World

Upsweep: the rising tone still echoing across the Pacific

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 ..

13/09/2026
5,135

Perytons: the fake cosmic signal produced by a microwave oven

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 ..

12/09/2026
4,988

Fast radio bursts: millisecond signals carrying colossal energy

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - A fast radio burst can end before a human can blink, but in that brief moment, the source in a distant galaxy emits an extraordinary amount of radio energy. When the first FRB was recognized in arch ..

12/09/2026
4,888

How Did the Sailing Stones of Death Valley Move?

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Across the dry lake bed of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, stones sit at the ends of long trails as if they crept through the mud when no one was looking. Some weigh hundreds of kilograms, with pat ..

12/09/2026
4,968

Linear A: The Lost Script of Crete

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - While Linear B has been deciphered as Mycenaean Greek, its predecessor, Linear A, still keeps the language of the Minoans shrouded in secrecy. Linear A appears on clay tablets, vessels, and various ..

12/09/2026
4,793

Tabby's Star: Do Its Unusual Dimmings Really Hide a Megastructure?

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In Kepler data, KIC 8462852 occasionally dimmed by more than 20% in irregular curves, much deeper than a normal transiting planet. When familiar causes did not fit immediately, the idea of an "alien ..

11/09/2026
4,907

Fairy Circles in Namibia: Footprints of the Gods, Sand Termites, or a Battle for Water?

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Across a long strip of the Namib Desert, millions of nearly circular barren patches lie evenly spaced across a grassy carpet. Seen from above, they resemble a grid drawn with a compass. Legend calls ..

11/09/2026
4,825

Rongorongo: The Undeciphered Message of Easter Island

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On a handful of surviving Rapa Nui wooden tablets are rows of human, bird, and object glyphs read by rotating the tablet in a unique way, yet their overall meaning remains lost to time. The rongoron ..

11/09/2026
4,940

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

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 ..

11/09/2026
5,016

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

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 ..

10/09/2026
5,106

Oumuamua: The First Interstellar Visitor and the Invisible Acceleration

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On October 19, 2017, Pan-STARRS1 detected a point of light leaving the Solar System on a hyperbolic orbit. It was traveling too fast to have ever been gravitationally bound to the Sun and became the ..

10/09/2026
5,164

Ball lightning: a real glowing sphere or just an illusion after a flash?

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - After a lightning flash, witnesses sometimes describe a glowing sphere about the size of an orange floating through the air, lasting a few seconds before fading or exploding. There are accounts of i ..

10/09/2026
4,913

The Indus Script and the Secrets of the Harappan Civilization

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Thousands of seals and small tablets bearing symbols of the Harappan civilization have been found, but the extremely short sequences make language identification exceptionally difficult. The Indus V ..

10/09/2026
5,156

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

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 ..

09/09/2026
4,684

Rohonc Codex: The Strange Manuscript with Hundreds of Unidentified Symbols

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - An illustrated book transferred to the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1838 contains a dense, unidentified system of symbols, with its author, language, or reading direction still un ..

09/09/2026
4,995

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

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 ..

09/09/2026
5,107

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

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 ..

08/09/2026
4,923

Blood Falls in Antarctica: The Red Flow Bleeding from the Heart of a Glacier

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Amidst the white and blue of Taylor Glacier, a dark red stream oozes out like an unhealed wound. Geologist Griffith Taylor recorded Blood Falls in 1911; initially, the color was attributed to algae. ..

08/09/2026
4,960

The Shugborough Inscription and the Eight Letters Sparking Decoders' Debates

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Beneath a relief at the Shugborough Estate lies a short sequence of letters commonly transcribed as DOUOSVAVVM—tantalizingly curious, yet far too brief to prove any single solution. The inscription ..

08/09/2026
4,890

Kryptos: The Final Cipher at CIA Headquarters

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - The first three sections of the artwork Kryptos have been solved, but K4 remains a unique case: the plaintext answer exists within the artist's records, but the decryption method and complete messag ..

07/09/2026
4,859