasure all over the place. Entire fortunes lost, the only people who knew their locations long dead.
Seriously, you could go out and find some of this stuff today, and be rolling in gold coins by the end of the week. The problem is finding it...

#5. The Gold at the Bottom of Lake Guatavita

Lake Guatavita was a holy site for the native people of Colombia a few centuries ago. Every year, the chief of the ruling tribe would cover himself in gold dust, get on a boat, and throw gold and gems into the lake as a sacrifice to his god, presumably because no one else could find anything better to do with their national budget.

Evidently disheartened by the low annual percentage yield earned by storing their money in a body of water, the natives had ended this practice long before the Spanish invaders arrived. But when the disease-carrying Europeans heard about the legend of the golden man (El Dorado in Spanish), they busted a 16th century nut all over Central America. After years of searching for the source of the legend, the conquistadors finally arrived at Lake Guatavita and learned its history.

The problem was, all the gold that had been thrown overboard over the years was now sitting beneath a shitload of water, and submarines were still a good 300 years from being perfected. So the Spanish graciously admitted defeat and moved forward with their conquering, a phrase which here means "they decided to drain the fucking lake." The first attempt occurred in 1545 when Hernan Perez de Quesada put a chain of slave laborers to work for three months, emptying out the water a bucket at a time.

They managed to lower the water level by 10-feet and recover 40-pounds of gold. Forty years later, a rich Spanish merchant decided to pull out the big guns and cut a fucking hole in the high cliff surrounding the lake, draining it 66-feet and drowning hundreds of people living in a nearby village in the process.

Finally, in 1911, an American company managed to drain the entire lake, because if there's one thing America is good at, it is the total destruction of a natural resource. Sadly, the mud on the bottom of the lake proceeded to immediately harden, trapping any gold that might be left under its thick, impenetrable crust.

"Awesome! So how do I get it?"
It's full of water again these days, the gold presumably still glittering away in the mud. But before you go heading off to Colombia with your rowboat, some rope and a bucket, know that no one has ever been able to find the bulk of treasure and the Colombian government has disallowed any more draining attempts.
Question: Would, say, dumping several million pounds of Jell-O powder into the lake, thus solidifying it and allowing us to eat our way down to the gold constitute "draining"? If you're an attorney, let us know in the comments.

#4. Captain Kidd's Treasure

Depending on what version you read, Captain Kidd was either a law abiding privateer or a stabtastically murderous pirate. Either way, he was arrested, tried for murder and piracy, and sentenced to hang.

But not before meeting Abbot and Costello.

In an attempt to delay his execution, Kidd claimed to have a huge stash of buried treasure, some of which was immediately found per his directions (Ted Bundy would later try a similar tactic to avoid execution, only replacing "stash of buried treasure" with "stash of buried women"). This essentially proved he was telling the truth, but the authorities hung him anyway, dipped his body in tar and dangled his corpse above the Thames River. It's still there today!

OK, not really. It was only up there for... two years. Anyway, today, people are still searching for the rest of Kidd's fabled loot.
"Awesome! So how do I get it?"
Well, first it would help to have a treasure map--the booty could be scattered pretty much any damned where. For instance, in 2007, a 300-year-old merchant ship that had apparently been commandeered by the Kidd back in the day was discovered right off the coast of the Dominican Republic. It was hidden under a mere 10-feet of crystal clear water, still loaded down with gold and silver and other valuables.

But you also should learn from the mistakes of previous attempts. For instance, back in the early 1980s, an out of work actor named Richard Knight, claiming to have a map of Kidd's verified by the British Museum, set off with an unemployed photographer named Cork Graham on a daring adventure.

Clearly ancient parchment and not a Chick-Fil-A napkin.

And by that we meant they went to Thailand and rented a speedboat. After bumbling around for a week in what we expect was a hilarious buddy-comedy type way, they accidentally landed in Vietnam. Authorities arrested the men for being in the country illegally and tried to ransom them off for $10,000 each. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to pony up 10-Gs for a couple of jobless retards, so they wound up spending 44 weeks in Vietnamese jail. We blame the map.

Still, you should totally get your boat and head out there. Vietnamese jails aren't that bad, right? They've surely fixed them up since Rambo.

#3. Montezuma's Gold

When the Spanish conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes arrived in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, they were greeted as returning gods because they were pale and had beards. If only it was that easy to impress people these days.

Despite their impeccable references, the Spanish turned out to not actually be gods at all. They installed themselves in the palace, forced their religion on the natives, led a brutal slaughter of 700 noblemen in the streets of Tenochtitlan and melted down all their golden statues to be transported back to Spain. Then they killed Montezuma, the king of the Aztec Empire, at which point the Aztec people decided they'd had entirely enough of these strange new douchebags, beards be damned.

The Spanish realized pretty quickly they needed to fight their way out of the city, so they could only pause to grab whatever they absolutely needed to survive, which roughly translated to "all the fucking gold we can possibly carry."

"My only regret is that there are so few pockets on our armor."

Gold weighs a shitload, and these soldiers who were already weighed down by armor took as much as 50-pounds of it each as they tried to flee. Did we mention Tenochtitlan was an island in the middle of a swamp? And that all bridges to get out had been removed?
In one night over half of Cortes's men were killed, mostly due to drowning in the swamp under the weight of all the bullshit they were carrying. It is a night known in Spanish as "Noche Triste," which in English means "just leave the fucking gold behind, you dick brained asstards."

"Awesome! So how do I get it?"

These days, trained archeologists do find some of that gold from time to time, but all the real authorities know that the rest of the stolen Aztec treasure wound up in southern Utah. That's where the gold is actually buried, according to Freddy Crystal, a "miner and amateur treasure hunter" who believed that an old map he found proved the Aztec priests removed most of their gold--before Cortes arrived--and took it to Utah for reasons best described as "making the opposite of sense,"

Notice the lack of Utah on this map.

Freddy managed to round up hundreds of volunteers in the 1920s and worked for three years, digging into the side of a mountain in the desert heat. While several artifacts and other relics were recovered, Freddy didn't find one goddamn piece of gold, not even the chocolate kind 70-year-old ladies pass out on Halloween.

55 Year Old Mystery About The Dark Side Of The Moon Solved

A team of astrophysicists claim to have solved one of the great mysteries of the moon, in the process providing insight into our companion's creation and a new take on our frame of reference.
When the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 transmitted the first images from the other side of the moon it was expected it would look pretty much like the side we are familiar with. Instead they saw none of the “seas” visible to Earthly astronomers with small telescopes, and only a couple of smaller dark areas covering 2% of the surface.
For 55 years the question of why the two sides are so different has remained a puzzle, now known as the Lunar Farside Highlands Problem. "I remember the first time I saw a globe of the moon as a boy, being struck by how different the farside looks," says Jason Wright "It was all mountains and craters. Where were the maria? It turns out it's been a mystery since the fifties."
Now Wright, and colleagues at Penn State University have come up with an explanation, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
It has long been known that the absence of the basaltic plains we call maria or seas is a result of the crust being thicker on the far side, but it has been unclear whether this greater thickness on the side away from the Earth was a coincidence.
The Moon's size, relative to Earth, has also been a puzzle with the theory that it was formed from debris thrown up when an object the size of Mars collided with the Earth gaining steadily more favor.
"Shortly after the giant impact, Earth and the moon were very hot," says Professor Steinn Sigurdsson, another of the paper's authors. Sigurdsson notes that the moon initially lay much closer to the Earth, ensuring it was more affected by our gravity.
At such a close distance, the Penn state team propose, synchronous rotation where one side always faces the object it is orbiting, would have occurred very rapidly. The same phenomenon is seen with planets orbiting close to their stars.
While the Earth-Moon interaction has slowly pushed the Moon to 10 or 20 times its original distance, with a correspondingly much longer orbit, its rotation has kept pace so that the same side has always face the Earth.
The smaller moon would have cooled while the Earth remained hot from the collision, 2500°C according to the paper's authors. For the side of the Moon facing the Earth it would be like having two suns – the second one cooler and smaller but also much closer. As a result the side facing the Earth would have cooled more slowly than that facing towards outer space.
"When rock vapor starts to cool, the very first elements that snow out are aluminum and calcium," says Sigurdsson. These would have snowed out first on the cooler far side, creating a thicker crust of plagioclase feldspars. The highlands have much more alumina (24% to 15%), and much less iron oxide (14% to 6%) and titanium dioxide (4% to 1%) concentrations.
When asteroids struck the moon's near side lava flowed to fill the spaces, but on the far side the thicker crust almost always prevented lava flowing.

There is a certain irony to the new theory. Some astronomers are annoyed at references to the “Dark Side of the Moon”. Sunlight reflected off the Earth aside, the far side of the moon gets just as much light as the side we can see.  Once however, it seems that if the far side was not actually dark, then it was certainly much less light than the side lit up by close association to the molten Earth.

13 unsolved mysteries that still need answers in 2015

From a missing plane to a vast city hidden beneath Earth, 2014 left many stones unturned. Although we made many discoveries over the course of 12 months, some of them led to even more puzzling questions.

See also: The biggest stories of 2014

Will 2015 be the year our search for answers comes to an end? Here are the mysteries the world will try to unravel in the new year.

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MH370

What happened to the plane that vanished without a trace?

A crewman on a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion Rescue Flight 795 searches for debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on April 1.

A Malaysia Airlines flight vanished without a trace while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. The weather was clear and there was no distress signal from the cockpit when the plane disappeared from radar screens. A massive search operation combed the Indian Ocean, but the Boeing 777 was never found.
After more than nine months, not a single piece of debris from MH370 has turned up. Despite numerous conspiracy theories, we still don't know what happened to the plane. All 239 people on board are presumed dead.

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ICELAND'S VOLCANO

Why is Bardarbunga still erupting?

Steam rises into the air near the Bardarbunga Volcano on Sept. 2, 2014.

Image: ARCTIC-IMAGES/CORBIS

The eruption of the Bardarbunga volcano in Iceland began at the end of August and continues to this day. The volcano has been unique in three main ways: the enormity of its lava field, the amount of hazardous sulfur dioxide gases it has released and the astonishing amount of sinking that has taken place in its crater.
Bardarbunga created a 32 square mile lava field, which is the largest in Iceland since the Laki eruption in 1783, and the Icelandic Met Office says it is “probably the third largest lava field on Earth” since 1783. The gases released by the volcano have affected all of Iceland at one point or another, the first time that has happened in 150 years. The Met Office says the amount of sulfur released by this volcano may have exceeded that of any volcano on Earth of this particular type.
The eruption has caused the Bardarbunga caldera to sink to 184 feet, swallowing a GPS instrument that had been installed to measure the sinking rate. This is the largest amount of sinking, or subsidence, at any caldera in Iceland in modern times.

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ADNAN'S STORY

Is the man spending life in prison the real killer of Hae Min Lee?

Adnan Syed, who is featured in the popular Serial podcast, was convicted of killing Hae Min Lee in 1999.

Image: Chicago Public Media

A 1999 murder case was resurrected and put under the microscope this year thanks to Serial, a nonfiction podcast that unravels a story week by week.
Currently, Adnan Syed is serving a life sentence for murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee when they were in high school. When Serial host Sarah Koenig started investigating the case a year ago, the strange story surrounding the murder of the Baltimore high school student, a lot of things didn't add up. There were no eye-witnesses tying Syed, who has been trying to prove his innocence for years, to the crime, and Syed's attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, failed to interview a witness who said she was with him at the time Lee was killed.
Ultimately, a Maryland appeals court will decide the man's fate. A hearing scheduled for January represents what Syed's lawyer, C. Justin Brown, said is the man's "last best chance" at freedom.

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SIBERIAN SINKHOLES

What caused three deep holes in Russia's north?

A view of a sinkhole, which stretches 20 meters by 30 meters, at the Solikamsk-2 mine in Russia’s Perm region.

Image: TASS/ZUMA WIRE

A 115-foot hole was discovered in Siberia's Yamal peninsula — a name that means "end of the world" in the language of the area's indigenous inhabitants — after an unexplained explosion in July. Two other mysterious sinkholes popped up in Russia's north shortly after. Scientists believe gas explosions beneath the surface caused the sinkholes, but they haven't been able to confirm that theory.
In November, a team of scientists, a medic and a professional climber plunged into the sinkhole to learn more about it, but the cause of the deep holes is still unknown.

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SADDLE RIDGE GOLD

Was the $10 million treasure actually from a 1901 heist?

Inside a Saddle Ridge Gold Coin Can.

Image: Kagin's

Buried for more than a century, 1,400 gold coins — worth an estimated $10 million — were unearthed in a California backyard in 2014. The middle-aged California couple who discovered the eight decaying tin cans full of gold remain anonymous.
Where did the gold come from?
The tale grew even more curious as we discovered that $30,000 worth of similar gold coins — that amount would be in the millions in today's dollars — had been stolen from the U.S. Mint in San Francisco in 1901. Soon we were all playing a game of whodunit.
Former San Francisco Mint clerk Walter N. Dimmick was charged with that theft, but, by the prosecution’s own admission, he was convicted on wholly circumstantial evidence. Despite the fact that the Secret Service searched all over California for those coins, they were never found.
But maybe that couple living in Northern California finally did.

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CELEBRITY PHOTO HACK

Who is behind the attack that exposed A-listers' most private messages?

Jennifer Lawrence, pictured here on Nov. 17, was one of several victims of the iCloud hack.

Image: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP/Associated Press

Beginning in late August an anonymous 4chan user began posting hundreds of never-before-seen private photos of celebrities that were stolen from their hacked iCloud accounts. The victims were mostly female and high-profile: Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlet Johansson, Kim Kardashian, Kate Upton and McKayla Maroney are just a few women whose accounts were compromised.
Apple confirmed the hackers had obtained the images by means of a "targeted" attack, though we still don't know who — or how many hackers — was involved. The FBI said it was looking into the case.

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ALIEN MOON

Did scientists really discover an exomoon for the first time?

Researchers have detected the first "exomoon" candidate — a moon orbiting a planet that lies outside our solar system.

Scientists think they found the moon of an alien planet, which would be the first time we've ever seen an "exomoon." The problem is that we'll never really know if that's what astronomers saw.
Researchers discovered the possible exomoon using gravitational microlensing — a technique that detects distant objects regardless of the light they emit — to take advantage of chance alignments between stars. When a foreground star passes between Earth and a more distant star, the closer star can act like a magnifying glass on the more distant one. If that star has a planet whizzing about it, the planet will brighten or dim the light of the distant star. But in some cases, the distant object could be a free-floating planet instead of a star, giving scientists the ability to measure the mass of the planet relative to its companion.
In this case, scientists could have spied a small star circled by a planet 18 times Earth's mass — or they could have spotted, for the first time, a planet bigger than Jupiter teamed up with a moon weighing less than Earth.
But because this encounter was completely random, it's impossible to know if we finally laid eyes on an exomoon. So, the search continues.

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BENEATH STONEHENGE

What is the sprawling structure hidden under the world's most famous standing stones?

Researchers uncovered 17 previously unknown ancient monuments under Stonehenge.

Image: Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project

Unprecedented underground mapping technology revealed that Stonehenge did not always stand alone. Beneath the 5,000-year-old stone structure is an archeological treasure trove made up of thousands of monuments that include shrines, burial mounds, deep pits and other unexplained features. Stonehenge was previously thought to be a standalone, isolated structure, so this discovery has thrown researchers for a loop.
"Stonehenge may never be the same again," said Vince Gaffney, the project's lead researcher.
And this is just the beginning — the vast majority of information from the site has yet to be analyzed.
"What you’re hearing about is simply a mere little finger of the amount of data that we have now," Gaffney told Mashable. "We think we’ve got at least another year’s work on this."

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SONY HACK

Was North Korea really behind the massive cyberattack on Sony?

An undated handout picture released by the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on April 27, 2014 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-un looking at a computer screen.

Image: EPA/KCNA

Sony is still reeling from a massive hack that exposed embarrassing company secrets and led the the cancellation of a movie release. The FBI blamed the hack on the North Korean government, saying the attack was in retaliation for The Interview, a Sony film starring James Franco and Seth Rogen that chronicles the assassination of Kim Jong-Un. However, not all security experts are convinced that the link to North Korea — specifically, the North Korean government — is accurate, especially in the absence of more concrete evidence.
"One of the biggest mistakes is that because an attack can be traced to the North Korean Internet that somehow means it's the North Korean government. That's a false assumption because the North Korean Internet is basically provided by outside companies, in this case a Thai company," Jeffrey Carr, cybersecurity expert told Mashable. "Nothing presented excludes alternate scenarios, so why jump to the most serious one?"

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MEXICAN STUDENTS

What happened to the 43 students who went missing?

Chairs sit in a pile int he corner of a class room that has been cleared out in the Ayotzinapa normalista school.

Image: BRETT GUNDLOCK/BOREAL COLLECTIVE/MASHABLE

Nearly four dozen high school students disappeared in Mexico after police stopped them from traveling to a protest. The cops then reportedly handed over the students to a drug gang, who investigators say killed them. However, their bodies have never been found.
Nearly 80 people have been arrested following the kidnapping, including a mayor, his wife and a local police chief. But without their bodies, the case remains unsolved.

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TWIN TWISTERS

What caused the double tornadoes that struck Pilger, Nebraska?

Two tornadoes approach Pilger, Nebraska, Monday June 16, 2014.

Image: Eric Anderson/Associated Press

The beastly twin tornadoes that leveled the small town of Pilger, Nebraska in June, killing two and injuring nearly two dozen, were a horrifying, relatively rare phenomenon. Both of the twisters were rated at EF-4 intensity on the Enhanced Fujita Tornado Damage Scale, with winds as high as 200 miles per hour. One of them went directly through Pilger, while its twin spun itself out to the east of the town.
The sibling tornado damage tracks were visible from space, where a NASA satellite spotted what look like nearly identical scars on the Earth's surface, separated by about two miles.
There are many things scientists still don’t know about tornadoes. For example, they still don’t know exactly why some severe, rotating thunderstorms, known as supercells, produce tornadoes while other nearly identical storms do not. The Pilger tornadoes demonstrated another unknown — how some storms can spawn multiple violent tornadoes at the same time.
Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center told Mashable after the event that the tornadoes were unusual since we rarely see such a “vivid example of a complex tornado.”

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NIGERIAN GIRLS

Where are the schoolgirls who Boko Haram kidnapped?

Martha Mark, the mother of kidnapped school girl Monica Mark cries as she displays her photo, in the family house, in Chibok, Nigeria.

Image: Sunday Alamba/Associated Press

Nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped in April from the Government Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria, by a radical Islamic group called Boko Haram. In early May, the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls began to spread on Twitter, raising the world's awareness of the mass abduction.
In May, Nigeria's chief of defense staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh, said the country's military had located the schoolgirls, but using force to free them is currently out of the question. Badeh did not specify the girls' location, and a U.S. Defense Department spokesperson said it could not confirm Nigeria's report.
By year's end, a majority of the girls remain missing.

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STEALTHY SUBMARINE

Did the submarine spotted near Sweden come from Russia?

Swedish navy corvette HMS Visby searches for a submarine in the Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden, on Oct. 19.

Image: TTT NEWS AGENCY / MARKO SAAVALA / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sweden's top general recently said the nation's territory was "unacceptably violated" in October, but he couldn't say by whom.

The Swedish military found traces of a mysterious submarine lurking in the water near the nation's capital, Stockholm, and many officials pointed the finger at Russia. But after a days-long search operation around the Stockholm Archipelago's 30,000 islands, Swedish officials called off the hunt. They said the submarine was foreign, but its country of origin remains unclear. 

The world’s biggest mysteries scientists still can’t solve

WHILE Harry Houdini prided himself on leaving audiences from around the world mystified at his illusions and escapes, modern science has revealed how he accomplished many of his spectacles of grandeur.

Time doesn’t always shed light on unexplained mysteries, though.
Consider the 5-tonne statues that dot remote Easter Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or 5,000-year-old coins that have been found buried in the United States. Such oddities continue to baffle modern science as experts continue — to date in vain — to search for rational explanations to the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries, which are as confounding as they are exhilarating.
12.The Moai statues of Easter Island

How these were constructed remains a head scratcher.Source:News Corp Australia

The mystery of Easter Island and the Moai statues that inhabit it is something that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, but the fact that there are still so many legitimate unanswered questions surrounding the island is in itself quite remarkable.
Back in Easter in 1722, a Dutch explorer happened upon something strange. He was originally in search of a hypothetical land mass called Terra Australis, thought to exist because at the time they thought that the northern and southern hemispheres should be balanced.
Instead though, he discovered an island in the Southeastern Pacific Ocean, which he would later name Easter Island due to the date of its discovery.
He was surprised to discover that the island was inhabited, and he reported seeing 2,000 to 3,000 people there. This was surprising, because the island is ... well … really far from anything else at all.
A staggering 1,900 kilometres away from the nearest inhabited land, and about 3,500 kilometres off the coast of Chile. And yet despite its incredible remoteness, The Rapa Nui people who called the island home managed to carve and transport a mind-blowing 887 statues, some measuring 33 feet tall and weighing up to 82 tonnes, an average of 17 kilometres each. And this all happened roughly 700 years ago. The biggest remaining question mark concerning the statues themselves is definitely their transportation.
Theories have been proposed that involve ropes, sleds, rollers, levelled tracks, or even that the people slowly rocked the statues back and forth to their destination. Attempts have been made to recreate the methods that could have been used, but most resulted in damage to the statues, or would have required hundreds of people making just 0.08 kilometres of progress per day.
The truth is, we don’t really know exactly how they did it. But however the Rapa Nui managed to move the Moai, they would have certainly needed to be incredibly patient, creative, and organised to make them a reality.
11.The Confederate Treasury

Will the gold rise again?Source:Supplied

The year was 1865, and the American Civil War was drawing to a close. As the Union army marched the final path to victory, however, Confederate Secretary of the Treasury George Trenholm made one last effort to preserve the South’s assets: he liquidated them. While a veritable fortune in gold, silver, and jewels had been carried by President Jefferson Davis and his men when they abandoned Richmond, Virginia, when they were captured, it was all gone. All of it, save a few confederate banknotes. And the most improbable part of all was the staggering 4,000 kilograms of Mexican silver dollars that seemed to simply have vanished. Dozens of theories have been proposed to explain the mystery behind the missing treasure. Some maintain that the gold was distributed among plantation owners and buried, waiting for a day when the South will rise again. Many believe that the silver was buried in Danville, Virginia, where it still resides today. Others have claimed that the funds were entrusted with a secret society called the Knights of the Golden circle, so that they could finance a second civil war in the future. But the truth is, the real fate of the Confederate treasury still remains a mystery to this day.
10. Gobekli Tepe

Our understanding of the rise of civilisation crumbles at this site.

Every so often, a discovery happens that forces us to re-imagine what we think we know about humanity, and how we got to where we are today.
Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe is certainly one such discovery. The site, located at the top of a mountain ridge, is composed of more than 200 pillars, up to 20 feet in height and weighing up to 20 tonnes, arranged in roughly 20 circles.
Many of the pillars have predatory animals engraved on them. And none of this would be surprising if it was built in, say 2000 B.C., but Gobekli Tepe was built more than 13,000 years ago, predating Stonehenge by more than 8,000 years.
Its existence completely up-ends the conventional view of the rise of civilisation. The idea of a religious monument built by hunter-gatherers flies in the face of our knowledge about both religious monuments and hunter-gatherers.
Prior to the discovery of this site, we believed that the people of that time lacked complex symbolic systems, social hierarchies, and the division of labour — three prerequisites, we thought, for building a 22-acre massive temple. Formal religion, meanwhile, is supposed to have appeared only after agriculture produced such hierarchical social relations.
The findings at Göbekli Tepe, however, suggest that we might just have the story backward — perhaps it was the need to build a sacred site that first fuelled hunter-gatherers in their quest to organise themselves as a workforce, to settle down in one place, to secure a stable food supply, and to, eventually, invent agriculture.
But the existence of the site raises far more questions than it answers. How did nomadic, neolithic man manage to organise a workforce to complete this site? Why was it built?
How come it predates similar structures by thousands of years? Excavation started on the site in 1996, and most of it still remains to be unearthed, but for now these questions must go unanswered.
9. Sea Peoples

Historians have no answer to this seafaring race

During the late Bronze Age, civilisation was progressing at an impressive rate in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions. Kingdoms rose, order was established, and technology advanced. The Mycenaean and Minoans had intricate palaces in Greece and Crete, the Hittites dominated what is now Turkey.
And the Canaanites controlled what would become the holy land — Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. But in the years surrounding 1200 B.C., all of the would change.
Over the course of a single generation, all of those civilisations would be almost entirely wiped off the map, and those that did survive would be set back a thousand years, losing the ability to write and turning back the clock on the sophistication of their art, architecture, and pottery in the hundred years to follow.
This event was part of what is known as the Bronze Age collapse, and it remains one of the largest dark spots in historians’ records. And one of the causes of this bizarre collapse was the mysterious “Sea Peoples” — a technologically inferior, unaffiliated group of seafaring warriors who raided the lands and are often credited with the collapse of these once-great civilisations.
The problem is, historians still have little if any idea of where these warriors came from, or what became of them after their conquest finally ended in Egypt. Also unknown is how the Sea Peoples managed to conquer civilisations hundreds of years more advanced in weaponry.
But without solid records from the time, and with only scattered details of the origins of these strange raiders, we may never know their true identity.
8. Antikythera Mechanism

Does not compute. The oldest computer known to man was built thousands of years ago.Source:AP

The Antikythera mechanism is an incredibly intricate analogue computer found in a shipwreck near Greece in the year 1900.
The device was used to determine the positions of celestial bodies using a mind-bogglingly complex series of bronze gears.
The device in and of itself would already be impressive, but the unbelievable part of the mechanism? It was created 100 years before the birth of Christ, and more than 1,000 years before anything even approaching its level of technological complexity and workmanship would be discovered again.
The device also came long before our modern understanding of astronomy and physics. The Antikythera mechanism was built over 1,600 years before Galileo was born, and over 1,700 years before Isaac Newton was born.
Now, the rational explanation is that the device used working theories on the movements of celestial bodies established at the time, and some remarkably brilliant craftsmen.
But if you were looking for a jumping-off point for your new time-travel novel or alien sci-fi epic, this one should hit you like a 10-tonne brick. Because for all the explanations we can offer, the Antikythera mechanism raises even more questions.
7. Oak Island Money Pit

Is there treasure deep down?

Throughout history, we’ve never ceased to be enamoured with tales of buried treasure, secret inscriptions, and booby traps. But one of the most enduring treasure mysteries of all time comes from a tiny island off the coast of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada.
Oak Island is the home of what is informally known as the “Money Pit,” an incredibly deep hole of incredibly elaborate construction discovered in 1795.
Over two centuries of excavation have unearthed no treasure thus far, but what has been discovered is arguably just as fascinating. Underneath the surface of the pit are a series of wooden platforms, and even deeper, flooding mechanisms formed from multiple underground canals leading to water.
The first time someone managed to dig deep enough, the entire pit was immediately flooded, and due to the construction of the mechanism, it would fill back up with water as fast as you could remove it. At the 90-foot mark, an inscribed, encoded stone tablet was found that was revealed to say “forty feet below, two million pounds lie beneath.”
In search for whatever the island is hiding, the money pit has attracted the attention of hundreds of search parties, including former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in his youth spent a summer with fellow Harvard grads in search of the treasure. It’s truly a historical oddity, but considering that we’re no closer to finding out who dug the pit and why, after 200 years of searching, one must wonder if we ever will.
6. The Voynich Manuscript

Forget the Art of War, this is book you’ll never finish because no one knows the language.

History is littered with ancient languages that have been decoded, and ciphers that have been cracked, but if there is one bizarre occurrence that marks a thorn in historians’ sides, it has to be the Voynich manuscript.
Purchased by rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, the text doesn’t appear particularly remarkable at first glance.
A series of paragraphs over the course of 240 pages accompanied by illustrations and diagrams, broken into what appear to be six distinct sections. The sections appear to describe different topics of herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, and pharmaceutical nature.
What is so remarkable about the manuscript, then? Well, It’s written in a language unknown to man, and has evaded all attempts to decipher its contents to this day.
The writing is composed of over 170,000 characters written in patterns that resemble natural language. Twenty or 30 glyphs can account for nearly the entire text, with the exception of a few stray characters that appear only once.
It was written smoothly, with no evidence of errors or corrections anywhere, and no evidence of pauses during writing, which one would expect with encoded text. Almost as to suggest that the language was natural for whoever wrote it.
Carbon dating revealed that the script was written between the years 1404 and 1438, and although theories have been offered, nobody actually knows the author of the work.
Due to the numerous failed attempts to decipher the Voynich manuscript, many have suggested that the manuscript is an elaborate hoax, and can’t actually be deciphered. But until the truth becomes known, this strange text will remain one of history’s most fascinating unsolved mysteries.
5. The WOW! signal

Aliens, are you there?

On a summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, recorded the strongest hard evidence of extraterrestrial life in human history.
Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, as his volunteer position entailed, hoping to come across a signal that bore the hallmarks of one sent by intelligent aliens.
And on that night, he saw his measurements spike, in a big way. The signal lasted for 72 seconds, the longest period of time it could possibly be measured by the array that Ehman was using. It was unmistakable, and appeared to have originated from within the Sagittarius constellation near a star called Tau Sagittarii, 120 light years away.
Ehman wrote the words “Wow!” on the original printout of the signal, thus its being known as the “Wow! Signal.”

Wow indeed.

If you’re wondering what the fuss is about the signal, think of it this way — the signal that was received was at precisely the right frequency that wouldn’t be interpreted as noise, and wouldn’t be intercepted along its journey.
In other words, if we were going to send a signal out into the universe to try to communicate with an alien race, that’s exactly the frequency we would use.
Despite the incredible occurrence however, all attempts to locate the signal again have failed, leading to much controversy and confusion about its origins and its meaning.
4. The real identity of Benjamin Kyle

Who do you think you are?

In 2004, A man that would soon adopt the name Benjaman Kyle woke up outside of a Burger King in Georgia without any clothes, any ID, or any memories.
He was diagnosed with retrograde amnesia, unable to remember who he was, and with no identification, unable to find out. Now, if this was like any other story about amnesia, it would have probably resolved itself soon afterwards. But the trouble was, authorities couldn’t identify him either.
Local and state police failed to discover him in any known records despite an exhaustive search. And then in 2007, the FBI became involved, but were also unable to identify him, making him the only US citizen in history listed as missing despite his whereabouts being known.
One particularly unfortunate side effect of not having your own identity is that, without a social security number, he is unable to obtain full-time employment, and without memory of any past skills or disciplines, the problem is only amplified.
After a student documentary was created about Benjaman, news media picked up the story, which attracted the attention of local business owners.
One of the owners offered him a job washing dishes, a job which he is still working today. This enabled him to move out of the woods where he was sleeping, and into an air-conditioned shed, where he now stays. But his true identity and past remain a mystery to this day.
3. The Dancing Plague of 1518

Long before music festivals dancing fever took hold of people.

The story of the dancing plague sounds like something straight out of fiction.
On a summer’s day in the town of Strasbourg during the year 1518, a woman began dancing wildly in the street. The day turned into night, the night turned into morning, and she was still dancing.
Within a week, 34 others had joined her, dancing as though they were possessed, without stop, for no apparent reason. And within a month, the number of dancers had reached 400. Religious sermons were called to address the issue.
Physicians were called in to document the event and try to find a solution. And all the while, the dancing worsened. Many became ill or died as a result of exhaustion, strokes, or heart attacks. The authorities eventually decided that the only way the dancers would recover is if they danced it out of their systems.
Gild halls and a grain market were opened to the dancers, and a wooden stage was even constructed for them. Musicians were even brought in to keep those affected moving. Numerous theories have been proposed for the cause of the bizarre event, including poisoning, epilepsy, typhus, mass psychogenic illness, and even secretly coordinated religious rituals, but to this day we still have no answer for this truly unbelievable historical event.
2. The S.S. Ourang Medan

Did ghosts kill the crew of a cargo ship?

In June 1947, multiple ships travelling trade routes in the strait of Malacca, off the coast of Malaysia, received a terrifying SOS message that read: “All officers including captain are dead lying in chart room and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.” After a short period of time, one final message was received, that read simply ... “I die.”
Nearby ships identified the source of the signal as coming from a Dutch freighter, the SS Ourang Medan.
The nearest merchant ship, The Silver Star, travelled as fast as they could to the source of the distress signal. But upon boarding the Ourang Medan, they were horrified by what they found: Every member of the crew lay dead, their corpses scattered on the decks.
The eyes of the men were still open and expressions of sheer terror were frozen on their faces. The Silver Star’s party found the deceased radio operator as well, his hand still on the Morse Code-sending key, and eyes wide open.
But strangely, there were no signs of wounds or injuries on any of the bodies. The Silver Star’s crew decided to tow the ship back to port, but before they could get underway, smoke began emanating from the decks below.
The boarding party quickly returned to their ship and barely had time to escape before the SS Ourang Medan exploded and swiftly sank. Some theorised that clouds of noxious natural gases bubbled up from fissures in the seabed and engulfed the ship, and others have even blamed the occurrence on the supernatural, but to this day, the exact fate of the ships crew remains a mystery.
1. Baghdad Battery

Shocking! Was electricity used thousands of years before we switched it on?

When we think of electricity, most of us recall back to a time in school where we learned about Benjamin Franklin, a metal key, and a kite. The year of Franklin’s fateful discovery was 1752.
But the existence of the Baghdad batteries suggests the possibility of far more shocking scientific advances in the field — a mind-blowing 2,000 years earlier. Discovered in 1936, and thought to have been created in the Mesopotamian region, these clay pots contain galvanised iron nails wrapped with copper sheeting, and some archaeologists theorise that an acidic liquid was used to generate an electric current inside the jar.
If correct, these artefacts would predate the currently accepted timeline for the invention of the electrochemical cell, attributed to Alessandro Volta, by more than two millennia.
Whether or not the artefacts were in fact used as batteries is highly contested by archaeologists, and what the resulting electrical current was used for is also a complete mystery, as we have no historical records from that time.
Some people theorise that they might have been used for electroplating objects, but such evidence of their use for that purpose is yet to be found.
What we do know, however, is that the batteries would actually work, at least in theory.
At least twice, experiments were conducted to test replica constructions of the batteries, including once on the show Mythbusters, and both experiments showed that the batteries were indeed capable of producing electricity when filled with an acidic solution. But for now, the true purpose of these artefacts remains unknown.