Ah, the Bermuda Triangle — that soggy wedge of ocean where, according to enthusiasts of sloppy thinking everywhere, the laws of physics take a coffee break and planes vanish into thin air because “mystery.” The legend is simple: ships and planes disappear inside a roughly triangular region bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Therefore, … Read more
Of all the ancient mysteries people cling to like life rafts in a sea of mediocrity, none is more stubbornly buoyant than the lost civilization of Atlantis. If you believe the breathless podcasts and badly animated documentaries, was technologically superior, spiritually enlightened, and somehow still forgot how to build boats that could float. The legend, … Read more
There’s something uniquely humbling about realizing that in an age where we can send robots to Mars, track hurricanes from space, map the molecular structure of proteins, and bounce lasers off retroreflectors on the Moon, there are still people — allegedly literate, allegedly breathing without assistance — who believe Earth is shaped like a cosmic … Read more
If there’s one thing more enduring than human stupidity, it’s the deep, desperate hope that someone, somewhere, has figured out how to escape it — preferably by building a machine out of junkyard parts and disappearing into the swirling folds of time. Enter time travel: the grand, glittering promise that somewhere out there, beyond the … Read more
The Mandela Effect is one of the saddest monuments to collective human ego in modern history. It’s the phenomenon where a large group of people misremembers something — and instead of accepting that memory is a squishy, unreliable mess, they decide they’ve stumbled into evidence of alternate dimensions. Because clearly, it’s more plausible that the … Read more
There is a special place in my cold, shriveled heart reserved for the Moon landing hoax crowd — the true believers who, against all available evidence and common sense, have convinced themselves that humanity’s single greatest technological achievement was faked on a soundstage somewhere in the desert by Stanley Kubrick, the CIA, or whichever shadowy … Read more
If you ever feel underachieving, remember: two thousand years ago, a group of ancient Peruvians spent decades carving enormous pictures into the desert floor — and modern humans immediately assumed it must have been aliens. The Nazca Lines — sprawling geoglyphs etched across the Nazca Desert — depict hummingbirds, monkeys, spiders, and a few abstract … Read more
There are many glittering examples of mass delusion in human history, but few sparkle quite so tragically — or quite so stupidly — as the great Fairy Photograph Scandal of the early 20th century. In 1917, two young girls from Cottingley, England produced a series of photographs allegedly showing themselves frolicking with tiny, winged fairies. … Read more
There was a time when looking at the Great Pyramid of Giza could fill a person with proper awe — the kind of admiration you should feel when you realize that, five thousand years ago, without cranes, GPS, or a single MBA consultant, human beings dragged two-ton stones across a desert, stacked them with supernatural … Read more
If there’s one thing guaranteed to make me break out in a full-body rash of secondhand embarrassment, it’s the enduring, relentless, utterly unkillable myth of the Curse of King Tutankhamun’s Tomb. Ninety-nine years after Howard Carter cracked open a Pharaoh’s dusty front door, we are still being subjected to whispered campfire stories about vengeful ancient … Read more