On Monday residents in the English country of Yorkshire were awoken when car alarms went off, and homes shook after several loud booms.
Alarmed, people gathered in the streets. What was it? An earthquake? A bomb? Aliens? Nah, just some sonic booms.
Eurofighter Typhoon jets from the Royal Air Force had just been scrambled, en route to a commercial airliner that had become unresponsive to air traffic controllers.
With apparent supersonic speed, the RAF caught up with the plane, which, it turned out, had a malfunctioning radio. The plane, an Air France jet, was then escorted to an airport in Newcastle, where it landed safely, according to the Guardian.
But the incident still caused some consternation for residents, who tweeted with the hashtag #QRATyphoon.
Others were more dramatic. "It was nice knowing you all. So long and thanks for all the fish," another wrote. "Alien invasion have began."
North Yorkshire police—themselves on Twitter—later told everyone to calm down.
"RAF update re sonic booms, which caused concern across the country," they tweeted, along with a photo that showed a RAF statement confirming there was no danger. "Thanks to all who called, that's what we're here for."
The timing was a little bit odd. A villager had found the toy on a beach while fishing, a day after a solar eclipse, which, Agence France-Presse reports, carries weighty spiritual meaning for many in the majority Muslim country.
Locals on the remote Banggai islands thought the events could be connected, and so took in the sex toy as one of their own, clothed it, and gave it a chair, according to AFP.
News of the heavenly gift, as it were, spread quickly and police, worried about unrest, went to investigate, eventually confiscating the sex toy.
Police blamed the remoteness of the islands for the episode, saying that the village is without internet and villagers have little idea about all the objects people use these days for sexual pleasure.
But can we be sure? Maybe they did know; maybe they didn't. Perhaps the religious meaning of sex toys should be a private decision, taken on one's own, after having given it some thought.
There is a technique in art known as grisaille, in which an artist will create a work entirely from shades of grey. Sometimes it is used simply because it’s cheaper; sometimes it is an undercoat; and sometimes it is employed to create a three-dimensional effect.
In his new book GreyMatter(s), Tom Jacobi's workcould be described as photographic grisailles: tranquil scenes composed entirely of landscapes that are devoid of color.
Jacobi’s interest in a monochrome palette began on a trip to the Antarctic. Instead of finding a world of blue and white, he discovered that much of what he saw was grey. “No color was screaming for attention," Jacobi recalls in the introduction to his book. “That grey landscape radiated unbelievable energy and meditative calm.”
To capture this de-saturated world in landscapes as wide-ranging as Arizona, New Zealand and Iceland, Jacobi photographed as light shifted between day and night. As twilight fell, landscapes seemed, he writes, “like mystical enactments from some other world.” Atlas Obscura has a selection of Jacobi’s worlds of hushed grey.
Jökulsárlón, Iceland.
Vågsøy, Norway.
Dettifoss, Iceland.
Kirkjufell, Iceland.
Moeraki, New Zealand.
Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA.
Hvítserkur, Iceland.
The cover of Jacobi's Grey Matter(s), published by Hirmer. (Photo: Courtesy Hirmer)
Today when people think of arcades they probably imagine expensive niche locations like a Dave & Busters, but back in 1982, arcades were ubiquitous gathering places where people of all ages could come and hang out, competing to conquer each other's high scores. The arcade was the new soda shop or juke joint, and that came with its own set of standards and etiquette.
Fortunately, the very first issue of early 1980s video game magazine Video Games Player put together a singularly silly guide to arcade do's and don'ts. Video Games Player was one of a glut of periodicals that came out during the early 1980s, trying to embrace the arcade boom and the burgeoning video game culture. The four-page photo article follows "Art Cater" ("arcader," get it?) as he bumbles his way through a night at his local arcade.
In addition to being pretty goofy by today's standards, the short piece provides an interesting look into an arcade culture that has been lost forever. Let's take a look.
"You've got to know how to look. You've got to know how to move. You've got to be cool." When this was published, arcades were places where the cool kids (or at least the cool kids of the arcade) would hang out. So no matter how strange it sounds that you might need to tell video game nerds to turn down their "Wyatt Earp" swagger, humility wasn't bad advice.
"Some games are bad. Some games are cool. Some games are bad." Words to live by. Back before we all had every game we could ever want on our phones or next-generation consoles, if you wanted to play a video game, you had to queue up at an arcade cabinet. If someone was already playing the game you wanted to play, it was customary to put a quarter on the machine, but as Video Games Player points out, it was bad form to load up coins without giving other players a chance to jump in. Not sure what the "Know Your Games" bit is about, but it does remind us that arcades used to have cigarette machines.
"Exclamations such as 'Yippee!' and 'Die, you slime!' are especially frowned upon." While it seems like every video game on the market these days has a multiplayer element, playing games at the arcade was generally a solitary, if competitive, pastime. No one likes being crowded by someone trying to peer over your shoulder, which was a pretty common occurrence in an arcade. As to "Shut Your Face," that advice is as relevant to the gaming community today, with its often toxic and hurtful speech, as it was back in 1982.
"Be respectful to the people waiting behind you, or you may be forced to pick shrapnel out of your legs." It was also bad form to stand in front of a game and prevent other players from getting to it as you gear up. Cool dudes at the arcade can just sidle up and start playing.
Of note is the hint book Art Cater is reading, which recalls another artifact of the era: cheap paperbacks that were filled with cheats and tricks for any of the popular games of the day. These were equivalent to the endless internet walkthroughs available for every single video game today. If your favorite game wasn't featured in the book you bought, you were simply out of luck.
"Do not wait for a bunch of angry bikers to look at you menacingly." Interestingly, Rule Number 7 points out that video games can never actually be beaten, which was, at the time, very true. Instead of the more closed narrative games of today, most arcade games in 1982 had no real end—the difficulty just increased until a player couldn't keep going. Knowing when to leave is another bit of good advice, although one has to wonder how many angry bikers were hanging out at coin-op arcades.
In 1979 in the town of Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard, Joan Poole Nash sat across from her great-grandmother Emily Howland Poole, surrounded by a team of linguists and a video camera. “Do you remember the signs for rain or snow?” In response her great-grandmother moved her hands, which were recorded on grainy, black-and-white-tape.
The old woman continued: “This of course was marriage…and this was courting.” The room, according to transcripts from the interview, oohed and aahed. Poole Nash then interviewed her grandfather and others, but none were Deaf— they’d learned sign language as a natural part of growing up in Martha’s Vineyard prior to the 1950s. The entire area was once fluent in their own sign language dialect, though by the ‘70s, only a few speakers remained. On this island several miles off the southeast coast of Massachusetts, Poole Nash had uncovered a piece of Deaf culture and language that had been hidden for decades, and was almost lost.
For two centuries Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) was used by hearing and Deaf people alike, specifically in the Squibnocket part of the Chilmark area of the island, which was isolated by swamps and rocks. Due to inherited deafness, one out of every 25 people were deaf by the 1850s—compared with a national average of one in every 5,728 people.
“It was generations that kept popping up in very isolated communities,” says Poole Nash, who in a lecture points out that more people in the area at that time had been to China on fishing boats than to Edgartown, which was only a few miles away. It was a Deaf utopia: everybody signed to communicate (how else would you speak to your neighbors, parents or friends?)—but hardly anyone outside the community knew about the language. In 1950, the last fluent MVSL speaker passed away. It would take 25 years for the language to reveal itself to off-islanders.
Poole Nash had become interested in sign language during her childhood on Martha’s Vineyard, when she would hide an American Sign Language (ASL) book in her school desk, sneakily teaching herself the alphabet. She learned that her great-grandmother knew signs, and they began “a secret language between us,” says Poole Nash, who began volunteering a camp with Deaf children at age nine, and made friends with Deaf peers near her secondary boarding school. (Usage note for “Deaf” versus “deaf”: Deaf is an identity and culture, while deaf refers to a condition.)
By the time she’d reached her freshman year at Boston University, where she studied American Sign Language, the dominant sign language in the United States, “the head of the department said, ‘Oh my gosh, you sign better than I do,” says Poole Nash. She was quickly sent to a new sign language research group called the New England Sign Language Society, where linguists from colleges like Harvard, Brown and MIT asked new questions about signs. “I just sat there with my jaw open for the whole first meeting,” Poole Nash says. “I had no idea that you could do this kind of research on sign languages–it was just how you did research on Greek or Latin.”
This was in the earliest days of sign language research, just a decade after academics began studying sign languages using a linguistic approach. Prior to this, any characteristic of sign language that differed from standard English was considered a “deaf idiom”, rather than the lingual syntax it is. Poole Nash ordered every sign language book she could find, but while they all made connections between gesture and sign, they didn’t talk about how words originated.
A paper by linguist Nancy Frishberg showed that older signs used two hands while newer signs used one, but no one knew how or why that happened. “A discussion was going on that was ‘how can we find out about old signs, and how do they compare to modern signs?’—and right away it clicked for me,” Poole Nash says.
All this time, Poole Nash had assumed her great-grandmother’s signs might have been related to signs from the Native Nations (which may have influenced MVSL), as Chilmark bordered on a Wampanoag reservation. Poole Nash gave her great-grandmother a call. “I asked ‘How do you know these signs?’ and she said ‘Because all these people were deaf.’” Suddenly, all the stories Poole Nash had heard about the island’s former residents came to life in a new way. Her own family knew this community. They were part of it.
When Poole Nash recounted what she had learned to the linguists at the New England Sign Language Society, the group decided to begin researching the language right away. They packed up an old, hulking camera and headed to Martha’s Vineyard to film the last living island residents who could communicate using MVSL.
Soon, 19-year-old Poole Nash and the prestigious linguists who accompanied her were recording as many words as possible from her great-grandmother, grandfather, and another elderly island resident using their grainy video camera. “It would be much easier if we were doing it today,” laughs Poole Nash. The tape was difficult to study afterward, and the people Poole Nash was interviewing were getting on in years, so it was difficult to make sure the hand shapes she was noting weren’t the result of arthritis.
Also, since her interview subjects weren’t fluent in the language, sometimes their memories were shaky. In a 1970s video of an interview with her grandfather Donald Poole, Poole Nash asks him how to ask someone’s age. He signs “how”, and says “and you point to the person or the child, but how you ask his age, that escapes me.” Abashed, Poole explained: “It wasn’t very necessary to ask that question; in a little town like this, you knew how old people were.”
In 1994, Poole Nash interviewed another island resident, named Eric Cottle, and added several fish and fishing-related signs to the MVSL list. She found that fishermen there had their own dialect, too. They used a different sign for swordfish that emphasized its fin as seen above water rather than its characteristic mouth, which was how MVSL signers represented it. The word for “codfish” was universally remembered by all.
Sign language has complex linguistic characteristics similar to tones in spoken languages. In addition to words, signs use facial expressions and classifiers: a hand contortion which represents an object or shape rather than an idea. If you were telling a friend how someone bumped into you and made you fall over, instead of signing out every word of the sentence, you’d point your index finger straight up and use that as a “person” to act out the scene, interspersed with your own reaction. When telling a story of any kind, you don’t just use your hands, you use your whole body—using just your hands to have a conversation would be like talking in monotone.
When Poole Nash and others study sign language, they take all of this into account; the differences between various dialects are highlighted to track the language’s history. MVSL-speaking children in the 1800s often attended the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which was established by Thomas Gallaudet and influenced by French Sign Language speakers. While ASL actually has more in common with French Sign Language than British Sign Language, MVSL might have evolved in the 1600s, when deaf immigrants from Kent, England, arrived to the island; many of the signs from Poole Nash’s great-grandmother resemble British Sign Language, often using two hands instead of one (as ASL does).
However, ASL and MVSL might still be related. When Deaf islanders returned home carrying ASL signs with them, it’s possible that they influenced other students at the school. French teacher Laurent Clerc, who taught at the American School of the Deaf in Connecticut, wrote that students learned more sign language from one another than from their teachers. The research that came from the MVSL interviews that Poole Nash initiated also helped further the understanding of ASL, and provided insight into Deaf cultural history, which is rife with past and current discrimination.
With the influx of tourism, better roads and travel technologies, new people were introduced to the gene pool on Martha’s Vineyard. Soon, the island’s unique sign language disappeared altogether. The genetics “burn out very quickly, even in a small community,” Poole Nash says. When the last fluent MVSL resident, Eva West, passed away in 1950, area residents didn’t talk about the lost language when they mourned her.
Indeed, it was lucky for Poole Nash that anyone had been left to speak to her of the island’s hidden Deaf past. “It wasn’t something that you ever talked about because it just wasn’t very significant” to them, says Poole Nash. “When there stopped being any deaf people, they didn’t think about why there weren’t any deaf people; life just went on.”
President Johnson meets with candidate Nixon. (Photo: Yoichi Okamoto/Public domain)
It might be said that official White House photography began with a very unofficial photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt.
As the story goes, Roosevelt was out riding her horse when she was spotted by Abbie Rowe, who was then working for the public roads bureau. According to some he was doing manual labor, a tough job for anyone, but particularly for Rowe, whose legs had been damaged by polio; other versions hold thathe was already at work as a photographer, documenting the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Either way, when Rowe saw the First Lady, he took her picture, and she was charmed enough that they began a relationship.
Soon, Rowe was working as photographer for the National Park Service, and in 1941, he was given a new assignment. His job would be to photograph the president.
So many babies to make faces at, so little time. (Photo: Pete Souza/Public domain)
Today, it's almost a given that the public will be given a glimpse inside the President's world. Since 2009, we've seen President Obama at work and play, and the Obama kids goof around and grow up. There are pictures of the president making silly faces at so many babies, and a picture of the president and his staff watching, live, the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Photographs like these can have a huge impact on the American public’s relationship with our president: the photographs can “affect the image and memory of their term and how the public perceives the president,” says Michael Martinez, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, who’s studying presidential photography.
But the tradition of hiring an official photographer, with virtually unlimited access to the President and his family, snuck into the White House. Go looking for the first “official” White House photographer, and you'll find more than one.
Abbie Rowe was still working for the White House when JFK took office. (Photo: Abbie Rowe/Public domain)
The first president ever to be photographed was John Quincy Adams, who sat for a daguerreotype in his 70s.The first president to sit for a photograph during his presidency was William Henry Harrison, who was photographed at his inauguration in 1841. But that photo's been lost. The oldest surviving photograph of a sitting president, taken in 1849, is of James K. Polk.
But Rowe was the first photographer to regularly document a president's activities. At first, his assignment had him covering President Roosevelt's most official public work—ceremonies, major announcements, visits from foreign ambassadors and leaders. At the time, the White House press corps, was strongly, sometimes forcibly discouraged from taking photos of the president in his wheelchair or getting in and out of cars, and Rowe's official photos followed suit. It's easy to imagine, though, that Rowe, who suffered a more mild disability from polio, would be sympathetic to the president's desire to emphasize his strength rather than focus on his weaknesses. After a few years, Rowe did start to get a closer view of the president, too. His photos still covered the “pomp and symbolism” of the president's work, but the situations were more intimate meetings, with kids or artists or recently pardoned turkeys.
It was John F. Kennedy, though, who first saw the potential for a photographer to tell a story and to reveal the interior life of a presidency. Kennedy had a harem of photographers. Jacques Lowe documented Kennedy’s campaign and continued to follow the president during his first years in the White House. Stanley Tretick, who took the famous picture of JFK, Jr., under the president’s desk, never worked directly for JFK, but the president promised him regular exclusive access. By that point, government photographers, usually from the military, were also regularly assigned to do the job Rowe had pioneered, documenting official events.
Cecil Stoughton (right), and Robert Knudsen, another White House photographer. (Photo: Robert Knudsen/Public domain)
Among all Kennedy’s photographers, though, one, Cecil Stoughton, is often called the “first official White House photographer.” Stoughton worked for the Army’s Public Information Office and after covering Kennedy’s inauguration, he was assigned to the White House full time. A large part of his job, along with other staff photographers, was to document official events: he’d sit waiting for a buzz from the President’s secretary before rushing to the Oval Office to take a couple of pictures. But he also developed a close enough relationship with the First Family that he’d be allowed to take photographs of more intimate moments and travel with them. He started taking home videos of the family on vacation.
One particular set of photos cemented Stoughton's place in history, though. He was traveling with the president on Nov. 23, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. After the president had been shot, when Stoughton heard the vice president was getting on a plane back to Washington, he got on it, too. The result: that series of iconic photos of Lyndon Johnson being sworn into office.
That was the one of the first iconic moments in which a White House photographer served as a documentarian of global news, that would have otherwise been dark to the public forever. Stoughton knew it, too. In Esquire’s account of the day, he tells Johnson’s people, “This is a history-making moment, and while it seems tasteless, I am here to make a picture if he cares to have it. And I think we should have it." There’s so little room in the space he has to ask Johnson, Lady Bird, and Jackie Kennedy to back up. Jackie’s blood-stained skirt is cut out of the frame.
After that, the job changed. In the Johnson administration, the president hired a photographer directly for the first time, and that photographer argued for unrestricted access—enough leeway that he could frame the story himself.
Johnson had met Yoichi Okamoto as vice president. The photographer had been working for USAID and had documented a few of the vice president’s trips abroad. Johnson had seen how the photographs of the Kennedy family had helped create an aura around the president; he wanted a photographer, too. He proposed that Okamoto join the White House as his official photographer, working for the president.
Before Okamoto agreed, he made a proposal of his own: He didn't just want to photograph Johnson when Johnson wanted to be photographed. He wanted more unfettered access—to be able to document presidential history as it was being made.
Okamoto had more availability with Johnson than any photographer had ever had to a president before. He could walk into the Oval Office without being announced. He spent as many hours as he could at the White House. “You just have to be there all the time,” he told one of his successors. “You can’t not be there.”
Because he was there all the time and because he didn’t have to wait for Johnson to call him to work, Okamoto photographed his president holding meetings from his bed in the morning, arguing with aides, laughing, scoffing, shaking hands with throngs of voters, meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Nixon, getting his hair cut, in the hospital during and after surgery, swimming in the White House pool, petting his dog.
Not every White House photographer after Okamoto enjoyed the same amount of freedom. Nixon kept his photographer, Ollie Atkins, at arm’s length, and the photos that came from the White House, up until Nixon’s resignation, returned to the hand-clasp, meet-and-greet style of the past. (The famous picture of Nixon and Elvis shaking hands is typical of this.) The Clintons also preferred to keep some of their privacy. Jimmy Carter didn’t have a personal photographer at all; he offered the job to Tretick, who’d photographed JFK, but the photographer turned him down. “'I didn't feel he wanted an intimate, personal photographer around him,'' he told the New York Times.
But some presidents—Ford, Reagan, both Bushes, and now Obama—let their photographers into the day-to-day life of the president. It’s a job that’s intimately connected, especially now that digital images can be distributed so quickly, with the public relations aspect of the presidency, the shaping of a positive image of the president. But it also has to succeed on its own terms. ”To be able to see the people in real moments, to see their human side, I think is valuable,” says Martinez, the professor.
Photojournalists who cover the White House, though, worry that those "real moments", when shot by a staff member, don't tell the whole story. The Obama administration has provided the public with a steady-stream of feel-good pictures of the President while keeping White House doors closed to independent photographers, and in 2013, the White House Correspondents' Association wrote, in a letter to the White House press office, that “officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the executive branch of government.”
Social media has brought visual messaging to whole new levels during Obama's presidency, as well. While some White House reporters have groused about their lack of access—the current president has conducted 274 q-and-a sessions with press corps as of August, compared to George W. Bush's 581—Obama has given a record number of interviews. Many of the accompanying images come directly from Pete Souza's camera, as it's incredibly convenient to download a free, high-quality photo in the public domain.
Regardless, there can be something special that comes out of a long term, day-to-day relationship between a photographer and his subject. Okamoto was the master of this. “Nobody had done it that way before, and pretty much nobody’s done it since,” President Ford’s photographer, David Hume Kennerly, said in a Times interview. It’s still the standard to aim for—to capture those moments of tension, grandeur, and mundanity that make the president seem both powerful and real.
The cover of David Bowie’s last album, Blackstar, has a simple design: a five-point star cut into the album cover, black on black. But as fans recently discovered, there’s a secret element to the design. Under the right circumstances, the black interior of the star transforms into a shining starscape from space.
The first example of this phenomenon came from a fan who left the album in direct sunlight and came back to see the stars shining through. It seemed magical—a field of glowing stars coaxed out by the sun, that faded with the light.
The cover with light shining through. (Photo: Imgur)
Further investigation by fans revealed that the mechanism was a little bit simpler—shine a strong light, from any source, through the cover, and the light shines through the starscape on the interior, revealing the same pattern on the exterior of the cover.
There’s some debate about whether this design was intentional or not, but we’re going to come down on the side of yes. It’s too haunting not to be.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Attention gem collectors and heist planners: the second largest diamond ever found, the Lesedi La Rona, is set to go on auction at Sotheby’s London in June. It’s about the size of a tennis ball, and worth about 45,000 times more than a diamond tennis bracelet.
Found in November in a Botswana mine, the massive diamond weighs 1,109 carats, which is still less than the largest diamond ever discovered, the Cullinan Diamond, found in 1905, which was over three-times as large. Lucara Diamond, which found the latest huge gemstone, voted on its name, which, in Tswana, a common language in Botswana, translates to “Our Light.”
The diamond is still in its rough and uncut state, but it is expected to be cut up into gems after purchase. The purchase itself could also end up being record-breaking as well. According to the Associated Press, the chairman of Sotheby’s jewel division has called the diamond “the find of a lifetime,” and the auction house expects the Lesedi La Rona to sell for upwards of $70 million, which would make it the most expensive diamond ever sold.
The auction is set to take place June 29, and while it’s unclear who will purchase the rock or what will become of it (the Cullinan Diamond was turned into the British crown jewels), as a Sotheby’s promotional video says, “Imagine the Possibility.”
Yawning a bunch at work these days? Finding your mouse magnetically attracted to the little Solitaire icon? You may have some legal recourse. Frédéric Desnard, a 44-year-old French professional, is suing his former employers for boredom, saying they turned him into a "professional zombie."
Desnard's stint with perfume company Interparfums started off fine, Agence France-Presse reports. He joined up in 2006 and enjoyed his work. But in 2009, Interparfum's fortunes began fading, and by 2012, most of the staff had been laid off. The company president soon had Desnard running errands, or just doing nothing. Perfect conditions, Desnard's lawyer Montasser Charni explains, for a "bore-out"—like a burn-out, but the opposite.
Desnard was "killed professionally through boredom," Charni explains. Desnard himself described the lack of stimulation as "a descent into hell," and says he ended up with serious depression.
The unrelenting tedium eventually caused him to have an epileptic fit while driving, Desnard alleges. He crashed his car, landed in a coma for a few days, and ended up with a prolonged illness. After 7 months of paid sick leave, Interparfums laid him off in September 2014.
Desnard is asking for 360,000 Euros—about $416,000. Though he's drummed up a lawyer and a doctor's note, Desnard has a long road ahead of him if he wants to win this case. For starters, he has to prove his working conditions were connected to his illness. This will be difficult, as he never complained while he was there—and also because he previously tried to sue Interparfums for working him too hard. Last year, a different court ordered Desnard to pay €1,000 to Interparfums for defamation, The Guardian reports. If nothing else, his relationship with his former employer has become very interesting.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Torrents of wind whip around buildings and streets as a tornado vortex consumes a tiny town. Good thing the town in this video is just a model test bed for engineers and researchers at Iowa State University.
Back in 2004, a team led by engineering professor Partha Sarkar constructed the first ever moving tornado and microburst simulator in the United States. The simulator is an 18-foot-wide, 12-foot-tall cylinder with a large fan that can generate vortex speeds as high as 55 miles per hour. Researchers use it to get a better understanding of how a tornado affects buildings and terrain as it passes through a city.
“From the research in tornadoes, we can never get into the tornado to get any measurements or really know what’s going on in the tornado,” Iowa State University graduate student, Hephziba Thampi explained in a video posted by the university’s engineering college back in 2010. In this particular video, researchers add dry ice to show the airflow, but during an actual experiment nothing is used to visualize the movement. The miniature-scaled buildings are filled with pressure tips to quantify where there is stress in infrastructures as the tornado passes by. Research groups can then take the data collected from experiments to propose stronger, more tornado-resistant structures.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Around 270 miles north of Edmonton, in the Canadian province of Alberta, is Fort McMurray, a boomtown that serves as the center of the country's oil production. On Sunday, a wildfire broke out southwest of town. Initially, this was of small concern to authorities.
But as the hours progressed, dry weather and high winds made the fire increasingly more threatening, to the point that it became a crisis on Tuesday. Officials ordered the entire city—around 60,000 people—evacuated, while the flames jumped a highway, a gas station exploded, and at least one entire neighborhood was destroyed, according to the CBC.
Fleeing residents, meanwhile, were running out of gas on the road as traffic piled up, forcing police to deliver gas by hand, as firefighters struggled to control the blaze.
Local officials were expected to ask for help from Canada's Department of National Defense, the CBC reported, though conditions—still hot and dry on Wednesday—weren't helping things.
Canada's Minister for Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains, center, who announced a change to the rules for scientists in November. (Photo: Michael Ignatieff/CC BY-ND 2.0)
For nine years, federal scientists in Canada couldn't talk to the press. Well, they could, but only after going through a dizzying amount of federal bureaucracy, a situation that turned into functional censorship.
Why? You can thank former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who instituted the policy shortly after his ascendancy in 2006. A huge proponent of exploiting the country's natural resources like oil and gas, Harper apparently feared that some of his own scientists would give reporters negative assessments of the environmental impacts of the country's energy work, according to Nature.
So even the smallest media requests had to be funneled through government communications offices, and were often denied. But all of that changed in November, after Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister, partly on a platform to open the government up to citizens more. (The U.S. has also come under criticism that it doesn’t always make its scientists available to the media, and problems are said to linger even after President Barack Obama vowed in 2009 to make government more transparent.)
The Canadian government was relaxing its rules on speaking to the press, Navdeep Bains, the Minister for Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, said then. Nature now reports that media requests are now handled similarly to the way they were before Stephen Harper. Scientists merely need to inform their supervisors if they speak with a reporter.
Which means, of course, that the scientists are also free to talk about things other than science, like, say, the old policy of generally not allowing scientists to speak with reporters.
One researcher Nature spoke with, for example, compared scientists under the Harper regime with Soviet scientists in the 1970s, who would attend academic meetings with KGB escorts.
Others said the cone of silence from the Harper administration was still not totally gone. Many officials remain from the previous government, accustomed to the Harper way of doing things.
But even while the new media rules are taking shape, scientists said the change was stark—and welcome.
“It was like a weight was being lifted,” one scientist told Nature.
For the first time, scientists have grown a human embryo for two weeks outside of a mother's womb, they said Wednesday.
Among the things they learned? That cells in human embryos have enviable organizational skills, which allows them to quickly form the basic shape of what will later be full-bodied humans, according to Reuters.
"Embryo development is an extremely complex process and while our system may not be able to fully reproduce every aspect of this process, it has allowed us to reveal a remarkable self-organizing capacity ... that was previously unknown," Marta Shahbazi, one of the researchers, told Reuters.
Previous attempts at growing human embryos outside the womb had never surpassed the seven-day mark, at which point the embryo needed to be implanted inside a uterus to grow further. But the scientists developed a new method first tested on mouse embryos that allowed them to go beyond that.
Fourteen days, it turns out, is the limit for growing human embryos outside the womb established by international law. But the new findings mean that the international community might need to rethink that law, something the scientists themselves said could allow for better research.
"Longer cultures could provide absolutely critical information for basic human biology," Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, who co-led the research, told Reuters. "But this would of course raise the next question–of where we should put the next limit."
While the meeting between Nixon and the King is the stuff of legend, hidden within Elvis' FBI file is a lesser known but equally bizarre epilogue. While in Washington visiting the president, Elvis Presley repeatedly tried - and failed - to gain an audience with the man he called "the greatest living American," J. Edgar Hoover.
In late December 1970, Hoover's office in Washington received a call from Senator George Murphy, stating that there was a young man that Murphy wanted the Director to meet - the "prominent entertainer and motion picture personality," Elvis Presley.
Murphy had already arranged for Elvis to meet with the President to discuss Elvis's strong opposition to narcotics and was hoping that Hoover might be available as well. Alas, the Director was out of town.
Arrangements were made to express Hoover's regrets, and a standard cross-reference of the Bureau's files dug up a few extortion attempts, a paternity suit, and lingering criticism over "gyrations." The matter was considered closed.
That is, until a week later, whereupon a fresh-from-meeting-the-President Elvis and his entourage called up FBI HQ, demanding to see the still-out-of-town Hoover.
Condolences were again expressed, and an impromptu tour was arranged, but this time, the racquetball gloves were off. With his long hair and "exotic dress," as far as the Bureau was concerned, the Director would be out of town whenever Elvis came calling.
An example of said hair and dress is indeed, attached.
Despite this rather inauspicious beginning, Elvis' tour of the Bureau was apparently pretty darn delightful - Elvis made no attempt to hide the fact that he was Hoover's number one fan, rattling off a surprisingly comprehensive list of the Director's anti-communist literature, geeking out about Hoover's accomplishments, and declaring him "the greatest living American."
The Assistant Director giving the tour appeared to be completely won over by Elvis' sincerity and belief in the American dream. Addressing his unorthodox appearance that made the Bureau so uncomfortable, Elvis explained that those were the "tools of his trade" that helped to interact with anti-establishment youth, so he could convince them "the error of their ways."
After the tour, Elvis showed off that nifty new badge Nixon gave him...
let the Bureau know that he was happy to act as a informant whenever they needed him to...
blamed the country's current problems on the Beatles, Smothers Brothers, and Jane Fonda...
and that if his country ever required his services, the FBI should contact him under the pseudonym "Colonel Jon Burrows."
Writing up the visit in his report to Hoover, the Assistant Director was unequivocal in his praise - this guy is awesome, and you should at leastsend him a note.
Hoover relented, and Elvis got the next best thing to a handshake - a personal letter from the greatest living American.
An illustration from one of Rose Mackenburg's articles for the Winnipeg Tribune. (Photo: Tony Wolf)
During the 1920s, the apocalyptic tolls of the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic caused a widespread revival of Spiritualism–the controversial practice of purported psychic communication with the spirits of the dead.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the famously rational Sherlock Holmes, embraced Spiritualism and became its most strident and effective propagandist. But his influence was countered by the famed magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, who put together a team dedicated to crusading against the "ghost racketeers" that posed as spirit mediums to con money out of vulnerable, grieving people.
Into this milieu stepped Rose Mackenberg, who was ultimately to become one of the most enduring and prolific ghost busters of the early 20th century. By her own account, Mackenberg grew up in New York City during the first decades of the 1900s. As a teenager, she developed a belief in Spiritualism that lasted until she was introduced to Harry Houdini, probably during the late 1910s.
An advertisement showing Rose Mackenberg "The Spook Spy". (Photo: Tony Wolf)
When Rose first encountered the master magician, she had already been working as a private detective for several years. Their initial meeting came about when she consulted with Houdini regarding one of her own investigations, which involved a case of "spirit fraud."
Impressed by her faculties of logic, resourcefulness and quick wit, Houdini invited Rose to join the team of about 20 salaried undercover investigators that he referred to as "my own secret service." This clandestine team traveled ahead of Houdini's touring schedule, visiting towns and cities where he was due to perform and infiltrating the local Spiritualist "scene" to gather evidence of fraud. These details were passed on to Houdini, who would then expose the fraudsters during his shows.
Inevitably, this tactic made Houdini and Rose many bitter enemies, angering both true believers who felt that they were attacking their religion and ghost racketeers who knew that they were threatening their livelihood. Sometimes the hostilities between pro- and anti-Spiritualists erupted into riots, and more than once Rose and other members of the "secret service" were caught up in the fray.
Partly as a safety precaution, Rose also became something of a mistress of disguise. Her first stop in a new town or city was to visit a department store and take detailed notes on the clothing worn by various local "types" of women, so she could plausibly pass muster as a rustic schoolteacher, a small-town matron or a smartly-garbed widow.
Her training with Houdini encompassed all the tricks of the fake séance trade and left her disabused of her teenage belief in the ability of mortals to communicate with the spirit world. Like her employer and mentor, Rose Mackenberg professed some sympathy for those mediums who genuinely believed in their own powers and who practiced Spiritualism sincerely, devoid of conscious charlatanism. Also like Houdini, though, she was contemptuous towards ghost racketeers who cynically took advantage of vulnerable people.
At the time of Harry Houdini's untimely death in October of 1926, Rose Mackenberg had become one of Houdini's most experienced investigators, with a wealth of experience in busting all manner of clairvoyants, mediums and purveyors of "love and luck potions."
Mackenberg is known to have written a manuscript detailing her adventures in battling the ghost racket–the final draft was titled So You Want to Attend a Seance?–but, sadly, it went unpublished during her lifetime and remains so as of this writing. It's likely, however, that her manuscript drew from a series of articles she wrote, which were published in several North American newspapers during 1929. At that time, she had decided to retire from the ghost-busting business, but her retirement didn't last long.
There was too much work to do. In 1932, Julien Proskauer, another investigator dedicated to exposing the ghost racket, estimated the number of people "suckered" by hoax seances, numerological and fortune telling sessions at 30 million per year, and their losses at $125 million.
Rose Mackenberg persisted in her unusual vocation throughout the Great Depression, investigating on behalf of insurance companies, law firms, Better Business Bureaus, newspapers and similar institutions. During mid-1945 she served as Chicago Tribune reporter E.W. Williamson's guide to the Spiritualist underworld of the Windy City; Williamson then revealed the mediums' predatory con-artistry through a series of expose articles. She also began performing lectures and demonstrations for service organizations, during which trumpets floated, tables tipped, glowing "spirit hands" materialized and Mackenberg generally did what she could to expose the tricks of the still-burgeoning spirit racket.
Another illustration from a Mackenburg newspaper article, this time showing her investigating a gothic graveyard. (Photo: Tony Wolf)
Mackenberg was hardly surprised when the U.S. involvement in the Second World War ushered in another revival of Spiritualism–and then even less startled when it happened yet again during the Korean War. Interviewed in 1951, she estimated that there were then some 150,000 mediums active in the United States, and also noted that she expected that number to rise as long as the War continued.
By that time, Rose Mackenberg–a lifelong "bachelor girl" who kept her New York City apartment well-lit because she had grown "tired of sitting in dark rooms"–had been investigating and debunking Spiritualistic fraud for over three decades. Her "Spook Spy" exposés had been featured in the American Magazine, Look, Collier's, Popular Science and numerous other journals. Still, she noted resignedly that "no number of exposures, in fact, seem to shake the faith of believers."
Despite frequent public exposés of prominent practitioners by reporters and skeptical investigators, as of 2013 the modern American "psychic services industry" was estimated to be worth slightly over two billion dollars.
Significantly, though, very few modern mediums attempt the sort of "physical manifestations", such as ectoplasm and ghostly materializations, that were convincingly debunked as phantasmagoric tricks by Rose Mackenberg and her peers during the first half of the 20th century.
Celebrity homes sell all the time, but it’s not very often that they end up going for record-breaking prices. But, praise the Lord, Tyler Perry’s opulent mansion in Atlanta recently sold for $17.5 million, making it the most expensive home in the city’s history.
Perry, a media mogul best known for his long-running character, Madea, first purchased the sprawling estate, which was built in 2007, for a measly $7.6 million. Covering 17 acres of land, the grounds are, of course, rich with features including a theater, a spa, a subterranean ballroom, manicured gardens, pools, fountains, and a multi-level parking garage with a full-size tennis court on top. Oh, and also a home with seven bedrooms and 14 bathrooms overlooking the Chattahoochee River.
An anonymous buyer bought the home last week, though $17.5 million was a steep cut from the original price tag of $25 million, when the mansion first went on the market in June 2015. According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, prior to Perry’s mansion, the most expensive home ever sold in Atlanta was an estate that sold for $10.5 million back in 2009.
Governors Ball—New York City's annual gathering of hot bands, cool foods, and lawn games—hits Randall's Island in early June. This year's lineup features Kanye West, The Strokes, competitive cornhole, and this insane milkshake. Understandably, one wants to gird up for such a sensory onslaught.
This year, though, some festivalgoers accidentally overprepared: they put their wristbands on early, and they got trapped.
The wristbands—which, once fastened, cannot be loosened or removed—began shipping out to ticketholders earlier this week. When they show up, there is a certain protocol—you register your number online, you do a brief ceremonial headbang, you put your wristband in a special box in preparation for its deployment—but, as the New York Daily News reports, some people got either overexcited or selfie-happy, and snapped them on right away. Bad idea:
@ anyone going to gov ball DO NOT GET EXCITED AND PUT ON YOUR WRISTBAND EARLY IT WILL NOT COME OFF NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY/CRY
All is not lost. According to the official Festival twitter account, cuffed concertgoers can cut themselves free—and then buy a replacement wristband at will-call for $20. Either that, or they can wear the band forever, like some kind of sweaty talisman.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
None-too-subtle spikes at the 18th-century Miles Brewton House in Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo: Spencer Means/CC BY-SA 2.0)
There's a fearsome fence surrounding the Miles Brewton House in Charleston, South Carolina. Its wrought-iron rails are topped with a cheval de frise, a horizontal bar covered in long spikes that jut out at multiple angles. Added in response to a planned slave revolt in 1822, the spiky bar sends a clear message: you are not welcome here.
Historically, landowners and city planners have kept sections of the population at bay by incorporating defensive design features into the architecture: spiked fences; barbed wire; a castle moat. In the 21st century, however, overt deterrents like these have given way to subtler features aimed at exerting social control, and keeping unwanted groups out.
In 2014, widespread outrage arose when a luxury London apartment building installed "anti-homeless spikes" to prevent people from sleeping in an alcove near the front door. The spikes, which were removed following the public outcry, drew attention to a broader urban phenomenon known as hostile architecture.
“The term hostile architecture is new—or new in the popular vernacular anyway," says James Petty, a freelance criminologist whose PhD research focuses on the ways in which society regulates homelessness. "But practices of designing cities and urban landscapes in certain ways that favor certain groups of people and not others has been going on for a long time.”
Hostile architecture, also known as defensive architecture, exists on a spectrum. At one end are the overt design features that are obvious to anyone walking by—like spikes and fences. At the other end, says Petty, are the design elements in which “the hostile function is often embedded under a socially palatable function.”
A prime example is street furniture, particularly public benches. Take a look at these four designs:
All of them provide a place for tired citizens to rest their weary legs—and all of them have been designed to preclude homeless people from sleeping there by making it impossible or uncomfortable to lie down on the bench.
Hostile architecture can be incorporated into both public and private spaces. “Local governments might do it explicitly, but might also do it implicitly," says Petty.
It's the same story for privately owned land that is publicly accessible, such as shopping malls. "Often it’s done under the radar, so it’s not explicitly stated, it’s just like, ‘Oh, we want to upgrade this area.’ And then the things that are upgraded are all designed to stop homeless people lying on benches.”
Hostile design comes in even more innocuous, and sometimes even lovely forms. Take the humble potted plant. What could be hostile about a leafy ficus in a pretty pot? Nothing—until you consider where it's placed. When set strategically in alcoves, "just as much as the spikes, it means that a homeless person can’t sleep there,” says Perry.
It can be a similar story with timed sprinklers. On the surface they're just watering a garden or keeping the sidewalk clean, but they have also been used to disperse homeless people. Homeless people are the main group affected by hostile architecture, but skateboarders, loitering teenagers, and people who use drugs are also targeted in increasingly creative ways.
In 2009, the Nottingham Post in England reported that the local residents' association had installed pink lights at underpasses to deter teenagers from congregating there. The lighting color was apparently chosen because, in addition to its purported calming effect—"seen as 'uncool' by some young males," it highlights facial blemishes. (This is a more cosmetically focused version of the blue light seen in some public bathrooms, which is installed in an effort to curb intravenous drug use by making it difficult for people to see their veins.)
But where is the line drawn between hostile architecture that seeks to favor one class of people over another, and practical urban planning that aims to keep all people safe? “All urban architecture or urban design has a level of control built into it," says Petty, citing pedestrian crossings and sidewalks as features that guide the behavior of the public. "But then you’ve got a point where that kind of controlling becomes direct, explicit, and targeted against certain groups and not others.”
Art is one frontier where citizens are fighting back. Individual artists and collectives have been using art to raise awareness of hostile design. Sarah Ross's "archisuits," for example, are jogging outfits that incorporate substantial padding. The placement of the padding was designed specifically to fit around the hard dividers of Los Angeles benches, making it possible for the wearer to lie down comfortably.
But art is also an area in which hostile architecture can be perpetuated. Petty believes that street art and public sculpture will increasingly be incorporated into cities' social control strategies. In other words, that huge eye-catching sculpture in the courtyard of a fancy office building may ostensibly be there for aesthetic reasons, but it's also preventing the wrong kind of people from congregating in a space that's not meant for them.
On Wednesday, a Colombian sailor found stranded out in the Pacific Ocean 3,500 miles from home finally made it to dry land, according to NBC News. He'd been fighting for survival for two months, forced to eat sea gulls and bear witness to the deaths of his three shipmates.
The 29-year-old mariner had been at sea with three others in a 23-foot skiff, he told the U.S. Coast Guard. When the engine failed, they found themselves in a worst-case scenario. But scavenging for fish and birds wasn't enough to keep all of them alive. Of his three companions, their passports were the only things left of them.
The skiff was first sighted on April 26 by a Panamanian cargo ship, around 2,150 miles southeast of Hawaii, according to NBC News. When the Coast Guard made the rescue, they found him in a bleak and sinister stretch of the Pacific. A Coast Guard lieutenant said that the area in which the sailor was found is not heavily trafficked, and it was a fortunate stroke of luck that he was spotted at all.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Hoover relented, and Elvis got the next best thing to a handshake - a personal letter from the greatest living American.
