On April 25, 1977, the Japanese trawler Zuiyo Maru was working off the coast of New Zealand when its nets caught a foul-smelling, decomposing corpse that measured about 10 meters long and weighed two tons.

To avoid spoiling the fish catch, the captain decided to dump the carcass back into the ocean, but the crew first took some photos and measurements. The creature had a neck 1.5 meters long, four large, reddish fins, and a tail about 2 meters long, and it lacked a dorsal fin.

The story made a sensation in Japan, and the shipping company belatedly ordered all its boats back to relocate the dumped corpse, without success.

Some scientists declared the creature to be a prehistoric plesiosaur; others thought it might have been an oversized basking shark. Fujiro Yasuda of Tokyo University said, “We can’t find any known species of fish that correspond with the animal caught outside New Zealand. If it is a shark, it is a species unknown to science.” We’ll never know.

On the morning of Dec. 12, 1910, American socialite Dorothy Arnold left her parents’ home in Manhattan to go shopping for a dress for a party. She met some friends on Fifth Avenue, who later described her as cheerful. She visited Park & Tilford’s store at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 27th Street and charged a pound of candy to her account, then went to Brentano’s on 26th Street, where she bought a book of epigrams and met a friend, who later reported that Dorothy had intended to walk home through Central Park.

That’s all anybody knows. She never came home that night, and her disappearance has never been explained. Friends searched hospitals, morgues and jails in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for three weeks but found nothing. Police and Pinkerton detectives fared no better. Arnold’s fiance, George Griscom Jr., spent thousands of dollars searching for her and bought ads in major newspapers, without result.

When her father died in 1922, he had spent more than $100,000 trying to find Dorothy. In his will he stated that he had come to believe his daughter was dead, but no one knows what became of her.

Excerpt from Clive Wearing’s diary:

8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

Due to a herpes simplex virus, the former BBC music expert is unable to encode new memories. He “wakes up” every few minutes and greets his wife joyously over and over again.

The diary entries are crossed out as “untrue” because he doesn’t remember writing them.

“PIG’S EARS, LYONNAISE — Singe off all the hair from pig’s ears, scrape and wash well and cut lengthwise into strips. Place them in a saucepan with a little stock, add a small quantity of flour, a few slices of onion fried, salt and pepper to taste. Place the pan over a slow fire and simmer until the ears are thoroughly cooked. Arrange on a dish, add a little lemon juice to the liquor and pour over the ears. Serve with a garnish of fried bread.”

— From Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus: A Collection of Practical Recipes for Preparing Meats, Game, Fowl, Fish, Puddings, Pastries, Etc., by Rufus Estes, Formerly of the Pullman Company Private Car Service, and Present Chef of the Subsidiary Companies of the United States Steel Corporations in Chicago, 1911

The supertanker Esso Languedoc was weathering a storm off Durban, South Africa, in 1980 when an enormous wave struck it from behind and washed over the deck. This photo was taken by first mate Philippe Lijour. That mast is 25 meters tall, which means the wave was the size of a four-story building.

So-called freak waves were once thought to be legendary, but now it appears that rogue waves even three times this size, 100 feet tall, can occur spontaneously in the middle of the ocean, sometimes in perfectly clear weather. No one’s sure why.