Isn’t food the best? Not only is it delicious, we literally have to eat it to stay alive. Still, there’s a catch: If our dinner is spoiled, the very thing keeping us alive could end up killing us. To prevent this, we have developed a number of creative ways to keep food in prime condition as long as possible. Here are ten of the strangest ones:

Irradiation is not a new thing in cooking. After all, microwave ovens (which work by bombarding the food with electromagnetic radiation) have been around for decades. But when it comes to food preservation, “radiation” suddenly becomes a worrying word. Preserved foods and radiation together tend to conjure images of nuclear shelters, things that glow in the dark and even agonizing death.

The last one of those is actually a very accurate image. The thing is, it’s not about your death—it’s the death of pests and germs in your food. Food irradiation is a technique where the food is exposed to ionizing radiation (for instance X-rays) in order to kill or incapacitate germs and microbes. Done correctly, the process can slow or even completely stop spoilage.

Have you ever wondered how some products claim they have no additives, yet have a suspiciously long shelf life? There is a trick to that. It’s called High Pressure Processing (also known as pascalization and bridgmanization, for the scientists who helped develop the technique). The food is subjected to a massive pressure of around 50,000 pounds per square inch for up to fifteen minutes. This sheer pressure is enough to inactivate microbes, preserving the food up to ten times to its usual shelf life (for instance, guacamole normally lasts around 3 days, but the high pressure treatment increases this to a month). And it gets better: Pascalization can even vastly improve the food. Research suggests that it can double the levels of certain healthy natural antioxidants in fruit. The method sounds like something straight out of a Science Fiction story. Even so, the basic principles of the process were invented back in the 17th Century by Blaise Pascal, a French scientist.

It’s difficult to imagine burials and cuisine together, except as an unfortunate aftermath to eating really bad salmon. But although most people assume burial just leads to decomposition (everyone knows buried corpses become skeletons), it is actually a fairly effective preservation technique. Burying food can shelter it from many spoiling agents, such as light and oxygen. The soil should preferably be dry and salty, or even frozen. Just remember to use a good container—otherwise your meal might easily become worm food. Burial is also used in cooking. For instance, the Korean national dish Kimchi is prepared by burying vats of seasoned vegetables for months.

Jugging is a peculiar technique of cooking and canning meat at the same time. It is similar to the time-honored vagabond tradition of heating a can of beans over a fire using the tin as a makeshift cooking pot. Jugging is a more hardcore version of the technique: The tin is a large earthenware jug and the beans are replaced with meat. The jug is tightly closed and the food is slowly cooked inside it. The process results in a tasty, stew-like meal that is preserved in the tightly shut jug.

Jugging was a common practice in both English and French kitchens until the 20th Century, which means it’s pretty much the only thing the two cuisines have ever agreed about. Some recipes that use the technique are “Jugged Hare” (rabbit cooked in wine and juniper berries) and kippers (because the tightly shut jug helps contain their smell).

Some foods, such as fruits and vegetables have a very delicate surface texture. This makes them very difficult to preserve with conventional methods (such as heat or chemicals) so that their taste and texture doesn’t chance.

However, scientists have found a way around this problem. They bombard the fruit with plasma (which consists of ionized particles and is considered the “fourth state” of matter, along with liquids, solids and gases). The particular plasma they use is not the destructive, superheated one you may know from movie and video game weaponry. Instead, they use nonthermal plasma, which is roughly room temperature and relatively safe . . . unless you’re a microbe.

Easily the most futuristic technique on this list, Nonthermal Plasma Treatment has proven to be a reliable antimicrobial treatment that doesn’t alter the food in any way—apart from making it safer to eat and giving it a longer shelf life.

Have you ever wondered how catering services manage to transport their food so that it’s still good and fresh when they serve it? Cooking the food on location is often impossible, and they can’t just prepare it in their own kitchen and cart it to the party guests on the other side of the town.

Or can they?

The technique many caterers use is called blast chilling. It’s a method of safe and swift preservation that is custom designed for hot food. First, they cook the food. Then, they rapidly cool it down from 158 °F (+70°C) to 37 °F (+3 °C) or below. As long as the process takes under 90 minutes, the food remains in the exact condition it was before chilling. A normal storage cooler could never manage that (shockingly, they can take 12 to 23 hours to cool food properly), so a special “air blast chiller” cabinet is used for the process. The frozen food is easy to transport and all they need to do is heat it up on location—its taste and quality has remained the same.

Since the technique is effective and relatively easy, its use has started to spread beyond catering. For instance, the next time your frozen TV dinner tastes particularly appealing, chances are it has been blast chilled.

Our ancestors realized that one of the most effective ways to preserve food was to seal it away from the elements, especially oxygen. They also knew that the best way to cover food was with even more food.

This is how two classic preservation techniques were born. Aspic (which is essentially savory jelly) was created around the middle ages, when cooks found the way to turn various stocks and consommés (clear stock or broth soup) into gelatin. They started encasing food (particularly meat and seafood) inside chunks of aspic. The gelatin prevented oxygen from spoiling the food, and provided a delicious addition to the eventual meal.

Confit also relies on shutting off the oxygen. There are two variations: The meat confit, where food is slowly cooked submerged in its own fat, cooled off (so the fat forms a solid layer all around the meat) and sealed in a container. The fruit version replaces the fat with sugar water.

Both aspic and particularly confit are also revered cooking techniques. The Confit d’Canard (duck’s leg confit) of southwestern France is considered a legendary delicacy.

Air is essential to plants and animals alike. But once they become food, air suddenly turns into an enemy: The oxygen that once gave them life now aids microbes and oxidization, doing its best to decompose the food as quickly as possible.

Food industry has gotten around the problem with a trick called “modified atmosphere”. It’s exactly what it sounds like—they artificially create an atmosphere that prevents spoilage. The practice originated in the 1930s, when food ships started filling their holds with carbon dioxide in order to increase their cargo’s shelf life. Later, the industry developed packaging techniques that helped encase products in the kind of gas that was optimal for the shelf life of that particular foodstuff.

Although the practice may sound suspicious, modified atmosphere gases are actually completely safe. They’re just different mixtures of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, all of which are naturally present in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Lye is a strong alkaline solution that is commonly used in things like soap, drain cleaners and various cleaning agents. It is extremely caustic and highly poisonous. Despite all this, it’s also used for food preservation.

When combined with fat (either animal fat or vegetable oil), lye reacts by starting a process called saponification. The end result of this reaction is usually soap, but certain lye solutions (“food-grade lye”) can be used to saponify food. This changes the texture, scent and flavor of the food to a great extent.

The most notable lye-treated foods are probably Lutefisk (lye-soaked whitefish) and cured olives. The fish is gelatinous and has an extremely sharp taste and smell, whereas the olives become soft and slightly soapy.

Lye treated food is considered a delicacy by some. But before you decide to make some, please remember that the treatment process is fairly challenging. Food grade lye is hard to come by and even if you find some, getting just one step of the process wrong can result in a dangerously poisonous meal.

Our modern world puts a huge emphasis on fresh and clean food. While there’s nothing wrong with this, it couldn’t be further removed from the priorities of our ancestors.

Humanity has been cooking meals for a long time, and the oldest way to treat food is the simplest: Just let stuff be and see if the end result is edible. Of course, we don’t call it exactly that: We dance around it with fancy terms like “biopreservation”. Still, deliberate spoiling is at the heart of many of our favorite foodstuffs.

The most commonly used variety of this is fermentation. Our favorite drinks (beer and wine) are completely dependent on this controlled spoiling process. Many milk products and baked goods rely on it. Many charcuterie products (prepared meats such as salami and dry aged beef) also benefit from the fermentation process.

Fermentation can also be used to effortlessly prepare food in most extreme conditions. An old Icelandian recipe called Hákarl requires no cooking: It’s chunks of pressed, disemboweled shark that has fermented underground for six weeks. Alaskan Inuit tribes are also known to prepare their catch by letting it ferment. This method is not without its failures, though—a lovely snack of fermented walrus can come with a side order of botulism.

Pauli Poisuo enjoys his food and also writes for Cracked.com. Why not follow him on Twitter?

The United States government has a department responsible for making sure its citizens don’t eat foods that may be dangerous. Whether this is due to an ingredient or how the dish is made, the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Products Safety Commission have decided that some stuff, no matter how delicious it may be, is just too dangerous to consume.

SEE ALSO: 10 Ridiculous Myths People Believe About Fast Food

Some of the items on this list may actually surprise you, given that you either had them growing up or consider them perfectly fine. These ten foods are considered safe for almost everyone else on the planet. The US government, however, has determined that they aren’t good for Americans.

10 Raw Milk

Remember in school, when you learned that Louis Pasteur figured out how to pasteurize milk, saving millions of lives and making milk safe for everyone to drink? It seems some folks missed school that day because there are people who enjoy drinking raw, unpasteurized milk. Raw milk isn’t necessarily dangerous to consume, but when it is mass-produced on the level the dairy industry puts out milk in the United States, the odds of passing on harmful bacteria increase exponentially if pasteurization is skipped.

Unpasteurized milk can carry dangerous bacteria like Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. These and other harmful organisms killed in the pasteurization process can be dangerous to the young, people with weakened immune systems, the elderly, and pregnant women. Pasteurization prevents harmful diseases such as listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and brucellosis, so it makes sense to keep raw milk under control. In the US, 20 states and the District of Columbia prohibit the sale of raw milk, while its sale is heavily regulated in all but 13 of the remaining 30 states.^[1]

9 Lazy Cakes

When having trouble sleeping, some people may take melatonin. In small doses, it’s a harmless supplement that can help regulate sleep, but it is not generally considered a food ingredient. That’s a problem for the makers of Lazy Larry brownies (formerly called Lazy Cakes), as their principal marketed ingredient is melatonin. The Food and Drug Administration found out about this additive and sent a letter to the company responsible, informing them that their cakes weren’t particularly good for people to . . . well, eat.

These cakes are particularly dangerous for children, who might see a delicious brownie and eat it. If a child were to take melatonin, they shouldn’t exceed 0.3 milligrams, but these brownies are packed with 8 milligrams of melatonin. While the nation as a whole hasn’t jumped on the bandwagon and outright banned Lazy Larry brownies just yet, you won’t be able to find them anywhere in Arkansas. The state banned them in 2011.^[2]

8 Ackee Fruit

Sometimes, the most dangerous treats are also the most delicious. That is certainly the case for the ackee fruit, which can be found in West Africa and Jamaica but certainly not in the United States. The FDA has completely banned the importation of ackee fruit into the country,^[3] and it may have been for a good reason: Ingesting unripe ackee will result in something called Jamaican vomiting sickness (JVS), which is pretty much exactly what you think it is. About two to 12 hours after eating unripe ackee, someone with JVS will begin vomiting uncontrollably, may lose consciousness, and is susceptible to seizures. If this happens while you’re out camping, this little fruit is going to kill you.

The reason ackee causes JVS has to do with the presence of hypoglycin, a nonproteinogenic amino acid. It functions by lowering a person’s blood sugar, which leads to an increased use of glucose and ultimately hypoglycemia. There are thousands of people who eat ackee fruit and its products every day without harm thanks to their patience in waiting for the fruit to ripen, but seeing as dozens of people die from eating it every year, the FDA may be on the right track with this ban.

7 Sassafras Oil

Sassafras oil is probably the one product many people have heard of but have never used. That’s certainly true for Americans, seeing as the use of it in commercially mass-produced foods was banned back in 1960. Sassafras is a bit different than other items on this list; you might just have it growing in your backyard. The plant hasn’t been banned, but you aren’t going to find it in your root beer anymore. The reason the oil has been banned in the States stems from the presence of safrole, a constituent in sassafras oil, which has been shown to be carcinogenic, causing cancer in lab animals.^[4]

There is another problem with safrole in that it is one of the principal ingredients of MDMA, otherwise known as Molly or ecstasy. Because the tree produces a component of the popular party drug, it is becoming threatened and may disappear one day. Despite the dangers posed from ingesting safrole, it is still used in a wide array of products across the planet. Some uses are not banned in the United States, but it is no longer included in foods.

6 Haggis (Imported)

If you have never been to Scotland or eaten their food, odds are you have heard of haggis and want nothing to do with it. Take it from the writer of this article, you are doing yourself a disservice! Haggis is delicious! Unfortunately, you cannot import it into the United States, thanks to a ban placed on the dish in 1971 by the FDA. They made the ban due to the presence of sheep lung, which constitutes less than 15 percent of the total dish. The FDA created the ban, which encompasses all lung meat, due to the potential presence of stomach acid and phlegm.^[5]

The ban only exists on haggis imported from the United Kingdom, so there is nothing stopping an intrepid eater from getting some homemade haggis in the States. If you aren’t ready to take the haggis challenge just yet, you may want to learn what it is: Haggis is described as a pudding in the way only folks from the UK can call a meat dish a pudding. It consists of a sheep’s heart, liver, and lung meat, which is then minced with various spices, onions, and oats before it is stuffed into a sheep stomach. It sounds disgusting but is arguably delicious, and many people in and out of Scotland enjoy it.

5 Casu Marzu

Most Americans reading this may be scratching their heads wondering what casu marzu is, and there’s a reason for it which you’ve probably already guessed: It’s banned in the United States. The traditional dish from Sardinia is made from sheep milk that contains an ingredient the people at the FDA may have gagged at learning: live insect larvae, more commonly known as maggots. Yes, you read that correctly—when prepared in the traditional way, this dish contains a cheeseload of maggots.

Casu Marzu is made by placing a wheel of pecorino cheese outside with a small portion of the rind removed. This allows a fly, Piophila casei, to lay its eggs in the cheese. Seeing as these little buggers can lay up to 500 eggs at a time, there are going to be quite a few maggots inside. As they mature and eat the cheese, the acid in their stomachs breaks down the cheese fat, making the cheese incredibly soft. The chef knows the dish is ready to be served when several thousand maggots are present. It’s up to the person eating the dish whether or not they want to eat the maggots whole or by mashing them into a paste. Many do this, while others flick them aside. While casu marzu is certainly banned in the United States, it is also banned in the EU, making it difficult to find . . . should you want to.^[6]

4 Mirabelle Plums

For most of the foods on this list, the United States government banned them for health reasons or environmental concerns. For the mirabelle plum, their reason is quite different, thanks to rules making the fruit protected from importation due to its designation as a “protected origin” food.^[7] This designation is the result of an agreement between the French and American governments aimed at helping the French market. As a regional delicacy in France, the country prefers to keep it in-house as a means of attracting tourism. This isn’t unusual for France, which protects a number of regional delicacies, including certain peppers and wines.

Because of this agreement, it is nearly impossible to get a mirabelle plum into the United States. If you want one (and you do, they are delicious), you need to travel to the Lorraine region of France. You can even attend a two-week festival in honor of the fruit and its economic importance to the region in the city of Metz. They hold a mirabelle festival every August, when the fruit becomes ripe. They do grow in other countries outside France but should be enjoyed when cultivated from their native soil.

3 Fugu

This food is so dangerous, it nearly killed Homer Simpson! Fugu is the sushi cut from a pufferfish—you know, those cute fish that blow up at the sense of danger. These fish possess within their bodies an incredibly toxic chemical called tetrodotoxin, a type of neurotoxin and one of the deadliest substances in the world. Because of the danger from eating it, the United States slammed the ban hammer down on serving it, but there are a few places you can get it. In order to serve fugu, a special license is required, and in Japan, three years of training are required before a chef can serve the dish.

If you ever end up eating fugu but then start to feel a little sick, you might have ingested some of the toxin. Here’s what you have to look forward to: some light dizziness followed by outright exhaustion, headache, and nausea. If you ingested a lethal dose, you will begin to have difficulty breathing and then enter a state of total paralysis in which you are unable to do much but contemplate your poor life choices. When the body is completely paralyzed, your lungs cease to work, and asphyxiation occurs. There is no antidote to tetrodotoxin, but your life can be saved with a stomach pump and the ingestion of more charcoal than anyone would want to eat.^[8]

2 Shark Fin Soup (Eight States)

Shark fin soup is a traditional dish found mostly in China and Vietnam, but it has made its way around the world since it originated sometime in the Song dynasty roughly 1,000 years ago. The dish is considered a luxury item and is traditionally served only during special occasions. It is also considerably expensive, costing anywhere between $50 and $100 per serving. You may be picturing a bowl of broth with a shark fin sticking out of the liquid, but it is made using the meat from the fin, which is dried and shredded after the skin is removed. One of the reasons the dish has been so prominent in Chinese culture is due to the belief that it helps prevent cancer, among many other purported benefits.

Its use in Chinese medicine has caused the demand for shark fins to skyrocket, which has caused a decline in a number of shark species. The biggest problem occurs when fishermen pull in sharks, slice off the fin, and throw the bleeding fish back in the water to die. In order to help conservation efforts, many nations have written laws and bans protecting various species targeted for the dish. While shark fin soup is banned in only a handful of states, the US has established a law requiring that sharks caught in American waters be documented before a fin can go on sale.^[9] By the end of 2017, efforts to completely ban the dish in the United States were underway.

1 Kinder Eggs

Saving the best for last, Kinder Eggs are probably the most ridiculous ban the United States has placed on an imported item. For most of Europe, these candies are ubiquitous and a nostalgic part of most people’s childhood. Kinder Eggs, also called Kinder Surprise, are hollow, egg-shaped chocolates containing a toy. The toy comes in a yellow plastic shell, and it can be just about anything. Whether they are promoting a film or are releasing their own line of toys, these can range from small cars to intricate playsets, unique characters, or just about anything imaginable. Sadly, it’s the toy inside that the US government has set its sights on.^[10]

Thanks to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, food items cannot be sold if they contain a nonnutritive object. Since there is very little nutrition in plastic toys, Kinder Eggs fell victim to the ban hammer. In 1997, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reexamined the ban based on some eggs brought illegally into the United States. They determined the presence of small parts in the toys presented a health and safety risk to small children under the age of three. The fine for bringing a Kinder Egg into the United States is a whopping $2,500 per egg. Ferrero, the company that makes Kinder Eggs, was able to create a modified version to market in the US. The new product started showing up in stores at the end of 2017, but they differ considerably from their European counterpart and just aren’t the same.

On June 25, 2021, just in time for Washington’s usual “when nobody’s looking” Friday information dumps, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its assessment of “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAP (that’s government-speak for UFOs). The assessment was a disappointing 6 pages (not counting title page and appendices). It, nevertheless, had a few surprising revelations.

First, the study limited its scope to UAP reports between November 2004 and March 2021 from military aviators – mostly naval pilots – whom the ODNI considered reliable witnesses. Surprisingly, they found 144 such reports and only 1 of them they could explain (but added they could eliminate more sightings with more data). Eighty of these reports were supported by electronic sensors (i.e. radar, infrared), giving credence not just to the reports, but that the UAPs were real, solid objects (as opposed to illusions or storm clouds). And 18 of the UAPs demonstrated speeds or movements that could not be explained by existing technologies.

Perhaps more disquieting is that most of these sightings were around military installations or training and testing grounds. This is what we’d expect if the witnesses were military personnel. But is that the only reason? Eleven of these UAPs had near collisions with the military aircraft. Could they have been attacks? Warnings? Testing of the aircraft’s capabilities? The ODNI must have wondered that too. They warned that these UAPs were potential hazards to national security. Here are 10 reasons the government is now concerned.

10 Truly Unbelievable Claims Of UFO And Alien Encounters

10 The Los Alamos Green Balls of Light (December, 1948)

Sightings of UFOs stretch all the way back to antiquity, but these strange encounters increased exponentially during World War II, the most violent conflict in human history. Sightings were so common, U.S. aviators began to call them “Foo Fighters.” Coined by Donald Meiers, a radar operator for the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Foo Fighters described mysterious glowing objects seen in the skies over Europe during missions. There are several accounts of Foo Fighters following or shadowing military aircraft for several minutes before peeling away, changing direction and speed on a dime. The fear was that Hitler had developed a superweapon, but aviation historians have since denied that possibility. The Nazis had neither aircraft nor rockets advanced enough for such maneuvers. Nor are there any known instances of these UFOs engaging these aircraft in combat, something the Nazis would definitely do. So what would be the purpose of shadowing and observing aircraft on combat missions?

Perhaps more disconcerting was the appearance of these lights after the war around the top secret Los Alamos and Sandia atomic weapons laboratories in New Mexico where the world’s first atomic bomb was assembled and tested. By 1948, the labs – specifically Los Alamos—were developing the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb that was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb. For nine days in December, 1948, green orbs of light – sometimes called balls of fire – flew above or near the labs. On December 5th , one of the orbs played chicken with an aircraft, forcing the pilot to veer off at the last second. On December 20th, a green orb descended at 45 degrees, then abruptly leveled off – something a meteorite wouldn’t do. Nor did anyone find evidence a meteorite reached the ground. The government was so disconcerted that they sent an expert to investigate and he determined the lights were man-made, either secret U.S. “defensive devices” or Soviet spying apparatus. Another expert posited it was ball lightning, but ball lightning is so rare we know very little about it. What are the odds something so rare would happen in the same area on nine separate nights in the same month? The lights continued to visit the area until the early 1950’s.

9 The Washington D.C. Sightings (July, 1952)

If Washington was concerned about the green orbs over Los Alamos, imagine how they’d feel with UFOs whizzing over their heads. Shortly before midnight on July 19th, 1952, an air-traffic controller at Washington National Airport found 7 slow-moving unidentified objects on his radar. Two more controllers at National Airport reported an odd light in the distance that hovered, then zipped away. Controllers at Andrews Air Force Base also saw a cluster of blips on their radar, racing away at speeds exceeding 7,000 mph. A commercial pilot for Capital Airlines saw six streaking lights over Washington “like falling stars without tails.” He added: “In my years of flying I’ve seen a lot of falling stars… But these were much faster… They couldn’t have been aircraft.” Two F-94 jets were sent to investigate, but the lights disappeared. The lights reappeared a week later on July 26 and this time an F-94 acquired a visual on the lights. But his jet had a top speed of 640 mph and he never caught up to it.

The next day the press was screaming for answers. President Truman was demanding them. So the Air Force did the obvious thing: it lied. A press conference was called and the press was told it was a temperature inversion, which, they explained, happens when warm air traps cooler air low in the atmosphere and radar signals bounce off it, making ground objects appear to be flying. It’s fairly common in the muggy summer months in Washington D.C., so common that all the radar operators were familiar with it and insisted temperature inversions were not what they saw on radar. Nor would an F-94 pilot chase a temperature inversion. And yet the Air Force explanation worked: the public outcry fell to a whisper.

But in true government form, they assigned a group to study the phenomena (but were not interested in properly funding it). The U.S. government entity that put out the June 25, 2021, report was the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). It was just the most recent entity in a long history of such entities. The first three were Project Sign (1948), Project Grudge (1949 – 1951) and Project Blue Book (1952 – 1969) all headed by the U.S. Air Force. The latter – Project Blue Book – was established in March 1952 and probably would have continued to investigate a handful of sightings a year if it weren’t for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. Just to the left of a sultry picture of Marilyn Monroe was the caption “There is a Case For Interplanetary Saucers.” UFOlogy was suddenly mainstream and Project Blue was inundated with UFO sightings, jumping from 23 in March to 148 in June. But after the Air Force’s temperature inversion theory was released, sightings to Project Blue Book dropped again, from 50 a day to 10. Years later when the relevant government papers were declassified, they showed that the administration wasn’t trying to cover-up secrets, unless you consider their inability to find their own butt inside their pants a secret.

8 Operation Mainbrace Sightings (September, 1952)

But 1952 wasn’t done yet. That September the U.S. and 7 other NATO nations along with New Zealand conducted a massive war-games exercise in the North Sea off Denmark and Norway. With 200 ships, 80,000 personnel, and 1,000 planes, Operation Mainbrace was the largest combined sea, land and air operation since World War II. Someone at the Pentagon joked that they should expect UFOs to show up as well. By the end of the 12 day operation, no one was laughing.

On the operation’s first day – September 13 – a Danish destroyer was just north of Borhnholm Island when Lieutenant Commander Schmidt Jensen and several fellow crewmembers observed a triangular bluish UFO as it flew by at a speed Jensen estimated to be 900 mph. A week later a British aircraft was landing at the Topcliffe airfield at Yorkshire, England, when air and ground crews observed a silver, disk-shaped object following it, swinging to and fro like a pendulum. When the aircraft circled the airfield, the object hovered, rotating on its axis. It then shot away at a speed greater than a shooting star.

On September 20, a metallic disk flew over Karup Field in Denmark at high speed. That same day the U.S. carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt was buzzed by a silver, spherical object that was photographed by reporter Wallace Litwin. His 4 photographs of what he described as a “white ping-pong ball” have never been released to the public. The next day, 6 British RAF pilots chased a shiny sphere, but could not catch it. On September 27 and 28, there were widespread UFO sightings in Germany, Denmark and Sweden. None of the sightings have been explained by anything other than the usual “it was a weather balloon.”

In his 1956 memoir The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, later to be the director of Project Blue Book, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote he initially thought the governments “brush-offs” were meant to keep the public from panicking. Instead he found a combination of a lack of interest, disbelief and aversion to admitting wrong blocked his investigative efforts. Even in the face of mounting, compelling evidence, the government just wanted it to go away.

7 Malmstrom AFB UFO Incident (March, 1967)

Perhaps the most disquieting UFO incident on this list is not a single incident at all, but the first of a decades-long harassment of the personnel manning and maintaining the missile silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base in central Montana. On a crisp March morning in 1967, Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander (DMCCC) Robert Salas was 60 feet underground at the Oscar-Flight Launch Control Center (LCC) where he and his commander monitored and – if so ordered – launched 10 ICBM missiles, each with an 800 kiloton nuclear warhead. That’s when Salas got a bizarre call from his LCC’s head of security upstairs: they had a UFO just above the LLC, making strange zig-zag movements. Salas hung up, annoyed at what he perceived to be a joke. A few minutes later the security head called again. The UFO – an orange and red pulsating oval-shaped object—was now hovering at the front gate. Salas hung up and woke his sleeping commander just as all hell broke loose.

A Klaxon alarm sounded and on the control panel “A ‘No-Go’ light and two red security lights were lit indicating problems at one of our missile sites…Another alarm went off at another site, then another and another simultaneously. Within the next few seconds, we had lost six to eight missiles to a ‘No-Go’ (inoperable) condition,” Salas would later relate. Eventually all 10 missiles were inoperable, would not launch, would not respond to commands. Repair crews were quickly dispatched, but it took a full day for the missiles to be brought back online.

Just a week before, a similar event happened at the Echo-Flight LLC under the same command but 20 miles from Oscar-Flight. Security and maintenance personnel contacted the Echo-Flight LLC to tell them there were UFOs hovering over two missile silos. Shortly afterward, ‘No-Go’ alarms began to wail as their 10 missiles became inoperable. Echo-Flight’s missiles, too, were down for a day. A full-scale investigation of both incidents failed to find a cause and Boeing conducted laboratory tests. “There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert,” wrote Boeing. “…there was no technical explanation that could explain the event.” They did theorize an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) might have caused the missiles to go off-line, but the equipment was shielded from an EMP up to a certain level. An EMP above that level required technology that didn’t exist in 1967.

Nor were these two incidents isolated. In November 1975, Malmstrom reported multiple disk or saucer-shaped UFOs with various colored lights hovered over the Weapons Storage Area where the nuclear warheads were kept. A pair of F-106s were dispatched but the lights disappeared. UFOs appeared again over Malmstrom in 1992, 1995 and 1996.

Nor was Malmstrom alone in these visitations. Between 1963 and 1996 there are dozens of UFO sightings over missile facilities or Weapons Storage Areas at Minot (North Dakota), Francis E. Warren (Wyoming), Ellsworth (South Dakota), Vandenburg (California), and Walker (New Mexico) Air Force Bases. UFOs were also reported at Wurtsmith (Michigan) and Loring (Maine) AFBs where B-52 nuclear bombers were stationed during the Cold War. At one of the Warren AFB silos, a missile’s targeting “tape” had been erased after a UFO hovered above it in the fall of 1973.

Perhaps one of the most well documented incidents also occurred over an ICBM site at Minot AFB on October 24, 1968. Sixteen Air Force personnel on the ground and 7 more in a B-52 overhead testified to seeing a large brilliantly lit object that changed colors from white to amber to green and at one point split into two objects. The government claimed it was a combination of two stars – Sirius and Vega – and some kind of plasma.

In September of 2010, a number of the Air Force officers who’d witnessed these UFO incursions gathered in Washington to highlight a scary pattern: UFOs are monitoring – and it some cases sabotaging—America’s nuclear arsenal. Where these UFOs malevolent or benevolent?

6 Cua Viet River Fire Fight (June, 1968)

The pattern of UFO interest in war continued after World War II. During the 3-year Korean War, there were dozens of UFO sightings, 42 of which were corroborated by secondary witnesses. One incident stands out. In May of 1951, American troops were at Chorwon, Korea, watching as artillery bombarded the enemy. Suddenly an orange-glowing object – like a “jack-o-lantern”—appeared atop a nearby mountain and quickly descended, flying without damage through the artillery bursts toward the American line. The UFO began pulsating a blue-green light. One private, Francis P. Wall, asked for and received permission to fire his M-1 rifle at the UFO and his bullets made metallic “dings” against the UFO’s hull. Its response was to attack. “We were… swept by some form of ray that was emitted in pulses, in waves that you could visually see only when it was aiming at you.” Wall remembered he experienced a tingling, burning throughout his body. The object hovered for a moment, then shot away at high speed. Three days later Wall’s entire company came down with dysentery and very high white-blood-cell count, similar to radiation poisoning.

Seventeen years later America was in another war, this time in Vietnam. Captain George Filer was an intelligence officer who daily briefed General George S. Brown, deputy commander of air operations in Vietnam. Frequently Filer’s briefings included UFO sightings and way too often they went from sightings to armed conflict.

Just after midnight on June 16, 1968, the patrol boat designated PCF-12 was on a routine night patrol on Cua Viet River not far from where it empties into the South China Sea, when it received a distress call from another patrol boat. PCF-19 said it was under attack from unidentified lights it called “enemy helicopters.” The North Vietnamese had a few Soviet MI-4 Hound helicopters at the time, but they were usually deployed along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Why would an attacking enemy helicopter have its lights on, making it easier for the Americans to hit it? PCF-12 was captained by Lieutenant Pete Snyder and as his swift boat approached PCF-19, he said he could see two bright lights with a “strange glow” hovering above PCF-19. One of the lights flashed brightly and PCF-19 exploded. The pair of lights then sped away. Two wounded survivors were picked up later by a Coast Guard Cutter and the survivors reported the pair of lights had stalked the PCF-19 for miles before the crew began firing at them. The lighted object then destroyed PCF-19.

PCF-12 motored up the Cua Viet River and encountered the pair of lights again. Snyder ordered his men to open fire, but the UFO was unphased. PCF-12 retreated as it fired, the object following. Eventually the lights were chased off by a pair F-4 Phantoms. This action so unnerved the American forces, it may have contributed to friendly fire the next night when F-4 Phantoms allegedly fired on the cruiser USS Boston and the Australian destroyer HMAS Hobart, killing two sailors and wounding 8. Extensive searches found no “enemy helicopter” wreckage anywhere in the area. Investigators determined that both incidents were the result of friendly fire, but, in the case of the destruction of PCF-19, no aircraft – friendly or enemy – were in the vicinity at the time. Interestingly, years later General George Brown admitted that the phrase “enemy helicopters” was a euphemism for UFOs. Is that what PCF-19 meant when they said they were under attack?

5 Campeche, Mexico sightings (March 5, 2004)

In the early evening of March 5, 2004, the Mexican Air Force was hunting drug smugglers along the east coast state of Campeche. The C-26A aircraft was flying at 11,500 feet when the crew turned on its infrared camera and noticed multiple bogeys – at one point 11 of them – on the monitor. ”We are not alone! This is so weird,” one crewmember can be heard saying. Since the camera only senses heat signatures, it doesn’t show the object’s exact outlines, its details or structure. The C-26A followed the blobs for a short time and some crewman claimed the objects actually surrounded their aircraft before breaking off.

When the Mexican air force released the video in May, it created quite a stir. Skeptics claimed the images were electrical flashes, ball lightning and even plasma sparks. A more plausible skeptical explanation was that the lights were flares from oil wells out in the Bay of Campeche. The area is the heart of Mexico’s petroleum industry with more than 200 wells in the bay, and they light flares on the tops of the rigs to burn off excess natural gas. UFOlogists proclaimed these images were far superior to the typical grainy pictures of UFOs the world was used to. Not really. It was cloudy, hot and humid that March 5, the images taken at sunset when temperatures were fluctuating, causing havoc not just with the human eye, but the infrared camera.

4 USS Nimitz Incident (November 14, 2004)

Just under two weeks before Thanksgiving, 2004, Carrier Strike Group 11 was training off the coast of southern California when the radar on the missile cruiser USS Princeton detected some 14 anomalous aerial vehicles (AAV) – yet another term for UFOs – uniformly spread out over 100 miles and was deemed a threat to the exercise. Two F/A-18F Super Hornet fighters from the carrier USS Nimitz – who had also picked up the AAVs on radar—were dispatched to the nearest object, guided by an E-2 Hawkeye airborne radar.

Once they had reached the intercept point, the F/A-18’s radar could not detect the AAV. Nor were they electronically jammed. That’s when the F/A-18 crews noticed a disturbance on the surface of the ocean below them, and flying just above the frothing disturbance was a white oblong object shaped like a “Tic-Tac” mint. Under its belly were what looked like two appendages. It was 40-50 feet long, 10-15 feet wide. There were no wings or engine heat or exhaust. It was moving erratically, instantaneously changing directions like, as one F/A-18 crewmember described, a ping pong ball bouncing off invisible walls. One of the F/A-18s descended to get a better look, but the object anticipated that and kept its distance. When the F/A-18 tried to intercept, the AAV shot away. The pilot, CDR David Favor, said: “And it takes off like nothing I’ve ever seen. It literally is one minute it’s there and the next minute it’s like -poof – and it’s gone.” Favor points out that an aircraft flying at Mach 3 will still be visible for 10-15 seconds. “This thing disappeared in a second, it was just gone.”

Shortly afterward the object returned and was videotaped. It was later determined that there was no submarine at the location of the water disturbance or any other known cause. From the video and radar information, it was calculated the object was moving 282,000 mph with a g-force of 12,823. No human could survive such g-forces, nor any aircraft survive the air friction at that speed. At that velocity there should have been noise when the object broke the sound barrier and the friction should have created a fireball. And yet the object was tracked by 3 highly sophisticated radar systems (from the Princeton, Nimitz and the E-2 Hawkeye) at different radar frequencies supporting the contention that this was a physical object and not a weather phenomena such as temperature inversion.

Shortly after the incident, the recordings of the radar, ship logs and other electronic proof was confiscated and it wasn’t until 2017 when a small portion of the evidence was declassified and released to the public. A careful analysis came to the conclusion that the “Tic-Tac” was not an “aircraft of any known type,” had “no aerodynamic air-frame, no obvious means of reactive propulsion, [and had] acceleration characteristics beyond human endurance and air-frame structural capability.”

Mike West, a former video-game designer and UFO skeptic, said the “Tic-Tac” is simply glare on the camera lens. The movements it makes? Simply the sweeping motions of the camera as it tries to keep a visual lock on the “glare.” West also said it could be due to the parallax effect, where stationary objects appear to move when it is actually the viewer moving. The problem is that the video is supported by reliable eyewitnesses who saw it with their own eyeballs. David Fravor, one of the pilots who saw the “Tic-Tac,” said it was not an illusion, and not glare. “It’s funny how people can extrapolate stuff who’ve never operated the system,” he said. Even the Navy, who has every reason to accept West’s theory, say the images are real and simply characterize the “Tic-Tac” as “unidentified.”

3 USS Theodore Roosevelt Sightings (2015)

Along with the Nimitz footage, two other F/A-18 Super Hornet videos were declassified in 2017 and released to the public. Both were shot by the same pilot from the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt while training off the eastern coast from Virginia to Florida before deployment to the Persian Gulf. A total of 6 seasoned pilots and weapons system operators (WSO) experienced multiple encounters.

The first encounter was in the summer of 2014 when Lieutenant Danny Accoin and his WSO picked up a UFO on radar and Accoin positioned his F/A-18 1,000 feet below the object. He should have been able to spot it with his helmet camera thru his canopy, but was unable to. A few days later, Accoin again encountered the object. This time Accoin got a missile lock on the object, but still could not visually see it. Accoin thought these UFOs were advanced military drones, until another Roosevelt pilot had a near collision.

In late 2014, the Roosevelt was training off Virginia Beach and a pilot – who wished to remain anonymous – was flying with his wingman, 100 feet between them. Then something flew between them that looked like a sphere encased in a cube. It flew so close, an aviation flight safety report had to be filed. If these UFOs were drones operated by the military, Accoin reasoned, they wouldn’t have endangered the pilots with a near-collision. “It turned from a potentially classified drone program to safety issue,” Lieutenant Ryan Graves said.

Then in 2015, the so-called “go-fast” and “gimbal” videos were taken. The objects have “no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume,” Accoin said of the videos. It also shows the UFOs accelerating to hypersonic speed, making abrupt stops and instantaneous turns, something a human wouldn’t survive. “Speed doesn’t kill you,” Lieutenant Graves said. “Stopping does. Or acceleration.”

2 USS Russell’s Pyramid UFO (July 15, 2019)

In July, 2019, the Navy held military exercises in restricted waters off the San Diego coastline. Beginning July 14, at least three ships were harassed by – what is described in their logs – as “drones.” Often there were multiple unidentified objects and in one case a “white light” paced the speed and direction of a destroyer – the USS Rafael Peralta—and performed “brazen” maneuvers for 90 minutes, far beyond the flight duration of most drones. On July 15, three pyramid-shaped UFOs trailed the destroyer USS Russell at 700 feet. The ship’s log described the “drones” changing elevation and moving erratically in all directions. The Pentagon confirmed that an anonymous sailor on the Russell filmed the UFO using night-vision goggles, and said they have verified the video’s authenticity.

This video was part of a classified briefing the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had on May 1, 2020 in an effort to “destigmatize” the reporting of these incidents and encourage the military to relate their experiences without the fear of ruining their careers or reputations. It was acknowledged that something is going on, and uncovering what it is will not happen with denials and secrecy. As remarkable as that announcement is, what came out of the Pentagon was shocking.

Luis Elizondo is a former U.S. Counterintelligence Special Agent and worked for nine years in the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD[I]). While at USD(I) , Elizondo headed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) that, from 2007 to 2012, studied UFO experiences. Even after funding lapsed in 2012, Elizondo said AATIP continued, funded by the military. Elizondo said that by 2017, AATIP had collected compelling evidence that UFOs posed a significant threat to national security. But he was frustrated by continued government secrecy and resigned. He has since been instrumental in releasing the Nimitz, Roosevelt and Russell videos to the public.

Elizondo also released the remarkable news that the Pentagon has three theories about what these UFOs are. The first is that the UFOs are U.S. military or civilian technology the Pentagon is unaware of, something Elizondo considers “highly unlikely.” The second is that the UFOs are “foreign adversarial” tech that the Pentagon is also unaware of. “This would be a huge intelligence failure of [the United States] because we’ve been technologically leapfrogged,” Elizondo said. He summarized the third theory: “If it’s not ours and it’s not [another country] well, then it’s someone or something else.”

1 USS Omaha’s Trans Medium UFO (July 15, 2019)

On the same night (July 15) the USS Russell was swarmed by UFOs, another ship – the littoral combat ship USS Omaha – videoed a UFO doing something not often witnessed: it traveled thru the sky and the water. Called a trans medium UFO, it further distanced itself from existing human technology. At approximately 11 p.m. a dark blob appeared near the Omaha. The radar plot said the object was spherical, measuring 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter, and traveling at speeds as much as 158 mph (254 km/h). A crewmember began to film the object displayed on a monitor in the Omaha’s Command Information Center (CIC) and the clip clearly has multiple edits. It stayed in place for nearly an hour before splashing into the water. A submarine investigated soon afterward and neither the object or wreckage was found.

The Omaha video was released with the Russell video at the same May 1, 2020, ONI briefing and the Pentagon has confirmed that the Omaha footage is authentic, that it was filmed by naval personnel and that it, along with the Nimitz, Roosevelt and Russell videos were among the 144 UFO sightings it investigated for the June 25, 2021 report.

From all of this, Luis Elizondo has identified five “unique” technological characteristics these UFOs have that are not evident in existing human technology: they have the tech for instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic speeds (greater than 3,000 mph or Mach 5), low visibility (they easily disappear and reappear), trans medium travel (thru space, atmosphere and water), and positive lift (can fly without wings, ailerons, rudders, or even engine exhausts). For the intelligence community to be unaware a foreign power had “leapfrogged” in developing any one of these characteristics would be unlikely. For the intelligence community to be unaware a foreign power developed all five characteristics would be incomprehensible. “We are seeing these — let’s call them vehicles, if you will — that are incurring [incursions?] into controlled U.S. airspace that are displaying performance characteristics that are frankly well beyond anything we can either replicate or in some cases really even understand,” Elizondo said. And for UFOs to have been displaying these technological advancements as far back as World War II? It stretched believability.

So where does that leave us? Cue “Twilight Zone” theme song.

Top 10 UFOs Caught On Video In Recent Years

About The Author: Steve is the New York Times Bestselling author of “366 Days in Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency” and a frequent contributor to .

The 19th and 20th centuries were a period of unprecedented change in human history. In 1807, the Napoleonic Wars were raging; in 2007, smartphones were becoming a thing. No other era in human history comes close to matching this rate of change.

And in no other place was this change faster than in Europe. As technology evolved, the borders of nations shifted, and entire states rose and fell. The 20th century in particular saw the shattering of ancient kingdoms and the birth of many new states, some of which failed to make it to the modern day. Ideologies led to new experiments and disastrous wars, and the human race saw the highest sustained period of migration in history. Not all the countries which entered this crucible made it out the other side. In this list, we’re taking a look at ten European countries that collapsed during this formative time.

10 Austria-Hungary

The Hapsburg monarchs had ruled Austria and Hungary since the 1500s. The two countries were governed in a similar way to England and Scotland before the Act of Union: While they shared a monarch, they remained independent of each other, with their own parliaments, budgets, and laws.^[1]

This system was shaken by the fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, when the Hapsburgs joined the countries together in the Austrian Empire. While Hungary was still nominally independent and still had its own parliament, it was now part of a larger state. This arrangement hardly suited the Hungarians, who agitated for reform several times over the course of the 19th century. One reformer, Istvan Szechenyi, shocked all when he addressed the Hungarian Diet in Hungarian for the first time in 1825, before proceeding to lay out a program of reform abolishing serfdom, introducing wage labor, and founding a national bank. His plans were ignored, but the Hapsburgs were rattled.

The empire expanded over the course of the 19th century, and by 1900, it controlled dozens of different ethnic groups, from Serbs in the south to Czechs in the north and many in between. In an era of rising nationalism, the government struggled to hold the empire together, despite its powerful army and huge industrial development. (At its height, the Austrian Empire had the fourth most developed industry in the world.)

Following the devastating Austro-Prussian War, the Hapsburgs reformed the country and renamed it Austria-Hungary, granting Hungary more powers in an attempt to appease the separatists. It did little to stifle the resistance. By the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had developed a plan to radically reform the country into the United States of Greater Austria, where the country would be broken into 13 semiautonomous states roughly following cultural boundaries. Unfortunately, the archduke was assassinated before his plans came to fruition. Following Austria-Hungary’s role in World War I, it was dismantled by the Allies and broken into several smaller successor states.

9 Czechoslovakia

In many ways, Czechoslovakia was a country born out of necessity. The archduke of Austria took the Bohemian crown in 1526, and from then on, the Czech lands were a client kingdom of the Austrian monarchy. On the other side, Slovakia was conquered by the invading Hungarians around the year 1000, becoming a part of the Kingdom of Hungary. With the formation of Austria-Hungary, they were brought together in one country. The Czech lands contained over half of the industrial development of all Austria-Hungary, and this, alongside the forced Magyarization of the Slovaks, led to people in both places agitating for independence.^[2]

These efforts were successful in 1918, when World War I came to an end. The Allies recognized their independence, and Czechoslovakia was born. The new country was widely successful, and at its height, it was the tenth most industrialized country on Earth. However, border tensions with Austria and Hungary remained unresolved, and the country was occupied and significantly reduced by the Nazis during World War II.

Following the war, aspirations for the country to be a bridge between East and West came to a bitter end with the communist coup of 1948. From then until 1990, the country was a satellite of the USSR, and communist ideology was implemented. Opposition to and deviation from Soviet control led to a government purge in 1952 and a clear break with Soviet policy in the Prague Spring of 1968, in which the Soviet military was forced to intervene. Further resistance came to a head in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which forced the collapse of the communist government. For the first time since 1938, Czechoslovakia was once again an independent country.

It wasn’t to last. Rising tensions between nationalists on both sides of the country drove a wedge through the government. In particular, many Slovaks thought the country was too heavily dominated by the Czechs, who made up over two thirds of the population and who held the national capital. On the other side, some Czechs in the government considered the poorer region of Slovakia a drain on the country’s resources. The prime ministers of both agreed to the country’s peaceful partition in 1992.

8 The Papal States

Starting in the 700s and continuing for over 1,000 years, the Pope exerted secular as well as religious influence over the people of Europe, particularly in Italy. For those who lived in the Papal States, whatever their religion, the Pope was their secular lord. However, the Pope’s actual influence was minimal, and the states were largely under the control of independent princes with their own territories. For the most part, the Papal States existed as a mechanism for protecting the Pope.^[3]

The Papal States really began to grow in influence during the Renaissance, particularly after the reign of Pope Julius II, who was nicknamed the Warrior Pope, from 1503 to 1513. In the 1800s, the Papal States became an increasingly old-fashioned and backward nation, refusing to acquiesce to many of the liberal and social reforms that swept Europe at the time. By 1870, the Papal States were the only country in Europe still continuing the practice of making young boys castrati, by castrating them before puberty so that they would retain their tenor singing voices.

Italian nationalism grew in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, and by the 1860s, few Italians opposed the Kingdom of Sardinia when it went on a military campaign to unite the peninsula. The newly formed Kingdom of Italy declared Rome its capital in 1861, but a French garrison protecting the city prevented them from conquering it. This garrison was recalled at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, and the city was conquered in 1870. Rather than surrender, though, the papacy insulated itself within the Vatican, and successive Italian leaders refused to conquer it. The standoff was finally resolved in the Lateran Treaty of 1929, in which the Papal States were formally abolished, and Italy recognized the Vatican City State.

7 East Germany

Following World War II, the UK, US, and USSR agreed to divide Germany and Berlin between them. Initially, this meant that Germany was divided into Soviet, US, UK, and French zones, but the British and American zones were merged in 1947. The French agreed to let their zone join the British and American zones in 1949, and the Federal Republic of Germany was formed.^[4]

Later that year, the Soviets ceded control of their zone to the German communist party, the SED. The Democratic Republic of Germany (known to the West as East Germany) was born. In the early days, the ruling German communist party often went against policy decided in Moscow. This sparked concern among Soviet leaders, so the party’s more moderate members were purged. From then on, the SED was a thoroughly communist party—sometimes even exceeding the government in Moscow. Strikingly, the SED refused to accept the liberalization policies of Gorbachev in the 1980s, sticking to an orthodox Marxist line right until the end.

Society in East Germany was highly controlled. The SED enforced strict censorship, and Marxism-Leninism was compulsory learning in schools. Though unemployment and homelessness were low, and state-funded benefits such as entertainment and health care were very affordable, if not outright free, the restrictions on everyday liberty and low income disparity led to many well-educated people—particularly university graduates—fleeing to the West. This “brain drain” became so acute that it was one of the main contributors to the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the East German border was heavily policed.

East Germany remained cut off from the West for nearly 30 years before popular resistance forced the communist government to allow an election. The first truly free elections in East Germany since 1932 took place in 1990, in which the pro-reunification Christian Democratic Union led a victorious coalition. The country officially dissolved itself and joined the Federal Republic of Germany shortly after, bringing East Germany to an end.

6 Yugoslavia

Though the concept of a united southern Slavic nation had existed since at least the 1600s, it was little more than a dream by the time it was suddenly created in the aftermath of World War I. Prior to the war, the nations of Yugoslavia had belonged to two old, powerful empires: Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Following the Treaty of Versailles, both of these empires were broken up, and the southern Slavs (consisting of more than 20 ethnic groups) were pushed together in a single state.^[5]

From the offset, the so-called “Versailles State” strained under the weight of nationalist tensions. Following political disorder, King Alexander seized power from the government in 1928 and pushed through a series of reforms aimed at uniting the country, including splitting the country into new provinces not based on historical borders and banning the use of non-Yugoslavian flags. The measures were widely unpopular, and Alexander was assassinated in 1934.

Yugoslavia had failed to find strong allies in the run-up to World War II and was invaded by Germany. The Germans split the country up, and the royals went into exile. By the time the country emerged from the occupation, nearly two million people had been killed in the unrest. The Nazis were eventually driven out by the communist-led Partisans, who aligned themselves with Moscow.

The country was thereafter dominated by Tito and his Partisans, who took the reins of power. In 1948, Yugoslavia officially broke its connections with Moscow. It became a core founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought to oppose both the communist East and US-led West. Tito granted the nations of Yugoslavia many freedoms, including their own supreme courts, parliaments, and leaders, in an effort to prevent nationalist tensions.

Tito held the country together through reputation and will, and with his death, the country began to unravel. A number of issues, including the potential for Serbian dominance, the ethnic makeup of Kosovo, and the status of minority ethnics living in different states, led to irreconcilable differences between Yugoslavia’s devolved governments. These came to a head shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the dominant communist party broke up. With the sudden lack of a federal government, these burning issues boiled over into outright conflict, leading to the brutal Yugoslav Wars.

5 The Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was one of the longest-lived empires in human history.^[6] First formed by seminomadic Turks in the 1300s, it dominated the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeastern Europe throughout the 1600s and 1700s. Its armies even reached the gates of Vienna in Austria. By the dawn of the 20th century, however, it was overextended, outdated, and struggling to control its hundreds of ethnic groups in an age of rising individual education and national identity.

The empire had been struggling to keep up with the other great powers of the globe since the 1800s but had been able to rely on its powerful alliances to maintain its position. In particular, the empire was able to defeat Russia in the Crimean War during the 1850s because of support from France and Britain. By 1900, however, the country was diplomatically isolated and very vulnerable. It looked toward the new state of Germany, very powerful but similarly isolated, as a way of forming a new bloc that could resist the Triple Entente. This bloc became known as the Central Powers.

Unfortunately, these two major factions found themselves at war in 1914, and by 1918, the Ottomans knew they were on the losing side. The empire was also struggling with rebellions and resistance in Arabia and had resorted to ethnically cleansing its Armenian and Greek regions to suppress resistance. Just as recently as 1909, the country had gone through a significant democratic reform that looked as though it would rejuvenate the state. By 1918, it was all but finished. The Allies officially partitioned the empire following World War I, leaving the empire with a much-reduced territory centered around modern-day Turkey. The death blow came from within Turkey itself, as the Young Turk movement pushed the sultanate out and declared Turkey a secular republic.

4 The USSR

In 1917, frustrated with the state of Russia and the slow pace of reform, a band of rebels set out to reshape the country. These were the Bolsheviks. Following an internal power struggle, they had taken control of Russia. Their influence extended to the surrounding states by 1922, and the Soviet Union was born.^[7] Founded as a communist state, the new government’s goal was to implement true equality for every man or woman, regardless of birth.

This dream began to founder shortly after its beginning with the death of its first leader, Vladimir Lenin, in 1924. Josef Stalin inherited the state. He was a man who many, Lenin included, considered to be dangerous both to communism and the USSR. Over the next three decades, fantastic achievements in industrialization, technology, and national identity were overshadowed by political crackdowns, extreme authoritarian control, and economic and organizational problems that ultimately led to a famine which killed millions of people. Stalin’s extreme interpretation of Marxism led to the birth of a state which could rightfully be considered one of the most influential, and controversial, in human history.

The era following Stalin’s rule was arguably the USSR’s most successful, a time when its technological achievements (particularly in the Space Race) reached their heights and when the country was shaking off its previous political restrictions and becoming more open to the world. Quality of life improved and led to something of a golden age which is viewed with nostalgia by some Russians today. This wasn’t to last, however, and the Union entered a period of stagnation in the years after Khrushchev’s departure in 1964. Facilitated by a growing desire for liberty among its people and accelerated by the USSR’s failure to keep up with the West economically, increasingly widespread political and economic crises led to the decision to partially liberalize the state. By 1991, however, the situation was no better, and one by one, all of its members declared independence.

3 Prussia

Prussia had its roots in the religious state established by the Teutonic Order in 1308.^[8] Following their conquest of the pagans who inhabited Prussia, this new German state attracted many Polish and German immigrants—so many, in fact, that they had all but displaced the original Old Prussians within a few decades. The Teutonic Order ultimately collapsed, and Prussia was absorbed by Poland around 1410.

The region remained dominated by German settlers, however, and it was eventually inherited by the leader of Brandenburg, Frederick I. While he was still technically a Polish vassal in Prussia and a German vassal in Brandenburg, Frederick began building his own state out of his possessions, including his own bureaucracy. Crucially, he established a powerful and very disciplined army, which Prussia later became famous for. Following the Thirty Years’ War, Prussia and Brandenburg became an independent state in 1657. From then on, it was one of the great powers of Europe, if not the world, victorious in wars throughout the 1700s and going on to decide the results of the Napoleonic Wars, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War, each of which shaped the borders and history of continental Europe. Prussia reached the height of its power in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. It used its influence to form first the North German Confederation and then the German Empire in 1871. It was the largest state in the new country, covering around half of Germany’s total area.

Prussia was always heavily conservative, but it became a bastion of democracy and left-wing thinking after Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated in 1918. Fears that the Prussian state could be used to launch a communist uprising led Chancellor Von Papen, under the influence of Hitler, to launch a coup, expelling the Prussian government and seizing it for the Reich. Hitler’s eventual rise to power six months later was made much easier by his possession of Prussian resources. Following World War II, Prussia was abolished for good in 1947 as one of the Allies’ war demands.

2 The Kingdom Of The Two Sicilies

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies existed in various forms from the Early Middle Ages to 1860, sometimes as one kingdom, sometimes as two—Sicily and Naples.^[9] For most of its history, it was tied to the royal families of Spain and Aragon, who often gave the kingdom to their heirs or close relatives. The two kingdoms of Sicily and Naples were officially united in 1816 as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under Ferdinand I, after a brief time as the Parthenopaean Republic under Napoleon.

For the majority of its existence, the Two Sicilies was a heavily agricultural country in which the Church had an enormous amount of influence—owning up to half of the country’s total land. The country did have a burgeoning industrial sector, however, particularly in the areas of arms manufacturing and processed foods. When the Italian Unification came, it hit Two Sicilies hard: The combination of northern migration and neglect by the new government led to the widespread collapse of industrial development.

The absolute monarch style of the Bourbon dynasty was never popular, and there were three popular uprisings against the monarchs between 1800 and 1848, when Sicily became independent for over a year. The advanced constitution it adopted, with dramatic liberal reforms and a plan for a united Italy, was a hint of what was to come in 1860, when Garibaldi and his volunteers invaded from Sardinia and conquered the kingdom, with help from Britain. Two Sicilies was absorbed by the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Despite its relatively short history, it was the home of many firsts, including the first railway in Italy, the first volcano observatory in the world, and the first suspension bridge in continental Europe.

1 The United States Of The Ionian Islands

The United States of the Ionian Islands was a tiny country compared with the others on this list, but it was important in the history of Greece because it was, when it was created in 1815, the first time any Greeks had governed themselves in 400 years.^[10]

The independence of the Ionian Isles stretched back to 1800, when the semi-independent Septinsular Republic was created under the governance of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The islands were seized by the French in 1807 and then made a protectorate of Britain in 1815 at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. While the islands were technically a satellite of the United Kingdom, they were self-governing and had their own senate. The senate was made up of elected representatives from each of the seven islands of the republic. With support from the British government, the islands’ infrastructure developed quickly, with new road links being built alongside new power plants, a palace, an aqueduct, and a university—most of which were dismantled or fell into disrepair when the islands merged with Greece.

Despite an anti-British riot which gripped the country during the year of European unrest in 1848, relations between the Ionian Isles and Britain were largely positive. With the crowning of a new Greek king in 1864, the British were keen to bolster his reign and ceded the islands to him, bringing the republic’s history to an end.

Over the years, television broadcasting has proved vital across the globe. Millions of people watch television daily. The evolution of television made it the primary source of information and entertainment for everyone worldwide. Information and entertainment are pretty much what modern-day society is all about. Even with the rise of social media, television broadcasting keeps everyone up to date on the latest news, weather, and other important information in our daily lives. There is always something new to be informed on through the news, documentaries, and even commercials. Sports, movies, and comedy-featured content also serve as entertainment avenues to television viewers.

All this has been made possible with the emergence of various television channels throughout the years. Some of these channels remained in existence for decades, with quite a few rebranded over time. Unfortunately, others have also been brutally closed down or replaced by other television channels, having existed for a limited time. This list accounts for ten popular television channels that impacted television broadcasting—whether good or bad—even after being closed down.

Related: Top 10 Truly Terrible Television Series

10 Setanta Sports Channel, UK

Most English Premier League fans may very much recall Setanta Sports. The sports channel, founded in the United Kingdom, was bought by Eircom Limited (EIR) in 1992. Eircom was a telecommunication company based in Ireland that purchased the Setanta Sports channel to bring Irish sports to fans worldwide. The channel expanded to have operations all over the United Kingdom and was very popular by the end of 1998.

With the acquisition of Setanta, Eircom was able to expand its television coverage to more customers. Setanta acquired broadcast rights to American golf, English rugby union, boxing, and football. Setanta also made a big step in having the rights to the Scottish Premier League in 2004 and 46 Premier League matches from 2007 to 2010.

The channel appeared to be expanding rapidly despite facing fierce competition with Sky Sports during that period. However, the channel was bound to face problems because it borrowed millions of pounds to acquire the rights to particular sports matches. The UK-based company was on the verge of collapse, with a debt of around £250 million. Setanta was forced into bankruptcy in 2009 after failing to make payments for television rights, owing the English Premier League £30 million. As a result, several British football clubs faced financial difficulties during the 2009/10 season. The channel had to close down as it accumulated too much debt.

After Discovery purchased the Asian version of the channel, Setanta is still active in Eurasia. All other international versions of the television channel, including the UK-based ones, were purchased by various media companies. Sky Sports, however, continued to expand its brand and is now considered one of the best sports media outlets worldwide.^[1]

Despite Setanta’s problems, it brought joy to football fans all over the United Kingdom.

9 The Comedy Channel & HA!

Although the world can never have enough laughter, it does not mean it requires two comedy channels. There were two comedy networks in 1989, which merged in April 1991. Home Box Office attempted to bring the chuckles 24 hours a day with the Comedy Channel, whiles Viacom had a similar idea, launching HA! about five months later in April 1991. Finally, both channels merged to form Comedy Central.

Before the channels merged, the Comedy Channel focused on stand-up comedy specials and clips from the classic comedy of feature movies. However, HA! produced content centered on acquired off-network situation comedies.

Both channels could not develop significantly during their years together, with only roughly seven million members apiece. According to the executives from both industries, the reluctance of cable system operators to take sides in a war between two industry giants was the reason for both channels not developing. Economically, the 50-50 marriage provided comedy television a 15 million-subscriber pool, nearly double the average starting capital. The merged television channels changed to Comedy Central, which is currently active and very popular among television viewers in the United States.^[2]

8 HawkVision

HawkVision was a United States television channel that came to light in 1992. It was a short-lived television subscription service founded by Bill Wirtz, owner of the Chicago Blackhawks. The ice-hockey team never had their home games televised after the 1992 National Hockey League season as the Blackhawks owner believed broadcasting the home games would not be fair to season ticket holders.

Bill Wirtz decided to cancel all traditional broadcasting offers from various television channels and offer HawkVision as a television subscription service. The sole purpose for the existence of the HawkVision channel was to broadcast Blackhawks games from their Chicago stadium to the homes of fans for a fee of up to $19.95 per game. Wirtz kept HawkVision going after the Stanley Cup playoff games by offering access to regular-season home games for the next two seasons for a fee of $29.99 per month. The fans reacted angrily to the increase in price. It was unlikely anyone was going to pay that amount. The HawkVision television channel proved unprofitable after one season, as ticket sales figures dropped massively. Bill Wirtz passed on in 2007, which saw the home game television restriction removed.^[3]

7 ITV Play

ITV Play was a British 24-hour participation television station that aired for a brief time. The channel lasted less than a year due to the infamous premium rate phone-in scandal that ruined it. When it was operating, it ran shows like The Common Room, The Debbie King Show, and the popular quiz show, Quizmania.

The television channel faced legal issues for charging people a lot of money to participate in the contests with very slim odds of winning. ITV set aside £5 million in its half-year results to deal with the financial fallout from the premium-rate phone-in controversy. The business had to pay for the Deloitte report and other inquiries into its phone-ins. As a result, the broadcaster announced in 2007 that it had set aside £18 million to cover the incident.

After that, all text and interactive voting on shows came to a close. Phone-in votings on the X-Factor show also ceased. ITV said on March 5, 2007, that all premium-rate phone competitions and quizzes, as well as the ITV Play channel, would be suspended. The ITV play channel closed down in the early hours of March 6, 2007.^[4]

6 Men & Motors

Men & Motors was a lifestyle television channel in the United Kingdom. The channel, founded in 1996, focused solely on men who enjoy motors and ladies. Having a show full of cars and women back in the day was bound to draw millions of viewers. Men and Motors had numerous car content shows, fueled action movies, adult cartoons, and plenty of footage of scantily clad women.

Unfortunately, the lifestyle channel aired for less than a year on Freeview. The channel stopped broadcasting on digital terrestrial television to make way for ITV to establish ITV Play. Men & Motors was then only available on satellite and cable television because of the restricted bandwidth on the platform and a wish to retain the ITV family.

The channel was re-launched in 2012. Shane Lynch and Torie Campbell were the new hosts. A new revenue stream opened up for One Media, which purchased the rights to Men & Motors from Granada Television Products and ITV Digital Channels. The new channel has thrived as a YouTube offering, with 134 million minutes of viewing in 2020. It airs the best shows from the extensive archives in a new on-demand format.^[]

You wouldn’t guess by looking at it now, but the Men & Motors channel was a force to be reckoned with when it was active.

5 Dumont Network

Dumont was one of the first major television and media networks in the United States. Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Dumont, and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) dominated television in the United States during the 1940s. During the war, most television channels had sporadic television content. Dumont, on the other hand, devised a deal for advertisers. The network ran a midweek special, where sponsors and advertisers could use the Dumont labs for commercial purposes. Dumont Network was very ambitious compared to the other two major television networks. Every show took place inside the Dumont building, owned solely by the Dumont Corporation. The Honeymooners was among the show’s sketches, inspiring the popular CBS sitcom, Gleason.

Since Dumont lacked the financial resources of NBC and CBS, the network trailed behind those two in terms of star power and production quality after the 1940s. Dumont was placed fourth in the Nielsen ratings after American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and United Paramount Theaters merged in 1953. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) limited the number of television stations an organization could possess and made it difficult for Dumont to expand the network. Dumont was on the verge of purchasing ABC and becoming the largest station in the United States until the FCC disapproved of the purchase. ABC, however, received financing from Paramount. Dumont converted to Ultra High-Frequency (UHF) broadcasts to save money. Unfortunately, no one liked UHF transmissions in the 1950s, resulting in the closedown of the channel.

The high cost of transmitting and the limit imposed by the FCC massively impacted Dumont Network and other television channels across the United States during the 1950s.^[6]

4 Nuts TV

Television nostalgia buffs may recall a short-lived television channel in the United Kingdom that aired various fun and bizarre content. Nuts TV was a British television cannel that debuted in 2007. Unlike other failed stations, Nuts TV was available on the Freeview network. Despite promising a never-ending parade of bizarre content, it was unable to attract viewers. Nuts TV had celebrity hosts, Lucy Pinder and comedian Dan Wright hosting the shows on the channel. The evening content always had the same pattern. Each night began with news, followed by sports, girls, and sex-related content.

It was barely on our screens for two years, which was a shame. The channel presented a wide range of unique and fast-paced comedies. It also featured a bizarre segment in which Lucy Pinder, the famous model, read famous works of “literature” while dressed in lingerie. The channel aired 20 hours of live television every week on Freeview channel 42.

The Cable News Network (CNN) replaced Nuts TV. It was scheduled to premiere on Freeview in January 2009, pending approval from Digital Television Multiplex Operators Limited, which oversaw all Freeview channels. Unfortunately, the Nuts television channel became inactive in 2009, followed by the Nuts magazine five years later.^[7]

3 The Cable Music Channel

The Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) owned the Cable Music Channel (CMC), a short-lived American cable channel. Ted Turner founded the all-music video channel, which debuted in 1984. With the Satellite News Channel going up against CNN back in the day, Ted turner wanted to give MTV a run for its money and music. But not all of his ideas turned out to be successful. While MTV had Madonna acting like a virgin on live television, CMC took a family-oriented approach. “I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman was the first video to air on CMC. Turner debuted the music channel with much excitement after his music video show, Night Tracks. However, with MTV still striving to expand its distribution, there was no room for a second music video network on cable systems.

Ted Turner decided to shut down the business after a month. The Cable Music Channel was sold to MTV’s parent company because it lacked the cable providers, videos, and viewership to compete with the all-music channel. The Cable Music Channel aired from October to November 1984. MTV, however, is now one of the leading entertainment channels worldwide^[8]

2 Sumo TV

Imagine a world where you could create a platform and have users provide all of the content, such a bizarre world. Sumo TV debuted in 2006, claiming to be the first user-content television channel. Unfortunately, most people in 2006 did not have access to high-quality cameras or widespread internet access. This idea was quite astonishing because YouTube had only recently launched. But having a user-generated format could never work on broadcast television. It was one of the main reasons why Sumo TV failed.

Unsurprisingly, the channel faced a problem with the Office of Communications (Ofcom)—the British version of the FCC—for imposing broadcast regulations on the people who sent the clips. After ruling against two Sumo TV clips, Ofcom cautioned broadcasters about user-generated content.

Ofcom was concerned about the responsibility placed on creators for adhering to the Sumo network broadcasting code on the user-generated clips rather than the network performing adequate checks themselves. The channel officially closed down in 2012 and was replaced by the Horror Channel.^[9]

1 National Educational Television

National Educational Television (NET) was an educational and public television network created in early 1952. The Ford Foundation previously owned it, and it was later co-owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. From 1952 to 1972, the NET collection contained a lot of television programs on the humanities, public affairs, social issues, science, and education from non-commercial TV stations and producers. The channel aired documentaries and discussions on the black freedom struggle, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, poverty, and student activism.

In 1963, NET decided to show documentaries that addressed issues regarding poverty and racism. The perceived liberal bias from the shows aired on the channel made it very unpopular with viewers. The Ford Foundation and the government decided to cease funding the television channel for continuously broadcasting such content. Within a year, the channel had lost so much money that it had to close down.

In 1970, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) replaced the educational channel, which initially began operations in 1969. The NET’s refusal to stop airing the critically acclaimed but contentious documentaries led to its closure by both Ford and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1970.^[10]

If you have a bucket list of travel destinations you really want to visit, it’s probably a good idea to do it as soon as possible. Quite a few natural and cultural tourist spots from history are now permanently lost to time, thanks to factors like wars, natural disasters, and economic recessions. 

10. Wawona Tree, USA

Estimated to be over 2,100 years old at the time it fell, the Wawona Tree was a giant sequoia tree in California’s Yosemite National Park. It was perhaps the most famous tree in the region, thanks to a tunnel cut through its trunk back in 1881, turning it into a popular tourist destination. 

The Wawona Tree fell during a winter storm in 1969, after years of being weakened by reasons like heavy snow, wet soil, and disease. Despite standing for 88 years, the tree was eventually no longer able to support its own weight due to the heavy snowfall and strong winds of the winters. The tunnel didn’t help, either, as trees generally don’t do well with gaping holes in their trunks. When it fell, the Wawona tree was reportedly 234 feet tall, with a total base diameter of about 26 feet. 

9. Guaira Falls, Brazil And Paraguay

The Saltos del Guairá, also known as Guairá Falls, was often called one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world. Located on the Paraná River along the border of Brazil and Paraguay, it was also one of the largest waterfalls in the world, with a drop height of about 375 feet and twice the flow rate of Niagara falls. 

Guairá Falls were destroyed in 1982, when the Itaipu Dam was built on the river and the falls had to be flooded to make way for a reservoir. The rock face of the falls was later destroyed with dynamite to make navigation easier on the new river. A joint project between Brazil and Paraguay, the construction of the dam caused environmental damage and mass relocation of people living near the shore. On the other hand, the Itaipu Dam is now one of the largest dams in the world, producing about 75% of Paraguay’s electricity and about 20% of Brazil’s. 

8. Sutro Baths, USA

Sutro Baths was a large saltwater swimming pool complex in San Francisco, California. Built in 1894 by a former mayor of the city – Adolph Sutro – it was opened to the public in 1896, and soon became a landmark destination for the residents of the city. At its peak, the Sutro complex could hold up to 10,000 people, with a number of popular features like natural rock formations, slides, springboards, an ice rink, and other water-based attractions. 

Like a lot of businesses around the world, Sutro Baths fell into disuse some time during the economic depression of the 1920s and ’30s. It was hit by a number of factors, like the sudden rise of new entertainment options like cinema, changing public tastes, and the high cost of maintaining such a large facility. A 1966 fire destroyed what was left of the abandoned complex, though one can still visit some of its ruins at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the San Francisco Bay. 

7. Pink And White Terraces, New Zealand

The pink and white terraces of New Zealand were natural wonders that existed until the late 19th century. They were a series of hot springs and geysers with various layers of silica deposited over time, creating large, multi-colored terraces on the shores of Lake Rotomahana in northern New Zealand. The terraces were first discovered by the native Maori people, who used them for bathing and healing purposes. They were estimated to be over 1,000 years old, and were a particularly popular tourist attraction around the world in the early 1800s.

Often considered one of the natural wonders of the world, the pink and white terraces remained popular until 1886, when the eruption of Mount Tarawera nearby dumped a huge amount of ash and debris on top of the terraces, permanently burying them underneath. While the region is still dotted with interesting features like geysers and fumaroles, the famous pink and white terraces of Lake Rotomahana now only exist in photographs and old travel accounts.

6. The Mausoleum At Halicarnassus, Turkey

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus was a grand tomb in Halicarnassus – an ancient Greek city in modern-day Bodrum, Turkey. It was one of the most famous buildings of antiquity, built in the fourth century BC in the honor of Mausolus, the ruler of Caria, and his wife, Artemisia. It was designed by Greek architects Satyros and Pythius of Priene, and was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world due to its impressive architecture and design. 

The mausoleum stood for many centuries, until a series of earthquakes presumably destroyed it some time between the 12th and 15th centuries. Today, only a few fragments and ruins of the structure remain, like the four famous horse statues that once stood at the corners of the structure’s roof. Even after its destruction, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus remained a symbol of ancient-Greek artistic and architectural excellence, as its design has since inspired many buildings and other structures around the world. 

5. Original Penn Station, USA

The original Penn Station in midtown Manhattan was opened to the public in 1910. Designed by architect Charles McKim, it was an imposing Beaux-Arts structure with a 150-feet vaulted ceiling, a sweeping marble staircase, and ancient-Greek Doric columns. The station also housed a vast waiting room, a ticketing hall, and a vast network of underground tunnels and platforms that served more than 100 million passengers each year at its peak in 1945. 

While its grandeur and beauty made it an important architectural symbol of New York City, the original Penn Station was eventually demolished in 1963 due to financial problems. A new station was built in its place, along with a new complex called the Madison Square Garden, which is still used as a high-rise office and sports complex today. The new station still uses many of the features of the old one, including old tracks, tunnels, and platforms.

4. Disney’s River Country Water Park, USA

River Country was a water park in the Walt Disney World Resort, Florida. Opened in 1976, it was one of the first few parks themed around old-fashioned swimming holes, along with a slew of other attractions that soon turned it into a popular tourist spot. Some of the more popular rides at the park included the Whoop ‘n’ Holler water slide, the Barrel Bridge rope swing, and the Bay Cove swimming area. 

That would last until 2001, when the Disney River Country water park permanently shut its doors for visitors after about 25 years in operation. The reasons for the closure were never officially disclosed, but it’s widely believed to have been due to declining attendance and safety concerns. A slew of accidents during its last few years didn’t help, either. Today, the park sits abandoned and overgrown, with most of its rides and attractions left to decay and rust. 

3. The New York Hippodrome, USA

The Hippodrome was a massive theater on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Designed by architects Frederick Thompson and J. H. Morgan, it opened to the public in 1905, and quickly turned into an iconic cultural and tourist landmark of the city. Apart from its famous dome, the theater was known for its massive, 100-feet-wide stage, with a total seating capacity of about 5,200 people, as well as its state-of-the-art lighting and sound effects. At its peak, the Hippodrome hosted a variety of entertainment shows, including circuses, operas, vaudeville shows, and theatrical productions. 

Despite its importance as a cultural landmark, however, the New York Hippodrome was ultimately demolished in 1939, largely due to the economic slowdown caused by the Great Depression. The site remained vacant until 1952, when an office building and parking garage called the Hippodrome Center were built in its place. 

2. Love Locks Bridge, France

Pont des Arts, also called the ‘love locks’ bridge back when it existed, was a pedestrian bridge over the Seine River in Paris, France. It was famous for the thousands of padlocks attached to its railings by couples from around the world, turning it into a symbol of everlasting love for visiting tourists. 

As one would expect, the locks soon became a safety hazard for the residents of the city and tourists alike, as their ever-increasing weight caused lasting damage to the structural integrity of the bridge. The local movement to remove the locks gained traction in 2014, when a section of the railing collapsed due to the weight of the locks, resulting in widespread protests and demands to restore the bridge to its original condition. The locks were finally removed by the authorities in 2015, replacing them with glass panels for unobstructed views of the Seine and other Parisian landmarks. 

1. Jonah’s Tomb, Iraq

Jonah’s tomb, also known as Nebi Yunis, was a holy site located in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq. Believed to be the final resting place of the biblical prophet Jonah, who is revered in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the tomb was believed to have been built in the eighth century BC. Apart from being an important pilgrimage site for tourists from around the world for centuries, Jonah’s Tomb was also a symbol of the region’s cultural and religious diversity.

Sadly, the tomb was destroyed in July 2014, when ISIS captured Mosul and destroyed much of the cultural heritage of the city, as a part of its larger campaign to remove all traces of religious and historical diversity in the areas under its control. The destruction caused global outrage, and while many efforts have been made to rebuild the tomb in the years since, progress has been slow due to the ongoing conflict in the region.

Our visual panoramas of our countries’ and territories’ terrains and vistas shape our sense of belonging, yet the world is always transforming. Tectonic activity, air currents, moisture, heat, and people all work together to reshape what we accept as familiar terrain, stripping away immense ravines, creating new land with steaming molten rock, and moving the paths of great river systems.

Large numbers of famous attractions all around the world have dramatically changed shape—or, worse, vanished—over the last five decades. The famous Darwin’s Arch in the Galápagos Islands disintegrated into the ocean in 2021, joining a multitude of other natural wonders that have been lost to time. Serving as a reminder that our world is constantly changing, here are a few of the world’s natural wonders that have been lost forever.

Related: 10 Beautiful And Bizarre Natural Wonders

10 Chacaltaya Glacier, Bolivia

Glaciers all over the world have shrunk rapidly in recent years, with several disappearing completely. In South America, climate change, specifically increased temperatures, steadily increasing humidity, and changes in rainfall patterns, are being blamed for the extremely rapid demise of the Andean glaciers. In the tropical Andes region, the average annual temperatures have been steadily rising at a rate of 0.33°C (0.6°F) every ten years since the 1990s. The accompanying high humidity levels also significantly contribute to the reduction of the Andean glaciers by causing the ice to melt instead of being turned into vapor via a process scientists call sublimation.

The Chacaltaya glacier, located about 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the northeast of La Paz, managed to lose over 60% of its mass from the 1940s to the 1980s and over 90% at the turn of the century. At that point, scientists predicted that the Chacaltaya glacier could very well disappear completely by 2015. However, rapid temperature increases due to global warming hastened the process, and the glacier vanished in 2009, leaving the slopes once overwhelmed with skiers dry and empty.^[1]

9 Azure Window, Malta

In Malta, the Azure Window was carved into Gozo Island’s limestone cliffs over hundreds of years. It withstood thousands of storms during its existence, but on March 8, 2017, it was pummelled into the sea forever during the worst storm of the season. Before its collapse, the instantly recognizable site in Dwejra Bay was one of Malta’s most popular tourist spots. In fact, most of us saw it during the Game of Thrones series.

However, four years later, it seems quite possible that the Maltese people’s shared broken heart might very well soon be patched up. The renowned architect Svetozar Andreev, in collaboration with the designer Elena Britanishskaya, has created a phenomenal concept for the restoration of this long-time historical landmark in the form of a massive artwork. The two Russian artists have already submitted the conceptual design to the relevant authorities. The remarkable project has already crept into the hearts of the locals who refer to it as the “The Heart of Malta.”^[2]

8 Hillary Step on Mount Everest, Nepal

Since the day during 2017 when climbers announced that the “Hillary Step” vanished, the status of the rocky outcrop, christened after Everest’s famous summiteer Sir Edmund Hillary, has been a source of considerable controversy. Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay successfully reached the summit after taking the steep step to the top, becoming the first climbers in our known history to reach the summit in 1953. After that first prolific climb, all climbers attempting to summit by way of the southern route have been using ropes to best the fearsome challenge before they reach the top, where they have to swing one leg over the “saddle” to get to the other side.

Experts believe that a 2015 earthquake may have dislodged the vertical outcropping. However, the Nepalese government maintains that it is just buried in snow—but they have admitted that all guides have been forbidden from discussing the Hillary Step due to the matter’s sensitive nature. As of 2017, numerous before and after photographs showing an obvious lack of the rocky protrusion have circulated. Despite the government’s claims, climbers have already started to refer to the Hillary staircase rather than the Hillary step when discussing the area.^[3]

7 Slims River, Canada

In the early summer of 2017, an entire river in the Yukon territory of Canada vanished within a mere four days. The trigger to the event was the rapid retreat of the enormous Kaskawulsh Glacier, which redirected the meltwater from the Slims River toward another river. According to scientists, the event marked the first incidence of “river piracy” in contemporary times. These shifts are also effectively reducing the size of Kluane Lake, the Yukon’s largest lake.

The Slims River’s demise has had an immediate and profound influence on the environment, disbursing fish stocks, completely changing the composition of neighboring lakes, and causing a rash of novel dust storms to hit the province. Many other glacial-fed rivers in the area, such as those that provide water and hydroelectric power to higher populated areas, may also be impacted. Geologists describe it as a previously unseen side-effect of global warming. This could also come to occur at other glacial-fed rivers throughout the world, placing river-dependent communities and environments at grave risk moving forward.^[4]

6 Sequoia Tunnel Tree, California

The glorious Pioneer Cabin “tunnel tree” in Calaveras Big Trees State Park in California was one of several colossal trees cut in the 1800s to boost California’s tourist industry. By the time it toppled over in 2017, it was California’s last giant sequoia featuring a drive-through arched doorway in its trunk. Although the true age of the Pioneer Cabin tree is unknown, several Sequoia trees within the area are well over 1,000 years old. And even older trees (dating back more than 3,000 years) have been discovered in nearby Yosemite National Park.

Only a few Sequoias were “tunneled-through” to serve the tourism purpose, the most famous of which was Yosemite’s Wawona Tree, estimated to have been around 2,100 years old when a storm brought it down in 1969. Today, the only lingering sequoia tree tunnels that can be found are either made up of stacked logs or trees that have long since died.

However, some drive-through “tunnel-trees” still exist. You can still visit three coastal Redwood trees (which are even longer but slimmer than the Sequoias) with tunnels cut through them. Although all three are owned by private companies, according to the Forest Service, they still allow cars to pass through and make for an incredible photo opportunity should anyone be passing through Northern California.^[5]

5 God’s Finger, Spain

The symbol of Gran Canaria, El Dedo de Dios, also known as “God’s Finger,” used to be a 98-foot-tall rock formation to the north of Gran Canaria, an island in the chain that makes up the Canary Islands. The rock’s distinct shape has inspired numerous artists over the years, and many believe that the famous writer Domingo Doreste was the first to pen its name.

In November 2005, tropical storm Delta created havoc all along the coastline, and the ensuing immense waves finally toppled the top part of the 300,000-year-old rock feature. After “God’s Finger” was destroyed, a team of experts investigated the possibility of rebuilding the famous landmark. However, the majority advised against its restoration and outlined a plan to conserve what remained of the iconic rock. Today what remains of the rocky feature is known as Roque Partido. Although the landscape has lost a little bit of its magic, it is still one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.^[6]

4 Old Man of the Mountain, New Hampshire

The legendary granite rock face of New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain collapsed in 2003. The 6,530 metric ton angular rocky outcrop stood nearly 45 feet tall and 30 feet wide on a mountainside in a climate prone to freeze-thaw corrosion. As a result, it was widely anticipated that the state emblem, also known as the Great Stone Face, would eventually collapse. Several previous efforts to preserve the natural wonder had been made beginning from the early 1900s. However, the news of the Old Man’s demise still surprised many geologists.

As with many of the other lost natural wonders on our list, local residents wished to reconstruct the lost monument. Arguments against such a project, such as the remaining rock mass’s volatility, the threat to workers, and the potential for environmental harm, eventually put an end to any such plans. Instead, the Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund spearheaded a new project to honor the Old Man of the Mountain. If you go to the spot today, you’ll find yourself in a plaza with special viewers or profilers that create a perfect optical illusion of the mountain’s former rockface.^[7]

3 The Aral Sea, Central Asia

The Aral Sea used to be among the five largest landlocked stretches of water in the world. Today its shallow remains can be found in Central Asia’s climatically hostile geographical area, not far from the Caspian Sea. The disappearance of the Aral Sea is of keen importance and rising concern to researchers due to the enormous reduction in its surface area, which began in the second half of the twentieth century and has continued to this day. The redirection of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya river systems for irrigation purposes when the area was under Soviet control was pretty much exclusively responsible for this change, as both were primary contributors to inflowing water to the Aral Sea.

By 1989, the Aral Sea had shrunk into two distinct bodies of water, the “Lesser Sea” in the north and the “Greater Sea” in the south, with salinities nearly three times higher than in the early 1960s. By the end of the last century, the Aral Sea had disintegrated into three different lakes: a long, slender western lake, a larger, wider eastern lake, and a small remnant of the Lesser Sea to the north. NASA satellite images from 2014 confirmed that the Aral Sea’s eastern lake had disappeared completely. Today, the eastern basin has been renamed the Aralkum Desert. The disappearance of the Aral Sea has been dubbed “one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.”^[8]

2 Valley of Geysers, Russia

The Valley of Geysers in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula used to be the world’s second-largest concentration of natural geysers—the first being Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. About 90 geysers could be found in the 6-km-long (3.7-mile) basin. Tragically, the Valley of Geysers was struck by a massive landslide in 2007. A mudslide containing snow, water, stones, and shards of rock swept down at 20-25 miles per hour, engulfing everything in its wake. The mass flooded the river and produced a dam, consuming the Valley of Geysers’ most spectacular features: boiling springs, thermal fields, and waterfalls.

The water eventually receded over the next few months, but the landscape was irrevocably altered: a new geyser, Mladenec, emerged, and a few ancient geysers, notably Pervenets geyser, were submerged by the newborn Geysernaya Lake, which came into being after the landslide. Luckily, the Valley of Geysers had a surprise in store. Six years after the catastrophe, it began to heal itself. The water levels of Lake Geysernaya started dropping in 2013, allowing previously undiscovered geysers to erupt. Even though it’s improbable that the area will revert to its pre-2007 beauty, it’s far too early to abandon its charms.^[9]

1 Ténéré Tree, Niger

For hundreds of generations, a single acacia tree thrived amid the sands of Africa’s Sahara desert. The lonely tree provided shade for years for all its weary visitors. But it also offered so much more. It functioned not only as a landmark along a lengthy trade route through the desolate countryside but also as a testament to life’s tenacity, as it was the only tree that could be found for 250 miles. In the 1930s, European military campaigners who came across the tree in the wilderness dubbed it L’Arbre du Ténéré (The Tree of Tenere), and its placement on cartographers’ charts highlighted the tree’s exceptional peculiarity as the world’s most secluded tree.

The loneliest tree in the world met its end in 1973, when a truck driver traveling along the ancient caravan route smashed into the tree, tearing its trunk into two. In the blink of an eye, a solitary careless deed terminated a connection to a history that was so firmly ingrained in the desert sands and the ideology of generation after generation who had come to deeply love and treasure it. The truck driver, who has never been publicly identified or named, was rumored to have been intoxicated when the accident occurred.^[10]

There are plenty of once-popular dishes from around the world that fell out of favor, but then there are those that you can’t eat — ever. This can happen for various reasons, including a business going belly up or a lawsuit resulting in a discontinued product.

Whatever the reason, there’s a chance you might have enjoyed these delicious treats once in your life but can’t find them any longer. They’ve gone the way of the Dodo, and while some may return, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get to eat these ten once-popular foods ever again!

10 Unfortunate Deaths Caused By Food

10 Jell-O Pudding Pops

Back in the 1980s, you couldn’t watch a show on television without seeing an ad for Jell-O Pudding Pops. They were ubiquitous, and thanks to the popularity of its spokesperson, Bill Cosby, they appealed to kids and parents alike.

Putting aside what we now know about Cosby, the treats he sold to the masses were delicious and popular. Still, they disappeared in the 1990s due to lagging sales. This is simply a case of a snack losing money, so the company stopped producing them… at least, for a while.

In 2004, General Foods, the company that owns Jell-O, licensed Pudding Pops’ name to Popsicle, which isn’t simply the name of a frozen treat; it’s also a company. Popsicle began producing them after acquiring the license, but they were made using a different recipe and popsicle molds.

Popsicle’s decision to use its own molds and different recipe made the new Pudding Pops look like a cheap imitation. They never sold well, and the company discontinued them. You can still buy the original Pudding Pop mold and follow a recipe if you wanted to make your own, so this is a treat that can live again.

9 McDonald’s Happy Meal Cookies

These days, if you want to get cookies at a McDonald’s, they have chewy and delicious chocolate chip cookies available, but it wasn’t always like that. For decades, the only cookies you could get at McDonald’s came in a Happy Meal, and they were very different.

Kids loved to eat them, and they came in either animal crackers in the shape of McDonald’s characters or chocolate chip. Most kids would probably prefer them to what they offer now (apple slices). The cookies were first introduced back in 1974, with the animal cracker version arriving first.

The chocolate chip cookies came in a box, and they were small, hard, and overly processed. Still, people remember them fondly, and McDonald’s receives requests all the time, asking for the recipe or for the company to reintroduce them.

People occasionally sell packs of them online, but they haven’t been produced in over 20 years, so buy and eat at your own risk! While the popular fast-food chain still makes a ton of treats, they have moved away from the overly processed fare that helped build their popularity in the previous century.

8 Sunny D

You can still buy a drink called Sunny D these days, but it’s completely different now than it was decades earlier. It launched in 1963 as Sunny Delight, but most kids who grew up in the ’90s know it simply as Sunny D, thanks to the plethora of commercials throughout the decade.

The drink came with a ton of controversies due to how it was marketed. It was sold as an alternative to orange juice despite being an orange-colored soft drink without any juice in it at all. As parents began paying attention to ingredients, sales plummeted, and the negative press didn’t help.

A four-year-old girl’s skin turned yellow after drinking 1.5 liters of the stuff every day. That’s not an urban legend — it really did happen, thanks to the beta-carotene in the drink. Poor publicity and concerns in the UK and elsewhere drastically impacted sales.

Sunny Delight Beverages ultimately had to reformulate the drink, bringing its fruit content from 0% to 70%, but the costs were too high. These days, Sunny D contains less than 2% fruit juice and comes in various flavors, but it’s nothing like the original.

7 Candy Cigarettes

Candy cigarettes were first introduced in the late 19th century. They were made of either chocolate, bubblegum, or chalky sugar, and kids loved them. They were marketed as edible cigarettes and often came packaged in a box that looked exactly like a pack of cigarettes.

The problem with candy cigarettes isn’t their ingredients or anything like that; it’s how they were marketed and sold. For most of the 20th century, parents complained about them, believing they desensitized children to smoking.

This led to the assumption that consumption of candy cigarettes led to people smoking later in life. As it happens, several studies have suggested this to be true, and as a result, candy cigarettes are a lot harder to find these days than they were in the past.

One of the earliest victims of cancel culture, candy cigarettes are banned in several countries, including the UK, Spain, Brazil, and many more. They are still made, but they must be marketed as bubble gum or candy sticks, removing the word “cigarette” from all packaging (which still looks like a pack of smokes). This makes them available in some places, much to the chagrin of culturephobes.

6 Life Savers Holes

Life Savers candy has been around since 1912, and for most of the candy’s history, it came in the shape of a ring-style life preserver, hence the name. In 1990, a new product was introduced, and through a rather brilliant marketing strategy, Life Savers Holes were born.

Like donut holes, Life Savers Holes were marketed as that missing bit from the candy’s middle. They were essentially smaller pieces of the same candy the company had always sold. It was a way of selling more of the same to the consumer, and it worked… at first.

The candies came in a plastic tube with a flip-top plastic cap that could easily break apart. This created a potential choking hazard to anyone who unwittingly threw the cap into their mouths along with some candy, and RJR Nabisco issued a voluntary recall after removing them from the shelves.

They did return with updated packaging a few months later, but they didn’t remain for long. Ultimately, they proved to be little more than a novelty, and the public grew tired of them. They were discontinued soon after their reintroduction.

5 Lay’s WOW Chips

When Frito-Lay introduced a new brand of fat-free potato chips in 1998, health-conscious fans went wild. WOW included versions of Lay’s Ruffles, Doritos, and Tostitos brand chips. They were marketed at the people’s growing desire for healthier snacks. Unfortunately, making a potato chip fat-free isn’t easy, and it requires some serious chemistry.

To make it happen, Frito-Lay opted to use a fat substitute called Olestra, and that came with some unforeseen consequences. The choice to use Olestra proved disastrous to the company’s sales. WOW chips dropped in sales by more than 50% by 2000 due to complaints of abdominal cramping, diarrhea, and fecal incontinence, which is the fancy way of saying “anal leakage.”

This required the chips’ packaging to contain warning labels, reading, “This Product Contains Olestra. Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients. Vitamins A, D, E, and K have been added.”

Eventually, the WOW brand was dropped due to negative publicity and lagging sales. It was rebranded as “Light” with the same old side-effects, so they are ‘technically’ still around in deceptively different packaging.

4 Gatorade Gatorgum

The Fleer Corporation produced a Gatorade brand of chewing gum, beginning in the late 1970s. Gatorgum came in lemon-lime and orange (the original flavors of Gatorade). Each pack came with the tagline, “IT WORKS!” This referenced the claim that it “helps quench thirst,” just like the drink it was based on.

While it was on sale, Gatorgum wasn’t the most popular chewing gum brand on store shelves. Still, it sold well enough to keep it around, and people who especially liked the drink were the ones who tended to buy it. The flavor was reasonably strong, though it didn’t last for very long.

It did work well to help create saliva, so the marketing claim that it was a cure for “dry mouth” proved true enough. When Fleer lost the license to produce it, the contract went to Swell and Vicks. The gum remained on the shelves from the late 1970s until 1989, when it disappeared.

This was due to the contract’s expiration, and it has never been renewed. The company simply stopped producing Gatorgum, so it disappeared, and fans were left to scour eBay, looking for ancient packs of their favorite chewing gum.

3 Nestlé Magic Ball

The Nestlé Magic Ball was first introduced in the 1990s to emulate the popular Kinder Surprise candies in Europe. The Magic Ball consisted of a large outer shell of milk chocolate with a surprise contained within. When the ball was opened, a small Disney figurine was found inside, hence the “wonder” of the Magic Ball.

The Nestlé Magic Ball was a major success for the company, but it ran into some problems. Competitors in the candy market and consumer groups banded together, labeling the Nestlé Magic Ball as a choking hazard, thanks to the small toy found inside.

Nestlé insisted that the Magic Ball was safe but admitted it had received a dozen reports of safety problems. As a result, the Nestlé Magic Ball was removed from production in 1997, never to be seen in its original form again. Nestlé reintroduced the product as the Nestlé Wonder Ball In 2000.

The Wonder Ball consisted of the same candy shell, but instead of a toy, it contained more candy inside. The candies came in various themes, including Disney, Pokémon, Cartoon Network, Care Bears, and many more. It disappeared for nine years and was re-released by Frankford in 2016 with candy and stickers inside.

2 Four Loko

Four Loko was first developed in 2005 as “energy beer,” which was primarily marketed to young college students who needed to build up some energy while drinking alcohol. Soon after it was introduced, it became popular among teenagers, which became a problem for Phusion Projects, the company that sold the drink.

The problem wasn’t necessarily with the alcohol; it was the caffeine, which formed the basis of the company’s marketing strategy for Four Loko. The original recipe included around 155 mg of caffeine, which is about the same amount in a strong cup of coffee. Combining a stimulant like caffeine and a depressant like alcohol can be dangerous.

In some cases, it can lead to severe intoxication and blackouts, so it wasn’t long before the FDA, and several state attorneys general got involved. Phusion eventually agreed to drastically change its marketing to remove models under 25 years of age and anything that glorified alcohol and binge drinking.

The company also reformulated the drink, removing caffeine, guarana, and taurine, replacing it with Red 40 (a food dye). When this happened, a black market rose to sell the original drink, which averaged five times the original price.

1 Haribo Sugar-Free Gummy Bears

Gummy bears are made with glucose syrup and sugar as their first two ingredients, so they aren’t the healthiest snacks a person can eat. To counter this problem and sell to more health-conscious people, Haribo created a sugar-free alternative.

The alternative they settled on was Lycasin, and its main ingredient is maltitol, which is a type of sugar alcohol. On paper, everything seemed great, thanks to the incredible similarities between natural sugar and Lycasin.

Unfortunately, the human body may recognize Lycasin as sweet, but it doesn’t like to keep the stuff around for very long. It goes through your system like Drano through a pipe. There are countless Amazon reviews for the product, which explain — in great detail — how Haribo’s Sugar-free Gummy Bears tore through people’s systems.

The bulk of them include phrases like “intestinal power wash,” a “volcano,” a “flood of toxic waste,” and other colorful explanations. Haribo discontinued the product, but you can occasionally find them on sites like eBay. Still, use caution and eat them close to your bathroom!

Top 10 Banned Snacks

Walk down any breakfast cereal aisle in the United States, and you will find a plethora of options. There are often dozens of selections, each with variations on flavor and type.

Sadly, some cereals that many enjoyed in childhood no longer exist. Whether it’s due to the public’s changing taste, a loss of license, or some other reason, some have simply vanished.

These ten kinds of cereal were once incredibly popular, but for whatever reason, you can’t find them anymore.

10 Weird Facts About Cereal

10 Mr. T

Back in the 1980s, you couldn’t go long without seeing something related to Laurence Tureaud’s popular character, Mr. T. The guy was everywhere, thanks to his popularity on The A-Team and Rocky III. To market off his popularity, Quaker Oats created a cereal that was simply called Mr. T.

The cereal was made with sweetened corn and oats, which were extruded into the shape of the capital letter “T.” It tasted a lot like Cap’n Crunch, which is also owned by Quaker Oats. The cereal debuted in 1984, and before long, it invaded popular culture.

Mr. T cereal made an appearance in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Pee-Wee Herman poured himself a bowl, saying, “I pity the poor fool that don’t eat my cereal.” The cereal had an additional catchphrase that was popular: “Team up with Mr. T (cereal); it’s cool.”

It appeared in various television shows and films throughout the decade, but it was ultimately discontinued in 1993. The reason Quaker Oats pulled it off the shelves was never disclosed, though it was likely due to the waning popularity of Mr. T in popular culture.

9 Hidden Treasures

General Mills released Hidden Treasures in 1993 alongside Springle Spangles, which has also been discontinued. Hidden Treasures were made of sweetened corn squares that all looked the same. The gimmick revolved around a filling made of icing that was flavored with cherry, grape, and orange.

While every square looked the same, some were filled with the icing. Kids would continue eating the cereal, and once they found a piece of hidden treasure, they wanted to keep eating. Hidden Treasures was marketed with the tagline, “The taste that’s full of surprises!”

This was a cereal that didn’t sit around for very long, but plenty of kids enjoyed it while it was available. General Mills stopped making Hidden Treasures in 1995, only two years after it was introduced. This meant that plenty of people missed out on it, while the few who didn’t tend to remember it fondly.

The cereal was around for such a short time; only two commercials were made. They included a temporary mascot, which was a robot named H.T. He was meant to be able to figure out which of the squares contained the so-called Hidden Treasure.

8 C-3PO’s

One year after Return of the Jedi was released in theaters, Kellogg’s introduced C-3PO’s to the masses. The cereal consisted of honey-sweetened oats, wheat, and corn extruded into the shape of the number eight. It tasted a lot like Alpha-Bits cereal but was said to have twice the crunch.

C3PO’s were incredibly popular among Star Wars fans who (correctly) believed there wouldn’t be any new content coming from the franchise for a long time. Fortunately, a commercial aired in 1984, and fans found that they could enjoy a newly licensed cereal featuring everyone’s favorite Protocol Droid.

The cereal came with a ton of marketing, including standees of C-3PO and other familiar markings. The box featured trading cards, cutout masks, or a plastic Rebel Rocket. There was also a send-away offer for a Kenner Star Wars action figure.

Unfortunately, Kellog’s stopped producing the cereal in 1986, only two years after introducing it. The boxes have become highly collectible, as have the individual small, single-serving packages Kellog’s released alongside the full box version. Even a flattened box without any (stale) cereal will cost around $75 or more on eBay.

7 Fruit-Shaped Trix & Mini Trix

Before 1991, Trix cereal came in the form of small fruit-flavored puffs, but that year, General Mills introduced something different. Instead of the familiar puffs, Trix was reformed into various fruit shapes related to each piece’s particular flavor.

Those shapes remained for years, but in 2006, General Mills reverted back to their original shapes. Fans of the cereal weren’t happy about this, and the company received thousands of requests to go back to the way it was. Fortunately, General Mills relented, and in 2018, the company announced that it would be bringing back the fruit-shaped version.

While you will be able to enjoy that version of the cereal once again, there is one that has gone away, seemingly for good. Mini Trix was introduced in 2015, and the name perfectly describes what they were: a much smaller version of the familiar puff-shaped Trix cereal.

Mini Trix were released as a limited edition. Like any variation to the popular cereal, they were enjoyed by the fans. Unfortunately, Mini Trix were indeed a limited edition. Once all the boxes were sold, they were discontinued and haven’t returned since.

6 Fruity Marshmallow Krispies

Rice Krispies have been around since 1928, and by 1939, the public became familiar with marshmallow Rice Krispies treats. These days, the recipe is on the box, and most people have enjoyed the combination of marshmallow and Rice Krispies at least once in their lives. They are insanely popular, so Kellogg’s released a cereal version in 1982.

Marshmallow Krispies managed to cut out all the work in making Rice Krispies Treats by putting them right into your bowl. Or, at least, it had many of the components. The familiar cereal was there alongside unflavored marshmallow bits. When milk was added, it tasted pretty much like the popular treats.

In 1987, Kellogg’s followed up with Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, which included orange, lemon, grape, and raspberry marshmallow pieces. The cereal remained popular throughout the early 1990s, but over time, its popularity waned.

By the mid-late 1990s, Kellogg’s stopped producing the cereal and ultimately discontinued it. While you can’t get Fruity Marshmallow Krispies any longer, you can still get Marshmallow Krispies cereal, though it’s now called Rice Krispies Treats Cereal.

5 Pac-Man

Believe it or not, Pac-Man is the highest-grossing video game of all time, and yes, that’s from counting quarters! The game’s popularity led to the development of a multimedia franchise, including comic books, numerous games, cartoons, and a breakfast cereal that was released in 1983.

At the time, Pac-Man had been out for three years, and the little yellow character was pretty much everywhere. The cereal consisted of “crunchy sweetened corn cereal with marshmallow bits,” which came in the shape of the eponymous character as well as the game’s ghosts, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.

Eventually, the cereal was upgraded following the release of Ms. Pac-Man. A new marshmallow was introduced with “a shocking pink bow” to honor Pac-Man’s main squeeze. It also included Super Pac-Man marshmallows, which were larger than the original ones.

Pac-Man cereal remained on store shelves until 1988 and was discontinued due to the character’s waning popularity. The same fate befell Donkey Kong Crunch, which was available from 1982 until 1984. That cereal featured barrel-shaped crunchy corn pieces and was similarly popular while it was sold.

4 Nerds

In 1985, Ralston introduced a cereal based on the popular Nerds candy with the tagline, “Which side are you gonna eat first?” Like the candy, Nerds cereal was split down the middle into two separate flavors. The duel varieties offered included orange/cherry and strawberry/grape and was described as “tiny, tangy, crunchy sweetened cereal.”

Kids especially loved the cereal because many boxes included small boxes of Nerds candy. They also featured a send-away offer for a “Two-Sided Nerds Bowl” and a “Nerd Gate.” These items were featured in commercials and made it possible to block the flow of milk from one side of the bowl to the other.

The cereal pieces looked a lot like the candies they were based on, but there were some issues. Because of the size of the pieces, they got mushy quickly. Additionally, the flavors often resulted in a somewhat sour-tasting mush. Despite these problems, the cereal had plenty of fans.

Nerds cereal remained popular for a few years, but Ralston discontinued it towards the end of the decade. Boxes sometimes turn up on eBay, where they sell for far more than they did when they sat on store shelves.

3 S’mores Grahams

General Mills released S’mores Grahams in 1982 to capitalize on the growing popularity of the campfire treat. The cereal was similar to Golden Grahams but included a blend of chocolate. It contained chocolate graham cracker pieces and tiny marshmallows that were the same as the kind found in packets of powdered hot chocolate.

The cereal came with a new mascot called the S’morecerer, who would help children get a bowl. This was usually accomplished by whisking the kids away from some sort of calamity, including getting chased by a lion. The kids would be happy… at first, but one would always ask, “Can I have s’more?”

The cereal managed to hit the mark in delivering a similar taste to actual S’mores. They remained on store shelves until 1988. Demand for their return saw that happen in the late 1990s, but it didn’t stay for long and was discontinued soon after.

While General Mills called it quits on making S’mores Grahams cereal, other companies haven’t. Kellogg’s introduced a similar version in 2003 called Smorz and kept it around until 2013. It also came back a few years later but was similarly discontinued in 2019.

2 Powdered Donutz

If you ever wanted to combine donuts with a bowl of breakfast cereal, all you had to do was buy a box of Powdered Donutz. The cereal was released by General Mills in 1980, and while they looked just like puffier powdered Cheerios, they were far sweeter.

It was described as a “cereal that looks and tastes like real donuts!” They weren’t the healthiest thing a kid could eat, but they were certainly popular among kids whose parents bought them. Eventually, General Mills released a chocolate flavor version, though it wasn’t as popular as the original.

Powdered Donutz managed to stick around for nearly a decade, but by 1989, General Mills called it quits on the brand. They haven’t returned, but General Mills didn’t entirely abandon the concept. Just six years after pulling Powdered Donutz from the shelves, the company introduced Frosted Cheerios.

Frosted Cheerios are similar to its predecessor, though they pack far less sugar than the originals. Of course, you can still buy a box of Frosted Cheerios, so if you throw a ton of sugar on top, you might be able to relive the glory days of Powdered Donutz cereal.

1 Nintendo Cereal System

When Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System, it helped save the video game industry. From the moment it was released, it dominated the market, and the company wasn’t about to stop with just video games. Nintendo marketed its various characters in every niche market available, including cereal.

Ralston introduced the Nintendo Cereal System in 1988 alongside a commercial with a jingle folks in their forties still have bouncing around the inside of their heads. Each Nintendo Cereal System box contained two 7.5 oz (212 g) bags of two types of cereals.

One side of the box was designed to look like Super Mario Bros., while the other was related to The Legend of Zelda. An advertisement released in 1989 included the text “Nintendo is two cereals in one….Fruit-flavored Marios, Mushrooms, and Goomas. Berry-flavored Links, Hearts, and Shields….If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.”

Each box came with four of 12 cutout trading cards that were meant to be collectible. Ralston discontinued the cereal after just one year, but you can still find it. Granted, you’ll have to drop as much as $200 per box on eBay, as it’s become highly collectible.

10 Famous Breakfast Cereals That Caused Absurd Controversies

About The Author: graphic artist, illustrator, and writer. He is a Retired Soldier and enjoys researching and writing about history, science, theology, and many other subjects.

Crowd-pleasing grub often creates a cult-like following only to suddenly disappear faster than you can say, ‘Jim Jones.’ Although occasionally an item will re-emerge on store shelves (Dunkaroos, anyone?), most discontinued faves are typically replaced by newer offerings in a shinier package, providing yet another gut-wrenching reminder that nothing lasts forever.

That said, join us in a hearty nostalgic stroll down the supermarket aisle, wheeling a shopping cart full of treasured treats that defy time immemorial.

10. Sugar Smacks

As the Cold War played out during the 1950s, a different kind of battle took place in homes across America to command the kitchen table. Top brass at Kellogg’s devised a bold strategy that would unleash the most powerful weapon ever launched in breakfast warfare: Sugar Smacks.

Containing a whopping 56% sugar by weight, the heavily sweetened puffed wheat delivered ammo capable of sending a polar bear into diabetic shock. The food giant also used a creepy clown as its mascot that somehow managed to appear both menacing and whimsical in the fight to win over customers. 

The product would undergo numerous permutations before gradually being phased out and replaced by the slightly less toxic Honey Smacks and a spokes-frog named “Dig ‘Em.” It’s also worth noting that several studies have shown sugar to be as addictive as cocaine and opiates. Additionally, ‘smack’ is a common slang term for heroin. Just sayin.’

9.  Pink Panther Flakes

For those of a certain age, sugar-fueled memories of munching a bowl of cereal and watching cartoons are inextricably linked. The connection can be summed up in two words: predatory marketing. 

Brands such as Post aggressively targeted young audiences by co-sponsoring Saturday morning TV shows like The Pink Panther with a product tie-in. Post would also employ similar strategies with beloved characters from The Flintstones and The Smurfs that usually contained a nifty toy inside the cereal box. 

Launched in 1973, Pink Panther Flakes were run-of-the-mill sugar-coated corn flakes in a neon, bubblegum-pink hue — coloring that dissolved almost instantly after adding milk, resulting in a soggy, maize mush. Regardless, the brand excelled for over two decades, bolstered in part by the well-known Pink Panther movie theme song by Henry Mancini, a jingle that originated with the movie franchise starring Peter Sellers.

8. Koogle Spread

Kraft introduced this innovative, artificially flavored peanut spread with the funny name in 1971. Koogle came in several varieties, including chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla, and banana, and could be slathered on anything or eaten straight out of the jar. 

One of the key selling points was a smooth texture that didn’t stick to your mouth, probably resulting from a higher concentration of chemicals that also made it so damn delish. Marketing centered around a bizarre jive-talking mascot with four eyes and blue hair, and sang “Pea-nutty-koogle with the koo-koo-koogly eyes!” while dancing a jig. 

Sluggish sales led to future commercials taking a more wholesome approach, portraying mothers and kids sitting around the kitchen table. Yawn. The toned-down pitch didn’t help as Koogle failed to make it out of the decade alive. 

7. Baron Von Redberry

Another cavity-inducing breakfast cereal from the 1970s, Baron Von Redberry was a spoof on legendary German WWI ace Manfred Von Richtofen, aka “The Red Baron.” The berry-flavored oats with red marshmallows transformed milk into crimson-stained bath and accompanied by the clunky catchphrase, “Baron Von Redberry is der berry goodest!” 

General Mills (the manufacturer, not an actual military officer) co-promoted the brand with a similar product called Sir Grapefellow, substituting a purple concoction and a British bi-plane aviator mascot. The marketing had little to do with educating children about the bloody carnage of the Great War, but instead offered dubious claims of “vitamin-charged!” and the lure of enticing prizes found inside the package. “Tally ho!”

6. Swanson TV Dinners

The notion of having an entire meal made from frozen, heavily processed food, and served in a metal tray doesn’t exactly sound appetizing. In fact, they more closely resemble the kind of chow served on airplanes or in prison. But taste and quality aside, these quickly prepared entrees helped usher in a revolutionary social dynamic: eating dinner in front of the TV. 

As the story goes, in 1952, CA Swanson & Sons overestimated the number of Thanksgiving turkeys the American public would eat. Stuck with an inventory of 260 tons of frozen meat, a Swanson salesman named Gerry Thomas allegedly conceived the idea to package individual servings replicating a holiday feast. The company would unload 10 million units the next year, making culinary history along the way.

In a strange twist of fate, TV dinners may have also given rise to the feminist movement. The National Women’s History Museum states: “TV dinners did more than just feed families, their convenience and quick cook time gave women (who usually did all or most of the cooking) more time of their own to pursue jobs and other interests, while still providing a hot meal for their families. One of the first advertisements for Swanson featured a woman pulling a Swanson dinner out of her grocery bag and promising her husband, ‘I’m late — but dinner won’t be.’”

5. Magic Middles

Children love mascots. And why not? Characters such as Ernie “The Keebler Elf” are seemingly warm and trustworthy, and even scientifically designed to make eye contact with younger (and shorter) consumers. More importantly, however, they offer a satisfying sugar fix for hungry pie-holes. Such was the winning recipe for Magic Middles, a line of shortbread cookies filled with either chocolate fudge or peanut butter that debuted in 1989.

The snack won the American Marketing Association (AMA) Edison Award for the best new food product innovation and later became the first entry in the burgeoning bite-sized cookie market. But in the end, corporate restructuring spelled doom for these tasty morsels. Petitions on social media have attempted to revive the ‘Magic’ but so far, Facebook and the like are much better at spewing misinformation and harvesting personal data.  

4. Frute Brute

As the fourth of five cereals in General Mills’ ‘Monster Collection,’ Fruit Brute featured a werewolf devouring a bowl of nondescript fruity flavors with marshmallow bits. Boxes first arrived on the scene in 1974, following Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry, and preceding Yummy Mummy. 

The Brute would live for eight years before being killed off in 1982 for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery. Fans of Quentin Tarantino films are well familiar with the brand after the cereal made cameo appearances in both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. In August 2013, all five labels were released for the Halloween season, only to see the werewolf and mummy head back to the cereal graveyard. 

3. Pizzaria Chips

It’s hard to imagine anyone not liking pizza. From a simple slice of cheese to an extra-large deep dish pie with all the fixings, this perennial Italian favorite is mouth-watering, life-affirming food. The suits at Keebler felt the same way and introduced bite-sized chips made from actual pizza dough.

Pizzeria chips were available in three flavors: Cheese Pizza, Pizza Supreme, and Zesty Pepperoni. Launched in 1991, Pizzarias were quickly embraced by the public, resulting in Keebler being named AMA’s “New Product Marketer of the Year.”

An extensive ad campaign also introduced the first teenage Keebler Elves (Ernie’s nephews, Zoot and JJ), uttering catchphrases such as “Radical grub!” and the tag line: “Tastes like real pizza, only louder.” Similar to the fate of Magic Middles, Pizzarias got the chop following the sale of Keebler in the late 1990s.

2. McDonald’s Fried Apple Pie

When McDonald’s first began its healthier menu makeover in the early 1990s, the iconic fried apple pie became one of the first casualties. The decision was met with immediate condemnation. And rightfully so. 

Public outrage would reach a fever pitch just short of rioting in the streets. Furthermore, the egregious move was made worse by a baked replacement that paled in comparison to the original crunchy, golden desert with apple filling hotter than the sun. 

The fast-food behemoth first launched the original version in the late 1960s to great fanfare. Generations grew up with these pies, establishing an army of loyal patrons who gladly risked third-degree burns to wolf them down. But what should have been obvious resulted in a miscalculation with dire consequences: Mickey D customers, past and present, don’t give a hoot about counting calories; if they did, binging at a burger joint wouldn’t be part of any weight loss plan.

1. Jell-O Pudding Pops

Long before Bill Cosby went from being “America’s Dad” to inmate #655321, the comedian-turned-convicted-felon served as the spokesman for Jell-O brand products. Pudding Pops arrived in the late 1970s, presenting a creamy, frozen version of pudding on a stick, featuring an evenly split chocolate and vanilla swirl. Genius. 

Over time, however, this freezer box staple would be scuppered — but for reasons that had nothing to do with the aforementioned rapist. Its parent company, General Foods, simply lacked the experience to successfully produce and sell frozen goods, and eventually gave up on the cherished snack, breaking hearts from ABQ to YYZ.