10The Black Tom Incident Before it was connected to the mainland and made a part of Jersey City, Black Tom Island stood as independent land in New York Harbor, right beside Liberty Island. In the early hours of July 30, 1916, several explosives went off at Black Tom. The explosions sent shock waves about 135 kilometers (90 mi) away, equivalent to an earthquake of between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Ritcher scale....

10 Edmond Halley Astronomer Edmond Halley, who documented Halley’s Comet, has seen two unidentified craft in his career. The first was in March 1676. He described it as having a “vast body apparently bigger than the moon.” By Halley’s estimations, the object was about 64 kilometers (40 mi) above him. He said it made a noise, “like the rattling of a great cart over stones.” After watching the distance it traveled in several minutes, he calculated that it was moving faster than 15,500 kilometers per hour (9,600 mph)....

10 Blue Tarantulas There are more than 850 documented tarantula species in the world. Some are as big as the human face while others are capable of shooting excrement as a defense mechanism. Then there are those that are, for some unknown reason, bright blue in color. Experts suspect that the blue color serves an important purpose. However, “they don’t know what that [specific] function is yet.” The most plausible hypothesis has to do with sexual selection....

The evidence, along with testimony from Smithsonian whistle-blowers, was said to show that thousands of giant skeletons between 183 and 366 centimeters (6–12′) tall were dug up all over the United States—only to be destroyed under direct orders from high up in Smithsonian management. Indeed, a surprising number of reports of giant skeletons do exist in old newspapers. All the same, you might want to take these claims with a bag of salt....

10 A Royal Easter Tradition Back when Easter was the most important event for the Russian Orthodox Church, people would take hand-painted eggs to church, have them blessed, and then hand them out to loved ones. Add that to the upper-class tradition of exchanging bejeweled gifts on Easter, and one can understand how the idea for the Faberge eggs came about. It began in 1885 when Tsar Alexander III wanted to surprise his wife, Empress Marie Fedorovna, with something special that year....

10Horseshoes The first horseshoes ever found are from the Etruscans in 400 BC. When the superstition was first introduced in northern Europe, most likely by wandering Celtic tribes, horseshoes were hung from above the doorway in an effort to ward off evil fairy folk who wandered the forests. They were also made of iron, which was considered lucky as well. (The fairy folk were also said to be afraid of the weapons of their enemies, which just happened to be made of iron....

The BNR was created as a pro-German buffer state against revolutionary Russia in 1918. The BNR was never a real state, as it had no constitution, no military and no defined territory. When German troops withdrew from Belarus, the region was quickly overrun by the Red Army, and the BNR provisional council went into exile to facilitate an anti-communist movement there. Its government still exists, though it is unrecognized and in exile in Toronto....

Included because the online documentation of this full-on runaround is so user-friendly it’s a great introduction to scam baiting. Seriously, this guy could have taken notes in law school. Fully color coded email entries and annotated notes detail the plan of, and correspondence with, Maryam Abacha, wife of the late military head of State for Nigeria. According to her unsolicited email to a total stranger, she has $30 million in cash and needs to get it out of the country but doesn’t trust her family....

Sometimes, they have little control over what preys on them. There is a mysterious brain fungus, and orcas treat them like a snack. The lucky few encounter the good side of people—when the public and experts do everything they can to rescue a shark that came in second. 10 Mother Of 14 Early in 2019, a pregnant white was caught under mysterious circumstances near Taiwan. The fishermen claimed that it was an accident, but she produced a sizable profit at the local market....

10 Michael’s Hair Design Michael’s Hair Design in Nailsea, UK, experienced some spooky goings-on during the decades since Michael Pearce took it over. The salon, based in a 200-year-old cottage, is the setting for the unexplained disappearance and moving around of items, as well as a mysterious chill in one of the rooms. The ghostly mischief persisted long enough that a medium was eventually asked to attend and shed some light on strange activities....

10 Fiery Star The name Fiery Star is irony at its best, considering that the ship met its end in a fury of fire. Having left Brisbane for London, the Fiery Star sailed for nearly two weeks without incident until April 20, 1865, when it inexplicably caught fire roughly 640 kilometers (400 mi) from land. Seeing that flames were quickly gaining ground, 80 passengers—including the captain—took to the four lifeboats onboard....

Only now, with modern technology, are we beginning to penetrate all of the Sahara’s mysteries—and there are quite a few of them. Here are ten amazing discoveries that the Sahara Desert has been hiding from us. 10 Lost Fortresses Satellites have allowed explorers to peer beneath the canopies of the densest jungles and pierce the heart of the most inhospitable deserts—all without the bother of even leaving one’s chair. In 2010, satellites detected the remains of more than 100 fortresses belonging to the Garamantes people of Libya....

Unfortunately, it is not a perfect world—far from it actually. Terrible illnesses and accidents do occur every day. Below is small example of some horribly unconventional ways that real people have died. 10 Death By Dog Food Sometimes, our love of and obsession with animals can come back to bite us in the rear. In the end, these two ladies would have been far better off just saying no to pet ownership....

He was one of the Puritans who had set sail for America in search of religious tolerance. They had cried for freedom of religion in England, but once they’d landed in America, all those ideas of tolerance had quickly started to fade. The Puritans were already becoming every bit as cruel as the people they’d tried to escape. And no religion would suffer as horribly under their hands than the Quakers....

The following people took this notion to sometimes ludicrous extremes. The standard warning to not try any of these things at home would be, in this case, completely unnecessary. 1073 Days Living Underwater The Jules Undersea Lodge, off the coast of Key Largo, Florida, was billed as the world’s only underwater hotel. We included it on a list of undersea facilities you could actually live in a couple years back; we did not expect that anyone would be ambitious or foolhardy enough to take us up on the suggestion....

10 ‘The Scourge Of God’ Attila the Hun has long been known in the West as “the scourge of God.” This was propaganda against the pagan king of an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to France. Historian Jordanes referred to Attila as, “a lover of war, yet restrained in action, mighty in counsel, gracious to suppliants, and lenient.” According to Priscus, he was also a man of his word....

10Chen Tao (Right Way) Formed in 1993, this now-defunct Taiwanese cult used to believe in some very bizarre doctrines laid out by its founder, ex-sociology teacher Hon-ming Chen. Blending Christianity, Buddhism, New Age, and UFO beliefs, Chen came up with many weird tenets. These included the idea that nuclear war created the solar system and annihilated four different time periods and that God picked up survivors in a flying saucer. Chen pinned these disasters and other problems plaguing humanity on corrupted human souls and devils known as “King Satans....

Education, wise investments, and access to opportunities unavailable to most people make it easy for rich kids to continue making a lot of money. However, there are a few wealthy individuals who truly did work hard to rise above their humble beginnings and become extremely rich. 10 Leonardo Del Vecchio Leonardo Del Vecchio was born in Milan, Italy, in 1935. Just a few months earlier, his father had died. His mother could not afford to raise him alone, so she gave him to an orphanage....

This disorder is very interesting, and there have been many movies and television shows made around the subject. Even though some of us are familiar with the condition, there is still a lot that we do not know. 10 It Is Not As Rare As We Think Most of us have only seen dissociative identity disorder in movies and television shows. We may also believe that it is uncommon and that we will never meet anyone with it....

10The Large Amorphous Creature On Camera Near An Oil Rig Recently, a video passed around online showed a giant, amorphous, blob-like creature floating near a deep drilling oil rig. The creature pulsated nearby for quite some time, catching the attention of pretty much everyone. It looked almost to be lit from within, and it was incredibly sized, rippling around and constantly changing shape. Some speculated that it was a completely unknown and massive creature from the depths of the ocean....