Mysteries & the bizarre

The Voynich Manuscript: A 600-year-old book no one can read

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - More than a century after Wilfrid Voynich brought the book to the antiquarian book market, the writing system in the manuscript remains undeciphered by any method accepted by experts.Beinecke MS 408 ..

14/09/2026
5,107

The Wow! Signal: 72 Seconds That Kept Humanity Listening to the Cosmos for Half a Century

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On the night of August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio recorded a narrow, powerful signal near the 21 cm hydrogen line. It lasted for only a single 72-second scan, then never reappeare ..

14/09/2026
5,060

Tunguska 1908: What Exploded in the Skies Over Siberia?

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On the morning of June 30, 1908, a streak of light tore through the Siberian sky and exploded over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. The shock wave flattened trees across more than 2,0 ..

14/09/2026
4,774

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

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 ..

14/09/2026
4,713

Bloop: The colossal sound under the Pacific and the answer from Antarctic ice

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In 1997, hydrophones spaced more than 3,000 km apart across the Pacific Ocean recorded a very low-frequency sound so powerful that it was given its own name: Bloop. When the sped-up recording was po ..

13/09/2026
4,682

The Hessdalen Lights: Strange Orbs Continue to Appear Over a Norwegian Valley

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In Norway’s cold and sparsely populated Hessdalen valley, people report white, yellow, or red lights that sometimes hover motionless and sometimes streak across the sky. A wave of sightings in the e ..

13/09/2026
5,066

The Phaistos Disc and the 241 Mysterious Symbols of the Minoan Civilization

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - A small clay disc found at the palace of Phaistos bears 241 tokens stamped in a spiral, but the text is too short and there is almost no comparative material. Archaeologist Luigi Pernier discovered ..

13/09/2026
4,953

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
5,084

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
4,942

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
4,841

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
4,923

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
4,742

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
4,789

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
4,896

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
4,857

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
4,969

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
5,055

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
4,877

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
5,125