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Where Do the Giant Circles Under the Ice of Lake Baikal Come From?

09/09/2026
4,701

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Every winter, Lake Baikal freezes over like a giant sheet of glass. But satellite images sometimes detect dark circles kilometers wide appearing amidst the white ice. They are too large to be recogn ..

UVB-76: The Mysterious Buzzing Sound Broadcast for Decades on 4625 kHz

14/09/2026
4,814

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On 4625 kHz, an intermittent buzzing sound has repeated day after day since at least the early 1980s. Occasionally, the channel marker stops, a Russian voice reads out a call sign, code words, and n ..

Strasbourg Dancing Plague of 1518: When the Entire City Couldn't Stop Dancing

07/09/2026
5,164

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In the summer of 1518, Strasbourg records describe citizens dancing against their will, continuing to the point of exhaustion. The authorities erected stages and hired musicians because physicians b ..

Upsweep: the rising tone still echoing across the Pacific

13/09/2026
5,168

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Ever since NOAA gained access to the SOSUS hydroacoustic data in 1991, listening stations across the Pacific have been recording trains of pulses a few seconds long whose pitch sweeps upward. The so ..

Perytons: the fake cosmic signal produced by a microwave oven

12/09/2026
5,015

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - For years the Parkes telescope in Australia picked up radio pulses in which the high frequencies arrived first and the low frequencies later - the look of a signal that had travelled through plasma ..

LGM-1: the clockwork signal once suspected of being aliens

11/09/2026
5,038

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In 1967 the postgraduate student Jocelyn Bell noticed a recurring patch of "scruff" on kilometres of chart paper from the Cambridge radio array. Recording at a faster rate turned the signal into pul ..

The Taos Hum: the drone only some people hear in the New Mexico desert

10/09/2026
5,142

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In the early 1990s a number of residents around Taos described a low hum like a diesel engine in the distance, clearer indoors and at night. A neighbour standing in the same room might hear nothing ..

The Princes in the Tower: who erased them from history in 1483?

09/09/2026
5,133

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In the summer of 1483, twelve-year-old Edward V and his younger brother Richard were brought to the Tower of London while their uncle took the throne as Richard III. At first the boys were still see ..

Legio IX Hispana: a Roman legion lost in Britain, or posted east?

08/09/2026
4,955

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Legio IX Hispana was once stationed at York and fought through ferocious uprisings in Britain. After the early second century its name disappears from the surviving lists of Roman legions. Novels an ..

The Green Children of Woolpit: legend, or a memory of refugees?

06/09/2026
5,180

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Two chronicles from the late twelfth century relate that villagers at Woolpit in Suffolk found two children with green-tinged skin beside a wolf pit. They wore strange clothes, spoke a language nobo ..

The Man in the Iron Mask: which prisoner made Louis XIV hide a name?

05/09/2026
5,001

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In 1669 the war minister Louvois instructed the jailer Saint-Mars to receive a prisoner named Eustache Dauger and hold him in absolute secrecy. The man followed Saint-Mars through several fortresses ..

The Loch Ness Monster: what is left after the blurry photo, sonar and eDNA?

04/09/2026
4,771

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Loch Ness holds water so dark, so deep and so long that a ripple in the distance easily turns into the back of an enormous creature. Nessie is famous not because of a bone or a carcass, but because ..

Bigfoot: giant footprints, the Patterson-Gimlin film and the FBI's hair sample

03/09/2026
5,158

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Bigfoot - or Sasquatch - is described as a tall, hair-covered primate living in the forests of north-western North America. Thousands of reports, plaster casts of footprints and a piece of film shot ..

The Yeti: footprints on the Himalaya and the answer from bear DNA

02/09/2026
4,715

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - The Yeti usually appears at the edge of a snow slope: a few large footprints, a dark shape, and then a storm that wipes the trail away. The image of the "abominable snowman" was popularised in the W ..

The Chupacabra: blood-sucking monster, or a coyote with mange?

01/09/2026
4,730

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - The Chupacabra is an unusually young legend. It flared up in Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s, described at first as a two-legged creature with spines along its back; by the time it reached Texas the im ..

Mothman at Point Pleasant: did the red-eyed creature really foretell a disaster?

31/08/2026
5,144

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In November 1966, Point Pleasant in West Virginia became the centre of reports about a winged creature with red eyes. A year later the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people. Popular culture joi ..

The Jersey Devil: a thirteenth child, the Pine Barrens and 300 years of legend

30/08/2026
4,796

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - The Jersey Devil is described as a creature with a horse's head, bat wings and hooves, born as Mother Leeds's thirteenth child and flying straight up the chimney. The story looks like a colonial tal ..

The Beast of Gevaudan: what animal terrified France in the 18th century?

29/08/2026
5,034

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Between 1764 and 1767, the Gevaudan region of south-central France recorded a series of fatal attacks, mostly on women and child herders. "La Bete" - the Beast - was described as larger than a wolf, ..

The Mongolian death worm: does Olgoi-khorkhoi really hide beneath the Gobi sand?

28/08/2026
5,108

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Olgoi-khorkhoi - usually translated as "intestine worm" - is said to live beneath the sand of the Gobi desert, thick and red, able to kill from a distance with venom or electricity. The story reache ..

Mapinguari: guardian of the Amazon, or a memory of the giant ground sloth?

27/08/2026
4,802

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In many Amazonian stories, Mapinguari is a creature or an entity that protects the forest, with a terrifying cry, a powerful smell, skin that is hard to pierce and sometimes feet that point backward ..

The Kraken: from ship-swallowing tentacles to a giant squid filmed in the deep

26/08/2026
5,158

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - The Kraken is a rare case of a "monster" with a relative made of flesh and bone. Giant squid of the genus Architeuthis, metres long, really do live in the deep sea, leaving drifting carcasses, beaks ..