Sports are such an ubiquitous presence in our daily lives that it is hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. While modern sports can usually only trace their roots back a hundred years or so, ancient humans had their own games which pitted teams against each other, often with bloody results.

10 Pitz
Culture: Mayan

Littered with cultural and religious significance, the sport known to the Mayans as pitz is one of the oldest games in human history, believed to have originated as early as 2,500 BC. A number of different variations existed, with the rules on ball size or what was used to hit it changing to fit the context of the game. Nevertheless, the game was originally much like racquetball, with the later addition of hoops that served as goals. The main focus of every town in the Mayan empire, the ball court was often used as a proxy for war, a way for enemies to settle their disputes without bloodshed.

In addition, Mayan kings, much like their Aztec counterparts, would often stage dramatic reenactments of their myths right on the court. The most popular myth played out on the court was that of the Maize Gods and the Hero Twins. As they were avid fans of pitz, the Maize Gods would often play loudly, which angered Xibalba, the god of the Underworld. So he killed the two of them and buried them on the court; he also took one of their heads and hung it from a tree in the Underworld. It spat on one of the princesses of the Underworld, who became pregnant, and she gave birth to the Hero Twins, who resurrected the Maize Gods.

Human sacrifice also played a role—captured kings or the captains of the losing team would often be decapitated after the game, although the games may have just been an elaborate ritual, with the outcome predetermined.

9 Harpastum
Culture: Roman

An early predecessor to the modern sport of rugby, harpastum was an ancient Roman game played with a small, hard ball of the same name. Derived from two early Greek games, the goal of the game varied often, but each version included two teams. Some variations involved a single player in the middle of a scrum, attempting to grasp the harpastum and escape, with the opponents trying to keep him inside and away from the ball.

Other versions were more like rugby, with two evenly matched teams squaring off on a field, with goals on either side. Passes, as well as feints, were common, as the goal was to get the ball to the opposite end of the field, and injuries abounded since there were no rules on grappling. A predetermined amount of time was agreed upon and the winner was the team with the most points at the end.

Galen, the famous Roman physician, claimed that harpastum was one of the greatest exercises, because it was cheap, easy, and could be tailored to fit the skill level of any player.

8 Fisherman Jousting
Culture: Egyptian

The game of choice for the poor and lower-class fisherman of the Nile River, fisherman jousting was exactly what it sounds like. Two teams of boatmen would square off, utilizing their hands or feet to knock the other team off balance and send them careening into the water. Papyrus boats, propelled by poles which would also be used to defeat the other team, were the stage for the contests, some of which were believed to have been impromptu games designed to settle territorial disputes.

Generally a very violent sport, fisherman jousting often ended in the deaths of a large number of the participants. Hippos and crocodiles roamed the waters, ready to maim the contestants who fell overboard. In addition, swimming was not as universally practiced as it is today, and many of the fishermen drowned simply because they didn’t know how to swim.

Some scholars believe there may have been a religious aspect to some of the fights as well, with murals depicting competing boats filled with offerings. The boatmen appear to be racing to be the first to honor the gods, with combat coming into play during a close race.

7 Buzkashi
Culture: Turkic

Developed by the Turkic people sometime between the 10th and 15th centuries, the sport of buzkashi is still played to this day, predominately by the descendents of its inventors. The national sport of Afghanistan, it involves two teams, riding on horseback, whose goal is to drag a headless goat carcass across the field and drop it inside a predetermined area, usually a circle. Occasionally, a sheep or calf is used instead of a goat.

Banned under the Taliban’s rule, buzkashi is a violent sport, with the riders equipped with whips with which to beat the other riders’ horses. They’re not supposed to use their whips on the riders themselves, but that rule is often disregarded. Often, the social status derived from owning the horses of the winning team is enough to cover the costs associated with maintaining the health of the animals between matches. The origins of this violent sport are lost in time, but the story goes that Genghis Khan and his Mongols would steal livestock from the Turkic people, who would brave death to snatch it back from them on horseback.

6 Pato
Culture: Argentinean

Derived from the Spanish word for duck and also known as horseball, pato is the official sport of Argentina and an eclectic mix of polo and basketball. The youngest sport on this list, it was created in the 1500s and was originally played with a duck in a basket rather than the ball that today’s participants use. A violent sport, riders would often attack each other in order to win, often because a large amount of money was at stake.

Throughout its history, the sport has been banned numerous times, mostly due to the increasing violence which often resulted in the deaths of many of its participants. In the 17th century, the Catholic church was so concerned with the sport that they would excommunicate anyone found playing. Up until the 20th century, it remained underground, until rule changes made it much safer to play; the duck in a basket was also replaced with a unique ball with six leather handles. The goals themselves have changed over time, evolving from a simple box on the ground to a hoop with a net that is in use today.

5 He’e Hölua
Culture: Hawaiian

One of the more dangerous entries on this list, he’e hölua (Hawaiian for “sled surfing”) is a sport which originated on the Hawaiian Islands over 2,000 years ago. It consists of a dangerous trek up the side of a volcano, with a large sled made of wood and coconut fibers. Once at the top, the rider, or team of riders, would race down the slope, either on their stomachs or in a typical surfing pose.

Speeds of up to 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph) were common, and the races were seen as tributes to Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes. Brought to a stop by 19th century Christian missionaries, who saw the sport as dangerous and a waste of time, it has been recently revived by native Hawaiians trying to reconnect with their heritage.

4 Pelota Purépecha
Culture: Mexican

Pelota purépecha is a pre-Hispanic game similar to field hockey, but with a fiery twist: The sport is played with a ball which is lit on fire. Named for its inventors, the indigenous Purépecha people of what is now the Mexican state of Michoacán, the game involved a ball which had been smeared with pine resin and lit on fire, which was batted around by players armed with wooden sticks. Goals were set up on either side of a stretch of field and the goal was to knock the ball across the line.

The ball, known as a zapandukua, was normally made up of interwoven cloth and twine, and the game was normally played at night, as the ball made for more of a spectacle under the light of the moon. Like many of the games created by the indigenous people of Mexico, pelota purépecha has been largely forgotten, but concerted efforts by the Mexican government are helping to raise awareness for this piece of national history.

3 Naumachia
Culture: Roman

Less well-known than the gladiator battles which frequented the Roman sports world, a naumachia was a mock naval battle, played in front of a crowd of onlookers. Normally pitting condemned criminals against each other, they often took place in man-made basins designed specifically for this purpose. The earliest recorded example of a naumachia was in 46 BC, begun by none other than Julius Caesar, who used it to celebrate his military accomplishments in a Roman ritual known as a triumph.

Basically, two ships were placed on either side, filled with “willing” participants, and then the fighting began. It lasted until one side was completely killed. Some of them were so elaborate that sea creatures were brought in and placed in the waters. The largest recorded naumachia was set up by Emperor Claudius in 52 AD, with 100 ships and over 19,000 men participating in the game.

2 Hurling
Culture: Irish

One of the oldest games still played today, hurling is sort of like hockey mixed with lacrosse. Basically, there are two teams and the object is for the players to use a wooden stick, known as a hurley, to hit a small ball called a sliotar into a goal. The fastest field sport in the world, ball speeds reaching up to 145 kilometers per hour (90 mph) are extremely common, and participants are often left bruised and bloodied after a match.

However, that’s nothing compared to the 3,000-year-old history of the sport, where it was more like warfare, with relatively few rules and matches that could last for days. In addition, there could be teams numbering in the hundreds squaring off against one another, only adding to the violence. Believed to have been brought to Ireland by the Celts, the sport has tales of mythological heroes playing which date as far back as the 12th century BC.

1 Chunkey
Culture: Native American

One of the earliest sports played in what is now the United States, chunkey was developed by the Mississippian culture and centered around the ancient city of Cahokia. Basically, any number of people participated on either of two teams, though it was usually just one-on-one. A small stone disk was rolled from the starting point and the opposing teams would throw spears at the area at which they thought the disk would end up.

Spreading to much of the Native Americans of the Southeast, chunkey is believed to have played a major role in joining the different tribes together, as they formed one of the largest North American civilizations north of Mesoamerica. Each tribe had unique rules, but the spirit of the game was the same. The sport was taken so seriously, and gambling so ingrained in the culture of chunkey, that losers would even commit suicide in some cases, normally because they had wagered all of their possessions.

Every year, surprising discoveries are made all over our planet, in our solar system, and even farther out in the deep void of space. These findings push forward our understanding of the reality we live in, often challenging previous notions of universal physical laws.

When a discovery falls outside the boundaries of our understanding—sometimes with a lack of context—it will often stump the smartest experts. Here are 10 mysteries that are baffling modern scientists.

10 Giraffe Skin Disease

Since the 1990s, baffling cases of skin disease have affected giraffes in captivity and in the wild. It is a widespread condition in sub-Saharan Africa.

Experts are unable to determine if this mysterious ailment is due to a combination of diseases or if an environmental effect is in play. The scientific community still doesn’t know how this disease spreads, if it can be transmitted to other animal species, or if there is a cure.

Currently, Fred Bercovitch, director of Save The Giraffes, advises that this skin disease should not play a larger role in giraffe conservation efforts due to a lack of information as to how the condition affects the animals’ reproduction and mobility. A better understanding of the effect of this disease on the giraffe population could greatly increase conservation efforts in the future.^[1]

9 East-Shifting Tornado Alley

Areas east of the Mississippi River have seen an increase in tornadic activity over the last few decades. Meanwhile, states in the area commonly known as Tornado Alley have seen a significant decrease.

Although states like Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas still have the most tornadoes each year, the total number has decreased since the late 1970s. The greatest decline has occurred in central and eastern Texas.

This change in atmospheric activity has led scientists to believe that Tornado Alley is shifting east, and they do not know why. Areas where tornadoes would often go unreported before the digital age are surprisingly the same regions seeing the largest decline in tornado activity.^[2]

Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University believes that the shift in Tornado Alley can be attributed to the drying of the Great Plains. Tornadoes form along the dry line where the dry air from the West meets the moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, a mixture that causes violent thunderstorms. As the dry line shifts east, so do the tornadoes.

However, it is unknown whether the shift is caused by our impact on the environment or an influence of nature.

8 Mysterious Seismic Waves

Seismic waves were picked up worldwide by monitoring stations on November 11, 2018, causing scientists to speculate as to what caused this never-before-witnessed event. They were able to trace the initial location to Mayotte, a French island located between continental Africa and Madagascar.

This region has been plagued by earthquakes over the last year with a decrease leading up to the event. However, no earthquakes were reported to have occurred on November 11, especially nothing capable of producing the seismic signal. The strange signal was described as better representing a burst in energy than an earthquake.

Lasting roughly 20 minutes, the seismic waves traveled thousands of kilometers across the globe. They tripped earthquake monitors, although oddly enough, nobody aboveground was able to feel them.

As the signal was so unusual, its origin is difficult to determine. John Ristau, a seismologist at GeoNet, compared the Mayotte signal with that of the 6.3-magnitude North Atlantic earthquake. Although both signals were visible, they were very different in appearance.

As Ristau explained, “You can see that the amplitude of the [Mayotte] signal varies over time; however, the frequency, or period, of the signal is virtually uniform for the entire time. This implies a source that is producing a signal at one consistent frequency, but the strength varies.”^[3]

Typically, an earthquake has a broad range of frequencies and periods at which it’s producing energy.

Anthony Lomax, an independent seismologist, suggested that the activity was probably caused by an undersea volcano to the north of Mayotte. Another possibility is an unacknowledged slow earthquake that kicked off the event.

7 The Antarctic Particles That Shatter Physics

Physicists have observed a high-energy particle blast toward space from the ice in Antarctica, and they have no idea why or how this event happened. They believe that it must be some sort of cosmic ray.

The collection of particles that comprise the Standard Model of particle physics should not be able to travel this way. But this is exactly what was observed by NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) in March 2016.

It is known that low-energy particles can travel miles through the Earth without being affected. But high-energy particles act differently because their large cross-sections make it likely that these particles will collide with something once they enter the Earth. As a result, they don’t make it out.

Most scientists suggest that ANITA captured a whole new type of particle. Some theories include an atypical distribution of dark matter inside Earth or a type of sterile neutrino which rarely collides with matter.

According to Penn State researchers who combined data from ANITA and IceCube, another Antarctica-based neutrino observatory, the particles bursting from the ice toward space have less than a 1-in-3.5-million chance of being a part of the Standard Model of particle physics.^[4]

6 Persistent Noctilucent Clouds

The mesosphere, the part of the atmosphere that almost touches space, is very cold and dry. During the summer, ice crystals about the size of cigarette smoke particles form around dust, possibly from meteoroids, in the -125 decree Celsius (-193 °F) conditions. When this happens, it creates a blue illuminating display of wispy clouds shortly after sunset called noctilucent clouds.

These fascinating clouds were first witnessed roughly two years after the eruption of Krakatoa in the 1880s. However, in 2006, scientists were able to answer the questions about their nature and formation.

Recently, a new mystery has sprung up about the persistence of the noctilucent clouds during the 2018 summer season. They are observed every year and have followed an expected routine—beginning their formation in May, intensifying in June, and dissipating by late July. It came as a shock to sky watchers across the northern hemisphere to see these spectacular night lights intensify in July and stick around long into August.

By using data from NASA’s satellite-based Microwave Limb Sounder, researchers from the University of Colorado realized that an increase in moisture is the cause of the prolonged effects of the noctilucent clouds. We do not know why there is an increase in moisture.

However, some theories are already in place. One involves an early entry into the solar minimum (originally expected in 2020), which may be associated with the coldest and wettest years in the mesosphere. Another possible explanation is planetary wave action in the southern hemisphere which causes more moisture in the northern atmosphere than one would usually expect.^[5]

5 The Puzzling Hexagonal Vortex Of Saturn

Analyzing data from the Cassini-Huygens mission that reached Saturn in 2004 and ended in 2017, researchers observed a strange hexagonal vortex forming at Saturn’s north pole as the northern hemisphere entered summertime. This vortex towered hundreds of kilometers above the clouds in the stratosphere.

In the 1980s, NASA’s Voyager spacecraft had discovered a hexagonal vortex much lower in the planet’s atmosphere, but they were astonished by the Cassini-Huygens finding. Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester explained:

While we did expect to see a vortex of some kind at Saturn’s north pole as it grew warmer, its shape is really surprising. Either a hexagon has spawned spontaneously and identically at two different altitudes, one lower in the clouds and one high in the stratosphere, or the hexagon is in fact a towering structure spanning a vertical range of several hundred kilometers.

A process called evanescence is one way for wave information to push up into the stratosphere, although its strength decays with height. According to our understanding of atmospheric sciences, however, a hexagonal vortex should not be able to push past the lower altitude clouds as wind directions change with higher altitudes.

Cracking the case on this geometric mystery will help scientists understand the transportation of energy around planets by grasping how the higher atmosphere is affected by the lower-altitude environment.

The Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) used on the Cassini-Huygens mission also revealed that Saturn’s poles exhibit surprisingly different behaviors. The south pole displays a vastly more mature circular vortex during the southern summer. This could indicate that Saturn’s northern vortex will continue to mature. Alternatively, Saturn may have asymmetrical poles that are yet to be understood.^[6]

4 The Missing Dark Matter

A team of scientists led by Pieter van Dokkum has discovered a galaxy named NGC1052-DF2 that appears to be lacking dark matter. This has astronomers scratching their heads because the absence of dark matter in this galaxy would confirm that the substance exists as well as produce doubts about our current understanding as to how a galaxy is created.

Our modern understanding is that galaxies are created from a halo of dark matter. Without dark matter, a galaxy should not be able to form.

The team was able to get a closer look and determine the mass of NGC1052-DF2, located 65 million light-years away, by tracking 10 embedded star clusters with the Dragonfly Telephoto Array. They found that the mass of NGC1052-DF2 was almost equal to the total mass expected from the stars (visible matter) within it. Also, the mass of NGC1052-DF2 is only 0.5 percent of the mass of our Milky Way galaxy.^[7]

Some have suggested that dark matter may not exist and that we need to modify our understanding of gravity. However, alternate theories of gravity still have something that mimics dark matter on a galactic scale. In fact, it should always be there.

So, van Dokkum argues that if an alternate law of gravity applies to one galaxy, then that law should affect all galaxies in the same way. As a result, every galaxy should look like it has dark matter (even if it doesn’t) because the mimicking factor would always be there.

That leads us to van Dokkum’s paradoxical conclusion. If all galaxies should look like they have dark matter (even if it’s really something else), then the inability to detect dark matter in galaxy NGC1052-DF2 proves that dark matter is real. Scientists are still debating this issue vigorously.

3 The Deep Space Flashing Light

When astronomers were searching the depths of space to determine what comprises the 80 percent of the universe we can’t see, they stumbled across something unexpected. Seventy-two intense bursts of light were monitored from the Cerro Tololo International Observatory in Chile by Miika Pursiainen and his team.

The hot bursts of light were measured as being 300 million kilometers (186 million mi) to 15 billion kilometers (9 billion mi) across. They also had brightness that one would expect from a supernova, although they did not have the duration.

According to one theory, this event occurred due to a complication in the development of a Type II supernova. A Type II supernova happens when a star blows off its outer shell of gas after a buildup of heavy elements in the star’s core causes it to collapse in on itself.

This complication is currently being researched by the Australian National University. It has been named a fast-evolving luminous transient (FELT), which occurs when a star develops gas bubbles during the early stages of the collapse. When the star goes supernova, these gas bubbles explode due to the superheating effect. This is still a working theory, and only time will give us any definitive answers.^[8]

2 Strange Infrared Light Emitting From A Pulsar

RX J0806.4-4123 is one of “The Magnificent Seven,” a group of X-ray pulsars located within 3,300 light-years from Earth. These pulsars are hotter and slower than astronomers would expect for their age.

RX J0806.4-4123 is emitting a strange infrared light that is completely new to scientists. When an international group of astronomers observed the pulsar with the Hubble Space Telescope, they noticed the extended area of roughly 29 billion kilometers (18 billion mi) of infrared light emitting from the pulsar.

Obviously, something more is going on with this neutron star as the infrared emissions are greater than the star alone can produce. So, what is the source of the energy? Scientists have proposed at least two theories: a fallback disk or a pulsar wind nebula.^[9]

A fallback disk is a large disk of dust that formed around the neutron star after its explosion. Although such a disk has never been observed, researchers have hypothesized its existence.

It would explain the higher temperature and slower rotation of the star as well as the amount of energy needed to emit so much infrared light. A confirmation of the fallback disk would be a huge leap forward in our understanding of the formation of neutron stars.

Now let’s examine the pulsar wind nebula theory. The fast rotation of a neutron star with a strong magnetic field creates an electric field. In turn, when particles are accelerated in this field, a pulsar wind may be produced. Infrared emissions would then be emitted by shocked particles created when the neutron star travels at faster than the speed of sound through the interstellar medium.

However, the existence of an infrared-only pulsar wind nebula would be extraordinary.

1 The Bird In The Child’s Mouth

Fifty years ago, the remains of a young child were found in Tunel Wielki Cave in the Saspowska Valley in Poland. The child’s gender is unknown, but the skull of a bird was in the youngster’s mouth and another was by the child’s cheek.

Although the discovery was peculiar, the bones were almost immediately boxed and put into storage without being properly examined and assessed. The findings went unpublished except for a single photograph in a 1980s book by Professor Waldemar Chmielewski, the man who originally discovered the skeleton.

Anthropologists don’t know why the child was buried about 200 years ago in this manner or location. The only other human remains found in the cave were at least 4,000 years old.

The mystery doesn’t stop there. Although the University of Warsaw has bones from the youngster’s body, it does not have the child’s skull. In fact, it is missing. It was sent to anthropologists in Wroclaw after the excavation, but no one seems to know where the skull is now.^[10]

History teaches us about ourselves. It tells us what man has done, how his follies have hurt him, and how his virtues and risen him up, and it shows us the path to follow.

Usually, anyway. We can’t really learn anything from history if we don’t get the stories right. Some of the most famous historical stories have little details that are usually left out. Sometimes, these little details change the whole story—and ruin the whole point.

10 The Titanic Had More Lifeboats Than Required

The sinking of the Titanic is a classic fable of the hubris of man. Confident that they’d built an unsinkable ship, the developers only included 20 lifeboats. Their bravado sent hundreds to their deaths.

The thing is, by 1911 standards, the Titanic didn’t skimp on the lifeboats at all. Legally, they were only required to have 16. Those extra four were actually the company being abnormally cautious. Lifeboats were only meant to ferry people to another ship, so they weren’t expected to have enough for everyone.

Obviously, there was a problem with that standard, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any logic behind it. After the Titanic sank, the law was changed, and ships were so overloaded with lifeboats and safety gear that they could barely move. One, the Eastland, was so weighed down that it capsized, killing 844 people.

9 Johnny Appleseed’s Apples Were Inedible

Every American child learns the story of Johnny Appleseed, the US hero who journeyed through the western frontier, planting apple trees so that children could enjoy the sweet flavor of a delicious Granny Smith. Johnny Appleseed was a real person—but he wasn’t planting apples for kids. In fact, the apples he planted were almost entirely inedible.

The real Johnny Appleseed planted sour apples that could only be used for hard, alcoholic apple cider. Early settlers were hard drinkers. Johnny was just trying to help those people get drunk. He didn’t do it for free, either. Johnny ran ahead of settlers planting apple orchards on the land in order to sell the land for profit.

The US government wasn’t as fond of him as its people were. Johnny was promoting cheap and easy alcoholism. When prohibition came into effect, the FBI went out and chopped down every tree Johnny Appleseed planted.

8 Solomon Northup Was Sold Back Into Slavery

Since 12 Years A Slave hit theaters, Solomon Northup has been a household name. His story of being forced into slavery and his long, hard fight for his freedom are known around the world. More happened after the credits rolled, though. A couple of years after being reunited with his family, Northup went to Boston to deliver a few speeches—and never came back.

No one knows for sure what happened to him, but the popular belief is that a mob of people who didn’t care for the idea of a freed black man giving lectures gathered. They lured him into a trap, grabbed him, and sent right back into slavery. “It is said that Solomon Northup,” the newspapers of the time reported, “has been again decoyed South, and is again a slave.”

7 The Battle of the Alamo Was A Huge Mistake

The brave US soldiers who fought and fell to an onslaught of Mexican soldiers is a major moment in US history. It’s a story of heroism, of patriotism, and of men who bravely stood up against a larger army for a greater cause.

Except that it was pretty much pointless. The Alamo wasn’t a key strategic location. US Army commander Sam Houston tried everything he could to convince the people to focus on more important places, telling them that they didn’t have the munitions to win there, but they didn’t listen.

The Alamo helped as a piece of propaganda. Houston spread the words “Remember the Alamo!” as a battle cry that rallied the people to avenge the fallen who’d heroically died behind its walls—but if they’d just listened to Houston in the first place, they never would have died.

6 John Nash Went Off His Meds

A Beautiful Mind told the heart-wrenching tale of mathematical genius John Nash’s struggle to overcome the symptoms of schizophrenia. In the end, he credits his recovery to two things: the love of his wife and newer medications.

The real John Nash wasn’t happy about that “newer medications” line. He’d handled his schizophrenia in the exact opposite way—by ceasing to take meds entirely. Antipsychotic medication, he felt, blunted his mind. He threw them out in 1970 and never went back on them again.

Nash isn’t the first schizophrenic to convince himself he’d do better off his meds. He’s just a rare case where it actually worked, which is exactly why the screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind fudged that little detail. He didn’t want anyone in the audience following Nash’s bad example and trying to go without their meds.

5 Stephen Hawking May Have Been Beaten By His Wife

It used to be that people would think about Stephen Hawking without thinking about his sex life—until The Theory of Everything changed all that. That story, though, left out what happened after Hawking’s marriage with Jane Wilde ended—which is a bit less touching.

Hawking married a woman named Elaine Mason in 1995. After five years of matrimony wore their toll, reports started to come out that Hawking was covered in “mysterious injuries,” which he refused to explain. Then he was found with a broken arm and a split lip. He even missed his 60th birthday, which he explained by claiming that he’d “crashed into a wall.”

Eventually, people became worried enough that the police tried to investigate Mason for spousal abuse. Hawking, however, wouldn’t let them do it and refused to press any charges against her, so they never got the chance to find out for sure.

4 Darwin Tried To Ride The Galapagos Tortoises

Darwin’s trip to the Galapagos Islands changed the way we see the world. Because of his work there, he’s become a symbol of the scientific method—a fastidious, dedicated man who tested his theories through rigorous and systematic scrutiny. It helps that we usually leave out the part where Darwin tried to ride a tortoise.

When Darwin saw the massive Galapagos tortoises, some weighing as much as 270 kilograms (600 lb) and stretching 1.4 meters (4.5 ft) across, he knew what he had to do: see if he could ride them. The father of evolution hopped onto a tortoise’s back and tried to make it giddyup, rapping on the back of the shell to make it go.

The tortoise kept throwing him off, though, so Darwin just ate them instead, until they were an endangered species. Thus, the father of evolution provided a great example of his own principle: If the Galapagos tortoises had just let him ride them like ponies, they wouldn’t be on the brink of extinction today.

3 The French Revolutionaries Slaughtered Thousands Of Peasants

When the French revolutionaries rose up against the aristocracy in the name of liberty, fraternity, and equality, it got bloody. The mass slaughter of royalty under the blade of the guillotine is pretty well-known, but we usually envision the revolutionaries picking on the ruling class. As it turns out, they actually killed more peasants than aristocrats.

A huge chuck of those deaths came from Vendee, where the people weren’t particularly thrilled about the revolution. They revolted against the new French government—and were beaten back by the French army. Before marching on Vendee, a French general asked the government to “pronounce in advance on the fate of the women and children” and was told to slaughter every one. The response read, “Exterminate the brigands to the last man.”

They did just that. Afterward, another general boasted that he “trampled children under horses’ feet and massacred women.” He told Paris, “I have no prisoners to worry about. I have exterminated everything.”

2 The Pyramid Builders Were Treated Pretty Well

Every film we see about Egypt shows slaves building the pyramids, struggling through whippings and pain, moving the great blocks of the tombs of selfish kings into place. These images are reminders of how the Jews suffered in slavery and symbols of how one powerful man can put his vanity above the lives of countless others.

Except it turns out that the pyramids weren’t built by Jewish slaves. They weren’t built by slaves at all; they were built by paid laborers working in three-month shifts, who even had health care plans. Archaeologists have even found Egyptian construction workers buried inside the pyramids with jars of beer and bread, so they can still get drunk and chow down on carbs in the afterlife.

1 The Catholic Church Strongly Supported Astronomy

The Catholic Church gets a bad rap. We usually picture them as people who insisted the world was flat and fought against all scientific progress. They are, after all, the people who locked Galileo up in house arrest. According to Berkeley University, though, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, the Roman Catholic Church actually gave more financial aid to astronomy than any other institution.

Their cathedrals were often built to work as solar observatories and were the best at the time. With that little painful exception of Galileo, most of the important figures in science were Catholic. Isaac Newton was devout, and Nicholas Copernicus, who first placed the Sun at the center of the universe, was a cleric.

It doesn’t stop there. Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, was an abbot. Georges Lemaitre, who proposed the expansion of the Universe, was an ordained priest. The list goes on.

Urban legends—from little elementary kids telling each other that swallowing a watermelon seed will make a watermelon grow in your stomach from teens daring each other to walk up to the “murder house” of the neighborhood—every one of us has heard them. The thing that makes urban legends so interesting is that they’re spread with the belief that they’re true. Urban legends come to be because of mysterious sightings, real experiences of people, and true historical events, so it makes them much more believable than simple creepypastas and scary stories. Most of them, however, are either completely untrue, remain unconfirmed, or extremely exaggerated. Only a small minority of urban legends have been confirmed as real.

10 The “Maine Hermit,” Christopher Knight

For years, residents of North Pond, Maine noticed the constant disappearance of items in their homes. Instead of watches and wallets, however, it was simple things like peanut butter, or apples. Considering the inconsequential nature of the items, the residents didn’t think much. Not until the break ins happened again, and again, and again—1000s times in fact.^[1] Finally, the police were able to catch and arrest the culprit—the “Maine Hermit,” Christopher Knight. When Christopher Knight was only 20 years old, he purposely stranded himself in the woods and lived without any other human contact for 27 years. He stole what he needed to survive, but avoided all other people. In the end, residents of North Pond finally got the answer to the mystery of their missing items.

9 The Boogeyman of New York, Cropsey

The story of Cropsey was once just a Staten Island urban legend kids told to scare each other. As it was said, Cropsey was an escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand that kidnapped children and murdered them in the underground abandoned tunnels of the Seaview Hospital. Parents would even use the story to scare their kids into keeping curfew or going to bed. In the ’80s, however, the urban legend manifested in real life. A bus full of children was hijacked by Cropsey, and five other children went missing at his hands. One poor child’s body was found in a shallow grave near the Willowbrook State School.^[2] Willowbrook State School, if you don’t recognize the name, was the subject of a national scandal in the 70s—children at the school were exposed to sexual abuse, corporal punishment, unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, and even unethical medical experiments. Our boy, Cropsey, turned out to be Andre Rand, the janitor at the school. Rand was convicted for kidnapping and lives in prison to this day.

8 Real Corpse Used as Carnival Prop

Real or not, corpses tend to give many of us the creeps. So to think that the haunted house zombie or the carnival mannequin beside you was more than just a prop? It’s the stuff of nightmares. In 1976, a film crew went to Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California for filming. While filming on one of the “spooky rides” of the park, a crew member reached for a hanged mannequin’s arm, which broke off. Upon examining the dismembered limb however, the worker saw real skin and bone. Turns out, that “mannequin” was no prop. In fact, it was the mummified corpse of outlaw and train robber, Elmer McCurdy. He was killed in a shootout after trying to evade the police. He was taken to a funeral and embalmed, but no one claimed the body, so the undertaker used him for display—people could see the body for dropping a nickel into the corpse’s mouth.^[3] A carnie eventually showed up a claimed to be a relative wanting to “lay the body to rest.” From then on, McCurdy’s corpse was used as a carnival attractions for decades. Eventually, the story of outlaw Elmer McCurdy was lost and the corpse was assumed to be fake. When the TV crew finally discovered the old boy he was laid to rest in Oklahoma. A layer of concrete covers the casket to prevent him from becoming a traveling attraction again.

7 Virginia “Bunny Man” Threatens Trespassers with axe

Many towns have their own share of local scary stories and haunted locations, and Virginia’s Fairfax County was no different. For decades, kids told each other the story of the “Bunny Man,” a threatening man in a bunny suit with an axe. Supposedly, Bunny Man was responsible for the murder of a couple children as well as some disappearances and the scattered presence of mutilated animal carcasses around the county. In truth, the story isn’t quite so wild. In October of 1970, the Washington Post published an article: “Man in Bunny Suit Sought in Fairfax,” after a couple had a hatchet thrown into their car windshield by a man in a bunny suit. The man threatened the couple for “trespassing” and then disappeared in the woods. Only a week later, the same event occurred once again with a separate couple.^[4] Though not quite as extravagant as murder, the bunny man was actually a very real man with an axe and everything.

6 Criminal Big Nose George’s Body was used to make Shoes

It’s not uncommon in horror movies for things made of skin, or bones, or something else more morbid. There was a case, however, where it was more than just a horror trope. George Parrot, or “Big Nose George,” was an ol’ wild west criminal. He stole horses, robbed stagecoaches and trains, and even murdered the local sheriff and detective.^[5] He did, at least, until he got caught. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. After the deed was done, no one came forward to claim the body. Two doctors present at the time asked to have the body for medical study. Though one of the doctors did study his brain, George’s corpse was mainly used for… not medical purposes. In fact, the cadaver was skinned and made into shoes and part of the skull was given as a gift to a medical protege. The rest of the body was buried in a whiskey barrel. The shoes still exist today and can be viewed at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, Wyoming.

5 Mysterious “Charlie No-Face” Confirmed a Considerate Pennsylvania Resident

Many people near Pittsburg know the story of Charlie No-Face (also called the Green Man). Depending on who you asked, he was a ghost, a monster, or a simple factory worked who had been horribly disfigured as a child and lost his face. This Beaver County bogeyman was more than just a legend, however. He was a real man and resident of Big Beaver, Pennsylvania. His real name was Raymond Robinson and was a normal boy—up until the accident. He was burned by high voltage when trying to climb an inoperative trolley line and, though he survived, he lost his eyes and nose and his lips and ears were horribly disfigured. Wanting to get some fresh air, but knowing his appearance would frighten others, Robinson began walking the roads at night. Word spread to local residents and people began to drive down to try to see him. Some even brought cigarettes and beer.^[6] Eventually, the story of Charlie No-Face was passed on until it became an unrecognizable ghost story, but Charlie was really just a kindly victim of a tragic accident.

4 Missing Woman’s Corpse Found in Hotel’s Water Tank

Have you ever gotten a glass of tap water and thought it tasted a bit funny? Well, this exact thing happened to guests of LA’s Cecil Hotel but with a gruesome twist. Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old Canadian tourist visiting LA. After Jan 26, 2013, however, she went missing. For 2 weeks her whereabouts were unknown. Unknown, that is, until a maintenance man went to check the Cecil Hotel water tank because of “water pressure issues”.^[7] Inside one of the four large tanks he found Lam’s naked corpse. Surveillance from the night of her disappearance showed her acting strangely: pressing all the elevator buttons or getting in and out of cars. The police deemed the incident a tragic accident, and health officials assured hotel guests that the water was not contaminated because of the body. Even so, guests were understandably upset.

3 Mysterious Gas Mask Man of Switzerland, “Le Loyon” photographed

Cryptids are a common thing. Some of them are extremely famous, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Others like mothman or thunderbird are uncommon but still far reaching. Some, like our aforementioned Maine Hermit or Cropsey, are only known locally. Le Loyon is most similar to the latter two. For about a decade, residents of Maule, Switzerland have experienced sightings of a mysterious man in the forest wearing a gas mask, boiler suit, and a cloak. Most who have encountered the mysterious Le Loyon retreated in fear, despite him/her showing no aggression. In fact, one observer even saw Le Loyon holding a bouquet of flowers one time.^[8] Though questions about Le Loyon remain unanswered, one observer was able to snap a picture of the mysterious man, thus proving his existence.

2 Man Actually Makes Himself Fly with Balloons

Many of us have dreamed of flying as children. With movies like Up and Mary Poppins it seems to be a fairly easy task—just get a lot of balloons, or maybe jump down the stairs with an umbrella. Okay, so maybe these methods don’t quite work like we’d hoped, but one man was actually able to accomplish it. In the ’80s, Larry Walter tied 42 weather balloons to a lawn chair and was able to soar 3 miles in the air for multiple hours.^[9] To return to earth, he used a pellet balloon to pop the balloons one at a time. Unfortunately, the balloons caught on power lines and caused a 20 min outage in Long Beach. Though he was issued a $1,500 fine, he received international attention and ever appeared on “The Tonight Show.”

1 Woman was Buried Alive and Mangled Her Fingers While Trying to Escape

I think most of us have probably heard the story of someone being buried alive: some person was proclaimed dead and was buried but later woke up, alive in their casket. When the grave is later dug up, the person is found dead by suffocation with horribly mangled fingers and scratch marks on the inside of the coffin. The story of Octavia Hatcher is likely the source of this legend. She fell ill and went into a coma in the late 1800s. Not long after, she was pronounced dead and swiftly buried. Not even a week later, other people began showing similar symptoms to Octavia—falling into a coma with extremely shallow breathing. These individuals, however, woke up. Her husband, worried she had been buried alive, ordered her to be unburied. Sadly, his suspicions were correct. Octavia was found dead in her casket with a scratched face and bloody fingers. The lining had even been torn from the coffin’s lid.^[10] She was shortly reburied.

You can find the student and freelance writer, Elizabeth Boyer, on YouTube at “Lizzie Boyer.”

Around the globe, the US of A is well known for the Statue of Liberty, New York City, Disney World and Las Vegas. This is obviously a drop in the bucket considering just how many famous landmarks reside in the States. America is also well known for its well deliberated conspiracy theories. No sooner does something happen, or the theories burn up the internet on a variety of open forums. On this list are 10 more conspiracy theories that include a wide spectrum from alien invasions to government coverups.

SEE ALSO: 10 Bizarre Celebrity Conspiracy Theories

10 Area 51

The Conspiracy: Area 51 is not a hiding place for aliens after all

In June this year, a California student uploaded a post to Facebook encouraging people to “storm Area 51 to see them aliens.” The storming event was meant to take place on Sunday 22 September, but as is usually the case with incidents such as these, only a few dozen people pitched up. However, as if conspiracy wasn’t rife enough about Area 51, a tweet by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), warned: “The last thing #Millennials will see if they attempt the #area51raid today” The tweet was accompanied by a photo of men and women in military attire standing in front of a B-2 stealth bomber. The DVIDS has since apologized but this won’t stop the already-convinced-of-dodgy-activity-at-Area-51 masses from dreaming up more theories.

The biggest theories have always involved reverse engineering of extra-terrestrial space craft and alien testing / autopsies being done at Area 51. However, another theory is blowing all of that out the water, stating that this is only what the American government wants the world to believe. This theory has it that the alien rumors were part of a deliberate hoax started and spread by the US Air Force and Intelligence forces to keep the public focused on ET and their attention diverted from actual spy aircraft and spy planes being built at Area 51.^[1]

9 Las Vegas False Flag

The Conspiracy: The Las Vegas shooting was a false flag event / terror attack

It took only a couple of hours after the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012 for conspiracy theories to flood the internet: Victims were accused of being crisis actors and the entire incident was written off as a false flag event. It was even alleged that the incident was set up by the US government in order to introduce stricter gun laws.

The same thing happened right after the Las Vegas shooting incident in 2017 when 64-year old Stephen Paddock opened fire on concertgoers, killing 58 of them and injuring 422 more. Paddock shot himself shortly afterwards, leaving his motive forever open to speculation.

Several false reports made it onto the internet claiming that Paddock was a registered Democrat, that there was a second shooter in the same hotel where Paddock had been staying and even a serious doozy of a theory stating that Paddock was an ISIS soldier. None of these allegations have proven to be true and Google as well as Facebook have been severely criticized for failing to censor these stories.^[2]

8 Hawaii Missile

The Conspiracy: The Hawaii missile false alarm was no accident

At 8:07 local time on 13 January 2018, a ballistic missile alert was issued in Hawaii. The message sounded over TV, radio and smartphones throughout the island sending citizens into a state of panic. 38 minutes later, the message was recalled with officials blaming miscommunication during a drill at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. The incident led to the resignation of the state’s emergency management administrator and a public apology from Hawaii Governor, David Ige.

While the majority were merely relieved that the message was sent in error, some didn’t accept the explanation given and came up with theories of their own. The most popular one of these being that someone pushed the alert notification through on purpose. At the time of the alert, the US was putting immense pressure on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Therefore, to conspiracy theorists, it meant that North Korea decided to strike back with a cyberattack that sent Hawaii into panic. Why, you may ask? Well, to send fear into the hearts of the enemy and make them back off, of course. It was also theorized that North Korea wanted to test the system and see how fast the US would react to an emergency system, to give them an idea of how and when to attack.^[3]

7 Government DNA Theft

The Conspiracy: 23andMe campaign is run by the government

23andMe is a privately-owned California biotech and genomics company. They provide consumer genetic testing services to determine one’s predisposition to disease as well as answer ancestry-related queries. You can have yourself tested by simply providing a saliva sample which the company will then have analyzed and tested in their lab.

Naturally the skeptics out there immediately saw a flaw in this process and came up with a theory to try and stop people from sending in their samples. Considering that Google’s parent-company, Alphabet, owns 23andMe, they are convinced that this is a sly way for the US government to get its hands on the DNA samples of citizens. The government, according to the theory, is using these DNA samples as just another means of keeping tabs on everyone all the time.^[4]

6 Blood Sacrifice

The Conspiracy: April is blood sacrifice month

As seen time and time again, the US government (and other governments around the world) are usually the first to be blamed in the event of tragedy. In America, shootings and tragedy seem to haunt the continent. Just think of the Boston Marathon bombing, all the school shootings including Columbine and Virginia Tech as well as the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conspiracy theorists have come up with an incredible connection between the above-mentioned tragedies and the American government. Seeing as how all of them occurred in the month of April, along with many more, it is now thought that they were part of a government-sponsored blood sacrifice to Baal. What’s more, the theory also has it that all historic American tragedies happened for the same reason: To appease the Beast by offering it a ritual blood sacrifice.^[5]

5 O.J. Didn’t Do It

The Conspiracy: O.J. is innocent after all

Not just America, but the world, watched as O.J. Simpson tried to escape the police as a passenger in a white Ford Bronco SUV in 1994. In 1995, the world again collectively held their breath and then gasped as O.J. was acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. While some believed he was indeed innocent, the majority consensus seemed to be that the justice system had failed and that a guilty man had been allowed to go free.

After the trial, Simpson continued to get in trouble with the law. He was arrested in 2001 for battery and burglary and was yet again acquitted of all charges. His house was searched after a tip off that Simpson was involved in drug trafficking, but nothing came of this. In 2007 Simpson was arrested again, this time for robbery, assault, kidnapping etc. He was eventually sentenced to 33 years in prison with the possibility of parole after 9 years. He was released on 1 October 2017.

While many felt that there was a measure of justice served, others came up with a theory that O.J. was completely innocent of killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Instead the blame was shifted to O. J’s son, Jason, who suffers from bipolar disorder. Most of this theory seems to be based on a diary entry written by Jason: “It’s the year of the knife for me. I cut away my problems with a knife. Anybody touches my friends – I will kill them. I’m also tired of being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

However, other theories refuse to let go of the premise that O.J. is guilty and state that he hired a serial killer and/or suffers from CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) which leads to memory loss, impaired judgment, impulse control issues etc. This, some believe, could have led to him killing two people and then ‘forgetting’ about it.^[6]

4 Michael Jackson Murder

The Conspiracy: Sony killed Michael Jackson

There is no denying that Michael Jackson was odd. But he was also regarded as the King of Pop and named as one of the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century. His achievements include 15 Grammy Awards, 26 American Music Awards and 13 No 1 US singles. In 2009, Jackson died of a sedative overdose at the hand of Conrad Murray who was his personal doctor.

A couple of weeks before his death, Jackson wrote 13 letters in which he claimed that someone was trying to murder him and that he was scared for his life. One of his close friends, Michael Jacobshagen, revealed this during an interview on an Australian TV program. Jacobshagen said he chose to speak about these letters to show his support of Jackson’s daughter who believes her father was murdered.

A theory making the rounds states that because of Michael Jackson’s publicized feud with Sony’s president, Tommy Mottola, the company decided to kill the singer off. Sony allegedly refused to give Jackson masters of his song’s licenses for many years and sued him for the failure of his album Invincible, because Jackson refused to participate in a US promotional tour. This is said to have given Sony a reason to get rid of Jackson.

However, all this has been outweighed by the 2019 documentary titled Leaving Neverland, which caused several radio stations to refuse to play any Michael Jackson song.^[7]

3 Stanley Meyer

The Conspiracy: Stanley Meyer was murdered

Stanley Meyer was born on 24 August 1940. From a young age he and his twin brother were interested building things and soon Stanley boasted ownership of several patents. By 1989, most of his very innovative patents were accepted and used within 8 months. He worked with NASA on the Gemini Space program and most of his work was paid for out of his own pocket.

Back in 1975, when oil prices were skyrocketing and due to a lack of oil supply in the US new car sales dropped dramatically, Meyer dreamed up the concept of a hydrogen fuel cell car. The car’s major selling point was that it would run on water instead of gas. The car would also not have emitted any harmful emissions into the environment. Within a couple of months, Meyer had built a prototype powered by a fuel cell engine. The car worked perfectly. People were in awe as Meyer exclaimed about being able to turn tap water into hydrogen to power his invention.

Unfortunately, the hype did not last. Lawsuits were brought against Meyer’s inventions, with lawyers alleging that the car was a fraudulent scam. The water fuel cell at the midst of the car’s innovation was examined and found to be using conventional electrolysis. At the end, Meyer had to pay back all investors who had turned against him.

In March 1998, Stanley Meyer, his brother and two Belgian investors were having a meal at a restaurant. Meyer sipped on cranberry juice, suddenly grabbed his neck before getting up and running out the door of the restaurant. He fell on his knees outside and vomited. When his brother hurried after him to see what was going on, Meyer simply said “They poisoned me” before he died.

Investigations showed that Stanley Meyer died of a cerebral aneurysm. However, some are not buying it. There is an ongoing conspiracy theory that Meyer was murdered in his own country to stop unwanted attention from governments around the world. Meyer’s brother believes that the Belgian investors that they had met with that fateful day may have had something to do with his death.^[8]

2 U.S.S. Maine Sinking

The Conspiracy: The US intentionally sunk the U.S.S Maine

On 15 February 1898, US battleship Maine was at anchor in Havana harbor. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until a massive explosion tore up the ship and sank her, costing the lives of 260 men on board. This led to the Spanish-American War of 1898, as most Americans and Congress believed Spain to be behind the attack.

There was no conclusive evidence at the time to find those responsible or even what exactly caused the explosion, even though it was ruled that the ship had probably been sunk by a mine. Investigations in 1976 seemed to point to a fire igniting ammunition stocks that could have caused the explosion.

The biggest conspiracy theory now surrounding the blast states that a US agent caused the explosion on purpose in order to anger the American public and instigate the war. Cuban politician, Eliades Acosta, claimed that economic interests in the US were behind the sinking of the Maine and responsible for the assassination of 3 American presidents.^[9]

1 Military Tornado

The Conspiracy: Joplin tornado was caused by the military

On 22 May 2011, a catastrophic EF5 tornado touched down in Joplin, Missouri. The monster tornado was nearly 1 mile wide and rapidly intensified in strength. It was the 7th deadliest tornado in the US, killing 158 people and injuring 1150 others. It was also the costliest as insurance pay-outs totaled $2.8 billion.

Just a week later, conspiracy theorists were stirring up internet forums, claiming that the tornado was not a natural occurrence, but instead had been the result of HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) shooting radio waves into the upper atmosphere. They believed that HAARP had a device capable of creating monster storms for their own dodgy agenda. Moreover, some theorists also firmly believe that HAARP was responsible for the Haiti earthquake as well as the massive Japan earthquake.^[10]

Eating is an essential part of human life, and eating stuff that won’t poison us or damage our bodies is one of the surest ways to keep ourselves in a state of long-term good health. For this reason, humans have always been fairly careful about how their food is handled. Even before we knew everything we do about hygiene, we certainly knew a good bit about cooking and preserving our grub.

However, with the advent of the modern food system and the global need to bring safe food to all corners of the globe, many new ingredients have been used to keep our food safe for eating. The fact that people don’t have quite as much knowledge of the origins of their food anymore has caused many to become increasingly worried about what they are eating, and that’s made it increasingly easy for people to be fooled by fake food scares.

10The Dangers Of High-Fructose Corn Syrup

Many people you talk to will claim that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is the greatest demon of the food industry. In fact, some people go so far as to suggest that HFCS is responsible for the rise of diabetes and obesity in our country. They also claim that HFCS affects your body differently than regular sugar and that it is basically ruining the health of our country.

However, after multiple different studies, the verdict is that there is no evidence whatsoever that it is more dangerous for you than regular sugar, or that it even affects you differently in any way, shape, or form. A study specifically designed to see if it could correlate with the rise of obesity also recently came up empty.

While scientifically there is no evidence that it’s more dangerous than regular sugar, some researchers do believe that it could potentially be leading to a less healthy nation overall. Decades ago, regular sugar became more expensive, and HFCS stepped in to save the day and sate the nation’s sweet tooth. People who indirectly blame HFCS believe that it was so much cheaper that we saw an overall rise in sugar in general in products, which helped contribute to the obesity epidemic.

However, whether this theory is true or not, what health experts recommend if you wish to cut back on your sugar intake is not to just remove HFCS from your diet, but to watch your entire overall sugar consumption carefully. All sugar will affect you and should be eaten with moderation.

9Subway Is Putting Yoga Mat Chemicals In Their Sandwiches

Not long ago, social media was ablaze with accusations that Subway’s bread contained a chemical commonly used for making yoga mats. Many people fell for this nonsense, and before long, Subway and other food producers were removing azodicarbonamide from their products in order to placate all of the angry bloggers shouting at them. However, it turns out that the entire scare was started by the blogger Vani Hari, also known as Food Babe. This is a woman who has made a business out of telling people that anything she can’t personally pronounce in an ingredient list is dangerous. She then starts angry petitions and puts the chemical on her banned list for her followers to read. This is quite a business, too. Hari sells products on her website (many of them containing ingredients she’s denounced), all while calling anyone who denounces her a shill for Big Food.

It turns out that azodicarbonamide is a safe baking additive that is used in incredibly tiny concentrations in dozens of baked products that you still find in stores everywhere. It was approved by the FDA in very small doses (45 ppm). Hari claimed that this additive can cause respiratory problems, but the only reports of this involved people who worked in the factories and inhaled the dust all day. Inhaling the dust of almost anything all day is bad for your respiration.

Some industry experts have also pointed out that products commonly used in industrial processes cross over into food production all the time. For example, an ingredient used to make tofu is often used in the creation of drywall. This may sound scary, but the finished product of tofu has about as much in common with drywall as Subway bread has with yoga mats.

8The Gluten Intolerance Fad Diet Train

Celiac disease has only recently received a lot of attention, and it still often goes undiagnosed for years. For those who do realize they have this rare disease, the only way to prevent suffering is to avoid gluten-containing products altogether. Unfortunately, due to the rapid spread of information on social media, many people in recent years have started to come to the conclusion that gluten is bad for them even if they don’t have celiac disease. This has led to a rash of people who say that they have “non-celiac gluten intolerance,” and so they try to avoid it for their own health, despite not actually needing to.

This has caused many more restaurants to stock up on gluten-free products, which can be nice for people who actually suffer from the disease, but probably annoying for waitstaff who have to continually hear gluten-free questions from customers who have jumped on the latest fad. Studies on whether there is anything to the non-celiac intolerance of gluten have been done, and the results show no evidence at all that gluten is bad for anyone who doesn’t have the disease.

In fact, studies showed that there is another ingredient common in most gluten-containing products called fermentable, poorly absorbed, short-chain carbohydrates—FODMAPs for short—that are likely the real culprit. Testing showed that if the food didn’t contain FODMAPs, there was no health difference between the gluten and non-gluten diet. As of yet, there is still no evidence that suggests gluten is bad for non-celiac sufferers.

7Eating Too Much Soy Can Increase Estrogen Levels In Men

Soy is a popular food for vegans and people who are trying to find an alternative source for protein aside from dairy and meat. It has also become something of a hipster food, and in some circles it has gained an unfortunate status as a “woman’s food.” The rumor has been making its way around for several years now and essentially claims that eating soy can greatly raise your estrogen levels and decrease your testosterone. If you look around the web, you’ll find bodybuilders on forums discussing their worries of using soy because of the womanly effects it might have on their manly bodies, and some people believe that it can definitely cause a serious hormonal change for men. This has caused some men to swear off soy completely to ensure that they don’t decrease their precious testosterone.

However, despite the claims that have been floating around for a while now, there is no real evidence to back any of them up. Multiple tests have found no reason to believe that eating soy will seriously mess with a man’s hormone levels. The only outlier is an odd case where an older man with multiple health issues was found to have a few noticeable effects, but he was drinking three entire quarts of soy a day. As you might imagine, this is far more than even the most die-hard soy fanatics usually consume—and that much of any particular product a day is typically not good for you. Balance and moderation are the key to healthy diets, and even if you eat an above-average amount of soy, there is no reason to believe it will have any serious effects, according to the studies. The bottom line with soy is that no reasonable consumption of soy is likely to have any serious or lasting effect on male hormone levels.

6The Recent Spate Of People With Lactose Intolerance

We should be clear here first that there are people who are truly lactose intolerant to a fairly serious degree—just a few ounces of milk can quickly give them some serious digestive issues. And, of course, milk allergies are a different thing entirely. But in recent years, lactose intolerance has become a popular catchall cause for digestive problems for a lot of people, and this fad is giving doctors headaches. To begin with, many of them feel that people are not only exaggerating how much indigestion is actually caused by it, but also ignoring many other possible factors that could be causing the indigestion, simply because lactose intolerance is the popular thing to blame.

In order to test this theory, a group of study volunteers were given a glass of milk a day for a week. The researchers put lactase in this milk to ensure it would break down, preventing discomfort even in those who would normally have a real issue. The second week, they stopped putting the lactase in the milk, but didn’t tell the study volunteers. They also messed with the milk to make sure it tasted the same. The test subjects reported the same levels of indigestion for both milks, confirming the researchers’ theory that for a lot of people, lactose intolerance is actually just in their heads.

Doctors are also worried that people will end up missing a lot of important nutrients by trying to remove dairy from their diet. They caution that most people with even fairly strong lactose intolerance can still have a moderate amount with a meal and be fine. They also want to remind people that it is not a disease or a serious, life-threatening condition—it’s just indigestion.

5The Atkins Diet And Why You Actually Need Carbohydrates

Some years back, the Atkins diet took off in popularity like a runaway freight train, and a lot of diets were quickly derailed. The diet essentially suggested cutting back on carbs and focusing more on eating fats and proteins. The idea behind it was that carbs are normally what your body goes to first for energy, but if it’s starved of carbs, it will actually eat away fat first and you will get the weight loss you so desperately crave. Apart from the fact that, like most diet plans, you run the risk of yo-yoing if you don’t keep it up forever, there were also a lot of dangerous implications from the low-carb diet fad.

The thing is, our body actually needs carbohydrates pretty badly, and while replacing the processed carbohydrates in your diet with more natural ones is certainly a good idea, removing them almost entirely is definitely not so smart. Carbohydrates, as we mentioned earlier, are the first thing your body burns for energy. Restricting your body’s access to them can actually hinder workouts and even lead to muscle loss, as a low-carb diet can lead to you burning your protein and muscle mass instead of carbs.

To make matters worse, people who went on low-carb diets were found to have trouble on memory tasks, because carbohydrates also help your brain function at an optimal level. Studies have also found that people who went on low-carb diets were more irritable overall, likely because carbohydrates are also linked to releasing feel-good chemicals in your body. While it is true that processed carbohydrates have things in them that aren’t great for you, the fact of the matter is that low-carb diets are even worse for you. The best of both worlds is to eat plenty of carbohydrates, but get them from safe, natural sources like fresh vegetables.

4Scary, Unpronounceable Chemicals In Our Food

Many people today read the labels for their food and see long chemicals that they can barely pronounce as adults, and they get a little bit concerned. Most people either just let it go and buy the food anyway, deciding it isn’t that important to them, or they go online and look up the ingredient to see why it’s there. Unfortunately, there has been a recent trend of busy people deciding that if they don’t understand an ingredient, they’ll go to random bloggers for advice. As a result, we’ve started avoiding certain foods or chemicals for all the wrong reasons.

The Food Babe blogger we talked about earlier has a rule for her cult-like followers that amounts to this: If a small child cannot pronounce an ingredient, you shouldn’t eat it. This is, of course, a completely ridiculous rule to live by. Plenty of poisonous ingredients, such as arsenic, are relatively easy to pronounce, while a tongue twister like azodicarbonamide is certainly a whole lot safer. But what’s really scary is the amount of people who are willing to be willfully ignorant about what is actually in their food.

3The Frightening Acidic Powers Of Coca-Cola

The dissolving powers of Coca-Cola have been thrown wildly around the Internet for years with a rather reckless degree of irresponsibility. People wantonly claim that Coke can dissolve metal nails and T-bone steaks, is suitable for cleaning car engines, is extremely dangerous to your stomach, and is so acidic that Coca-Cola truck drivers have to have special permits for carrying corrosive materials. While it would be amazing to have a cheap, household product that is so readily capable of all those things, the fact of the matter is that they are simply not true. To begin with, even if these claims were true, they would basically apply to all sodas. All sodas have carbonic acid, and you would be hard-pressed to find a modern soda that doesn’t contain citric acid as well.

Carbonic acid itself is hardly that acidic, and while citric acid is fairly more so, there is more citric acid found in a typical glass of orange juice than there is in a can of Coke. In other words, if the claims were true, they would apply equally to a glass of OJ. And according to Snopes, the acids in your stomach are far stronger than anything in Coca-Cola, so you really don’t have to worry about it dissolving your insides. Of course, this still doesn’t mean that soda is good for you, but in moderation it isn’t going to kill you.

2The Lurking Danger Of Wood Pulp In Our Food

Not long ago, the media went on a food panic about the dangers of cellulose in our food. In order to mislead people as best as possible, they referred to it as “wood pulp.” While that’s essentially true, it gives people a rather inaccurate picture of what they are actually eating. Some of these hysterical postings slyly made it sound like they were suggesting that cellulose could have something to do with obesity, and despite making it sound dangerous, couldn’t mention any real dangers besides the fact that it has no nutritional value.

The reason, of course, is because there is no danger from cellulose at all. While it is referred to by panic mongers as “wood pulp,” it’s something that’s found in the cell walls of all plants and is basically pure fiber. It goes right through you and won’t give you any calories or nutrients, but it is not at all dangerous for you—in fact, you’ll find cellulose naturally in any fruit or vegetable.

Some people also tend to think of it at least as an evil filler ingredient, meant to make you think you’re getting more food than you actually are, but that’s not really the case either. Food items label the calorie count, and since cellulose doesn’t provide calories, there’s no way it can inflate the count and make you think you are getting more nutrition than you are. In food production, it’s basically just used to thicken foods and help them mix better.

1Doritos And Other Chips Are Scary Because They Double As Kindling

Doritos are the quintessential chip of teenagers and stoners everywhere. Despite their popularity, they are also not known for being very good for you, and most people would place them firmly in the “junk food” category. However, sometimes you hear something about a particular food and it gives you even more pause than usual. On YouTube, people have made a trend of showing how you can set fire to a Dorito and it will very slowly burn. For many people, this is a dramatic demonstration of just how bad this food is for you.

Now, these fire videos are actually useful in that they show how Doritos would make fine kindling if you were ever out in the wilderness, but there is no reason at all to think it makes them extra bad for you. As Lifehacker explains, Doritos and other similar chips like Frito’s and Cheetos (which all work just as well or better), are basically just hydrocarbons soaked in fat and then dried. In other words, you could hardly ask for a better way to start a fire, but there is nothing especially dangerous going on in your corn chips.

Finding the truth in our history is like trying to solve a crime after arriving at the scene 2,000 years too late. We analyze the evidence left behind, we listen to the witnesses, and we make our best guess—but we rarely know for sure what really happened.

There are few better examples of just how murky the truth can get than the Great Fire of Rome. We have a handful of stories and a few half-melted coins still buried in the ashes of old Rome, and we have to pick through them to find the truth.

It’s difficult to know who started the Great Fire of Rome and what fallout ensued. Every group had an interest in this story, and every version of it comes with a political agenda attached. There are a lot of different versions of the story, and no one knows for sure who was telling the truth.

10 Nero Started The Fire

According to Roman historian Cassius Dio, Nero had always wanted to see Rome burn. He claimed that Nero would say that a king who sees his country and throne destroyed together would be “wonderfully fortunate.”

“He secretly sent out men who pretended to be drunk,” Dio says, “and caused them at first to set fire to one or two or even several buildings.” The fire spread faster than anyone could deal with, and the people broke into a panic. “Here men while assisting their neighbors would learn that their own premises were afire; then others, before reached them that their own houses had caught fire, would be told that they were destroyed.”

Most of the early Roman historians agree with Dio. Pliny the Elder, who experienced the fire firsthand, called it “Emperor Nero’s conflagration,” and an unknown playwright, sometimes thought to be Nero’s advisor Seneca, wrote a play about Nero’s life, which depicts Nero promising that “the city’s buildings must fall to flames set by me.”

Suetonius, another Roman historian, takes it even further. He says that Nero didn’t even bother hiding that he was behind it. Nero just gave the excuse that he didn’t like “the ugliness of the old buildings” and openly burned the city down. He even brought out siege weapons, Suetonius says, and smashed down any buildings that wouldn’t burn.

9 It Was An Accident

“It seems unlikely that Nero would have started the great fire,” says historian Eric Varner. After all, “It destroyed his palace.”

The Roman historian Tacitus seems to have agreed. He claims that the fire started in a shop. “It had its beginning in that part of the circus which adjoins the Palatine and Caelian hills, where, amid the shops containing inflammable wares, the conflagration both broke out and instantly became so fierce and so rapid from the wind that it seized in its grasp the entire length of the circus.” From there, the fire got worse, spread on by a poorly designed city.

Some modern historians agree with Tacitus. One, Henry Hurst, claims that “as many as 100 minor fires broke out in Rome every day,” making it no stretch of the imagination to conceive that one of those fires might have gotten out of control.

This theory, though, starts with Tacitus—and he makes it clear that he isn’t fully convinced, himself. Whether the fire was “accidental or treacherously contrived by the emperor,” Hurst concludes, “is uncertain.”

8 Christian Extremists Started The Fire

When the fire was over, Emperor Nero blamed the Christians. Most people believe that he was just using them as a scapegoat, but one historian, Gerhard Baudy, thinks Nero might have been telling the truth.

Before the fire, Baudy claims, Christians were passing around pamphlets promising that Rome would be reduced to ashes. “That is the constant theme: Rome must burn,” Baudy says. “This was the long-desired objective of all people who felt subjugated by Rome.”

Baudy can’t prove that pamphlets promising to burn Rome existed, but he thinks the idea fits the trend. He argues that there are Biblical verses, especially in Revelations, condemning Rome and promising destruction through fire, which show that this was a common theme in early Christian writing. He believes that a forgotten Christian prophet promised that July 19 would be the “day of the Lord,” timed to fit an ancient Egyptian prophecy that Rome would fall when the star Sirius rose into the sky—which happened on the day the fire started.

Baudy believes that the Christians knew the prophecy and started the fire, determined to make sure it came true.

7 It Was A Controlled Fire Meant To Build A New City

Archaeologist Andrea Carandini writes off every attempt to take the blame off Nero as historical revisionism. He says, “This rehabilitation—this process of a small group of historians trying to transform aristocrats into gentlemen—seems quite stupid to me.”

Carandini sides with a rumor that Tacitus mentions was going around Rome at the time: “Nero was aiming at the glory of founding a new city and calling it by his name.” He points to the sheer level of destruction, believing Nero was burning the homes of the wealthy. “All these houses were destroyed, so the aristocracy didn’t have a proper place to live,” Carandini argues. “It’s the end, in a way, of the power of aristocracy in Rome.”

Nero is the one who benefited from it. “How could he build the Domus Aurea without the fire?” Carandini asks. “Whether or not he started the fire, he certainly profited from it.”

6 Nero Played The Lyre While Rome Burned

One of the most popular stories about the fire is that while Rome burned, Nero simply played his lyre and sang. Cassius Dio gives the most detailed version of the story. While the city burned, he says, “Nero ascended to the roof of the palace, from which there was the best general view of the greater part of the conflagration, and assuming the lyre-player’s garb, he sang the ‘Capture of Troy,’ as he styled the song himself, though to the enemies of the spectators it was the Capture of Rome.”

Suetonius backs him up, although he changes a few little details. He puts Nero on a tower on a different hill, and he has him singing the “Sack of Ilium” instead.

Enough modern historians have disputed the lyre story that it tends to show up in articles about historical misconceptions, but the account shows up in every single early version of the story of the fire. That doesn’t necessarily prove it really happened—but it means that a lot of Romans were willing to believe it did.

5 Nero Was Out Of Town And Sent A Relief Party

According to Tacitus, however, Nero couldn’t have played the lyre. He wasn’t even in Rome when the fire happened. He was at Antium, Tacitus claims, and rushed to Rome as soon as he heard. By the time he’d made it, though, his palace—the place where Dio claims he played the lyre—had already been destroyed.

Afterward, Nero set up a relief effort. “To relieve the people, driven out homeless as they were, he threw open to them the Campus Martius and the public buildings of Agrippa, and even his own gardens, and raised temporary structures to receive the destitute multitude,” Tacitus claims. “Supplies of food were brought up from Ostia and the neighboring towns, and the price of corn was reduced to three sesterces a peck.”

All his efforts to help his people, though, didn’t win him anyone’s love. According to Tacitus, the rumor that Nero had been playing the lyre while Rome burned had already spread. By the time he’d arrived, the people had already turned against him.

4 Nero’s Relief Party Just Started More Fires

Cassius Dio doesn’t agree that Nero was so helpful. Nero sent out relief parties, he says, but they didn’t help anybody. They just made the fire worse.

“Many [houses] were set on fire by the same men who came to lend assistance,” Dio claims. Nero’s men, he claims, ran through the town, setting buildings on fire. “The soldiers, including the night watch, having an eye to plunder, instead of putting out fires, kindled new ones.”

Tacitus actually backs up Dio’s claim that people were making the fires worse, but he isn’t as sure that Nero sent them. “No one dared to stop the mischief, because of incessant menaces from a number of persons who forbade the extinguishing of the flames,” he claims. Tacitus isn’t sure who sent them, but these men, he says, “kept shouting that there was one who gave them authority, either seeking to plunder more freely, or obeying orders.”

3 Nero Blamed It On The Christians

When the fire was over, Tacitus claims, Nero needed a scapegoat. Everyone was blaming the fire on him, and to deflect it, “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.”

This, Tacitus says, was the beginning of the persecution of Christianity. “An arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty,” he says. “Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Other Romans talk about the persecution of Christians, although they don’t specifically connect it to the fire like Tacitus does. Suetonius praises Nero for torturing them, writing, “Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.”

Also, a letter still exists, written by Pliny the Younger to the Roman emperor Trajan, asking how he should deal with Christians. Should he punish every Christian, he asks, “even without offenses” or “only the offenses associated with the name?”

2 Christians Were Never Persecuted By Nero

Some modern historians, though, don’t believe that any of that really happened. One, Gordon Stein, thinks that Tacitus didn’t actually write the part about Christians being used as scapegoats. He believes it was added by later Christian writers.

“The term ‘Christian’ was not in common use in the first century,” Stein claims. The word choice in this passage, Stein believes, is out-of-character for both Tacitus and the time he was alive. “Tacitus does not use the name Jesus, and writes as if the reader would know the name Pontius Pilate, two things which show that Tacitus was not working from official records or writing for non-Christian audiences.”

Instead, Stein claims it was pulled from another source. “It is present almost word-for-word in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (died in 403 A.D.), where it is mixed in with obviously false tales.” Stein thinks that this passage was added hundreds of years after the Great Fire. “Copyists working in the Dark Ages,” he claims, “copied the passage from Sulpicius into the manuscript of Tacitus.”

1 The Truth Is Unknowable

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote a short history of Nero, but he didn’t even touch on the Great Fire of Rome. “I omit any further discourse about these affairs,” Josephus wrote. The life of Nero, he felt, was too murky to be worth stepping into.

“There have been a great many who have composed the history of Nero,” he wrote, “some of which have departed from the truth of facts out of favour, as having received benefits from him; while others, out of hatred to him, and the great ill-will which they bare him, have so impudently raved against him with their lies.”

The history of Nero, Josephus seems to believe, is so full of bias and lies that it’s impossible to tell the truth, and it’s no longer worth writing about. “These that have no regard for truth,” Josephus says, “they may write as they please.”

Cycling in the Victorian era meant freedom and independence for a moderate cost. Women wore special cycle wear that allowed them flexibility whilst still preserving their modesty beneath long and heavy skirts. Gentlemen cycled in their top hats, children had tricycles and babies had their pushchairs attached to bicycles with which cycling nannies would perambulate around the park. Even shop boys delivered groceries on bikes with enormous wicker baskets.

See Also: Top 10 Bizarre Modes Of Transportation

Cycling was for everyone, and it became one of the defining Victorian obsessions.

Another thing the Victorians were famous for, was their ingenious, and sometimes wacky inventions. It was only a matter of time before the ever-curious Victorians decided to combine the two.

Here are 10 of the strangest.

10 John Otto Lose and his Monowheel

John Otto Lose’s patent application for the monowheel shows a gentleman in a hat, seated on a bench suspended inside a very large wheel, casually smoking a cigarette, while he pedals a smaller wheel at an angle that looks rather improbable and certainly uncomfortable. The cycle was steered by means of a pair of rudders on either side, almost as if it were a boat.

The bicycle, which looks a little unwieldy, boasts a range of mod cons, including an umbrella fixed over the cyclist’s head in case of inclement weather, and some fancy wrought-iron work which, while certainly decorative, probably added a fair bit to the weight of the machine. However, they did save a fair bit on the unpadded wooden bench, so it probably evened out in the end.

The monowheel was patented in 1885, but, for some reason, never caught on.

9Karl Lange and his Double Bicycle

In 1905, Karl Lang patented his double bicycle, which is, pretty much, one bicycle on top of another, with the top one being upside down. It looked pretty strange, and also rather uncomfortable, as the rider’s head is forced forwards by a padded cushion behind his neck.

However, the cushion, and indeed the bike, had a purpose, being designed, according to Mr Lange, for the benefit of circus performers, to enable them to Loop the Loop.

Which seems reasonable, until you start to think about it.

The ‘normal’ part of the bicycle has two pedals and a handle-bar. The upper bicycle appears to be missing pedals, and shares the handle-bar with the lower bike. In order for the contraption to loop the loop, the loop would need to be so small that all four wheels were in contact with the surface at the same time.

And then it would very likely just get stuck.

In actual fact, despite what it said in the patent application, the bike was not really designed to loop the loop, rather it was a stunt bicycle which allowed the bike to take off on the lower wheels and land on the upper wheels, thus appearing to have completed a full loop.

Instead of pedaling through a full 360 degrees against gravity, the rider of the double bicycle merely had to pedal to the top of the loop on the bottom wheels, take off into the air, land on the top wheels, which he couldn’t see, whilst steering the wrong way up, without pedaling, or presumably, braking. Easy peasy.

There do not appear to be any records of stunt riders or circus performers actually using the bike.

Can’t think why.

8 Etienne Bunau-Varilla and his Torpedo Bicycle

An invention that really worked this time. Etienne Bunau-Varilla was a French engineer and aviation pioneer, who had taken part in the first ever international flying convention in Riems in 1909, when he was only 19.

He also designed racing bikes

One of his most iconic designs was the Velo Torpille, or Torpedo Bike, an aero-dynamically streamlined bike in which the rider sits inside a teardrop-shaped pod.

The bike, ridden by Marcel Berthe, broke the world speed record in 1913, covering 5 km in 5 minutes and 39.3 seconds, an average of 33 miles per hour.

The design was much copied, until the following year, when the enclosed bicycle design was banned in competitive races and, not being very suitable for normal use, the torpedo bicycle was, well torpedoed.

7 Hiram Nickerson and his Aerial Bicycle

Hiram Nickerson’s idea for an aerial bicycle is the perfect example of why you shouldn’t over-complicate things. Instead of two wheels on a metal frame which rides over the existing roads, Nickerson proposed an aerial bicycle which required a whole elevated track to be built.

The rider would sit on a saddle hooked to the track overhead, and would propel themselves along the track by pedaling. The cyclist would only be able to cycle wherever there was track, which would have required some hefty infrastructure investment.

Nickerson’s patent application also left out a few details. Such as, how do you get your bike to and from the track? Do you hook it on to the track yourself, or leave it there like a cable-car seat? What happens if two cyclists are pedaling on the same piece of track? Can they overtake? Can they prevent a collision?

Does it have brakes? (No).

Hiram Nickerson described his idea as ‘a new and useful improvement’ in bicycle design.

Really? An interesting idea, perhaps, but this one never really got off the ground

6 The Bicycle Ambulance

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and this must certainly explain the bicycle ambulance. Makeshift ambulances had been used since the 1890’s, but they really came into their own during World War I.

The ambulance consisted of 2 bicycles, fixed together, side-by-side, with a tarpaulin stretcher slung between them. The saddlebags would be filled with medical supplies, and the medics would cycle out to the injured soldiers, load them onto the stretcher and cycle back with them to the nearest field hospital.

The bicycles could move over terrain that other vehicles could not cover, but they gave the medical personnel no protection from gunfire and shells.

At such a time of chaos and destruction, the sight of a couple of men cycling side-by-side across a battlefield must have been a pretty surreal one.

5 Simon Wortmann and his Servant Propelled Bicycle

Simon Wortmann was clearly a man who took the axiom, why keep a bike and pedal yourself, to heart. His invention did away with most of the hard work of cycling, at least for 1 of the 2 riders needed to propel it.

The drawing which accompanied the patent application, shows a man in a flat cap pedaling like mad at the lower end of the bike, while a gentleman in morning coat and top hat sits at the top and steers with a couple of unwieldy poles.

Billed as an Improvement in Velocipedes, the bike seemed to model itself on the old-fashioned horse and carriage, with the servant, of course, being cast in the role of the horse.

Though Wortmann patented the idea in 1869, he never went into full-scale production with his bike. He probably couldn’t get the staff.

4The Quadricyle Fire Engine

In the days when a fire engine was just a hand cart and a bucket, the Quadricycle Fire Engine must have seemed like cutting-edge design.
The machine consisted of 2 tandem bicycles, ridden side-by-side and fixed together by cross-pieces, with a platform built between. The platform housed the hose reel, while a pump was fitted to the rear of the quadricycle, which could be fitted to a household tap and used to supply the hose with water.

Firemen in Australia trained using the contraption, and were able to cycle to the site of the fire, unreel the hose, and fix it to the pump within a few minutes. Then they would jump back onto their bikes to continue pedaling, thus powering the pumping machine, which was capable of spraying 4500 gallons of water an hour over distances of up to 100 feet,

Assuming they pedaled fast enough.

Although the machines may have looked somewhat comic, they were used in remote towns and villages with great success for many years.

3 Edward Burstow and his Hen and Chicks

One invention that was not quite such a success was Edward Burstow’s pentacycle, or, as it came to be known the Hen and Chicks. Invented in 1882, the pentacycle, which was adopted by the Post Office in Britain, had one large wheel, on which the postman sat, with two smaller wheels, front and back, for added stability.

There is no doubt that the pentacycle was a majestic looking vehicle, though perhaps a trifle cumbersome. It did have two handy baskets in which the postie could store the mail on his rounds.

Ultimately, however, the pentacycle was not a success, perhaps because it took ages to climb up on it, only to have to climb off it again at the next house.

2 Georg Pinkert and his Navigating Tricycle

Nothing but a miracle, it is said, can allow a person to walk on water, but there is nothing to stop people cycling on it. Except, perhaps, the laws of nature.

But Georg Pinkert was not the sort of man to be put off with a trifle like that. In 1891, he patented the Navigating Bicycle, which was perhaps a strange title, since it doesn’t quite make clear that what the bicycle is navigating, is the ocean.

He built his tricycle with 3 enormous balloon tires, and so confident was Pinkert in the machine’s capabilities that he set out to cross the English Channel in it. He didn’t make it.

He had cycled about half way over the 20-mile strait, when the tide turned, and he found himself going 2 wheels forwards and 3 wheels back. He realized that he was about to be swept out to sea, so, as he happened to be in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, he “hailed a passing vessel and was taken on board.”

Though the tricycle had proved its sea-worthiness, it didn’t catch on, but Georg, every inch the Victorian eccentric, vowed to carry with his experiments.

1 Louis S Burbank and his Bicycle Rowing Machine

Cycling is good exercise. It builds up the muscles in the legs. But what if you wanted to exercise your arm muscles at the same time? The ever-inventive Victorians had the solution.

In 1898, Louis S Burbank invented the Bicycle Rowing Machine. Two work-outs for the price of one, with a free trip to the emergency room thrown in.

Burbank’s invention fitted a rowing machine to the top of an ordinary two wheeled bicycle. The machine was propelled forwards not by pedaling, but by the action of the rowing, and steered not with a handle bar, but by manipulating the oars, just as one would in a sculling boat.

Slowly.

Sounds great. Just a few nit-picky questions though. How does it start off? Because, by the time the rider has mounted the bike, put their feet in the stirrups and grabbed the oars, the bike will have toppled over. And how does it stop?

There is no mention of brakes in the patent application.

Of course, they could fix the bike in position so that it was static. But then of course it would just be a rowing machine.

Perched on top of a bike.

Perhaps not.

About The Author: Ward Hazell is a freelance writer and travel writer, and is currently studying for a PhD in English Literature

Most of history comes from what gets written down. But what we know of our past is only a sliver of everything that happened. A great deal of where we came from was never etched into a stone and, today, has been lost.

We don’t know what’s missing from the patchwork of history. But every now and then, archaeologists find things that don’t quite fit with what’s been written down. We find relics from a society left in a place that should have been a world away from its owners.

Nobody knows for sure how these things got there, but they suggest some incredible events that might never have been recorded. Some of the greatest adventures may have happened to people who never made it home to tell the tale—and they might completely change the history of our world.

10 A Roman Sword In Canada

On Oak Island, Nova Scotia, a TV crew accidentally stumbled upon the last thing they ever expected to find: an ancient Roman sword that seems to have been there since AD 200.

The sword alone is shocking—it suggests that a Roman might have made it to North America 800 years before the Vikings. But it’s not even the only thing they found. Other people have stumbled upon other strange things that shouldn’t be in Canada: a crossbow bolt wedged into a tree, a Roman-style burial mound, Carthaginian coins, and even a stone with what appears to be Roman writing on it—all made about 1,800 years ago.

It’s theorized that a group of Roman and Carthaginian explorers might have traveled out West about 1,800 years ago. They may never have made it home and may have buried their dead on the island—explaining why there are Roman graves in Canada and no record of their trip in Rome.

None of this has been proven yet—and the fact that the sword was found by a TV crew instead of archaeologists makes it easy to be a little suspicious. Still, it’s a lot of evidence. If expert testing backs it up, it could change the history of the first Europeans to visit the Americas.

NOTE: According to this source (thanks Fuzzybunny), the sword is a fake.

9 Chinese Oracle Bone Writing In The United States

According to John Ruskamp, another group made it to the Americas thousands of years before the Vikings: the Chinese.

Ruskamp found strange symbols etched into old stones in 82 places around the southern United States. Every etching follows the same style, and none of them match anything made by the local cultures. Ruskamp, however, is convinced that they’re not just random squiggles. He believes that they are messages written in Chinese oracle bone script.

Oracle bone is one of the oldest forms of Chinese writing, which nearly faded out of use entirely around 1046 BC. If Ruskamp’s theory is right, this would mean that these Chinese settlers reached North America about 3,000 years ago.

The etchings match up to oracle bone eerily well. One in Arizona appears to read: “Set apart (for) 10 years together; declaring (to) return, (the) journey completed, (to the) house of the Sun; (the) journey completed together.” It seems to be a message left behind by explorers in a new world.

8 Ancient Ape Bones In Ireland

At the Hill of Tara in Ireland, a body has been carefully laid to rest. Its bones were given a full royal treatment, but they don’t look like the bones of a normal king. Instead, the bones look an awful lot like those of an ape.

It’s not even the only set of ape bones found in Ireland. Another ape skull has been found in County Armagh that appears to have been there for about 2,300 years. Nobody knows how these apes got there. Someone in the ancient world, for some reason, was taking apes up to Ireland and burying them there.

The apes might have been traded along early routes, but there’s a fringe theory that takes it in a very different direction. An ancient Irish legend claims that a group of strangers with magical powers came to Ireland on a massive ship and ruled the people from the Hill of Tara. Some think that legend was based on a real event and that the people they thought were magic were really a group of Egyptians with advanced technology.

That’s a big leap to make just because of some ape bones—but there’s more evidence than just that. DNA testing on ancient Irish bodies suggests that they have an ancestor from the Middle East. And, not too far from the Hill of Tara, the 3,800-year-old remains of a boy have been found, wearing what appears to be an Egyptian necklace.

7 Native American Legends Of White Giants

In 1857, a Native American of the Comanche tribe stood in front of a crowd and told them a story. “Innumerable moons ago, a race of white men, [305 centimeters (10′) high], and far more rich and powerful than any white people now living here, inhabited a large range of country,” he said. “They drove the Indians from their homes, putting them to the sword, and occupying the valleys in which their fathers had dwelt.”

It seemed like a parable of what was happening now. But all that changed when what appeared to be a Greek medallion and two coins was found in Oklahoma. After that, genealogist Donald Yates started piecing together the evidence and realized that this wasn’t an isolated story.

The Choctaws also had a story about “a race of giants” with white skin who lived in what is now the state of Tennessee—and other tribes had some stories that were oddly similar. The Greek writer Strabo wrote about a “Western Continent,” suggesting that he might have had some knowledge of the Americas.

Yates believes that these native stories might not be entirely made up. Greek explorers may have actually made it to the Americas and fought with the people there, leaving behind a legacy that grew bigger every time the story was told.

6 Mayan Murals Showing White-Skinned Warriors

Inside the Temple of the Warriors in Chichen Itza, there are murals depicting a scene that doesn’t seem to fit the Maya’s surroundings. The murals show brutal battles fought between a very diverse group of people for pre-Columbian Mexico. Some have pale white skin, some are pitch-black, and others are brown.

On its own, that could just be an artistic choice. But other evidence supports the theory that different races of people might have fought around modern Mexico. For one, when Hernan Cortes reached Mexico, he claimed that the people there hailed him as a returning “white lord”—suggesting that another white person had been there before.

And the Maya left behind a story called the “Dance of the Giants.” In it, a white giant pairs up with the Maya and helps them fight off a black giant who’s harassing them. According to one controversial theory, all this really happened. The black-skinned giants, it’s believed, were Aztecs moving in from the North. And the white-skinned giants might be Vikings.

As early as 1789, there was speculation about Viking explorers reaching modern Mexico. One in particular, Ari Marson, was sent off course by a storm while trying to make it to Greenland. According to the theory, Marson may have ended up in Mayan territory a little after the Aztecs and he might have left his mark on their history.

5 A Temple To An Egyptian Goddess In India

On the western coast of India, there are the ruins of a temple to the goddess Pattini. It’s not a particularly strange thing to find in India—except that there’s a secret chamber underneath that’s rumored to hold an underground shrine to the Egyptian goddess Isis.

The ruins are now owned by a Hindu temple, so nobody’s been able to actually check what’s underneath them. But according to writer Chris Morgan, the idea that it was a secret shrine to an Egyptian goddess fits. He believes that an Egyptian traveler may have come to India and started a cult dedicated to his own goddess.

Morgan believes that the idea of the goddess Pattini came from this cult. He points out some major similarities in the two legends, both of which are about women defined by the brutal murder and dismemberment of their husbands. He thinks that Pattini might be an Indian evolution of the concept of Isis spread through that shrine—a little in the way that Egyptian culture influenced Hinduism.

4 The Giant Village Of Peru

When the Spanish first came to Peru, conquistador Pedro Cieza de Leon recorded everything he could in a book called The Chronicles of Peru. It’s full of incredibly detailed and accurate descriptions of the cultures of the natives, the conquests by the Spanish, the details of the environment—and strangely, a village built by giants.

Cieza de Leon recorded a native legend about giants who arrived “in boats made of reeds, as big as large ships.” He said, “From the knee downward, their height was as great as the entire height of an ordinary man.” According to the legend, the giants built wells that were beyond the native technology as well as massive villages to accommodate their size. Later, a great fire came down and consumed the giants.

Oddly, though, Cieza de Leon claimed to have seen the village and the well built by the giants. He said that they were big enough to fit the story. He even claimed to have seen a giant’s skull and a femur and attested that other Spaniards saw teeth that must have weighed 0.2 kilograms (0.5 lb).

We don’t have these artifacts anymore, so we can’t confirm it. But it’s hard to understand why Cieza de Leon would make up lies to support a native legend.

It’s not clear what he saw. Was he deceived? Did he make it up? Or did the Spanish conquistadors really find something in Peru that suggested they weren’t the first foreign visitors to arrive?

3 The Marcahuasi Ruins

In the Andes Mountains, there are strange rocks known as the Marcahuasi Ruins. They appear to be rocks carved by human beings, sculpted to be shaped like human heads. One, in particular, looks almost exactly like a crude copy of the Egyptian Sphinx.

It’s possible that these rocks took their shape by pure, random erosion. But there are some people who don’t think it’s possible. The theory that the rocks were deliberately sculpted by an unknown people is out there—although it’s mostly supported by some pretty off-the-wall theories, including stories about aliens and mystical healing powers.

One of the more popular theories comes from an archaeologist who claims that the site was built by a biblical civilization called the Masma, who traveled to Peru and carved crude imitations of the wonders they’d seen in Egypt. His theory, though, comes from having seen it in a dream, which is a slightly less-than-scientific approach to history.

Still, even if they weren’t built by aliens or by biblical tribes, it’s not out of the question that someone carved these rocks—making them an incredible work of art still without a name for its creator.

2 The Three Handbags Of Heaven

There’s a strange design that keeps popping up all around the world. It shows something that looks like a little handbag, usually drawn in groups of three and usually up in the sky. And nobody really knows what they mean.

The oldest one in Turkey shows three handbags floating over all of creation. It’s far from the only one, though. The same handbags have been seen in art from all around the world, including India, Egypt, and even Central America. It seems to be something that’s been passed on from an ancient Middle Eastern culture—which might make it a way to trace where groups of people came from.

That’s why it’s interesting that the Maori of New Zealand used the three handbags, too. They have a myth about a hero named Tane who went up to Heaven to get three baskets of knowledge—an image that seems strangely similar to the one carved in a rock in Turkey.

It could just be a coincidence. But this might be a strong sign that the Maori have ancestors who once lived in the Middle East, long before they moved to New Zealand.

1 The Redheaded Giants Of Lovelock Cave

In 1911, miners working in Nevada’s Lovelock Cave were digging through piles of guano when they stumbled upon a massive wealth of ancient Indian relics. The miners started searching through the relics and found something even more incredible—the mummified remains of a 198-centimeter (6’6″) man with red hair.

The cave soon turned into an archaeological dig site, and some incredibly strange things were found. Inside, there were 38-centimeter (15 in) sandals, which appeared to have been used by a very large person, and a giant handprint that was twice the size of that of a normal man.

Some believed that this backed up the Paiute legend about redheaded, “freckle-faced” cannibals called the Si-Te-Cahs coming onto their land. The giants, they said, came by boats and preyed on them until the Paiute managed to chase the giants into a cave and set it on fire.

The original redheaded mummy has been destroyed, making the story impossible to prove, and some alternative explanations have been created. Several people, though, insist that they saw it firsthand. If they’re telling the truth, it might just mean that the Si-Te-Cahs were a real group of violent European explorers—people who tormented the Native Americans and met their end in Nevada.

It is frequently said that “love makes the world go round.” Unlike most Hallmark greeting card aphorisms, this one is surprisingly accurate. Love permeates every facet of our lives—from movies and books to possibly our very existence. This is not a recent phenomenon. Plenty of people throughout history have shaped the world just to impress a girl.

10 Two Divorces Created The PG-13 Rating

A look at the box office will show how influential the PG-13 rating has become. Eight of the 10 past highest-grossing movies of the year were rated PG-13. This rating has been blamed for drastically reshaping Hollywood by dumbing down films for adults and children alike.

However, the movie that inspired the creation of the PG-13 rating was not really child-friendly. 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom featured graphic scenes of monkey brains, child slaves, and a beating heart ripped out of someone’s chest.

Behind the scenes, the hearts of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were ripped out of their chests, too. The darker tone of the movie was caused by Spielberg’s divorce from Amy Irving and Lucas’s from his film editor wife, Marcia.

The two men used the movie to vent about their divorces. Looking back, Lucas said that “we certainly took it to the extreme.” He was right. After seeing the violence and gore, the MPAA thought it was not appropriate for children. In response, they created the PG-13 rating.^[1]

9 Adolf Eichmann Was Captured Because His Son Bragged To His Jewish Girlfriend

Responsible for sending millions to their deaths in the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann was one of the most wanted war criminals for more than a decade. Like all Nazis, he was hiding somewhere in South America.

He would have evaded capture if it wasn’t for his son. Nicholas Eichmann started dating the Argentinian Sylvia Hermann. Not knowing she was Jewish, Nicholas boasted about his father’s role in the Holocaust. He even mentioned that he wished the Nazis had “finished the job.”^[2]

Unsurprisingly, this caused a rift between the two. The stupidest thing Nicholas did was sometimes use the name Eichmann. Sylvia Hermann’s dad, a Holocaust survivor himself, had read about Adolf Eichmann in the papers. He called Mossad, which eventually captured Adolf and put him on trial.

The 1961–62 Adolf Eichmann trial was a watershed moment for the Holocaust. It was the first trial to be televised, thus changing the conversation around the Holocaust. For the first time, people heard the testimonials of survivors.

8 A Honeymoon Stopped Marvel From Going Down With The Hindenburg

In 1937, Martin Goodman and Jean Davis had just finished their honeymoon. They wanted to fly back to New York on one of those new Hindenburg airships. Goodman tried to buy tickets. There were still some available, but none of the seats were next to each other.

Instead, the couple flew back on a plane and not a flaming ball of gas. They landed in New York and, later that year, launched Timely Comics, the early precursor of Marvel Comics.

Jean Davis also changed Marvel in another way. As a young upstart pulp magazine division, Timely Comics hired Jean’s 17-year-old cousin, Stanley Martin Lieber.^[3] Stanley Lieber worked as an assistant for Goodman by proofreading issues until he wrote his first story in 1941 under the pseudonym Stan Lee.

7 A Honeymoon Saved Kyoto From Being Nuked

Hiroshima will always be synonymous with the nuclear attack that leveled the city. More than 100,000 citizens died from the initial blast and radiation. The event is even more tragic because those people lost their lives over something as arbitrary as where a guy went on vacation a few years earlier.

In the 1920s, Henry Stimson, then the governor-general of the Philippines, went on his honeymoon with his wife to Kyoto. While there, Henry Stimson fell in love with the city.

In the 1940s, he served as secretary of war. That made him privy to a memo circulating with the five potential targets for the bomb. Number one on that list was Kyoto, the old capital of Japan and the center of historical and artistic treasures. It would have been absolutely demoralizing for Japan, making it the perfect choice.

But Henry Stimson sent another memo to President Truman to protest the choice. Stimson could not let the United States destroy the city where he and his wife had honeymooned. Truman acquiesced, and Kyoto’s citizens and irreplaceable cultural treasures were saved.^[4]

6 Segregation Ended Because A Judge Cheated On His Wife

As the son of a Confederate veteran and a native of Charleston, South Carolina, Judge Waties Waring seemed like the furthest thing from a civil rights icon in the 1940s. He would have kept that up if it wasn’t for Elizabeth Avery Hoffman.

After meeting at a party, Waring and Elizabeth had an affair for months. Now in love, Waring divorced his Southern wife of 32 years for this Detroiter. Charleston society was not only aghast that he had cheated on his wife but that the other woman was a Yankee. Perhaps most egregious was that Elizabeth was very active in the civil rights movement.

After marrying her, Judge Waring became equally interested in the civil rights movement. Elizabeth is considered the major reason that he became an outspoken critic of segregation and a champion for racial justice.

The city turned on him. Some residents threatened his life, burned crosses on his yard, and even spat on his wife. Waring was not moved. He was one of the first Southern judges to desegregate his courtroom.^[5]

He became the first federal judge since 1896 to opine that the “separate but equal” doctrine was unconstitutional in Briggs v. Eliott. Waring was also the one who pushed Thurgood Marshall to expand the case at the Supreme Court level into the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.

5 Hoover Ignored Pearl Harbor Warnings Because A Spy Had Sex

During World War II, Dusko Popov was a spy for the German army. Or at least, that was his cover. He was actually a double agent working for MI6. As a British spy, he had discovered the Japanese plot to bomb Pearl Harbor.

In August 1941, he went to New York to give this information to the FBI. He told some agents, who understood the consequences of something like this, so they advised him to go see J. Edgar Hoover.

Popov and his then-girlfriend Terry Richardson sneaked back to their hotel for an “undercover” mission. What can you expect from the guy who’s allegedly the inspiration for James Bond?

Hoover hated the fact that this foreigner had taken a woman from Florida to New York to have sex with her. Hoover considered this was a violation of the Mann Act and threatened to have Popov put in jail.^[6] Instead of that, Popov just went back home and Hoover disregarded all of Popov’s findings. A few months later, Pearl Harbor was bombed.

4 Eli Whitney’s Lover Bought A Cat, And Slavery Continued For Decades

In the early 1790s, slavery was on its last legs. Under the Constitution, the slave trade had been set to end in 1807. In fact, slavery would have become an outdated model, but then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. The effects of this machine are hard to overstate.

Cotton soon overtook rice and tobacco as the major crop. Unlike rice and tobacco, however, cotton required extensive labor. The unprecedented revenue and the demand for slaves made the slave trade boom. This resulted in dramatically higher profits for planters, which then led to a seemingly insatiable increase in the demand for more slaves.

It also ushered in the abusive chapter we associate with slavery. As cotton grew best in the West, the crop brought slavery westward as well. It also forced the South to defend slavery more, which culminated in the Civil War.

All of this is owed to a cat. While visiting his girlfriend, Eli Whitney saw a cat claw a chicken. The cat went for the kill, but its claws only caught feathers. Eli then realized that the same technology could pull the seeds out of cotton without ruining the plant. If that cat had not wanted to eat that chicken, slavery would have ended a lot sooner.^[7]

3 Stalin Lost His Humanity When He Lost His Wife

In 1899, Joseph Stalin was just a young man in seminary school. Unable to continue his education because he couldn’t afford the tuition, he started committing minor crimes in Tiflis. While a petty criminal and revolutionary, he met Ekaterina Svanidze.

A far cry from what he would become, Stalin was a kindhearted and compassionate lover. An associate of Stalin’s noted that he was “amazed how [Stalin], who was so severe in his work and to his comrades, could be so tender, affectionate, and attentive to his wife.”^[8]

That kindness did not last long as Ekaterina died from typhus a year after they married. Stalin was heartbroken. Upon hearing the news, he threatened suicide and a gun had to be wrestled from his hand.

At the funeral, Stalin threw himself into her grave until he was dragged out. Before leaving her funeral, he said, “This creature softened my heart of stone. She died, and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.”

Following her death, he left Tiflis and moved to Petrograd. There he changed his name from Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili to “Man of Steel,” or “Stalin,” and started his political career.

True to his word, Stalin really did lose his heart when his first wife died. No longer the tender lover from before, Stalin was so cruel that he even killed Ekaterina’s entire family during his purges.

2 Pol Pot Vowed To Destroy Democracy After A Bad Breakup

Like Stalin, Pol Pot was also a hopeless romantic disguised as a genocidal maniac. Before he would order the deaths of millions in the Cambodian killing fields, he was a French literature teacher named Saloth Sar.

He’d been at school for a year or two when he fell hopelessly in love with a former beauty queen and princess, Son Maly, in 1949. But she did not feel the same way. Five years later, she left him for famed democratic supporter and Pol Pot’s long-term political rival Sam Sary.

The breakup was devastating for Pol Pot.^[9] It hardened him to love. More importantly, his hatred of Sam Sary turned into a hatred of democracy. Following the breakup, Pol Pot wandered around listlessly for months.

During this time, his mentor, Keng Vannsak, tried to cheer him up by giving him traditional Cambodian stories where princes learn to fight in the jungle. He read these stories as an instructional manual and set off for the jungle. There, he met Marxist revolutionaries who converted him to the cause.

1 A Cut-Off Penis Caused World War I

In 1889, Rudolf, crown prince of Austria, was the only son of Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria-Hungary. They got along fine, and Rudolf was destined to take over the throne. But that all changed when the 30-year-old prince met the 17-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera.

Like all classic romances, the father disapproved. Franz Joseph demanded that the couple end their relationship, and the crown prince did—as part of a suicide pact. But Mary was afraid that they were going to break up. So after a night of making love, she decided to cut it off. The “it” refers to the relationship and his penis.^[10]

While he was sleeping, she took a razor and chopped off his penis. Unable to cope with the loss of his relationship and his penis, he shot her in the head. Consumed by guilt, he then turned the gun on himself.

Austria had to look to Rudolf’s cousin Franz Ferdinand, who fought with Emperor Franz Joseph about nearly everything. Most importantly, Franz Ferdinand wanted to grant Slavs equal rights with Austrians and Hungarians in the empire. Many historians believe that this is exactly why Serbian nationalists chose to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Things spun out from there, and World War I was the result.

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