The Sentinelese

The Stone Age isn’t quite over — not everywhere. On North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal lives a tribe of about 250 people, the Sentinelese, who have remained so hostile to contact with outsiders that their society is almost entirely free of modern influences.

They have no agriculture, subsisting through hunting, fishing and gathering plants. It’s not even clear whether they can produce fire without an external source like lightning.

The Indian government has made overtures by leaving gifts, but the warlike Sentinelese drove them off. Earlier this year, Sentinelese archers killed two fishermen who came too close to the island. Their bodies still haven’t been recovered — even a helicopter sent to retrieve them was driven off by arrows.

| Oddities · Society

Newgrange

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Older than the pyramids, Ireland’s Newgrange lay lost for millennia until workers uncovered it while looking for building stone in the late 1600s.

No one knows who built it or why, but each year at the winter solstice the sun shines directly along a special passage into a chamber at its heart.

Oscar Wilde wrote, “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

| History · Oddities

The Valentich Disappearance

On Oct. 21, 1978, 20-year-old Frederick Valentich was piloting a Cessna 182 airplane off King Island, Australia. About 45 minutes after taking off, he radioed air traffic control to report a large aircraft with four lights at about his altitude.

He said the craft had passed about 1,000 feet above him at very high speed. He described it as “a long shape” with “a green light” and said it was “metallic,” as though it were “shiny all over.”

“It seems to me that he’s playing some sort of game,” he said. “He’s flying over me two … three times at speeds I could not identify.” He reported that the object “vanished,” then said it was approaching again from the southwest.

A few minutes later he said, “Melbourne, that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. … It is hovering, and it’s not an aircraft.” Valentich’s radio microphone stayed open for another 17 seconds, during which air traffic controller Steve Robey heard “metallic scraping sounds” before the signal died.

No trace of Valentich or his plane was ever found.

| Oddities

Animal Trials

Witches weren’t the only ones in danger during the Middle Ages. In 1386, when a pig tore a French child’s face, the tribunal of Falaise put it on trial, ultimately sentencing it to be maimed and hanged in human clothing.

In 1474 the Swiss town of Basel tried a rooster for sorcery (it had allegedly produced an egg) and burned it at the stake.

Likewise wolves, snakes, crows, bats, owls, rats — even dogs and cats were put on trial. Like women, animals were considered demonic whenever men couldn’t understand their behavior.

| History · Oddities

Everybody Wins

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The fishermen of Laguna in southern Brazil have a unique arrangement with local bottlenose dolphins. A pod of dolphins will drive fish toward the beach, where fishermen stand in the surf. When they see a dolphin roll over, the men throw out their nets, and the dolphins eat the escaping fish.

No one trained the dolphins to do this. It’s been going on since at least 1847.

| Oddities

Nostradamus Distaff

If you’re going to make prophecies, it pays to be a little vague. The supporters of Ursula Southeil (1488-1561) claimed she’d correctly foreseen the automobile, the telegraph, air travel, and submarines. But one prediction failed to come true:

The world to an end shall come,
In eighteen hundred and eighty one.

“Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “their long beards, and pretenses to foretell events.”

| Oddities

The Pied Piper

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The pied piper is not just a fairy tale. Something specific and terrible appears to have happened in the German town of Hamelin on June 26, 1284. What it was is uncertain, but it seems to have claimed the town’s children, perhaps in a mass drowning, burial, epidemic or exodus. An inscription from 1603 reads:

Anno 1284 am dage Johannis et Pauli
war der 26. junii
Dorch einen piper mit allerlei farve bekledet
gewesen CXXX kinder verledet binnen Hamelen gebo[re]n
to calvarie bi den koppen verloren

In the year of 1284, on John’s and Paul’s day
was the 26th of June
By a piper, dressed in all kinds of colors,
130 children born in Hamelin were seduced
and lost at the place of execution near the Koppen.

Rats weren’t added to the story until the late 16th century. The site of the children’s disappearance, on Coppenbrugge mountain, is now a site of pagan worship, and a law forbids singing and music in one street of Hamelin, out of respect for the victims … though we may never know what their fate was.

| History · Literature · Oddities

Sea Monks

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In his Annales, English antiquarian John Stow describes the capture of a sea monster in the shape of a man, in 1187:

“Neere unto Orforde in Suffolke, certaine Fishers of the sea tooke in their nettes a Fish having the shape of a man in all pointes, which Fish was kept by Barlemew de Glanville, Custos of the castle of Orforde, in the same castle, by the space of six monthes, and more, for a wonder: He spake not a word. All manner of meates he gladly did eate, but more greedilie raw fishe, after he had crushed out all the moisture. Oftentimes he was brought to the Church where he showed no tokens of adoration. At length, when he was not well looked to, he stale away to the sea and never after appeared.”

The creature was not fish-tailed, but had a bald head, the body of a man, a beard and a very hairy chest. What was it really? A giant squid? A walrus? An angel shark? We’ll never know.

| Oddities