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10 Bizarre Events and Discoveries
Many strange and unexplained events have been documented in modern history, events that raise important questions and baffle world populations. These events are often times initiated by a bizarre archeological discovery, strange recording, or unsolved murder. This article will be describing 10 strange and bizarre world events anddiscoveries.
The Humanzee
The humanzee is a hypothetical chimpanzee and human hybrid. The DNA sequence of a human is very similar to a chimpanzee. Many experimental tests have been conducted, determining that humans share 95% of a chimpanzee DNA, as well as 99% of all coding DNA sequences. This has led to the speculation that it may be possible to breed a human and chimpanzee. No specimen has ever been confirmed. Humans do have one fewer pair of chromosomes than apes. However, having a different numbers of chromosomes is not an absolute barrier to producing young. Similar mismatches are common in nature. The phenomenon is known as chromosomal polymorphism. In the 1920s the Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov carried out a number of experiments in hopes of creating a human and ape hybrid. He began by working with human sperm and chimpanzee females, but none of his attempts created a pregnancy. He soon fell under political criticism in the Soviet Union and was sentenced to exile in the Kazakh SSR.
Research conducted by J. Michael Bedford showed that human sperm could penetrate the protective outer membranes of a gibbon egg. Throughout history there have been many reports and rumors based around the existence of humanzees. The most widely discussed humanzee sighting was a critter named Oliver. Oliver was a sideshow star in the 1970s. He is said to have come from somewhere in the Congo, although this claim has never been proven. Oliver is very different from other chimps. He typically doesn’t like being in the same general area of other apes and prefers the company of humans. Oliver possesses a flatter face than his fellow chimpanzees. He has less hair, a smaller chin, a smaller and rounder cranium, and pointed ears. He also reportedly had an unusual scent, which is different from both chimps and humans. Oliver was habitually bipedal before being struck with arthritis, meaning that he walked upright. He has never walked on his knuckles like other chimps.
Many reports have indicated that Oliver prefers human females over chimps. He was acquired as a young animal by trainers Frank and Janet Berger. The Berger’s eventually had to sell Oliver because he began to mount and attempted to mate with Janet. Janet Berger has indicated that this behavior started when Oliver reached the age of sixteen. In 1996, geneticists examined Oliver’s chromosomes. The test revealed that Oliver contains forty-eight chromosomes similar to other chimps, although Oliver’s owner Michael Miller claims he had the ape tested and the results showed only forty-seven chromosomes. These results have been widely scrutinized and challenged. His appearance has been dismissed as a genetic deformity. Scientists will not perform further tests on the hypothesis that Oliver could be an undiscovered species of chimpanzee. Oliver is still alive today, living at Primarily Primates in the state of Texas.
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Marree Man
Unexplained Geoglyph
The Marree Man, or Stuart’s Giant, is an enormous geoglyph discovered by air on June 26, 1998. The drawing appears to depict an indigenous Australian man, most likely of the Pitjantjatjara tribe. He is hunting birds or wallabies with a throwing stick. The geoglyph lies on a plateau at Finnis Springs, which is 60 km west of the township of Marree in central South Australia. The figure is large, measuring 4.2 km tall with a circumference of 15–28 km. It is officially the largest non-commercial geoglyph in the world. The origin of the artwork remains a complete mystery. There are no historical accounts of the geoglyph and nobody reported witnessing its creation. The lines that make up the Marree Man are 20 to 30 cm deep and up to 35 meters wide. A lot of time and energy was spent creating this artwork. Many researchers have stated that the creation of the geoglyph would have required aerial photography or satellite imagery. The discovery of the geoglyph fascinated Australians due to its size and mystery. At the time of the discovery there was only one track entering and one track exiting the site and no footprints or tire marks were discernible.
In the weeks following the discovery, several anonymous press releases suggested that the Marree Man was created by people from the United States. The releases quoted measurements in miles, yards and inches, instead of the metric system usually used in Australia. When the site was discovered, several items were found in a small pit near the figure. Officials discovered what appeared to be a satellite photo of the Marree Man, a jar containing a small flag of the US, and a note which referred to the Branch Davidians, a religious group infamous for the Waco raid in 1993. These were the only man-made items found at the site. In January 1999, pubic officials received a strange fax from a hotel in Oxford, England. The fax discussed a plaque buried five meters south of the nose of the figure. The fax also said that the plaque was intended to have been dug up by a “prominent U.S. media figure” shortly before the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Similar clues were said to be buried near the Cerne Abbas giant near Dorset and the Long Man of Wilmington, Sussex, in England.
The plaque was discovered in the suggested location. It has a small American flag on it, with an imprint of the Olympic rings. The plaque reads: “In honor of the land they once knew. His attainments in these pursuits are extraordinary; a constant source of wonderment and admiration.” The quote on the plaque comes from a book, The Red Centre, by H.H. Finlayson, in a section describing the hunting of wallabies. The Red Centre also has photographs of hunters without loin cloths, which is the same depiction as the Marree Man. The archeological site was closed shortly after the discovery of the figure, when some members of the Dieri tribe complained of harm and exploitation of the land. Certain people do believe that the geoglyph was created by an ancient civilization. The hand of the figure which is not throwing has the correct posture for the normal Aboriginal technique for throwing. The initiation scars on the chest were also placed perfectly. The creation of the Marree Man remains a mystery.
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The Vela Incident
Unexplained Explosion Recorded
On July 16, 1945 the first nuclear weapon was tested near Alamogordo, New Mexico. After the end of World War II, many countries were determined to gain nuclear technology. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first fission weapon. The United Kingdom followed on October 2, 1952, France on February 13, 1960, and China on October 16, 1964. These five powers are permitted to possess nuclear weapons under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. There are four recognized sovereign states that are not parties to the treaty, including India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea. India, Pakistan and North Korea have openly tested and declared that they possess nuclear weapons, while Israel has a policy of opacity regarding its nuclear weapons program. There have been over 2,000 nuclear tests conducted since 1945. In 1963, many states signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space.
After adopting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, world powers pledged to discontinue all nuclear testing. When a nuclear explosion occurs, it creates intense light, heat, and incredible explosive force. Many national defense programs have released satellites into the atmosphere that have sensors designed specifically to detect nuclear explosions. On September 22, 1979, a “double flash” was detected by the American Vela Hotel satellite. World specialists who examined the data speculated that the double flash was characteristic of a nuclear explosion and may have been the result of a nuclear weapons test. The satellite reported the characteristic double flash of an atmospheric nuclear explosion. It was detected in the Indian Ocean between Bouvet Island and the Prince Edward Islands, which belongs to South Africa. The recording was labeled the Vela Incident.
There has been much doubt as to whether the satellite’s observations were accurate. South Africa has declared that they made no such nuclear test. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 of November 4, 1977 introduced a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa, which also required all states to refrain from “any co-operation with South Africa in the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons.” The conclusions of the Presidential panel suggested that the most likely explanation of the Vela detection was a meteoroid hitting the satellite. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was convinced that a nuclear explosion was detected by the satellite. No evidence of an explosion was found, such as the presence of nuclear wastes in the air. Several passes were made by military planes from all over the world. The planes were specifically designed to detect airborne radioactive dust. However, Low levels of iodine-131 were reportedly found in the thyroid glands of sheep in the Australian States of Victoria and Tasmania soon after the “detection” of the light flashes. Studies of wind patterns confirm that fall-out from an explosion in the southern Indian Ocean could have been carried to southwestern Australia.
An observation station in Puerto Rico detected an anomalous ionospheric wave during the morning of September 22, 1979, which moved from the southeast to the northwest. The Republic of South Africa did have a nuclear weapons program during the 1970s. However, since the fall of apartheid, South Africa has disclosed most of the information on its nuclear weapons program, and according to international inspections there was no mention of the incident. In February 1994, Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, a convicted Soviet spy and the commander of South Africa’s Simon’s Town naval base at the time, talked about the incident upon his release from prison. He is quoted as saying “Although I was not directly involved in planning or carrying out the operation, I learned unofficially that the flash was produced by an Israeli-South African test, code-named Operation Phoenix. The explosion was clean and was not supposed to be detected. But they were not as smart as they thought, and the weather changed, so the Americans were able to pick it up.” It remains uncertain whether the South Atlantic flash in September 1979 was a nuclear detonation and, if so, to whom it belonged.
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The Bloop
Unexplained Deep Sea Recording
The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency and extremely powerful underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) several times during the summer of 1997. The sound was traced to a remote point in the South Pacific Ocean west of the southern tip of South America. According to the NOAA reports, the sound came rapidly in frequency and lasted for around one minute. It was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km. The NOAA’s system ruled out any known man-made sound, such as submarine or bomb, or familiar geological sounds such as volcanoes or earthquakes. The audio profile of the Bloop resembles that of a living creature. The system identified it as unknown because it was several times louder than the loudest known biological sound.
The microphone and computer system that recorded the Bloop is a military relic of the Cold War. In the 1960s the U.S. Navy set up an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, around the globe to track Soviet submarines. The network was known as the Sound Surveillance System. The listening stations are located hundreds of yards below the ocean surface, at a depth where sound waves become trapped in a layer of water known as the deep sound channel. In the channel, temperature and pressure cause sound waves to continue travelling without being scattered by the ocean surface or bottom. Many sounds have been detected with the system. However, they are usually from whales, ships, or earthquakes.
Cryptozoologists have speculated that the Bloop could have come from a giant sea monster, several times bigger than the largest known living creature. Others have suggested that it could have been bubbles from some kind of huge chemical reaction in the seabed or have something to do with the interaction of powerful ocean currents. One must remember that the sound profile represented a living creature. People have also pointed out that the location of the Bloop originated from the southern Pacific Ocean, which is the claimed location of R’lyeh, linking the sound to the sleeping Great Old One Cthulhu, from the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The Bloop remains a mystery of the deep ocean. In history, five other significant unexplained sounds have been named by the NOAA. They are Julia, Train, Slowdown, Whistle, and Ups
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Wow! Signal
Unexplained Deep Space Recording
The Universe is defined as everything that physically exists, including all forms of matter, energy, and momentum. A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants. Over 100 billion galaxies exist in the observable universe. In 1963, Ohio State University began the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. As part of this project they developed The Big Ear radio telescope. The Big Ear telescope was used to conduct full sky survey’s of outer space in search of extraterrestrial radio sources. On August 15, 1977 The Big Ear telescope recorded a strange narrow band radio burst. The event was documented by Dr. Jerry R. Ehman, who scribbled “WoW!” in the margin of the recorded printout.
The signal came from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. It was indicative of technological advancement as it stood out distinctly from the background noise of signals from space. The signal bore expected hallmarks of potential non-terrestrial and non-solar system origin. It lasted for a total of 72 seconds and has not been detected since. Seventy-two seconds is the exact length of time it takes for the Earth to rotate the Big Ear satellite through a signal from space. The event registered enormous strength, and the shape of the signal had a strange rise and fall calculation. Many people have speculated that the Wow signal was sent by an advanced civilization. Curiously, it was picked up by only one of the scope’s two detectors. When the second detector covered the same patch of sky three minutes later, it heard nothing.
This indicates that the first beam had detected something that wasn’t there, or that the source of the signal had been shut off or redirected in the intervening time. The event remains the strongest and most clear signal ever received from an unknown source in space, as well as the most fascinating and unexplainable. Its original discoverer Jerry Ehman doesn’t care to speculate on its source, and he remains scientifically skeptical about the incident. People have made claims that an extraterrestrial race was attempting to contact Earth. The official scientific explanation of the event is interstellar scintillation of a weaker continuous signal. The Wow Signal remains a mystery of space.
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Ivy League Nude Posture Photos
Why Were These Photos Taken?
In the late 1970s an employee from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, made a startling discovery in a rarely visited room located in a section of Payne Whitney Gymnasium. The employee discovered a large collection of thousands and thousands of nude pictures. The pictures depicted young men that were profiled from the front, side, and rear position. Upon further investigation of the pictures, something disturbing was reported. It seemed that the people in the photos had a bizarre row of sharp metal pins protruding from their spines. It was discovered that the pictures were part of a strange program that was developed in the United States during the 1940s. The program involved taking nude photos of every incoming freshman who attended certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges. These colleges included Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, and Wellesley College.
The official explanation is that the photos were an attempt to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population. The project was run by William Herbert Sheldon and E.A. Hooton who may have been using the data to support their theory on body types and social hierarchy. These explanations have been highly scrutinized. The United States government took swift action and tracked and burned all of the photographs. Many high ranking government officials and prominent members of American society were among the people profiled. The program was active from the 1940s to the 1970s. The Ivy League nude posture photos are an extremely touchy subject among U.S. government officials. However, people have released accounts of their experience.
The freshman were summoned to the top floor of the gym and met by a man dressed in white garments. They were ordered to remove all their clothes and metal pins were placed along their spine. The pictures were labeled the “posture photos” because claims have been made that the metal pins were being used to judge posture. The people whose pins were described as erratic were required to attend posture classes. However, this does not explain why the college students were forced to remove all their clothes and why the event was documented. It seems that this information could have been obtained with only the removal of the shirt. Many people have questioned the official story behind the U.S. Ivy League nude photos. This procedure was not limited to men. Some famous Americans who reportedly had the pictures taken are George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff, Meryl Streep, Hilary Clinton, and Diane Sawyer.
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Globster
The Mystery of the World’s Globsters
A globster is an unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water. Many different globsters have been found over the years and the term was coined by Ivan T. Sanderson to describe the Tasmanian carcass of 1960. The Tasmanian carcass measured 20 ft (6.1 m) by 18 ft (5.5 m) and was estimated to weigh between five and ten tons. It was said to have no visible eyes, no defined head, and no apparent bone structure. A globster is distinguished from a normal beached carcass by its strange appearance. Many globsters have been scientifically identified as whales or sharks. However, many of the creatures present such a puzzling appearance that their existence remains controversial, even after being officially categorized. Some globsters lack bones, while others have tentacles, flippers, eyes, or other identifiable features. A variety of these creatures have been described as gigantic octopuses. Many different globsters have been examined after being severely decomposed, leading to unreliable data. Other carcasses have been destroyed, as happened with the famous Cadborosaurus willsi (caddy) carcass, found in 1937.
Caddy is an alleged sea serpent reported to be living on the Pacific Coast of North America. There have been more than 300 claimed sightings of Caddy during the past 200 years. Cadborosaurus willsi is said to resemble a serpent with vertical coils or humps in tandem. It has a horse-like head and long neck. It also has a pair of small elevating front flippers, and a pair of large webbed hind flippers fused to form a large fan-like tail region that provides powerful forward propulsion. The picture of Caddy taken in 1937 is one of the most famous globster photos captured. Some other famous globsters include the Hebrides Blob, which was discovered in 1990 on Benbecula beach in the Hebrides, Scotland. The New Zealand Globster is a large unidentified carcass that washed ashore at Muriwai, on the west coast of North Island, New Zealand, in 1968. The Tasmanian Globster 2 was discovered in 1970. Pictures of this globster have mysteriously disappeared. In 1997, the Four Mile Globster washed ashore Four Mile Beach in Tasmania. Many of these creatures remain a complete mystery.
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The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid
Why Did The K Foundation Burn a Million Pounds of Cash?
K Foundation burn a million quid was an action that took place on August 23, 1994, in which the K Foundation, which was an art duo consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, burned one million pounds in cash on the Scottish island of Jura. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty are well known as the pop group The KLF. The KLF was one of the United Kingdom’s most successful pop acts during the early 1990s. They were the biggest selling singles act in the world for 1991. In 1992, the band stopped recording music and Drummond and Cauty formed the K Foundation. The foundation served as an artistic outlet for the duo’s post-retirement KLF income. Between 1993 and 1995, the duo spent their money in a number of ways, including on a series of press adverts and wild subversions in the art world, with a strong focus on the Turner Prize. However, the most unusual event occurred when the K Foundation burned one million pounds of cash. The money took well over an hour to burn as Drummond and Cauty fed £50 notes into the fire. According to Drummond, only about £900,000 of the money was actually burnt, with the remainder heading straight up the chimney.
The pair has never fully explained their motivation for burning the money. In 1995, the group announced a 23 year moratorium on all projects. They indicated that they would not respond to questions about the burning of the cash until 2018. The incineration was recorded on a Hi-8 video camera by K Foundation collaborator Gimpo. In 1995 the footage was used in a documentary titled Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid. The K Foundation toured the film around the UK. In most cases, Drummond and Cauty would engage the audience in debate about the burning of the money and its meaning. A book recounting the event was released in 1997. It contains stills from the film, accounts of the events, and viewer reactions. The book also contains an image of a single house brick that was manufactured from the fire’s ashes. Bill Drummond spoke about the burning in 2000 and 2004. At first he was unrepentant, but in 2004, he admitted to the BBC that he regretted burning the money. Many people have reported that the K Foundation have no solid answers as to why they burned the money and what the act represented. It is truly one of the most peculiar stories ever reported.
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Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?
On April 18, 1943 four boys from the town of Stourbridge made a grisly discovery in the area of Hagley Wood, which is part of the Hagley Hall estate belonging to Lord Cobham, located in the Midlands of England. The boys had illegally traveled to the woods in order to poach birds and small critters. In the area they came across an old hollowed out wych-hazel tree. One of the boys decided to climb the tree to look inside for nesting birds. What he saw was a decomposing human skull. The boys had a suspicion that the skeleton was human, but did not report the event for a couple weeks. One of the teenagers discussed the experience with his father, who contacted the Worcestershire County Police Force. The police investigated the wych-hazel tree and found not only the human skull, but an almost complete skeleton, a shoe, and some fragments of rotted clothing.
During a careful search of the surrounding undergrowth, a severed hand from the body was also discovered buried nearby. Professor James Webster examined the remains at the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory in England. He determined that the woman was around 35-years-old, five feet tall, with brown hair and irregular teeth in the lower jaw. She had also given birth at least once. Webster’s estimated that she had been dead for at least 18 months before she was found. There were no marks of disease or violence on the body, but her mouth had been stuffed with taffeta, which is a smooth woven fabric. The coroner declared it murder by asphyxiation. Authorities searched through the lists of missing persons, however the uncertainties of war had increased the amount of women reported missing and had forced people to change addresses frequently.
The most unusual detail was that despite exhaustive searches through dental records, no trace of the woman was found. Even after a description of the woman and the specific irregularities of her lower jaw were published in dental journals. She also had a tooth removed from the right side of her lower jaw. Towards the end of 1943, strange graffiti began to appear on the walls of empty buildings in various parts of the West Midlands of England. The first graffiti message stated “Who put Luebella down the wych-elm?” This message was followed by many other slight variations, such as “Hagley Wood Bella,” which was found on a wall in Birmingham. Over time, the message has appeared all over England, with the majority of them stating “who put Bella in the wych-elm?” The individual who wrote the first message and gave the woman the name “Bella” is unknown. On August 18, 1999 the phrase was sprayed onto the side of the Wychbury Obelisk, which is a monument constructed in 1758 by Lord Lyttelton. Many theories have suggested that the woman’s murder shows signs of ritualistic witchcraft.
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Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 Incident
What did Captain Kenji Terauchi Witness in the Sky?
On November 16, 1986, a Japanese crew captained by Kenji Terauchi embarked on a routine flight from Paris to Tokyo. The three-man crew was transporting wine aboard a JAL cargo jumbo freighter aircraft when they witnessed three unidentified objects while flying over Alaska, USA. The sighting gained international attention when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it was going to officially investigate the sighting because the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Anchorage, Alaska, had reported that the UFO had been detected on radar. It is one of the few times in history when an unidentified object has appeared and then suddenly disappeared on radar. The UFOs in this case were tracked on both ground and airborne radar, witnessed by experienced airline pilots, and confirmed by a FAA Division Chief. At the time of the sighting, JAL Flight 1628 was heading towards Anchorage, Alaska to re-fuel. At 5:11 PM Captain Terauchi reported seeing three large objects 2000 feet below, describing the largest as resembling a shelled walnut. The lights were described as yellow, amber, and green. The voice of Terauchi showed strong signs of emotion as he described the size of the largest craft. He said that it was twice the size of an aircraft carrier.
At one point the smaller UFOs veered 1000 feet in front of the plane, the captain reported that he could feel the warmth of their glows. Terauchi flew for about six minutes before he decided to report anything to the control center. During the event, the JAL crew attempted to lose the craft by turning in a complete circle, but it remained directly on their tail. U.S. military radar picked up the two objects trailing the JAL flight and the FAA requested military intervention, however the military did not take any action, as the crafts mysteriously disappeared. The flight was able to land safely in Alaska. Captain Terauchi cited in the official FAA report that the objects were UFOs. However, for reasons unknown, the FAA did not pursue the case in depth. Within a few months after the events Kenji Terauchi was grounded, apparently for his indiscretion of reporting a UFO, even though he was a senior captain with an excellent flying record. Several years later he was reinstated by the Japanese government. In a related incident, the U.S. Air Force’s KC135 jet flying from Anchorage to Fairbanks encountered the same object in January 1986. They reported that the UFO traveled within forty feet of their plane.
