In the 1950s, there was a real danger afoot. The Communists, as our brave senators warned us, had infiltrated the governments of the democratic world. And they’d brought with them their most powerful weapon: the gays.

As Senator Kenneth Wherry told the American people, “Only the most naive could believe that the Communists’ fifth column in the United States would neglect to propagate and use homosexuals to gain their treacherous ends.” We needed a device that could weed out these wily gays from their patriotic hetero peers. Our mission was clear: we needed a real-life, fully functioning gaydar.

The best minds in the world got to work. And they didn’t stop in America in the 1950s—in many parts of the world, our best and brightest are to working to build one today.

10 The Hoey Committee’s Investigative Techniques

In 1950, the best and brightest minds of the US Senate were organized into a special task force called the Hoey Committee. Their mission: to identify and root out the insidious gays hiding throughout America.

It would not, as they quickly learned, be as easy as they imagined. Senator Margaret Smith, during a meeting with America’s top medical minds, disappointedly asked: “There is no quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things?”

To her heartbreak, the surgeon general explained that homosexuality didn’t show up on most X-rays. He, at least, was answering their questions. Most medical experts, for some reason, rambled on with some nonsense about sexuality being “complicated” and “fluid” and refused to hand over the machine the senators apparently hoped would make all gay men in America start glowing with a neon red light.

After two years of research, though, the Hoey Committee identified some foolproof facts about homosexuals. Gay men, they announced, could be identified through a few key clues: They were unmarried, they “seldom refuse to talk about themselves,” and they tended to have what the council called “prissy habits.”

They started a complex system for tracking, eliminating, and destroying the lives of gay men, often crushing them so fully that they drove them to suicide.

And not a moment too soon. As their report warned, gay was contagious: “One homosexual can pollute a government office.”^[1]

9 The Canadian Government’s Fruit Machine

North of the border, the Canadians were hard at work on a special machine that they were convinced could identify any gay man. They called it the “Fruit Machine,” which, in the 1960s, was something you could name a machine, and nobody would say anything. In fact, the government would pay you $10,000, and everything would be fine.

It was a gigantic device, described by those who have seen it as looking “like something out of science fiction.”^[2] It had multiple cameras, giant steel girders, and a special screen designed to project gay porn.

A suspected homosexual would be called into the security official’s office and told: “We have evidence that you may be a homosexual. What do you have to say about this?”

If they denied it, the Fruit Machine would be their judge. They would be strapped in and shown a series of mundane images which, every now and then, would be livened up with the odd picture of gay porn. While they watched, the researchers would measure their pulse, skin reflexes, breathing, and pupillary response.

If your pupils expanded on the sight of gay porn, it meant that the pictures of naked men excited you. Or that the photo was a bit too dark for you. Or maybe that you were surprised. Or probably really nothing at all, since most tests showed that the Fruit Machine was wildly ineffective.

Still, the Canadian government was nothing if not cautious. Even if the machine didn’t work, they forced everyone who failed its test to resign from their jobs, thereby saving Canada from the horrors of having homosexuals walk through its streets leading normal, healthy lives.

8 The US Park Police’s Pervert Records

The United States Park Police played a special role in America’s mission to weed homosexuals out of government. They were put on a special task force when the government received some prized intel providing an insight into the mind of the homosexual man: Gay guys love parks.

The Park Police were expanded, with countless more officers brought on to help them with their missions, including weeding out “sex perverts.” Parks, the government had learned, were “popular cruising spots for gay men.” They needed a team to watch them.

One group of Park Police spent 12 hours, from dusk to dawn, staring at the bathroom in Lafayette Park and placing bets on whether or not the visitors were gay. In their report to Congress, they declared: “I do not believe a half a dozen legitimate persons go in there to answer Nature’s call.”^[3]

Thanks to their tireless work, the US government came to an important conclusion: Pretty well anyone who goes to the bathroom in a public park can be assumed to be a homosexual. And they took that intel seriously, even firing a CIA employee on the charge that he’d been spotted “hanging around the men’s room in Lafayette Park.”

7 J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Deviates Program

J. Edgar Hoover personally pushed the FBI into leading what he called the “Sex Deviates” program. For decades, they would stop wasting so much time tracking down organized crime and domestic terrorists and, instead, focus their resources on America’s real threat: the gay menace.

Any person accused of being a closeted homosexual, on the FBI’s orders, was to be immediately reported to the chief of investigations.^[4] The FBI would take over from there, and they would put every resource at their disposal to work. FBI agents would follow men to their homes, keep tabs on which bars and restaurants they ate at, and have professional psychologists examine detailed records of their habits, searching for those telltale patterns of gayness.

Then they’d strike. Some eager FBI agents would pull the suspected homosexuals in early, while they were still just loitering outside those notorious park bathrooms. The truly diligent, though, would wait until they were the middle of what they called “an act of perversion” and until they’d gotten really good photographs of the act before bringing them in.

It was hard work, or work that made them hard, or one of those two—but it had to be done. Nobody understood that more than J. Edgar Hoover. After all, if the rumors about Hoover are true, he had an unfortunate habit of showing up at homosexual orgies—clear proof that those contagious gays had been coughing all over him.

6 The Gulf Cooperation Council Homosexuality Test

The quest for a foolproof way to spot gays didn’t end with the 1950s, and it wasn’t limited to the United States. Decades later, in 2013, Kuwait’s director of public health, Yousuf Mindkar, took up the cause himself.

Mindkar promised his people that he would introduce sweeping reforms to improve the nation’s gaydar, declaring to the world: “We will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays.”

His plan was to revise Kuwait’s visa stipulations to require doctors to certify any incoming visitors as heterosexual before letting them into the country.^[5] Mindkar wasn’t entirely clear on how the doctors would test their patients for homosexuality, but he was confident that it would be a simple procedure. He assured the press that any doctor in any country would be able to run a thorough test for the telltale physical markings of homosexuality.

Mindkar backed down because of criticism in the international community. FIFA expressed concern that his plan might bar some fans from watching the 2022 World Cup. The concern was echoed by many in the US, who suggested that the plan would bar everyone who likes soccer from entering Kuwait and then high-fived each other.

5 The Malaysian Guide To Spotting A Gay

A 2018 issue of Sinar Harian, a Malaysian newspaper, came with a helpful checklist to teach readers “how to spot a gay.”^[6]

The article came with a checklist of the classic telltale markings of homosexuality. Gay men, it explained, love beards. They also love branded clothing, are close to the family, and like to go to the gym. But once in the gym, it warned, the homosexual male will not exercise. Instead, he will merely ogle the other men, his eyes lighting up with joy whenever he spots a particularly handsome one.

Lesbians, it said, could be detected through their venomous attitudes toward men. Toward women, the article explained, lesbians are open and carefree. They will hold each other’s hands and hug each other openly. But they behave very differently around men. Lesbians, the article explained, hate men. What little joy they get out of life, they get from belittling them.

4 The Scientific Study Into Gay Faces

In 2008, Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University conducted an experiment into one of the great questions that have plagued scientists for centuries: Do gay people have gay faces?^[7]

They took pictures of heterosexual and homosexual people, carefully chosen to eliminate the effect of what they called “self-presentation.” They even Photoshopped out their hair and pasted them onto white backgrounds, trying to leave nothing but their cheekbones and eyebrows as hints into their sexuality. Then they showed the pictures to a group of 90 people and asked them to guess which faces were gay.

The participants, Rule and Ambady claimed, got the right answer more often than not, thereby proving that everyone can tell you’re gay just by looking at you (even if they don’t realize it). Apparently, you’re not fooling anybody, and you might as well drop the act.

3 Stanford University’s Gaydar Machine

In 2017, Stanford professor Michael Kosinski took spotting gay people by looking at their faces into the next era. He turned that idea into what he claims is a working “gaydar” machine.

Kosinski and his coauthor, Yilun Wang, had a facial recognition program scan 75,000 online dating profiles, organized into groups of “gay” and “straight.” Their AI was programmed to identify patterns in “gay facial features,” searching for the unique quirks that unite all gay men. Then they pitted their machine against humans to see who was better at identifying homosexuals.

The humans weren’t much better at telling if someone was gay by looking at their face than a coin flip, which sort of ruins the entire point of the study in that last entry, but anyway, the point is that the machine got it right 81 percent of the time for gay men and 74 percent for lesbians.^[8] Finally, they had created an effective gaydar.

Or, at least, it was an effective gaydar when it looked at people’s Tinder profile pictures. When they tried using it on pictures that people hadn’t put up on dating apps, it was significantly less effective. Still, they had finally developed a machine that could identify the sexuality of people who are actively and deliberately trying to make their orientations as visible as possible.

2 The Attempt To Isolate The Gay Gene

During the 2015 conference of the American Society of Human Genetics, a University of California researcher named Tuck Ngun made a bold declaration to the world: He had isolated the gay gene.^[9]

Specifically, Ngun had found “methylation marks” that he believed could be connected to homosexuality. His study had looked at 37 pairs of identical male twins that consisted of one homosexual brother and one heterosexual brother and identified five methylation marks that he claimed were clear biological indicators of homosexuality.

Sort of. The scientific community wasn’t exactly supportive. They pointed out that he looked at 6,000 methylation marks in just 37 sets of twins, which made it pretty much inevitable that he’d be able to find some kind of pattern between them, just by the sheer law of averages. And in this case, Ngun hadn’t even found a particularly good pattern—even in his test subjects, the “gay gene” he’d identified only showed up in 67 percent of the time.

1 Penile Plethysmograph

Some devices that have been employed as gaydars still see fairly widespread use today, like the penile plethysmograph. The Czechoslovakian Army once used it to determine if men claiming to be gay to avoid being drafted were telling the truth.

Here’s how it works: first, a scientist attaches a device shaped like a thin strip of metal to the penis. Then he puts on a variety of gay pornography (or whatever else they’re attempting to determine the subject’s response to) and uses the device to measure how erect the man gets looking at each image.

Admittedly, there are probably easier ways to figure out someone’s sexuality—like, for example, if a man attaches a thin strip of metal to people’s penises, shows them gay porn, and then takes careful notes on how erect they get, it might be a clue that he himself is gay—but somehow, this one has caught on and is still used in various scientific studies today.

It has been hailed as the most accurate sexuality test known to man—and with good cause. This test has proven to be an accurate determinant of a man’s sexual preferences 32 percent of the time,^[10] making it the most effective, proven way to tell somebody’s sexuality—other than flipping a coin.

What did you think about when you saw the name of this article? Did you click on it because you already know the answer and wanted to see if we got it right? Or maybe because you never actually wondered about this yourself and it made you curious? Or do you think about this often and haven’t come up with an answer on your own?

Maybe you took a step back and then, based on the subject matter, thought about why you thought anything at all. How is it that your brain is allowing you to understand what we’re saying to you right now and then form opinions about it? What is it in your brain that makes you think or understand anything?

Despite the fact that neuroscience is a 20th-century discipline and psychology dates back to the 1870s, we still know very little about certain parts of the brain and how they function. That doesn’t mean we know nothing, though, which is a good thing. We’re constantly learning, constantly progressing, and one day we may fully understand all the subtle intricacies of the human mind. But for now, do we know how thoughts and consciousness are formed? Let’s have a look.

The Basic Science

Let’s start with some fundamentals. How does your brain do anything? Neurons. Neurons are the basic building blocks that make your brain do everything from ensuring you keep breathing to creating new mathematical formulas if that’s something you do. Neurons make it all happen. 

Neurons are nerve cells and they group together in neural tracts and send signals to one another. They receive sensory input from outside of the brain, which could be anything from signals in your stomach about food you’re digesting to smells in the air, music you’re hearing, a movie you’re watching or a cold breeze you feel on your neck. 

The neurons send electrical signals between each other and also throughout your nervous system, controlling your entire body in response to the sensory input they receive. Some of it is totally out of your control, like the way your intestines contract as food is digested or the way your heart beats. Some of it is all up to you, like deciding if you want to go for a walk or just veg on the sofa. But how your neurons work controls it all. 

To manage everything your brain needs to control, you have between 80 and 100 billion neurons. These are connected by synapses of which you have 500 trillion. Electrical impulses are formed in the neuron thanks to positive ions flowing across the cell membrane. Any given neuron is permeable to both sodium ions and potassium ions, but the flow of potassium out is larger than the leak of sodium in, which allows for a negative inner charge until the neuron actually fires and the sodium channels open. Then these ions are exchanged thanks to action potential. Sodium rushes in and the neuron is depolarized. Potassium channels open and the potassium rushes out. A little spark is formed and your neuron can send a signal to the next in line. Now imagine it happening millions of times along the axons that connect your neurons.

When your neurons send impulses, they create neurotransmitters. These cause other neurons to fire. As the neurotransmitters spread, hundreds and then thousands of neurons will fire, and this is essentially how a thought is formed. 

So, in simple terms, stimulus from outside the brain sends a nerve signal to the brain. That causes the neuron to fire. The neuron produces neurotransmitters that make a chain reaction across many neurons, thought forms as a result. This happens in a fraction of a second, up to about half a second. 

Of course, your brain has many sections that govern many different functions, but we’re not getting into deep neuroscience here, just how the thing works in the first place. With that in mind, let’s look a little closer at what it does now that we know how it does it. 

What Your Brain Does

One thing to remember about those firing neurons in your brain will form patterns for you. If you do things repeatedly, the same way, your brain will create a neural pathway that actually strengthens as you continue to do and react the same way. That can, in part, explain why people get into routines and habits. Your brain is quite literally wired to do things a certain way if you allow it to happen. That’s also why learning to do something a new way once you’ve adapted to a different way can be difficult. Your brain has established it should be done one way and you’re trying to write a new pattern for it. 

Learning things makes the connections between neurons, and these neural pathways, stronger. You have reinforced the thought, an idea, a behavior, whatever it is. It is now something you know. The more you do it, the stronger it gets, the better you are at it. That is why repetition and practice are often essential to learning. 

Your brain weighs about three pounds and is made of both gray matter and white matter. The gray matter is on the outside and it allows you to process and interpret the information that you receive from all the external stimuli and sensory data in the world. The white matter is inside, and that sends information to different parts of your brain and throughout your nervous system so you can do things and react to what you’re experiencing.

How does your brain decide what to do, and when, and where? That’s an anatomy question.

Brainatomy!

There are multiple parts to your brain, but three main parts comprise the whole thing. The front of your brain is called the cerebrum. That’s where you find the cerebral cortex. This is a full 80% of your brain, so most of what you’re doing happens here. The cerebrum is where you interpret external stimuli like things you see and hear. It’s also where you do your learning, your reasoning, speaking, and where emotions are controlled.

Next up is the cerebellum. This little guy is in the back of your brain, just above the brainstem. Do you have any motor skills whatsoever? Can you stand upright without falling down? Thank your cerebellum for that. It handles balance, coordination, and your fine motor skills.

Speaking of your brainstem, that’s the last part. There are several sections in your brain stem, and the whole part is chiefly concerned with the more automatic functions of your body. Things like chewing and blinking are controlled in your brain stem, as well as breathing, sleeping, and your heart rate.

But wait, you might say. What about your frontal lobe? Or your occipital lobe? Those are in there too, and they are part of the cerebrum. Your brain has two hemispheres and four main lobes. The frontal lobe, which is obviously located at the front, controls things like personality, speaking, decision-making, and, for whatever reason, your ability to smell.

In the middle, you’ll find the parietal lobes that aid in spatial understanding, your sense of touch and pain, object identification, and understanding speech.

At the back of the brain, you’ll find your occipital lobes and those help you with seeing things and understanding visual stimuli. Understanding movement, color, and shape all happens in the occipital lobes.

Last but not least is your temporal lobes. These help with short-term memory, smell again, facial recognition, and emotional awareness.

There are also a number of other structures in your brain, including the amygdala, the hippocampus, the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus, the prefrontal cortex, and so on. As you can see, it’s a real mixed bag when it comes to what part of your brain does what. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of organizational structure going on there, so the whole thing needs to work together to have a fully functional mind. 

So maybe now we have a basic idea of how thoughts are formed in a brain, but what about consciousness? That’s not a reaction to external stimuli. Where does the you that exist in your brain come from?

Consciousness

We’ve got good news and bad news when it comes to explaining consciousness. The good news is, if you’re experiencing any of what we’re saying right now, you are conscious. The bad news is that’s about all science can tell you about your consciousness.

Something in the way that all your neurons and synapses connect throughout your entire brain creates your conscious experience. But what does that even mean? We can say fairly certainly that consciousness is a product of your brain. If you undergo anesthesia, your consciousness actually disappears for a short time. You’re not asleep, you’re not dreaming, and there’s no sense of yourself anymore because anesthesia shuts off nearly all the electrical activity in your brain. 

If you want a specific answer about how the inner workings of your brain allow consciousness to form, then you’re going to have to wait for a while. We don’t have an answer to that yet.

We can describe some of the dimensions of consciousness, what needs to happen for consciousness to be a thing. That includes the ability to have thoughts and feelings and be aware of them, some degree of wakefulness, and some degree of sensory organization that allows us to group concepts and perceptions together in an understandable way.

All of those things are more philosophical than biological, however. There’s a little crossover, but the ability to have thoughts and feelings isn’t really a scientific concept that can be explained in the same way as sodium and potassium ions moving in and out of neurons in your brain. Some have argued that your consciousness can’t actually be a biological process and that biology only represents the consciousness in the way a frown may represent sadness. It shows the emotion, but it is not the felt emotion, just like patterns in your brain may show consciousness but are not consciousness itself. 

MRIs and EEGs show that there is more activity in your thalamus and its connections through your brain when you are awake than asleep. We know something is happening in there, but not what or how. Sorry if that’s disappointing. 

What We Don’t Know

The fact is even neuroscientists can’t explain to you with a lot of detail how a brain works because there are so many things they don’t know. Those trillions of synapses we mentioned earlier? Each one is home to 100,000 molecular switches. Each of those is full of protein molecules that transmit information between themselves.

Given that studying thought and consciousness requires investigating a living brain and not damaging it while studying it, you can see how it would be almost impossible to fully map a conscious mind when you’re dealing with such ungainly numbers and such sensitive material.

We have a general understanding of how you can learn something, but not how your brain processes the information. In order to fully understand the human brain, we probably have to map it. So far, only a handful of organisms have had their brains fully mapped. It took four years to make a basic map of a mouse brain and a human brain has 1,100 times as many neurons. A team of scientists around the world have been collaborating on the project for years now and many millions of dollars have been spent, but we’re only a fraction of the way through the job.

One of the big problems with understanding how a brain works and even mapping it is that your brain and my brain are not the same brain. Neural pathways are formed differently, and information is processed differently. There are people out there who have severe brain damage, have even lost portions of their brain, whose brains are able to adapt and alter function. So even a map of the brain can’t explain everything about how a human mind works because it’s very subjective.

Neuroscientists have written extensively about many things we don’t know. For instance, the number of neurons is a ballpark number. We don’t know exactly how many a brain has, and it’s probably safe to assume that your brain and my brain have different numbers of neurons because neurogenesis exists and that can create neurons, while others can be destroyed.

We don’t know why drinking alcohol makes you feel relaxed. We don’t even know exactly how Tylenol works in your brain. We’re not sure why the left side of your brain is linked to the right side of your body, and vice versa. We don’t even know why we dream.

While we are learning more and more about the biology of the brain, the fact is there’s just a lot about what it can do and why that we can only guess at.

When one is immersed in nature, absorbing sounds, smells, and the views, it brings us back to our primordial roots. It can be a place for healing and rejuvenation of the spirit, with psychological and physiological benefits. It’s no wonder that it connects us to our brief, impermanent being.

Humans are creators instinctively, so we want to contribute to the landscape and make our impression on the world. Sometimes, we create beautiful things, only to let them go. We enjoy the transience of art, like building sandcastles even though we know they will be washed to the sea or designing intricate mandalas that we will destroy upon completion with a blow of breath.

Some people, however, take this inclination a step further. This list is concerned with artists, shepherds, adventurers, as well as millionaires and rebels who have participated in this desire to create something incredible, only to hide it in the middle of the wilderness for someone else to find.

10 Giants

If you find yourself wandering off the beaten path in a forest in Copenhagen, Denmark, you may encounter giants. Six massive sculptures made from recycled wood were created by Danish artist Thomas Dambo, who hid them deep in the woods for hikers to come across. Some are camouflaged amid tall trees, while others lounge on hillsides. One is even lurking beneath a bridge like a troll.

Dambo says, “As humans, we often have a way of choosing the beaten path and the main roads.” In this creative endeavor, he wanted to challenge that mindset and encourage people to explore the hidden outskirts of their town. He calls the project an “open air sculpture treasure hunt.” For those with a taste for adventure, he posted a treasure map on his website with hints so that people can follow the bread crumbs. He also engraved poems on stones near the sculptures with clues to find the next one.^[1]

9 Eyes

Nietzsche famously said, “ . . . if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Australian artist Jennifer Allnutt took this statement quite literally. She paints stunningly hyperrealistic eyes, complete with lids, lashes, and the surrounding skin. She uses stones as her medium and then places those stones back into nature in the exact spot she first found them.^[2]

Allnutt says, “I’m fascinated by those in-between, grey areas, intangibles and ambiguities and then fusing these into the physicality and language of paint.” She paints these ocular rocks to create a sense of wonder in the unsuspecting passerby, who may find that the abyss is gazing back after all. She also says that if the eyes don’t meet another’s gaze, that’s alright, too. They can simply be lost forever.

8 Living Artifacts

Who hasn’t carved their initials into a tree at some point? Trees have been a canvas for this activity since ancient times, and there’s a new field of archaeology that’s being created around this human tradition. The study of arborglyphs examines the world’s oldest tree carvings, some of which are a few hundred years old. Since the carvings were etched onto a living host, the artifacts can only exist as long as the tree does.

The most famous arborglyphs were created by Basque shepherds from the mid-1800s in the western parts of the United States on the smooth, white canvas of aspen trees. Being isolated for long lengths of time in remote forests with no one to talk to but the sheep led to the creation of elaborate tree carvings.

In the mountains of California, Oregon, and Nevada, 20,000 of these living artifacts have been recorded for study, from drawings to poetry. Without them, nobody would ever know that these shepherds existed. There’s nothing written about them in history. They were only able to communicate through time by leaving these hidden messages behind. One carving simply says, “Es trieste a vivir solo,” which translates to, “It is sad to live alone.”^[3]

7 Geocaches

Geocaching usually involves a group of people who are hunting for a cache that has been left behind by someone else. They use GPS coordinates to determine its whereabouts. This recreational activity was made popular in recent years by the relative ease of finding specific points in nature by simply using a smartphone. It’s a treasure hunt that’s not only meant for children but also adults, who hunt for geocaches all over the world.

A cache is a small, waterproof container that has at least a pen and a notebook for hunters to exchange musings of their journey and sign their code name into the log as proof that they found it. Then, they re-hide it for the next person. Some of these caches have toys, gems, trinkets, or other small objects to exchange. It’s the usual “take one, leave one” scenario.^[4]

Some of the caches can be extremely challenging to find. There’s an underwater cache that’s only accessible by scuba diving to the site, for example. Another cache is a fake bird’s nest, complete with eggs and even a phony bird guarding over them.

6 Twisting Branches

Spencer Byles is an artist who sculpts branches and twigs to create a mystical experience of twisting, curving limbs that appear to be the result of magic. In the south of France, Byles sculpted the woods surrounding the Loup River. After a year of living in the remote wilderness, he left behind these strange, temporary structures from the natural materials he came across.^[5]

Byles says, “The force of life and growth and the slow disintegration of all living things has always fascinated me.” These fairy-tale creations are woven into the natural fabric of the landscape and are almost impossible to find, but Byles doesn’t do it to attract attention. He doesn’t share the location of the ephemeral sculptures because he prefers that people stumble upon them by chance.

5 Fairy Homes

The lore of fairies, enchanting thumb-sized creatures with wings that live deep in the woods, continues to allure children and the young at heart. Some communities keep the flame of imagination lit by creating fairy houses for people to find on their nature hikes. In Roswell, Georgia, for example, they exist along a public nature trail to the delighted squeals of children visiting the Chattahoochee Nature Center. They can be hidden in stumps or bushes. Fifteen of these whimsical fairy houses are carefully camouflaged into the natural surroundings, as they are made of twigs, pine cones, moss, rocks, and feathers, so it takes a keen eye to discover them.^[6]

In upstate New York, 20 fairy houses have mysteriously appeared on a rarely used nature trail. These charming cottages are ornate, with painted doors that opened up to reveal tiny steps and ladders inside. Now, they attract visitors who want to connect to their inner child. Fairy homes are also popping up on the islands of Maine and across the nation in San Francisco Bay.

4 Treasure Chest

A sheriff in Montana had to issue an official warning that the hunt for the infamous, secret treasure chest could be deadly. In 2010, an eccentric millionaire named Forrest Fenn said that he’d hidden a chest filled to the brim with gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The 19-kilogram (42 lb) chest holds antique coins, relics like an ancient Chinese jade carving, and a jar of Alaskan gold dust. Fenn left clues in the form of poetry and has dropped other hints throughout the years.

Ever since, treasure hunters have been scouring the hills in search of it, and two have died in the pursuit. Others have come close to death and wound up seriously injured. The problem is that treasure hunters don’t want to reveal their location to anyone at the risk of someone finding the chest before them, so nobody knows where they are when something goes wrong. This was not Fenn’s intention when he set the treasure hunt into motion. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and he wanted to leave behind a legacy that inspired people to explore the outdoors and pursue the thrill of the treasure hunt.^[7]

3 Time Capsule

On Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, researchers created a time capsule that contains the history of civilization and preserves the science and technology of modern humans in 2017. They buried the 60-centimeter (24 in) stainless steel tube 5 meters (16 ft) deep in a fjord, where it won’t resurface for at least 500,000 years.

Within the tube, scientists have included DNA samples from humans, rats, salmon, and even potatoes to explain the biology of our time. There’s a bee frozen in resin and about 300 tardigrades, which are the microscopic “water bears” that can survive exposure to radiation and other extreme conditions. To inform the future discoverers of Earth’s geology, they included a chunk of a meteorite that’s 4.5 billion years old, sand from Namibia that has diamond particles, and lava from a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The technology they placed in the capsule includes electronic devices like a basic mobile phone but also more complex machinery like a radiation detector. They also threw in a photograph (etched into porcelain to extend its existence) of Earth taken from space.

The permafrost specialist who created this time capsule is Marek Lewandowski. He says, “I wanted to create a memorial for the ages.”^[8] So, he filled the container with objects for a distant, unimaginably different civilization to hopefully find and decode many years from now.

2 Graffiti

Graffiti can be found in the most unlikely of places. Not only are spray cans light and easy to carry, but humans have an insatiable propensity for leaving their mark. In Riverside, California, for example, there’s a local secret spot where people go to do just that.

It’s called Graffiti Waterfall, although it’s not a waterfall at all. It’s a giant mound of rocks tucked between hillsides, where just about every crevice is painted in bright, swirling colors. This mural has been touched by many people who dare to climb the steep and treacherous rock pile for the sake of creating something that simply says, “I was here.”^[9]

1 Nature Art

Andy Goldsworthy is the master when it comes to nature art, which entails working with natural materials that disappear over time by either ice melting, wind blowing, or rainfall. Whether it’s stacking ice between two tree trunks or laying down the petals of poppies in a bright red line down an ancient staircase in Spain, Goldsworthy surprises people by challenging their perception and creating an uncanny reality that makes you look twice. He’ll set down golden autumn leaves around the base of an old sycamore tree to make it appear as if the tree is glowing. He’ll use mud as his paint or ice as his clay. It doesn’t matter, as long as the materials are natural and overtaken by nature’s course eventually.^[10]

He never creates anything permanent, but he does photograph his work upon completion. Goldsworthy says, “It’s not about art, it’s just about life and the need to understand that a lot of things in life do not last.” His work is too bizarre and diverse to capture in words, so he’s made documentaries to capture his art and the process it takes to make it. If interested, check out the trailer above for Leaning Into the Wind to get an idea of what nature art is and the nerve it takes to create it. At times, he can put his life in danger for the pursuit of his creations, like balancing on icy rocks at night or walking through a mangrove swamp in Africa. He’ll be cut and bloodied by brambles and still go on making art that may only last for seconds and be seen by no one except him.