Early space missions that passed over the featureless Sahara were surprised to see a 30-mile eye staring up at them. No one’s quite sure what it is. It’s too flat to be a crater or a volcano. If it’s simply an uplift laid bare by erosion, why is it so nearly circular? For now they’re just calling it the Richat Structure.
If Ebenezer Scrooge were a woman, he’d look like this. Hetty Green (1834-1916) amassed more than $100 million as a shrewd businesswoman, but today she’s remembered mostly for her breathtaking stinginess.
Born into a Massachusetts whaling family, Hetty was reading financial papers to her father at age 6 and keeping the family books at 13. She inherited $7.5 million on her father’s death, and reportedly married only to keep her relatives at bay (she made her fiance sign a prenup). When her husband divorced her and then died, she moved to Hoboken and basically went nuts.
Legends say she never heated her house or used hot water; that she wore one old black dress; that she rode in an old carriage. Rather than pay rent, she sat on the floor of New York’s Seaboard National Bank and ate only oatmeal heated on the office radiator, and she would travel thousands of miles to collect a debt of a few hundred dollars.
Almost no expense was worthwhile. Her son’s leg had to be amputated when she tried to treat him at home. She herself refused treatment for a hernia because it cost $150.
When she died, at age 80, she may have been the richest woman in the world. Unfortunately, you can’t take it with you.
On New Year’s Day, 1963, two bodies were found in a lovers’ lane in Sydney, Australia. They belonged to Gilbert Bogle, a top research physicist, and his mistress. Both were partially undressed and covered with clothes and cardboard. Police could find no trace of poison; their hearts had simply stopped beating.
To this day, no one has determined whether they were murdered, and if so, how or why. It is a perfect mystery.
“The great affair, we always find, is to get money.” So wrote Adam Smith, but he might have been surprised to visit the Micronesian island of Yap, where a coin’s value is determined by its size. If a native pays you a large debt, you might find yourself with a limestone coin 12 feet in diameter and weighing several tons. You might display it outside your home, as a status symbol — or you might just leave it where it is (even underwater) and agree that ownership has been transferred. Easier on the back.
An optical illusion. The gray bar is the same shade throughout.
For most Japanese, World War II ended in 1945. But not for some:
“It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive,” Yokoi said on returning to Japan. He got $300 in back pay.
In 1955, the merchant vessel Joyita disappeared en route from Samoa to the Tokelau Islands, about 270 miles away.
A search and rescue mission found nothing, but five weeks later she was sighted more than 600 miles from her scheduled route. The ship was partially submerged and there was no trace of her 16 crewmembers or 9 passengers, including two children.
An inquiry found that the disappearance of the passengers and crew was “inexplicable on the evidence submitted.” But the Fiji Times and Herald quoted an “impeccable source” saying that the Joyita had passed through a fleet of Japanese fishing boats and “had observed something the Japanese did not want them to see.”
What was it? No one knows.
Like mermaids, trolls probably joined the culture when people misperceived perfectly natural phenomena. This one “lives” on the coast of the island of Hamarøy in Norway.
An optical illusion. There’s no spiral, just concentric circles.
A falling person reaches a top speed of around 120 mph. After that, all falls are equally dangerous: If you survive the lack of oxygen, a fall of 10,000 feet won’t necessarily hurt you any more than 2,000 feet.
During World War II, at least three airmen survived free falls of around 20,000 feet without a parachute. All three lost consciousness, and two of them landed in deep snow.
In 1972, a Yugoslavian flight attendant fell from 33,330 feet when terrorists blew up her DC-9 over Czechoslovakia. She broke both legs and was paralyzed from the waist down, but only temporarily.
